Podcasts about OSCON

El sector productor y exportador de frutas y hortalizas frescas agrupado en FEPEX ha rechazado los actos de protesta que se están llevando a cabo en Francia desde la semana pasada y que están afectando a la circulación de camiones de frutas y hortalizas españolas y en algunos casos está suponiendo la destrucción del producto, por lo que se ha solicitado que se respete el derecho al libre tránsito en territorio francés.La superficie de viñedo ecológico crece un 33% en España en 4 añosCon 142.100 hectáreas, España es la primera potencia a nivel mundial en superficie de viñedo ecológico de las que 2.550 corresponderían a Aragón. La producción ecológica es desarrollada por 1.334 bodegas y embotelladoras a nivel nacional.

Episodio 49 - Cómo manejar las emociones mientras planeas tu bodaNuestra invitada de hoy se llama Anabel, ella está comprometida, a 1 mes y medio de su boda. En este episodio hablamos sobre cómo está manejando las emociones que vienen con ser novia. Entre las dos vamos a contestar un dilema de otra comprometida que no sabe qué tanto le debe ayudar su Wedding Planner y por último nos comparte el tip para esta etapa de comprometida.En este episodio:Cómo manejar las emociones como noviaSi te da miedo llorar el día de tu bodaTips para cuando tu boda es sin niñosCon qué te puede ayudar tu Wedding PlannerRelájate pero no tantoRecursos adicionales:Inscríbete al curso Prepárate para el mes antes de tu bodaÚnete al Taller para definir la decoración de tu bodaTe ayudo a organizarte y planear tu boda con una cita de Wedding CoachEncuentra tips en Instagram y en Tiktok como @yocomprometida  

Guest Josh Simmons Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! Richard is in Portland at FOSSY, the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference that is held by the Software Freedom Conservancy. In this exciting episode, we welcome guest Josh Simmons, a notable figure with an illustrious career in the open source community. We hear about Josh's important contributions, particularly his involvement with OSCON as a community manager and now, a co-organizer and program chair of the community track. Josh also outlines his talk on health and safety policies in the diversity, equity, and inclusion track, focusing on minimizing risks and promoting inclusivity at events. Josh also introduces his exciting new venture, Open Chapters, a consultancy designed to support and elevate open source projects, community organizers, and institutions. If you're curious about the dynamics and challenges of open source communities, this episode is a must listen! Hit download now! [00:00:41] Josh talks about his involvement in OSCON as a community manager and how he's now involved in the community track, as a co-organizer and program chair and mentions his fellow organizers. He also mentions his upcoming talk on health and safety policies in the diversity, equity, and inclusion track. [00:02:14] Richard shares his experience of traveling and getting COVID twice, and asks Josh provides an overview of health and safety practices. [00:05:05] Josh shares about his newly launched consultancy with Julia Ferraioli called Open Chapters, which focuses on social and technical systems in open source projects. [00:06:00] He explains his ideal clients for their consultancy for profit or non-profit organizations looking to benefit from or contribute to open source and free software. [00:07:03] Josh discusses the “community manager trap” and how they plan to avoid it by providing coaching, strategy, and educational materials to mentor new community managers into those roles. [00:07:50] Josh acknowledges the resource disparities in open source and his hopes to level the playing field. [00:10:40] Richard presents a devil's advocate stance, challenging the approach of trying to help maintainers and suggesting that they should be encouraged to set boundaries instead. Josh agrees with Richard's stance and highlights the importance of maintainers and suggesting that they should be encouraged to set boundaries instead. [00:12:47] Find out where you can follow Josh, Open Chapters, and his health and safety policy work online. Links Sustain OSS (https://sustainoss.org/) Sustain OSS Twitter (https://twitter.com/SustainOSS?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) Sustain OSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) Sustain OSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Twitter (https://twitter.com/richlitt?lang=en) Software Freedom Conservancy (https://sfconservancy.org/) Open OSS (https://openoss.sourceforge.net/) Josh Simmons Website (https://joshsimmons.com/) Josh Simmons Mastodon (https://josh.tel/@josh) Josh Simmons LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshsimmons) Open Chapters (https://openchapters.tech/) The Public Health Pledge (https://publichealthpledge.com/) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Josh Simmons.

This episode features all things security with our guest, Laura Bell Main, CEO & Founder @ SafeStack. She shares valuable strategies for building your security team & tool stack. We cover why security is a human problem based on human motivations, prioritization conversations for assessing risks, considerations for early-stage security teams, how behavior change & decision making impact security, and considerations for companies in the “messy middle” phase. Laura also addresses communicating about security in terms of tech debt, recommendations for incorporating security monitoring tools, how to measure those tools' ROI, and more.ABOUT LAURA BELL MAINWith over twenty years of experience in software development and information security, Laura Bell Main (@lady_nerd) specialises in bringing security into organisations of every shape and size.She is the co-founder and CEO of SafeStack, an online education platform offering flexible, high-quality, and people-focused secure development training for fast-moving companies, with a focus on building security skills, practices, and culture across the entire engineering team.Laura is an experienced conference speaker, trainer, and regular panel member, and has spoken at a range of events such as BlackHat USA, Velocity, and OSCON on the subjects of privacy, covert communications, agile security, and security mindset.She is also the co-author of Agile Application Security and Security for Everyone."The most important thing that we forget to tell folks when they're starting out in security is most of our tooling is about being more effective and efficient. It's not about doing something you can't do yourself. Security isn't about a magic box. I wish it was, it would be a lot easier if we could just buy a magic box. Done! Off we go to the beach, but what we have is a really human problem.”- Laura Bell Main    Join us at ELC Annual 2023!ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You'll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical proven strategies.Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San FranciscoFor tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023SHOW NOTES:What to do about security if you don't already have a security team (2:28)Security as a “human problem” in the scope of eng orgs (4:58)Why you need to understand human motivations (7:21)Prioritization frameworks & chaos engineering for assessing threats (9:14)Considerations for the early stages of forming a security org (11:47)Understanding security through a behavior change model (14:57)How to operationalize a security mindset within a software team (18:00)Examples of how decisions can flag security risks (20:50)Approaches for tracking & managing security as tech debt (23:20)Addressing security considerations as a “messy” middle-stage company (27:17)High friction aspects of security behavior change for eng orgs (30:51)Tips for knowing if you have the right security tool (34:41)How to evaluate the ROI of tools you're considering (38:06)Methods for incorporating security monitoring into your current tool stack (39:32)Rapid fire questions (42:45)LINKS AND RESOURCESThe Body Keeps The Score - The inspiring story of how a group of therapists and scientists— together with their courageous and memorable patients—has struggled to integrate recent advances in brain science, attachment research, and body awareness into treatments that can free trauma survivors from the tyranny of the past.Open source checklist for high-growth CTOsThis episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Laura Bell Main specializes in securing some of Australia and New Zealand's fastest-growing organizations. She has over twenty years of experience in software development and information security. It's her mission to bring security into organizations of every shape and size. Laura is the founder and CEO of SafeStack Academy, an online education platform offering flexible, high-quality, and people-focused, secure development training for fast-moving companies. SafeStack is a values-driven company on a mission to make cybersecurity accessible for everyone and any organization. “To protect each one of us, we must protect all of us,” this is the underpinning belief that drives Laura. Her company is pushing hard into this issue by attempting to train all of our organizations, big and small. Through free plans, student sponsorships, and sponsored communities, she is working towards a future where we no longer spend 99% of our security resources on 1% of our organizations. She is an experienced conference speaker, trainer, and regular panel member, and has spoken at a range of events such as BlackHat USA, Velocity, and OSCON on the subjects of privacy, covert communications, agile security, and security mindset. She is also the co-author of Agile Application Security and Security for Everyone. What you will learn What sparked Laura's passion for software engineering and computer security What inspired Laura to launch her own company in this industry The top 3 things a growing company can do to get started with security Discover the critical importance of software updates in protecting your systems Laura shares her best tips for enhancing the security of your WordPress site Learn how to reduce and prevent unwanted emails Uncover how to secure and grow your company Discover the opportunities and challenges for business security in the age of AI

With over twenty years of experience in software development and information security, Laura Bell Main specializes in bringing security into organizations of every shape and size. She is the co-founder and CEO of SafeStack, an online education platform offering flexible, high-quality, and people-focused secure development training for fast-moving companies, focusing on building security skills, practices, and culture across the entire engineering team. Laura is an experienced conference speaker, trainer, and regular panel member, and has spoken at various events such as BlackHat USA, Velocity, and OSCON on the subjects of privacy, covert communications, agile security, and security mindset. She is also the co-author of Agile Application Security and Security for Everyone.

Paris Pittman is a Senior Program Manager at the Open Source Program office at Apple. A Prominent Kubernetes and CNCF member who served many roles with a focus on community and governance. Paris was on some key milestones for this show. First appearance was on Episode 1 and later on Episode 100. So we could not be happier to have Paris back in Episode 200. We discussed how Paris got started with community work and how the experience has been. Paris shared with us some words of wisdom on the power of working with others and the importance of moving on.   Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know: - web: kubernetespodcast.com - mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com - twitter: @kubernetespod   News of the week KCD Amsterdam Retro AWS announced Data on EKS Kubecon EU 2023 “Security Village” Podman desktop released version 0.14 Keycloak joined CNCF as an incubating project Kubernetes v1.27 code name Chill Vibes was released The CNCF “Cloud Native Explorers” - Amsterdam Edition CNCF white paper on Platforms for Cloud Native Computing GKE Autopilot is now the default mode of operations for new clusters   Links from the interview Paris Pittman: Linkedin Twitter Mastodon (@paris@hachyderm.io) OSCON 2016 Sarah Novotny Kaslin is a new chair of SIG contribX

Today Laura and Kevin speak to Laura Bell Main, CEO of SafeStack about cybersecurity, threat modeling, and ChatGPT while also trying to determine who is the best Laura Laura Bell Main is the co-founder and CEO of SafeStack, an online education platform offering flexible, high-quality, and people-focused secure development training for fast-moving companies, with a focus on building security skills, practices, and culture across the entire engineering team. With over twenty years of experience in software development and information security, Laura Bell Main specializes in bringing security into organizations of every shape and size. Laura is an experienced conference speaker, trainer, and regular panel member, and has spoken at a range of events such as BlackHat USA, Velocity, and OSCON on the subjects of privacy, covert communications, agile security, and security mindset.  She is also the co-author of Agile Application Security and Security for Everyone.

Ten years ago Dell launched the developer laptop, shipping a Linux desktop of their best gear. In this episode, Coté talks with Barton George who's lead the project about Project Sputnik (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/xps-13-plus-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9320-laptop/ctox13w11p1c4001u), lessons learned about innovating in large companies, and compressed air can sponsorships. Links mentioned: - Check out Barton's overview of the most recent Dell XPS 13 Plus developer edition (https://www.dell.com/community/Developer-Blogs/Dell-XPS-13-Plus-developer-edition-with-Ubuntu-22-04-LTS-pre/ba-p/8255332), and the laptop itself (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/xps-13-plus-developer-edition/spd/xps-13-9320-laptop/ctox13w11p1c4001u) and other Linux on Dell machine (https://www.dell.com/en-us/lp/linux-systems). - Also, Barton mentions the new Dell Developer site (https://developer.dell.com), which you can see here (https://developer.dell.com). - Dell Linux Workstations, Laptops, and Desktops (https://www.dell.com/en-us/lp/linux-systems) -  In addition to XPS 13 and Precision developer systems, this also features the Linux-enabled Latitude and Optiplex lines.  Latitude and Optiplex are part of the broader Dell Linux portfolio which is made up of over 100 systems. - Dell's Sputnik - Git what you want (http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/07/dells-sputnik-git-what-you-want.html), 2021. - Project Sputnik --_ Cote interviews Barton_ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4ddV4Qim_k), May 7, 2012. - Sputnik Developer Laptop Overview (Barton George) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7o6CLtggXg), July 19, 2012. - Barton George interviewed at OSCON 2012 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcBMC7htQno), July 19, 2012 - “Precise Pangolin (https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/12.04/)” - was code name for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (which the first XPS 13 developer edition launched with)  - Names of months (https://www.almanac.com/content/how-did-months-get-their-names) This interview was done on December 12th, 2022. Special Guest: Barton George.

Join Jennifer and Laura Bell Main as they talk about the importance of Software security.  Software security is not just a business challenge, but a challenge for home computer users as well.  Laura Bell Main shares some great insights and tips that everyone can use to have a safer online experience. A little more about Laura Bell Main: Laura Bell Main specializes in securing some of Australia and New Zealand's fastest-growing organizations. She has over twenty years of experience in software development and information security. It's her mission and passion to bring security into organizations of every shape and size. Laura is the founder and CEO of SafeStack Academy, an online education platform offering flexible, high-quality, and people-focused, secure development training for fast moving companies, with a focus on building security skills, practices, and culture across the entire engineering team. SafeStack is a value's driven company on a mission to make cybersecurity accessible for everyone and any organization. “To protect each one of us, we must protect all of us” This is the underpinning belief that drives Laura. Her company pushing hard into this issue by attempting to train all of our organisations, big and small. Through free plans, student sponsorships and sponsored communities, she is working towards a future where we no longer spend 99% of our security resources on 1% of our organizations. She is an experienced conference speaker, trainer, and regular panel member, and has spoken at a range of events such as BlackHat USA, Velocity, and OSCON on the subjects of privacy, covert communications, agile security, and security mindset. She is also the co-author of Agile Application Security and Security for Everyone.

In this episode of the podcast, Grizz interviews Dawn Foster, Director Open Source Community Strategy at VMware. This is the beginning of our series on the bedrock benefits of open source. Dawn and Grizz talk about how collaboration breeds creativity, how to be a good corporate citizen in open source, and also about Dawn's path, and how she's been able to turn her fascination in open source communities into a career. Dawn's Info | https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawnfoster/ Dawn's OSFF London Talk | https://resources.finos.org/znglist/osff-london-2022-video-recordings/?c=cG9zdDoxNzE5 Dawn is Director of Open Source Community Strategy within VMware's OSPO. She is a Governing Board member / maintainer for CHAOSS, Steering Committee member for the TODO Group, co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy TAG, and OpenUK board member. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like Intel and Puppet with expertise in community building, strategy, open source software, governance, metrics, and more. Dawn holds a PhD from the University of Greenwich along with an MBA and a BS in Computer Science. She has spoken at over 100 industry events, including many Linux Foundation events, KubeCon, OSCON, SXSW, FOSDEM and more. In her spare time she enjoys reading science fiction, running, and traveling. CFP - submit your talks for OSFF NYC by September 12: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/program/cfp/ Register - Early bird ends September 14 (Members attend for free, but register early to be entered to win FINOS swag): https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-finance-forum-new-york/register/ OSFF London Videos & Pics: https://resources.finos.org/znglist/osff-london-2022-video-recordings/?c=cG9zdDo5OTA2MjA= Grizz's Info | https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarongriswold/ | grizz@finos.org ►► Visit FINOS www.finos.org ►► Get In Touch: info@finos.org

Hoy en el programa:Andy Valdez en el baúl de los recuerdos Hablo de María FelixPaty Estrada y su ayuda a la comunidad.En la canción de Gastón, saludos cantado sobre la canción Maquina 501 de Francisco “El Charro Avitia”.Jorge Lozano nos habló de familia de extrañosCon la Diva de México Hablamos de la gente de las suegras (OS) que le han bajado a la novia al hijo (A)llamadas y reflexión que tocaran tu corazón.

