Podcasts about Slack

Let's get a gym badge! Troy and Ziffler set out to get their first gym badge... huzzah! Social Media: See everything TroytlePower related by visiting this page! Follow the show on Twitter at @TPPTPPTPwTP or follow Troytle directly at @TroytlePower! Support the show, hear episodes early, get bonus content, and even request specific episodes by checking out the Patreon Page! Check out The Power Play-Throughs Podcast on Youtube for video versions of some episodes! We Can Make This Work Probably Network: Follow the We Can Make This Work Probably Network to keep up with this show and discover our many other podcasts! The place for those with questionable taste! Join the Probably Work Discord! ProbablyWork.com Twitter, Facebook, Instagram: @ProbablyWork Email: ProbablyWorkPod@gmail.com Geek to Geek Media Follow Geek to Geek Media to join our community in geeking out about the things we love. Join our Slack or Discord! GeekToGeekMedia.com Twitter, Instagram: @GeekToGeekMedia Patreon Digital Magazine

The @UclaBTeam is now part of the What's Bruin Network! Subscribe to one feed to get three great shows!What's Bruin Symposium - A conversation about all things Bruin over drinks with Bruin Report Online's @mikeregaladoLA, @wbjake68, Jamaal (@champspapa1015) and BillThe B Team - insightful Bruin talk with @MichaelMHanna and Nathan (@Sideoutpar)West Coast Bias - LA Sports (mostly Lakers, Dodgers and NFL) with Jamaal and JakeSupport WBS at Patreon.com/WhatsBruinShow for just $2/month and get exclusive content, access to our SLACK channel and the new WBS Sticker. Please rate and review us on whatever platform you listen on. Call the WBS Hotline at 805-399-4WBS (Suck it Reign of Troy)

SUBSCRIBE TO SALES SECRETS PODCASTITUNES ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/s...​SPOTIFY ► https://open.spotify.com/show/1BKYsQo...​YOUTUBE ► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVUh...​THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SEAMLESS.AI - THE WORLD'S BEST SALES LEADSWEBSITE ► https://www.seamless.ai/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/seamlessai/JOIN FOR FREE TODAY ► https://login.seamless.ai/invite/podcastSHOW DESCRIPTIONBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson, entrepreneur and founder of Seamless.AI. Twice a week, Brandon interviews the world's top sales experts like Jill Konrath, Aaron Ross, John Barrows, Trish Bertuzzi, Mark Hunter, Anthony Iannarino and many more -- to uncover actionable strategies, playbooks, tips and insights you can use to generate more revenue and close more business. If you want to learn the most powerful sales secrets from the top sales experts in the world, Sales Secrets From The Top 1% is the place to find them.SALES SECRET FROM THE TOP 1%WEBSITE ► https://www.secretsalesbook.com/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-secret-book/ABOUT BRANDONBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson (over $100M in sales deals), multi-million dollar sales tech entrepreneur, motivational sales speaker, international sales DJ (DJ NoQ5) and sales author who is obsessed with helping you maximize your sales success.Mr. Bornancin is currently the CEO & Founder at Seamless.ai delivering the world's best sales leads. Over 10,000+ companies use Seamless.ai to generate millions in sales at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Slack, Dell, Oracle & many others.Mr. Bornancin is also the author of "Sales Secrets From The Top 1%" where the world's best sales experts share their secrets to sales success and author of “The Ultimate Guide To Overcoming Sales Objections.”FOLLOW BRANDONLINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbornancin/INSTAGRAM ► https://www.instagram.com/brandonbornancinofficial/FACEBOOK ► https://www.facebook.com/SeamlessAITWITTER ► https://twitter.com/BBornancin

Apple is complicit in Chinese censorship. There's simply no other way to put it. Thousands of apps have been deleted from the Chinese Apple App Store, including recently a Quran app and a Bible app. Plus hundreds of games, social apps, and more. Apple has to do business in China. That's just realistic. And it has to obey the laws of countries it does business in. That's also just realistic. Sideloading could enable both. Links: Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

SUBSCRIBE TO SALES SECRETS PODCAST:ITUNES ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/s...​SPOTIFY ► https://open.spotify.com/show/1BKYsQo...​YOUTUBE ► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVUh...​THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SEAMLESS.AI - THE WORLD'S BEST SALES LEADS:WEBSITE ► https://www.seamless.ai/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/seamlessai/JOIN FOR FREE TODAY ► https://login.seamless.ai/invite/podcastBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson, entrepreneur and founder of Seamless.AI. Twice a week, Brandon interviews the world's top sales experts like Jill Konrath, Aaron Ross, John Barrows, Trish Bertuzzi, Mark Hunter, Anthony Iannarino and many more -- to uncover actionable strategies, playbooks, tips and insights you can use to generate more revenue and close more business. If you want to learn the most powerful sales secrets from the top sales experts in the world, Sales Secrets From The Top 1% is the place to find them.SALES SECRET FROM THE TOP 1%WEBSITE ► https://www.secretsalesbook.com/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-secret-book/ABOUT BRANDONBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson (over $100M in sales deals), multi-million dollar sales tech entrepreneur, motivational sales speaker, international sales DJ (DJ NoQ5) and sales author who is obsessed with helping you maximize your sales success.Mr. Bornancin is currently the CEO & Founder at Seamless.ai delivering the world's best sales leads. Over 10,000+ companies use Seamless.ai to generate millions in sales at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Slack, Dell, Oracle & many others.Mr. Bornancin is also the author of "Sales Secrets From The Top 1%" where the world's best sales experts share their secrets to sales success and author of “The Ultimate Guide To Overcoming Sales Objections.”FOLLOW BRANDON:LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbornancin/INSTAGRAM ► https://www.instagram.com/brandonbornancinofficial/FACEBOOK ► https://www.facebook.com/SeamlessAITWITTER ► https://twitter.com/BBornancin

Amber McBride is an English professor at the University of Virginia and holds an MFA in poetry from Emerson College. Her poetry has been published in several literary magazines including Ploughshares and The Rumpus. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her dog, Shiloh. Me (Moth) is her young adult debut.How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you'll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. Join Rachael's Slack channel, Onward Writers! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SUBSCRIBE TO SALES SECRETS PODCAST:ITUNES ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/s...​SPOTIFY ► https://open.spotify.com/show/1BKYsQo...​YOUTUBE ► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVUh...​THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SEAMLESS.AI - THE WORLD'S BEST SALES LEADS:WEBSITE ► https://www.seamless.ai/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/seamlessai/JOIN FOR FREE TODAY ► https://login.seamless.ai/invite/podcastBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson, entrepreneur and founder of Seamless.AI. Twice a week, Brandon interviews the world's top sales experts like Jill Konrath, Aaron Ross, John Barrows, Trish Bertuzzi, Mark Hunter, Anthony Iannarino and many more -- to uncover actionable strategies, playbooks, tips and insights you can use to generate more revenue and close more business. If you want to learn the most powerful sales secrets from the top sales experts in the world, Sales Secrets From The Top 1% is the place to find them.SALES SECRET FROM THE TOP 1%WEBSITE ► https://www.secretsalesbook.com/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-secret-book/ABOUT BRANDONBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson (over $100M in sales deals), multi-million dollar sales tech entrepreneur, motivational sales speaker, international sales DJ (DJ NoQ5) and sales author who is obsessed with helping you maximize your sales success.Mr. Bornancin is currently the CEO & Founder at Seamless.ai delivering the world's best sales leads. Over 10,000+ companies use Seamless.ai to generate millions in sales at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Slack, Dell, Oracle & many others.Mr. Bornancin is also the author of "Sales Secrets From The Top 1%" where the world's best sales experts share their secrets to sales success and author of “The Ultimate Guide To Overcoming Sales Objections.”FOLLOW BRANDON:LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbornancin/INSTAGRAM ► https://www.instagram.com/brandonbornancinofficial/FACEBOOK ► https://www.facebook.com/SeamlessAITWITTER ► https://twitter.com/BBornancin

Let's talk about 10 good practice tips when using Git. Podcast Notes: PHP News: Swoole is a PHP extension that has been forked due to on going security concerns. The current version of Swoole downloads a compressed file from the business Swoole site which is NOT GOOD! This file is a gzip file which is downloaded to your application. Apparently many attempts were made to raise this concern with the current maintainer of Swoole but nothing happened. After these concerns were un-heard the PHP community decided to fork Swoole and remove the ability to run remote code from the Swoole business site. The forked alternative is called Open Swoole. Read more about it here: https://news-web.php.net/php.pecl.dev/17446 Theres a new Apple event on the 18th of October. M1X Mac book pro. 14 + 16 inch Mac mini AirPods Will the Mac Book Pro have 64 GB of ram, will I buy a new Mac? 10 Git Branch good practices Run code audits before merging into a work flow branch to prevent pipeline blockages Put config into a separate branch to the feature Use a GUI to inspect right, left, middle merges Communicate and talk through conflicts with other developers Don't squash commits. History is good Regularly merge the main branch into the feature branch Always get a team mate to review your code. Even if its the smallest code change Keep to a good branch naming convention Separate code maintenance, features and fixes into their own branches - Be aware of what other features use your code Use messaging platforms like Slack or Discord to inform your team that something has been merged. Also use this to tell your team if the code audits have failed Fix any failed code audits before doing anything else. Kick start your tech career with Amarachi Amaechi's new book Getting Started in Tech: A guide to building a tech career My web development courses ➡️ Learn How to build a JavaScript Tip Calculator ➡️ Learn JavaScript arrays ➡️ Learn PHP arrays ➡️ Learn Python ✉️ Get my weekly newsletter ⏰ My current live coding schedule (Times are BST) Thursdays 20:00 = Live Podcast YouTube Sundays 14:30 - Live coding on Twitch

This week we discuss the real-world use of containers, recap the Google Cloud Next announcements and make some Apple predications. Plus, how often do you wash jeans…? Rundown Containers in the Real World 10 trends in real world container use (https://www.datadoghq.com/container-report/) What Workloads Do Businesses Run on Kubernetes? (https://thenewstack.io/what-workloads-do-businesses-run-on-kubernetes/) Google Cloud Next `21 What's New at Google Cloud Next ‘21 (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/google-cloud-next/whats-new-at-next) Introducing Google Distributed Cloud—in your data center, at the edge, and in the cloud (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/announcing-google-distributed-cloud-edge-and-hosted) Introducing Anthos for VMs and tools to simplify the developer experience (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/introducing-anthos-for-vms-and-other-app-modernization-tools) Build a more secure future with Google Cloud (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/next21-how-google-cloud-secures-the-world) Google Cloud will show users their gross carbon emissions (https://www.engadget.com/google-cloud-platform-carbon-footprint-emissions-environment-163339146.html) GKE AutoPilot not new but mentioned (https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/autopilot-overview#security) Google Cloud launches a managed Spark service (https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/12/google-cloud-launches-a-managed-spark-service/) Weave & Chick-fil-A: Managing Fleets of Kubernetes Clusters... (https://youtu.be/ta9jJc-RVvE) Relevant to your interests Eating the Cloud from Outside In (https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go/) The Confidential Computing Consortium Year in Review, 2021 - Confidential Computing Consortium (https://confidentialcomputing.io/2021/10/06/the-confidential-computing-consortium-year-in-review-2021/) Experts Discuss Top Kubernetes Trends and Production Challenges (https://www.infoq.com/articles/kubernetes-trends-and-challenges/) Microsoft and Amazon reach truce allowing former AWS executive Charlie Bell to start in new role (https://www.geekwire.com/2021/microsoft-amazon-reach-truce-allowing-former-aws-executive-charlie-bell-start-new-role/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslogin&stream=top) Series A Funding Announcement | cloudtamer.io (https://www.cloudtamer.io/announcing-our-series-a/) Reddit hires former Google Cloud exec as its first chief product officer (https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/11/reddit-hires-former-google-cloud-exec-as-its-first-chief-product-officer/) The next big thing in podcasts is talking back (https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/12/22722468/spotify-amazon-facebook-audio-podcast-polls-interact) 1Password's new feature lets you safely share passwords using just a link (https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/12/1passwords-new-feature-lets-you-safely-share-passwords-using-just-a-link/) Coinbase is launching its own NFT platform to take on OpenSea – TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/12/coinbase-is-launching-its-own-nft-platform-to-take-on-opensea/) The Air Force's First Software Chief Stepped Down—But He Won't Be Quiet (https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2021/10/air-forces-first-software-chief-stepped-down-he-wont-be-quiet/186047/) Nonsense Tesla is moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas (https://www.theverge.com/22715458/tesla-move-headquarters-to-austin-texas) VC firm associate has built a crypto marketplace designed for fantasy startup investing (https://twitter.com/KateClarkTweets/status/1445830869151748101The> Confidential Computing Consortium Year in Review, 2021 - Confidential Computing Consortium) Musk vs. Bezos in a Tweet (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1447426189660880898?s=20) Pon agrees to buy Dorel Sports for $810 million (https://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2021/10/11/pon-agrees-buy-dorel-sports-810-million#.YWWYtC-B0dk) The first USB-C iPhone is here thanks to a mod (https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/12/22722123/first-iphone-usb-c-port-robotics-engineering-student-custom) Sponsors strongDM — Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure. Start your free 14-day trial today at strongdm.com/SDT (http://strongdm.com/SDT) CBT Nuggets — Training available for IT Pros anytime, anywhere. Start your 7-day Free Trial today at cbtnuggets.com/sdt (https://cbtnuggets.com/sdt) Conferences GitOpsDays Community Special: GitOps One-Stop Shop Event October 20 (https://www.gitopsdays.com/) TriggerMesh Open Source Software Webinar (https://www.triggermesh.com/oss-intro) - October 28, 2021 MongoDB.local London 2021 (https://events.mongodb.com/dotlocallondon) - November 9, 2021 THAT Conference comes to Texas January 17-20, 2022 (https://that.us/activities/call-for-counselors/tx/2022) Listener Feedback Ed wants you to be Product Manager at VMware based in Spain (https://vmware.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/VMware/job/ESP-Seville-Av-de-Republica-Argentina/Product-Manager-for-RabbitMQ_R2111712) Brian wants you to be a Senior Product Manager - Pipelines in Bangalore (https://global-redhat.icims.com/jobs/89894/senior-product-manager---technical/job?mobile=false&width=1140&height=500&bga=true&needsRedirect=false&jan1offset=-300&jun1offset=-240) or Senior Product Manager - GitOps in Remote, UK (https://global-redhat.icims.com/jobs/89893/senior-product-manager---gitops/job) Brian recommends this jump box (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082ZZ2W14/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) TriggerMesh is hiring! (https://twitter.com/sebgoa/status/1437722696536797185) SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=823) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Brandon: Universel Dual Monitor Arm with Pistons (https://www.bestar.com/product/dual-monitor-arm-ak-ma01d-17/) Coté: A Carnival of Snackery (https://www.audible.com/pd/A-Carnival-of-Snackery-Audiobook/1549108212), new David Sederis diaries, audio of course. Tasty Meats Paul's Whole Hair Thing (https://twitter.com/bridgetkromhout/status/1448351873614827521). Also (https://twitter.com/cote/status/1448556155266084866). Photo Credits Header Image (https://unsplash.com/photos/3oejsU5OQVk) Show Artwork (https://cdn.thenewstack.io/media/2021/09/dbdf6555-image4.png) Show Artwork (https://imgix.datadoghq.com/img/container-report/2021-container-orchestration-report-FACT-10_part-1v3.png?ch=Width,DPR,Save-Data&fit=max&fm=png&auto=format)

