Podcasts about senior developer advocate

Falco, an open-source runtime observability and security tool, was created by Sysdig founder Loris Degioanni to collect real-time system events directly from the kernel. Leveraging eBPF technology for improved safety and performance, Falco gathers data like pod names and namespaces, correlating them with customizable rules. Unlike static analysis tools, it operates in real-time, monitoring events as they occur. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Editor-in-Chief, Heather Joslyn spoke with Thomas Labarussias, Senior Developer Advocate at Sysdig, Leonardo Grasso, Open Source Tech Lead Manager at Sysdig and Luca Guerra, Sr. Open Source Engineer at Sysdig to get the latest update on Falco. Graduating from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in February 2023 after entering its sandbox six years prior, Falco's maintainers have focused on technical maturity and broad usability. This includes simplifying installations across diverse environments, thanks in part to advancements from the Linux Foundation.Looking ahead, the team is enhancing core functionalities, including more customizable rules and alert formats. A key innovation is Falco Talon, introduced in September 2023, which provides a no-code response engine to link alerts with real-time remediation actions. Talon addresses a longstanding gap in automating responses within the Falco ecosystem, advancing its capabilities for runtime security.Learn more from The New Stack about Falco:Falco Is a CNCF Graduate. Now What?Falco Plugins Bring New Data Sources to Real-Time SecurityeBPF Tools: An Overview of Falco, Inspektor Gadget, Hubble and CiliumJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.

In this episode of the Modern Web Podcast, Rob Ocel, Danny Thompson, and Adam Rackis talk with Michael Liendo, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, about building practical AI applications and tackling challenges like scalability, multimodal functionality, and cloud infrastructure choices. Michael shares insights on tools like AWS Amplify and DynamoDB, discusses strategies for managing cloud costs, and explores the evolving role of prompt engineering. Michael previews his upcoming talks at AWS re:Invent on AI and scalable B2B SaaS applications. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction and Guest Welcome 01:30 - Talking Weather and Life in the Midwest 03:00 - Exploring Generative AI and Practical Applications 06:45 - Navigating Cloud Costs and Scalability Considerations 08:30 - Maintaining Creativity and Customization with AI 11:00 - Managed Services vs. On-Prem Infrastructure Debate 15:30 - Choosing a Tech Stack for Side Projects and Startups 18:45 - Learning Cloud: Paths for Full-Stack Cloud Development 22:30 - The Role of Cloud Certifications in Today's Market 26:00 - Preview of Michael's Upcoming Talks at AWS re:Invent 32:00 - Where to Find Michael Online Follow Michael Liendo on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/focusotter Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/focusotter/ Sponsored by Wix Studio: wix.com/studio

Rob Ocel, Tracy Lee, Adam Rackis, and Danny Thompson sit down with Kyle Tryon, Senior Developer Advocate at Depot, to talk all things Docker, dev containers, and modern build systems. They break down how Docker simplifies development by solving those "it works on my machine" problems, how cloud-based caching speeds up builds, and why tools like Kubernetes are becoming essential for scaling modern apps. Kyle also shares his journey from fixing laptops in retail to becoming a leading voice in the dev space, plus some great insights into how Docker and Depot are changing the game for developers everywhere. Chapters 1: Introductions (00:00 – 02:40) 2: What is Docker and Why It Matters (02:41 – 06:30) 3: Docker Files and Containers 101 (06:31 – 11:00) 4: Challenges of Environment Setup & Dev Containers (11:01 – 15:00) 5: The Power of Layer Caching in Docker (15:01 – 20:30) 6: Introduction to Depot and Cloud-Based Builds (20:31 – 25:00) 7: Optimizing Docker Builds with Depot (25:01 – 30:00) 8: Docker in the Modern Web Stack (30:01 – 35:00) 9: The Future of Cloud Builds and CI/CD Pipelines (35:01 – 40:00) 10: Final Thoughts and Where to Find More (40:01 – End) Follow Kyle Tryon on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/TechSquidTV Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-tryon/ Github: https://github.com/techsquidtv Sponsored by This Dot

Chris DeMars is a Senior Developer Advocate at DigitalOcean. He has over 20 years of technical experience and speaks globally on various frontend topics and has received accolades for his community contributions, including the prestigious Microsoft MVP and Progress Champion awards. Chris is passionate about enhancing web development and helping developers achieve their goals. In his free time, he enjoys writing blog posts, rating Detroit-style pizza, and investigating UFO's. You can find Chris on the following sites: Twitter LinkedIn GitHub PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST Spotify Apple Podcasts YouTube Music Amazon Music RSS Feed You can check out more episodes of Coffee and Open Source on https://www.coffeeandopensource.com Coffee and Open Source is hosted by Isaac Levin --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/coffeandopensource/support

Redis is no longer open source. Just a few months ago, in March 2024, the project was relicensed, leaving its vast community confused. But the community did not give up, and started work to fork Redis to keep it open.  In this episode, we delve into the Valkey project, a prominent fork of Redis, established under the Linux Foundation, which brought together important figures from the Redis community, as well as leading industry giants including AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle and others. Valkey has rapidly gained momentum and just reached General Availability (GA).  Join us as we explore the motivations behind Valkey's creation, hear first-hand stories on its foundation and journey to GA, and learn of its Redis compatibility, roadmap and implications for the open-source community.  Valkey's first Contributor Summit is taking place June 5-6 in Seattle and we will bring you announcements and updates hot off the summit. Our guest is Kyle Davis, the Senior Developer Advocate on the Valkey project, and a past contributor for Redis.  Kyle currently works at AWS, a founding member of Valkey, and has a long history with open source and with forks. He was a founding contributor to the OpenSearch project, which started as a fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana after the latter's relicensing off OSS. Most recently Kyle worked to build a community around Bottlerocket OSS project.   The episode was live-streamed on 10 June 2024 and the video is available at youtube.com/live/HQ7TAdQpxu4 OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat. ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠   https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠ Show Notes: 01:12 - Episode intro, Kyle Davis' Redis background  05:43 - Redis relicensing off open source  10:10 - Valkey vs. other Redis open source forks 16:50 - drop-in replacement of Redis 19:35 - Redis user experience during the relicensing 28:50 - From fork to GA in less than a month 34:00 - Valkey roadmap and Contributor Summit updates 40:00 - Valkey's Technical Steering Committee and leadership 44:14 - what Valkey latest GA is about  Resources: Valkey announced: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_redis-opensource-activity-7179186700470861824-Gghq Valkey first GA and new member companies: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_redis-valkey-valkey-activity-7186263342041198593-fsY3 Announcements from Valkey's first Contributor Summit: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_valkey-welcomes-new-partners-amid-growing-activity-7209084153718362112-OfdI/ For Kubernetes 10th anniversary - special episode with Kelsey Hightower: https://logz.io/blog/kubernetes-and-beyond-2023-reflection/?utm_source=devrel&utm_medium=devrel Socials: Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ Dotan Horovits ============ Twitter: @horovits LinkedIn: in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon Kyle Davis ======== LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kyle-davis-linux/ Mastodon: @linux_mclinuxface@fosstodon.org

Industry experts answer some of your biggest testing questions in this highlight video of our favorite moments from past episodes. From leveraging blockchain technology to testing generative UIs, they've got you covered.You'll hear insights from these experienced leaders:Marcus Merrell, VP of Technology Strategy at Sauce Labs – watch the full episode with Marcus here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vkfbtwF3dQ&list=PL67l1VPxOnT7qLyCn37RmESq-luA36iIh&index=20Hanson Ho, Android Architect at Embrace – watch the full episode with Hanson here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkRqjCeYuYM&list=PL67l1VPxOnT7qLyCn37RmESq-luA36iIh&index=16Titus Fortner, Senior Developer Advocate at Sauce Labs – watch the full episode with Titus here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNIA1EYpt9o&list=PL67l1VPxOnT7qLyCn37RmESq-luA36iIh&index=36Lindsay Walker, Product Lead at Starling Lab for Data Integrity – watch the full episode with Lindsay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vkfbtwF3dQ&list=PL67l1VPxOnT7qLyCn37RmESq-luA36iIh&index=20Karen Laiacona Frazier, Senior Director, QA at Unqork – watch the full episode with Karen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBtMp3IPjX8&list=PL67l1VPxOnT7qLyCn37RmESq-luA36iIh&index=8Join us as we discuss:00:25 Which languages developers and testers should use01:11 Who decides which tests are important02:07 How to verify digital content to avoid misinformation03:03 What happens when everyone uses the same version of an app03:56 What testing a generative UI looks like04:49 How white hat hackers can prevent Blockchain fraudWe'd love to hear from you! Share your thoughts in the comments below or at community-hub@saucelabs.com.SUBSCRIBE and visit us at https://saucelabs.com/community to dig into the power of testing in software development.Sign up for a free account and start running tests today at https://saucelabs.com/. ▶ Sauce YouTube channel:  / saucelabs  

How can contract testing boost your efficiency? Stay tuned to find out!Contract testing is a hidden gem. It combines the strengths of unit tests and integration tests, allows for safe deployment, and promotes better team communication – but not many testers know about this game-changing approach.Marie Drake, Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs, and Lewis Prescott, Test Specialist at IBM, put their great minds and collective experience together to write Contract Testing In Action; a book where readers get to know the ins and outs of contract testing.In this episode, Lewis & Marie explain contract testing and how it could improve testing efficiency by detecting communication problems early in the development cycle.❓What did you think of the show? Leave your anonymous feedback:https://forms.gle/Df5sDABiNMQn4YSj7CONNECT WITH LEWIS PRESCOTT

Learn how to AI-proof your job and prepare for the future of test automation!In this episode, we're sharing a highlight reel of our conversations with these industry leaders:Marie Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana LabsSimon Stewart, Software Engineer at AppleKent Dodds, Software Engineer Educator at Kent C. Dodds Tech LLCFilip Hric, DevRel at Replay.ioGleb Bahmutov, Senior Director of Engineering at Mercari USAndy Knight, Principal Architect at Cycle LabsBoni Garcia, Associate Professor at UC3MMark Winteringham, Author of AI-Assisted TestingJason Arbon, CEO of Checkie.AIRobin Gupta, Creator of TestZeusJOIN THE CONVERSATION! Subscribe to our YouTube channel now and get access to the latest exclusive shows, before anyone else!  https://www.youtube.com/@test-automation-experienceSauce YouTube channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@SauceLabs_Official‍‍  Community page: https://saucelabs.com/communityHome Page: https://saucelabs.com/

When Stuart Clark, AWS's Senior Developer Advocate, sat with us at Cables2Clouds, he didn't just bring stories from his journey through the tech realms of Cisco and AWS. He brought a whirlwind of insights on productivity, the rigor of technical writing, and a testament to crafting a DevNet Associate study guide in a record four days. Our own tech aficionados, Alex Perkins, Tim McConnaughy, and Chris Miles, jump into the mix, adding their own seasoning to the robust discussion of how to navigate technical literature's unique challenges and the pivotal role of a tailored morning routine in achieving daily writing goals.As we peel back the layers of our work habits, we uncover the delicate yet profound relationship between mental health and professional success. Through our own decades-long dances with anxiety, we explore the strategies that foster resilience, from emphasizing the importance of mental health in the community to the art of integrating mindful breaks. Stuart and the crew volley ideas back and forth, discussing how morning rituals and the careful acknowledgment of daily wins can be the shield against the creeping tendrils of burnout.The tapestry of our conversation is rich with the threads of self-reflection, the gentle embrace of feedback, and the dance of navigating a tumultuous job market. We unpack the evening routines that bolster a positive mindset and delve into AWS's peer review system's nuances, advocating for a culture of balanced feedback. As the tech industry's waves of layoffs cast shadows of doubt, we share insights on keeping imposter syndrome at bay, recording professional high notes, and the healing embrace of yoga nidra meditation to maintain calm in the storm. Join us for this heartfelt exchange where technology meets humanity, and learn how you can fortify your mental fortitude against the ever-accelerating pace of the tech industry.Check out the Fortnightly Cloud Networking NewsVisit our website and subscribe: https://www.cables2clouds.com/Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cables2cloudsFollow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@cables2clouds/Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cables2cloudsMerch Store: https://store.cables2clouds.com/Join the Discord Study group: https://artofneteng.com/iaatjArt of Network Engineering (AONE): https://artofnetworkengineering.com

Hoje o papo é sobre identidade, autenticação e segurança! Neste episódio, entendemos o que é empresa, o que é tecnologia e o que é protocolo dentro do universo da Okta, e exploramos o presente e o futuro autenticação online de identidade. Vem ver quem participou desse papo: Paulo Silveira, o host que parou na época do tokenzinho Fernando Meyer, Principal Engineer na Okta Jess Temporal, Senior Developer Advocate na Auth0 Leonardo Zanivan, Arquiteto de Engenharia na Okta Mário Souto, o Dev Soutinho, Lead Software Engineer no Nubank

In this episode of GlideChat, Michael Lombardo, CEO of GlideFast Consulting, and Chuck Tomasi, Senior Developer Advocate at ServiceNow, dive into the evolution of ServiceNow from its early days to its future trajectory. They discuss the drive towards enhancing efficiency through low-code technologies, the potential of generative AI, and the importance of community engagement. Chuck shares insights on the need for a developer sub-brand within ServiceNow and reflects on the platform's potential to revolutionize event coordination. They explore the profound impact ServiceNow has had on various sectors, including emergency response, and speculate on the platform's future in addressing societal challenges. Join them as they envision the possibilities for ServiceNow in the years to come.

Join Dave in this enlightening conversation with Dan Blanco, Senior Developer Advocate for the AWS Infrastructure as Code (IaC) team, as they dive deep into the transformative world of IaC. In an era where manual processes no longer suffice, IaC emerges as a pivotal technology, enabling developers to provision and manage computing infrastructure through code, streamlining the setup, update, and maintenance of essential infrastructure components for application development, testing, and deployment. In this episode, Dan unveils the latest innovations from his team, including the groundbreaking AWS CloudFormation Git sync, CDK Migrate, and the IaC Generator. Discover how the IaC Generator revolutionizes template creation, allowing developers to automatically generate CloudFormation templates for resources in their accounts, enhancing efficiency and control over cloud environments. Beyond the technical, Dave and Dan explore the unique journey of being a developer in the gaming industry, the transition to cloud careers, and share a feast of food analogies along with insider knowledge from culinary school. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to understand the future of cloud infrastructure management, control costs, reduce risks, and seize new business opportunities with agility and speed. Dan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedanblanco Dan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thedanblanco/ Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedavedev Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidisbitski [BLOG] AWS DevOps Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops [BLOG] Dan's Blog Post on IaC Generator- Import entire applications into AWS CloudFormation: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/import-entire-applications-into-aws-cloudformation/ [BLOG] Announcing CDK Migrate: A Single Command to Migrate to the AWS CDK - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/announcing-cdk-migrate-a-single-command-to-migrate-to-the-aws-cdk/ [DOCS] Generating templates for existing resources - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/generate-IaC.html [DOCS] Working with AWS CloudFormation Git Sync - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/git-sync.html [TRAINING] AWS IaC Workshops: https://cdkworkshop.com and https://catalog.workshops.aws/cfn101/en-US Subscribe: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7rQjgnBvuyr18K03tnEHBI Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/id1574162669 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/1065378 Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/PC:1001065378 TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/AWS-Developers-Podcast-p1461814/ Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f8bf7630-2521-4b40-be90-c46a9222c159/aws-developers-podcast Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zb3VuZGNsb3VkLmNvbS91c2Vycy9zb3VuZGNsb3VkOnVzZXJzOjk5NDM2MzU0OS9zb3VuZHMucnNz RSS Feed: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:994363549/sounds.rss

In this exciting episode of "The Generative AI Meetup Podcast," we sit down for a brief yet enlightening interview with Audrey Sage Lorberfeld, a Senior Developer Advocate at Pinecone. With a remarkable five years of experience as a search engineer for renowned companies like Reddit, IBM, and Shopify, Audrey is deeply passionate about the fascinating intersection of information retrieval and AI. Her true calling lies in teaching fellow developers about this evolving space. Yesterday, Audrey delivered an engaging talk about Pinecone's groundbreaking new product, Canopy, and the art of building a RAG (retrieval augmented generation) application. In this podcast episode, we delve deeper into the world of vector databases, Pinecone, Canopy, and explore the diverse use cases they enable. Join us on this enlightening journey as we uncover the answers to essential questions: What exactly is a vector database, and why is it crucial in the realm of AI and information retrieval? What is Pinecone, and how is it revolutionizing the way we handle vector search and similarity ranking at scale? Dive into the specifics of Canopy, Pinecone's latest innovation, and learn how it can supercharge your AI applications. Discover a range of use cases where vector databases, Pinecone, and Canopy can make a profound impact. Whether you're a seasoned AI professional or a curious developer looking to expand your knowledge, this episode promises valuable insights and an engaging discussion. Don't miss this opportunity to stay at the forefront of the AI and information retrieval landscape. For more information and resources, be sure to check out the show notes: Canopy: https://github.com/pinecone-io/canopy Pinecone: https://www.pinecone.io/ Tune in to "The Generative AI Meetup Podcast" and stay informed about the latest developments in AI, information retrieval, and the incredible world of Pinecone and Canopy.