In this episode, we cover: Aaron talks about starting out as a developer and the early stages of cloud development at RBC (1:05) Aaron discusses transitioning to developer advocacy (12:25) Aaron identifies successes he had in his early days of developer advocacy (20:35) Jason asks what it looks like to assist developers in achieving completion with long term maintenance projects, or “sustainable development” (25:40)  Jason and Aaron discuss what “innersource” is and why it's valuable in an organization (29:29) Aaron answers the question “how do you keep skills and knowledge up to date?” (33:55) Aaron talks about job opportunities at RBC (38:55) Links Referenced: Royal Bank of Canada: https://www.rbcroyalbank.com Opportunities at RBC: https://jobs.rbc.com/ca/en TranscriptAaron: And I guess some PM asked my boss, “So, Aaron doesn't come to our platform status meetings, he doesn't really take tickets, and he doesn't take support rotation. What does Aaron do for the Cloud Platform Team?”Jason: [laugh].Jason: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability, learning, and building better systems. In this episode, we talk with Aaron Clark, Director of Developer Advocacy at the Royal Bank of Canada. We chat with him about his journey from developer to advocate, the power of applying open-source principles within organizations—known as innersource—and his advice to keep learning.Jason: Welcome to the show, Aaron.Aaron: Thanks for having me, Jason. My name is Aaron Clark. I'm a developer advocate for cloud at RBC. That is the Royal Bank of Canada. And I've been at the bank for… well, since February 2010.Jason: So, when you first joined the bank, you were not a developer advocate, though?Aaron: Right. So, I have been in my current role since 2019. I've been part of the cloud program since 2017. Way back in 2010, I joined as a Java developer. So, my background in terms of being a developer is pretty much heavy on Java. Java and Spring Boot, now.I joined working on a bunch of Java applications within one of the many functions areas within the Royal Bank. The bank is gigantic. That's kind of one of the things people sometimes struggle to grasp. It's such a large organization. We're something like 100,000… yeah, 100,000 employees, around 10,000 of that is in technology, so developers, developer adjacent roles like business analysts, and QE, and operations and support, and all of those roles.It's a big organization. And that's one of the interesting things to kind of grapple with when you join the organization. So, I joined in a group called Risk IT. We built solely internal-facing applications. I worked on a bunch of stuff in there.I'm kind of a generalist, where I have interest in all the DevOps things. I set up one of the very first Hudson servers in Risk—well, in the bank, but specifically in Risk—and I admin'ed it on the side because nobody else was doing it and it needed doing. After a few years of doing that and working on a bunch of different projects, I was occasionally just, “We need this project to succeed, to have a good foundation at the start, so Aaron, you're on this project for six months and then you're doing something different.” Which was really interesting. At the same time, I always worry about the problem where if you don't stay on something for very long, you never learn the consequences of the poor decisions you may have made because you don't have to deal with it.Jason: [laugh].Aaron: And that was like the flip side of, I hope I'm making good decisions here. It seemed to be pretty good, people seemed happy with it, but I always worry about that. Like, being in a role for a few years where you build something, and then it's in production, and you're running it and you're dealing with, “Oh, I made this decision that seems like a good idea at the time. Turns out that's a bad idea. Don't do that next time.” You never learned that if you don't stay in a role.When I was overall in Risk IT for four, almost five years, so I would work with a bunch of the teams who maybe stayed on this project, they'd come ask me questions. It's like, I'm not gone gone. I'm just not working on that project for the next few months or whatever. And then I moved into another part of the organization, like, a sister group called Finance IT that runs kind of the—builds and runs the general ledger for the bank. Or at least for a part of capital markets.It gets fuzzy as the organization moves around. And groups combine and disperse and things like that. That group, I actually had some interesting stuff that was when I started working on more things like cloud, looking at cloud, the bank was starting to bring in cloud. So, I was still on the application development side, but I was interested in it. I had been to some conferences like OSCON, and started to hear about and learn about things like Docker, things like Kubernetes, things like Spring Boot, and I was like this is some really neat stuff.I was working on a Spark-based ETL system, on one of the early Hadoop clusters at the bank. So, I've been I'm like, super, super lucky that I got to do a lot of this stuff, work on all of these new things when they were really nascent within the organization. I've also had really supportive leadership. So, like, I was doing—that continuous integration server, that was totally on the side; I got involved in a bunch of reuse ideas of, we have this larger group; we're doing a lot of similar things; let's share some of the libraries and things like that. That was before being any, like, developer advocate or anything like that I was working on these.And I was actually funded for a year to promote and work on reuse activities, basically. And that was—I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes that I now, like, inform some of the decisions I make in my current role, but I was doing all of this, and I almost described it as I kind of taxed my existing project because I'm working on this team, but I have this side thing that I have to do. And I might need to take a morning and not work on your project because I have to, like, maintain this build machine for somebody. And I had really supportive leadership. They were great.They recognize the value of these activities, and didn't really argue about the fact that I was taking time away from whatever the budget said I was supposed to be doing, which was really good. So, I started doing that, and I was working in finance as the Cloud Team was starting to go through a revamp—the initial nascent Cloud Team at the bank—and I was doing cloud things from the app dev side, but at the same time within my group, anytime something surprising became broken, somebody had some emergency that they needed somebody to drop in and be clever and solve things, that person became me. And I was running into a lot of distractions in that sense. And it's nice to be the person who gets to work on, “Oh, this thing needs rescuing. Help us, Aaron.”That's fantastic; it feels really good, right, up until you're spending a lot of your time doing it and you can't do the things that you're really interested in. So, I actually decided to move over to the Cloud Team and work on kind of defining how we build applications for the cloud, which was really—it was a really good time. It was a really early time in the bank, so nobody really knew how we were going to build applications, how we were going to put them on the cloud, what does that structure look like? I got to do a lot of reading and research and learning from other people. One of the key things about, like, a really large organization that's a little slow-moving like the bank and is a little bit risk-averse in terms of technology choices, people always act like that's always a bad thing.And sometimes it is because we're sometimes not adopting things that we would really get a lot of benefit out of, but the other side of it is, by the time we get to a lot of these technologies and platforms, a bunch of the sharp edges have kind of been sanded off. Like, the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world, they've adopted it and they've discovered all of these problems and been, like, duct-taping them together. And they've kind of found, “Oh, we need to have actual, like, security built into this system,” or things like that, and they've dealt with it. So, by the time we get to it, some of those issues are just not there anymore. We don't have to deal with them.Which is an underrated positive of being in a more conservative organization around that. So, we were figuring there's a lot of things we could learn from. When we were looking at microservices and, kind of, Spring Boot Spring Cloud, the initial cloud parts that had been brought into the organization were mainly around Cloud Foundry. And we were helping some initial app teams build their applications, which we probably over-engineered some of those applications, in the sense that we were proving out patterns that you didn't desperately need for building those applications. Like, you could have probably just done it with a web app and relational database and it would have been fine.But we were proving out some of the patterns of how do you build something for broader scale with microservices and things like that. We learned a bunch about the complexities of doing that too early, but we also learned a bunch about how to do this so we could teach other application teams. And that's kind of the group that I became part of, where I wasn't a platform operator on the cloud, but I was working with dev teams, building things with dev teams to help them learn how to build stuff for cloud. And this was my first real exposure to that scope and scale of the bank. I'd been in the smaller groups and one of the things that you start to encounter when you start to interact with the larger parts of the bank is just, kind of, how many silos there are, how diverse the tech stacks are in an organization of that size.Like, we have areas that do things with Java, we have areas doing things with .NET Framework, we have areas doing lots of Python, we have areas doing lots of Node, especially as the organization started building more web applications. While you're building things with Angular and using npm for the front-end, so you're building stuff on the back-end with Node as well. Whether that is a good technology choice, a lot of the time you're building with what you have. Even within Java, we'd have teams building with Spring Boot, and lots of groups doing that, but someone else is interested in Google Guice, so they're building—instead of Spring, they're using Google Guice as their dependency injection framework.Or they have a… like, there's the mainframe, right? You have this huge technology stack where lots of people are building Java EE applications still and trying to evolve that from the old grungy days of Java EE to the much nicer modern ways of it. And some of the technology conversations are things like, “Well, you can use this other technology; that's fine, but if you're using that, and we're using something else over here, we can't help each other. When I solve a problem, I can't really help solve it for you as well. You have to solve it for yourself with your framework.”I talked to a team once using Vertex in Java, and I asked them, “Why are you using Vertex?” And they said, “Well, that's what our team knew.” I was like, “That's a good technology choice in the sense that we have to deliver. This is what we know, so this is the thing we know we can succeed with rather than actually learning something new on the job while trying to deliver something.” That's often a recipe for challenges if not outright failure.Jason: Yeah. So, it sounds like that's kind of where you come in; if all these teams are doing very disparate things, right—Aaron: Mm-hm.Jason: That's both good and bad, right? That's the whole point of microservices is independent teams, everyone's decoupled, more velocity. But also, there's huge advantages—especially in an org the size of RBC—to leverage some of the learnings from one team to another, and really, like, start to share these best practices. I'm guessing that's where you come into play now in your current role.Aaron: Yeah. And that's the part where how do we have the flexibility for people to make their own choices while standardizing so we don't have this enormous sprawl, so we can build on things? And this is starting to kind of where I started really getting involved in community stuff and doing developer advocacy. And part of how this actually happened—and this is another one of those cases where I've been very fortunate and I've had great leaders—I was working as part of the Cloud Platform Team, the Special Projects group that I was, a couple of people left; I was the last one left. It's like, “Well, you can't be your own department, so you're part of Cloud Platform.” But I'm not an operator. I don't take a support rotation.And I'm ostensibly building tooling, but I'm mostly doing innersource. This is where the innersource community started to spin up at RBC. I was one of the, kind of, founding members of the innersource community and getting that going. We had built a bunch of libraries for cloud, so those were some of the first projects into innersource where I was maintaining the library for Java and Spring using OIDC. And this is kind of predating Spring Security's native support for OIDC—so Open ID Connect—And I was doing a lot of that, I was supporting app teams who were trying to adopt that library, I was involved in some of the other early developer experience things around, you complain this thing is bad as the developer; why do we have to do this? You get invited to one of the VP's regular weekly meetings to discuss, and now you're busy trying to fix, kind of, parts of the developer experience. I was doing this, and I guess some PM asked my boss, “So, Aaron doesn't come to our platform status meetings, he doesn't really take tickets, and he doesn't take support rotation. What does Aaron do for the Cloud Platform Team?”Jason: [laugh].Aaron: And my boss was like, “Well, Aaron's got a lot of these other things that he's involved with that are really valuable.” One of the other things I was doing at this point was I was hosting the Tech Talk speaking series, which is kind of an internal conference-style talks where we get an expert from within the organization and we try to cross those silos where we find someone who's a machine-learning expert; come and explain how TensorFlow works. Come and explain how Spark works, why it's awesome. And we get those experts to come and do presentations internally for RBC-ers. And I was doing that and doing all of the support work for running that event series with the co-organizers that we had.And at the end of the year, when they were starting up a new initiative to really focus on how do we start promoting cloud adoption rather than just people arrive at the platform and start using it and figure it out for themselves—you can only get so far with that—my boss sits me down. He says. “So, we really like all the things that you've been doing, all of these community things and things like that, so we're going to make that your job now.” And this is how I arrived at there. It's not like I applied to be a developer advocate. I was doing all of these things on the side and all of a sudden, 75% of my time was all of these side projects, and that became my job.So, it's not really the most replicable, like, career path, but it is one of those things where, like, getting involved in stuff is a great way to find a niche that is the things that you're passionate about. So, I changed my title. You can do that in some of our systems as long as your manager approves it, so I changed my title from the very generic ‘Senior Technical Systems Analyst—which, who knows what I actually do when that's my title—and I changed that to ‘Developer Advocate.' And that was when I started doing more research learning about what do actual developer advocates do because I want to be a developer advocate. I want to say I'm a developer advocate.For the longest time in the organization, I'm the only person in the company with that title, which is interesting because then nobody knows what to do with me because I'm not like—am I, like—I'm not a director, I'm not a VP. Like… but I'm not just a regular developer, either. Where—I don't fit in the hierarchy. Which is good because then people stop getting worried about what what are titles and things like that, and they just listen to what I say. So, I do, like, design consultations with dev teams, making sure that they knew what they were doing, or were aware of a bunch of the pitfalls when they started to get onto the cloud.I would build a lot of samples, a lot of docs, do a lot of the community engagement, so going to events internally that we'd have, doing a lot of those kinds of things. A lot of the innersource stuff I was already doing—the speaking series—but now it was my job formally, and it helped me cross a lot of those silos and work very horizontally. That's one of the different parts about my job versus a regular developer, is it's my job to cover anything to do with cloud—that at least, that I find interesting, or that my boss tells me I need to work at—and anything anywhere in the organization that touches. So, a dev team doing something with Kubernetes, I can go and talk to them. If they're building something in capital markets that might be useful, I can say, “Hey, can you share this into innersource so that other people can build on this work as well?”And that was really great because I develop all of these relationships with all of these other groups. And that was, to a degree, what the cloud program needed from me as well at that beginning. I explained that this was now my job to one of my friends. And they're like, “That sounds like the perfect job for you because you are technical, but you're really good with people.” I was like, “Am I? I guess I am now that I've been doing it for this amount of time.”And the other part of it as we've gone on more and more is because I talk to all of these development teams, I am not siloed in, I'm not as tunneled on the specific thing I'm working with, and now I can talk to the platform teams and really represent the application developer perspective. Because I'm not building the platform. And they have their priorities, and they have things that they have to worry about; I don't have to deal with that. My job is to bring the perspective of an application developer. That's my background.I'm not an operator; I don't care about the support rotation, I don't care about a bunch of the niggly things and toil of the platform. It's my job, sometimes, to say, hey, this documentation is well-intentioned. I understand how you arrived at this documentation from the perspective of being the platform team and the things that you prioritize and want to explain to people, but as an application developer, none of the information that I need to build something to run on your platform is presented in a manner that I am able to consume. So, I do, like, that side as well of providing customer feedback to the platform saying, “This thing is hard,” or, “This thing that you are asking the application teams to work on, they don't want to care about that. They shouldn't have to care about this thing.” And that sort of stuff.So, I ended up being this human router are sometimes where platform teams will say, “Do you know anybody who's doing this, who's using this thing?” Or finding one app team and say, “You should talk to that group over there because they are also doing the same thing, or they're struggling with the same thing, and you should collaborate.” Or, “They have solved this problem.” Because I don't know every single programming language we use, I don't know all of the frameworks, but I know who I asked for Python questions, and I will send teams to that person. And part of that, then, as I started doing this community work was actually building community.One of the great successes was, we have a Slack channel called ‘Cloud Adoption.' And that was the place where everybody goes to ask their questions about how do I do this thing to put something on Cloud Foundry, put it on Kubernetes? How do I do this? I don't understand. And that was sometimes my whole day was just going onto that Slack channel, answering questions, and being very helpful and trying to document things, trying to get a feel for what people were doing.It was my whole day, sometimes. It took a while to get used to that was actually, like, a successful day coming from a developer background. I'm used to building things, so I feel like success because I built something I can show you, that I did this today. And then I'd have days where I talked to a bunch of people and I don't have anything I can show you. That was, like, the hard part of taking on this role.But one of the big successes was we built this community where it wasn't just me. Other people who wanted to help people, who were just developers on different dev teams, they'd see me ask questions or answer questions, and they would then know the answers and they'd chime in. And as I started being tasked with more and more other activities, I would then get to go—I'd come back to Slack and see oh, there's a bunch of questions. Oh, it turns out, people are able to help themselves. And that was—like that's success from that standpoint of building community.And now that I've done that a couple times with Tech Talks, with some of the developer experience work, some of the cloud adoption work, I get asked internally how do you build community when we're starting up new communities around things like Site Reliability Engineering. How are we going to do that? So, I get—and that feels weird, but that's one of the things that I have been doing now. And as—like, this is a gigantic role because of all of the scope. I can touch anything with anyone in cloud.One of the scope things with the role, but also with the bank is not only do we have all these tech stacks, but we also have this really, really diverse set of technical acumen, where you have people who are experts already on Kubernetes. They will succeed no matter what I do. They'll figure it out because they're that type of personality, they're going to find all the information. If anything, some of the restrictions that we put in place to manage our environments and secure them because of the risk requirements and compliance requirements of being a regulated bank, those will get in the way. Sometimes I'm explaining why those things are there. Sometimes I'm agreeing with people. “Yeah, it sucks. I don't want to have to do this.”But at the same time, you'll have people who they just want to come in, write their code, go home. They don't want to think about technology other than that. They're not going to go and learn things on their own necessarily. And that's not the end of the world. As strange as that sounds to people who are the personality to be constantly learning and constantly getting into everything and tinkering, like, that's me too, but you still need people to keep the lights on, to do all of the other work as well. And people who are happy just doing that, that's also valuable.Because if I was in that role, I would not be happy. And someone who is happy, like, this is good for the overall organization. But the things that they need to learn, the things they need explained to them, the help they need for success is different. So, that's one of the challenges is figuring out how do you address all of those customers? And sometimes even the answer for those customers is—and this is one of the things about my role—it's like the definition is customer success.If the application you're trying to put on cloud should not go on cloud, it is my job to tell you not to put it on cloud. It is not my job to put you on cloud. I want you to succeed, not just to get there. I can get your thing on the cloud in an afternoon, probably, but if I then walk away and it breaks, like, you don't know what to do. So, a lot of the things around how do we teach people to self-serve, how do we make our internal systems more self-serve, those are kind of the things that I look at now.How do I manage my own time because the scope is so big? It's like, I need to figure out where I'm not moving a thousand things forward an inch, but I'm moving things to their completion. And I am learning to, while not managing people, still delegate and work with the community, work with the broader cloud platform group around how do I let go and help other people do things?Jason: So, you mentioned something in there that I think is really interesting, right, the goal of helping people get to completion, right? And I think that's such an interesting thing because I think as—in that advocacy role, there's often a notion of just, like, I'm going to help you get unstuck and then you can keep going, without a clear idea of where they're ultimately heading. And that kind of ties back into something that you said earlier about starting out as a developer where you build things and you kind of just, like, set it free, [laugh] and you don't think about, you know, that day two, sort of, operations, the maintenance, the ongoing kind of stuff. So, I'm curious, as you've progressed in your career, as you've gotten more wisdom from helping people out, what does that look like when you're helping people get to completion, also with the mindset of this is an application that's going to be running for quite some time. Even in the short term, you know, if it's a short-term thing, but I feel like with the bank, most things probably are somewhat long-lived. How do you balance that out? How do you approach that, helping people get to done but also keeping in mind that they have to—this app has to keep living and it has to be maintained?Aaron: Yeah, a lot of it is—like, the term we use is sustainable development. And part of that is kind of removing friction, trying to get the developers to a point where they can focus on, I guess, the term that's often used in the industry is their inner loop. And it should come as no surprise, the bank often has a lot of processes that are high in friction. There's a lot of open a ticket, wait for things. This is the part that I take my conversations with dev teams, and I ask them, “What are the things that are hard? What are the things you don't like? What are the things you wish you didn't have to do or care about?”And some of this is reading between the lines when you talk to them; it's not so much interviewing them. Like, any kind of requirements gathering, usually, it's not what they say, it's what they talk about that then you look at, oh, this is the problem; how do we unstuck that problem so that people can get to where they need to be going? And this kind of informs some of my feedback to the systems we put in place, the processes we put in place around the platform, some of the tooling we look at. I really, really love the philosophy from Docker and Solomon Hykes around, “Batteries included but removable.” I want developers to have a high baseline as a starting point.And this comes partly from my experience with Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry has a really great out-of-the-box dev experience for lots of things where, “I just have a web app. Just run it. It's Nginx; it's some HTML pages; I don't need to know all the details. Just make it go and give me the URL.”And I want more of that for app teams where they have a high baseline of things to work with as a starting point. And kind of every organization ends up building this, where they have—like, Netflix: Netflix OSS or Twitter with Finagle—where they have, “Here's the surrounding pieces that I want to plug in that everybody gets as a starting point. And how do we provide security? How do we provide all of these pieces that are major concerns for an app team, that they have to do, we know they have to do?” Some of these are things that only start coming up when they're on the cloud and trying to provide a lot more of that for app teams so they can focus on the business stuff and only get into the weeds when they need to.Jason: As you're talking about these frameworks that, you know, having this high quality or this high baseline of tools that people can just have, right, equipping them with a nice toolbox, I'm guessing that the innersource stuff that you're working on also helps contribute to that.Aaron: Oh, immensely. And as we've gone on and as we've matured, our innersource organization, a huge part of that is other groups as well, where they're finding things that—we need this. And they'll put—it originally it was, “We built this. We'll put it into innersource.” But what you get with that is something that is very targeted and specific to their group and maybe someone else can use it, but they can't use it without bending it a little bit.And I hate bending software to fit it. That's one of the things—it's a very common thing in the corporate environment where we have our existing processes and rather than adopting the standard approach that some tool uses, we need to take it and then bend it until it fits our existing process because we don't want to change our processes. And that gets hard because you run into weird edge cases where this is doing something strange because we bent it. And it's like, well, that's not its fault at that point. As we've started doing more innersource, a lot more things have really become innersource first, where groups realize we need to solve this together.Let's start working on it together and let's design the API as a group. And API design is really, really hard. And how do we do things with shared libraries or services. And working through that as a group, we're seeing more of that, and more commonly things where, “Well, this is a thing we're going to need. We're going to start it in innersource, we'll get some people to use it and they'll be our beta customers. And we'll inform it without really specifically targeting an application and an app team's needs.”Because they're all going to have specific needs. And that's where the, like, ‘included but removable' part comes in. How do we build things extensibly where we have the general solution and you can plug in your specifics? And we're still—like, this is not an easy problem. We're still solving it, we're still working through it, we're getting better at it.A lot of it's just how can we improve day-over-day, year-over-year, to make some of these things better? Even our, like, continuous integration and delivery pipelines to our to clouds, all of these things are in constant flux and constant evolution. We're supporting multiple languages; we're supporting multiple versions of different languages; we're talking about, hey, we need to get started adopting Java 17. None of our libraries or pipelines do that yet, but we should probably get on that since it's been out for—what—almost a year? And really working on kind of decomposing some of these things where we built it for what we needed at the time, but now it feels a bit rigid. How do we pull out the pieces?One of the big pushes in the organization after the log4j CVE and things like that broad impact on the industry is we need to do a much more thorough job around software supply chain, around knowing what we have, making sure we have scans happening and everything. And that's where, like, the pipeline work comes in. I'm consulting on the pipeline stuff where I provide a lot of customer feedback; we have a team that is working on that all full time. But doing a lot of those things and trying to build for what we need, but not cut ourselves off from the broader industry, as well. Like, my nightmare situation, from a tooling standpoint, is that we restrict things, we make decisions around security, or policy or something like that, and we cut ourselves off from the broader CNCF tooling ecosystem, we can't use any of those tools. It's like, well, now we have to build something ourselves, or—which we're never going to do it as well as the external community. Or we're going to just kind of have bad processes and no one's going to be happy so figuring out all of that.Jason: Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned about staying up to speed and having those standards reminds me of, you know, similar to that previous experience that I had was, basically, I was at an org where we said that we'd like to open-source and we used open-source and that basically meant that we forked things and then made our own weird modifications to it. And that meant, like, now, it wasn't really open-source; it was like this weird, hacked thing that you had to keep maintaining and trying to keep it up to date with the latest stuff. Sounds like you're in a better spot, but I am curious, in terms of keeping up with the latest stuff, how do you do that, right? Because you mentioned that the bank, obviously a bit slower, adopting more established software, but then there's you, right, where you're out there at the forefront and you're trying to gather best practices and new technologies that you can use at the bank, how do you do that as someone that's not building with the latest, greatest stuff? How do you keep that skills and that knowledge up to date?Aaron: I try to do reading, I try to set time aside to read things like The New Stack, listen to podcasts about technologies. It's a really broad industry; there's only so much I can keep up with. This was always one of the conversations going way back where I would have the conversation with my boss around the business proposition for me going to conferences, and explaining, like, what's the cost to acquire knowledge in an organization? And while we can bring in consultants, or we can hire people in, like, when you hire new people in, they bring in their pre-existing experiences. So, if someone comes in and they know Hadoop, they can provide information and ideas around is this a good problem to solve with Hadoop? Maybe, maybe not.I don't want to bet a project on that if I don't know anything about Hadoop or Kubernetes or… like, using something like Tilt or Skaffold with my tooling. That's one of the things I got from going to conferences, and I actually need to set more time aside to watch the videos now that everything's virtual. Like, not having that dedicated week is a problem where I'm just disconnected and I'm not dealing with anything. When you're at work, even if KubeCon's going on or Microsoft Build, I'm still doing my day-to-day, I'm getting Slack messages, and I'm not feeling like I can just ignore people. I should probably block out more time, but part of how I stay up to date with it.It's really doing a lot of that reading and research, doing conversations like this, like, the DX Buzz that we invited you to where… I explained that event—it's adjacent to internal speakers—I explained that as I was had a backlog of videos from conferences I was not watching, and secretly if I make everybody else come to lunch with me to watch these videos, I have to watch the video because I'm hosting the session to discuss it, and now I will at least watch one a month. And that's turned out to be a really successful thing internally within the organization to spread knowledge, to have conversations with people. And the other part I do, especially on the tooling side, is I still build stuff. As much as, like, I don't code nearly as much as I used to, I bring an application developer perspective, but I'm not writing code every day anymore.Which I always said was going to be the thing that would make me miserable. It's not. I still think about it, and when I do get to write code, I'm always looking for how can I improve this setup? How can I use this tool? Can I try it out? Is this better? Is this smoother for me so I'm not worrying about this thing?And then spreading that information more broadly within the developer experience group, our DevOps teams, our platform teams, talking to those teams about the things that they use. Like, we use Argo CD within one group and I haven't touched it much, but I know they've got lots of expertise, so talking to them. “How do you use this? How is this good for me? How do I make this work? How can I use it, too?”Jason: I think it's been an incredible, [laugh] as you've been chatting, there are so many different tools and technologies that you've mentioned having used or being used at the bank. Which is both—it's interesting as a, like, there's so much going on in the bank; how do you manage it all? But it's also super interesting, I think, because it shows that there's a lot of interest in just finding the right solutions and finding the right tools, and not really being super-strongly married to one particular tool or one set way to do things, which I think is pretty cool. We're coming up towards the end of our time here, so I did want to ask you, before we sign off, Aaron, do you have anything that you'd like to plug, anything you want to promote?Aaron: Yeah, the Cloud Program is hiring a ton. There's lots of job openings on all of our platform teams. There's probably job openings on my Cloud Adoption Team. So, if you think the bank sounds interesting—the bank is very stable; that's always one of the nice things—but the bank… the thing about the bank, I originally joined the bank saying, “Oh, I'll be here two years, and I'll get bored and I'll leave,” and now it's been 12 years and I'm still at the bank. Because I mentioned, like, that scope and scale of the organization, there's always something interesting happening somewhere.So, if you're interested in cloud platform stuff, we've got a huge cloud platform. If you're in—like, you want to do machine-learning, we've got an entire organization. It should come as no surprise, we have lots of data at a bank, and there's a whole organization for all sorts of different things with machine-learning, deep learning, data analytics, big data, stuff like that. Like, if you think that's interesting, and even if you're not specifically in Toronto, Canada, you can probably find an interesting role within the organization if that's something that turns your crank.Jason: Awesome. We'll post links to everything that we've mentioned, which is a ton. But go check us out, gremlin.com/podcast is where you can find the show note for this episode, and we'll have links to everything. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure to have you.Aaron: Thanks so much for having me, Jason. I'm so happy that we got to do this.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called, “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

https://go.dok.community/slack https://dok.community/ From the DoK Day EU 2022 (https://youtu.be/Xi-h4XNd5tE) Data doesn't magically appear in our data centers. There are usually several phases and several storage locations along its journey throughout your organization. New architectural patterns, such as microservices, and new technology, such as Kubernetes are changing how we can think about and manage the large volumes of data coming at us. In this talk we will begin by quickly introducing the architecture and technology and how they make our lives better. From there it's live demo time combining Java microservices, a processing caching service, a messaging layer, and a relational database all running in Kubernetes . This application will be handling frequently updated data, generating alerts on specific data events, and simultaneously populating a system of record. Come for the discussion, hands on demo, and witty banter! Steve is a Dad, Partner, Son, and Senior Developer Readiness Engineer for VMware Tanzu. In addition to showing off all the great work of the Tanzu team, he helps drive Tanzu developer experience. He can teach you about Containers, Kubernetes, Data Analysis, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, Microservices, and some JavaScript. He has deep subject area expertise in GIS/Spatial, Statistics, and Ecology. Before Tanzu, Steve was a developer Advocate for Crunchy Data, DigitalGlobe, Red Hat, LinkedIn, deCarta, and ESRI. Steve has a Ph.D. in Ecology and can easily be bribed with offers of bird watching or fly fishing. He has spoken at hundreds of conferences and done over 100 workshops including Monktoberfest, Red Hat Summit, MongoNY, JavaOne, FOSS4G, ODSC, AjaxWorld, GeoWeb, Where2.0, and OSCON.

https://go.dok.community/slack https://dok.community ABSTRACT OF THE TALK Eventually the time will come to run a stateful app in Kubernetes. This can be a scary thing adding more moving parts to a Kubernetes cluster and deploying as well as managing your app on Kubernetes when it requires state. In this talk Steve Buchanan will take you through a journey of understanding how storage works in Kubernetes, how to Persistent state with pods, what storage options are available with Azure Kubernetes Service, best practices, and a demo of deploying a stateful app to AKS. BIO Steve Buchanan is a Principal Program Manager with a leading global tech giant focused on improving the cloud. He is a Pluralsight author, the author of eight technical books, and a former 10-time Microsoft MVP. He has presented at tech events, including, DevOps Days, Open Source North, Midwest Management Summit (MMS), Microsoft Ignite, BITCon, Experts Live Europe, OSCON, Inside Azure management, and user groups. He has been featured in several publications including the Star Tribune (the 5th largest newspaper in the US). He stays active in the technical community and enjoys blogging about his adventures in the world of IT at www.buchatech.com KEY TAKE-AWAYS FROM THE TALK Overview of Storage in Kubernetes covering Storage Classes, Persistent Volumes, & Persistent Volume Claims. Overview of Azure Storage, Best Practices to running stateful apps in Kubernetes.