The Cover 1 Fantasy Football show, Episode 16, brought to you by hosts Rich Hanes (@BurnRiverSports) and Greg Tompsett (@GregTompsett). Now that we're through the first 5 weeks, who are we planting our flag on, who to panic over, how to handle FAAB Waiver bids, Line-up Decisions, Trade Targets & Regular Season Strategy Fantasy Sponsor - Underdog Fantasy New Users receive free $25 when using Promo Code: COVER1 Link: https://play.underdogfantasy.com/p-cover1-sports Great merch available through Cover 1 Affiliate partner Playbook Products below: https://bit.ly/2ETuWjS Cover 1 would love to hear your thoughts on this topic and the show in general. Comment below and let us what you think! — Don't miss out on our PREMIUM CONTENT -Access to detailed Premium Content. -Access to our video library. -Access to our private Slack channel. -Sneak peek at upcoming content. -Exclusive group film room sessions. & much more. SIGN UP HERE: https://www.cover1.net/premium-content-plans/ Thank you for watching this video, we can't do it without the support of our fans. If you have any ideas for content you'd like to see from us, comment below. — DOWNLOAD THE COVER 1 MOBILE APP! ► Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coverapp ► iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1532587486 — ► Subscribe to our YouTube channel ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on iTunes ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on Google Play ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft Podcast on iTunes ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft on Google Play — Cover 1 provides multi-faceted analysis of the NFL and NFL Draft including: Podcasts, Video blogs, Commentary, Scouting Reports, Highlights and Video Breakdowns. NFL footage displayed is not owned by Cover 1. — — Follow Us Here Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cover1 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@Cover_1_ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cover1NFL/ Official Merchandise:https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/cover-1 The Cover1.net web site and associated Social Media platforms are not endorsed by, directly affiliated with, maintained, authorized, or sponsored by the NFL or any of its clubs, specifically the Buffalo Bills. All products, marks and company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners. The use of any trade name or trademark is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association with the trademark holder of their product brand.

Always Start with VII Troytle is diving into the Xuan Yuan Sword series with the seventh game, because oh heck why not? See the video version of this episode here! Social Media: See everything TroytlePower related by visiting this page! Follow the show on Twitter at @TPPTPPTPwTP or follow Troytle directly at @TroytlePower! Support the show, hear episodes early, get bonus content, and even request specific episodes by checking out the Patreon Page! Check out The Power Play-Throughs Podcast on Youtube for video versions of some episodes! We Can Make This Work Probably Network: Follow the We Can Make This Work Probably Network to keep up with this show and discover our many other podcasts! The place for those with questionable taste! Join the Probably Work Discord! ProbablyWork.com Twitter, Facebook, Instagram: @ProbablyWork Email: ProbablyWorkPod@gmail.com Geek to Geek Media Follow Geek to Geek Media to join our community in geeking out about the things we love. Join our Slack or Discord! GeekToGeekMedia.com Twitter, Instagram: @GeekToGeekMedia Patreon Digital Magazine

The Carbon Robotics self-driving farm bot kills weeds with lasers: 8 150-watt lasers, to be precise. That's pretty cool, but much cooler is that no toxic herbicides are required. That's safer for the farmer, better for the soil, and produces better crops. In this episode of TechFirst, we check out the robot, talk to the CEO of Carbon Robotics Paul Mikesell, and see the results on the fields. Links: Carbon Robotics: https://carbonrobotics.com/ Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 0:00 Laser-powered weed killer 0:47 AI, computer vision, robotics 1:48 Herbicides and weeds 3:50 Health impact and food quality 5:42 Robots with lasers 8:18 How it works 12:13 Autonomous driving 13:08 Speed and ROI 15:11 Solar powered? 17:31 Lighting and computer vision 21:21 Future of farm robots

You're not alone if you're facing anxiety, concerns, and difficult situations in your workplace 18 months into the pandemic—it's a pattern across the globe. A lot of people thought (hoped) we'd be back to normal by this point, or at least adjusting really well to our “new” normal. But it turns out there are just a lot of new problems and questions, fears and insecurities. In today's episode, co-hosts Jeff Mask and Richard Lindner want you to know you're not alone. It's not just a hot topic; it's the anxiety everyone is feeling, whether or not they realize it. They want to help you understand what's going on and give you actionable steps to make things better, to give more clarity, to help you realign and reunite your company.  This is how the episode will go: Validate what you're feeling. Live in that feeling a little bit. Go through some of the causes/effects. Give some hope. Your Experience/Feelings Are Valid We've all been through a lot in the past 18 months, and then we saw some signs that things were getting a little better. Then other things started to creep in. Things like: Tension being a little bit higher  Friction being deeper and hotter Pockets in the business that don't feel as engaged/dialed in Resentment Entitlement Inconsistent sales Overall dysfunction within leadership teams More easily frustrated with people Richard shares their company's story. On Friday, April 13th, 2020, they sent everybody home from their headquarters for a couple weeks, which turned into a month, then a quarter. Then they made the decision to be a virtual first company. They knew they couldn't go back. They still don't know if today is a new normal or a temporary normal. They're in limbo. A couple weeks ago, things seemed to start getting better-ish, but people started leaving. Everyone wanted to know, what are we doing now? People seemed way more disconnected, out of touch, accusatory in tone. It was harder to get people on the same page. Everything seemed forced. They're not in a rhythm, not in alignment.   Then people start leaving.    Why Are People Leaving Your Company? Richard can't help but think, “Uh oh. Did we make it this far, then we're going to fall apart? The world is going to get better, and we're going to crumble? That's what it felt like.”  “Our thoughts go to dark places,” Jeff says. “Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm a horrible leader. Maybe the company isn't as good as I thought it was. Now that things are more stable, people are going where they want to go. Before, they felt imprisoned in this company, but at least it was a place of security. And your ego goes all over the place.” Richard says yes to the ego. They stepped up and supported their people during the bulk of the last year. They cut other things before people. When the first few people put in their resignation, he had to fight his ego. “How dare you leave us when we didn't leave you? Do you know how easy it would have been to just cut this, but we didn't, but now you are? That's my own brokenness and humanity popping up, but I felt it.” Why are people leaving now? For a lot of reasons. First of all, it felt like a lot, because no one left for 18 months. People were exploring new opportunities because this wasn't a cultural fit for them. They had hit a ceiling. All types of normal reasons people leave. Natural ebb and flow of turnover happens. But it didn't for 18 months, so it felt like a lot all at once.  Harvard Business Review has been putting out some great articles about the Great Resignation. It's helpful to put it into the context of a bigger picture. What occurred during the pandemic was a lot of soul-searching. Why am I doing what I'm doing?  People had a lot more flexibility in where they live and work. They're leaving companies and also industries—not just because it's a horrible place to work. Some people leave because your company looks a lot different from the company they signed up for. We've changed.  It's hard enough running a business, and then you slap a pandemic on it. There are so many new variables at play that are tough to navigate. Communicating Well When You're Not Face-to-Face The environment is shifting, so the medium we use to communicate is changing too. Face to face interaction was easier in many ways. The difficulty of going from eyeball to eyeball dialogue to strictly text/Slack/email is that you strip out so much of the richness of communication—tone, body language. As receivers, we fill in the gaps in the texts. And often erroneously when it's a high conflict situation and we're lacking nonverbal cues. One thing Richard does is make himself read the message to someone else or just out loud. Then he checks his tone. Have you ever read a text conversation out loud and noticed the change in inflection/tone when you get to YOUR part? Are you putting a bad guy tone, a Disney villain tone, on the other person's text? Are you ascribing emotion to the conversation that's not actually there?  We filter texts through what's going on with us. We read it with baggage. So Richard does the Disney Villain Test. Take a breath, count to 5, tell himself the best case of what they could have meant, because he just acknowledged the worst case. It probably needs to be a conversation. Want to jump on the phone? Or acknowledge the weirdness. It takes time, but you have to invest the time upfront to deliver communication the right way from the beginning. A five minute conversation can offset weeks of resentment, underperformance, lashing out. Interpersonal stuff is a domino effect. If you feel that tension, when's the last time you connected on a personal level with that team member? There are probably other issues happening in their lives that are more important than work. Some Helpful Tips for Making Those Connections #1: Use a message matrix. It's a simple tool you can download. It lists different scenarios of communication and times to check in or face conflict and different mediums you can use. Knowing which medium to use with what timing with what person is super helpful. #2: Intentionally build relationships of trust.  Check in on people. Flex your emotional intelligence muscle. If you don't have a high EQ, ask for help. It's one of the most critical skill sets we can understand and grow as we're leading through this unique time. #3: Give yourself a break.  Stop beating yourself up so much. Stop expecting perfection. Don't go down the spiral of “everything's falling apart.” #4 Acknowledge It publicly. Not on Facebook, but with your team. A lot of times we leaders think we can't acknowledge a problem until we have a solution, but that's a limiting belief. That is a false narrative. One of the most powerful tools a leader has is to acknowledge something is wrong, even if—especially if—you don't have a solution. You'll see your team breathe a sigh of relief.  Have a virtual meeting with your team. We know there are a lot of things going on personally, and there are a lot of changes in the business. This is normal. We are going to figure out a solution to make it easier to communicate and collaborate. We don't have one yet, but we'll get it. Know that we're committed to changing it. You're not alone. You Can Do This. Tell Us About It. We're all working through leading and growing together. No company or leader has it perfectly figured out. That's okay. Learn from each other. Give yourself space and grace. And take one action today. What's one thing you can do to create a healthier work environment today?   Richard and Jeff want to hear from YOU. What's working for you right now? What have you figured out in your organization as a leader that's helping this transition? And what are your biggest problems? Where are you stuck? What are some areas you can use some help? Where are things going well and why? If you have any really cool tools you'd like to share, they'll give you a shoutout and share them here on the podcast. If you have questions/problems they can help you find a solution to, email them here: feedback@readytolead.com  OTHER SHOWS YOU MIGHT ENJOY: Business Lunch with Roland Frasier and Ryan Deiss Perpetual Traffic with Ralph Burns and Kasim Aslam DigitalMarketer Podcast 