Is browser-based load testing really worth it? How do you set up testing scenarios on k6.io? What are the most common mistakes you can make in software testing? Get answers and insights to these questions on this fantastic episode of the Test Automation Experience! Marie Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs' k6.io, returns for part two of our breakdown of front-end performance testing. With our host Nikolay Advolodkin, get an insider look into k6.io with demos on setting up and running scenarios for load testing, asynchronous operations and best practices for front-end performance testing. Stay informed, stay ahead with Test Automation Experience - your source for all things test automation!k6 Documentation - https://k6.io/docs/testing site: https://test.k6.io/Adobo & Avocados YT Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@adoboandavocadosCONNECT WITH MARIE CRUZ

In this repeat episode picked by host Paul Mikulskis, Hassan El Mghari, Senior Developer Advocate at Vercel, joins us today to talk about some of his projects and how he has been using Vercel Edge Functions and Next.js to build them. Links https://github.com/Nutlope https://twitter.com/nutlope https://www.elmghari.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/nutlope We want to hear from you! How did you find us? Did you see us on Twitter? In a newsletter? Or maybe we were recommended by a friend? Let us know by sending an email to our producer, Emily, at emily.kochanekketner@logrocket.com (mailto:emily.kochanekketner@logrocket.com), or tweet at us at PodRocketPod (https://twitter.com/PodRocketpod). Follow us. Get free stickers. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, fill out this form (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/get-podrocket-stickers), and we'll send you free PodRocket stickers! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today. (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr) Special Guest: Hassan El Mghari.

This episode features a panel discussion with Mikiko Bazeley, Head of MLOps at Featureform; Zain Hasan, Senior Developer Advocate at Weaviate; and Tuana Celik, Developer Advocate at deepset.In this episode, Mikiko, Zain, and Tuana discuss what open source data means to them, how their companies fit into the AI-first ecosystem, and how jobs will need to evolve with the AI-native stack.-------------------“We're almost part of a fancy new AI robot kitchen that you'd find in Tokyo, in some ways. I see a virtual feature store as, yes, you can have a bunch of your ingredients tossed into a closet. Or, what you can do is you can essentially have a nice way to organize them. You can have a way to label them, to capture information.” – Mikiko Bazeley“I really like that analogy as well. I like how Mikiko put it where a vector search engine is really extracting value from what you've already got. [...] So where I see vector search engines, really, is if we think of these embedding providers as the translators to take all of our unstructured data and bring it into vector space into a common machine language, vector search engines are essentially the workhorses that allow us to compute and search over these objects in vectorized format. They're essentially the calculators of the AI stack.” – Zain Hasan“Haystack, I would really position as the kitchen. I need Mikiko to bring the apples. I need Zain to bring the pears. I need Hugging Face or OpenAI to bring the oranges to make a good fruit salad. But, Haystack will provide the spoons and the pans and the knives to make that into something that works together.” – Tuana Celik-------------------Episode Timestamps:(02:58): What open source data means to the panelists(09:11): What interested the panelists about AI/ML(24:10): Mikiko explains Featureform(27:00): Zain explains Weaviate(30:23): Tuana explains deepset(36:00): The panelists discuss how their companies fit into the AI-first ecosystem(44:58): How jobs need to evolve with the AI-native stack(54:35): Executive producer, Audra Montenegro's backstage takeaways-------------------Links:LinkedIn - Connect with MikikoVisit FeatureformLinkedIn - Connect with ZainVisit WeaviateLinkedIn - Connect with TuanaVisit deepsetVisit Data-centric AI

For this week here's a throwback episode from Season 2 with Angie Jones!   Angie Jones is a Java Champion and Senior Developer Advocate who specializes in test automation strategies and techniques. She shares her wealth of knowledge by speaking and teaching at software conferences all over the world, writing tutorials and technical articles on angiejones.tech, and leading the online learning platform, Test Automation University.   As a Master Inventor, Angie is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style which has resulted in more than 25 patented inventions in the US and China. In her spare time, Angie volunteers with Black Girls Code to teach coding workshops to young girls in an effort to attract more women and minorities to tech.   In this episode, I chat with Angie Jones who is a Senior Developer Advocate specialized in test automation strategies & techniques about how she discovered her niche in tech. Angie shares how she got her patents, teaches us her secret to fighting imposters syndrome, and shows us how having a personal brand can help you level up in your career.   Key takeaways from this episode: What is test automation? The skillsets needed to become an effective test automation engineer One simple exercise you can do to combat imposter syndrome The # 1 type of testing everyone should know about Misconceptions about being a test automation engineer The importance of speaking up and sharing your ideas How developing your personal brand can level up your career 3 major keys for getting into tech as a developer Connect with Angie : YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/angieluvboo?sub_confirmation=1 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angiejones Website: https://angiejones.tech/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/techgirl1908 Free Courses: https://testautomationu.applitools.com/instructors/angie_jones.html Connect with Grace: Twitter: https://twitter.com/GraceMacjones LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gracemacjones/   Follow the podcast: Twitter: https://twitter.com/techunlockedpod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techunlockedpod/ LinkedIn: Tech Unlocked   Thank you so much for listening to this podcast! If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a rating and review on iTunes. Use the hashtag #Techunlocked to ask questions and share your thoughts. Have a tech-related question? Shoot us an email techunlockedpod@gmail.com

Episode 240 of the #MVPbuzzChat interview series. Conversation between Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), and (now former) Developer Technologies MVP, Brandon Minnick (@TheCodeTraveler), a Senior Developer Advocate for.NET, MAUI and Xamarin at AWS, based in Napa, California. You can also find this episode on the CollabTalk blog at https://www.buckleyplanet.com/2023/11/mvpbuzzchat-with-brandon-minnick.html

In this episode, dive deep into the world of test automation with host Nikolay Advolodkin and special guest Titus Fortner, Senior Developer Advocate at Sauce Labs. Discover the art of designing tests, mastering page objects, and understanding essential design patterns in Selenium. Join us to uncover the secrets behind building a robust testing framework that guarantees reliable and consistent results. If you're passionate about creating effective testing strategies, this episode is a must-watch. Page Object code-shared by Titus: https://github.com/titusfortner/craft_frameworkPage Factory: https://titusfortner.com/2021/02/03/page-factory-optimization.htmlCONNECT WITH TITUS FORTNER

In this episode, host Nikolay Advolodkin and special guest Titus Fortner, Senior Developer Advocate at Sauce Labs, take you on a fascinating journey through the evolution of the Selenium logger and the future of AI in testing and in the Selenium ecosystem. Join us for a captivating discussion that dives deep into the heart of Selenium innovation. Tune in now to stay ahead in the world of test automation with Test Automation Experience!Selenium Logger: https://github.com/titusfortner/selenium-loggerCONNECT WITH TITUS FORTNER 

Join Jon as he interviews Katie Hoesley, Senior Developer Advocate at BigCommerce. In this episode, they delve into the challenges that beginner developers face and explore how to creatively bridge the gap between technical leaders and the next generation of technologists. Drawing from her liberal arts background, Katie emphasizes the importance of creativity, communication, and community in developer advocacy. Don't miss out on their insightful discussion where they unpack the complexities of measuring the ROI of developer marketing the importance of relationships in DevRel, and much more!

Over the past couple of months, Generative AI has taken the world by storm. OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT was a turning point. With each iteration, the Transformer has improved its capabilities while the underlying compute power needed to do the same task has seen massive efficiency gains. This trend has fueled a rise in the series of apps powered by Generative AI. Hassan is a Senior Developer Advocate at Vercel, the company behind the famous Next.js framework. In this episode, we discuss interesting AI projects that Hassan has worked on. We talk about the future of generative AI, the impact it will have on developers, and Hassan shares his advice for newcomers in this space.

Robby has a chat with Adriana Villela, a Senior Developer Advocate at Lightstep. Adriana highlights that well-maintained software should be software that one can understand when they go into the code even if they're not super familiar with it. She shares why she values being a serial refactorer and describes what beautiful code should look like. Adriana views debuggers as her best friends because as she says, “I do find maintaining documentation very difficult. That's where a debugger comes in very handy so that he can step through the code to figure out what is going on”She will share a story about joining a software project that required a lot of refactoring, why asking for forgiveness is often easier than asking for permission, her involvement with the OpenTelemetry project and the standardization of observability protocols, and how to think about observability on a practical day-to-day level as a software engineer. She will also introduce us to Lightstep and what being a Senior Developer Advocate role is like, and dive into trace-based testing, why every software engineer should develop a trace mindset, the complexities of tooling we have today versus what was available a few decades ago, and what her podcast, On-Call Me Maybe Podcast, is all about. Stay tuned for all that and more.Book Recommendations:Implementing Service Level Objectives by Alex HidalgoHelpful Links:https://oncallmemaybe.com/Adriana on Twitter - @adrianamvillelaMastodon - adrianamvillela@hachyderm.ioAdriana on LinkedInAdriana on Instagram - @adriana.m.VillelaLinktree - https://linktr.ee/adriana_villelaSLOconfVIDEO: SLOconf 2023 - Translating Failures into SLOs - Ana Margarita Medina and Adriana VillelaAbby Bangser: Building Trust In Your Deployment PipelineSubscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

Rosemary Wang is a Senior Developer Advocate at HashiCorp and author of "Infrastructure as Code, Patterns and Practices: With examples in Python and Terraform"! In this episode she discusses tools, lessons learned and best practices for testing Terraform! Resources: https://joatmon08.github.io/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosemarywang/ https://twitter.com/joatmon08 https://tinyurl.com/rosemary-iac

Journey with us in this enlightening episode as Linda and Dave sit down with Matheus Guimaraes, the dynamic Senior Developer Advocate at AWS for the UK and Ireland. From the vibrant streets of Brazil to the bustling tech hubs of the US, Matheus's story intertwines the world of musical theatre with the cutting-edge sphere of technology. With a heart set on global exploration and living life to its fullest, Matheus's radiance and passion inspire everyone in his path. Tune in for a heartfelt discussion on hope, the zest for life, and adventure into the evolving tech landscape with insights on monolithic architectures and the debate on centralization vs. decentralized systems in 2023. You won't want to miss this! Matheus on Twitter: https://twitter.com/codingmatheus Matheus on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codingmatheus Matheus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codingmatheus/ Linda on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lindavivah Linda's Website: https://lindavivah.com/ Linda on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lindavivah Linda on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lindavivah/ Linda's Medium: https://medium.com/@LindaVivah Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedavedev [AMAZING] Linda Sings as Different AWS Services: https://www.tiktok.com/@lindavivah/video/7177948159719607595 [PORTAL] AWS Usergroups: https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/usergroups [USERGROUP] AWS Ireland Usergroup: https://www.meetup.com/AWS-Ireland-Usergroup/ The Phantom of the Opera: https://www.thephantomoftheopera.com/ Subscribe: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7rQjgnBvuyr18K03tnEHBI Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/id1574162669 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/1065378 Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/PC:1001065378 TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/AWS-Developers-Podcast-p1461814/ Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f8bf7630-2521-4b40-be90-c46a9222c159/aws-developers-podcast Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zb3VuZGNsb3VkLmNvbS91c2Vycy9zb3VuZGNsb3VkOnVzZXJzOjk5NDM2MzU0OS9zb3VuZHMucnNz RSS Feed: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:994363549/sounds.rss

Troisième épisode de l'Entretien hors-série tourné au DevFest Nantes 2022

Strap in for a journey that takes you from the vibrant streets of Mumbai to the bustling tech scene of London, led by none other than Akshata Sawant, Senior Developer Advocate at Salesforce. We had the pleasure of delving into her career, starting from her time as a Newellsoft ambassador to her current influential role at Salesforce, where she's truly making a difference by connecting with community groups across the globe.  We dive deep into the robust capabilities of MuleSoft's transformation from a simple API integration tool to a comprehensive automation suite. We also shine a light on Akshata co-authored book, "MuleSoft for Salesforce Developers," which is a must-read for anyone interested in this space. Whether you're a seasoned developer or a tech newbie, this episode's got insights and conversations that you just can't afford to miss! Show Highlights: Akshata's work as a MuleSoft ambassador and her current role as Salesforce's Senior Developer Advocate.  Deep dive into MuleSoft's evolution from a simple API integration tool to a comprehensive automation suite.  Akshata's co-authored book, "Mulesoft for Salesforce Developers," offering insights for anyone interested in this field.  The potential game-changers from MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform, such as AI capabilities and a Visual Studio Code plugin. The capabilities of MuleSoft and the value of the platform for Salesforce developers.  The Anypoint platform's offerings and potential future developments. Links: Twitter account: https://twitter.com/sawantakshata02 Linkedin account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshatasawant02/ Github account: https://github.com/devrelakshata MuleSoft for Salesforce Developers: https://www.amazon.co.uk/MuleSoft-Salesforce-Developers-practitioners-integrations/dp/1801079609/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=mulesoft+for+salesforce+developers&qid=1687466406&sprefix=mulesoft+%2Caps%2C70&sr=8-1  

Austin Gil is a Senior Developer Advocate. He joins the show to talk about CSS-in-JS. He begins by explaining all things CSS, in a way that developers can easily understand it. He discusses the Evolution of CSS, the challenges you may encounter, CSS branches or specificities, and many more!SponsorsChuck's Resume TemplateDeveloper Book Club Become a Top 1% Dev with a Top End Devs MembershipLinksAST ExplorerParticles CSSSocialsAustin GilLinkedIn: Austin GilPicksAustin - $100 linode creditAustin - local meetups to engage with people in your local communityAustin - Panda CSSAustin - Jury DutyDan - Participating in conferences, especially for the "hallway track"Dan - "The Recruit" on Netflix Dan - The Faithful and the Fallen" fantasy book series by John GwynneDan - Ongoing war in UkraineSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/javascript-jabber/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Get ready for an incredible journey as we chat with Jeremiah Peoples, a Senior Developer Advocate for Slack at Salesforce, and explore his fascinating career path. From his earliest computer encounters to joining the Air Force and teaching himself to code, Jeremiah's story will inspire you to chase your dreams. Learn how he became a freelance YouTuber and ultimately landed his dream job at Slack, where he now shares his unique perspective on the power of Slack as a development platform and its potential to make the other 98% of software more efficient. But that's not all - we'll also dive deep into the world of building modular Slack applications. Jeremiah walks us through the new tools available for Slack developers, the starting point of the Slack CLI, and the different ways you can trigger a workflow. Discover the magic of Block Kit, a tool for building surfaces with JSON, and how modularity can be used to create powerful applications. Don't miss this enlightening conversation that will leave you eager to explore the endless possibilities of Slack development! Show Highlights: Exploring the world of building modular Slack applications, including the new tools available for Slack developers. The three main pillars of modular Slack applications: functions, workflows, and triggers. The different ways to trigger a workflow in Slack, including event triggers, shortcut triggers, webhooks, and scheduled triggers. The upcoming features for Workflow Builder, including conditional logic and a greater contribution to the ecosystem of apps in Slack. Links: Twitter account - https://twitter.com/we_the_peoples Linkedin account - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremiah-peoples-7b2a65185/ The next generation Slack Platform: https://api.slack.com/automation  

James Perkins is a Senior Developer Advocate at Clerk, a drop-in authentication solution for React and the modern web.James Perkins Website Twitter YouTube GitHub Clerk Website Twitter GitHub

Danica Fine is a Senior Developer Advocate at Confluent. She is a big fan of the power of data and has deep expertise in Apache Kafka. She chats with Scott about the importance of a strongly architected data platform and gives tips on when you need to move from the basics of SQL to a true data rich environment that includes data streaming products.Head over to https://elevateai.com/hanselminutes to sign up today and get started!