About RachelRachel Kelly is a Senior Engineer at Fastly in Infrastructure, and is a proud career-switcher over to tech as of about eight years ago. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and spends her time thinking about crafts, cycling, leadership, and ditching Google. Previously, she worked at Bright.md wrestling Ansible and Terraform into shape, and before then, a couple years at Puppet.  You can reach Rachel on twitter @wholemilk, or at hello@rkode.com.Links: Fastly: https://www.fastly.com SeaGL: https://seagl.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/wholemilk 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 LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key or a shared admin account isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And no, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A periodic subject that comes up from folks desperate to sell people things is this idea of cloud repatriation, where people have put their entire business in the cloud decided, “Mmm, not so much. I'll build some data centers and move it there.” It's an inspiring story if you're selling things for data centers, but it's not something we're seeing widespread evidence of, and I maintain that.Today, we're going to talk about that, only completely different. My guest today is Rachel Kelly, senior infrastructure engineer at Fastly. And no, Fastly has not done a cloud repatriation of which I am aware. But Rachel, you've done a career repatriation. You went from working with AWS in your previous company to working in bare metal. First, welcome to the show, and thank you for joining me.Rachel: Thanks, Corey. Super happy to be here.Corey: Now, let's talk about why you would do such a thing. It feels almost like you're Benjamin Button-ing here.Rachel: Yeah, a bit. The normal flow has been to go from sort of a sysadmin level, where you're managing servers fairly directly, to an operational level, where you are managing entire swathes of servers to entire data centers and so forth. But I went from managing just the SaaS web app to managing enormous groups of servers in data centers all over the world. And I did that because the provisioning of the web app, even on AWS, was absolutely my favorite part. What I've always wanted to get better with is the Linux and networking side of how our internet runs, and at Fastly, we are responsible for such a huge percentage of traffic all over the world. We have enormous customers who rely on us to deliver that data. And I get to be part of the group of people that puts those enormous groups of servers into production.Corey: I started my career in the more traditional way of starting out in data centers, building things out, and then finally scampering off into a world of cloud. And you learn things going through the data center side of the world that don't necessarily command the same levels of attention in the cloud environment because you don't have to think about these things. Networking is a great example. During the Great Recession, there was a salary freeze. I was not super thrilled in my job, but I couldn't find another one, so I spent the year learning how networks worked, and it made me a better systems administrator as a direct result of this. Same story with file systems, not necessarily because I did extensive amounts of work with their innards, but because every sysadmin interview under the sun asked the same questions about how inodes work, how journaling works, et cetera, and you have to be able to pass the trivia-based hazing process in order to get a job when you've just been fired from your last one.So, that became where I was focusing on these things. And now looking at a world of cloud, feels like we don't really need that in any meaningful sense. I mean, a couple people need to know it, but by and large no one has to think about it. So, is that just a bunch of useless knowledge that is taking up valuable space in your brain that could be used for other stuff or do you think that there's a valid story for folks who are working in purely cloud environments to still learn how the things underlying these concepts work?Rachel: First of all, I think that there is so much that we can do with less particular networking knowledge than we've ever needed in the past, thanks so much in part to AWS and all of their hangers-on. But yes, there are still people who need this networking knowledge. And once you have that kind of knowledge, once you're able to see how the routes talk to each other, and how your firewalls actually work, and how to abstract out these larger networks and determining your subnetting and everything, you can utilize that really beautifully, even in something like VPC on AWS. Without that kind of knowledge, like, you can still get quite a bit done—which I think is a testament to the power of abstraction in AWS—but I mean, boy oh boy, what you can do once you have some of that knowledge.Corey: I'm not allowed in the AWS data centers because I'm very bad at dodging bullets, but I find the knowledge is still useful because it helps me reason about things. When I know what—at least in a traditional environment—it's doing, I know what AWS is emulating, and I can safely assume that I haven't discovered some bug in their network stack for almost anything reasonable that I'd be working on other than maybe their documentation explaining it. So, when I start reasoning about it from that perspective, things make a lot more sense. And that's always been helpful. The argument historically has been when you're hiring—at least in the earlier days of cloud—well, I'm trying to hire, but it's hard to find cloud talent, so the story was always, “Oh, don't worry. If you've worked in a data center, we'll teach you the cloudy pieces because it's the natural evolution of things.” And there's a whole cottage industry of people training for exactly that use case. Because you are who you are, and doing what you do, how do you find hiring works when you're going the exact opposite direction?Rachel: Oh, my gosh, it's so interesting. In my area, we are trying to build these huge groups of servers based on bare metal. Do we hire sysadmins? Maybe. Do we hire ops folks? Maybe. Do we hire network engineers? Also, maybe.There are so many angles that we need to be aware of when pulling new talent into our area. And I think it's fascinating what all of these different, largely, like, non-programmer types have to contribute to the provisioning process. We need someone with expertise in security, and quality, and networking, and file systems, and everything else between those items. And it's really exciting seeing what people can add to our process.Corey: There's so much in there that I love, but at the part I'm going to focus on is you're talking about new hires as being additive. And that is valuable. It can lead to some pretty toxic and shitty behaviors, where it's, “We want to make sure everyone we hire is schmucks we've hired now.” Like, no, that is not what we're talking about. But culture is something you get whether you want it or not, and I firmly believe teams are atomic, when you bring someone new in or let someone go, you haven't changed the team, you have a new team, in many respects, and that dynamic becomes incredibly important.The idea of hiring people for strength has always been what I look for, as opposed to absence of weakness, where it's okay, I'm going to ask you a whole bunch of questions around all the different aspects of computing; I'm going to find the area you're bad at, and we just beat the snot out of you on that. It's, yeah, if I want to join a fraternity, I would.Rachel: [laugh]. Yeah, when I was job seeking, I wound up in interviews at places where their method of interviewing was very much hazing. “Well, let's see, I haven't read your resume. It says that you've set up a few things with Nginx. Do you know about this particular command in Nginx?” It's like, “Well, geez, I could look it up and figure it out, but that's not the point of this job.”I mean, we work together collaboratively every day, and if that doesn't sound familiar to you, I'm going to leave this interview. But yes, I mean, everybody's additive. There was another gal who joined at the same time that I did at Fastly, and we both have a very operational background. And we were additive to the very strong networking and data center engineers who were already on the team. And as far as I can tell, the team changed overnight when we joined.It is now our role—both this other gal's and mine—to work so much on the automation piece of our build process, which has been focused on lightly in some areas, but that we can bring that with—even just shell scripting, we are able to enhance that process by so much. And I just fantasize about the day that we can get someone in who is directly on our team and focused on security, or directly on our team and focused on testing. The heights we could soar to with that kind of in-department knowledge, where we're still focused on creating these builds, it's just so exciting to think about.Corey: It is and it's easy to look at data centers as the way things used to be but not the future at all, but CDNs are increasingly becoming something very different than they used to be. And I admit I'm a little stodgy; I tend to fight the tide. There's value in having something that is serving static assets close to your customer. There's value to the CDN, in following the telco story, of aspiring to be more than just the quote-unquote, “Dumb pipe,” because that's a commodity; you want to add differentiated value. But I'm also leery to wind up putting things that look like business logic into the edge at this stage.And I'm starting to feel like I might be wrong as far as the way that the world views these things. But I like the idea that if a CDN takes an outage—which is not common, but it does happen—that I should be able to seamlessly—well, “Seamlessly”—failover to a different CDN within an hour or so. But if there's significant business logic in your CDN, you've got to either have that replicated in near real-time between the two providers, or your migration is now measured with a calendar instead of a stopwatch.Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's an incredibly hard problem. We want to be able to really provide that uptime. And we don't really have outages. Everybody remembers—well, listeners of this show will probably remember, the Fastly outage, but—Corey: The Fastly outage, and that's the—Rachel: The—Corey: —best part is the fact that I'm talking about ‘the' and everyone knows the one I'm talking about, that says something.Rachel: Yeah. In June of this year, we had an outage for 45 minutes, and it was just an incredible and beautiful effort on the engineering side to get us back up as quick as possible. There were a handful of naysayers, certainly, in the outage, but we fixed it real fast. One thing that I loved was your tweet about it in June, when our outage happened. “The fact that Fastly was able to detect, identify, and remediate this clearly complex problem as quickly as they did may be one of the most technically impressive things I've seen in years.” I appreciated that so much. So, many folks internal to Fastly appreciated that point of view so much because the answer to should I have a backup CDN? Like, yeah, maybe, and it is complicated because you have so much logic on the edge right there, but really, the answer is, we really do a good job of staying up. And that cannot be the full picture for any company that needs just a ton of HA, but that is what we'd really like to present, we really want you to be able to trust us. And I feel like we have demonstrated that.Corey: I would argue from where I sit you absolutely have. If this were a three times a week situation, it wouldn't matter, no one would care because no one's going to trust the CDN that breaks like that.Rachel: Right.Corey: It gets to the idea of utility computing. And that means different things to different people, but to me, what that says is that when I use an actual utility, like water or electricity, when I turn the faucet or flip a switch, I don't wonder if it's going to work or not. Of course, now I have IoT light switches, so I absolutely wonder if it's going to work or not, but going to the water story, yeah, I turn on the faucet, if something doesn't happen, or the water comes out a different color than expecting, I have immediate concerns. And that is extraordinarily atypical and I can talk about that one time it happened. It's not that every third time I go and wash my hands, the water catches fire because there's fracking nearby, or something. Or it's poisonous because I live in Flint. It is just a thing that works.No one is going to sit here and have a business problem and say, “You know what I really need? I really need a local point of presence close to my users so that the static asset can be served more quickly and efficiently to this.” No, the business problem is, “Our website is slow, so people aren't using it.” It's how do you speak to things like that? And how do you make working with it either programmatically or through a console—because surprise, business users generally don't interact with things via APIs—how do you make that straightforward? How do you make that accessible, and Fastly does—Rachel: Oh gosh.Corey: —a bang-up job on this.Rachel: I think that Fastly has done a good job on it. How that has happened, I simply cannot tell you whatsoever. I am so far from support and marketing. I know that those folks work their tails off and really are focused on selling the story of you need your assets to be more easily delivered to the people who want to consume it. No, and you would never use that as a soundbite for Fastly because it [laugh] it sounds like a robot said it.Corey: It's always—I was gonna interesting, but I'm also going to go with strange—the ability to, for whatever reason, build out a large scaling infrastructure business like this—CDNs are one of those businesses where you're not going to come up with this in your garage and a cloud provider tonight and be ready to deploy in a couple of weeks. It takes time to get these facilities out there. It takes tremendous capital investment. But I want to switch a little bit because I know that you're a believer in this in the same way that I am. As much fun as it is to talk smack about cloud providers, I think it's impossible to effectively understate just how transformative the idea of being able to prototype things via a cloud provider is.Yeah, it's not going to be all businesses, I'm not going to build a manufacturing company on a cloud provider overnight in my spare time, but I can build the bones of a SaaS app and see if it works or not without having to buy infrastructure or entering into long-term contracts. I just need a credit card and then I'll use a free tier that's going to lie to me and then hit me with a surprise $60,000 bill. But yeah, you know, the thought is there.Rachel: The thought is there. I think that if you know a little bit what you're doing with a not even terribly clever operations engineer to get into AWS with you, you can prototype that for pretty cheaply. If you're not spending all this money on transfer fees and whatever else. If you really just want this small mock up of hey, does this work? Can it be reached from the network? Again, getting your networking knowledge in will only serve you, even in this setting, even though we're in the modern era.I mean, I think it's incredible, and I think it's responsible for the total democratization of the modern internet as we know it. Yes, there are other cloud providers, but AWS is who brought this to everybody. Their support for when you run into a jam is some of the most technical and capable of any support organization I've ever interfaced with. And at my previous role we did all the time because, you know, the internet gets complicated, if you can imagine that. And I just think that's phenomenal.On AWS, I want something where I'm hooking up some VPC to this Redis Database over here to a few EC2 instances with backups going over here, and some extremely restricted amount of dummy data flowing from all of those objects. And there's nothing like that. [laugh].Corey: Oh, yeah. And part of the reason behind this, as it turns out, is architectural. The billing system aspires to an eight-hour consistency model, in which case, I spin up something and it shows up in the bill eight hours later. In practice, this can take multiple days. But it's never going to get fixed until the business decides, all right, you can set up a free tier account with the following limits on it, and to get past these, you have to affirmatively upgrade your account so we can start charging you and we automatically going turn things off or let you stop adding storage to it or whatnot, whenever you cross these limits.Well today, you can do whatever you want for the first eight hours. And the way to fix this is, cool, Amazon eats it. Whenever their billing system doesn't catch something, they eat the free tier. And given how much they love money, and trimming margins, and the rest, suddenly you have an incentive because if someone screws up royally and gets that $60,000 bill before the billing system can clamp down on it, okay, great. I would rather the $1.6 trillion company eat that bill than the poor schmoo sitting in their dorm room halfway around the world.Rachel: That's such a good point. Some schmo in their dorm room. How many kids have been bitten by this that we don't hear about because people become ashamed of “Stupid mistakes” like that—that was big air quotes, for those of you at home. It's not a stupid mistake.Corey: People think I'm kidding when I say this, but Robinhood had a tragic story, right? A 19-year-old was day-trading, saw on the app that he had lost $900,000—which turned out not to be true once things settled—and killed himself. And that is tragic. It is not a question of if, it's a question of when someone sees this, reads that you're on the hook for it, support takes a few days to respond, they see their life flashing before their eyes because in many cases, that is more money than people in some of these places will expect to earn in a year, and does something horribly tragic. And at that point, there's a bell that has been rung that cannot be unrung.Of all the things I want to fix, yeah, I complain and I whine about an awful lot of stuff, but this is the one that has the most tragic consequences. No story for a human is going to end in tragedy because of the usurious pricing for Managed NAT Gateway data transfer, but a surprise bill that we know support is going to wipe over something like that, that is going to break people. And that's not okay.Rachel: No, it's not okay. I think that you write very well about that topic in particular, and I really would love to see some changes take place. I know that Amazon knows their business better than to need to rely on some Adore Me-style subscription model that you can't figure out how to get out of. Like, have some faith in your products or don't sell it.Corey: I really, really wish that more companies saw it that way. And the hell of it is the best shining example is a recurring sponsor of this show: Oracle Cloud. Oracle is, let's be honest, they're Oracle; that's less a brand than a warning label in many cases, but I've often said the Oracle Cloud biggest challenge is the word Oracle at the front of it—Rachel: Absolutely.Corey: —because their service offering is legitimate, their free tier is actually free—I've been running some fairly beefy stuff there for over a year, and have never been charged a dime for it. And it's not because I'm special; it's because I haven't taken the affirmative upgrade-my-account step. And their data transfer pricing is great. Within the confines of those things, yeah, it's terrific. I can't speak to what it looks like a super large-scale for a cloud-native app, yet, but that's going to change; people are starting to take them a lot more seriously.And I've got to say, in previous years in the re:Invent keynotes, they've made fun and kicked at Oracle a fair bit, which no one has any sympathy for. Now, I don't think that would lend the same way, just among people who have decided to suspend disbelief long enough and kick the tires in the Oracle free tier. It's like, well, yeah, you can say a lot of negative things about Oracle—and I have a list of them—but you know, what I never got with Oracle: A surprise bill. And its Oracle we're talking about, where surprise billing is the entire reason that they—Rachel: It's the model.Corey: —are a company.Rachel: Yeah. [laugh].Corey: That is the model. And in this case, they are nailing it. And I've often said that you can buy my attention, but not my opinion. Long before they sponsored this show, I was talking, like, this about this particular offering. “Oh, so you're saying we should migrate everything to Oracle databases?” “Good, Lord, no. Not without talking with someone who's been down that path.” And almost everyone who has will scream at you about it. It's a separate model. It's a separate division. It's a separate way of thinking about things. And I'm a big fan of that.Rachel: Oh, that's great. There have been ruinous results of Oracle's decisions and acquisitions in our industry, and yet, this does appear to be a slice of the market that they have given autonomy to the people running it. And I feel like that's really the key. I know just a hair about the product process—the new product introduction process at Amazon in general, And therefore, I actually do have a bit of faith that they will fix this. It's just a huge problem, and when Oracle is eating your lunch, I mean, I just—you really have some things to reconsider.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is, in AWS, with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem, and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai, and Stax have seen significant results by using them, and it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Corey: I am an Amazon fan. I think that given the talent, and the insight, and the drive that they have there—not to mention the fact that they're a $1.6 trillion company—if they want to do something, it will get done. And there are very few bounds I would put on it. Which means that everything that Amazon does, is, on some level, a choice. There are very few things they could not achieve with concerted effort if they cared enough.Corey: I want to also tell a story about you for a change, because why not? Back in 2018, I was just really getting to have an audience, and the rest, and I found myself at the replay party at re:Invent. And it was a weird moment for me because I'd finished most of my speaking stuff, I had hung out with my meetups and my friends and the rest, and I'm wandering around the party—Rachel: Your DevOps stand-up, as I recall.Corey: That's what it w—that's what it was. Yeah, my DevOps stand-up, cloud comedy, whatever you want to call it. And I'm walking around, and it's isolating and weird after something like that—back in the before times, at least—and when people know me as a character, more or less, but not as a person, and it's isolating, and it's lonely, and it's—again, you don't feel great after four days in Las Vegas, and it's dark, and it's hard to tell who's who we ran into each other and just started walking around and having a conversation outside because apparently 4000 decibels as a little much for volume for both of us. And it was just great finding someone who I can talk to as a human being. There's not enough of that in different ways. Because remember, back then, I was an independent consultant I didn't have colleagues to hang out with. It was—Rachel: Oh, that was pre-Duckbill.Corey: That was when I was still the Quinn Advisory Group.Rachel: Oh, very good. Okay. Yes, I do remember that.Corey: The Duckbill Group was formed about a month-and-a-half after that as memory serves.Rachel: Oh, okay. Cool.Corey: But yeah, same problem. It's, how do I build this? How do I turn this into something was a separate problem that hadn't quite—hadn't come up with an answer yet. So, I'm an independent consultant, wandering around, feeling lonely. My clients are all off doing their own things because it turns out that I'm great at representing clients in meetings with Amazon execs, but lousy at representing them on the dance floor.So, it was just the empathy that exuded from you was just phenomenal. And I don't know ever thank you for just how refreshing it was to be able to just step back from the show for a minute and be a person. So thanks.Rachel: Oh, likewise. I remember I had gotten in touch with you beforehand as well to say, like, “I'm going to be at re:Invent. I don't know any women who will be there. Can you please introduce me to some?” And you introduce me to some lovely people who, along with you, really helped me navigate my first re:Invent in a huge way, which was—you think it's going to be overwhelming, multiply that by ten or a hundred. That is how much information is coming at you all the time when you are at re:Invent.So, to go to this funny party where there was like some EDM DJ, who I think was, like, well-known or something in 2018, be like, [laugh] that's really not my thing. But I want to bum around this party, I do want to see what's going on, and if I can touch base with anybody else that I have met during this conference. And I remember we, kind of like, stuck close to each other. And that was so—that was, it was so human. And I appreciated that so much from you as well.I was sent by my company—as anybody who goes to [OSCON 00:31:03] or re:Invent are, if they pay full freight [laugh]—it was so lovely to just have a buddy to bum around with and make fun of things, and talk shop, and everything in between.Corey: I do want to give one small tip, something buried in there that I think is just something I've been doing extensively for a while, but I haven't really ever called it out, or at least not recently—and I'll do a tweet thread about this after we're done recording—the counterpoint that I want to that I want to point out is that introductions are great, but every person I introduced you to, I had your permission to give their email address to them, and I reached out to them independently in every case and said, “Hey, someone would like”—once I was had your permission to reference you—“She would like to talk to other folks who don't look like me who are going to re:Invent. May I introduce you?” The idea of a double opt-in introduction goes so far. And I'm talking about this for folks who aren't me. In my case, fine. If some rando wants to introduce me to some other rando, knock yourself out. There is very little showing up in my inbox that I am not going to have some way of handling. But not everyone thinks about things that way, and it just shows a baseline level of human respect.Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I actually just did that this morning. I'm sure all of us get these calls a few times a year: “I'm thinking about switching to tech because the money's there, the stability is there, the job market is there, and I have been underpaid and treated poorly for a long time,” or whatever variation on that story that I know we all are aware of. And I talked with him for a while last night, and then I put him in touch with the dual opt-in emails with someone in the field that he's looking at, exactly, and a recruiter friend of mine to help give more perspective on the industry as a whole. And with both of those people, I asked permission to introduce them to the friend of mine who had reached out to me, and both of them responded right away because when you are fielding questions like these all day, you become familiar with the kindest way to do that.And I really love being able to use my network in that way. Yes, I know a person at X, and yes, I would love to introduce you to Y. And I will make sure that everybody agrees and knows that this is coming, and I'm not just taken by surprise. Where I do get those emails and I understand that etiquette is something to learn, it isn't directly common-sense sometimes. And then you sit down and you think about it, or someone says to you like, “I really need you to give me a heads up before giving my contact information to someone that I don't know.”Corey: It happens. It's about being accessible. It's about making the industry better than it is. And on that topic, I have one more area I want to delve into before we call it a show, and that is you are on the program committee for SeaGL, the Seattle GNU/Linux conference.Rachel: That's right.Corey: I have fond memories of that conference, once upon a time. I gave a keynote a few years ago back when I was, you know, able to go places without it being a deadly risk, and much more involved in the community side of the world when it comes to conferences. I've unfortunately pulled back from a lot of it, just due to demands on my time. But great conference. Enjoyed a lot of the conversations once you, sort of, steered around the true believers around some areas of things, to the point where it subverts, you know, being civil to people. But it was a good conference. There was a lot to recommend it.Rachel: SeaGL is a beautiful little conference. It is community-focused. We don't let sponsors get on stage. We really restrict how much the people giving us money are able to dictate what we do. What we do is create a platform for people to discuss open-source in a human way, I would say.I think in our earlier days, we had a lot of focus on software freedom at all costs, and that has softened in the name of humans and social justice in a way that I feel very proud of. I have been the program chair for three years now, and it's just wonderful seeing the trends that come up every year. Our conference is Friday and Saturday, November 5th and 6th, so I hope that by the time you hear this, you will still have an opportunity to go to that; I'm not sure. Some of the themes this year have just been so interesting. It's all about—and this will be very interesting to a particular subset of people, and maybe not to everybody—but about open-source governance, and how do we maintain the soul and the purpose of an open-source project, while keeping people housed and fed who are working on these things, and to not sign over all the rights of a given project to our corporate overlords and such.So, there's a number of talks that are going to be talking about that. A few years ago, the trend that I was really excited about that I personally gave a talk about as well, is how to start owning and managing your own data entirely. I gave a talk on trying to get off Google, which is Herculean and close to impossible. And I understand that, and that's frustrating. But you know, we see these trends where we're trying to help our community protect itself and remain open at the same time in a technical and open-source context. And it's just an exciting and lovely organization and event each year. This is our second year being virtual. I was shocked by how good our virtual experience was last year. And I have high hopes for this year, too. So, I hope you can come check it out.Corey: I would highly recommend it though I believe this will be airing after the show goes out.Rachel: Ah darn.Corey: But there's always next year.Rachel: That's right. And they're all recorded as well, all the talks will be recorded. The publication date on those might be a little bit after but yes, they will all be up.Corey: But we will of course include links to that in the [show notes 00:37:13] because there's always next year.Rachel: That's right.Corey: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Rachel: I think probably the best place is on Twitter. That is @wholemilk on Twitter. Like, the dairy product by the gallon that's me.Corey: And that link to that will go in the [show notes 00:37:33] as well. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Rachel: Thank you, Corey. This has been great.Corey: It really has. Rachel Kelly, senior infrastructure engineer at Fastly. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me that you should absolutely shove your business logic fully into the CDN, then wind up not being able to edit the comment because it's locked to a single CDN.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 our latest #TechTalks episode, Zoe Cunningham is joined by Christie Wilson, software engineer at Google, to explore the importance of continuous delivery, how it started as continuous integration during the 90s, and how to use it now to improve your work. PLUS... Visit our website to enter our competition below for a free copy of book: https://tinyurl.com/continuous-delivery-CD (ends 24/12/21) Christie Wilson is a software engineer at Google, with over a decade of experience dealing with complex deployment environments and high-criticality systems. She is a frequent speaker on CI/CD at conferences including KubeCon, OSCON, QCon, and PyCon. At Google, she built internal productivity tooling for AppEngine, bootstrapped Knative, and created Tekton, a cloud-native CI/CD platform built on Kubernetes. She is the author of her new book, Grokking Continuous Delivery.