SUBSCRIBE TO SALES SECRETS PODCAST:ITUNES ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/s...​SPOTIFY ► https://open.spotify.com/show/1BKYsQo...​YOUTUBE ► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVUh...​THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SEAMLESS.AI - THE WORLD'S BEST SALES LEADS:WEBSITE ► https://www.seamless.ai/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/seamlessai/JOIN FOR FREE TODAY ► https://login.seamless.ai/invite/podcastBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson, entrepreneur and founder of Seamless.AI. Twice a week, Brandon interviews the world's top sales experts like Jill Konrath, Aaron Ross, John Barrows, Trish Bertuzzi, Mark Hunter, Anthony Iannarino and many more -- to uncover actionable strategies, playbooks, tips and insights you can use to generate more revenue and close more business. If you want to learn the most powerful sales secrets from the top sales experts in the world, Sales Secrets From The Top 1% is the place to find them.SALES SECRET FROM THE TOP 1%WEBSITE ► https://www.secretsalesbook.com/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-secret-book/ABOUT BRANDONBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson (over $100M in sales deals), multi-million dollar sales tech entrepreneur, motivational sales speaker, international sales DJ (DJ NoQ5) and sales author who is obsessed with helping you maximize your sales success.Mr. Bornancin is currently the CEO & Founder at Seamless.ai delivering the world's best sales leads. Over 10,000+ companies use Seamless.ai to generate millions in sales at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Slack, Dell, Oracle & many others.Mr. Bornancin is also the author of "Sales Secrets From The Top 1%" where the world's best sales experts share their secrets to sales success and author of “The Ultimate Guide To Overcoming Sales Objections.”FOLLOW BRANDON:LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbornancin/INSTAGRAM ► https://www.instagram.com/brandonbornancinofficial/FACEBOOK ► https://www.facebook.com/SeamlessAITWITTER ► https://twitter.com/BBornancin