Austin Gil is a Senior Developer Advocate. He joins the show to talk about "Web Fundamentals". He begins by explaining its purpose, and the importance of knowing web fundamentals as a developer or programmer. SponsorsChuck's Resume Template Raygun - Application Monitoring For Web & Mobile AppsBecome a Top 1% Dev with a Top End Devs MembershipLinksSeries on HTML form fundamentalsSeries on file uploads fundamentalsBlog post on progressive enhancementSocialsaustingil.com LinkedIn: Austin GTwitter: heyAustinGilPicksAJ - The Mentalist (TV Series 2008–2015)Austin - AkamaiAustin - $100 creditAustin - SolidStartAustin - Stash Licorice Spice Herbal TeaDan - FranceDan - React Streaming In Depth: NextJS! Remix! DIY!Steve - Vuetensils, HTML, HTML Forms with Austin Gil - VUE 214Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/javascript-jabber/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In this episode, PJ Hagerty, Senior Developer Advocate at Spotify, joins us to talk about why Spotify is such an interesting place to work, the parallels between coding and music and why the education system needs to change the way it teaches math and coding.

Today's guest is Chuck Tomasi, Senior Developer Advocate at ServiceNow. Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Chuck has over 40 years of experience in the IT industry which has given him the skills to leverage industry best practices, create lean processes, and provide his customers with the best service and solutions possible. His experience includes global team management, program rollout and leading small to medium (

In this exhilarating episode, join Dave and special co-host Viktoria Semaan, Senior Developer Advocate from AWS Developer Relations, as they reconnect with Doug Clauson, Principal Product Manager Technical for AWS Developer Tools, and Harry Mower, GM for AWS DevOps Tools at AWS. Get the inside scoop on the highly anticipated General Availability launch of Amazon CodeCatalyst! Amazon CodeCatalyst is a groundbreaking software development and delivery service that empowers development teams to rapidly plan, create, collaborate, build, and deploy applications on AWS, streamlining the development lifecycle. Doug and Harry offer an exclusive look into the journey since the developer preview at re:Invent last year, highlighting invaluable community feedback, the intricate mechanics of developer environments, and the innovative blueprints feature. Get a glimpse into the future as our guests reveal what they have in store for the next release of Amazon CodeCatalyst and be inspired by the minds minds behind this game-changing service! Harry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrymower/ Doug on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-clauson/ Viktoria on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/viktoria.semaan Viktoria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/semaan/ Sign up for Code Catalyst Here - https://codecatalyst.aws/explore Code Catalyst Resource Page - https://codecatalyst.aws/explore/resources A Quokka! - https://awsdeveloperspodcast.s3.amazonaws.com/Quokka.jpg [PODCAST] Episode 061 – Announcing Amazon CodeCatalyst with Harry Mower and Doug Clauson - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0qbQQ8MX5I2IZr57ir5wOd [VIDEO] 5 steps to Build a Modern 3-Tier Web App Using a Blueprint from a New Service Called Amazon CodeCatalyst – Linda Haviv on Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@lindavivah/video/7203428249194745134 [YOUTUBE] AWS re:Invent 2022 - Introducing Amazon CodeCatalyst (DOP206-R) - https://youtu.be/mKdGehrUYFI [WORKSHOP] Amazon CodeCatalyst Workshop - https://bit.ly/awscchandson Subscribe: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7rQjgnBvuyr18K03tnEHBI Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/id1574162669 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/1065378 Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/podcast/aws-developers-podcast/PC:1001065378 TuneIn: https://tunein.com/podcasts/Technology-Podcasts/AWS-Developers-Podcast-p1461814/ Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f8bf7630-2521-4b40-be90-c46a9222c159/aws-developers-podcast Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zb3VuZGNsb3VkLmNvbS91c2Vycy9zb3VuZGNsb3VkOnVzZXJzOjk5NDM2MzU0OS9zb3VuZHMucnNz RSS Feed: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:994363549/sounds.rss

A common refrain you'll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can't just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they've built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They're people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can't just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. Episode notes:Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. If you're interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. We've covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.  