Today with me in the Podcast is Tim O'Reilly, the Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media and boy, his 1,5 million twitter followers are there for a reason! People call him "the Oracle of the Silicon Valley", he came up with the term "Web 2.0" - This man is crazy a wizard! We spoke about: * Writing as superpower! How it helps you to structure your thoughts. * How he started OSCON and great nerdy 90s * The big tectonic "Platform changes" and how the giants use "Algorithmic Rents" to silently put more money into their pockets * The wrong incentives and optimization functions of our economy and how to change it * How we are part of "the machine" and "the machine" needs us to decide what is good ("ham") and what is bad ("spam") Brilliant thoughts! Thank you so much Tim!

In this episode, I interview Laura Bell, the Founder, and CEO of SafeStack Academy, a boutique cybersecurity company with a team that now stretches across New Zealand and Australia. With over a decade of experience in software development and information security, Laura specializes in bringing security survival skills, practices, and culture into fast-paced businesses and organizations of every shape and size.  An experienced conference speaker, trainer, and regular panel member, Laura has spoken at a range of events such as BlackHat USA, Velocity, OSCON, Kiwicon, Linux Conf AU, and Microsoft TechEd on the subjects of privacy, covert communications, agile security, and security mindset. Laura started SafeStack from a shared workspace back in 2015, aged 30 and with just $300 in startup capital. The business is currently focused on its online educational platform, which they launched in July 2020. Five months in, they had about 4,000 learners and were generating $280,000 in annual revenue with expectations to reach $1 Million within a year.  She was the sole full-time employee when she started the business and now has 8 full-time employees after peaking to seventeen a while back. Laura says the hardest thing in growing a small business for her has been trusting their journey to be different from other companies without focusing on what the other companies were doing. The one thing she says she would tell herself on day one of starting out is, “Believe in yourself more, be confident, don’t sweat the small stuff, and don’t let your anxiety get the best of you” Prepare to be blown away by Laura’s small business growth wisdom. This Cast Covers: Cybersecurity consulting for growing businesses and those that may not have their own internal security team. Generating revenue from the consultancy services and online educational platform. Rate quitting her job to go out on her own and fix everything she couldn’t fix before. Focusing on the online educational platform that they launched in 2020. From 0 to 4,000 learners within 5 months of being in operation and currently generating $280,000 a year in revenue which is projected to reach $1 Million. Giving time to ideas and opportunities that may not seem worthy in the present. Bootstrapping the business from the beginning and their current funding round. The valuable hiring lessons that Laura has learned over time and how it has positively impacted her business. Discovering that sales in cybersecurity are based on emotion and shared values. The power of being authentic to herself and finding confidence in her style of management. Navigating the roller coaster that is fast growth in small business. Overcoming challenges, continuous learning, and enjoying the flexibility that comes with being a small business owner. Scheduling your fitness time and health activities as if they are your most important client. Having success with hiring people who are outside her bubble and hiring through a recruiter. How she struggled with work-life balance in the beginning. Reading a lot on management, communication, and habits for her professional development. Additional Resources:   SafeStack Academy Thinking, Fast and Slow By Daniel Kahneman Atomic Habits By James Clear The Gift of Imperfection By Brené Brown   Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

You can find John on Twitter at [twitter.com/jgrahamc](https://twitter.com/jgrahamc).- Babbage overview and the Difference Engine:    https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/overview/- Difference Engine No. 2 at the London Science Museum:    https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co526657/difference-engine-no-2-designed-by-charles-babbage-built-by-science-museum-difference-engine- BBC Micro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro- Sinclair ZX81: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81- BBC Micro Advanced User Guide:    http://stardot.org.uk/mirrors/www.bbcdocs.com/filebase/essentials/BBC%20Microcomputer%20Advanced%20User%20Guide.pdf- Sharp MZ-80K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_MZ- John's TED Talk, The greatest machine that never was: https://www.ted.com/talks/john_graham_cumming_the_greatest_machine_that_never_was- Hilbert's Problems: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/HilbertsProblems.html- Gödel's incompleteness theorems: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/- The Lovelace–De Morgan mathematical correspondence - A critical re-appraisal: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086017300319- The mathematical correspondence of Ada Lovelace and Augustus De Morgan:    https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2867731.2867738- Douglas Engelbart: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Douglas-Engelbart- "Mother of all demos": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY- John's OSCON talk "Turing's Curse": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVZxkFAIziA- Design of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture:    https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2016-1.pdf- Engines of Creation - The Coming Era of Nanotechnology: https://www.amazon.com/Engines-Creation-Nanotechnology-Scientific-Revolution/dp/1872180469/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

When you contribute to open source projects, Dawn Foster makes it abundantly clear that even if “you’re there on behalf of [a] company, you need to do the right things for the community.” In this episode of Community Signal, Dawn outlines the principles that she follows and shepherds as the director of open source community strategy at VMware’s Open Source Program Office. These principles foster projects and communities that are collaborative and encouraging, but of course, it does not always pan out that way. Dawn discusses how documentation and education, having a clear commitment from the company managing the open source project, and balancing for collaboration instead of number of contributions can all help to build healthy open source communities. Unlike social platforms that optimize for getting everyone to contribute an infinite amount, open source projects rely on spreading knowledge and contributions amongst the group. “In some cases we have open source projects [where] almost all of the contributions are made by a single individual. What happens if that individual wins the lottery and leaves VMware, and doesn’t want to work on this project anymore?” That’s a great question for all of us that manage communities. If our top contributors left tomorrow, who would pull the community forward? Patrick and Dawn also discuss: Evaluating open source community health The tools and documentation that help with governance Evaluating the risk of contributing to an open source project Our Podcast is Made Possible By… If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsors: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community and Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community. Big Quotes Good documentation begets good contribution practices (7:00): “Even though I’ve been contributing to open source projects for years, every time I pop up in a new community, I still have to read the contribution docs because there will [always] be something that project does in a very specific and nuanced way that the last project I worked on didn’t do. In a lot of cases, people just make mistakes and they don’t really think about what they should have been doing. They just need a little more education.” –@geekygirldawn Illustrating contributor risk (18:37): “Some of these big open source projects are maintained by fewer people than you might think. The biggest example I can think of was OpenSSL. There was a huge security vulnerability in OpenSSL. It’s a technology that almost every single company in the world relies on. This vulnerability was going to require a lot of time and effort to fix. What we quickly realized was that OpenSSL was maintained part-time by two people, none of whom were being paid to work on it.” –@geekygirldawn To truly be open source means to cede a bit of control (23:20): “You don’t, as a company, want to dominate the entire [open source] project because if you do that, you might as well never have open sourced it. You might as well have kept it proprietary. The whole purpose of open sourcing it is you collaborate together, and you innovate, and you get ideas that you wouldn’t have otherwise had as a company.” –@geekygirldawn Open source thrives through collaboration (26:41): “Some of the more social platforms, it’s like the more social, the better. Collaboration doesn’t necessarily work that way. You don’t get more collaboration because I did more stuff. You get more collaboration because you got more people involved, and you gave them some space to contribute.” –@geekygirldawn The benefit of neutral foundations for open source projects (29:42): “What you get by putting [an open source] project into these neutral foundations is some assurance that everybody’s working together on a level playing field. If I want to contribute to a Linux Foundation project, I can rest assured that I can participate on the same field as everybody else. Whereas, if the project is owned by a particular company and they have their own agenda that may or may not align with the community’s best interest, they may take things in a different direction. They may not accept your contribution because it competes with something that they have.” –@geekygirldawn About Dawn Foster Dawn Foster is the director of open source community strategy within VMware’s Open Source Program Office. She is on the board of OpenUK, an organization committed to developing and sustaining UK leadership and open technology. Dawn is on the governing board and is a maintainer for the Linux Foundation’s CHAOSS project and the board of advisors for Bitergia. She has 20-plus years of experience at companies like Intel and Puppet Labs, with expertise in community building strategy, open source software, metrics, and more. Dawn holds a PhD from the University of Greenwich, along with an MBA and Bachelors in Computer Science. She has spoken at dozens of industry events, including many Linux Foundation events, OSCON, SXSW, FOSDEM, and more. Related Links Sponsor: Localist, plan, promote, and measure events for your community Sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop-shop for online community Dawn Foster on Twitter VMware’s Open Source Program Office OpenUK Fast Wonder, Dawn’s blog Pivotal, which was acquired by VMWare The Social Dilemma Tristan Harris Dirk Hohndel, VMWare’s Chief Open Source Officer The Linux Foundation The Apache Software Foundation Transcript View transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

Summary: In this episode, we'll discuss Continuous Updates, a concept introduced in the Liquid Software book by Fred Simon, Yoav Landman, and Baruch Sadogursky. It is a logical next step in all the things continuous, as Baruch will explain. Tune in to hear the Head of DevOps Advocacy in JFrog talking about his, JFrog's, and even some of the industry's DevOps Journey.Bio: Baruch Sadogursky (a.k.a JBaruch) is the Head of DevOps Advocacy and a Developer Advocate at JFrog. His passion is speaking about technology. Well, speaking in general, but doing it about technology makes him look smart, and 19 years of hi-tech experience sure helps. When he's not on stage (or on a plane to get there), he learns about technology, people, and how they work, or more precisely, don't work together.He is a co-author of the Liquid Software book, a CNCF ambassador and a passionate conference speaker on DevOps, DevSecOps, digital transformation, containers and cloud-native, artifact management and other topics, and is a regular at the industry's most prestigious events including KubeCon, DockerCon, Devoxx, DevOps Days, OSCON, Qcon, JavaOne and many others. You can see some of his talks at jfrog.com/shownotes. Support the show (https://cd.foundation/podcast/podcast-submission-form/)

0:19 First Scala Love conference! CFP is open!!! 1:29 Scala OOP & FP 8:13 Hobby 15:09 Architectural katas 18:43 Soft Skills 20:04 Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach 20:08 Structural design 21:10 ilities 22:48 Building evolutinary architectures 23:25 Fitness functions 26:46 ArchUnit 30:29 OSCON, Workshop

In this episode, Rosalie Bartlett, Sr. Open Source Community Manager, interviews Rachel Roumeliotis, Vice President of Content Strategy at O'Reilly Media. Rachel reflects on OSCON 2019, what to expect at OSCON 2020, where the industry is going, and how she empowers her team to be great storytellers.

This episode of My JavaScript Story is coming to you live from OSCON. Joining Charles Max Wood is Daniel Gruesso from GitLab to talk about developing in the Open Source and the Developer Report. GitLab works with an open core model, Daniel talks about the trade - offs of having code open to public, the first of which is having everything up-to-date so any contributions made will work with the latest version. Daniel calls this the "bus-factor" where if one of the team members gets hit by a bus, the rest of the team will have everything to work with. They then talk about the GitLab 2019 Global Developer Report results. One of the most interesting results of this survey with over 4,000 respondents, was that remote teams outperformed on site teams. This ties into the current Twitter discussion about "10x Performing Engineers". Remote teams are able to work on their own most productive hours and are not disturbed by their teammates when they are doing dedicated work on a deadline. Also remote teams by nature have to be more conscious of security. Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan Adventures in DevOps Adventures in Blockchain CacheFly Host: Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Daniel Gruesso Links Daniel's LinkedIn GitLab Open Source & Software Development| O'Reilly OSCON GitLab 2019 Global Developer Report | GitLab 10x Engineer Twitter

This episode of My JavaScript Story is coming to you live from OSCON. Joining Charles Max Wood is Daniel Gruesso from GitLab to talk about developing in the Open Source and the Developer Report. GitLab works with an open core model, Daniel talks about the trade - offs of having code open to public, the first of which is having everything up-to-date so any contributions made will work with the latest version. Daniel calls this the "bus-factor" where if one of the team members gets hit by a bus, the rest of the team will have everything to work with. They then talk about the GitLab 2019 Global Developer Report results. One of the most interesting results of this survey with over 4,000 respondents, was that remote teams outperformed on site teams. This ties into the current Twitter discussion about "10x Performing Engineers". Remote teams are able to work on their own most productive hours and are not disturbed by their teammates when they are doing dedicated work on a deadline. Also remote teams by nature have to be more conscious of security. Sponsors Sentry use the code “devchat” for 2 months free on Sentry small plan Adventures in DevOps Adventures in Blockchain CacheFly Host: Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Daniel Gruesso Links Daniel's LinkedIn GitLab Open Source & Software Development| O'Reilly OSCON GitLab 2019 Global Developer Report | GitLab 10x Engineer Twitter

All these cloud-native apps don't magically figure out how to talk with each other themselves. They need to usual help with finding each other (registries) and then mediating and managing their ongoing “chatter” with one-another (API gateways). While killing time at the Pivotal booth at OSCON, I talked with Spencer Gibb who works on these things and more in Spring.

As organizations get deeper into improving how they do IT, they're interested in replicating the collaborative benefits of open source communities. Jono Bacon (https://twitter.com/jonobacon) has worked in this space for many, many years and shares some of his experiences here with Barton George (https://twitter.com/barton808) and I (https://twitter.com/cote), while we were all at OSCON. Jono also goes over some of the important parts of community management. See also the video of this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqlbMK8cBZo). Special Guests: Barton George and Jono Bacon.

Matt Curry is back! In this episode recorded at OSCON 2017, we discuss the problems with getting people to change, from staff to management, private sector and government.