About EwereCloud, DevOps Engineer, Blogger and AuthorLinks: Infrastructure Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch: https://www.amazon.com/Infrastructure-Monitoring-Amazon-CloudWatch-infrastructure-ebook/dp/B08YS2PYKJ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ewere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/nimboya Medium: https://medium.com/@nimboya My Cloud Series: https://mycloudseries.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I periodically make observations that monitoring cloud resources has changed somewhat since I first got started in the world of monitoring. My experience goes back to the original Call of Duty. That's right: Nagios.When you set instances up, it would theoretically tell you when they were unreachable or certain thresholds didn't work. It was janky but it kind of worked, and that was sort of the best we have. The world has progressed as cloud has become more complicated, as technologies have become more sophisticated, and here today to talk about this is the first AWS Hero from Africa and author of a brand new book, Ewere Diagboya. Thank you for joining me.Ewere: Thanks for the opportunity.Corey: So, you recently published a book on CloudWatch. To my understanding, it is the first such book that goes in-depth with not just how to wind up using it, but how to contextualize it as well. How did it come to be, I guess is my first question?Ewere: Yes, thanks a lot, Corey. The name of the book is Infrastructure Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch, and the book came to be from the concept of looking at the ecosystem of AWS cloud computing and we saw that a lot of the things around cloud—I mostly talked about—most of this is [unintelligible 00:01:49] compute part of AWS, which is EC2, the containers, and all that, you find books on all those topics. They are all proliferated all over the internet, you know, and videos and all that.But there is a core behind each of these services that no one actually talks about and amplifies, which is the monitoring part, which helps you to understand what is going on with the system. I mean, knowing what is going on with the system helps you to understand failures, helps you to predict issues, helps you to also envisage when a failure is going to happen so that you can remedy it and also [unintelligible 00:02:19], and in some cases, even give you a historical view of the system to help you understand how a system has behaved over a period of time.Corey: One of the articles that I put out that first really put me on AWS's radar, for better or worse, was something that I was commissioned to write for Linux Journal, back when that was a print publication. And I accidentally wound up getting the cover of it with my article, “CloudWatch is of the devil, but I must use it.” And it was a painful problem that people generally found resonated with them because no one felt they really understood CloudWatch; it was incredibly expensive; it didn't really seem like it was at all intuitive, or that there was any good way to opt out of it, it was just simply there, and if you were going to be monitoring your system in a cloud environment—which of course you should be—it was just sort of the cost of doing business that you then have to pay for a third-party tool to wind up using the CloudWatch metrics that it was gathering, and it was just expensive and unpleasant all around. Now, a lot of the criticisms I put about CloudWatch's limitations in those days, about four years ago, have largely been resolved or at least mitigated in different ways. But is CloudWatch still crappy, I guess, is my question?Ewere: Um, yeah. So, at the moment, I think, like you said, CloudWatch has really evolved over time. I personally also had that issue with CloudWatch when I started using CloudWatch; I had the challenge of usability, I had the challenge of proper integration, and I will talk about my first experience with CloudWatch here. So, when I started my infrastructure work, one of the things I was doing a lot was EC2, basically. I mean, everyone always starts with EC2 at the first time.And then we had a downtime. And then my CTO says, “Okay, [Ewere 00:04:00], check what's going on.” And I'm like, “How do I check?” [laugh]. I mean, I had no idea of what to do.And he says, “Okay, there's a tool called CloudWatch. You should be able to monitor.” And I'm like, “Okay.” I dive into CloudWatch, and boom, I'm confused again. And you look at the console, you see, it shows you certain metrics, and yet [people 00:04:18] don't understand what CPU metric talks about, what does network bandwidth talks about?And here I am trying to dig, and dig, and dig deeper, and I still don't get [laugh] a sense of what is actually going on. But what I needed to find out was, I mean, what was wrong with the memory of the system, so I delved into trying to install the CloudWatch agent, get metrics and all that. But the truth of the matter was that I couldn't really solve my problem very well, but I had [unintelligible 00:04:43] of knowing that I don't have memory out of the box; it's something that has to set up differently. And trust me, after then I didn't touch CloudWatch [laugh] again. Because, like you said, it was a problem, it was a bit difficult to work with.But fast forward a couple of years later, I could actually see someone use CloudWatch for a lot of beautiful stuff, you know? It creates beautiful dashboards, creates some very well-aggregated metrics. And also with the aggregated alarms that CloudWatch comes with, [unintelligible 00:05:12] easy for you to avoid what to call incident fatigue. And then also, the dashboards. I mean, there are so many dashboards that simplified to work with, and it makes it easy and straightforward to configure.So, the bootstrapping and the changes and the improvements on CloudWatch over time has made CloudWatch a go-to tool, and most especially the integration with containers and Kubernetes. I mean, CloudWatch is one of the easiest tools to integrate with EKS, Kubernetes, or other container services that run in AWS; it's just, more or less, one or two lines of setup, and here you go with a lot of beautiful, interesting, and insightful metrics that you will not get out of the box, and if you look at other monitoring tools, it takes a lot of time for you to set up, for you to configure, for you to consistently maintain and to give you those consistent metrics you need to know what's going on with your system from time to time.Corey: The problem I always ran into was that the traditional tools that I was used to using in data centers worked pretty well because you didn't have a whole lot of variability on an hour-to-hour basis. Sure, when you installed new servers or brought up new virtual machines, you had to update the monitoring system. But then you started getting into this world of ephemerality with auto-scaling originally, and later containers, and—God help us all—Lambda now, where it becomes this very strange back-and-forth story of, you need to be able to build something that, I guess, is responsive to that. And there's no good way to get access to some of the things that CloudWatch provides, just because we didn't have access into AWS's systems the way that they do. The inverse, though, is that they don't have access into things running inside of the hypervisor; a classic example has always been memory: memory usage is an example of something that hasn't been able to be displayed traditionally without installing some sort of agent inside of it. Is that still the case? Are there better ways of addressing those things now?Ewere: So, that's still the case, I mean, for EC2 instances. So before, now, we had an agent called a CloudWatch agent. Now, there's a new agent called Unified Cloudwatch Agent which is, I mean, a top-notch from CloudWatch agent. So, at the moment, basically, that's what happens on the EC2 layer. But the good thing is when you're working with containers, or more or less Kubernetes kind of applications or systems, everything comes out of the box.So, with containers, we're talking about a [laugh] lot of moving parts. The container themselves with their own CPU, memory, disk, all the metrics, and then the nodes—or the EC2 instance of the virtual machines running behind them—also having their own unique metrics. So, within the container world, these things are just a click of a button. Everything happens at the same time as a single entity, but within the EC2 instance and ecosystem, you still find this there, although the setup process has been a bit easier and much faster. But in the container world, that problem has totally been eliminated.Corey: When you take a look at someone who's just starting to get a glimmer of awareness around what CloudWatch is and how to contextualize it, what are the most common mistakes people make early on?Ewere: I also talked about this in my book, and one of the mistakes people make in terms of CloudWatch, and monitoring in generalities: “What am I trying to figure out?” [laugh]. If you don't have that answer clearly stated, you're going to run into a lot of problems. You need to answer that question of, “What am I trying to figure out?” I mean, monitoring is so broad, monitoring is so large that if you do not have the answer to that question, you're going to get yourself into a lot of trouble, you're going to get yourself into a lot of confusion, and like I said, if you don't understand what you're trying to figure out in the first place, then you're going to get a lot of data, you're going to get a lot of information, and that can get you confused.And I also talked about what I call alarm fatigues or incident fatigues. This happens when you configure so many alarms, so many metrics, and you're getting a lot of alarms hitting and notification services—whether it's Slack, whether it's an email—and it causes fatigue. What happens here is the person who should know what is going on with the system gets a ton of messages and in that scenario can miss something very important because there's so many messages coming in, so many integrations coming in. So, you should be able to optimize appropriately, to be able to, like you said, conceptualize what you're trying to figure out, what problems are you trying to solve? Most times you really don't figure this out for a start, but there are certain bare minimums you need to know about, and that's part of what I talked about in the book.One of the things that I highlighted in the book when I talked about monitoring of different layers is, when you're talking about monitoring of infrastructure, say compute services, such as virtual machines, or EC2 instances, the certain baseline and metrics you need to take note of that are core to the reliability, the scalability, and the efficiency of your system. And if you focus on these things, you can have a baseline starting point before you start going deeper into things like observability and knowing what's going on entirely with your system. So, baseline understanding of—baseline metrics, and baseline of what you need to check in terms of different kinds of services you're trying to monitor is your starting point. And the mistake people make is that they don't have a baseline. So, we do not have a baseline; they just install a monitoring tool, configure a CloudWatch, and they don't know the problem they're trying to solve [laugh] and that can lead to a lot of confusion.Corey: So, what inspired you from, I guess, kicking the tires on CloudWatch—the way that we all do—and being frustrated and confused by it, all the way to the other side of writing a book on it? What was it that got you to that point? Were you an expert on CloudWatch before you started writing the book, or was it, “Well, by the time this book is done, I will certainly know [laugh] more about the service than I did when I started.”Ewere: Yeah, I think it's a double-edged sword. [laugh]. So, it's a combination of the things you just said. So, first of all, I have experienced with other monitoring tools; I have love for reliability and scalability of a system. I started Kubernetes at some of the early times Kubernetes came out, when it was very difficult to deploy, when it was very difficult to set up.Because I'm looking at how I can make systems a little bit more efficient, a little bit more reliable than having to handle a lot of things like auto-scaling, having to go through the process of understanding how to scale. I mean, that's a school of its own that you need to prepare yourself for. So, first of all, I have a love for making sure systems are reliable and efficient, and second of all, I also want to make sure that I know what is going on with my system per time, as much as possible. The level of visibility of a system gives you the level of control and understanding of what your system is doing per time. So, those two things are very core to me.And then thirdly, I had a plan of a streak of books I want to write based on AWS, and just like monitoring is something that is just new. I mean, if you go to the package website, this is the first book on infrastructure monitoring AWS with CloudWatch; it's not a very common topic to talk about. And I have other topics in my head, and I really want to talk about things like networking, and other topics that you really need to go deep inside to be able to appreciate the value of what you see in there with all those scenarios because in this book, every chapter, I created a scenario of what a real-life monitoring system or what you need to do looks like. So, being that I have those premonitions, I know that whenever it came to, you know, to share with the world what I know in monitoring, what I've learned in monitoring, I took a [unintelligible 00:12:26]. And then secondly, as this opportunity for me to start telling the world about the things I learned, and then I also learned while writing the book because there are certain topics in the book that I'm not so much of an expert in things, like big data and all that.I had to also learn; I had to take some time to do more research, to do more understanding. So, I use CloudWatch, okay? I'm kind of good in CloudWatch, and also, I also had to do more learning to be able to disseminate this information. And also, hopefully, X-Ray some parts of monitoring and different services that people do not really pay so much attention into.Corey: What do you find that is still the most, I guess, confusing to you as you take a look across the ecosystem of the entire CloudWatch space? I mean, every time I play with it, I take a look, and I get lost in, “Oh, they have contributor analyses, and logs, and metrics.” And it's confusing, and every time I wind up, I guess, spiraling out of control. What do you find that, after all of this, is a lot easier for you, and what do you find that's a lot more understandable?Ewere: I'm still going to go back to the containers part. I'm sorry, I'm in love containers. [laugh].Corey: No, no, it's fair. Containers are very popular. Everyone loves them. I'm just basically anti-container based upon no better reason than I'm just stubborn and bloody-minded most of the time.Ewere: [laugh]. So, pretty much like I said, I kind of had experience with other monitoring tools. Trust me, if you want to configure proper container monitoring for other tools, trust me, it's going to take you at least a week or two to get it properly, from the dashboards, to the login configurations, to the piping of the data to the proper storage engine. These are things I talked about in the book because I took monitoring from the ground up. I mean, if you've never done monitoring before, when you take my book, you will understand the basic principles of monitoring.And [funny 00:14:15], you know, monitoring has some big data process, like an ETL process: extraction, transformation, and writing of data into an analytic system. So, first of all, you have to battle that. You have to talk about the availability of your storage engine. What are you using? An Elasticsearch? Are you using an InfluxDB? Where do you want to store your data? And then you have to answer the question of how do I visualize the data? What method do I realize this data? What kind of dashboards do I want to use? What methods of representation do I need to represent this data so that it makes sense to whoever I'm sharing this data with. Because in monitoring, you definitely have to share data with either yourself or with someone else, so the way you present the data needs to make sense. I've seen graphs that do not make sense. So, it requires some level of skill. Like I said, I've [unintelligible 00:15:01] where I spent a week or two having to set up dashboards. And then after setting up the dashboard, someone was like, “I don't understand, and we just need, like, two.” And I'm like, “Really?” [laugh]. You know? Because you spend so much time. And secondly, you discover that repeatability of that process is a problem. Because some of these tools are click and drag; some of them don't have JSON configuration. Some do, some don't. So, you discover that scalability of this kind of system becomes a problem. You can't repeat the dashboards: if you make a change to the system, you need to go back to your dashboard, you need to make some changes, you need to update your login, too, you need to make some changes across the layer. So, all these things is a lot of overhead [laugh] that you can cut off when you use things like Container Insights in CloudWatch—which is a feature of CloudWatch. So, for me, that's a part that you can really, really suck out so much juice from in a very short time, quickly and very efficiently. On the flip side, when you talk about monitoring for big data services, and monitoring for a little bit of serverless, there might be a little steepness in the flow of the learning curve there because if you do not have a good foundation in serverless, when you get into [laugh] Lambda Insights in CloudWatch, trust me, you're going to be put off by that; you're going to get a little bit confused. And then there's also multifunction insights at the moment. So, you need to have some very good, solid foundation in some of those topics before you can get in there and understand some of the data and the metrics that CloudWatch is presenting to you. And then lastly, things like big data, too, there are things that monitoring is still being properly fleshed out. Which I think that in the coming months and years to come, they will become more proper and they will become more presentable than they are at the moment.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: The problem I've always had with dashboards is it seems like managers always want them—“More dashboards, more dashboards”—then you check the usage statistics of who's actually been viewing the dashboards and the answer is, no one since you demoed it to the execs eight months ago. But they always claim to want more. How do you square that?I guess, slicing between what people asked for and what they actually use.Ewere: [laugh]. So yeah, one of the interesting things about dashboards in terms of most especially infrastructure monitoring, is the dashboards people really want is a revenue dashboards. Trust me, that's what they want to see; they want to see the money going up, up, up, [laugh] you know? So, when it comes to—Corey: Oh, yes. Up and to the right, then everyone's happy. But CloudWatch tends to give you just very, very granular, low-level metrics of thing—it's hard to turn that into something executives care about.Ewere: Yeah, what people really care about. But my own take on that is, the dashboards are actually for you and your team to watch, to know what's going on from time to time. But what is key is setting up events across very specific and sensitive data. For example, when any kind of sensitive data is flowing across your system and you need to check that out, then you tie a metric to that, and in turn alarm to it. That is actually the most important thing for anybody.I mean, for the dashboards, it's just for you and your team, like I said, for your personal consumption. “Oh, I can see all the RDS connections are getting too high, we need to upgrade.” Oh, we can see that all, the memory, there was a memory spike in the last two hours. I know that's for you and your team to consume; not for the executive team. But what is really good is being able to do things like aggregate data that you can share.I think that is what the executive team would love to see. When you go back to the core principles of DevOps in terms of the DevOps Handbook, you see things like a mean time to recover, and change failure rate, and all that. The most interesting thing is that all these metrics can be measured only by monitoring. You cannot change failure rates if you don't have a monitoring system that tells you when there was a failure. You cannot know your release frequency when you don't have a metric that measures number of deployments you have and is audited in a particular metric or a particular aggregator system.So, we discovered that the four major things you measure in DevOps are all tied back to monitoring and metrics, at minimum, to understand your system from time to time. So, what the executive team actually needs is to get a summary of what's going on. And one of the things I usually do for almost any company I work for is to share some kind of uptime system with them. And that's where CloudWatch Synthetics Canary come in. So, Synthetic Canary is a service that helps you calculate that helps you check for uptime of the system.So, it's a very simple service. It does a ping, but it is so efficient, and it is so powerful. How is it powerful? It does a ping to a system and it gets a feedback. Now, if the status code of your service, it's not 200 or not 300, it considers it downtime.Now, when you aggregate this data within a period of time, say a month or two, you can actually use that data to calculate the uptime of your system. And that uptime [unintelligible 00:19:50] is something you can actually share to your customers and say, “Okay, we have an SLA of 99.9%. We have an SLA of 99.8%.” That data should not be doctored data; it should not be a data you just cook out of your head; it should be based on your system that you have used, worked with, monitored over a period of time so that the information you share with your customers are genuine, they are truthful, and they are something that they can also see for themselves.Hence companies are using [unintelligible 00:20:19] like status page to know what's going on from time to time whenever there is an incident and report back to their customers. So, these are things that executives will be more interested in than just dashboards, [laugh] dashboards, and more dashboards. So, it's more or less not about what they really ask for, but what you know and what you believe you are going to draw value from. I mean, an executive in a meeting with a client and says, “Hey, we got a system that has 99.9% uptime.”He opens the dashboard or he opens the uptime system and say, “You see our uptime? For the past three months, this has been our metric.” Boom. [snaps fingers]. That's it. That's value, instantly. I'm not showing [laugh] the clients and point of graphs, you know? “Can you explain the memory metric?” That's not going to pass the message, send the message forward.Corey: Since your book came out, I believe, if not, certainly by the time it was finished being written and it was in review phase, they came out with Managed Prometheus and Managed Grafana. It looks almost like they're almost trying to do a completely separate standalone monitoring stack of AWS tooling. Is that a misunderstanding of what the tools look like, or is there something to that?Ewere: Yeah. So, I mean by the time those announced at re:Invent, I'm like, “Oh, snap.” I almost told my publisher, “You know what? We need to add three more chapters.” [laugh]. But unfortunately, we're still in review, in preview.I mean, as a Hero, I kind of have some privilege to be able to—a request for that, but I'm like, okay, I think it's going to change the narrative of what the book is talking about. I think I'm going to pause on that and make sure this finishes with the [unintelligible 00:21:52], and then maybe a second edition, I can always attach that. But hey, I think there's trying to be a galvanization between Prometheus, Grafana, and what CloudWatch stands for. Because at the moment, I think it's currently on pre-release, it's not fully GA at the moment, so you can actually use it. So, if you go to Container Insights, you can see that you can still get how Prometheus and Grafana is presenting the data.So, it's more or less a different view of what you're trying to see. It's trying to give you another perspective of how your data is presented. So, you're going to have CloudWatch: it's going to have CloudWatch dashboards, it's going to have CloudWatch metrics, but hey, this different tools, Prometheus, Grafana, and all that, they all have their unique ways of presenting the data. And part of the reason I believe AWS has Prometheus and Grafana there is, I mean, Prometheus is a huge cloud-native open-source monitoring, presentation, analytics tool; it packs a lot of heat, and a lot of people are so used to it. Everybody like, “Why can't I have Prometheus in CloudWatch?”I mean—so instead of CloudWatch just being a simple monitoring tool, [unintelligible 00:22:54] CloudWatch has become an ecosystem of monitoring tool. So, we got—we're not going to see cloud [unintelligible 00:23:00], or just [unintelligible 00:23:00] log, analytics, metrics, dashboards, no. We're going to see it as an ecosystem where we can plug in other services, and then integrate and work together to give us better performance options, and also different perspectives to the data that is being collected.Corey: What do you think is next, as you take a look across the ecosystem, as far as how people are thinking about monitoring and observability in a cloud context? What are they missing? Where's the next evolution lead?Ewere: Yeah, I think the biggest problem with monitoring, which is part of the introduction part of the book, where I talked about the basic types of monitoring—which is proactive and reactive monitoring—is how do we make sure we know before things happen? [laugh]. And one of the things that can help with that is machine learning. There is a small ecosystem that is not so popular at the moment, which talks about how we can do a lot of machine learning in DevOps monitoring observability. And that means looking at historic data and being able to predict on the basic level.Looking at history, [then are 00:24:06] being able to predict. At the moment, there are very few tools that have models running at the back of the data being collected for monitoring and metrics, which could actually revolutionize monitoring and observability as we see it right now. I mean, even the topic of observability is still new at the moment. It's still very integrated. Observability just came into Cloud, I think, like, two years ago, so it's still being matured.But one thing that has been missing is seeing the value AI can bring into monitoring. I mean, this much [unintelligible 00:24:40] practically tell us, “Hey, by 9 p.m. I'm going to go down. I think your CPU or memory is going down. I think I'm line 14 of your code [laugh] is a problem causing the bug. Please, you need to fix it by 2 p.m. so that by 6 p.m., things can run perfectly.” That is going to revolutionize monitoring. That's going to revolutionize observability and bring a whole new level to how we understand and monitor the systems.Corey: I hope you're right. If you take a look right now, I guess, the schism between monitoring and observability—which I consider to be hipster monitoring, but they get mad when I say that—is there a difference? Is it just new phrasing to describe the same concepts, or is there something really new here?Ewere: In my book, I said, monitoring is looking at it from the outside in, observability is looking at it from the inside out. So, what monitoring does not see under, basically, observability sees. So, they are children of the same mom. That's how I put it. One actually needs the other and both of them cannot be separated from each other.What we've been working with is just understanding the system from the surface. When there's an issue, we go to the aggregated results that come out of the issue. Very basic example: you're in a Java application, and we all know Java is very memory intensive, on the very basic layer. And there's a memory issue. Most times, infrastructure is the first hit with the resultant of that.But the problem is not the infrastructure, it's maybe the code. Maybe garbage collection was not well managed; maybe they have a lot of variables in the code that is not used, and they're just filling up unnecessary memory locations; maybe there's a loop that's not properly managed and properly optimized; maybe there's a resource on objects that has been initialized that has not been closed, which will cause a heap in the memory. So, those are the things observability can help you track. Those are the things that we can help you see. Because observability runs from within the system and send metrics out, while basic monitoring is about understanding what is going on on the surface of the system: memory, CPU, pushing out logs to know what's going on and all that.So, on the basic level, observability helps gives you, kind of, a deeper insight into what monitoring is actually telling you. It's just like the result of what happened. I mean, we are told that the symptoms of COVID is coughing, sneezing, and all that. That's monitoring. [laugh].But before we know that you actually have COVID, we need to go for a test, and that's observability. Telling us what is causing the sneezing, what is causing the coughing, what is causing the nausea, all the symptoms that come out of what monitoring is saying. Monitoring is saying, “You have a cough, you have a runny nose, you're sneezing.” That is monitoring. Observability says, “There is a COVID virus in the bloodstream. We need to fix it.” So, that's how both of them act.Corey: I think that is probably the most concise and clear definition I've ever gotten on the topic. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you view about these things—and of course, if they want to buy your book, we will include a link to that in the [show notes 00:27:40]—where can they find you?Ewere: I'm on LinkedIn; I'm very active on LinkedIn, and I also shared the LinkedIn link. I'm very active on Twitter, too. I tweet once in a while, but definitely, when you send me a message on Twitter, I'm also going to be very active.I also write blogs on Medium, I write a couple of blogs on Medium, and that was part of why AWS recognized me as a Hero because I talk a lot about different services, I help with comparing services for you so you can choose better. I also talk about setting basic concepts, too; if you just want to get your foot wet into some stuff and you need something very summarized, not AWS documentation per se, something that you can just look at and know what you need to do with the service, I talk about them also in my blogs. So yeah, those are the two basic places I'm in: LinkedIn and Twitter.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:28:27]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I appreciate it.Ewere: Thanks a lot.Corey: Ewere Diagboya, head of cloud at My Cloud Series. 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 hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment telling me how many more dashboards you would like me to build that you will never look at.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.