Darko Mesaroš, Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss all the weird and wonderful things that can be done with old hardware, as well as the necessary skills for being a successful Developer Advocate. Darko walks through how he managed to deploy Kubernetes on a computer from 1986, as well as the trade-offs we've made in computer technology as hardware has progressed. Corey and Darko also explore the forgotten art of optimizing when you're developing, and how it can help to cut costs. Darko also shares what he feels is the key skill every Developer Advocate needs to have, and walks through how he has structured his presentations to ensure he is captivating and delivering value to his audience.About DarkoDarko is a Senior Developer Advocate based in Seattle, WA. His goal is to share his passion and technological know-how with Engineers, Developers, Builders, and tech enthusiasts across the world. If it can be automated, Darko will definitely try to do so. Most of his focus is towards DevOps and Management Tools, where automation, pipelines, and efficient developer tools is the name of the game – click less and code more so you do not repeat yourself ! Darko also collects a lot of old technology and tries to make it do what it should not. Like deploy AWS infrastructure through a Commodore 64.Links Referenced: AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/ Blog post RE deploying Kubernetes on a TRS-80: https://www.buildon.aws/posts/i-deployed-kubernetes-with-a-1986-tandy-102-portable-computer AWS Twitch: https://twitch.tv/aws Twitter: https://twitter.com/darkosubotica Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@darkosubotica TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Chronosphere. When it costs more money and time to observe your environment than it does to build it, there's a problem. With Chronosphere, you can shape and transform observability data based on need, context and utility. Learn how to only store the useful data you need to see in order to reduce costs and improve performance at chronosphere.io/corey-quinn. That's chronosphere.io/corey-quinn. And my thanks to them for sponsor ing my ridiculous nonsense. Corey: Do you wish your developers had less permanent access to AWS? Has the complexity of Amazon's reference architecture for temporary elevated access caused you to sob uncontrollably? With Sym, you can protect your cloud infrastructure with customizable, just-in-time access workflows that can be setup in minutes. By automating the access request lifecycle, Sym helps you reduce the scope of default access while keeping your developers moving quickly. Say goodbye to your cloud access woes with Sym. Go to symops.com/corey to learn more. That's S-Y-M-O-P-S.com/coreyCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and my guest today is almost as bizarre as I am, in a somewhat similar direction. Darko Mesaroš is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS. And instead of following my path of inappropriately using things as databases that weren't designed to be used that way, he instead uses the latest of technology with the earliest of computers. Darko, thank you for joining me.Darko: Thank you so much, Corey. First of all, you know, you tell me, Darko is a senior developer advocate. No, Corey. I'm a system administrator by heart. I happen to be a developer advocate these days, but I was born in the cold, cold racks of a data center. I maintain systems, I've installed packages on Linux systems. I even set up Solaris Zones a long time ago. So yeah, but I happen to yell into the camera these days, [laugh] so thank you for having me here.Corey: No, no, it goes well. You started my career as a sysadmin. And honestly, my opinion, if you asked me—which no one does, but I share it anyway—is that the difference between an SRE and a sysadmin is about a 40% salary bump.Darko: Exactly.Corey: That's about it. It is effectively the same job. The tools are different, the approach we take is different, but the fundamental mandate of ‘keep the site up' has not materially changed.Darko: It has not. I don't know, like, what the modern SRS do, but like, I used to also semi-maintain AC units. Like, you have to walk around with a screwdriver nonetheless, so sometimes, besides just installing the freshest packages on your Red Hat 4 system, you have to also change the filters in the AC. So, not sure if that belongs into the SRE manifesto these days.Corey: Well, the reason that I wound up inviting you onto the show was a recent blog post you put up where you were able to deploy Kubernetes from the best computer from 1986, which is the TRS-80, or the Trash-80. For the record, the worst computer from 1986 was—and remains—IBM Cloud. But that's neither here nor there.What does it mean to deploy Kubernetes because, to be direct, the way that I tend to deploy anything these days, if you know, I'm sensible and being grown up about it, is a Git push and then the automation takes it away from there. I get the sense, you went a little bit deep.Darko: So, when it comes to deploying stuff from an old computer, like, you know, you kind of said the right thing here, like, I have the best computer from 1986. Actually, it's a portable version of the best computer from 1986; it's a TRS-80 Model 102. It's a portable, basically a little computer intended for journalists and people on the go to write stuff and send emails or whatever it was back in those days. And I deployed Kubernetes through that system. Now, of course, I cheated a bit because the way I did it is I just used it as a glorified terminal.I just hooked up the RS 232, the wonderful serial connection, to a Raspberry Pi somewhere out there and it just showed the stuff from a Raspberry Pi onto the TRS-80. So, the TRS-80 didn't actually know how to run kubectl—or ‘kube cuddle,' what they call it—it just asked somebody else to do it. But that's kind of the magic of it.Corey: You could have done a Lambda deployment then just as easily.Darko: Absolutely. Like that's the magic of, like, these old hunks of junks is that when you get down to it, they still do things with numbers and transmit electrical signals through some wires somewhere out there. So, if you're capable enough, if you are savvy, or if you just have a lot of time, you can take any old computer and have it do modern things, especially now. Like, and I will say 15 years ago, we could have not done anything like this because 15 years ago, a lot of the stuff at least that I was involved with, which was Microsoft products, were click only. I couldn't, for the love of me, deploy a bunch of stuff on an Active Directory domain by using a command line. PowerShell was not a thing back then. You could use VB Script, but sort of.Corey: Couldn't you wind up using something that would effect, like, Selenium or whatnot that winds up emulating a user session and moving the mouse to certain coordinates and clicking and then waiting some arbitrary time and clicking somewhere else?Darko: Yes.Corey: Which sounds like the absolute worst version of automation ever. That's like, “I deployed Kubernetes using a typewriter.” “Well, how the hell did you do that?” “Oh, I use the typewriter to hit the enter key. Problem solved.” But I don't think that counts.Darko: Well, yeah, so actually even back then, like, just thinking of, like, a 10, 12-year step back to my career, I automated stuff on Windows systems—like Windows 2000, and Windows 2003 systems—by a tool called AutoIt. It would literally emulate clicks of a mouse on a specific location on the screen. So, you were just really hoping that window pops up at the same place all the time. Otherwise, your automation doesn't work. So yeah, it was kind of like that.And so, if you look at it that way, I could take my Trash-80, I could write an AutoIt script with specific coordinates, and I could deploy Windows things. So actually, yeah, you can deploy anything with these days, with an old computer.Corey: I think that we've lost something in the world of computers. If I, like, throw a computer at you these days, you're going to be pretty annoyed with me. Those things are expensive, it'll probably break, et cetera. If I throw a computer from this era at you, your family is taking bereavement leave. Like, those things where—there would be no second hit.These things were beefy. They were a sense of solidity to them. The keyboards were phenomenal. We've been chasing that high ever since. And, yeah, they were obnoxiously heavy and the battery life was 20 seconds, but it was still something that—you felt like it is computer time. And now, all these things have faded into the background. I am not protesting the march of progress, particularly in this particular respect, but I do miss the sense of having keyboards didn't weren't overwhelmingly flimsy plastic.Darko: I think it's just a fact of, like, we have computers as commodities these days. Back then computers were workstations, computers were something you would buy to perform a specific tasks. Today, computer is anything from watching Twitch to going on Twitter, complaining about Twitter, to deploying Kubernetes, right? So, they have become such commodities such… I don't want to call them single-use items, but they're more becoming single-use items as time progresses because they're just not repairable anymore. Like, if you give me a computer that's five years old, I don't know what to do with it. I probably cannot fix it if it's broken. But if you give me a computer that's 35 years old, I bet you can fix it no matter what happened.Corey: And the sheer compute changes have come so fast and furious, it's easy to lose sight of them, especially with branding being more or less the same. But I saved up and took a additional loan out when I graduated high school to spend three grand on a Dell Inspiron laptop, this big beefy thing. And for fun, I checked the specs recently, and yep, that's a Raspberry Pi these days; they're $30, and it's not going to work super well to browse the web because it's underpowered. And I'm sitting here realizing wait a minute, even with a modern computer—forget the Raspberry Pi for a second—I'm sitting here and I'm pulling up web pages or opening Slack, or God forbid, Slack and Chrome simultaneously, and the fan spins up and it sounds incredibly anemic. And it's, these things are magical supercomputers from the future. Why are they churning this hard to show me a funny picture of a cat? What's going on here?Darko: So, my theory on this is… because we can. We can argue about this, but we currently—Corey: Oh, I think you're right.Darko: We have unlimited compute capacity in the world. Like, you can come up with an idea, you're probably going to find a supercomputer out there, you're probably going to find a cloud vendor out there that's going to give you all of the resources you need to perform this massive computation. So, we didn't really think about optimization as much as we used to do in the past. So, that's it: we can. Chrome doesn't care. You have 32 gigs of RAM, Corey. It doesn't care that it takes 28 gigs of that because you have—Corey: I have 128 gigs on this thing. I bought the Mac studio and maxed it out. I gave it the hostname of us-shitpost-1 and we run with it.Darko: [laugh]. There you go. But like, I did some fiddling around, like, recently with—and again, this is just the torture myself—I did some 6502 Assembly for the Atari 2600. 6502 is a CPU that's been used in many things, including the Commodore 64, the NES, and even a whole lot of Apple IIs, and whatnot. So, when you go down to the level of a computer that has 1.19 megahertz and it has only 128 bytes of RAM, you start to think about, okay, I can move these two numbers in memory in the following two ways: “Way number one will require four CPU cycles. Way number two will require seven CPU cycles. I'll go with way number one because it will save me three CPU cycles.”Corey: Oh, yeah. You take a look at some of the most advanced computer engineering out there and it's for embedded devices where—Darko: Yeah.Corey: You need to wind up building code to run in some very tight constraints, and that breeds creativity. And I remember those days. These days, it's well my computer is super-overpowered, what's it matter? In fact, when I go in and I look at customers' AWS bills, very often I'll start doing some digging, and sure enough, EC2 is always the number one expense—we accept that—but we take a look at the breakdown and invariably, there's one instance family and size that is the overwhelming majority, in most cases. You often a—I don't know—a c5.2xl or something or whatever it happens to be.Great. Why is that? And the answer—[unintelligible 00:10:17] to make sense is, “Well, we just started with that size and it seemed to work so we kept using it as our default.” When I'm building things, because I'm cheap, I take one of the smallest instances I possibly can—it used to be one of the Nanos and I'm sorry, half a gig or a gig of RAM is no longer really sufficient when I'm trying to build almost anything. Thanks, JavaScript. So okay, I've gone up a little bit.But at that point, when I need to do something that requires something beefier, well, I can provision those resources, but I don't have it as a default. That forces me to at least in the back of my mind, have a little bit of a sense of I should be parsimonious with what it is that I'm provisioning out there, which is apparently anathema to every data scientist I've ever met, but here we are.Darko: I mean, that's the thing, like, because we're so used to just having those resources, we don't really care about optimizations. Like, I'm not advocating that you all should go and just do assembly language. You should never do that, like, unless you're building embedded systems or you're working for something—Corey: If you need to use that level of programming, you know.Darko: Exactly.Corey: You already know and nothing you are going to talk about here is going to impact what people in that position are doing. Mostly you need to know assembly language because that's a weeder class and a lot of comp-sci programs and if you don't pass it, you don't graduate. That's the only reason to really know assembly language most of the time.Darko: But you know, like, it's also a thing, like, as a developer, right, think about the person using your thing, right? And they may have the 128 gig us—what is it you called it? Us-shitpost-1, right—that kind of power, kind of, the latest and greatest M2 Max Ultra Apple computer that just does all of the stuff. You may have a big ‘ol double Xeon workstation that does a thing.Or you just may have a Chromebook. Think about us with Chromebooks. Like, can I run your website properly? Did you really need all of those animations? Can you think about reducing the amount of animations depending on screen size? So, there's a lot of things that we need to kind of think about. Like, it goes back to the thing where ‘it works on my machine.' Oh, of course it works on your machine. You spent thousands of dollars on your machine. It's the best machine in the world. Of course, it runs smoothly.Corey: Wait 20 minutes and they'll release a new one, and now, “Who sold me this ancient piece of crap?” Honestly, the most depressing thing is watching an Apple Keynote because I love my computer until I watch the Apple Keynote and it's like, oh, like, “Look at this amazing keyboard,” and the keyboard I had was fine. It's like, “Who sold me this rickety piece of garbage?” And then we saw how the Apple butterfly keyboard worked out for everyone and who built that rickety piece of garbage. Let's go back again. And here we are.Darko: Exactly. So, that's kind of the thing, right? You know, like, your computer is the best. And if you develop for it, is great, but you always have to think other people who use it. Hence, containers are great to fix one part of that problem, but not all of the problems. So, there's a bunch of stuff you can do.And I think, like, for all of the developers out there, it's great what you're doing, you're building us so many tools, but always that take a step back and optimize stuff. Optimize, both for the end-user by the amount of JavaScript you're going to throw at me, and also for the back-end, think about if you have to run your web server on a Pentium III server, could you do it? And if you could, how bad would it be? And you don't have to run it on a Pentium III, but like, try to think about what's the bottom 5% of the capacity you need? So yeah, it's just—you'll save money. That's it. You'll save money, ultimately.Corey: So, I have to ask, what you do day to day is you're a senior developer advocate, which is, hmm, some words, yes. You spend a lot of your free time and public time talking about running ancient computers, but you also talk to customers who are looking forward, not back. How do you reconcile the two?Darko: So, I like to mix the two. There's a whole reason why I like old computers. Like, I grew up in Serbia. Like, when I was young in the '90s, I didn't have any of these computers. Like, I could only see, like, what was like a Macintosh from 1997 on TV and I would just drool. Like, I wouldn't even come close to thinking about getting that, let alone something better.So, I kind of missed all of that part. But now that I started collecting all of those old computers and just everything from the '80s and '90s, I've actually realized, well, these things are not that different from something else. So, I like to always make comparisons between, like, an old system. What does it actually do? How does it compare to a new system?So, I love to mix and match in my presentations. I like to mix it, mix and match in my videos. You saw my blog posts on deploying stuff. So, I think it's just a fun way to kind of create a little contrast. I do think we should still be moving forward. I do think that technology is getting better and better and it's going to help people do so much more things faster, hopefully cheaper, and hopefully better.So, I do think that we should definitely keep on moving forward. But I always have this nostalgic feeling about, like, old things and… sometimes I don't know why, but I miss the world without the internet. And I think that without the internet, I think I miss the world with dial-up internet. Because back then you would go on the internet for a purpose. You have to do a thing, you have to wait for a while, you have to make sure nobody's on the phone. And then—Corey: God forbid you dial into a long-distance call. And you have to figure out which town and which number would be long distance versus not, at least where I grew up, and your parents would lose their freaking minds because that was an $8 phone call, which you know, back in the '80s and early '90s was significant. And yeah, great. Now, I still think is a great prank opportunity to teach kids are something that it costs more to access websites that are far away, which I guess in theory, it kind of does, but not to the end-user. I digress.Darko: I have a story about this, and I'm going to take a little sidestep. But long-distance phone calls. Like in the '80s, the World Wide Web was not yet a thing. Like, the www, the websites all, just the general purpose internet was not yet a thing. We had things called BBSes, or Bulletin Board Systems. That was the extreme version of a dial-up system.You don't dial into the internet; you dial into a website. Imagine if you have a sole intent of visiting only one website and the cost of visiting such a website would depend on where that website currently is. If the website is in Germany and you're calling from Serbia, it's going to cost you a lot of money because you're calling internationally. I had a friend back then. The best software you can get were from American BBSes, but calling America from Serbia back then would have been prohibitively expensive, like, just insanely expensive.So, what this friend used to do, he figured out if he would be connected to a BBS six hours a day, it would actually reset the counter of his phone bill. It would loop through a mechanical counter from whatever number, it would loop back again to that number. So, it would take around six and some hours to complete the loop the entire phone counting metric—whatever they use back in the '80s—to kind of charge your bill, so it's effectively cost him zero money back then. So yeah, it was more expensive, kids, back then to call websites, the further away the websites were.[midroll 00:17:11]Corey: So, developer advocates do a lot of things. And I think it is unfair, but also true that people tend to shorthand those of those things do getting on stage and giving conference talks because that at least is the visible part of it. People see that and it's viscerally is understood that that takes work and a bit of courage for those who are not deep into public speaking and those who are, know it takes a lot of courage. And whereas writing a blog post, “Well, I have a keyboard and say dumb things on the internet all the time. I don't see why that's hard.” So, there's a definite perception story there. What's your take on giving technical presentations?Darko: So, yeah. Just as you said, like, I think being a DA, even in my head was always represented, like, oh, you're just on stage, you're traveling, you're doing presentations, you're doing all those things. But it's actually quite a lot more than that, right? We do a lot more. But still, we are the developer advocate. We are the front-facing thing towards you, the wonderful developers listening to this.And we tend to be on stage, we tend to do podcasts with wonderful internet personalities, we tend to do live streams, we tend to do videos. And I think one of the key skills that a DA needs to have—a Developer Advocate needs to have—is presentations, right? You need to be able to present a technical message in the best possible way. Now, being a good technical presenter doesn't mean you're funny, doesn't mean you're entertaining, that doesn't have to be a thing. You just need to take a complex technical message and deliver it in the best way possible so that everybody who has just given you their time, can get it fully.And this means—well, it means a lot of things, but it means taking this complicated topic, distilling it down so it can be digested within 30 to 45 minutes and it also needs to be… it needs to be interesting. Like, we can talk about the most interesting topic, but if I don't make it interesting, you're just going to walk out. So, I also lead, like, a coaching class within internally, like, to teach people how to speak better and I'm working with, like, really good speakers there, but a lot of the stuff I say applies to no matter if you're a top-level speaker, or if you're, like, just beginning out. And my challenge to all of you speakers out there, like, anybody who's listening to this and it has a plan to deliver a video, a keynote, a live stream or speak at a summit somewhere, is get outside of that box. Get outside of that PowerPoint box.I'm not saying PowerPoint is bad. I think PowerPoint is a wonderful tool, but I'm just saying you don't have to present in the way everybody else presents. The more memorable your presentation is, the more outside of that box it is, the more people will remember it. Again, you don't have to be funny. You don't have to be entertaining. You just have to take thing you are really passionate about and deliver it to us in the best possible way. What that best possible way is, well, it really depends. Like a lot of things, there is no concrete answer to this thing.Corey: One of the hard parts I found is that people will see a certain technical presenter that they like and want to emulate and they'll start trying to do what they do. And that works to a point. Like, “Well, I really enjoy how that presenter doesn't read their slides.” Yeah, that's a good thing to pick up. But past a certain point, other people's material starts to fit as well as other people's shoes and you've got to find your own path.My path has always been getting people's attention first via humor, but it's certainly not the only way. In many contexts, it's not even the most effective way. It works for me in the context in which I use it, but I assure you that when I'm presenting to clients, I don't start off with slapstick comedy. Usually. There are a couple of noteworthy exceptions because clients expect that for me, in some cases.Darko: I think one of the important things is that emulating somebody is okay, as you said, to an extent, like, just trying to figure out what the good things are, but good, very objectively good things. Never try to be funny if you're not funny. That's the thing where you can try comedy, but it's very difficult to—it's very difficult to do comedy if you're not that good at it. And I know that's very much a given, but a lot of people try to be funny when they're obviously not funny. And that's okay. You don't have to be funny.So, there are many of ways to get people's attentions, by again, just throwing a joke. What I did once on stage, I threw a bottle at the floor. I was just—I said, I said a thing and threw a bottle at the floor. Everybody started paying attention all of a sudden at me. I don't know why. So, it's going to be that. It can be something—it can be be a shocking statement. When I say shocking, I mean, something, well, not bad, but something that's potentially controversial. Like, for example, emacs is better than vim. I don't know, maybe—Corey: “Serverless is terrible.”Darko: Serverl—yeah.Corey: Like, it doesn't matter. It depends on the audience.Darko: It depends on the audience.Corey: “The cloud is a scam.” I gave a talk once called, “The Cloud is A Scam,” and it certainly got people's attention.Darko: Absolutely. So, breaking up the normal flow because as a participant of a show, of a presentation, you go there you expect, look, I'm going to sit down, Corey's going to come on stage and Corey says, “Hi, my name is Corey Quinn. I'm the CEO of The Duckbill Group. This is what I do. And welcome to my talk about blah.”Corey: Tactically, my business partner, Mike, is the CEO. I don't want to I don't want to step too close to that fire, let's be clear.Darko: Oh, okay [laugh]. Okay. Then, “Today's agenda is this. And slide one, slide two, slide three.” And that the expectation of the audience. And the audience comes in in this very autopilot way, like, “Okay, I'm just going to sit there and just nod my head as Corey speaks.”But then if Corey does a weird thing and Corey comes out in a bathtub. Just the bathtub and Corey. And Corey starts talking about how bathtubs are amazing, it's the best place to relax. “Oh, by the way, managing costs in the cloud is so easy, I can do it from a bathtub.” Right? All of a sudden, whoa [laugh], wait a second, this is something that's interesting. And then you can go through your rest of your conversation. But you just made a little—you ticked the box in our head, like, “Oh, this is something weird. This is different. I don't know what to expect anymore,” and people start paying more attention.Corey: “So, if you're managing AWS costs from your bathtub, what kind of computer do you use?” “In my case, a toaster.”Darko: [laugh]. Yes. But ultimately, like, some of those things are very good and they just kind of—they make you as a presenter, unpredictable, and that's a good thing. Because people will just want to sit on the edge of the seat and, like, listen to what you say because, I don't know what, maybe he throws that toaster in, right? I don't know. So, it is like that.And one of the things that you'll notice, Corey, especially if you see people who are more presenting for a longer time, like, they've been very common on events and people know them by name and their face, then that turns into, like, not just presenting but somebody comes, literally not because of the topic, but because they want to hear Corey talk about a thing. You can go there and talk about unicorns and cats, people will still come and listen to that because it's Corey Quinn. And that's where you, by getting outside of that box, getting outside of that ‘this is how we present things at company X,' this is what you get in the long run. People will know who you are people will know, what not to expect from your presentations, and they will ultimately be coming to your presentations to enjoy whatever you want to talk about.Corey: That is the dream. I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk so much about how you view the world and the state of ancient and modern technologies and the like. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Darko: The best way to find me is on twitch.tv/aws these days. So, you will find me live streaming twice a week there. You will find me on Twitter at @darkosubotica, which is my Twitter handle. You will find me at the same handle on Mastodon. And just search for my name Darko Mesaroš, I'm sure I'll pop up on MySpace as well or whatever. So, I'll post a lot of cloud-related things. I posted a lot of old computer-related things, so if you want to see me deploy Kubernetes through an Atari 2600, click that subscribe button or follow or whatever.Corey: And we will, of course, include a link to this in the show notes. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Darko: Thank you so much, Corey, for having me.Corey: Darko Mesaroš, senior developer advocate at AWS, Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry and insulting comment that you compose and submit from your IBM Selectric typewriter.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.

If you're a fan of SQL, this episode is for you. The addition of the multi-stage query engine in Apache Druid has enabled SQL-based ingestion. While that's not something new to the database space, it makes Druid easier to use since more developers know SQL. Sergio Ferragut, Senior Developer Advocate at Imply walks us through using SQL to define and run batch ingestions and how it's simpler and faster than traditional Druid batch ingestion.

Hassan El Mghari is a Senior Developer Advocate at Vercel, he joins us today to talk about some of his projects and how he has been using Vercel Edge Functions and Next.js to build them. Links https://twitter.com/nutlope https://www.elmghari.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/nutlope https://github.com/Nutlope https://www.npmjs.com/~nutlope Tell us what you think of PodRocket We want to hear from you! We want to know what you love and hate about the podcast. What do you want to hear more about? Who do you want to see on the show? Our producers want to know, and if you talk with us, we'll send you a $25 gift card! If you're interested, schedule a call with us (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us) or you can email producer Kate Trahan at kate@logrocket.com (mailto:kate@logrocket.com) Follow us. Get free stickers. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, fill out this form (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/get-podrocket-stickers), and we'll send you free PodRocket stickers! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today. (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr) Special Guest: Hassan El Mghari.