Michael Coté: @cote | cote.io | Pivotal | Software Defined Talk Show Notes: 00:54 - Pivotal 04:39 - Being a Professional Muller aka Analyst 11:08 - Iterative Development 32:54 - Getting a Job as a Professional Muller aka Analyst Resources: Pivotal Cloud Foundry GemFire Greenplum Pivotal Labs Wardley Maps Software Defined Talk Episode #79: From a vegan, clothing optional co-op to working with banks and oil companies - Coté's professional life, part 1 Software Defined Talk Episode #85: Being an analyst without being an asshole - Coté's professional life, part 2 RedMonk Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #66. I am a developer, Charles Lowell at The Frontside and also host-in-training for 65 episodes. This is my 66th and I'm flying alone this week but we do have on the show with us a very special guest. Actually, the person who taught me how to podcast, I think it was about 10 years ago and he was like, "Charles, we should do this podcasting thing." I started my very first podcast with him and I still haven't figured it out. But his name is Michael Coté and he's a fantastic guy and welcome to the show, Coté. MICHAEL: Thanks for having me, Charles. It's great to be here. CHARLES: Now, what are you up to these days? You're over at Pivotal. MICHAEL: That's right. I work at Pivotal and probably people who are in the developing world know them for Spring. We have most of the Spring people. Then we also have this thing Pivotal Cloud Foundry. We're not supposed to call it a platform as a service but for matters of concision, it's a platform as a service that's the runtime that you run your stuff in. Then we also have a bunch of data products like GemFire and Greenplum and things like that. Then, 'openymously', if that's a word, we have Pivotal Labs. Now -- CHARLES: I think, it's eponymously. MICHAEL: Eponymously, yes. Now, you might remember Pivotal Labs as the people who use Chef Scripts to configure their desktops. Remember that? CHARLES: Yeah, I remember that. I was into that. MICHAEL: Yeah, in coincidental kind of way, the inspiration for the project Sputnik thing, which is coincidentally because now Dell Technologies owns Pivotal so all of that stuff has come for a full circle. I guess also since I'm intro-ing myself, I work on what we call the Advocate Team because we don't call them evangelists. No one likes to be called that I guess. I guess there's 12 of us now. We just hired this person, also in Austin actually McNorma who's big in the Go community and apparently can make images of gophers really well. I'm sure she does many other extraordinary things, not just the illustrator master. Everyone else basically like codes or uses the terminal but I do slides. CHARLES: Well, that's your weapon of choice, right? It's a more elegant weapon for civilized time or something like that. I'm going to look it up on Wikia. MICHAEL: Yeah, basically what we do on our team is we just talk about all the stuff Pivotal does and problems that we solve in the way people in an organizations like would think to care about our stuff. Most of what I do is I guess you call it the management consultant type of stuff. Since I have a background as an analyst and I used to work on corporate strategy and M&A at Dell so I have a vantage point in addition to having programmed a long time ago. If you're changing your organization over to be more agile or trying to devops, we would say cloud-native with a hyphen. How do you change your organization over what works and doesn't work? Most people in large organizations, they sort of pat you on your head. I'm sure you encounter this. That sounds really nice that we would be doing all of the good, correct ways of using computers but we're basically terrible and we could never make that happen here. Thanks for talking with us, we're going to go back and stew in our own juices of awfulness. You've got to pluck them out of that self-imposed cannibal pot there in the jungle and show them that they actually can improve and do things well. CHARLES: Would you say you feel like your job is being that person who shakes them away and can be like, "Good God! Get a grip on yourself!" MICHAEL: Sure. That's a very popular second or third slide in a presentation -- the FUD slide, the Fear of Uncertainty and Doubt slide where you're basically like, "Uber!" and then everyone just like soils their pants because they're afraid that are like Airbnb and Uber and [inaudible] and Google is going to come in and, as they say, disrupt their state industry. I try not to use the slides anymore because they're obnoxious. Also, most people in large organizations nowadays, they know all of that and they've already moved to putting on a new pair of pants stage of their strategizing. CHARLES: You've got the kind of the corporate wakeup call aspect of it but then it's also seems like a huge component of your job which is when you were at RedMonk, when you were at 451 and even to a lesser extent, it was Dell who was paid well to just kind of mull it over, like just kind of sit there and asynchronously process the tech industry, kind of like organizational yeast and let it ferment, kind of trying to see where the connections lie and then once you've made that presented, do you think that's fair? That's what sprung to mind when I heard you say like, "Yeah, we just kind of sit around and think about what is Pivotal and what does it do and what's it going," but like how do you get that job of like, "I'm just kind of a professional muller." MICHAEL: That's right. First of all, I think professional muller is accurate, as long as, I guess mulling is also for -- what's that thing you drink at Christmas that you put the little -- CHARLES: Mulled wine. Like low wine. MICHAEL: I can feel like that sometimes late at night. But having a job as an analyst, I was an industry analyst at two places for a total of about eight years or so. Then as you're saying doing strategy at a company, now what I do here, essentially a lot of what you do is very difficult. I know it sounds to people. You just read a lot of the Internet. You just consume a lot of the commentary and the ideas of things that are going out there and you try to understand it and then synthesize to use that cheesy word. Synthesize it into a new form that explains what it is and then finally, the consultant part comes in where you go and meet with people or you proactively think about what people might be asking and they say something like, "What does this mean for me? And how would I apply it to solve my problems?" I guess as an example of that -- I apologize for being a little commercial but these are just the ideas I have in my head -- Ford is a customer of ours and they also have invested in us which is kind of novel. We have GE and Ford invested in Pivotal and Microsoft and Dell Technologies as an interesting mix but anyways, they have this application called the Ford Pass Application. I drive a Ford Focus -- CHARLES: Like Subaru? But you do drive a Ford. MICHAEL: Yeah, because I don't care about cars. It's a bunch of nonsense. I see this app and basically the app, if you have a more advanced one, it might tell you your mileage and even like remotely start your car. But it doesn't really do that much. You have the app and it will tell you information about your car and where to park and it even has this thing where it links to another site to book a dealership thing, which is annoying. CHARLES: Why would you want to book a dealership? To buy another car? MICHAEL: Well because the Ford Focus I have is notorious for having transmission problems so you're like, "I got to go and take it into the dealer to get all this recall stuff taken care of," so wouldn't it be nice... I don't know if you've ever worked with a car dealer but it's not desirable. CHARLES: Yeah, it would be nice if they didn't charge $6000 for everything. MICHAEL: Right. It's a classic system of having a closed market, therefore that jacks up prices and lowers customer service usually. What's the fancy word if there is a negative correlation, if you were to chart it out? Like price is negatively correlated to your satisfaction with it. Kind of like the airline industry, not to bring up a contemporary topic. You pay a lot of money to fly and you're like, "This is one of the worst experiences I've had in my life," whereas you go to the dentist and get a root canal and you're like $20 co-pay. Loving it. [Laughter] MICHAEL: Anyhow, this Ford Pass application doesn't really do very much so what does that mean for what I was explaining. If you go look up and read about it, starting back in the late-90s, your extreme programming and then your Agile Software Development and your devops nowadays, one of the major principles is what you should do is ship often. Maybe you should even ship every week or every day. Don't worry about this gigantic stack of requirements that you have and whatever you should be shipping all the time and then we've trained ourselves to no longer say failing fast. That was a fun cheeky thing back in the late-2000s. CHARLES: Did we trained ourselves not to say that anymore? MICHAEL: I don't hear it very often. CHARLES: Man, I got to go scrub my brain. MICHAEL: Yeah, well this is why you consult with me every 10 years as I tell you the new things. CHARLES: Okay, here we go. We're going to have you on the podcast again. MICHAEL: That's right. You have this idea of like, "We should be releasing weekly," but then if you go to Ford, you're like, "What does that mean?" To shave the shaggy dog here, essentially the idea that they're shipping this mobile application that doesn't really do very much is an embodiment of the idea that they should be shipping more frequently. This may be a stupid example. It's not that it's not going to do very much like permanently but as I have witnessed, very frequently they add new features so Ford is in this cadence but there's this app that instead of working on an application for two years and having everything in it, they're actually releasing it on, I don't know if it's weekly but they're releasing it on a very frequent basis, which allows them to add features. What that gets you is all the advantages of a fast iteration cycle small batch thing where they can study this actually a good feature. They can do all your Lean Startup nonsense. That's a very like weird, perhaps example of how you explain to someone like a large car manufacturer like Ford, this is what devops means for you. Therefore, why you should spend a lot of money on Pivotal? Now that's the part that lets me pay my mortgage every month, the last bit there. CHARLES: Right so Pivotal builds apps. MICHAEL: Well, the Labs people build apps for you. CHARLES: I'm kidding Coté. MICHAEL: Yeah, they actually do. The Labs people are like a boutique of another boutique like ThoughtWorks is kind of a boutique but they're kind of a boutique-y version of ThoughtWorks. That probably is terrible as someone who markets for Pivotal to do that. Do you ever notice how political candidates never really name their opposition? Like you never really want to name your competition but anyways... CHARLES: Pivotal marketing are going to come crashing through your window. Everybody, if we hear them in the next five seconds -- well, I guess you can't call 911 because this is not live. MICHAEL: Yeah, that's true. The Labs people build stuff for you and then the part that I work, in the Pivotal Cloud Foundry people, they have the actual runtime environment, the cloud platform that you would run all that stuff. Plus all the Spring nonsense for your microservices and your Spring Boot. I understand people like that. CHARLES: So good for Ford, for actually being able to experience, either in the development and the joys and the benefits that come with it. But this is actually something that I actually want to talk about independently was as I kind of advance in my career, I find myself pushing back a little bit against that incredibly tight, iterative schedule. Shipping things is fantastic and it's great but I find so much of my job these days is just trying to think out and chart a course for where those iterations will carry you and there is a huge amount of upfront design and upfront thought that it is speculatory but it's very necessary. You need to speculate about what needs to happen. Then you kind of measure against what's actually happening but I feel that kind of upfront design, upfront thought, we had this moment we're like, "We don't need that anymore. Let's throw it all in the garbage." In favor of doing things in these incredibly tight loops and finding where's the clutch point, that kind of long range thinking and long range planning comes and meets with the iterative development. I have no idea. What's the best way for those to match up those long cycles and those short cycles? Where is the clutch play? MICHAEL: I'll give you two and a half, so to speak trains of thoughts on that. One of them is I think -- CHARLES: Two and half trains of thought, I like that. Can we get straight to the half train of thought? MICHAEL: Yeah, I'm going to start with the half, which is just taking all of your questions and putting periods at the end of them before I round up to answering the question. I think a lot of the lore and the learnings you get from the Agile world is basically from consultants and teams of consultants. Necessarily, they are not domain experts in what they're doing so their notion is that we're going to learn about what it is we're doing and we don't actually know we can't predict ahead of time because we're not domain experts so they almost have this attitude of like, "We'll just figure it out on the job." Let's say The Frontside gets hired to go work on a system that allows the Forest Service to figure out which trees to go chop down or not -- CHARLES: If you're the Forest Service, we are available to do that. MICHAEL: I'm guessing you don't have a lot of arborists who have 10 or 20 years of experience working there. CHARLES: No, we don't. MICHAEL: And so you have no idea about that domain so in doing an iterative thing, you won't be able to sit down and predict like everyone knows that when you send the lumberjacks out, they're going to need these five things so we're going to have to put that that feature on there. They need to be able to call in flapjacks when they run out. That's just what's going to happen so you don't know all of these things they need to do so you just can't sit down and cogitate about it ahead of time. Also this comes in from the Lean Startup where there's a small percentage of software that's actually done globally and the notion of a Lean Startup is that when you're doing a startup, you're never going to be determined what your exit is, how you cash out, whether that's building a successful long term company while you get sold to someone or whether you IPO, you're not going to able to predict what that business model is so you just need to start churning and not think a lot ahead of time. Now, the problem becomes, I think that if you are a domain expert, as you can do the inverse of all the jokes I was just making there, you actually can sit down and start to predict things. You're like, "We know we're going to need a flapjack service," so we can predict that out and start to design around that and you can do some upfront thinking. Now similarly, developers often overlook the huge amount of governance and planning that they do for their own tools, which I know you're more cognizant of being older or more experienced, as they like to say. But basically, there's a bunch of, as we used to call it when I did real work and develop stuff, iteration zero work like we're going to need to build a build system, we're going to need a version control. You actually do know all these things you're going to need so there are all the things you can plan out and that's analogous to whatever domain you're working in. Sometimes, at least for your toolchain, it is worth sitting down and planning out what you want. Now, to hold back the people who are going to crash in my window, one of the things you should consider is using Pivotal Cloud Foundry. That's probably something you should cogitate on ahead of time. CHARLES: I think they're going to crash through your window and give you a Martini, if the marketing ninjas are going to do that and if you mention them in a positive light. MICHAEL: You know, it's 10:52 Central but if we were in London, it would probably be an appropriate time so we'll just think about that. Now, on the other hand, you don't want to go too overboard on this pre-planning. I'll give you an example from a large health insurance company that I was talking with recently. They had this mobile app -- it's always a mobile app -- that had been languishing for 15 months and it really wasn't doing anything very interesting. It was just not working well and they could never release it. This is a classic example of like, "We took a long time to release a mobile app and then we never released it again and then it blows." It's not achieving all of the business goals that we wanted. Mostly, what a health insurance company -- I've talked with a lot of the health insurance companies -- want with their mobile app is at least two things and probably many more but these would be the top of the list. One, they want their customers, their users to look up what their health insurance is, figure out doctors they can go to, the basic functioning that you expect from your health insurance company. And two, they want to encourage their customers to do healthy behaviors because if you think about it as a health insurance company, health insurance in my mind is basically like this weird gamble of like, "I'm gambling on the fact that you are going to be healthy," because then I pay out less to you and you just give me money so the healthier that your users can be, the more profit you're going to make. That's why they're always trying to encourage you to be healthy and stuff like that. The mobile app was not achieving, at least these two, if not other business goals they have. They basically were rebooting the effort. The way they started off is they had -- I don't know how many inches thick it was -- a big, old stack of requirements and the first few iterations, the product team was working on it and talking with the business analyst about this and going over it and what they sort of, as we were calling Pivotal Labs the product owner but the person who runs the team, realize is like -- to cut a long story short -- "This is kind of a waste of time. We shouldn't just prioritize these 300 features and put them in some back road and execute on them because these are the same features that we based the more abundant application on, we should probably just start releasing up the application," kind of like the FordPass app. That said, they did have a bunch of domain experience so they had a notion of basically what this app was going to do and they could start planning it out but they figured out a good balance of not paying attention to, as Martin Fowler used to call it the almighty thud, of all the requirements. What they ended up doing is they basically -- CHARLES: What's the almighty thud? MICHAEL: You know, he's got some bleaky or whatever. It's basically like we started a project and I think it's from 2004 and someone FedExed me about 600 pages of an MRD or whatever and I put it down on my table and it made a loud noise so he calls that the 'almighty thud', when you get this gigantic upfront requirement thing. What happened in this health insurance thing is they stopped listening and talking with those people and they kind of like chaff them out, not like when your rub your legs together but they kind of distracted them to that fact but eventually, they just got them out of the cycle and they started working on the app. Then lo and behold, they shipped it and things are working out better now. CHARLES: Hearing what you're saying and kind of thinking it over, I think if you're going to have an almighty thud, what you really want is you want all that upfront research and all that upfront requirements gathering or whatever, not necessarily to take the form of a set of features or some backlog of 300 things that the app 'needs' to do or 'should' do but just a catalogue of the problems, like a roadmap of the problems. MICHAEL: Exactly. CHARLES: You know, that actually is very valuable. If it's like, "These are things that are true about our users and these are the obstacles that they face. If we do choose that we want to go from Point A to Point B, where we are at Point A, then we actually have a map of what are the things that are sitting in front of that and what are the risks involved." It's like if you got -- you played, you're from my generation, you play the Oregon Trail, right? MICHAEL: Yeah. "You have dysentery." CHARLES: Right. I don't know where I'm going with this analogy but my point is developing that app is like going from Kansas City to Portland. But the thing about software is you don't necessarily have your corn meal. You don't need to say like, "We're going to need six pounds of cornmeal and we're going to need these wagons and we're going to need these mules," because this is software and you can just code a mule if you need it. But you might not need a mule, if the rivers are not in flood... I don't know. Like I said, I don't know where I'm going with this analogy. But do you see what I'm saying? The point I'm trying to make is that having the map of the Rockies and where the passes are is going to help you. MICHAEL: Yeah, this is probably where I'm supposed to expertly rattle off what Wardley maps are and how they help, which is fine. I think that's a great tool. There's this guy Simon Wardley and he's actually a great contemporary philosophizer on IT-led strategy. I think he works for CSC who no longer owns mercenaries but they used to -- Computer Science Corporations. I think they own a little bit of HP Services Division but he works for some think tank associated with CSC and he has got a couple of OSCON talks on it, where it's called a Wardley map and it's a way that you start figuring out what you're saying, which is to say your company's strategy. Using your front metaphor of the era of tall hats, if you remember that other movie, if you're on the Oregon Trail, broadly your strategy is -- and people get all up in your face about the difference between a plan and a strategy and we'll just put mute on them and edit them out of the audio because they're very annoying -- CHARLES: We'll call it an approach. MICHAEL: That's right. Your plan or your strategy -- and pardon me if I use these phrase free and loosely and everything -- is you would like to get to Oregon and you would like to live there and maybe grow apples or start a mustache wax company or some donuts, whatever it is you do out there once you get to Oregon and their strategy is -- what are the assets that I have. I have a family, I have some money and I also know some people who are going there so I'm going to buy a stagecoach and a mule, then I'm going to kind of wangle it out and we're going to go over there. Also, part of our strategy is we're going to go through the northern pass because we're used to winter versus the southern pass, which isn't the Oregon Trail because reasons. Maybe Texas isn't part of The Union yet so I don't want to deal with the transition between whatever that weird Texas thing down there -- CHARLES: The desert, there's the southwest and the desert. MICHAEL: I don't have the capabilities to survive in a desert so I need to go to the north and hopefully I won't be like that movie and have a grizzly bear rip up my backside and everything. You sort of put together this plan. Now going back to what you would do in IT world is to your point, someone does need to define what we would call the business value or the strategy, like what you want to do. Looking at the Ford thing, what Ford wants to do is they do cogitating thing ahead of time and they're like, "We manufacture cars," and you've got electric cars and Uber. That's where the scarce light comes in. In the future, who knows that people will still buy cars? It might be like that I-Robot movie where all the cars are automated and you just go into one. As a company, whose responsibility is to be as immortal as possible, we need to start making plans about how we can survive if individuals no longer buy cars. Let's do that. This is a huge upfront notion that you would have and then that does trickle down into things like my Ford thing -- I'm kind of speaking on their behalf -- if we have a direct connection with people, maybe eventually we introduce an Uber-like service. You can just check-out a Ford car. Then maybe this and maybe that. It's the strategy of how do we set ourselves up to do that. Now, I think the Agile people, what they would go for is it's really good to have that upfront strategy and you'll notice that in a lot of lean manufacturing in Agile talk, no one ever talks about this stuff, much to my extreme annoyance. They don't ever talk about who defines the strategy and who defines that you're working on this project. That's sort of left as an exercise to the reader. The Agile people would say like, "The implementation details of that are best left to the development team in an Agile model." Just like the developers are always arrogantly are like, "Hey, product manager. How about you f-off about how I should implement this? I am the expert here and let me decide how I'm going to implement the feature that you want for me." It's kind of like that rushing dolling down of things. To the development team, you worked on some, what was it? Band frame wire thing, a long time ago? It was basically like, "We don't know it. Maybe this is not the case. Let's pretend like it was." We don't know exactly how you're going to implement this stuff but our goal is that there's bands and they need sides and ways of interacting with their users so let's just figure out what that looks like but they had that upfront idea of ways that they were doing things. CHARLES: Let's start walking. MICHAEL: To add on some more. There's another edge case that you're making me think of, which is a good way of thinking through almighty thuds versus how much planning you have and that's government work. Government work that's done by contractors and especially, military contracting work. What you notice in government work is they have, seemingly way too much paperwork and process. They literally will have project managers for project managers and the project managers have to update how the project is going and they reports. If they don't do the reports correctly, their contract is penalize and you might even get fired for doing it. If anyone stops and says while the software is working, they were like, "No, no, no. don't be naive. It doesn't matter if the software is working or not, if we don't fill up the project report, we're fired." Until someone like yourself or me, it's just like your head explodes and you're like, "But working software, not a concern." In that case, it actually is part of the feature set, part of the deliverable is this nauseating amount of project reporting and upfront requirements, which has this trickle-down effect of annoyance but that's what you're getting paid for so that's what you do and if you want to make yourself feel better about it. I don't know how it is in the rest of the world but in the US, basically we think the only person worse than maybe, Lucifer is the government. I don't know why this comes about. We enjoy the fruits of the government all