This week, it's a one on one pod with Rob Lim & Jeremy.We chat about what's happening in the B! Slack, Michael Bastian's recent Brook's Brothers Collection, going nuts on Aesop, flexing at home with your soap, missing Adam Kimmel, why J. Crew has always been good, and the post model world?Last but not least, #watches channel heat and asking more from the brands we love.**Listen to the entire episode on Blamo! Extra

Remember to subscribe and toggle the bell icon to never miss a show. Go Seahawks. Follow us on Twitter! Brian Nemhauser: @hawkblogger Evan Hill: @EvanHillHB Nathan Ernst: @Nathane11 Jeff Simmons: @realjeffsimmons Dayna O'Gorman: @DaynaOG Real Hawk Talk: @realhawktalk Support the show on Patreon & get access to our private Slack channel: https://www.patreon.com/hawkblogger

Diese Folge als Video schauen Aus der Preshow: Frischluft, Reimen, Torfrock Heute mit: Canon VR, Skylum, Brennweiten, Geheimtipp zum Fotobearbeiten Fast immer dienstags, gerne mal um 18:00 Uhr: Happy Shooting Live. Täglich im Slack mitmachen – auch Audio-/Videokommentare werden gern angenommen. Danke an alle Spender des freiwilligen Solidaritätsabos. BUNQ-Link für direkte Spenden per Überweisung oder … „#732 – Der Po-Trip“ weiterlesen Der Beitrag #732 – Der Po-Trip ist ursprünglich hier erschienen: Happy Shooting - Der Foto-Podcast.

Aaron & Greg are joined by BLEAV Podcast host Davey Hudson to preview the week 6 MNF match-up between the Buffalo Bills and the Tennessee Titans presented by Uncle Jumbos & Colby Development Guest - Davey Hudson - BLEAV Host Twitter - @Davey_Hudson Buffalo Tennessee Preview Buffalo Bills Tennessee Titans Preview Presenting Sponsor - Uncle Jumbo's https://www.unclejumbosdistillery.com/ Segment Sponsor - Colby Development https://colbydevelopment.com/ Fantasy Sponsor - Underdog Fantasy New Users receive free $25 when using Promo Code: COVER1 Link: https://play.underdogfantasy.com/p-cover1-sports Great merch available through Cover 1 Affiliate partner Playbook Products below: https://bit.ly/2ETuWjS Cover 1 would love to hear your thoughts on this topic and the show in general. Comment below and let us what you think! — Don't miss out on our PREMIUM CONTENT -Access to detailed Premium Content. -Access to our video library. -Access to our private Slack channel. -Sneak peek at upcoming content. -Exclusive group film room sessions. & much more. SIGN UP HERE: https://www.cover1.net/premium-content-plans/ Thank you for watching this video, we can't do it without the support of our fans. If you have any ideas for content you'd like to see from us, comment below. — DOWNLOAD THE COVER 1 MOBILE APP! ► Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coverapp ► iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1532587486 — ► Subscribe to our YouTube channel ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on iTunes ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on Google Play ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft Podcast on iTunes ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft on Google Play — Cover 1 provides multi-faceted analysis of the NFL and NFL Draft including: Podcasts, Video blogs, Commentary, Scouting Reports, Highlights and Video Breakdowns. NFL footage displayed is not owned by Cover 1. — — Follow Us Here Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cover1 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@Cover_1_ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cover1NFL/ Official Merchandise:https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/cover-1 The Cover1.net web site and associated Social Media platforms are not endorsed by, directly affiliated with, maintained, authorized, or sponsored by the NFL or any of its clubs, specifically the Buffalo Bills. All products, marks and company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners. The use of any trade name or trademark is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association with the trademark holder of their product brand.

Aaron & Greg are joined by BLEAV Podcast host Davey Hudson to preview the week 6 MNF match-up between the Buffalo Bills and the Tennessee Titans presented by Uncle Jumbos & Colby DevelopmentGuest - Davey Hudson - BLEAV HostTwitter - @Davey_HudsonBuffalo Tennessee PreviewBuffalo Bills Tennessee Titans PreviewPresenting Sponsor - Uncle Jumbo'shttps://www.unclejumbosdistillery.com/Segment Sponsor - Colby Developmenthttps://colbydevelopment.com/Fantasy Sponsor - Underdog FantasyNew Users receive free $25 when using Promo Code: COVER1Link: https://play.underdogfantasy.com/p-cover1-sportsGreat merch available through Cover 1 Affiliate partner Playbook Products below:https://bit.ly/2ETuWjSCover 1 would love to hear your thoughts on this topic and the show in general. Comment below and let us what you think!—Don't miss out on our PREMIUM CONTENT-Access to detailed Premium Content.-Access to our video library.-Access to our private Slack channel.-Sneak peek at upcoming content.-Exclusive group film room sessions.& much more.SIGN UP HERE: https://www.cover1.net/premium-content-plans/Thank you for watching this video, we can't do it without the support of our fans. If you have any ideas for content you'd like to see from us, comment below.—DOWNLOAD THE COVER 1 MOBILE APP!► Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coverapp► iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1532587486—► Subscribe to our YouTube channel► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on iTunes► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on Google Play► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft Podcast on iTunes► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft on Google Play—Cover 1 provides multi-faceted analysis of the NFL and NFL Draft including: Podcasts, Video blogs, Commentary, Scouting Reports, Highlights and Video Breakdowns. NFL footage displayed is not owned by Cover 1.——Follow Us HereTwitter: https://twitter.com/Cover1Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@Cover_1_Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cover1NFL/Official Merchandise:https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/cover-1The Cover1.net web site and associated Social Media platforms are not endorsed by, directly affiliated with, maintained, authorized, or sponsored by the NFL or any of its clubs, specifically the Buffalo Bills. All products, marks and company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners. The use of any trade name or trademark is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association with the trademark holder of their product brand.

How the Bills Beat the Chiefs, & Buffalo Bills vs Tennessee Titans Matchup In this episode of Disguised Coverage from Cover 1, Anthony Prohaska dives into how the Buffalo Bills beat the Kansas City Chiefs in week 5, and welcomes Buck Reising of 104-5 The Zone and A to Z Sports Nashville to look ahead at the week 6 Monday Night matchup between the Bills and Titans. Presenting Sponsor - One Pie Pizza https://www.onepiepizza.com/menu/ Tell them Cover 1 and Disguised Coverage sent you!! Catch the "Ed Oliver, Buffalo Bills vs Kansas City Chiefs Matchup, & Tremaine Edmunds" episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXX3s... Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pro__Ant​​​​​​ Fantasy Sponsor - Underdog Fantasy Get $10 free when you deposit $10 using Promo Code: COVER1 Link: https://play.underdogfantasy.com/p-co... Great merch available through Cover 1 Affiliate partner Playbook Products below: https://bit.ly/2ETuWjS Cover 1 would love to hear your thoughts on this topic and the show in general. Comment below and let us what you think! — Don't miss out on our PREMIUM CONTENT -Access to detailed Premium Content. -Access to our video library. -Access to our private Slack channel. -Sneak peek at upcoming content. -Exclusive group film room sessions. & much more. SIGN UP HERE: https://www.cover1.net/premium-conten... Thank you for watching this video, we can't do it without the support of our fans. If you have any ideas for content you'd like to see from us, comment below. — DOWNLOAD THE COVER 1 MOBILE APP! ► Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/de... ► iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id15325... — ► Subscribe to our YouTube channel ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on iTunes ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on Google Play ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft Podcast on iTunes ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft on Google Play — Cover 1 provides multi-faceted analysis of the NFL and NFL Draft including: Podcasts, Video blogs, Commentary, Scouting Reports, Highlights and Video Breakdowns. NFL footage displayed is not owned by Cover 1. — — Follow Us Here Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cover_1_ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@Cover_1_ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cover1NFL/ Official Merchandise:https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/co... The Cover1.net web site and associated Social Media platforms are not endorsed by, directly affiliated with, maintained, authorized, or sponsored by the NFL or any of its clubs, specifically the Buffalo Bills. All products, marks and company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners. The use of any trade name or trademark is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association with the trademark holder of their product brand.

Local-first is a set of principles that enables collaborative software without the loss of data ownership associated with the cloud. Martin is a computer scientist on the frontier of this movement, and he joins Mark and Adam to discuss how creative people put their souls into their work; a vision for a generic AWS syncing service; and why local-first could be a breakthrough for indie app developers. @MuseAppHQ hello@museapp.com Show notes Martin Kleppmann University of Cambridge Debussy four-handed piano piece Martin's previous startup, Rapportive Apache Kafka Designing Data-Intensive Applications Writing a book: is it worth it? Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud Ink & Switch Geoffrey Litt Pixelpusher the fish says “what the hell is water?” “crushing it” elevator pitch Google Docs realtime collaboration defrag your hard drive self-hosting an SMTP server and spam filtering thin client Peter van Hardenberg Pixelpusher Automerge “there is stuff you always use; and stuff that won't work when you need it” Slack's free vs paid message retention federation, mesh network CRDTs How we pay for software Swift, Kotlin technology transfer fuzz testing, Monte Carlo simulation local-first Trello clone demo end-to-end encryption Firebase

Global Azure Outage, Ally.io Acquisition, Visual Studio 2022 Yep, Microsoft is Updating Notepad for Windows 11 Too AMD-Based PCs Suffer a 3-15 Percent Performance Hit with Windows 11 Microsoft makes Windows Subsystem for Linux for Windows 11 a separate app in the Microsoft Store It's Official: The PC Market Stalled in Q3 Azure & Cloud Global Azure outage knocked out virtual machines, other VM-dependent services Business as usual for Azure customers despite 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure Microsoft Blames Russia for Most Nation-State Cyberattacks Microsoft 365 EU regulators asking Teams rivals about Microsoft's bundling practices, per Slack's 2020 complaint Microsoft acquires objectives and key results vendor Ally.io and plans to add it to Viva Smooth Scrolling is Coming to Excel for Windows Amazon Embraces Hybrid Work Developer Microsoft delivers near-final VS 2022 Release Candidate and designates November 8 as GA date Microsoft to Launch Visual Studio 2022 on November 8 Xbox Microsoft Embraces Right to Repair Microsoft Announces 20th Anniversary Xbox Hardware Quake Gets a Big Update for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 Tips and picks App pick of the week: Start11 RC App pick of the week: Vivaldi 4.3 Enterprise pick of the week: Ignite sessions are live now Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard Beer pick of the week: Allagash Ghoulschip Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: privacy.com/ww BANDWIDTH.COM/WW akamai.com/ww

Global Azure Outage, Ally.io Acquisition, Visual Studio 2022 Yep, Microsoft is Updating Notepad for Windows 11 Too AMD-Based PCs Suffer a 3-15 Percent Performance Hit with Windows 11 Microsoft makes Windows Subsystem for Linux for Windows 11 a separate app in the Microsoft Store It's Official: The PC Market Stalled in Q3 Azure & Cloud Global Azure outage knocked out virtual machines, other VM-dependent services Business as usual for Azure customers despite 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure Microsoft Blames Russia for Most Nation-State Cyberattacks Microsoft 365 EU regulators asking Teams rivals about Microsoft's bundling practices, per Slack's 2020 complaint Microsoft acquires objectives and key results vendor Ally.io and plans to add it to Viva Smooth Scrolling is Coming to Excel for Windows Amazon Embraces Hybrid Work Developer Microsoft delivers near-final VS 2022 Release Candidate and designates November 8 as GA date Microsoft to Launch Visual Studio 2022 on November 8 Xbox Microsoft Embraces Right to Repair Microsoft Announces 20th Anniversary Xbox Hardware Quake Gets a Big Update for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 Tips and picks App pick of the week: Start11 RC App pick of the week: Vivaldi 4.3 Enterprise pick of the week: Ignite sessions are live now Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard Beer pick of the week: Allagash Ghoulschip Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: privacy.com/ww BANDWIDTH.COM/WW akamai.com/ww