This episode features a panel discussion with Mikiko Bazeley, Head of MLOps at Featureform; Zain Hasan, Senior Developer Advocate at Weaviate; and Tuana Celik, Developer Advocate at deepset.In this episode, Mikiko, Zain, and Tuana discuss what open source data means to them, how their companies fit into the AI-first ecosystem, and how jobs will need to evolve with the AI-native stack.-------------------“We're almost part of a fancy new AI robot kitchen that you'd find in Tokyo, in some ways. I see a virtual feature store as, yes, you can have a bunch of your ingredients tossed into a closet. Or, what you can do is you can essentially have a nice way to organize them. You can have a way to label them, to capture information.” – Mikiko Bazeley“I really like that analogy as well. I like how Mikiko put it where a vector search engine is really extracting value from what you've already got. [...] So where I see vector search engines, really, is if we think of these embedding providers as the translators to take all of our unstructured data and bring it into vector space into a common machine language, vector search engines are essentially the workhorses that allow us to compute and search over these objects in vectorized format. They're essentially the calculators of the AI stack.” – Zain Hasan“Haystack, I would really position as the kitchen. I need Mikiko to bring the apples. I need Zain to bring the pears. I need Hugging Face or OpenAI to bring the oranges to make a good fruit salad. But, Haystack will provide the spoons and the pans and the knives to make that into something that works together.” – Tuana Celik-------------------Episode Timestamps:(02:08): What open source data means to the panelists(08:22): What interested the panelists about AI/ML(23:20): Mikiko explains Featureform(26:11): Zain explains Weaviate(29:34): Tuana explains deepset(35:11): The panelists discuss how their companies fit into the AI-first ecosystem(44:12): How jobs need to evolve with the AI-native stack(53:45): Executive producer, Audra Montenegro's backstage takeaways-------------------Links:LinkedIn - Connect with MikikoVisit FeatureformLinkedIn - Connect with ZainVisit WeaviateLinkedIn - Connect with TuanaVisit deepsetVisit Data-centric AI

Lars is a Senior Developer Advocate with Pluralsight, author, trainer, Microsoft Azure MVP, community leader, aspiring YouTube host, and part-time classic car collector. He is heavily involved in the space of cloud computing services, especially Azure, and is a published author, solution architect, and writer for numerous publications. He has been a part of the software development community for the past 20 years and co-organizes the DDD Melbourne community conference, organizes developer events with Microsoft, and also runs a part-time car restoration business. He has spoken at numerous technical events around the world and is an expert in Australian Outback Internet.   Topics of Discussion: [4:24] Lars talks about his early start in programming and the IT industry and his path to his present-day career. [6:36] As a self-described “nerd that doesn't mind talking to people,” Lars worked that characteristic into networking over his career. [8:17] Why did Lars decide to write a book? [9:40] Lars talks about his book, Microsoft Azure in Action. [9:57] What part of Azure should developers be using more than less? [13:00] What ideas have risen to the surface for general internal business application developers? [16:36] What's the best way to store and manipulate data? [21:58] What are some of Lars's favorite scenarios where you would reach for the queue? [23:57] How would Lars decipher his architectural decisions on whether to use App Service? [26:57] What is Lars's thought process when creating service workers to read from that queue versus creating a second app that is installed into the app service plan? [30:34] Lars talks about the importance of Application Insights.   Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast!  Email us programming@palermo.network Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! Architect Tips — Video podcast! Azure DevOps Microsoft Azure in Action Lars On YouTube   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

The past year saw new trends emerge in the world of data streaming technologies, as well as some unexpected and novel use cases for Apache Kafka®. New reflections on the future of stream processing and when companies should adopt microservice architecture inspired several talks at this year's industry conferences. In this episode, Kris is joined by his colleagues Danica Fine, Senior Developer Advocate, and Robin Moffatt, Principal Developer Advocate, for an end-of-year roundtable on this year's developments and what they want to see in the year to come.Robin and Danica kick things off with a discussion of the year's memorable conferences. Talk submissions for Kafka Summit London and Current 2022 featuring topics were noticeably more varied than previous years, with fewer talks focused on the basics of Kafka implementation. Many abstracts featured interesting and unusual use cases, in addition to detailed explanations on what went wrong and how others could avoid the same issues.The conferences also made clear that a lot of companies are adopting or considering stream-processing solutions. Are we close to a future where streaming is a part of everything we do? Is there anything helping streaming become more mainstream? Will stream processing replace batch?On the other hand, a lot of in-demand talks focused on the importance of understanding the best practices supporting data mesh and understanding the nuances of the system and configurations. Danica identifies this as her big hope for next year: No more Kafka developers pursuing quick fixes. “No more band aid fixes. I want as many people as possible to understand the nuances of the levers that they're pulling for Kafka, whatever project they're building.”Kris and Robin agree that what will make them happy in 2023 is seeing broader, more diverse client libraries for Kafka. “Getting away from this idea that Kafka is largely a Java shop, which is nonsense, but there is that perception.”Streaming Audio returns in January 2023.EPISODE LINKSPut Your Data To Work: Top 5 Data Technology Trends for 2023Write What You Know: Turning Your Apache Kafka Knowledge into a Technical TalkCommon Apache Kafka Mistakes to AvoidPractical Data Pipeline: Build a Plant Monitoring System with ksqlDBIf Streaming Is the Answer, Why Are We Still Doing Batch?View sessions and slides from Current 2022Watch the video version of this podcastKris Jenkins' TwitterStreaming Audio Playlist Join the Confluent CommunityLearn more with Kafka tutorials, resources, and guides at Confluent DeveloperLive demo: Intro to Event-Driven Microservices with ConfluentUse PODCAST100 to get an additional $100 of free Confluent Cloud usage (details)

This week we're joined by Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub, and a true tech and pop culture connoisseur. From her days at Mashable covering the intersections of entertainment and technology, to Gizmodo, to Microsoft, and now her current role at GitHub we talk with Christina about her journey from journalist to developer, and the latest happenings coming out of GitHub Universe. BTW, we're planning to get Christina on Backstage in the new year to talk about Plex, MakeMKV, and all things that go into hosting your own media server. Drop a commment on this episode with a +1 if you want to see that happen.

In this episode of the Tiaras and Tech podcast, Shelley Benhoff talks to Didi Asikpo, Senior Developer Advocate on the topic of Getting Involved in the Tech Community on the Tiaras and Tech Podcast for Women in Tech. Shelley is a Business Owner, Author, and Professional Speaker. She is also a Sitecore Technology MVP with experience as a Lead Developer for many years. Connect with Didi! https://twitter.com/Didicodes https://www.linkedin.com/in/edidiong-asikpo/ https://www.youtube.com/c/saiyam911 https://www.getambassador.io/kubernetes-learning-center/ https://kodekloud.com/ https://edidiongasikpo.com/ Connect with Shelley! https://twitter.com/sbenhoff https://pluralsight.pxf.io/mgGLbO Join the Tiaras and Tech Discord https://discord.gg/7aeDjXqV8y Tiaras and Tech is dedicated to providing inspiration for women & marginalized groups in tech. We aim to provide support, celebrate successes, & discuss how we're treated. Follow us! YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest @tiarasandtech tiarasandtech.com Tiaras and Tech is a HoffsTech production. Theme music by Nobuo Uematsu and Juan Medrano https://ocremix.org/remix/OCR03610 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/tiaras-and-tech/support

Adewale “Ace” Abati, Senior Developer Advocate for CodeSandbox, comes back to PodRocket to talk about how CodeSandbox has evolved and how developers can pivot their own web development to browser-based IDEs. Links https://codesandbox.io https://twitter.com/ace_kyd https://twitter.com/codesandbox https://www.youtube.com/c/CodeSandbox https://www.youtube.com/acekyd Tell us what you think of PodRocket We want to hear from you! We want to know what you love and hate about the podcast. What do you want to hear more about? Who do you want to see on the show? Our producers want to know, and if you talk with us, we'll send you a $25 gift card! If you're interested, schedule a call with us (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us) or you can email producer Kate Trahan at kate@logrocket.com (mailto:kate@logrocket.com) Follow us. Get free stickers. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, fill out this form (https://podrocket.logrocket.com/get-podrocket-stickers), and we'll send you free PodRocket stickers! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today. (https://logrocket.com/signup/?pdr) Special Guest: Adewale Abati.