the time but for some reason, we just think they're awful. Whenever we give money over the government, we want to make sure that they're spending it well and if they're not corrupt and they don't hire their entire family to help them run the government and make sure that they're making extra money globally in their businesses, I wouldn't know anything about that. But essentially, you want to make sure there's no corruption so transparency is almost more important than working software. The way you achieve that transparency is with all this crazy documentation. CHARLES: Here's the thing. I agree the transparency is fantastic but nothing is more transparent than working software. Nothing is more transparent than monitored software. Nothing is more transparent than software whose, by its very nature is radiating information about itself. You can fudge a report but you can't fudge a million happy users. MICHAEL: Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the way that things currently operate is the ideal state. I'm saying that that desire for transparency has to be addressed and for example, using your example, let's say you were delivering working software but you were also skimming 20% off the top into some Swiss bank account -- you're basically embezzling -- and then it turns out that you need 500 developers but you only actually had 30 developers. There was corruption. The means even though the ends, even though the outcome was awesome, the means was corrupt so that's the thing in a lot of government work that you want to protect against. I just bring that up as an edge case so a principle to draw from that, when it comes to almighty thudding is like sometimes, that is part of the deliverable. We would aspire in our fail, fast, Agile world to not have a bunch of gratuitous documentation as part of the deliverable because it seems like a waste. It would be like every morning when you battle with your kids to get their shoes on, you had to write a two-page report about how you're getting ready to go to school stuff with your kids was going. As a parent you would be like, "I don't need that." However, maybe if you were like an abusive parent and it was required for you to fill out a daily status report for you to retain the parentship of your kids, maybe it would be worth of your time to fill out your daily status report. That was an awfully depressing example there. CHARLES: Let's go back to the Oregon Trail. What I'm hearing is that -- and we will take it back to the Oregon Trail -- you also need to consider, as were saying, you have some sort of strategy which is we want to go sell apples and moustache wax. But what we're going to do is we're just going to start walking, even though we don't have a map. But obviously, if you send out scouting missions, like you know where you're going, you know the West Coast is out there somewhere, you start walking but the stakes determine how much of your resources you spend on scouting and map drawing -- MICHAEL: Yeah. My way of thinking about strategy and again, people strategy is this overloaded word. But my way of thinking about strategy is you establish a goal: I would like to go to the West Coast. Now, how you figure that out could be a strategy on its own, like how did you figure out you want to go to the West Coast. But somehow, you've got to get to a prime mover. Maybe those tall hat people keep beating me up so I want to go to the West Coast. I want to go the West Coast is the prime mover. There's nothing before that. Then you've got to deal in a series of constraints. What capabilities do I have, which is another way of saying, what do I not have? And what's my current situation and context? On the Oregon Trail thing, you might be like, "I have a family of seven. I can't just get a horse and go buy a pack of cigarettes and never show up again." I guess I could do that. That's probably popular but I, as an individual have to take this family of six other people. Do I have the capabilities to do that? How could I get the cash for it? Because I need to defend against all the madness out there, I'm going to need to find some people to meet with. You're thinking and scenario planning out all of this stuff and this gets to your point of like, "If you're going to Oregon, it probably is a good idea to plan things out." You don't want to just like the next day, just figure it out. [inaudible] tell a joke. It's like, "Why do they sell luggage at the airport? Is anyone is just like, 'Screw it. Pack a clothes and we'll sort it out at the airport.'" It's an odd thing to sell at the airport. But you do some planning and you figure out ahead of time. Now, to continue the sort of pedantry of this metaphor, the other characteristic of going to the Oregon Trail, unless you're the first 10 people to do it is hundreds, if not thousands of people have done it already so you kind of know what it's going to be like. It's the equivalent, in a piece of software, if they were like, "This application is written in COBOL. I want you to now write it in --" I don't know, what are the kids do nowadays? Something.io? I-want-you-to-write-this-in-a-hot-new-language.io and basically just duplicate it. You're going to still have to discover how to do things and solve problems but if the job is just one-to-one duplicate something, then you can do a lot more upfront planning for it. CHARLES: While you're doing it, making the Uber and Airbnb. MICHAEL: Yes. CHARLES: Then you're done. MICHAEL: I think that's the truth and I want to put it another way. We used to be down here in Texas, the way we run government here is just lovely but we used to have this notion of a zero-budget, which is basically like, "Assume I'm going to give you nothing and justify every penny that I'm going to give you." I think that's a good way to think about defaults. I mean, about requirements is default is you don't need any and only get as many requirements as you need. If you're building tanks or going to the Oregon Trail, you might need a lot of requirements upfront that are actually helpful. CHARLES: But like a suit, you're just going to just strike out naked walking with. MICHAEL: That's probably a bad idea unless you -- CHARLES: Yeah, that is a bad idea but that's the bar but what happened if I were to do that? I might make it for 20 miles. MICHAEL: And build up from there and then have all the requirements that you need. I'm sure when Lewis and Clark went they were like, "We're going to need a quill and some paper and maybe a canoe and probably some guns and then let's see what happens." But that was a whole different situation than going to establish Portland. CHARLES: That was an ultimate Agile move. That was a pretty Agile project. They needed boats, they built them but they didn't leave St Louis carrying boats. MICHAEL: Right and they also didn't have a family of six that they needed to support and all this kind of stuff, right? CHARLES: Uhm-mm. MICHAEL: There was a question you asked a long time ago, not to steal the emceeing for you -- CHARLES: I would say, we need to get onto our topic -- MICHAEL: Oh, yeah. Well, maybe this is a good saying, what you're asking is, "How do you get this job?" and I don't think we ever addressed that. CHARLES: Yeah, that's a great question. You said you had to consume a lot of stuff on the internet. MICHAEL: Right. That's definitely how I do the job but I think how I get the job, there's an extended two-part interview with me on my Software Defined Talk Podcast Episode, available at SoftwareDefinedTalk.com, where I talk about my history of becoming an analyst and things like that but the way it happened is I don't have any visible hobbies, as you know Charles except reading the stuff in the Techworld. I would read about what's happening in the Techworld and would blog about it back in 2004, 2005 and I was discovered as it were by the people at RedMonk. I remember for some reason, I wrote some lengthy opinion piece about a release of Lotus Notes. I don't know why but that was a good example. This is back when all of the programming job were going to be off shored and I thought it was imminent that I was going to lose my job. I was looking for a job and I shifted over to being an analyst. That like the way that you get into this kind of business is you establish, there's two ways -- CHARLES: You established expertise, right? MICHAEL: Yeah, which is like always an unhelpful answer because it's sort of like, I was joking about this in another podcast, it's like Seth Godin's advice about doing good marketing, which is the way you do good marketing is you have an excellent product. If you have an excellent product that everyone wants to buy, then your marketing will take care of itself. I think if I'm asking how to market, I'm trying to figure out how to market a bad product. That's really what people want. CHARLES: That's also just not true. That's just like flat ass not true. That's a lie. MICHAEL: I mean, people who want to know how to diet better are not already healthy and dieting successful. You can't start with the base assumption of things are going well. CHARLES: Well, it is true. I like to think that we have an excellent product. We sell an excellent product but the thing is you can just sit on your excellent product all day and you have to tell people about it. If you want them to come sample it and try, maybe eventually buy it like the advice that you just need an excellent product. I'm amazed at anyone who can actually can say that with a straight face. MICHAEL: Well, he only writes like 150-word blogpost. I think his point is that you should aspire to have a unique situation and then marketing is easier. Similar with everyone's favorite example like an Apple or like a Pivotal or a ThoughtWorks. We eat all three of us and yourself as well, once someone gives you the benefit of the doubt of listening, you can explain why what you have is not available anywhere else. CHARLES: What it boils down to is if you want to easily differentiate, allow people to differentiate your products from others, then be different. That's fair. I'll give -- MICHAEL: To summarize it, it begets more of the tactics of how one gets a job like I do. What's the name of the short guy in Game of Thrones? 'Tyrian'? 'Tyran'? 'Tyron'? CHARLES: Tyrion. MICHAEL: At one point, Tyrion is like, "I do two things. I know things and I drink," so that's how you get into this type of business as you establish yourself as an expert and you know things. Now, the third thing which I guess Tyrion was not always required to do is you have to be able to communicate in pretty much all forms. You need to be good at written communication, at verbal communication, at PowerPoint communication, whatever all the mediums are. Just knowing something is not very useful. You also have to tell people these things. CHARLES: I think Tyrion is pretty good at that. MICHAEL: Yeah, that's true but he doesn't ever write anything. There is no Twitter or things like that. CHARLES: I feel like [inaudible] been a pretty big deal in the blogosphere. MICHAEL: Sure, no doubt. The metaphor kind of breaks down because the lattice for the continuing counterarguments do not exist in the Game of Thrones universe but whatever. CHARLES: They've got the ravens. That's like Twitter and it's bird. MICHAEL: That is true. Knowing how to deploy a raven at the right time, with the right message is valuable. CHARLES: We buffer up our ravens so that they fly right at eleven o'clock. MICHAEL: That's true. I could be convinced otherwise. CHARLES: That's why they arrived both at 6PM in the Westeros -- MICHAEL: I guess true to the metaphor of a tweet, most of the communications in Game of Thrones is either, what are they called? Little Birds? That the [inaudible] always has and then the Big Birds. You've got to tweets and the blogs. CHARLES: This is like it's nothing but Twitter. MICHAEL: Exactly. You got to really communicate across mediums. Now that the other thing that's helpful and you don't necessarily have to do this but this is what I think gets you into the larger margin. The more profitable parts of the work that I do is you have to be able to consult with people and give them advice and consulting is largely about, first figuring out the right opportunity to tell them how they can improve, which usually is it's good if they ask you first. I don't know about you but I've found that if you just pro-offer advice, especially with your spouse, you're basically told that you're a jerk. CHARLES: Well, it'd be like a personal trainer and walking around me like, "Hey man. Your muscle tone is kind of flabby. You got to really work on that." MICHAEL: The line between a good consultant and being overly-explain-y is difficult to discern but it's something that you have to master. Now, the other way you consult with people is you study them and understand what their problems are and you're sympathetic to them and I guess you can be like a British nanny and just scold them. That's a certain subset of consulting. CHARLES: Don Rickles of consulting? MICHAEL: That's right. You just help them understand how all of this knowledge that you have applies to them and hope solve their problems like the FordPass thing. When I went from being a developer to an analyst, it was a big risk to take on. I think I probably took like a $30,000 pay cut and I went from a big company health insurance to being on a $10.99 and buying your own health insurance which a whole other conversation. We talked about that every now and then but like it's a risky affair. It's not a promotion or even a lateral move. It's just an entirely different career that you go into. Then you talk with people a lot. As an analyst, you're constantly having to sort out the biases that you have with vendors who want to pay you to save things versus end-users who want to hear the truth. You can't really see a lot of Gartner and Forrester work but the work that you can see publicly from people like RedMonk, it's pretty straightforward. CHARLES: Yeah it is and whatever they did, a piece that was for one of their clients, there was always a big fat disclaimer. MICHAEL: Now, the other thing I would say is what I've noticed -- not to be all navel-gazing -- about myself and other people who are successful at whatever it is I do is there's two things. One, they constantly are putting themselves out there. I remember and this is probably still the case. This is probably all in Medium. There's probably a Medium post every quarter that's like, "If you're a developer, how do you give more talks. What your first conference talk?" Basically, the chief advice in there, other than bring business cards and rehearse is essentially like you just got to get over that idea of self-promotion. You basically have to self-promote yourself incessantly and do all those things that you find nauseous and be like, "Me, me, me," which is true. You've got to get over that thing. If you're like me and you're an introvert who actually doesn't really like that many people, except a handful of people like yourself that I'm friends or family with, you have to put on the mask of an extrovert and go out there and do all this extrovert stuff or you'll fail. I shouldn't say you'll fail, you won't increase your overall comp and margin and everything. You'll basically bottom out at about $120,000 a year or so because that's about as much as anyone will pay for someone who just write stuff but doesn't actually engage in the world and consult. You've got to do that. Then the other consequence of that is you always have to be trying out new types of content and mediums like here we are in a podcast. Long ago, you and I, in 2005 or 2004 -- CHARLES: You got me to sign up for Twitter. MICHAEL: Yeah, like we started off a podcast because I remember hearing the IT conversation stuff and John [inaudible], who is a big inspiration for me, a role model, I remember he was just trying out podcast and I was like, "All right. I'll try that out. That looks like fun," and then here we are. CHARLES: I remember you tried out the podcast and you're like, "Let's go into your backyard or my backyard. Let's talk about software for 15 minutes." I remember that very clearly and that was 12 years ago. Then I remember also like with Twitter, you're like, "Now, you should sign up for this Twitter thing," and I remember I did and that's when it was still coming through SMS on your phone and like "I'm walking around Teatown Lake. I'm going to get tea." And I was like, "Oh, my God. This is so fucking stupid." But little did I know, you were actually signed me up to a service that changed my life. MICHAEL: Yeah, it was the stage direction era of Web 2.0 where you're just supposed to give people your status updates, instead of your searing insights. But yeah, you've tried it all these different mediums because again it goes back to your job is to communicate. You need to tell people things that you know. CHARLES: Coté, what is your strategy on virtual reality? MICHAEL: My strategy in virtual reality. Well, you've caught me, Charles because I'm not into that. You remember when Time Magazine had that Chinese lady who was like a... Not Frontside. What was the name of the big virtual reality thing that was big...? CHARLES: Second Life. MICHAEL: Second Life, who is a Second Life millionaire. CHARLES: Yeah, she had armies of people. She was mining some resource in Second Life and then reselling it and she made a lot of money. MICHAEL: I don't really like visual mediums so as Marshall McLuhan would say 'hot mediums'. I guess I like the cool mediums. That's not my thing. That's where my principle fails. Maybe I'll do that one day. CHARLES: This is pretty hot. This medium is pretty like -- MICHAEL: I think maybe audio broadcast is hot. I'm just pretending like I know. This is another trick that you can deploy that my wife has picked on is most of the time, 78% of the time, I actually have no idea what I'm talking about. I just know words. I don't actually know Marshall McLuhan theory. I read that one book a long time ago and I remember that scene in Annie Hall where he gives a little diatribe to whatever the Woody Allen character is. That's the extent of my Marshall McLuhan knowledge. CHARLES: Was Marshall McLuhan actually in Annie Hall? MICHAEL: He was. CHARLES: Don't sell yourself short, Coté. MICHAEL: Sure. CHARLES: You know things and you drink so let's talk about that second aspect because I know that you like me whole tearing up as a role model. MICHAEL: I should say since we're both happily married, except for the third thing that he does which he -- CHARLES: Oh, right. MICHAEL: Another unmentionable word. He too freely hangs out with the ladies. CHARLES: Right, anyway aside from that, throughout doing all this stuff, you keep a very, very chill perspective on things. I feel like the tech world gets so wound up around itself and it gets so tight and so stressed about its own problems. There's constantly wars in JavaScript and before we were in the JavaScript world, we were warring in Ruby. I remember when Twitter went over to using Scala instead of Ruby. Oh, my goodness, it was terrible times. I feel like there's a lot of stress and yes, you want to take it seriously but I feel like you've always been able to maintain an even-keeled perspective about technology which actually allows you to commentate on it effectively and intelligently because you're able to unwind yourself from the squabbles of the day and see maybe a bigger picture or something like that. MICHAEL: That's nice of you to characterize me to use a -- is that a hanging, dangling participle there, when you're in [inaudible]? CHARLES: Yeah, I don't know. MICHAEL: I think that's also just a function of being old. CHARLES: So are you actually not stressed or is it just part of your persona of being an extrovert or something like that? MICHAEL: About the tech world? No, I'm not stressed about that. As you kind of outlined, especially I was not sent the demographics for the show, which is fine. I'll overlook that but I'm guessing that that was a joke. CHARLES: Who got some designers, developers -- MICHAEL: I'm guessing there's a lot of people who actually are on the frontlines of working on software. I think this happens also in the white collar set. But essentially, it's really easy to slip into over allegiance to something and I don't know what rhetorical fallacy this is but it's the bias of over allegiance to something, you get all wrapped up in defending a tool over something and the virtue of it, whether it's Emacs and vi. I'm sure reactive people, whatever that is, have all sorts of debates. The thing is when you're heads down on this stuff, you don't realize how petty all those discussions are. It's not so much that it's a waste of your time but it's just one battle in an overall war that you have. It's good to have opinions and figure things out but you should just relax about it because the more angry and emotional you get, you're going to make a lot of mistakes and decision and problems. I wish I had an example of this but this is one of those things that intuitively as you ages as developer, it's not like your literal age. It's just the amount of time you've been developing software. You could be a 25-year old who's been developing software for 10 years and you would probably get this notion but you just realize that stuff changes and you just learn the new things. It's kind of not a big deal like one day, you're going on and on about how vi is great and the next day you're using that Atom editor and then whatever and you just use the tool that's appropriate and it's annoying when you're younger and people are applying Hacker News with like, "You should use the tool that is appropriate," which is a stupid reply. That's just kind of how it is. Also the other thing, in the more white collar world, as an analyst, especially doing strategy for a company, you can't be biased by things because then you'll make poor decisions as an analyst. Also when you're doing strategy in M&A that result in bad business outcomes so you actually be very unbiased about things. CHARLES: I think it applies in everything. If you get too emotionally invested in one particular approach in software, literally in anything you do, it does result in bad outcomes. The problem is you may not actually realize the consequences of those bad outcomes far down the road from the poor decision that you made that caused you that outcome so you might not necessarily connect it back. MICHAEL: Yeah, and I keep bringing this up but I think another effect of being calmer in your nerd life is having something that you do outside of your programming life, which is either having a family or having hobbies or something like that but you know -- CHARLES: Or having a wild turkey. MICHAEL: Yeah but you've got to have something, a reason to stop thinking about your tech stuff or it'll consume you. I suspect when you see the older graybeards who go on and on about open source and they're very like... I don't know. What's the word? They're very over the top and fervent about tech stuff. It's probably because like me, that's their only hobby and they haven't figured out how to how to control it. It becomes part of their identity and it defines them and then they're down this twisty, turny path of annoyance to the rest of us. CHARLES: Again, don't sell yourself short, Coté. You've got plenty: you love the cooking and eating and the drinking so close this. Do you have a favorite drink that you've been mixing lately? MICHAEL: No. CHARLES: Or any kind of favorite food because every time I go over to your house, even if we're having pizza, there's always a nice hors d'oeuvre or something to drink, something to tweak that appetite for something special. I kind of wondering if there's anything that you're into. MICHAEL: I have some very basics. One, I don't know if I drink a lot or drink a little. I think the science on this is very confusing, kind of like drinking coffee. I try to drink less. I basically go back to the basics of I want cheap wine that's not terrible. That's what I'm always trying to discover. I think I've also started to rediscover just straight vodka. That's pretty good. I think that fits into the grand scheme. CHARLES: I just can't do it. I can't follow you there. I need some, what do they call them? Gin florals? I can drink gin -- MICHAEL: Oh yeah, that's good too. CHARLES: That's about as close as I can get to straight vodka. MICHAEL: And then food-wise, I just wrapped up finally figuring out how to cook fish and chicken without it tasting terrible. CHARLES: Oh! What's the secret? MICHAEL: No, I want to put a disclaimer out. There's a EULA on this. I'm not responsible for anything bad that happens but what you want to do is cook at about 10 degrees less than you're supposed to. A chicken is supposed to be 165 degrees but you take it out of the pot when it's like 150 or 155 on another part of the pan. Fish is supposed to be 145 degrees but you take it off when it's about 130 or 135. It cooks a little bit more but these guidelines to cook your meat to that thing, it ruins it. Also you can brine a chicken and things like that. Also, what you want to get is an instant meat thermometer. One of those that you can just poke in your meat so you're always checking the temperature. That's what I've been working on. CHARLES: I have a theory about that. I will laid out really quickly, maybe it's just because the juices. It's the juice that so yummy there so you want those to be locked in and boiling but not boiled away. I'm going to give that a try on my -- MICHAEL: And fish is particularly tricky. CHARLES: Because all it takes is five minutes. Sometimes, it's two minutes and 30 seconds too long and you ruin the fish. MICHAEL: Then the next theory I want to try out is that you can actually fry fish in pure butter but you've got to paper towel it off afterwards because too much butter ruins it. But I think if your paper tower it off like you do grease off of bacon, then I think that's how you achieve -- not as good as a restaurant because in a restaurant, they have those butane torches and the crisp it up on the outside or reverse sear or whatever -- CHARLES: Is that what they do? Do they just run their torch right over the fish? MICHAEL: That's all I can figure. They might also be professional cooks who know how to cook things. CHARLES: They might have done it a lot of times. They might have had someone like Gordon Ramsay yelling at them constantly. "I can't believe this fish is so terrible. Waah!" All right. I'm going to give the fish a try. I'm going to give the chicken a try and I'm going to give everything that you just spent the last hour talking about, also a try. MICHAEL: Well, thanks for having me on. It's always fun to have a show with you. I just posted yesterday our second revival of the Drunken Retired Podcast, which is over at Cote.show. It's just '.show'. URLs are crazy nowadays. I guess the only self-promotional thing I have is I'm over in Twitter @Cote. It'd be nice if everyone should just go follow me there because I'm always very sad that I don't have enough followers and they'll never verify me. I don't understand what the problem is. I'm clearly me. Then I mentioned earlier, the main podcast that I do is Software Defined Talk, which is at SoftwareDefinedTalk.com and you should come spend a lot of money on Pivotal stuff. I'm happy to tell you all about that. Just go check out Pivotal at Pivotal.io CHARLES: I guess that is about it. We will talk to everybody later. Thank you for staying tuned and listening to this supersized episode. Come check us out sometime!