Global Azure Outage, Ally.io Acquisition, Visual Studio 2022 Yep, Microsoft is Updating Notepad for Windows 11 Too AMD-Based PCs Suffer a 3-15 Percent Performance Hit with Windows 11 Microsoft makes Windows Subsystem for Linux for Windows 11 a separate app in the Microsoft Store It's Official: The PC Market Stalled in Q3 Azure & Cloud Global Azure outage knocked out virtual machines, other VM-dependent services Business as usual for Azure customers despite 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure Microsoft Blames Russia for Most Nation-State Cyberattacks Microsoft 365 EU regulators asking Teams rivals about Microsoft's bundling practices, per Slack's 2020 complaint Microsoft acquires objectives and key results vendor Ally.io and plans to add it to Viva Smooth Scrolling is Coming to Excel for Windows Amazon Embraces Hybrid Work Developer Microsoft delivers near-final VS 2022 Release Candidate and designates November 8 as GA date Microsoft to Launch Visual Studio 2022 on November 8 Xbox Microsoft Embraces Right to Repair Microsoft Announces 20th Anniversary Xbox Hardware Quake Gets a Big Update for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 Tips and picks App pick of the week: Start11 RC App pick of the week: Vivaldi 4.3 Enterprise pick of the week: Ignite sessions are live now Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard Beer pick of the week: Allagash Ghoulschip Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: privacy.com/ww BANDWIDTH.COM/WW akamai.com/ww

Global Azure Outage, Ally.io Acquisition, Visual Studio 2022 Yep, Microsoft is Updating Notepad for Windows 11 Too AMD-Based PCs Suffer a 3-15 Percent Performance Hit with Windows 11 Microsoft makes Windows Subsystem for Linux for Windows 11 a separate app in the Microsoft Store It's Official: The PC Market Stalled in Q3 Azure & Cloud Global Azure outage knocked out virtual machines, other VM-dependent services Business as usual for Azure customers despite 2.4 Tbps DDoS attack | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure Microsoft Blames Russia for Most Nation-State Cyberattacks Microsoft 365 EU regulators asking Teams rivals about Microsoft's bundling practices, per Slack's 2020 complaint Microsoft acquires objectives and key results vendor Ally.io and plans to add it to Viva Smooth Scrolling is Coming to Excel for Windows Amazon Embraces Hybrid Work Developer Microsoft delivers near-final VS 2022 Release Candidate and designates November 8 as GA date Microsoft to Launch Visual Studio 2022 on November 8 Xbox Microsoft Embraces Right to Repair Microsoft Announces 20th Anniversary Xbox Hardware Quake Gets a Big Update for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 Tips and picks App pick of the week: Start11 RC App pick of the week: Vivaldi 4.3 Enterprise pick of the week: Ignite sessions are live now Enterprise pick of the week: Microsoft Emissions Impact Dashboard Beer pick of the week: Allagash Ghoulschip Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com Check out Mary Jo's blog at AllAboutMicrosoft.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: privacy.com/ww BANDWIDTH.COM/WW akamai.com/ww

The Learning2 Talk referenced in the episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxX2AT3Cpjs Join Queerwisdom.com Learn more about Slack: https://www.shiftingschools.com/webinars

Welcome, one and all, to the latest episode of The Film Stage Show! Today, Brian Roan, Bill Graham, and Robyn Bahr are joined by Kyle Turner to discuss Cary Fukunaga's No Time to Die and Daniel Craig's 007 cycle. Enter our giveaways, get access to our private Slack channel, and support new episodes by becoming a Patreon contributor. For a limited time, all new Patreon supporters will receive a free Blu-ray/DVD. After becoming a contributor, e-mail podcast@thefilmstage.com for an up-to-date list of available films. This episode of The Film Stage Show is supported by Film Movement, whose latest release, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's masterful new drama Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy opens in NYC and LA theaters on October 15 and will expand. Learn more here: https://filmmovement.com/wheel-of-fortune-and-fantasy#playing

SUBSCRIBE TO SALES SECRETS PODCASTITUNES ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/s...​SPOTIFY ► https://open.spotify.com/show/1BKYsQo...​YOUTUBE ► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVUh...​THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SEAMLESS.AI - THE WORLD'S BEST SALES LEADSWEBSITE ► https://www.seamless.ai/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/seamlessai/JOIN FOR FREE TODAY ► https://login.seamless.ai/invite/podcastBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson, entrepreneur and founder of Seamless.AI. Twice a week, Brandon interviews the world's top sales experts like Jill Konrath, Aaron Ross, John Barrows, Trish Bertuzzi, Mark Hunter, Anthony Iannarino and many more -- to uncover actionable strategies, playbooks, tips and insights you can use to generate more revenue and close more business. If you want to learn the most powerful sales secrets from the top sales experts in the world, Sales Secrets From The Top 1% is the place to find them.SALES SECRET FROM THE TOP 1%WEBSITE ► https://www.secretsalesbook.com/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-secret-book/ABOUT BRANDONBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson (over $100M in sales deals), multi-million dollar sales tech entrepreneur, motivational sales speaker, international sales DJ (DJ NoQ5) and sales author who is obsessed with helping you maximize your sales success.Mr. Bornancin is currently the CEO & Founder at Seamless.ai delivering the world's best sales leads. Over 10,000+ companies use Seamless.ai to generate millions in sales at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Slack, Dell, Oracle & many others.Mr. Bornancin is also the author of "Sales Secrets From The Top 1%" where the world's best sales experts share their secrets to sales success and author of “The Ultimate Guide To Overcoming Sales Objections.”FOLLOW BRANDONLINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbornancin/INSTAGRAM ► https://www.instagram.com/brandonbornancinofficial/FACEBOOK ► https://www.facebook.com/SeamlessAITWITTER ► https://twitter.com/BBornancin