About ChrisChris Short has been a proponent of open source solutions throughout his over two decades in various IT disciplines, including systems, security, networks, DevOps management, and cloud native advocacy across the public and private sectors. He currently works on the Kubernetes team at Amazon Web Services and is an active Kubernetes contributor and Co-chair of OpenGitOps. Chris is a disabled US Air Force veteran living with his wife and son in Greater Metro Detroit. Chris writes about Cloud Native, DevOps, and other topics at ChrisShort.net. He also runs the Cloud Native, DevOps, GitOps, Open Source, industry news, and culture focused newsletter DevOps'ish.Links Referenced: DevOps'ish: https://devopsish.com/ EKS News: https://eks.news/ Containers from the Couch: https://containersfromthecouch.com opengitops.dev: https://opengitops.dev ChrisShort.net: https://chrisshort.net Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisShort TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Coming back to us since episode two—it's always nice to go back and see the where are they now type of approach—I am joined by Senior Developer Advocate at AWS Chris Short. Chris, been a few years. How has it been?Chris: Ha. Corey, we have talked outside of the podcast. But it's been good. For those that have been listening, I think when we recorded I wasn't even—like, when was season two, what year was that? [laugh].Corey: Episode two was first pre-pandemic and the rest. I believe—Chris: Oh. So, yeah. I was at Red Hat, maybe, when I—yeah.Corey: Yeah. You were doing Red Hat stuff, back when you got to work on open-source stuff, as opposed to now, where you're not within 1000 miles of that stuff, right?Chris: Actually well, no. So, to be clear, I'm on the EKS team, the Kubernetes team here at AWS. So, when I joined AWS in October, they were like, “Hey, you do open-source stuff. We like that. Do more.” And I was like, “Oh, wait, do more?” And they were like, “Yes, do more.” “Okay.”So, since joining AWS, I've probably done more open-source work than the three years at Red Hat that I did. So, that's kind of—you know, like, it's an interesting point when I talk to people about it because the first couple months are, like—you know, my friends are like, “So, are you liking it? Are you enjoying it? What's going on?” And—Corey: Do they beat you with reeds? Like, all the questions people have about companies? Because—Chris: Right. Like, I get a lot of random questions about Amazon and AWS that I don't know the answer to.Corey: Oh, when I started telling people, I fixed Amazon bills, I had to quickly pivot that to AWS bills because people started asking me, “Well, can you save me money on underpants?” It's I—Chris: Yeah.Corey: How do you—fine. Get the prime credit card. It docks 5% off the bill, so there you go. But other than that, no, I can't.Chris: No.Corey: It's—Chris: Like, I had to call my bank this morning about a transaction that I didn't recognize, and it was from Amazon. And I was like, that's weird. Why would that—Corey: Money just flows one direction, and that's the wrong direction from my employer.Chris: Yeah. Like, what is going on here? It shouldn't have been on that card kind of thing. And I had to explain to the person on the phone that I do work at Amazon but under the Web Services team. And he was like, “Oh, so you're in IT?”And I'm like, “No.” [laugh]. “It's actually this big company. That—it's a cloud company.” And they're like, “Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. The cloud. Got it.” [laugh]. So, it's interesting talking to people about, “I work at Amazon.” “Oh, my son works at Amazon distribution center,” blah, blah, blah. It's like, cool. “I know about that, but very little. I do this.”Corey: Your son works in Amazon distribution center. Is he a robot? Is normally my next question on that? Yeah. That's neither here nor there.So, you and I started talking a while back. We both write newsletters that go to a somewhat similar audience. You write DevOps'ish. I write Last Week in AWS. And recently, you also have started EKS News because, yeah, the one thing I look at when I'm doing these newsletters every week is, you know what I want to do? That's right. Write more newsletters.Chris: [laugh].Corey: So, you are just a glutton for punishment? And, yeah, welcome to the addiction, I suppose. How's it been going for you?Chris: It's actually been pretty interesting, right? Like, we haven't pushed it very hard. We're now starting to include it in things. Like we did Container Day; we made sure that EKS news was on the landing page for Container Day at KubeCon EU. And you know, it's kind of just grown organically since then.But it was one of those things where it's like, internally—this happened at Red Hat, right—when I started live streaming at Red Hat, the ultimate goal was to do our product management—like, here's what's new in the next version thing—do those live so anybody can see that at any point in time anywhere on Earth, the second it's available. Similar situation to here. This newsletter actually is generated as part of a report my boss puts together to brief our other DAs—or developer advocates—you know, our solutions architects, the whole nine yards about new EKS features. So, I was like, why can't we just flip that into a weekly newsletter, you know? Like, I can pull from the same sources you can.And what's interesting is, he only does the meeting bi-weekly. So, there's some weeks where it's just all me doing it and he ends up just kind of copying and pasting the newsletter into his document, [laugh] and then adds on for the week. But that report meeting for that team is now getting disseminated to essentially anyone that subscribes to eks.news. Just go to the site, there's a subscribe thing right there. And we've gotten 20 issues in and it's gotten rave reviews, right?Corey: I have been a subscriber for a while. I will say that it has less Chris Short personality—Chris: Mm-hm.Corey: —to it than DevOps'ish does, which I have to assume is by design. A lot of The Duckbill Group's marketing these days is no longer in my voice, rather intentionally, because it turns out that being a sarcastic jackass and doing half-billion dollar AWS contracts can not to be the most congruent thing in the world. So okay, we're slowly ameliorating that. It's professional voice versus snarky voice.Chris: Well, and here's the thing, right? Like, I realized this year with DevOps'ish that, like, if I want to take a week off, I have to do, like, what you did when your child was born. You hired folks to like, do the newsletter for you, or I actually don't do the newsletter, right? It's binary: hire someone else to do it, or don't do it. So, the way I structured this newsletter was that any developer advocate on my team could jump in and take over the newsletter so that, you know, if I'm off that week, or whatever may be happening, I, Chris Short, am not the voice. It is now the entire developer advocate team.Corey: I will challenge you on that a bit. Because it's not Chris Short voice, that's for sure, but it's also not official AWS brand voice either.Chris: No.Corey: It is clearly written by a human being who is used to communicating with the audience for whom it is written. And that is no small thing. Normally, when oh, there's a corporate newsletter; that's just a lot of words to say it's bad. This one is good. I want to be very clear on that.Chris: Yeah, I mean, we have just, like, DevOps'ish, we have sections, just like your newsletter, there's certain sections, so any new, what's new announcements, those go in automatically. So, like, that can get delivered to your inbox every Friday. Same thing with new blog posts about anything containers related to EKS, those will be in there, then Containers from the Couch, our streaming platform, essentially, for all things Kubernetes. Those videos go in.And then there's some ecosystem news as well that I collect and put in the newsletter to give people a broader sense of what's going on out there in Kubernetes-land because let's face it, there's upstream and then there's downstream, and sometimes those aren't in sync, and that's normal. That's how Kubernetes kind of works sometimes. If you're running upstream Kubernetes, you are awesome. I appreciate you, but I feel like that would cause more problems and it's worse sometimes.Corey: Thank you for being the trailblazers. The rest of us can learn from your misfortune.Chris: [laugh]. Yeah, exactly. Right? Like, please file your bugs accordingly. [laugh].Corey: EKS is interesting to me because I don't see a lot of it, which is, probably, going to get a whole lot of, “Wait, what?” Moments because wait, don't you deal with very large AWS bills? And I do. But what I mean by that is that EKS, until you're using its Fargate expression, charges for the control plane, which rounds to no money, and the rest is running on EC2 instances running in a company's account. From the billing perspective, there is no difference between, “We're running massive fleets of EKS nodes.” And, “We're managing a whole bunch of EC2 instances by hand.”And that feels like an interesting allegory for how Kubernetes winds up expressing itself to cloud providers. Because from a billing perspective, it just looks like one big single-tenant application that has some really strange behaviors internally. It gets very chatty across AZs when there's no reason to, and whatnot. And it becomes a very interesting study in how to expose aspects of what's going on inside of those containers and inside of the Kubernetes environment to the cloud provider in a way that becomes actionable. There are no good answers for this yet, but it's something I've been seeing a lot of. Like, “Oh, I thought you'd be running Kubernetes. Oh, wait, you are and I just keep forgetting what I'm looking at sometimes.”Chris: So, that's an interesting point. The billing is kind of like, yeah, it's just compute, right? So—Corey: And my insight into AWS and the way I start thinking about it is always from a billing perspective. That's great. It's because that means the more expensive the services, the more I know about it. It's like, “IAM. What is that?” Like, “Oh, I have no idea. It's free. How important could it be?” Professional advice: do not take that philosophy, ever.Chris: [laugh]. No. Ever. No.Corey: Security: it matters. Oh, my God. It's like you're all stars. Your IAM policy should not be. I digress.Chris: Right. Yeah. Anyways, so two points I want to make real quick on that is, one, we've recently released an open-source project called Carpenter, which is really cool in my purview because it looks at your Kubernetes file and says, “Oh, you want this to run on ARM instance.” And you can even go so far as to say, right, here's my limits, and it'll find an instance that fits those limits and add that to your cluster automatically. Run your pod on that compute as long as it needs to run and then if it's done, it'll downsize—eventually, kind of thing—your cluster.So, you can basically just throw a bunch of workloads at it, and it'll auto-detect what kind of compute you will need and then provision it for you, run it, and then be done. So, that is one-way folks are probably starting to save money running EKS is to adopt Carpenter as your autoscaler as opposed to the inbuilt Kubernetes autoscaler. Because this is instance-aware, essentially, so it can say, like, “Oh, your massive ARM application can run here,” because you know, thank you, Graviton. We have those processors in-house. And you know, you can run your ARM64 instances, you can run all the Intel workloads you want, and it'll right size the compute for your workloads.And I'll look at one container or all your containers, however you want to configure it. Secondly, the good folks over at Kubecost have opencost, which is the open-source version of Kubecost, basically. So, they have a service that you can run in your clusters that will help you say, “Hey, maybe this one notes too heavy; maybe this one notes too light,” and you know, give you some insights into Kubernetes spend that are a little bit more granular as far as usage and things like that go. So, those two projects right there, I feel like, will give folks an optimal savings experience when it comes to Kubernetes. But to your point, it's just compute, right? And that's really how we treat it, kind of, here internally is that it's a way to run… compute, Kubernetes, or ECS, or any of those tools.Corey: A fairly expensive one because ignoring entirely for a second the actual raw cost of compute, you also have the other side of it, which is in every environment, unless you are doing something very strange or pre-funding as a one-person startup in your spare time, your payroll costs will it—should—exceed your AWS bill by a fairly healthy amount. And engineering time is always more expensive than services time. So, for example, looking at EKS, I would absolutely recommend people use that rather than rolling their own because—Chris: Rolling their own? Yeah.Corey: —get out of that engineering space where your time is free. I assure you from a business context, it is not. So, there's always that question of what you can do to make things easier for people and do more of the heavy lifting.Chris: Yeah, and to your rather cheeky point that there's 17 ways to run a container on AWS, it is answering that question, right? Like those 17 ways, like, how much of this do you want to run yourself, you could run EKS distro on EC2 instances if you want full control over your environment.Corey: And then run IoT Greengrass core on top within that cluster—Chris: Right.Corey: So, I can run my own Lambda function runtime, so I'm not locked in. Also, DynamoDB local so I'm not locked into AWS. At which point I have gone so far around the bend, no one can help me.Chris: Well—Corey: Pro tip, don't do that. Just don't do that.Chris: But to your point, we have all these options for compute, and specifically containers because there's a lot of people that want to granularly say, “This is where my engineering team gets involved. Everything else you handle.” If I want EKS on Spot Instances only, you can do that. If you want EKS to use Carpenter and say only run ARM workloads, you can do that. If you want to say Fargate and not have anything to manage other than the container file, you can do that.It's how much does your team want to manage? That's the customer obsession part of AWS coming through when it comes to containers is because there's so many different ways to run those workloads, but there's so many different ways to make sure that your team is right-sized, based off the services you're using.Corey: I do want to change gears a bit here because you are mostly known for a couple of things: the DevOps'ish newsletter because that is the oldest and longest thing you've been doing the time that I've known you; EKS, obviously. But when prepping for this show, I discovered you are now co-chair of the OpenGitOps project.Chris: Yes.Corey: So, I have heard of GitOps in the context of, “Oh, it's just basically your CI/CD stuff is triggered by Git events and whatnot.” And I'm sitting here going, “Okay, so from where you're sitting, the two best user interfaces in the world that you have discovered are YAML and Git.” And I just have to start with the question, “Who hurt you?”Chris: [laugh]. Yeah, I share your sentiment when it comes to Git. Not so much with YAML, but I think it's because I'm so used to it. Maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome, maybe the whole YAML thing. I don't know.Corey: Well, it's no XML. We'll put it that way.Chris: Thankfully, yes because if it was, I would have way more, like, just template files laying around to build things. But the—Corey: And rage. Don't forget rage.Chris: And rage, yeah. So, GitOps is a little bit more than just Git in IaC—infrastructure as Code. It's more like Justin Garrison, who's also on my team, he calls it infrastructure software because there's four main principles to GitOps, and if you go to opengitops.dev, you can see them. It's version one.So, we put them on the website, right there on the page. You have to have a declared state and that state has to live somewhere. Now, it's called GitOps because Git is probably the most full-featured thing to put your state in, but you could use an S3 bucket and just version it, for example. And make it private so no one else can get to it.Corey: Or you could use local files: copy-of-copy-of-this-thing-restored-parentheses-use-this-one-dot-final-dot-doc-dot-zip. You know, my preferred naming convention.Chris: Ah, yeah. Wow. Okay. [laugh]. Yeah.Corey: Everything I touch is terrifying.Chris: Yes. Geez, I'm sorry. So first, it's declarative. You declare your state. You store it somewhere. It's versioned and immutable, like I said. And then pulled automatically—don't focus so much on pull—but basically, software agents are applying the desired state from source. So, what does that mean? When it's—you know, the fourth principle is implemented, continuously reconciled. That means those software agents that are checking your desired state are actually putting it back into the desired state if it's out of whack, right? So—Corey: You're talking about agents running it persistently on instances, validating—Chris: Yes.Corey: —a checkpoint on a cron. How is this meaningfully different than a Puppet agent running in years past? Having spent I learned to speak publicly by being a traveling trainer for Puppet; same type of model, and in fact, when I was at Pinterest, we wound up having a fair bit—like, that was their entire model, where they would have—the Puppet's code would live in an S3 bucket that was then copied down, I believe, via Git, and then applied to the instance on a schedule. Like, that sounds like this was sort of a early days GitOps.Chris: Yeah, exactly. Right? Like so it's, I like to think of that as a component of GitOps, right? DevOps, when you talk about DevOps in general, there's a lot of stuff out there. There's a lot of things labeled DevOps that maybe are, or maybe aren't sticking to some of those DevOps core things that make you great.Like the stuff that Nicole Forsgren writes about in books, you know? Accelerate is on my desk for a reason because there's things that good, well-managed DevOps practices do. I see GitOps as an actual implementation of DevOps in an open-source manner because all the tooling for GitOps these days is open-source and it all started as open-source. Now, you can get, like, Flux or Argo—Argo, specifically—there's managed services out there for it, you can have Flux and not maintain it, through an add-on, on EKS for example, and it will reconcile that state for you automatically. And the other thing I like to say about GitOps, specifically, is that it moves at the speed of the Kubernetes Audit Log.If you've ever looked at a Kubernetes audit log, you know it's rather noisy with all these groups and versions and kinds getting thrown out there. So, GitOps will say, “Oh, there's an event for said thing that I'm supposed to be watching. Do I need to change anything? Yes or no? Yes? Okay, go.”And the change gets applied, or, “Hey, there's a new Git thing. Pull it in. A change has happened inGit I need to update it.” You can set it to reconcile on events on time. It's like a cron or it's like an event-driven architecture, but it's combined.Corey: How does it survive the stake through the heart of configuration management? Because before I was doing all this, I wasn't even a T-shaped engineer: you're broad across a bunch of things, but deep in one or two areas, and