Liz Baillie @_lbaillie | GitHub | Blog | Tilde Inc. Show Notes: 01:32 - Becoming a Developer 07:54 - Website Building 12:03 - Understanding Programming 17:34 - Coming to Peace with Ignorance 22:25 - Systems Programming 26:46 - Making Goals for Yourself 28:57 - Math and Programming 38:08 - Open Source Resources: Wicked Good Ember Liz Baillie: Journey to the Center of Ember Test Helpers Fibonacci Number Freewheel: Volume One by Liz Baillie The Flatiron School Skylight Impostor Syndrome Twilio Letter to a Young Haskell Enthusiast Hello, Con! OSCON Transcript: CHARLES: Hello, everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast Episode 57. My name is Charles Lowell. I am a developer here at The Frontside and with me is Stephanie Riera, also a developer at The Frontside. Today, we have with us Liz Baillie, who is a developer at Tilde. I am actually really excited to have Liz on the show. I saw her at Wicked Good Ember back in June of 2016 and her talk was definitely one of the more memorable ones. You come away from a conference kind of only remembering a certain number of talks that stick in your mind and as time passes, the messages may fade but some of the message just stick with you and the one I got from her talk was a feeling of empowerment that, even though I have a lot of experience, I could approach any code base and try and grapple with it and understand it. I came away thinking, "There are a lot of code bases out there that I don't understand but if I apply a certain set of techniques and a certain level of fearlessness, I will actually get there." You know, if I want to go attack something like I don't know like Kafka or something like that, I would feel better about that. That was actually a great feeling coming away from that, a feeling of great power so thank you very much for that, Liz. LIZ: Yeah, no problem. CHARLES: Why don't we start with a conversation of how you came to be a developer? Everybody's got kind of a unique path. What's yours? LIZ: Well, I went to art school and I studied comic books. I actually have a bachelor's degree in comic books. I was a cartoonist for a number of years and at some point, maybe like 10 years ago, I had a friend who was a programmer. He's a web developer. But I didn't even what's a web developer was. But I knew he worked at home and he made his own hours and he made a lot of money. It seemed like an awesome job so I was like, "How did you get into that?" And he's like, "I don't know. I just kind of mess around and figured it out." And I was like, "Uh... I don't know what that means." Like how do you start? I have no idea. I went to the bookstore and I look at the For Dummies books and I got Programming for Dummies or something and it was like Visual Basic, I think. CHARLES: All right. What year was this? LIZ: That's 2004. I guess, it was a little more than 10 years ago. But it didn't say that on the cover. It was like 'Programming' and I was like, "Oh, cool. I'll learn programming." I don't even know what the difference of languages was or anything like that. I did a couple of exercises in that book and I had no concept of how this would become a website ever. I was making 'Hello, World' and little things that spit out Fibonacci numbers or whatever. I kind of gave up on that and I was like, "I don't care. I don't mind being poor." I'm used to it so I kept being a cartoonist, putting out books and stuff. I did a little PHP and HTML type of stuff in making websites for myself in between but I don't really consider that programming. It didn't feel like programming. CHARLES: Did you ever put any of your cartoons on the web? LIZ: Oh, yeah. Google me. They're there. [Laughter] LIZ: I might have some stuff like my web comic, I'm not sure if it's still up. But I had a web comic called Freewheel, which was about this girl who runs away from home and joins a band of magical hobos. CHARLES: That sounds like a career change to programming. It was oddly prophetic. LIZ: Yeah. It's out there. Anyway, I got to a point where, long story short, I was tired of being broken for all the time and I have to figure out some way to make money that I like doing so I thought, "I would go back to school," so I went back to school. I didn't start out with computer science but I took some math and science classes and I got really into math a lot. I really enjoyed math so I started looking into what careers can I do that are math-y. Somebody said, "If you enjoy the problem solving aspects of math, you'll love computer science," so I took a Computer Science 101 class or something like that and I got really, really into it like I just killed it. I just loved it. It was awesome. But I still didn't understand how you made that a website. In the back of my mind, I was like, "We did this thing --" We learned Python in my class so there's some program we had that like move a little turtle around and do pictures or something. I was like, "I don't understand how this makes a website." CHARLES: You got to move that turtle around a lot, especially like account for the kerning in the fonts and stuff. LIZ: Yeah. I have no idea how you make that a job, like the stuff that we were doing like spitting out Fibonacci numbers and making a little adventure game or something but how does that translate into anything else. That was in 2014 and that was around the time that web development bootcamps were starting to be more of a thing. I heard about a school called the Flatiron School in New York which is right at the time and I thought, "This sounds great. In three months, they'll actually teach me how this makes a website and finally know how does this make a website?" I applied in kind of like on a lark. I don't think I'll get in, I didn't know how can I afford it or anything and I applied and I got in. I was really lucky that my stepdad help me pay for it so I don't have to worry about it. I did that in three months and then I got a job. In November 2014, my first web job and now I know how those codes make a website so here I am today. CHARLES: What a journey. LIZ: Now, I live in Portland, Oregon and I make websites. Not really, I work on web apps, I guess is more accurate. CHARLES: So you actually went straight from the Flatiron School to working at Tilde? LIZ: No. I was in New York at the time and my first job was at an ad tech company called SimpleReach and I worked there for a little over a year before I got the job at Tilde, then I move to Portland. A year ago yesterday was my first day at Tilde. CHARLES: Fantastic. Knowing that company and knowing what they do, they must have you doing some really, really fascinating stuff. LIZ: Yeah, I do a lot of typical web stuff. I work on the Ember side of our app, Skylight. I also, more recently have been working on Rails engine that's also a gem that spits out documentation automatically, which is pretty cool. CHARLES: Now, is this documentation for the product or is it just documentation for any real site? LIZ: No, it's for our products specifically but I don't think it would be very difficult to alter for someone's personal needs, other than ours. But it's basically like if someone can write a markdown document, then we'll parse it and spit it out into HTML and all these different places so that it just updates the whole documentation site around our products. CHARLES: Basically, there's an infinite amount of stuff that has to happen to make a website because there are literally so many moving parts. What's been your favorite kind of area, I'll just say the whole website building because that really is like the tip of the iceberg. The actual iceberg goes way, way, way beneath the surface. But what's your favorite location on the iceberg so far? LIZ: I kind of like the middle, I guess. I always feel bad saying it because everybody talks badly about CSS but I just don't like it. I tried it really hard. One of my resolution this year was I'm going to try really hard and I'm going to like it more. But what I like the most is whenever I get to do pure Ruby. I learned Rust in the last year or two and anytime I get to make the stuff behind the visual aspect work or kind of like meta stuff. I'm saying this and it's totally wrong but I did my first meta programming the other day or last month. The metaprogramming that I did ended up getting cut out of [inaudible] but I got to do it before it got deleted. It was pretty cool. CHARLES: That's generally how it works. Metaprogramming is the program we do that we end up hating ourselves later for but it's really fun. LIZ: Yeah, they're like, "This is cool but this is not the most efficient to do this." It's like, "I guess, we don't have to dynamically create methods based on all our filenames. CHARLES: As far as the CSS goes, I actually see CSS like raw kale. It's actually really good for you, if you like to it eat in large quantities and it's like fantastic but it's not always the most pleasant going down. LIZ: It tastes bad. It has a terrible feel. It's like eating rubber. I am really lucky, though that I worked with a couple of people who are incredible at CSS and when I get to pair with them, it's like watching magic happen. CHARLES: Yeah, you realized, for all its quirks and strange ways that you approach it, is an outlier but it is kind of a fully-formed programming model that has a lot of depth and a lot of people have really, really generated some pretty neat abstractions and ways of dealing with CSS. But it is like, "I just want to fix this one thing," and it's basically a sea of things that I have no idea how to navigate. LIZ: It's one of those things. I always think it's funny, anyway that I come from a visual art background but the thing I like about programming is anything visual. CHARLES: That is actually really is fascinating. LIZ: Yeah, when they hired me here they're like, "You're going to be really good at design," and I'm like, "I just want to do programming." CHARLES: Like never the temptation, like this is just because you've actually kind of drank your fill of that in a past life? LIZ: I think I've talked to my coworker, Kristen about this because she actually has a design background and we paired together all the time. She's one of the people that I was talking about who are geniuses at CSS. She's a genius at it. She has a design background. We've talked about this how art and design are kind of different, like the brain stuff that I use to make a comic is really different from designing a book cover or designing an experience. It's all part of the art side of the brain but it's different compartments of the art side of the brain. I don't really have a design background as much as I have like a narrative and a drawing background. STEPHANIE: That and your interest for math that probably has a factor. LIZ: Yeah. STEPHANIE: Going back to your journey, I wanted to ask about it seems like it took you awhile to knock on different doors and finally feel like, "Now, I understand. How do I work with what I have to create a website?" We have similar backgrounds in that. We didn't start off in programming and I also went through a code boot camp. But mine was a little different where when I finish, I didn't really feel I understood what programming really was. I still felt like I understood a primitive level like just building something, just a 'Hello, World' using HTML CSS. When I finished, it took me a year and a half to actually get a full time programming job, like a legit job. Before that, I was scrambling doing three part time jobs and lots of WordPress grunt work. Even though I thought it was actual experience, it was enough experience but I feel like a lot of the programming concepts that I've had to learn and just basic functional programming, I've learned it on the job. I don't yet feel like I am a legit 'real programmer'. We were talking about the Pinocchio thing like, "I'm a real boy." But I want to be a real programmer. [Laughter] STEPHANIE: What I'm curious about is at what point did that happen? When did that click and when did you stop having -- I'm sure at some point you had -- impostor syndrome? When did that just evaporate and you're okay? LIZ: I still have impostor syndrome all the time. It's weird that it's like I have a sense of, "Oh, I can figure anything out." At this point, I know who to ask or where to look and I could figure anything out if I really wanted to. But I also feel like everyone else is better than me. I get impostor syndrome in that sense, not that I'm not a programmer but that everyone else is better than me. When did I start feeling like I was a real programmer? Definitely not at my first job. When I started my first job at SimpleReach in November 2014, I had two months in between bootcamp and the job. In that time, I made some weird little apps but nothing super serious. I made an app that I use the Twilio API to anonymously text Seal lyrics to people. It sends either lyrics from Kiss From A Rose or a fact about Kiss From A Rose. You can choose which one. I made stuff like that. CHARLES: [Singing in the tune of Kiss From A Rose] There's was so much in app can tell you so much it can touch. Okay, I'll stop. I'll stop right there. I promise. LIZ: Yeah, so I did stuff like that and I sort of wrote my own crowdfunding to go to RubyConf because I gotten an opportunity scholarship ticket that year. But I couldn't afford to go otherwise. I did a little crowdfunding thing but I did little things like that. I didn't really feel like I understood everything so I was looking on other people's code and forking stuff to make all that happen. Then I got my job and it was small-ish start up at the time and they didn't have a whole lot of on-boarding at all. It's kind of like I showed up, they gave me a computer and it took me three or four days to get their app running locally. It was just a lot of leaving me to my own devices a lot of the time in the beginning and I was kind of like, "I don't know what I'm doing. What do I do?" It took a while. As the company matured and as I matured as a programmer, they kind of develop a little more infrastructure, I guess for supporting junior engineers. As time went on, I became better and they became better at mentoring me. I don't know when I felt like a real programmer, probably sometime in the middle of that job. I gave my first technical talk, I guess or conference talk at EmberConf in 2015. I gave a lightning talk at the behest of the Leah who is now my boss. It was a five-minute talk on why testing an Ember sucked at that time. It sucked for me to learn and it was really hard. I wanted to learn it but it was really hard. Then after that, people started talking to me. They came up to me after and they are like, "Oh, my God. Blah-blah-blah." I was like, "I don't know half the stuff these people are saying. I don't understand what you're talking about." I'm going to smile and nod. But maybe a little bit after that, I kind of started feeling more that I could solve problems. I think public speaking actually helped me a lot with that like when I realized that I had something to say and that people want to hear it, then I could help other people feel empowered to learn stuff, I think that was part of it as well. CHARLES: Yeah, I really like that. Obviously, I'm going to push back a little bit on Stephanie, just in terms of the day-to-day. You definitely deliver daily as a programmer so you can look at that. You've mentioned this at the very beginning of your answer and it almost really sounds like what you came to be was more of a kind of a peace with the things that you didn't know, rather than feeling confident about the things that you did. You said something and I'm going to paraphrase it but it's like, "I got to the point where I became sure that I would be able to figure it out." Or, "I had strategies for being able to figure it out." Maybe we can unpack that a little bit because I feel that's actually very, very important and that's a skill that's important to have at any level of experience in your career, whether it's one year or whether it's 20. Certainly, that message when I saw you speak that's something that I took away as a very experienced developer. I felt actually empowered by it. What are some of those mechanisms to feel at peace with your own ignorance? LIZ: I think part of the problem for me, I started learning how to program before I went to dev bootcamp or whatever, that I was really good at stuff. I actually think that was a problem because I was used to succeeding immediately or like always doing everything right so it's hard when you start learning something and you don't realize when you first start learning programming and it's not supposed to work immediately, like you're starting with something that's broken and you're making it work. CHARLES: Right. In fact, 99% of the experience is like every time I look at a piece of software, I'm like, "Someone sat with the broken version of this for a year and then it work and that's what I got." They got to live with the working version for two seconds before it came to me and they spent the rest of the time, totally broken. LIZ: Yeah, totally. It's hard when you're used to creating something from scratch like doing comic books and like writing stories and stuff. It's never broken it's just blank and then you add to it so I'm used to that sort of workflow. Then I started in this new field where Rails is new or whatever then it's just errors as far as the eye can see until you fix it, until you configure it, you made it work. It's hard to change your mindset into that. It's easy to feel like a failure when all you see is errors and you don't know that that's normal. I helped a couple of my friends to learn to program and I think the biggest hurdle is just mentally overcoming that it's not you, you're not a failure. It's just that everything's broken until it's done. STEPHANIE: I can definitely relate to that. I was always one of those overachievers, straight A, AP class. I'm not even kidding. In my high school, they called me Hermione, which for those that don't know, that's the girl from Harry Potter. It's like you take it really personally when you feel like you're a failure. You feel like you can't deliver, you don't pull your own weight. For me, it's actually so overbearing that it can even inhibit you from doing things like public speaking or other activities. But one of the reasons why I do like to teach whenever I can is because that's when you realize, "I do know a lot of things," like how to do stuff on Git and just basic things that you don't even think twice about. I volunteered for this these high school girls and no one really gave me any instructions and I just rolled out of bed for this thing and just have them build a basic cute little web page with their picture and this and that. I had to really think hard to how do I put just a regular image tag and I had to peel back all the old layers of stuff that I don't do anymore. You don't think about those kind of things in Ember or JavaScript frameworks. I caught myself in keep on saying dom and this and that and they were like, "What is a dom?" And I'm like, "Urghh." But then I realized, I do have all this context, I guess I don't appreciate it or something. LIZ: I think talking to beginners when you're slightly above beginner-level in helping other fresh beginners is one of the best things for you as a new developer because you realized, you're like, "I actually know stuff." STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's usually the type of advice I like to give to other aspiring junior programmers. I also wanted to ask about it seems like now you're going through something similar because you tweeted or you're asking about systems programming. What's that like? LIZ: I'll start at the beginning. When I started at Tilde about a year ago, I knew that we use Rust, which is a systems programming language, a lower level language than Ruby or JavaScript. We use it for some aspects of our stacks. I thought, "That's really cool. I want to get into that nitty-gritty type of stuff so how do I learned that?” I started learning Rust but I didn't really know how to apply that knowledge. I wrote like a little adventure game in Rust and it was almost exactly the same as when I first started learning about web development, it's similar to how does this become a website, instead of like, "How does this become a computer thing?" I don't even know what systems programming is but I hear Rust is a systems programming language so I want to learn that stuff, like what is that stuff? A couple months ago, I think it was, I tweeted like, "Anybody have any probably three systems programming resources so I could learn more about systems programming?" And I got huge amount of responses. Everybody was super kind and helpful but a third of the responses were like, "Well, what kind of systems programming?" And I was like, "I..." [Laughter] CHARLES: "The kind that happens on a system?" [Laughter] LIZ: I don't know. It was kind of the same thing. I think I used this metaphor earlier but it's similar to when I first started learning programming it was like I was standing at the front of a forest and I knew that the stuff I want is in the forest but I don't even know what a tree is, you know what I mean? Eventually, I learned what a tree was then I learned what a map was and I learned how to get through that forest. But then in the middle of that forest, I was like, "Oh, there's a tunnel," like there's another stuff. "I want to get on to this tunnel," but I don't know anything about living underground, you know what I mean? Like, "What do I need? What even is there?" I have no idea so that's kind of how I feel about systems programming. At the moment, I'm trying to go into this tunnel but can I breathe down there? I don't know. Where does it lead? CHARLES: I feel like at that point when you're about to enter into the tunnel, can you intentionally apply filters for information that at that point is not useful like the difference between a stalactite and stalagmite is not useful when you haven't even gone into the cave yet and you're just like, "How do I actually just get down there with a flashlight?" How do you go about deciding which information is useful and which is not at your particular stage? Because obviously, it's all going to be useful at some point but at what point it becomes useful and what point do you just catalog it and put it for later? I feel like that's very, very hard thing to do. Do you feel like you're able to do that? LIZ: I'm not sure. I think I said this earlier but I feel like I can figure most things out at this point like if I really want to. One of the things I learned just from talking to people on Twitter about systems programming is like, "Oh, some examples of systems programming are operating system," or like a browser engine because I'm still learning Rust and I gotten to write as much lately but I know that there is servo which I believe is a browser rendering engine written in Rust, it's something like that. CHARLES: Supposedly it's going to powering Firefox at some point. LIZ: Yeah, stuff like that, I think is really interesting but now I know a little more about what to look at in terms of as far as I understand, there is probably an infinite amount of different kinds of systems: operating systems is one, maybe a browser engine is another. I can't remember the others but I'm sure people tweeted it out to me. STEPHANIE: I feel like we touched on something which is it can get overwhelming when you're starting off in something new. Trying to understand what you don't know that you don't know. LIZ: Yeah, that's the hardest thing. STEPHANIE: How can you make tangible goal marks for yourself if you don't even know what you don't know? When I first started off, when I would pair with someone that was more advanced, I remember having a realization that every time I would look for an add-on or I'm looking at someone's repo, I would take my time to read everything about it, all of the Ember documentation and I need to know everything. Then later I realized that is totally not the case. Like Charles said, people develop this filter for noise and only focusing on not the entire tool box but that one tool that they need for that one specific thing that they're doing and I realized it only when I was pairing with people and seeing that. They go to this repo, skim it, "No, this is not what we need. Let's go to the next one. Let's try to find a method that what we need," and then they would just search on the page. "Oh, this looks kind of similar. Let's plug this in," and I'm just like, "What? You can do this? You can just copy/paste someone else's stuff?" and it was amazing. But when you're starting out, you don't know all of these things and unfortunately, kind of waste a lot of time thinking that you need to know everything and you don't. CHARLES: Yeah, Cheating is totally a virtue in so many cases. [Laughter] LIZ: Totally, for sure. CHARLES: Just being like, "I don't need to understand this," but I just know that it works. You pushed at what point that happens like further and further back but that boundary of understanding is just simply always going to be there. No matter where you are, that kind of veil of ignorance, you can push it out but it's just can be further away. I am actually curious, you mentioned you got really into math, this is when you went back to school. What drew you to that and how have you applied, if you've applied? Have you found it to be an asset in your development career? LIZ: For sure. When I first went back to school, it was with the idea that this is totally different now, obviously. I thought I might become a veterinarian -- CHARLES: You need a lot of math for that, right? LIZ: Well, it's like a lot in biology and there's a lot of math and science and stuff. I had to take a bunch of science classes and take biology and chemistry so that involved taking some pre-calculus and calculus and more calculus. What I realized, though was that I hated biology and chemistry but I love the math that I was learning. I loved the process of problem solving and just figuring out puzzles. When you get into calculus, how you solve problems, they're similar to how you solve problems in programming where you have sort of a framework like I have this certain language which would be the different theorems or whatever in math and you can just pick and choose which ones will fit your problem and if you're taking a calculus test, you could be sitting next to the same person and you might come to the same answer in different ways so it's similar in programming where you have all of this documentation, you have these languages, you have use other frameworks and you can solve the same problem in a million different ways. But in terms of how people talk about needing math for programming, I don't necessarily think you need math for programming but if you already like math, it's definitely sort of a happy path, I guess because you get the same joy out of programming that you get out at solving calculus problem. But if you don't like calculus, it's okay. I don't think it's necessary. CHARLES: One of my favorite blog posts of all time is this letter to young Haskeller, I don't know if any of you guys have ever read that. It's fantastic and it's an experienced person in the Haskell community talking to someone who's just coming in and it's incredibly empathetic and wonderful. I think it's a message that needs to be heard more generally. I think it's ironic coming out of the Haskell community as it does because they definitely have a reputation for being a little bit salty and a little bit exclusive. But it's actually a very inclusive message. One of the great points they make is they say we've got the whole equation reversed. It shouldn't be, "Math is hard, therefore programming is hard." It should be, "Programming can be really fun, therefore math on which programming is based, can also be really fun." You can go both ways. If you find math fun, you can find programming fun and if you find programming fun first, you can later go and have fun with math. You can pick and choose which parts you want. I think it's a great message that needs to get out there. LIZ: I think it's also really, really important to note for anyone who might be listening that is getting in to programming, that is scared of math or has had a bad experience with math that it is not necessarily to love math. I think that scares a lot of people away and a lot of the stuff that people learn when they're first learning programming are math based. When I was in the Flatiron School, Some of the exercise we did in the beginning with just pure Ruby were Fibonacci sequence. They were sort of math-y and that turns a lot of people off and makes people scared. If someone is hearing this and has experienced that, don't be scared. You don't need to worry about it. But if you love math, then it's great but you don't have to. STEPHANIE: I'm one of those people that always had this mental block of like, "I'm not good at math." I was good at everything in school. I excelled at everything except math. I think a lot of it came from my struggle when I was a kid so you have this self-perpetuating thought that you aren't good at something. Every time you take a final or something, you blank out because you have this mental wall in your mind. What I found weird was I was doing the exact same thing. I was taking calculus for bio-sciences and physics too at the same time. In physics, I loved that class. It was so awesome and I realized that half the stuff I was doing was going backwards in all of my problems and it was fun for me. Eventually, I was taking a final for my calculus class and I didn't remember the equation that we needed for that class so I took out all the variables and I solved it as if it's a physics problem and I got the same answer and I was correct. I realized at that moment, if you just remove the negativity from your mind and you try to apply yourself in the same fashion as you would in something that you enjoy, you'll just forget for the moment that it's math, that it's something that you 'suck at'. You actually could do good in it and not get stuck. I realized I actually do like math when it's veiled as chemistry or physics. LIZ: I think a lot of people have that experience with math. They have a really bad experience when they're young and then they get stuck and they feel like they're just not good at it like somehow, on this subatomic level, you just can't change it or you're not good at it. It's not really true. STEPHANIE: Yeah. CHARLES: I actually love that example because it is, it's all integrated. We are constantly doing things like math without even realizing it. Actually, one of the things I love about the Montessori education is that's the way they actually teach it. They have all of the different great lessons, they want to convey to the children which is things like courtesy and grace, things like taking care of your things, things like music. But for all, I think they've got a bunch of different categories but they make sure that they always intersect with each other and you get that in surprising ways to make sure that if a child likes music, use the music as a way to introduce them to arithmetic. If they like arithmetic, use that as a way to introduce them to music. If they have things doing design, I don't want to say, interior designer or clothing design but practical life stuff and if that's something that a child really is drawn to, then they'll use that as an introduction to music or geography. There's all these parallels that are constantly there and you can ride whichever rail works for you to whatever area that you want to go. There is no set way to approach math. You literally can find a way that works for you. STEPHANIE: The subjects aren't mutually exclusive, "Because you're not good at this, probably you shouldn't become a programmer." CHARLES: It's not expected that every child will grow in one subject at the same rate that they'll grow in every other subject. They just let the children explore the area that they're interested in and let them go crazy. If they're really into art, they just let them explore and learn as much as they can and then slowly entice them and just show them the connections that art has to courtesy and grace to math to music to other things and let them see those connections and then follow them on their own. That's why they call it -- the kind of grown up in there -- the guide. It's really there. The way that they push is by showing them the connections but then using the kind of internal motivations of the children to move. I actually have some pretty strong feels on this. I feel like our education does leave a lot of people behind because there's this expectation that in every single subject, everybody will goose step forward at exactly the same rate and that's just a fable. It's not real. It's not how the human mind works. LIZ: Yeah. CHARLES: But yeah, I actually think, certainly for me and my connection to math has been helped by the fact of programming and now, later on after having done a lot of programming, so much more is interesting to me about math and I can see beauty in it, I think where I didn't see beauty in it before. STEPHANIE: For one of the projects that we've been working on, we have been doing an Ember upgrade. I basically needed to get some changes for one of the dependencies and I have no experience in open source, whatsoever. That happened for the past two weeks. I was making a lot of PRs to two different dependencies and that was my first experience with open source. It was less scary than I had imagined and I actually got a lot of great feedback from it. Now, I realized that it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be and most people are very receptive to your PRs or if you have questions about their open source because they need help, they need people to help them tackle all the issues that they have so I'm curious, do you have any advice for people that are interested in contributing to open source but they may find it daunting and they don't want to look dumb or do things the wrong way? LIZ: One of the things I've been interested in since I started learning programming is open source because I enjoy collaborative atmospheres and just the idea of a big group of people coming together to solve problems. It was something that I wanted to do since the beginning but it's super intimidating because when you think of people who are open source maintainers, at least to me in the beginning, they seemed way above me like Gods so I'm like, "How can I possibly be useful to these Gods?" At my last job, my manager was like, "I got a couple of goals for you and for your career." One of my goals was I want to contribute To Ember CLI Mirage. That was a goal. I just thought, "This is a great add-on. This is a great project and everyone uses it and I love it and I would love to contribute to that." I made it a goal but then in that in the middle of that time period, I got a job here at Tilde and I went to Portland. Shortly after that, I went to the repo and I was like, "I'm going to do this thing," because one of the reasons why I chose it as a project to contribute to is because I heard Sam is a really nice guy. One of the things was that I was really intimidated by the people maintaining projects is like, "Well, he's not intimidating." I feel okay about this so that's a good first step. The second step is let's find a thing to do so I look at all the issues on the repo and I find something super simple which is just adding in-line documentation. That's what I did and I was like, "Can I pick this up?" I was feeling super shy so I didn't even want to put it on the issues so I think I just pinged him on the Ember Slack and just like, "Can I help with this?" He's like, "Yeah, yeah. That's great," so I made a bunch of in-line documentation additions to the project and I made my first PR and it felt like such a way that it's not as scary at all as I thought it would be so I started contributing to other projects, things that just came up. Not so much like in your situation where it was a dependency I was using but more like I saw somebody tweet about it and like, "I just made this project and I think there's a bunch of typos. Can somebody just spell-check this for me?" I'll go in and do a couple of typo fixes. Another situation when I was reading through a repo because I want to learn and there's a project called intermezzOS which is Rust operating system, like a tiny operating system. I was just reading the code and I was like, "There's a couple of typos. I can fix this," and stuff like that and I found, through that experience, that open source maintainers are super happy to have you help in any way that you can, even if it's a little things. In the last couple of months, I started my own project which is like an app -- it's not an add-on or anything. I actually got my first couple of PRs from other people and other people are helping me build it. I don't think I've ever met but every time I get a PR, I feel like I won a prize. Every time someone contributes and I'm like, "Thank you." I cannot give you another -- [Laughter] LIZ: I love that you're helping me. You know, like I only have one hour a day to work on this thing so anything, anyone people can do to help me is so great. Now I have the experience of being on the other side and I can attest to the fact that most open source maintainers are incredibly stoked for any help they can get. Even if you're new, just find someone who's nice and ask them how you can help. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that was a realization that I had because I was communicating directly with this person in the Ember Slack as well. I had submitted a PR and later he was like, "Hey, while you're at it, do you mind adding in this one property that's missing?" And I'm just like, "All right. Sure." Later he offered if I wanted to become a collaborator because I was putting in so many PRs and like you said, he hasn't had the time to cut out a new version or to fix the things that you keep in your head, "Okay, I'm going to go back and fix this," and then someone else is like, "I want to fix this thing," go for it. That's the best. LIZ: Yeah, totally. It's a great way to learn more stuff too. CHARLES: I like the point about choosing a project that you know is not intimidating because unfortunately, there is a lot of negativity that happens out there. LIZ: Totally, I knew that and that was a big blocker for me, for a long time. CHARLES: Yeah but knowing that there are actual, I would like to say, a majority I don't know if that's true but it can feel like it's enclaves, just because negativity has a way of clouding everything and propagating but there are certainly areas where we put that way and it's very healthy, it's very collaborative and welcoming and making a definitive effort to first know that they're out there because if you have a negative experience, you make sure that you don't bounce off of that and then define them. I really like that, how you were deliberate about that. LIZ: Yeah, it seems like the most important thing, if you're a new programmer and they're like, "How do I get involve in open source," and your first advice is like, "Find someone who's really nice." It doesn't sound like the right advice but I think it is the right advice. CHARLES: That's because that's where you'll stick. LIZ: Yeah and you'll want to collaborate with that person and that project because you're not scared of being insulted or something. CHARLES: Well, that was fantastic. We can wrap it up. LIZ: I have two talks this year so far coming up. One is going to be in Toronto at the end of this month at a new conference called 'Hello, Con!' I built a type space adventure game in Rust and I built it side by side with the same game in Ruby so I can learn Rust by doing the same thing on both sides. I'm going to be talking about the similarities and differences and things I came across learning Rust as a Rubyist. I also have a similar talk in May at OSCON in Austin about learning Rust as a Rubyist but at a slightly different, longer talk. I did a version of it at RustConf last year. It's kind of in comic book form so it's all of drawings and it's sort of a story about going to a place called Rustlandia as a Ruby person and how you literally navigate that world, not just everything is sort of a metaphor. I'm getting that talk again in a longer form at OSCON in Austin in May. CHARLES: Well, fantastic. You have to stop by the office and come see us. LIZ: Yeah. CHARLES: But thank you so much -- LIZ: Thank you. CHARLES: -- Liz for taking the time to talk with us. This is a great conversation again. You know, I feel like I'm going to come away feeling that I've got more tools to deal, certainly with my daily struggles -- LIZ: Yeah, get pumped! CHARLES: -- In programming. Yeah. LIZ: Programming! Yeah! [Laughter] LIZ: -- One of the Mortal Kombat music comes in -- Tun-tun-tun-tun-tun-tun-tun-tun-tun... [Laughter] CHARLES: I remember actually seeing Mortal Kombat in a theater and I actually getting up and dancing in the theater and then the rest of the movie just sucked. It was like they spent the whole budget on the first 20 seconds of that movie. Anyhow, all right. That's it from The Frontside. Remember to get in touch with us at Frontside.io, if you're interested in UI that's engineered to make your UX dreams come true.