Imke Feldmann is among the first few to have recognized the incredible value and potential of this thing called Power Pivot in Excel (which was the precursor to Power BI).  And did she ever run with it, launching quite the successful solo consultancy and training service!  She exemplifies the helpful nature of the data community through her blog, The BIccountant, where she shares her amazing Microsoft BI tool knowledge. Her background is in Finance and Accounting, but you'll quickly realize she knows a great deal more than just Finance and Accounting! Contact Imke: The BIccountant Imke's Twitter References in this Episode: Imke's Github MS Power BI Idea - Customizable Ribbon - Please Upvote :) MS Power BI Idea - Speed Up PQ By Breaking Refresh Chain - Please Upvote :) Episode Timeline: 3:00 - The value of outsourcing certain business functions, Imke's path to Power BI starts with Rob's blog, a multi-dimensional cube discussion breaks out! 19:45 - One of Power BI's strengths is collaboration, Imke LOVES her some Power Query and M and loves DAX not so much 33:45 - Imke has a BRILLIANT idea about how to improve Power Query and some other improvements that we'd like to see in PQ 52:30 -  Rob's VS code experience, how COVID has affected the consulting business, Staying solo vs growing a company and how Imke determines which clients she takes on Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Today's guest is Imke Feldmann. We've been working for a long time, nearly a year to arrange the schedules to get her on the show, and I'm so glad that we finally managed to do it. For a moment, imagine that it's 2010, 2011, that era. During that timeframe, I felt not quite alone, but a member of a very slowly growing and small community of people who had glimpsed what Power Pivot could do. And for those of you who don't know what Power Pivot is, and that was the version of Power BI, the first version that was embedded only in Excel. And at the time, the way the community grew, we'll use a metaphor for this. Imagine that the community was a map of the world and the map is all dark, but slowly, you'd see these little dim lights lighting up like one over here in the UK, one in the Southwest corner of the United States, very faintly. Rob Collie (00:00:51): And these would be people who were just becoming aware of this thing, this Power Pivot thing, and you'd watch them. They'd sort of show up on the radar, very tentatively at first kind of dipping their toe, and then that light would get brighter, and brighter, and brighter over time, as they really leaned in, and they learned more and more, and they became more adept at it. And this was the way things went for a long time. And then in 2011, out of nowhere in Germany on the map, this light comes on at full intensity, brightly declaring itself as super talented and powerful. And that was what it felt like to come across Imke Feldmann. Rob Collie (00:01:27): Like all of our guests, there's a little bit of that accidental path in her career, but also a tremendous sense of being deliberate. When this stuff crossed her radar, she appreciated it immediately. And I didn't know this until this conversation, but she quit her corporate job in 2013, the same year that I founded P3 as a real company, and became a freelancer. So for eight plus years, she has been a full time Power BI professional. There truly aren't that many people who can say that in the world. Our conversation predictably wandered. At one point, we got pretty deep into the notion of M and Power Query and it's screaming need for more buttons on its ribbon. And Imke has some fantastic ideas on how they should be addressing that. Rob Collie (00:02:14): We also, of course, naturally talked about the differences between remaining a solo freelancer as she has, in contrast to the path that I chose, which is scaling up a consulting practice business. Along the way we reprised the old and completely pointless debate of DAX versus M, I even try to get Tom hooked on M as his new obsession. We'll see how well that goes. Most importantly though, it was just a tremendous pleasure to finally get to talk to Imke at length for the first time after all these years, we literally crossed paths 10 years ago. So it was a conversation 10 years in the making compress down to an hour and change. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did, so let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:56): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please? Announcer (00:03:00): This is The Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast, with your host Rod Collie, and your cohost Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to P3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:03:24): Welcome to the show Imke Feldmann. How are you today? Imke Feldmann (00:03:27): Thank you, Rob. Great. It's a great day here over in Germany. Rob Collie (00:03:30): We have been talking about doing this for the better part of a year. So I'm glad that we're landing the guest, Imke is here. I really appreciate you doing this. So why don't we start with the basics. What are you up to these days? What do you do for a living? Imke Feldmann (00:03:48): I have people building great Power BI solutions these days. Rob Collie (00:03:55): Ah, yes. Imke Feldmann (00:03:55): That's how I fill my days. Rob Collie (00:03:58): I hear that that's a good business. Imke Feldmann (00:03:58): Yeah, it is. Rob Collie (00:04:03): So, and your website is? Imke Feldmann (00:04:06): Thebiaccountant.com. Rob Collie (00:04:07): Is that what you are on Twitter as well? Imke Feldmann (00:04:08): Yes. That's also my Twitter handle theBIccountant without an A in the middle. I just replaced the A from accountant with a BI. Rob Collie (00:04:17): There you go. Imke Feldmann (00:04:18): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:04:18): That's right. So that means that I'm going to make a tremendous leap here, wait till you see these powers of observation and deduction. You must have an accounting background? Imke Feldmann (00:04:29): I do, yes. Rob Collie (00:04:30): See you look at that. That's why I make the money. Okay, let's start there, was accounting your first career out of school? Imke Feldmann (00:04:39): Yes. I went to university and studied some economics or business stuff there, they'll know it's translated into English. And then I worked as a business controller. After that, I took over a job to lead a bookkeeping departments or to work with an area where the numbers came from basically. And then after that, I worked as the finance director, where I was responsible for a whole bunch of areas, controlling bookkeeping, IT, HR, and production. So that was quite a job with a broad range of responsibilities. Rob Collie (00:05:18): So you mentioned, kind of slipped IT into that list, right? Imke Feldmann (00:05:23): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:05:23): There's all these things in that list of responsibilities that all seemed they belong together, right? Bookkeeping, accounting, control or finance, IT. We've run into this before, with actually a number of people, that a lot of times the accounting or finance function in a company kind of wins the job of IT by default. Imke Feldmann (00:05:45): Yeah. It seems quite common in Germany, at least I would say. Rob Collie (00:05:48): I get multiple examples, but one that I can absolutely point to is Trevor Hardy from the Canadian Football League, he is in accounting, accounting and finance. And just by default, well, that's close to computers. Imke Feldmann (00:06:00): Yes. Rob Collie (00:06:01): And so it just kind of pulls the IT function in. Now is that true at really large organizations in Germany or is it a mid market thing? Imke Feldmann (00:06:09): No I would say a mid market thing. Rob Collie (00:06:12): That's true here too. So when there isn't an IT org yet it ends up being, oftentimes it falls to the finance and accounting function. Hey, that's familiar. It's kind of funny when you think about it, but it's familiar. And isn't finance itself pretty different from accounting? How much of a leap is that? What was that transition like for you taking over the finance function as well? We tend to talk about these things, at least in the US, is like almost like completely separate functions at times. Imke Feldmann (00:06:43): It depends, but at least it had something to do with my former education, which wasn't the case with IT. So, I mean, of course on a certain management level, you are responsible for things that you're not necessarily familiar with in detail. You just have to manage the people that know the details and do the jobs for you. So that was not too big an issue I must admit. Rob Collie (00:07:10): My first job out of school was Microsoft, an organization of that size, I was hyper specialized in terms of what I did. At this company at P, we are nowhere near that scale, and there's a lot more of that multiple hat wearing. I've definitely been getting used to that over the last decade, the first decade plus of my career, not so much. Imke Feldmann (00:07:31): Yeah. That's interesting because I basically went completely the other way around. I see myself now as working as a technical specialist and as a freelancer, I don't have to manage any employees anymore. Rob Collie (00:07:47): Well, so now you wear all the hats? Imke Feldmann (00:07:49): Yes. In a certain way, yes. Rob Collie (00:07:51): Okay. There's no HR department necessarily, right, so it's just you. But marketing, sales, delivery, everything. Imke Feldmann (00:08:01): Yep, that's true. Yep. And when I first started, I tried to do everything by myself, but the test changed as well. So in the past I started to outsource more things, but to external companies, not internal staff. Rob Collie (00:08:17): So you're talking about outsourcing certain functions in your current business, is that correct? Imke Feldmann (00:08:22): Yes, yes. Rob Collie (00:08:22): So it's interesting, right? Even that comes with tremendous risk when you delegate a certain function to an outside party whose incentives and interests they are never going to be 100% aligned with yours. Even we have been taken for a ride multiple times by third-party consulting firms that we've hired to perform certain functions for us. Imke Feldmann (00:08:46): Oh, no I don't outsource and your services that I directly provide to my clients. Rob Collie (00:08:49): Oh, no, no. Imke Feldmann (00:08:50): No. Rob Collie (00:08:50): No, we don't either. But I'm saying for example, our Salesforce implementation for instance- Imke Feldmann (00:08:56): Okay, mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob Collie (00:08:57): ... Has been a tremendous money sink for us over the years. Where we're at is good, but the ROI on that spend has been pretty poor. It's really easy to throw a bunch of money at that and it just grinds and grinds and grinds. And so this contrast that I'm getting around to is really important because that's not what it's like to be a good Power BI consultant, right? You're not that kind of risk for your clients. But if you go out and hire out some sort of IT related services for example, like Salesforce development, we're exposed to that same sort of drag you out into the deep water and drown you business model, that's not how we operate. I'm pretty sure that's not how you operate either. And so anyway, when you start talking about outsourcing, I just thought, oh, we should probably talk about that. Have you outsourced anything for your own sort of back office? Imke Feldmann (00:09:52): Back office stuff, yeah. My blog, WordPress stuff, or computer stuff in the background. So security [inaudible 00:09:59] the stuff and things like that, things that are not my core, I hire consultants to help me out with things that I would formally Google, spend hours Googling with. Rob Collie (00:10:09): Yes. Imke Feldmann (00:10:10): Now I just hire consultants to do that. Or for example, for Power Automate, this is something that I wanted to learn and I saw the big potential for clients. And there I also did private training basically, or coaching, or how you called it, hire specialists. Rob Collie (00:10:27): To kind of getting you going? Imke Feldmann (00:10:29): Exactly, exactly. Rob Collie (00:10:30): And those things that you've outsourced for your back office, have there been any that felt like what I described you end up deep in the spend and deepen the project going, "What's going on here?" Imke Feldmann (00:10:41): I'm usually looking for freelancers on that. And I made quiet good experiences with it, I must say. Rob Collie (00:10:49): Well done. Well done. All right. So let's rewind a bit, we'll get to the point where you're in charge of the finance department, which of course includes IT. Imke Feldmann (00:10:58): Not necessarily so. I felt quite sad for the guys who I had to manage because I said, "Well, I'm really sorry, but you will hear a lot of questions from me, especially at the beginning of our journey," because I had to learn so much in order to be a good manager for them. So that was quite different situation compared to the management roles in finance that I had before, because there I had the impression that I knew something, but IT was basically blank. Rob Collie (00:11:30): I would imagine that that experience turned out to be very important, the good cross pollination, the exposure to the IT function and sort of like seeing it from their side of the table, how valuable is that turned out to be for your career? Imke Feldmann (00:11:45): I think it was a good learning and really interesting experience for me just to feel comfortable with saying that I have no clue and ask the people how things work and just feel relaxed about not being the expert in a certain area and just be open to ask, to get a general understanding of things. Rob Collie (00:12:09): That's definitely the way to do it, is to be honest and transparent and ask all the questions you need to do. It's easier said than done. I think a lot of people feel the need to bluff in those sorts of situations. And that usually comes back to haunt them, not always. Imke Feldmann (00:12:25): No, that's true. Rob Collie (00:12:27): Some people do get away with it, which is a little sad. So at what point did you discover Power BI? Imke Feldmann (00:12:35): I didn't discover Power BI, I discovered Power Pivot, for your blog of course. Rob Collie (00:12:41): Oh, really? Imke Feldmann (00:12:43): Yes, yes, yes, yes. I think it was in, must be 2011, something like that. Rob Collie (00:12:50): Early, yeah. Imke Feldmann (00:12:51): Yeah. Quite early. When I was building a multidimensional cube with a freelancer for our finance department, then I was just searching a bit what is possible, how we should approach this and things like that. So we started with multi-dimensional cube because that was something where I could find literature about and also find experts who could have me building that. But when doing so, I really liked the whole experience and it was a really excellent project that I liked very much. And so I just searched around in the internet and tried to find out what's going on in that area. And this is where I discovered your blog. Rob Collie (00:13:35): I have no idea. First of all, I had no idea that my old blog was where you first crossed paths with this. Imke Feldmann (00:13:42): I think [inaudible 00:13:43]. Rob Collie (00:13:44): And secondly, I had no idea that it was that early. I mean, I remember when you showed up on the radar, Scott [inaudible 00:13:51] had discovered your blog and said, "Hey, Rob, have you seen this? Have you seen what she is doing? She is amazing." That wasn't 2011, that was a little bit later. I don't remember when but... Imke Feldmann (00:14:06): No, I think we've met first. I think we met on the Mr. XR Forum on some crazy stuff I did there. I cannot even remember what that was, but I started blogging in 2015 and we definitely met before. Rob Collie (00:14:21): That's what it was. It was the forums. And Scott was the one that had stumbled upon what you were doing there and brought my attention to it. I was like, whoa. It was like... Imke Feldmann (00:14:34): That last really some crazy stuff. I think I was moving data models from one Excel file to another or something like that. Some crazy stuff with [inaudible 00:14:43] and so on. Rob Collie (00:14:44): You obviously remember a better than I do. But I just remember being jaw dropped, blown away, impressed, by what you were doing. And the thing is the world of Power Pivot interest at that point in time still seems so small. The community still seems so small that for you to emerge on our radar fully formed, already blowing our minds, that was the first thing we ever heard from you. That was a real outlier because usually the way the curve of awareness went with other members of the community is that like, you'd see something modest from them. And you'd sorta like witnessed their upward trajectory as they developed. Of course, you've continued to improve and learn and all of that since then. But as far as our experience of it, it was you just showed up already at the graduate level, just like where did she come from? So cool. So you said that you enjoyed the multi-dimensional cube project? Imke Feldmann (00:15:43): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. I don't know MDX, but I totally enjoyed the project. So being able to build a reporting solution for my own company, basically then for the company I worked for, and doing it live with a consultant with a freelancer on my hand, discussing how things should look like and just seeing the thing form before my eyes and grow. And this was just such an enjoyable experience for me. Rob Collie (00:16:11): So the thing that's striking about that for me is, there's no doubt that the multi-dimensional product from Microsoft was a valuable product. It did good things. But I never have heard someone say that they really enjoyed the implementation process as a client, right? Imke Feldmann (00:16:31): Okay. Rob Collie (00:16:31): You had a freelancer doing the work. So something you said there really jumped out at me, it was, sort of like doing the project live. So the way that this worked traditionally, at least in the US, is the consultant would interview you about your requirements and write a big long requirements document and then disappear and go build a whole bunch of stuff and come back and show it to you, and it's completely not what anyone expected. It's almost like you're on completely different planets. Obviously, if you'd had that experience, you would not be saying that you enjoyed it. So there had to be something different about the way that you and that freelancer interacted. Do you remember what the workflow was like? Imke Feldmann (00:17:16): What we did is that we often met together and just looked at where we're at and what the next steps should be. And we definitely had specific targets in mind. So there were some reports that I had defined as a target, and around these reports I was aware that we needed something that a proper data model, because I also knew that I wanted to have some sort of a general set up that could be carried from Excel as well. So I knew about cube functions, and I knew that on one hand I needed these reports that had formerly been within our ERP system. Also, I wanted them to be in a separate solution that was under my control and independent from the ERP system. And on the other hand, I wanted some more. So I wanted the flexibility to be able to vary this data and for certain other purposes in the controlling department as well. So basically being able to do ad hoc analysis on it. Imke Feldmann (00:18:23): And we met often and I showed a certain interest in how the table logic was created. So I knew that the MDX was over my head at the time, but I showed a very strong interest in which table are created, how they relate to each other, and that was quite unusual. At least this is what the [inaudible 00:18:47] the freelancer told me. Rob Collie (00:18:49): I bet. Imke Feldmann (00:18:50): He said that he doesn't see that very often that clients showed this sort of interest. Rob Collie (00:18:56): Did he say, "Yeah. You really seem to be having fun with this. Most of my clients don't enjoy this." You said that you met very often, so were there times where he was writing MDX while you were in the room? Imke Feldmann (00:19:10): Sometimes yes, because I said, "Well, can we switch this a bit or make some changes?" And sometimes he said, "Well, I can try adjust now." Because he came over for one day or half a day, and then we spoke things through and defined further things. And if we were finishing early, he would just stay and do some coding there. But apart from that, he would work from home and do the big stuff. Rob Collie (00:19:37): OLAP originally it stands for online analytical processing, where online meant not batch, right? It meant you could ask a question and get the answer while you were still