one of mine was configuration management. I wrote part of SaltStack, once upon a time—Chris: Oh.Corey: —due to a bunch of very strange coincidences all hitting it once, like, I taught people how to use Puppet. But containers ultimately arose and the idea of immutable infrastructure became a thing. And these days when we were doing full-on serverless, well, great, I just wind up deploying a new code bundle to the Lambdas function that I wind up caring about, and that is a immutable version replacement. There is no drift because there is no way to log in and change those things other than through a clear deployment of this as the new version that goes out there. Where does GitOps fit into that imagined pattern?Chris: So, configuration management becomes part of your approval process, right? So, you now are generating an audit log, essentially, of all changes to your system through the approval process that you set up as part of your, how you get things into source and then promote that out to production. That's kind of the beauty of it, right? Like, that's why we suggest using Git because it has functions, like, requests and issues and things like that you can say, “Hey, yes, I approve this,” or, “Hey, no, I don't approve that. We need changes.” So, that's kind of natively happening with Git and, you know, GitLab, GitHub, whatever implementation of Git. There's always, kind of—Corey: Uh, JIF-ub is, I believe, the pronunciation.Chris: JIF-ub? Oh.Corey: Yeah. That's what I'm—Chris: Today, I learned. Okay.Corey: Exactly. And that's one of the things that I do for my lasttweetinaws.com Twitter client that I build—because I needed it, and if other people want to use it, that's great—that is now deployed to 20 different AWS commercial regions, simultaneously. And that is done via—because it turns out that that's a very long to execute for loop if you start down that path—Chris: Well, yeah.Corey: I wound up building out a GitHub Actions matrix—sorry a JIF-ub—actions matrix job that winds up instantiating 20 parallel builds of the CDK deploy that goes out to each region as expected. And because that gets really expensive with native GitHub Actions runners for, like, 36 cents per deploy, and I don't know how to test my own code, so every time I have a typo, that's another quarter in the jar. Cool, but that was annoying for me so I built my own custom runner system that uses Lambda functions as runners running containers pulled from ECR that, oh, it just runs in parallel, less than three minutes. Every time I commit something between I press the push button and it is out and running in the wild across all regions. Which is awesome and also terrifying because, as previously mentioned, I don't know how to test my code.Chris: Yeah. So, you don't know what you're deploying to 20 regions sometime, right?Corey: But it also means I have a pristine, re-composable build environment because I can—Chris: Right.Corey: Just automatically have that go out and the fact that I am making a—either merging a pull request or doing a direct push because I consider main to be my feature branch as whenever something hits that, all the automation kicks off. That was something that I found to be transformative as far as a way of thinking about this because I was very tired of having to tweak my local laptop environment to, “Oh, you didn't assume the proper role and everything failed again and you broke it. Good job.” It wound up being something where I could start developing on more and more disparate platforms. And it finally is what got me away from my old development model of everything I build is on an EC2 instance, and that means that my editor of choice was Vim. I use the VS Code now for these things, and I'm pretty happy with it.Chris: Yeah. So, you know, I'm glad you brought up CDK. CDK gives you a lot of the capabilities to implement GitOps in a way that you could say, like, “Hey, use CDK to declare I need four Amazon EKS clusters with this size, shape, and configuration. Go.” Or even further, connect to these EKS clusters to RDS instances and load balancers and everything else.But you put that state into Git and then you have something that deploys that automatically upon changes. That is infrastructure as code. Now, when you say, “Okay, main is your feature branch,” you know, things happen on main, if this were running in Kubernetes across a fleet of clusters or the globe-wide in 20 regions, something like Flux or Argo would kick in and say, “There's been a change to source, main, and we need to roll this out.” And it'll start applying those changes. Now, what do you get with GitOps that you don't get with your configuration?I mean, can you rollback if you ever have, like, a bad commit that's just awful? I mean, that's really part of the process with GitOps is to make sure that you can, A, roll back to the previous good state, B, roll forward to a known good state, or C, promote that state up through various environments. And then having that all done declaratively, automatically, and immutably, and versioned with an audit log, that I think is the real power of GitOps in the sense that, like, oh, so-and-so approve this change to security policy XYZ on this date at this time. And that to an auditor, you just hand them a log file on, like, “Here's everything we've ever done to our system. Done.” Right?Like, you could get to that state, if you want to, which I think is kind of the idea of DevOps, which says, “Take all these disparate tools and processes and procedures and culture changes”—culture being the hardest part to adopt in DevOps; GitOps kind of forces a culture change where, like, you can't do a CAB with GitOps. Like, those two things don't fly. You don't have a configuration management database unless you absolutely—Corey: Oh, you CAB now but they're all the comments of the pull request.Chris: Right. Exactly. Like, don't push this change out until Thursday after this other thing has happened, kind of thing. Yeah, like, that all happens in GitHub. But it's very democratizing in the sense that people don't have to waste time in an hour-long meeting to get their five minutes in, right?Corey: DoorDash had a problem. As their cloud-native environment scaled and developers delivered new features, their monitoring system kept breaking down. In an organization where data is used to make better decisions about technology and about the business, losing observability means the entire company loses their competitive edge. With Chronosphere, DoorDash is no longer losing visibility into their applications suite. The key? Chronosphere is an open-source compatible, scalable, and reliable observability solution that gives the observability lead at DoorDash business, confidence, and peace of mind. Read the full success story at snark.cloud/chronosphere. That's snark.cloud slash C-H-R-O-N-O-S-P-H-E-R-E.Corey: So, would it be overwhelmingly cynical to suggest that GitOps is the means to implement what we've all been pretending to have implemented for the last decade when giving talks at conferences?Chris: Ehh, I wouldn't go that far. I would say that GitOps is an excellent way to implement the things you've been talking about at all these conferences for all these years. But keep in mind, the technology has changed a lot in the, what 11, 12 years of the existence of DevOps, now. I mean, we've gone from, let's try to manage whole servers immutably to, “Oh, now we just need to maintain an orchestration platform and run containers.” That whole compute interface, you go from SSH to a Docker file, that's a big leap, right?Like, you don't have bespoke sysadmins; you have, like, a platform team. You don't have DevOps engineers; they're part of that platform team, or DevOps teams, right? Like, which was kind of antithetical to the whole idea of DevOps to have a DevOps team. You know, everybody's kind of in the same boat now, where we see skill sets kind of changing. And GitOps and Kubernetes-land is, like, a platform team that manages the cluster, and its state, and health and, you know, production essentially.And then you have your developers deploying what they want to deploy in when whatever namespace they've been given access to and whatever rights they have. So, now you have the potential for one set of people—the platform team—to use one set of GitOps tooling, and your applications teams might not like that, and that's fine. They can have their own namespaces with their own tooling in it. Like, Argo, for example, is preferred by a lot of developers because it has a nice UI with green and red dots and they can show people and it looks nice, Flux, it's command line based. And there are some projects out there that kind of take the UI of Argo and try to run Flux underneath that, and those are cool kind of projects, I think, in my mind, but in general, right, I think GitOps gives you the choice that we missed somewhat in DevOps implementations of the past because it was, “Oh, we need to go get cloud.” “Well, you can only use this cloud.” “Oh, we need to go get this thing.” “Well, you can only use this thing in-house.”And you know, there's a lot of restrictions sometimes placed on what you can use in your environment. Well, if your environment is Kubernetes, how do you restrict what you can run, right? Like you can't have an easily configured say, no open-source policy if you're running Kubernetes. [laugh] so it becomes, you know—Corey: Well, that doesn't stop some companies from trying.Chris: Yeah, that's true. But the idea of, like, enabling your developers to deploy at will and then promote their changes as they see fit is really the dream of DevOps, right? Like, same with production and platform teams, right? I want to push my changes out to a larger system that is across the globe. How do I do that? How do I manage that? How do I make sure everything's consistent?GitOps gives you those ways, with Kubernetes native things like customizations, to make consistent environments that are robust and actually going to be reconciled automatically if someone breaks the glass and says, “Oh, I need to run this container immediately.” Well, that's going to create problems because it's deviated from state and it's just that one region, so we'll put it back into state.Corey: It'll be dueling banjos, at some point. You'll try and doing something manually, it gets reverted automatically. I love that pattern. You'll get bored before the computer does, always.Chris: Yeah. And GitOps is very new, right? When you think about the lifetime of GitOps, I think it was coined in, like, 2018. So, it's only four years old, right? When—Corey: I prefer it to ChatOps, at least, as far as—Chris: Well, I mean—Corey: —implementation and expression of the thing.Chris: —ChatOps was a way to do DevOps. I think GitOps—Corey: Well, ChatOps is also a way to wind up giving whoever gets access to your Slack workspace root in production.Chris: Mmm.Corey: But that's neither here nor there.Chris: Mm-hm.Corey: It's yeah, we all like to pretend that's not a giant security issue in our industry, but that's a topic for another time.Chris: Yeah. And that's why, like, GitOps also depends upon you having good security, you know, and good authorization and approval processes. It enforces that upon—Corey: Yeah, who doesn't have one of those?Chris: Yeah. If it's a sole operation kind of deal, like in your setup, your case, I think you kind of got it doing right, right? Like, as far as GitOps goes—Corey: Oh, to be clear, we are 11 people and we do have dueling pull requests and all the rest.Chris: Right, right, right.Corey: But most of the stuff I talk about publicly is not our production stuff, so it really is just me. Just as a point of clarity there. I've n—the 11 people here do not all—the rest of you don't just sit there and clap as I do all the work.Chris: Right.Corey: Most days.Chris: No, I'm sure they don't. I'm almost certain they don't clap… for you. I mean, they would—Corey: No. No, they try and talk me out of it in almost every case.Chris: Yeah, exactly. So, the setup that you, Corey Quinn, have implemented to deploy these 20 regions is kind of very GitOps-y, in the sense that when main changes, it gets updated. Where it's not GitOps-y is what if the endpoint changes? Does it get reconciled? That's the piece you're probably missing is that continuous reconciliation component, where it's constantly checking and saying, “This thing out there is deployed in the way I want it. You know, the way I declared it to be in my source of truth.”Corey: Yeah, when you start having other people getting involved, there can—yeah, that's where regressions enter. And it's like, “Well, I know where things are so why would I change the endpoint?” Yeah, it turns out, not everyone has the state of the entire application in their head. Ideally it should live in—Chris: Yeah. Right. And, you know—Corey: —you know, Git or S3.Chris: —when I—yeah, exactly. When I think about interactions of the past coming out as a new DevOps engineer to work with developers, it's always been, will developers have access to prod or they don't? And if you're in that environment with—you're trying to run a multi-billion dollar operation, and your devs have direct—or one Dev has direct access to prod because prod is in his brain, that's where it's like, well, now wait a minute. Prod doesn't have to be only in your brain. You can put that in the codebase and now we know what is in your brain, right?Like, you can almost do—if you document your code, well, you can have your full lifecycle right there in one place, including documentation, which I think is the best part, too. So, you know, it encourages approval processes and automation over this one person has an entire state of the system in their head; they have to go in and fix it. And what if they're not on call, or in Jamaica, or on a cruise ship somewhere kind of thing? Things get difficult. Like, for example, I just got back from vacation. We were so far off the grid, we had satellite internet. And let me tell you, it was hard to write an email newsletter where I usually open 50 to 100 tabs.Corey: There's a little bit of internet out Californ-ie way.Chris: [laugh].Corey: Yeah it's… it's always weird going from, like, especially after pandemic; I have gigabit symmetric here and going even to re:Invent where I'm trying to upload a bunch of video and whatnot.Chris: Yeah. Oh wow.Corey: And the conference WiFi was doing its thing, and well, Verizon 5G was there but spotty. And well, yeah. Usual stuff.Chris: Yeah. It's amazing to me how connectivity has become so ubiquitous.Corey: To the point where when it's not there anymore, it's what do I do with myself? Same story about people pushing back against remote development of, “Oh, I'm just going to do it all on my laptop because what happens if I'm on a plane?” It's, yeah, the year before the pandemic, I flew 140,000 miles domestically and I was almost never hamstrung by my ability to do work. And my only local computer is an iPad for those things. So, it turns out that is less of a real world concern for most folks.Chris: Yeah I actually ordered the components to upgrade an old Nook that I have here and turn it into my, like, this is my remote code server, that's going to be all attached to GitHub and everything else. That's where I want to be: have Tailscale and just VPN into this box.Corey: Tailscale is transformative.Chris: Yes. Tailscale will change your life. That's just my personal opinion.Corey: Yep.Chris: That's not an AWS opinion or anything. But yeah, when you start thinking about your network as it could be anywhere, that's where Tailscale, like, really shines. So—Corey: Tailscale makes the internet work like we all wanted to believe that it worked.Chris: Yeah. And Wireguard is an excellent open-source project. And Tailscale consumes that and puts an amazingly easy-to-use UI, and troubleshooting tools, and routing, and all kinds of forwarding capabilities, and makes it kind of easy, which is really, really, really kind of awesome. And Tailscale and Kubernetes—Corey: Yeah, ‘network' and ‘easy' don't belong in the same sentence, but in this case, they do.Chris: Yeah. And trust me, the Kubernetes story in Tailscale, there is a lot of there. I understand you might want to not open ports in your VPC, maybe, but if you use Tailscale, that node is just another thing on your network. You can connect to that and see what's going on. Your management cluster is just another thing on the network where you can watch the state.But it's all—you're connected to it continuously through Tailscale. Or, you know, it's a much lighter weight, kind of meshy VPN, I would say, if I had to sum it up in one sentence. That was not on our agenda to talk about at all. Anyways. [laugh]Corey: No, no. I love how many different topics we talk about on these things. We'll have to have you back soon to talk again. I really want to thank you for being so generous with your time. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and how you view these things, where can they find you?Chris: Go to ChrisShort.net. So, Chris Short—I'm six-four so remember, it's Short—dot net, and you will find all the places that I write, you can go to devopsish.com to subscribe to my newsletter, which goes out every week. This year. Next year, there'll be breaks. And then finally, if you want to follow me on Twitter, Chris Short: at @ChrisShort on Twitter. All one word so you see two s's. Like, it's okay, there's two s's there.Corey: Links to all of that will of course be in the show notes. It's easier for people to do the clicky-clicky thing as a general rule.Chris: Clicky things are easier than the wordy things, yes.Corey: Says the Kubernetes guy.Chris: Yeah. Says the Kubernetes guy. Yeah, you like that, huh? Like I said, Argo gives you a UI. [laugh].Corey: Thank you [laugh] so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.Chris: Thank you. This has been fun. If folks have questions, feel free to reach out. Like, I am not one of those people that hides behind a screen all day and doesn't respond. I will respond to you eventually.Corey: I'm right here, Chris. Come on, come on. You're calling me out in front of myself. My God.Chris: Egh. It might take a day or two, but I will respond. I promise.Corey: Thanks again for your time. This has been Chris Short, senior developer advocate at AWS. 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 and if it's YouTube, click the thumbs-up button. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, same thing, smash the buttons five-star review and leave an insulting comment that is written in syntactically correct YAML because it's just so easy to do.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode, Jaap tells us how he got into speaking at conferences. We talk about examples of how his support has helped people on their own speaking journey. We discuss a few of the recent talks he has given, from abstracting code to bettering your home automation. We get to discuss his Microsoft MVP being renewed a few hours before we recorded. Last, and probably most important, we learned that he submitted the slap with a fish function into Poshbot. A function that gets extensive use in our office.    Guest Bio and links: Jaap Brasser is a Senior Developer Advocate at Harness as well as a 7-time Microsoft MVP. If you are attending a PowerShell convention anywhere in the world, chances are pretty good that he will be there speaking about something new.   https://twitter.com/jaap_brasser  https://www.jaapbrasser.com/about/  https://github.com/jaapbrasser  MVP Profile  Think Abstract, abstracting your PowerShell code by Jaap Brasser 