Bradley and Karen discuss Conservancy's conference trips and presentations during the first half of 2016. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:38) Bradley attended and spoke at FOSDEM 2016 and LinuxConf Australia 2016 (03:10) Bradley and Karen co-coordinated the FOSDEM 2016 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom (04:43) Tom Marble did an interview-format discussion with Richard M. Stallman at FOSDEM 2016 (04:55) Bradley gave two talks at FOSDEM 2016, Copyleft For the Next Decade: A Comprehensive Plan for the GPL and A Beautiful Build: Releasing Linux Source Correctly (06:40) Richard Fontana gave a talk at FOSDEM 2016 entitled Open source foundations: threat or menace? (08:15) The Doge take on FOSDEM 2016 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom was Much politics. Many peoples. (11:00) There was a Conservancy Supporter event at the Novotel Grand Place in Brussels at FOSDEM 2016. (14:00) Bradley gave a talk at LCA 2016. (15:20) Karen gave the closing keynote at LibrePlanet 2016, entitled Companies, free software, and you . (16:54) Karen Sandler gave a talk at the Linux Foundation's Embedded Linux Conference 2016 entitled Tales of Enforcement (27:00) Karen gave a talk at

Gleb Bahmutov (@bahmutov) chats with the panel on Reactive Programming in JavaScript. What is Reactive Programming? Join Gleb and the panel to learn about event streams, sequences over time, and how these help developers build complex JavaScript applications. Resources Gleb's 2016 OSConf Talk on Reactive Programming - http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/open-source-us/public/schedule/detail/49290 The talk is mostly how to train anyone coming to JavaScript in different techniques, each more powerful than the previous one. Slides, video and all links to futher information in https://glebbahmutov.com/blog/oscon/ I posted the list of interesting things from OSCON at https://glebbahmutov.com/blog/oscon/#interesting-things-i-saw-at-oscon Companion code repo showing the same simple example (literally multiply numbers then print them) implemented using different styles https://github.com/bahmutov/javascript-journey - from imperative to FRP and beyond. The long and evolving blog post https://glebbahmutov.com/blog/journey-from-procedural-to-reactive-javascript-with-stops/ that I have been updating for the past two years. Feathersjs - http://feathersjs.com/ Horizon.js from RethinkDB team - https://horizon.io/ Most.js stream library - https://github.com/cujojs/most Cycle.js - pure reactive web framework - http://cycle.js.org/ Xstream - tiny stream library targeted at Cycle.js https://github.com/staltz/xstream

Free as in Freedom host Christopher Allan Webber interviews Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn about their work on copyleft and at Software Freedom Conservancy. You can become a Supporter of this work! Show Notes: Bradley mentioned Cygnus Solutions, ultimately acquired by Red Hat, which was an early for-profit supporter of copylefted projects. Bradley and Karen discussed the VMware lawsuit. Chris Webber wrote this blog post in response to a Shane Curcuru, who is VP of Brand Management at the Apache Software Foundation, anti-copyleft talk at OSCON 2015. Shane's talk is consistent with Apache Software Foundation's historical and recent anti-copyleft positions (12:23) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Summary What organization could be larger than the US Federal government? Not only that, the chance to transform how software is done in the government has perhaps one of the largest possible impacts of transforming any "IT department." In this episode, Matt and Coté talk with Diego Lapiduz who works in the GSA's 18F organization helping government agencies develop their software in new, more agile and cloud-driven ways. We discuss the background of 18F and the broader government initiatives to transform how software is done and also walk through some of the learnings 18F has had in trying to make such a huge transformation. Subscribe: iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/lord-of-computing-podcast/id983773453), RSS Feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/LordsOfComputing) Show-notes and Links Hiring is the biggest problem around government processes. To build empathy and different teams working together, try to tackle a common goal. Building credibly by demonstrating that your method works. The Ugly Baby Problem - winning over people who think they're already doing it right. Measuring success. 18F in github. github.com/18F (https://github.com/18F) and 18f.gsa.gov (https://18f.gsa.gov/). Examples of project: NotAlone.gov (https://www.notalone.gov/), The College Score Card (https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/). Explaining "failing fast" (http://cote.io/blog/fail-fast-recording) in government. People start to understand it as they have more experience. How open source is helpful here, how non-government folks get involved and contribute to the open source projects. Diego's recent talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=598c1pB39Ms) at the Cloud Foundry Summit 2014. As more background on IT change in the government, check out this overview from Mikey Dickerson at OSCON 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6nMQg9qs7k). Diego Lapiduz: @dlapiduz (https://twitter.com/dlapiduz) Matt Curry: @mattjcurry (https://twitter.com/mattjcurry/) Coté: @cote (https://twitter.com/cote/), cote.io (http://cote.io) Libsyn downloads as of 20160912: 458.

Bradley and Karen discuss the key differences between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6) organizations in the USA, and discuss recent refusals by the IRS to grant such statuses to Open Source and Free Software orgs. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:34) Bradley mentioned the 501(c)(3) vs. 501(c)(6) difference came up on FaiF 0x41. (03:35) Bradley mentioned that in 501(c)(3) status from the IRS is based on receiving some status governed by §170(b)(1)(A) of the tax code. (Most Free Software charities, such as Conservancy, are classifed as non-profit charities under §170(b)(1)(A)(vi).) (05:10) Bradley mentioned this issue had been discussed on FLOSS Foundations' mailing list (05:50) Bradley discussed that at the OSCON 2013 tutorial, Community Foundations 101, most of the 501(c)(6) representatives who spoke argued incorrectly that the differences between 501(c)(3)'s and 501(c)(6)'s were not substantive. (10:50) Karen referenced how the TV show Silicon Valley parodies the irony of for-profit software companies claiming they make the world a better place. (11:58) Bradley mentioned he was inspired by Michael Moore in his work on Free Software. (15:02) Bradley mentioned Karen's talk called Identity Crisis (15:21) Karen mentioned that open source was on the list of items the IRS gave additional scrutiny. (16:51) Bradley mentioned a blog post by Jim Nelson where Yorba's rejection was discussed; Yorba's 501(c)(3) application was previously discussed on was discussed on 0x1C, and covered in many other places. (17:46) Karen wrote a blog post about why she isn't worried for Conservancy's 501(c)(3) status at this time. (18:30) Bradley mentioned that IRS decisions don't make precedent, and if there's a dispute, it would go to USA Tax Court (19:00) Mozilla Foundation's odd hybrid for-profit/non-profit model was audited by the IRS, and Mozilla Foundation settled with the IRS. (20:22) Open Stack Foundation was initially denied 501(c)(6) status, as reported on Mark McLoughlin's blog. (25:10) Bradley promised links to both Yorba's 501(c)(3) denial letter from the IRS and Open Stack Foundation's 501(c)(6) denial letter from the IRS. (The response to the IRS from OpenStack, written by DLA Piper, OpenStack Foundation's law firm, is also available, too. (27:15) Bradley and Karen discussed Board of Directors meetings in FaiF 0x45: I'm Board (31:40) Bradley mentioned the How fresh stays fresh campaign, which includes the Nature's Pause Button television commercials by the American Frozen Food Institute, which is a 501(c)(6) organization. It's FY 2012 Form 990 is the most recent on available. Bradley also mentioned the Beef: It's What's For Dinner advertisting campaign that has existed for decades in the USA, which is sponsored by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, Inc. which is a 501(c)(6) as well. It's FY 2012 Form 990 is the most recent on available. (35:40) Bradley further mentioned the Pork: the other white meat advertising campaign, which has also existed for decades but is now called the Pork: Be Inspired campaign, seems a bit more dubious in its non-profit existence. It appears to be funded by the National Pork Board Foundation, which is ostensibly a 501(c)(3) but has no assets, revnue nor expenses, and appears to be a front for an org called the America's Pork Producers / Pork Checkoff, which appears to be some quasi-govermental agency related to pork (in other words, it's pork for pork). More research would probably be needed to figure out better what's going on here with regard to non-profit status, but it seems that unlike the Beef ads, which are clearly funded by a 501(c)(6), this campaign is funded by a separate legislation, presumably unrelated to §501(c). There is, BTW, also, a 501(c)(5) called the National Pork Producers Council, which appears to be where the big money is (— not surprisingly — 501(c)(4)'s and 501(c)(5)'s often make 501(c)(6)'s and 501(c)(3)'s look tiny by comparison). (36:13) Segment 1 (39:43) Conservancy and OSI jointly announced a working group on IRS applications and denials. (40:49) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Bradley and Karen discuss the talk, Why the free software phone doesn't exist by Aaron Williamson given at FOSDEM 2013 on Sunday 3 February 2013. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:37) Bradley and Karen introduce the talk. Segment 1 (04:06) Aaron's slides area available. Segment 2 (56:41) Bradley mentioned dakota imaging where he used to work. (1:02:15) dacotag imaging Karen mentioned Aaron's OSCON 2010 talk (but we incorrectly said it was 2009). (1:04:35) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Bradley and Karen discuss the talk, copyleft-next: an Introduction by Richard Fontana given at FOSDEM 2013 on Sunday 3 February 2013. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:37) Bradley and Karen introduce the talk. Segment 1 (05:37) The slides Fontana's talk on copyleft-next are available. Segment 2 (01:06:51) Bradley mentioned the issue of Noam Chomsky's points on concision (01:13:23). Bradley mentioned the anti-GPL keynote by Tom Preseton-Werner of Github at OSCON 2013. (01:14:53) Bradley and Karen discussed the Harvey Birdman Rule. (1:27:45) Bradey mentioned a comment he posted about CHR-governed policy meetings. (01:29:00) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Bradley and Karen interview Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the The Linux Foundation. Show Notes: Bradley and Karen interview Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the The Linux Foundation. Segment 0 (00:00:33) Bradley and Karen introduce the interview. Segment 1 (00:03:03) Bradley and Karen interview Jim Zemlin. Segment 2 (00:25:23) Karen and Bradley wrap up the discussion about 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(6). Bradley referenced this post which ocurred in this thread about Linus saying Greg KH is a door-mat. (26:36, 34:55) The OSCON session that Bradley chaired was Non-Profits Organizations for FLOSS Projects: There Is No Place Like Home, and the slides are available. (33:21) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Karen and Bradley interview Christopher Allan Webber of the GNU Mediagoblin project. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:31) Karen and Bradley introduce the interview. Segment 0 (00:56) Karen and Bradley interview their guest, Christopher Allan Webber of the GNU Mediagoblin project. GNU Mediagoblin is licensed under the Affero GPL, but does not require copyright assignment and the developers have no plans to seek a proprietary licensing business. Bradley mentioned this dent by Stephen Fry on identi.ca, but that was in fact not his last dent as Bradley said. (21:50) GNU Mediagoblin is working on a fundraising video and will start a new fundraising campaign soon. Chris discussed this comic about trolls that was part of the slides of Chris' OSCON talk. (27:07) Chris mentioned the Open Source Almost Everything essay from GitHub's founder. (28:30) Karen mentioned Mike Linksvayer's talk in FaiF 0x2E. (39:00) Segment 1 (43:36) GNU Mediagoblin will be launching a fundraising campaign soon. Check back here for details later! Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Karen and Bradley discuss OSCON and GUADEC. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:36) Bradley represents FSF on the GNOME Advisory Board. (02:20) Bradley points out it's very dangerous when you can buy voting rights of a 501(c)(3) by paying money, such as the structure of OSI. Karen notes that contribution-based membership works very well for GNOME. (03:50) Bradley is concerned about the future of OSI's license list now that votes in OSI are for sale. (04:30) Bradley received an O'Reilly Open Source Award at OSCON 2012. Bradley blogged an acceptance speech for the award. (08:50) The Python award and the Perl White Camel award is also given at OSCON. (12:35) Karen mentioned FLOSS Foundations, and asked if there was a meeting at OSCON. Bradley mentioned it had been primarily rolled into Jono Bacon's CLS conference. (15:10) Segment 1 (17:56) Bradley wrote in a post about the GUADEC 2010 conference to note how welcoming the community was. Karen described GUADEC 2012 as very similar in nature. (21:25) Karen mentioned her husband Mike had a similar reaction to GUADEC 2012 that Bradley had to GUADEC 2010. (23:50) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Karen and Bradley interview Deb Nicholson of Open Invention Network, GNU MediaGoblin and Open Hatch. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:36) Karen announced her pregnancy. (01:50) Bradley will be at OSCON, Karen might be, and Karen will be at GUADEC. Bradley will be at LinuxCon North America and LinuxCon Europe. (03:00) Segment 1 (04:40) Deb Nicholson was previously on the show as Episode 0x25: FOSDEM 2012 Patents Panel. (06:00) Deb mentioned Linux System Definition, which is the OIN-published list of things that OIN members license their patents to each other on. (07:12) Deb and Bradley are debating Bradley's comment regarding Deb's points on the panel on 0x25. If you go back to listen to 0x25, the context for the comment they're debating starts around 38:00 in 0x25. (19:20) It's possible etymology of the verb “to harp” may indeed come from the musical instrument, not harpy. (31:00) Karen mentioned The Ada Initiative. (32:52) Segment 2 (38:54) Bradley and Karen talk about plans for upcoming shows. Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Karen and Bradley play and discuss John Sullivan's talk entitled Is Copyleft Being Framed? from the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:34) Dave Neary wrote an article based on his FOSDEM talk, and we're trying our best to fix the audio and have a FaiFCast of his talk, but it may not be salvagable. Segment 1 (06:35) Follow along with John's slides from his FOSDEM talk. Segment 1 (37:23) John referenced the source Black Duck numbers for which there is no methodology posted (38:30) Bradley mentioned Chris DiBona's keynote at OSCON 2010. (39:14) John mentioned the FLOSS Mole project in his talk. (42:50) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Bradley and Karen discuss Jacob Appelbaum's talk at Linux Conf Australia 2012, as well as other conference talks. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:35) Bradley spoke at SCALE, but the talk was very similar to the talk given on 0x18. (07:15)

Bradley and Karen discuss issues of gender inequality in the software freedom community and technology generally. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:38) Bradley and Karen discuss issues of gender inequality in the software freedom community and technology generally. Bradley wrote a blog post a while back noting that issues of gender inequality are technology-sector-wide, as shown on PDF page 10 of this study. However, Bradley incorrectly remembered the study: in fact, all levels of academic computer science are (23:19) Karen got a 5 on our Calculus AB exam, even though her teacher told her only boys were good at math. Bradley also got a 5 on the Calculus AB exam. (27:06) Bradley believes that Stand and Deliver. (29:37) Bradley is sure there is no Calculus in Good Will Hunting (30:08) Bradley mentioned that S05E11 of American Greed contained an rsync output on a Debian system and Python DBUS binding C code as “code cracking examples” (31:00) Miguel de Icaza had a cameo in the file Antitrust. (33:27) Bradley mentioned that Craig Mundie keynoted OSCON (38:55) Bradley mentioned the USENIX/Freenix to Perl Conference to OSCON history (42:50) Karen mentioned the GNOME Marketing Meeting at FOSDEM 2012. (43:27) Karen is speaking at Linux Conf Australia on 19 January 2012,Bradley is speaking at Scale 10x, the 2012 Southern California Linux Expo (44:16) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Karen interviews Adam Dingle of Yorba, and Bradley and Karen briefly discuss the interview. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:33) The interview is with Adam Dingle of Yorba. (02:30) Segment 1 (02:45) Yorba was founded in January 2009. (04:01) Yorba applied for 501(c)(3) status nearly two years ago and the application is still pending in the queue (the same delay queue we discussed in Episode 0x13. (28:30) Adam mentioned Yorba's donation page. (30:13) Segment 2 (41:08) Karen mentioned that Yorba's response to the IRS should be published soon. (41:35) Bradley mentioned Cat Allman's Fundraising 101 talk from OSCON. (43:30) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Bradley and Karen play a speech recording of Bradley's presentation at OSCON 2011, entitled 12 Years of FLOSS License Compliance: A Historical Perspective. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:36) Bradley mentioned that time travel requires special verb tenses according to the Douglas Adams' book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. (01:48) Bradley gave a keynote at Ohio Linux Fest 2011 (01:58) Segment 1 (05:02) This segment is a recording of Bradley's OSCON 2011 talk, entitled 12 Years of Copyleft License Compliance: A Historical Perspective. The slides are available on Bradley's website so you can follow along during the talk if you like. There is a live denting identi.ca thread from Bradley's talk. (03:50) Bradley wrote a blog post about a minor GPL violation in the Emacs codebase. It has since been fixed. RMS mentioned the NeXT/Objective C GPL violation in his essay, Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism. Segment 2 (52:35) Bradley will be speaking at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2011 and at LinuxCon Europe 2011. (55:05) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Bradley and Karen play a speech recording of Richard Fontana's presentation at OSCON 2011, entitled Contributor Agreements Considered Harmful. Note: this show and the slides from Richard Fontana are licensed under CC-By-SA-3.0 USA. This will be the new license of the show for this and future episodes. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:34) This show is a recording of Richard Fontana's talk Contributor Agreements Considered Harmful. (03:13) Segment 1 (03:34) Richard Fontana has made his slides from his talk available on his website. Bradley live-dented Fontana's talk from OSCON. Richard Fontana references Michael Meeks' essay, Some thoughts on Copyright Assignment (29:55) Segment 2 (45:17) Bradley and Karen were on a panel discussion on copyright assignment at Desktop Summit. (45:33) Bradley mentioned that Mark Shuttleworth's obsession with cadence had a similar weird effect on a different debate. (58:30) Karen has done some pro bono work for PubPat, and also Question Copyright (01:01:30) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Bradley and Karen play and comment on a talk recording of Aaron Williamson's and Karen's presentation at OSCON 2011, entitled Legal Basics for Developers. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:33) Bradley mentioned the birthday attack when explaining to Karen how likely it might be that the number of the show might match the number of the day. (01:38) This show is a recording of Aaron and Karen's OSCON 2011 talk, Legal Basics for Developers. (02:20) Segment 1 (05:53) The slides for the Legal Basics for Developers are available to follow along with the recording (05:53) Segment 2 (49:36) Richard Fontana gave at a talk at OSCON as well, which was recorded, and Karen and Bradley have asked for his permission to play it. (50:45) Bradley asked folks to ping Richard on identi.ca to ask him to allow us to use his audio on the oggcast. (51:05) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Karen and Bradley discuss Karen's OSCON keynote and her 2011 O'Reilly Open Source Award, as well as other happenings from OSCON. Show Notes: Segment 0 (00:35) Bradley and Karen just returned from the 2011 O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention (OSCON). (00:45) Karen received one of the 2011 O'Reilly Open Source Awards. (Video of the award ceremony is online.) (03:05) Karen now has a blog called GNOMG. (05:03) Karen's wrote a blog post about winning the 2011 Open Source Award. (03:47) Karen now has a redirector to her blog via gnomg.org. (05:42) Listener Michael Dexter let Bradley stay at his house for part of the time of OSCON, and Bradley later shared a room with listener Richard Fontana. (06:40) Segment 1 (10:22) Karen keynoted at OSCON, entitled Software Freedom: From my Heart to the Desktop. (10:22) Bradley had a live-denting thread of Karen's keynote at OSCON 2011. Karen's 2011 OSCON keynote is available YouTube. You can also hear the audio on the show itself, but if you prefer video, use the preceding link. If you watch instead of listen, just skip the audio in the oggcast up to Segment 2 below: Segment 2 (24:49) Bradley mentioned conferences can be ephemeral on his blog about GUADEC 2010. (28:25) Bradley and Karen are about to go to the Desktop Summit. (29:15) Bradley, Michael Meeks and Mark Shuttleworth will be on a panel on copyright assignment moderated by Karen. (29:25) Send feedback and comments on the cast to . You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on identi.ca and and Twitter. Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums. The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).