About WesleyWesley Faulkner is a first-generation American, public speaker, and podcaster. He is a founding member of the government transparency group Open Austin and a staunch supporter of racial justice, workplace equity, and neurodiversity. His professional experience spans technology from AMD, Atlassian, Dell, IBM, and MongoDB. Wesley currently works as a Developer Advocate, and in addition, co-hosts the developer relations focused podcast Community Pulse and serves on the board for SXSW.Links Referenced: Twitter: https://twitter.com/wesley83 Polywork: https://polywork.com/wesley83 Personal Website: https://www.wesleyfaulkner.com/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D.Corey: What if there were a single place to get an inventory of what you're running in the cloud that wasn't "the monthly bill?" Further, what if there were a way to compare that inventory to what you were already managing via Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, but then automatically add the missing unmanaged or drifted parts to it? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Well, stop dreaming and start doing; visit snark.cloud/firefly to learn more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I am joined again for a second time this year by Wesley Faulkner. Last time we spoke, he was a developer advocate. And since then, as so many have, he's changed companies. Wesley, thank you for joining me again. You're the Head of Community at SingleStore, now. Congrats on the promotion.Wesley: Thank you. It's been a very welcome change. I love developer advocates and developer advocacy. But I love people, too, so it's almost, I think, very analogous to the ebbs and flow that we all have gone through, through the pandemic, and leaning into my strong suits.Corey: It's a big deal having a ‘head of' in a role title, as opposed to Developer Advocate, Senior Developer Advocate. And it is a different role. It's easy to default into the world of thinking that it's a promotion. Management is in many ways orthogonal to what it takes to succeed in an actual role. And further, you're not the head of DevRel, or DevRelopers or whatever you want to call the term. You are instead the Head of Community. How tied is that to developer relations, developer advocacy, or other things that we are used to using as terms of art in this space?Wesley: If we're talking about other companies, I would say the Head of Community is something that's under the umbrella of developer relations, where it's just a peer to some of the other different elements or columns of developer relations. But in SingleStore specifically, I have to say that developer relations in terms of what you think about whole umbrella is very new to the company. And so, I consider myself the first person in the role of developer relations by being the Head of Community. So, a lot of the other parts are being bolted in, but under the focus of developer as a community. So, I'm liaisoning right now as helping with spearheading some of the design of the activities that the advocates do, as well as architecting the platform and the experiences of people coming in and experiencing SingleStore through the community's perspective.So, all that to say is, what I'm doing is extremely structured, and a lot of stuff that we're doing with the efficacy, I'm using some of my expertise to help guide that, but it's still something that's kind of like an offshoot and not well integrated at the moment.Corey: How has it changed the way that you view the function of someone who's advocating to developers, which is from my cynical perspective, “Oh, it's marketing, but we don't tell people it's marketing because they won't like it.” And yes, I know, I'll get emails about that. But how does it differ from doing that yourself versus being the head of the function of a company? Because leadership is a heck of a switch? I thought earlier in my career that oh, yeah, it's a natural evolution of being a mediocre engineer. Time to be a mediocre manager. And oh, no, no, I aspired to be a mediocre manager. It's a completely different skill set and I got things hilariously wrong. What's it like for you going through that shift?Wesley: First of all, it is kind of like advertising, and people may not think of it that way. Just to give an example, movie trailers is advertising. The free samples at the grocery store is advertising. But people love those because it gives an experience that they like in a package that they are accustomed to. And so, it's the same with developer relations; it's finding the thing that makes the experience worthwhile.On the community side, this is not new to me. I've done several different roles, maybe not in this combination. But when I was at MongoDB, I was a technical community manager, which is like a cog in the whole giant machine. But before that, in my other life, I managed social and community interactions for Walmart, and I had, at the slow period, around 65, but during the holidays, it would ramp up to 95 direct reports that I managed.It's almost—if you're a fan of The Princess Bride, it's different than fighting one person. Sometimes it's easier to fight, like, a squad or a gang of people. So, being Head of Community with such a young company is definitely a lot different than. In some ways, harder to deal with this type of community where we're just growing and emerging, rather than something more well-established.Corey: It probably gives you an interesting opportunity. Because back when I was doing engineering work as an SRE or whatever we call them in that era, it was, “Yeah, wow, my boss is terrible and has no idea what the hell they're doing.” So, then I found myself in the role, and it's, “Cool. Now, do all the things that you said you would do. Put up or shut up.”And it turns out that there's a lot you don't see that our strategic considerations. I completely avoided things like managing up or managing laterally or balancing trade-offs in different ways. Yeah, you're right. If you view the role of management as strictly being something that is between you and your direct reports, you can be an amazing manager from their perspective, but completely ineffective organizationally at accomplishing the goals that have been laid out for you.Wesley: Yeah. The good thing about being head of and the first head of is that you help establish those goals. And so, when you take a role with another company saying, “Hey, we have headcount for this,” and it's an established role, then you're kind of like streamlining into a process that's already underway. What's good about this role specifically, a ‘head of,' is that I help with not only designing what are the goals and the OKRs but deciding what the teams and what the team structure should look like. And so, I'm hiring for a specific position based on how it interacts with everything else.So, when I'm coming in, I don't say, “Well, what do you do?” Or, “How do you do it?” I said, “This is what needs to be done.” And that makes it so much easier just to say that if everything is working the way it should and to give marching orders based on the grand vision, instead of hitting the numbers this quarter or next quarter. Because what is core to my belief, and what's core, too, of how I approach things is at the heart of what I'm trying to do, which is really great, in terms of making something that didn't exist before.Corey: The challenge, too, is that everyone loves to say—and I love to see this at different ways—is the evolution and understanding of the DevRel folks who I work with and I have great relationships with realizing that you have to demonstrate business value. Because I struggle with this my entire career where I know intrinsically, that if I get on stage and tell a story about a thing that is germane to what my company does, that good things are going to happen. But it's very hard to do any form of attribution to it. In a different light, this podcast is a great example of this.We have sponsors. And people are listening. Ideally, they aren't fast-forwarding through sponsor messages; I do have interesting thoughts about the sponsors that I put into these ads. And that's great, but I also appreciate that people are driving while they're listening to this, and they are doing the dishes, they are mowing the lawn, and hopefully not turning up the volume too loudly so it damages their hearing. And the idea that they're going to suddenly stop any of those things and go punch in the link that I give is a little out to lunch there.Instead, it's partially brand awareness and it is occasionally the, “Wait. That resonates exactly with the problem that I have.” So, they get to work or they get back in front of a computer and the odds are terrific they're not going to punch in that URL of whatever I wound up giving; they're going to type in whatever phrases they remember and the company name into Google. Now—and doing attribution on something like that is very hard.It gets even more hard when we're talking about something that is higher up the stack that requires a bit more buy-in than individual developers. There's often a meeting or two about it. And then someone finally approaches the company to have a conversation. Now, does it work? Yes. There are companies that are sponsoring this stuff that spend a lot of time, effort, and money on that.I don't know how you do that sort of attribution; I don't pretend to know, but I know that it works. Because these people whose entire job is making sure that it does tell me it does. So, I smile, I nod, and that's great. But it's very hard to wind up building out a direct, “If you spend X dollars sponsoring this, you will see Y dollars in response.” But in the DevOps world, when your internal doing these things, well, okay because to the company, I look an awful lot like an expensive developer except I don't ever write production code.And then—at least in the before times—“So, what does your job do? Because looking at the achievements and accomplishments last quarter, it looks an awful lot like you traveled to exotic places on the company dime, give talks that are of only vague relevance to what we do, and then hang out at parties with your friends? Nice job, how can I get that?” But it's also first on the chopping block when okay, how do we trim expenses go? And I think it's a mistake to do that. I just don't think that story of the value of developer relations is articulated super-well. And I say that, but I don't know how to do a much better job of it myself.Wesley: Well, that's why corporate or executive buy-in is important because if they know from the get-go while you're there, it makes it a little bit easier to sell. But you do have to show that you are executing. So, there are always two parts to presenting a story, and that's one, the actual quantitative, like, I've done this many talks—so that output part—I've written this many blog posts, or I've stood up this many events that people can attend to. And then there's the results saying, people did read this post, people did show up to my event, people did listen to my talk that I gave. But you also need to give the subjective ones where people respond back and say, “I loved your talk,” or, “I heard you on Corey's podcast,” or, “I read your blog posts,” because even though you might not understand that it goes all the way down in a conversion funnel to a purchase, you can least use that stand-in to say there's probably, like, 20, 30 people behind this person to have that same sentiment, so you can see that your impact is reaching people and that it's having some sort of lasting effect.That said, you have to keep it up. You have to try to increase your output and increase your sphere of influence. Because when people go to solve their problem, they're going to look into their history and their own Rolodex of saying what was the last thing that I heard? What was the last thing that's relevant?There is a reason that Pepsi and Coke still do advertising. It's not because people don't know those brands, but being easily recalled, or a center of relevance based on how many touchpoints or how many times that you've seen them, either from being on American Idol and the logo facing the camera, or seeing a whole display when you go into the grocery store. Same with display advertising. All of this stuff works hand in hand so that you can be front-of-mind with the people and the decision-makers who will make that decision. And we went through this through the pandemic where… that same sentiment, it was like, “You just travel and now you can't travel, so we're just going to get rid of the whole department.”And then those same companies are hunting for those people to come back or to rebuild these departments that are now gone because maybe you don't see what we do, but when it's gone, you definitely notice a dip. And that trust is from the top-up. You have to do not just external advocacy, but you have to do internal advocacy about what impacts you're having so that at least the people who are making that decision can hopefully understand that you are working hard and the work is paying off.Corey: Since the last time that we spoke, you've given your first keynote, which—Wesley: Yes.Corey: Is always an interesting experience to go through. It was at a conference called THAT Conference. And I feel the need to specify that because otherwise, we're going to wind up with a ‘who's on first' situation. But THAT Conference is the name.Wesley: Specify THAT. Yes.Corey: Exactly. Better specify THAT. Yes. So, what was your keynote about? And for a bit of a behind-the-scenes look, what was that like for you?Wesley: Let me do the behind-the-scenes because it's going to lead up to actual the execution.Corey: Excellent.Wesley: So, I've been on several different podcasts. And one of the ones that I loved for years is one called This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte. Was a big fan of Leo Laporte back in the Screen Saver days back in TechTV days. Loved his opinion, follow his work. And I went to a South by Southwest… three, four years ago where I actually met him.And then from that conversation, he asked me to be on his show. And I've been on the show a handful of times, just talking about tech because I love tech. Tech is my passion, not just doing it, but just experiencing and just being on either side of creating or consuming. When I moved—I moved recently also since, I think, from the last time I was on your show—when I moved here to Wisconsin, the organizer of THAT Conference said that he's been following me for a while, since my first appearance on This Week in Tech, and loved my outlook and my take on things. And he approached me to do a keynote.Since I am now Wisconsin—THAT Conference is been in Wisconsin since inception and it's been going on for ten years—and he wanted me to just basically share my knowledge. Clean slate, have enough time to just say whatever I wanted. I said, “Yes, I can do that.” So, my experience on my end was like sheer excitement and then quickly sheer terror of not having a framework of what I was going to speak on or how I was going to deliver it. And knowing as a keynote, that it would be setting the tone for the whole conference.So, I decided to talk on the thing that I knew the most about, which was myself. Talked about my journey growing up and learning what my strengths, what my weaknesses are, how to navigate life, as well as the corporate jungle, and deciding where I wanted to go. Do I want to be the person that I feel like I need to be in order to be successful, which when we look at structures and examples and the things that we hold on a pedestal, we feel that we have to be perfect, or we have to be knowledgeable, and we have to do everything, well rounded in order to be accepted. Especially being a minority, there's a lot more caveats in terms of being socially acceptable to other people. And then the other path that I could have taken, that I chose to take, was to accept my things that are seen as false, but my own quirkiness, my own uniqueness and putting that front and center about, this is me, this is my person that over the years has formed into this version of myself.I'm going to make sure that is really transparent and so if I go anywhere, they know what they're getting, and they know what they're signing up for by bringing me on board. I have an opinion, I will share my opinion, I will bring my whole self, I won't just be the person that is technical or whimsical, or whatever you're looking for. You have to take the good with the bad, you have to take the I really understand technology, but I have ADHD and I might miss some deadlines. [laugh].Corey: This episode is sponsored in parts by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word.Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half dozen manage databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications, including Oracle, to the cloud.To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: I have a very similar philosophy, and how I approach these things where it's there is no single speaking engagement that I can fathom even being presented to me, let alone me accepting that is going to be worth me losing the reputation I have developed for authenticity. It's you will not get me to turn into a shill for whatever it is that I am speaking in front of this week. Conversely, whether it's a paid speaking engagement or not, I have a standing policy of not using a platform that is being given to me by a company or organization to make them look foolish. In other words, I will not make someone regret inviting me to speak at their events. Full stop.And I have spoken at events for AWS; I have spoken at events for Oracle, et cetera, et cetera, and there's no company out there that I'm not going to be able to get on stage and tell an entertaining and engaging story, but it requires me to dunk on them. And that's fine. Frankly, if there is a company like that where I could not say nice things about them—such as Facebook—I would simply decline to pursue the speaking opportunity. And that is the way that I view it. And very few companies are on that list, to be very honest with you.Now, there are exceptions to this, if you're having a big public keynote, I will do my traditional live-tweet the keynote and make fun of people because that is, A, expected and, B, it's live-streamed anywhere on the planet I want to be sitting at that point in time, and yeah, if you're saying things in public, you can basically expect that to be the way that I approach these things. But it's a nuanced take, and that is something that is not fully understood by an awful lot of folks who run events. I'll be the first to admit that aspects of who and what I am mean that some speaking engagements are not open to me. And I'm okay with that, on some level, I truly am. It's a different philosophy.But I do know that I am done apologizing for who I am and what I'm about. And at some point that required a tremendous amount of privilege and a not insignificant willingness to take a risk that it was going to work out all right. I can't imagine going back anymore. Now, that road is certainly not what I would recommend to everyone, particularly folks earlier in their career, particularly for folks who don't look just like I do and have a failure mode of a board seat and a book deal somewhere, but figuring out where you will and will not compromise is always an important thing to get straight for yourself before you're presented with a situation where you have to make those decisions, but now there's a whole bunch of incentive to decide in one way or another.Wesley: And that's a journey. You can't just skip sections, right? You didn't get to where you are unless you went through the previous experience that you went through. And it's true for everyone. If you see those success books or how-to books written by people who are extremely rich, and, like, how to become successful and, like, okay, well, that journey is your own. It doesn't make it totally, like, inaccessible to everyone else, but you got to realize that not everyone can walk that path. And—Corey: You were in the right place at the right time, an early employee at a company that did phenomenally well and that catapulted you into reach beyond the wildest dreams of avarice territory. Good for you, but fundamentally, when you give talks like that as a result, what it often presents as is, “I won the lottery, and here's how you can too.” It doesn't work that way. The road you walked was unique to you and that opportunity is closed, not open anyone else, so people have to find their own paths.Wesley: Yeah, and lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice. But there are some things where you can understand some fundamentals. And depending on where you go, I think you do need to know yourself, you do need to know—like, be able to access yourself, but being able to share that, of course, you have to be at a point where you feel comfortable. And so, even if you're in a space where you don't feel that you can be your authentic self or be able to share all parts of you, you yourself should at least know yourself and then make that decision. I agree that it's a point of privilege to be able to say, “Take me how I am.”I'm lucky that I've gotten here, not everyone does, and just because you don't doesn't mean that you're a failure. It just means that the world hasn't caught up yet. People who are part of marginalized society, like, if you are, let's say trans, or if you are even gay, you take the same person, the same stance, the same yearning to be accepted, and then transport it to 50 years ago, you're not safe. You will not necessarily be accepted, or you may not even be successful. And if you have a lane where you can do that, all the power to you, but not everyone could be themselves, and you just need to make sure that at least you can know yourself, even if you don't share that with the world.Corey: It takes time to get there, and I think you're right that it's impossible to get there without walking through the various steps. It's one of the reasons I'm somewhat reluctant to talk overly publicly about my side project gig of paid speaking engagements, for instance, is that the way to get those is you start off by building a reputation as a speaker, and that takes an awful lot of time. And speaking at events where there's no budget even to pay you a speaking fee out of anyway. And part of what gets the keynote invitations to, “Hey, we want you to come and give a talk,” is the fact that people have seen you speak elsewhere and know what you're about and what to expect. Here's a keynote presented by someone who's never presented on stage before is a recipe for a terrifying experience, if not for the speaker or the audience, definitely [laugh] for the event organizers because what if they choke.?Easy example of this, even now hundreds of speaking engagements in, the adrenaline hit right before I go on stage means that sometimes my knees shake a bit before I walk out on stage. I make it a point to warn the people who are standing with me backstage, “Oh, this is a normal thing. Don't worry, it is absolutely expected. It happens every time. Don't sweat it.”And, like, “Thank you for letting us know. That is the sort of thing that's useful.” And then they see me shake, and they get a little skeptical. Like, I thought this guy was a professional. What's the story and I walk on stage and do my thing and I come back. Like, “That was incredible. I was worried at the beginning.” “I told you, we all have our rituals before going on stage. Mine is to shake like a leaf.”But the value there is that people know what to generally expect when I get on stage. It's going to have humor, there's going to be a point interwoven throughout what I tend to say, and in the case of paid speaking engagements, I always make sure I know where the boundaries are of things I can make fun of a big company for. Like, I can get on stage and make fun of service naming or I can make fun of their deprecation policy or something like that, but yeah, making fun of the way that they wind up handling worker relations is probably not going to be great and it could get the person who championed me fired or centered internally. So, that is off the table.Like, even on this podcast, for example, I sometimes get feedback from listeners of, “Well, you have someone from company X on and you didn't beat the crap out of them on this particular point.” It's yeah, you do understand that by having people on the show I'm making a tacit agreement not to attack them. I'm not a journalist. I don't pretend to be. But if I beat someone up with questions about their corporate policy, yeah, very rarely do I have someone who is in a position in those companies to change that policy, and they're certainly not authorized to speak on the record about those things.So, I can beat them up on it, they can say, “I can't answer that,” and we're not going to go anywhere. What is the value of that? It looks like it's not just gotcha journalism, but ineffective gotcha journalism. It doesn't work that way. And that's never been what this show is about.But there's that consistent effort behind the scenes of making sure that people will be entertained, will enjoy what they're seeing, but also are not going to deeply regret giving me a microphone, has always been the balancing act, at least for me. And I want to be clear, my style is humor. It is not for everyone. And my style of humor has a failure mode of being a jerk and making people feel bad, so don't think that my path is the only or even a recommended way for folks who want to get more into speaking to proceed.Wesley: You also mention, though, about, like, punching up versus punching down. And if you really tear down a company after you've been invited to speak, what you're doing is you're punching down at the person who booked you. They're not the CEO; they're not the owner of the company; they're the person who's in charge of running an event or booking speakers. And so, putting that person and throwing them under the bus is punching down because now you're threatening their livelihood, and it doesn't make any market difference in terms of changing the corporate's values or how they execute. So yeah, I totally agree with you in that one.And, like you were saying before, if there's a company you really thought was abhorrent, why speak there? Why give them or lend your reputation to this company if you absolutely feel that it's something you don't want to be associated with? You can just choose not to do that. For me, when I look at speaking, it is important for me to really think about why I'm speaking as well. So, not just the company who's hiring me, but the audience that I'll be serving.So, if I'm going to help with inspiring the next generation of developers, or helping along the thought of how to make the world a better place, or how people themselves can be better people so that we can just change the landscape and make it a lot friendlier, that is also its own… form of compensation and not just speaking for a speaker's fee. So, I do agree that you need to not just be super Negative Nancy, and try to fight all fights. You need to embrace some of the good things and try to make more of those experiences good for everyone, not just the people who are inviting you there, but the people who are attending. And when I started speaking, I was not a good speaker as well. I made a lot of mistakes, and still do, but I think speaking is easier than some people think and if someone truly wants to do it, they should go ahead and get started.What is the saying? If there's something is truly important, you'll be bad at it [laugh] and you'll be okay with it. I started speaking because of my role as a developer advocate. And if you just do a Google search for ‘CFPs,' you can start speaking, too. So, those who are not public speakers and want to get into it, just Google ‘CFP' and then start applying.And then you'll get better at your submissions, you'll get better at your slides, and then once you get accepted, then you'll get better at preparing, then you'll get better at actually speaking. There's a lot of steps between starting and stopping and it's okay to get started doing that route. The other thing I wanted to point out is I feel public speaking is the equivalent of lifting your own bodyweight. If you can do it, you're one of the small few of the population that is willing to do so or that can do it. If you start public speaking, that in itself is an accomplishment and an experience that is something that is somewhat enriching. And being bad at it doesn't take the passion away from you. If you just really want to do it, just keep doing it, even if you're a bad speaker.Corey: Yeah. The way to give a great talk because you have a bunch of terrible talks first.Wesley: Yeah. And it's okay to do that.Corey: And it's not the in entirety of community. It's not even a requirement to be involved with the community. If you're one of those people that absolutely dreads the prospect of speaking publicly, fine. I'm not suggesting that, oh, you need to get over that and get on stage. That doesn't help anyone. Don't do the things you dread doing because you know that it's not going to go well for you.That's the reason I don't touch actual databases. I mean, come on, let's be realistic. I will accidentally the data, and then we won't have a company anymore. So, I know what things I'm good at and things I'm not. I also don't do hostage negotiations, for obvious reasons.Wesley: And also, here's a little, like, secret tip. If you really want to do public speaking and you start doing public speaking and you're not so good at it from other peoples' perspective, but you still love doing it and you think you're getting better, doing public speaking is one of those things where you can say that you do it and no one will really question how good you are at it. [laugh]. If you're just in casual conversation, it's like, “Hey, I wrote a book.” People like, “Oh, wow. This person wrote the book on blah, blah, blah.”Corey: It's a self-published book that says the best way to run Kubernetes. It's a single page; it says, “Don't.” In 150-point type. “The end.” But I wrote a book.Wesley: Yeah.Corey: Yeah.Wesley: People won't probe too much and it'll help you with your development. So, go ahead and get started. Don't worry about doing that thing where, like, I have to be the best before I can present it. Call yourself a public speaker. Check, done.Corey: Always. We are the stories we tell, and nowhere is it more true than in the world of public speaking. I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to speak with me about this for a second time in a single year. Oh, my goodness. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Wesley: I'm on Twitter, @wesley83 on Twitter. And you can find me also on PolyWork. So, polywork.com/wesley83. Or just go to wesleyfaulkner.com which redirects you there. I list pretty much everything that I am working on and any upcoming speaking opportunities, hopefully when they release that feature, will also be on that Polywork page.Corey: Excellent. And of course, I started Polywork recently, and I'm at thoughtleader.cloud because of course I am, which is neither here nor there. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak about this side of the industry that we never really get to talk about much, at least not publicly and not very often.Wesley: Well, thank you for having me on the show. And I wanted to take some time to say thank you for the work that you're doing. Not just elevating voices like myself, but talking truth to power, like we mentioned before, but being yourself and being a great representation of how people should be treating others: being honest without being mean, being snarky without being rude. And other companies and other people who've given me a chance, and given me a platform, I wanted to say thank you to you too, and I wouldn't be here unless it was people like you acknowledging the work that I've been doing.Corey: All it takes is just recognizing what you're doing and acknowledging it. People often want to thank me for this stuff, but it's just, what, for keeping my eyes open? I don't know, I feel like it's just the job; it's not something that is above and beyond any expected normal behavior. The only challenge is I look around the industry and I realize just how wrong that impression is, apparently. But here we are. It's about finding people doing interesting work and letting them tell their story. That's all this podcast has ever tried to be.Wesley: Yeah. And you do it. And doing the work is part of the reward, and I really appreciate you just going through the effort. Even having your ears open is something that I'm glad that you're able to at least know who the people are and who are making noises—or making noise to raise their profile up and then in turn, sharing that with the world. And so, that's a great service that you're providing, not just for me, but for everyone.Corey: Well, thank you. And as always, thank you for your time. Wesley Faulkner, Head of Community at SingleStore. 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 rambling comment telling me exactly why DevRel does not need success metrics of any kind.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.

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In this episode, we talk about making databases fun and approachable with Joe Karlsson, Senior Developer Advocate at Single Store DB. Joe talks about going from hating coding to loving it, the relationship between databases and backend work, and how people can bring creativity and fun into their learning and their work in databases. Show Links DevDiscuss (sponsor) DevNews (sponsor) Appwrite (sponsor) VeroSkills (sponsor) New Relic (sponsor) Compiler (sponsor) SingleStore Node.js JavaScript Python SQL