sitting there. Imke Feldmann (00:19:51): Okay. Oh, really? Rob Collie (00:19:53): That's what online meant. Imke Feldmann (00:19:54): It's interesting. Rob Collie (00:19:56): It basically meant almost like real time. It's a cousin of real time, that's what online meant at that point, as opposed to offline where you write a query and submit it and come back next week right? So that's what the online and OLAP comes from. Imke Feldmann (00:20:12): Oh, interesting. Rob Collie (00:20:13): We would pick a different terminology of OLAP were it invented today. So something interesting about, it sounds like your experience, and I did not anticipate drilling into your experience with multi-dimensional on this conversation, but I think it's really important is that at least some portion of that project that you sponsored and implemented with the freelancer, at least some portion of the work was similarly performed online. Meaning the two of you were sort of in real time communication as things evolved. And the old model and the vast majority of multidimensional solutions that have ever been built in the world, the MDX powered solutions, were built and an offline model, where the majority of the communication supposedly takes place in the form of a requirements document. Rob Collie (00:21:05): And that was a deeply, deeply, deeply flawed approach to the problem, that just doesn't actually work. So I guess it's not surprising to me that the one time I've ever heard someone say they really enjoyed that multi-dimensional project, that at least a portion of that multidimensional project was sort of almost like real-time collaboratively performed rather than completely asynchronous, right? I guess we want to be really geeky, we could say it was a synchronous model of communication as opposed to an asynchronous one. And Power BI really facilitates that kind of interaction. Imke Feldmann (00:21:41): Absolutely. Rob Collie (00:21:42): The reason why the MDX multi-dimensional model worked the way it did, or there was two reasons, one is a legitimate one on one of them is more cynical. So the legitimate reason is, is that it required reprocessing of the cube for every change, it's just too slow, right? The stakeholder, the business stakeholder doesn't typically have the time or the patience to sit there while the code's being written, because it's so long between even just implementing a formula change sometimes would be, well, we need to wait an hour. And so the attention span of the business person can't be held for good reason there, right? And so that sort of drove it into an asynchronous model. Rob Collie (00:22:23): The other reason is, is that that is asynchronous model turned out to be a really good business model for the consultants, because the fact that it didn't work meant that every project lasted forever. And so that's the cynical reason. But Power BI is not long delays. You change the measure formula, or you add an extra relationship, or heck even bringing in a new table, just a brand new table, bring it in, it wasn't even in the model, now it's in the model. End to end that can sometimes be measured in minutes or even seconds. And so you can retain engaged collaborative interest. Now it's not like you're always doing that, right? There's still room for offline asynchronous work in our business, but really critical portions of it can be performed the other way. And I think that makes a huge difference. Imke Feldmann (00:23:13): Yep. And that's what I like about it. So it's so great to be able to have, as a consultant, to perform really relatively large tasks without any further involvement of other people. Which, I mean, honestly, I don't call myself a team worker, not because I don't love other people also, but teamwork means you have to communicate with other people, make sure that they know what you're working on. So there are so many interfaces that have to be maintained if you're working with other people. And so I really laugh the way I work currently being able to deliver full solutions as a one woman show consultant. That is really a pleasure for me. That's really my preferred way of work, I must say. Because I can really focus on the things that have to be done and I'm able to deliver value in a relatively short time for the clients. Rob Collie (00:24:14): That's a really interesting concept. There are certain kinds of problems in which collaboration, a team collaboration is absolutely necessary. The magic of collaboration sometimes can beat problems that no individual could ever beat. At the same time though, there's this other dynamic, right, where having a team working on a problem is actually a real liability because the communication complexity between the people becomes the majority of the work. Here's a really hyper simplified example. There used to be sort of a three-person committee, if you will, that was running our company P3, me and two other people. Imke Feldmann (00:24:57): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob Collie (00:24:58): And so all leadership decisions were essentially handled at that level. Well, things change, people move on, right? And so we went from a three person committee to a two person committee. We didn't anticipate the two of us who stayed, right? We did not anticipate how much simpler that was going to make things. We thought, just do the math, right, it's going to be like, well, it's one less person to get on the same page. So it's going to be a one-third reduction in complexity. It was actually double that because we went from having three pairs of communication, right, the triangle has three sides, to a line that only has one side, right? So there was only one linkage that needed to be maintained as opposed to three geometrically, combinatorially, whatever we're going to say, right? It just became- Imke Feldmann (00:25:45): Exponential. Rob Collie (00:25:45): ... Exponetially simpler. And so for problems that can be soloed, you have this amazing savings in efficiency, in clarity, even, right? Imke Feldmann (00:25:59): Yup. Rob Collie (00:25:59): There's just so many advantages when you can execute as one person, then there's the other examples like our company at our size now, even ignoring the number of consultants that we need to do our business, just the back office alone, we need the difference in skills. We need the difference in talents and interests and everything. We simply could not exist without that kind of collaboration. However, when our consultants were working with a client, usually it's essentially a one-on-one type of thing, right? We don't typically put teams of consultants on the same project. We might have multiple consultants working for the same client and they might be building something that's somehow integrated, but it's still very similar, I think to your model, when you actually watch sort of the work being done, there's this amazing savings and complexities. Imke Feldmann (00:26:50): Yup, that's true. Of course I have a network in the background. So when big problems arise where I need brain input, of course, I have a network, but it's not a former company. Rob Collie (00:27:02): And that's how we work too, right? We have all kinds of internal Slack channels. For some reason we adopted Slack years ago before Teams was really a thing. So Slack is sort of like our internal social network. There's a lot of discussion of problems, and solutions, and a lot of knowledge sharing, and people helping each other out behind the scenes in that same way. Again, we do bring multiple consultants into particularly large projects, but it's not like there's three people working together on the same formula. In Power BI, the things that you do in ETL, the things that you do in power query are intimately interrelated with the data model and the decks that you need to create. And imagine parceling that out to three different people. You have one formula writer, one data modeler, one ETL specialist, you would never ever get anywhere in that kind of approach. Imke Feldmann (00:28:00): Not necessarily. I mean, the tax people are the person responsible for the data model. He could write down his requirements. He could define the tables basically. And then someone could try to get the data from the sources. But of course, then you get some feedback that the data isn't there or that the model has to be shaped in a different way. So it has two sides to it. But that's interesting to see that you have the same experience, that Power BI models or solutions of a certain size that can very well be handled by one person alone. And that really brings speed, and flexibility, and agility to the whole development process I think. Rob Collie (00:28:41): You communicate with yourself at what's above giga? Peta, petabit? you communicate with yourself at petabit speed and you communicate with others through a noisy 2,400 baud modem that's constantly breaking up. It's amazing what that can do for you sometimes. So there comes a point in your journey where you decide to go freelance. Imke Feldmann (00:29:07): Yup. Rob Collie (00:29:08): That's a courageous leap. When did that happen and what led you to that conclusion? Imke Feldmann (00:29:13): I made the decision in 2012 already to do that. Rob Collie (00:29:19): Wow. Imke Feldmann (00:29:20): And I just saw the light. I just saw the light in Power Pivot and then Power Query came along and I saw what Microsoft was after. And as I said, I enjoyed the building of the cube, getting my hands dirty, reading about the technologies behind it and so on. And this was what I felt passionate about. And I also had the idea that I needed some break from company politics. And so I just thought, well, I give it a try. And if it doesn't work, I can find a job after that or find a company where I work for at any time after that. So I just tried it and it worked. Rob Collie (00:30:05): So you decided in 2012, did you make the break in 2012 as well? Imke Feldmann (00:30:12): I prepared it, and then I just in 2013, I started solo. Rob Collie (00:30:18): Okay. 2013 is also when we formally formed our company. For 2010-2013, it was a blog. I had other jobs. I had other clients essentially, but I wasn't really hanging out the shingle so to speak, as you know, we're not an actual business really until 2013. And I guess it's not much accident that we both kind of did the same thing about the same time, it's that demand was finally sufficient I think in 2013 to support going solo. In 2012, there weren't enough clients to even support one consultant. And so, oh, that's great. And I think you really liked Power Query too, does M speak to you? Imke Feldmann (00:31:02): Yes. Yes. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:31:03): It does, doesn't it? Imke Feldmann (00:31:04): I really prefer Power Query or M over DAX, I must admit. It has been much more liable to me than DAX. Rob Collie (00:31:15): Oh, and I liked you so much before you said that. I'm team DAX all the way. Imke Feldmann (00:31:23): I know. I know. I know. I mean, of course I love to use DAX as well, but I really feel very, very strong about Power Query. And I mean, I had such a great journey with it. I mean, it was really [inaudible 00:31:35] work for me personally, that I did with it. And it was just a great journey to understand how things work. I mean, this has been the first coding language for me that I really learned. And it was just a great journey to learn all the things and starting to blog about it. And of course, I started basically helping people in the forum, that's where I basically built my knowledge about it, solving other people's problems. And this was just a great journey. And Polar Query has always been good to me than DAX. Rob Collie (00:32:14): This is really cool, right? So you fell in love with Power Pivot, so DAX and data model, right? There was no Power Query. Imke Feldmann (00:32:21): Mm-hmm (affirmative)-, that's true. Rob Collie (00:32:23): Okay. And because we had no Power Query, there were many, many, many things you couldn't do in Power Pivot unless your data source was a database. Imke Feldmann (00:32:30): Yup. Rob Collie (00:32:31): Because you needed views created that gave you the right shape tables, right? If your original data source didn't have a lookup table, a dimension table, you had to make one. And how are you going to make one without Power Query? It gets crazy, right? At least unbelievable. So try to mentally travel back for a moment to the point in time where you're willing to, and not just, it doesn't sound like you were just willing to, you were eager to go solo to become a freelancer, right, with just DAX and data modeling. And then after that, this thing comes along that you light up when you talk about. You didn't have this thing that you love, but you were already in, that doesn't happen very often. Imke Feldmann (00:33:18): It could be that loved DAX at the beginning, but it just started to disappoint me at sometimes. Rob Collie (00:33:29): Oh, okay. Thomas LaRock (00:33:29): It disappoints everyone. Rob Collie (00:33:29): I'm just devastated. Imke Feldmann (00:33:35): No, I mean, it's amazing what DAX can do, but I mean, we all know it looks easy at the beginning, but then you can really get trapped in certain situations. Rob Collie (00:33:46): Yeah. I described these two things is like the length and width of a rectangle, Power Query and DAX. Take your pick, which one's the width, which one's the length? I don't care. And then we ask which one is more responsible for the area of the rectangle, right? Neither. You can double the length of either of them and it doubles the area of the rectangle. So it's really ironic that I'm so sort of firmly on team DAX for a number of reasons. Number one, is that I'm really not actually that good at it compared to the people who've come along since. Like my book, for instance, I think, I look at it as this is the 100 and maybe the 200 level course at university, maybe the first in the second course, maybe, but it's definitely not the third course. The thing that you take in your third or fourth year of university, that's not covered in my book in terms of DAX. Rob Collie (00:34:44): And basically every one of the consultants at our company is better at DAX than I am. And that's great. That's really good. And the other thing that's ironic about my love of DAX over M, is if these two were in conflict, which they aren't. Imke Feldmann (00:35:00): No they are. Rob Collie (00:35:02): Is that I actually was trying for years to get a Power Query like project started on the Excel team. I knew how much time was being chewed up in the world just transforming data, not analyzing it even, just getting things ready for analysis. It's just ungodly amounts of time. And so I was obsessed with end-user ETL. When I was on the Excel team, it was like a running joke, someone would mention in a meeting, "Well, that's kind of like ETL," and other people would go, "Oh no, no, don't say that in front of Rob, he's going to get started and he won't shut up about it for the next 30 minutes." On the podcast with the Power Query team, I told them I'm really glad that no one ever agreed to fund my project on the Excel team because now that I see what Power Query is like I grossly underestimated how much work needed to go into something like that. And I'm glad that Microsoft isn't saddled with some old and completely inadequate solution to the Power Query space, because now that I've seen what the real thing looks like, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, we would've never been able to pull that off." Rob Collie (00:36:14): So the thing that I was most obsessed with is the thing that now that it's actually been built, for some reason, I just find M to be, I don't know, there's like a reverse gravity there that pushes me away. Imke Feldmann (00:36:26): What I actually would like to see is that there's less need to use M in the Power Query product. So first, the only thing I was dreaming about was finally to have a function library that can easily be shipped from then, or that you can download from internet or wherever, where you can use additional functions in your M code. So this was the first thing that I was really passionate about and thought that we should have such a thing in Power Query to be able to make more cool things, or group steps together. But now what I really think we should actually have and see in Power Query is the ability to build our own ribbons and to the query editor. Rob Collie (00:37:13): Yes. Imke Feldmann (00:37:13): Like we have in an Excel. So this is something that in my eyes would really bring a big push to the product and actually would make so much sense for the people who start using these products. I mean the whole Power platform can have so many benefits for finance department, all departments, but I mean, I'm passionate about finance departments. But have you counted how many low-code languages are in there, if you include Power Apps and Power Automate and all these things? Rob Collie (00:37:50): Low-code. Imke Feldmann (00:37:50): And honestly, in order to come up with any solution that makes sense in a business environment, I would say in all of these solutions, there is no way around the code at the end. I mean, you get quite far with clicky, clicky, but I haven't seen solutions where you get around the languages. And now imagine the typical finance people who really they know the Excel formulas and some of them might know VBA as well. And now their server uses new low-code, no-code word, and just get your head around about five or six new languages that you all have to know and learn in order to get something useful and so on. So I think that's just not feasible for people who have real jobs in the business to learn all that. Rob Collie (00:38:42): Well, that's what you're here for, right? That's what your business is for and that's what P3 is for. Imke Feldmann (00:38:48): We get them started and the products are great. And if there are people in the companies who have a drive to learn things and take the time they get their heads around it, but it could be easier. It could be easier with things like that, where we could provide additional user interfaces and just make it even easier for people to build great solutions for them or adapt solutions that consultants had build initially, but to maintain them by themselves and make adjustments to them if needed. Rob Collie (00:39:19): So [inaudible 00:39:20] has an old joke where he says, when he's doing a presentation or something, he says, "That's a good question. And I define good question as a question I know the answer to, right." And then he says, "But then a great question is a question that is covered by the very next slide." So there's a similar parallel joke to make here, which is that, that idea you just talked about with the ribbons and everything, right? So if I said, it's a smart idea, what I would mean is, again, this is a joke, right? I would mean that that's an idea that I agree with and have kind of already had. But if I say it's a brilliant idea- Imke Feldmann (00:39:55): Okay. Rob Collie (00:39:56): ... Then it's an even better version of an idea that I've already had that has never occurred to me. Your idea is a brilliant idea. Imke Feldmann (00:40:02): Okay. Rob Collie (00:40:06): It goes beyond. So I have been advocating privately behind the scenes with the Power Query team forever telling them that they need about three or four more ribbon tabs. There's just way too many commonly encountered problems for which you can imagine there being a button for, and there's no button. Imke Feldmann (00:40:28): Exactly. Rob Collie (00:40:29): And it's like, I don't understand. I used to be on teams like that, but I don't understand why they haven't gotten to this. Because it seems so low hanging fruit. They've already built the engine, they've built the language, right? The language can already handle this, but you actually had two brilliant ideas in there that had never occurred to me. First of all, I'm used to the idea that the community can't contribute libraries of functions, they can't do that for DAX. Imke Feldmann (00:40:57): Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob Collie (00:40:58): That's not even like engineering possible for DAX. And the reason for it is, is that the DAX engine is so heavily optimized in so many ways that there'd be no way to plug in some new function that's unpredictable in terms of what it needs to do. All of these things, they're all inherently interrelated and they make changes in the storage and the query engine to make this function work better and vice versa, because it has to take advantage of the index compression scheme and all of that kind of stuff. It's actually not possible, is the wrong word, but it's actually orders of magnitude more difficult, if not impossible to allow DAX to have UDF, user-defined function type of feature. Rob Collie (00:41:42): I don't think Power Query is like that though. Maybe naively, because again, I'm not on the internals team on the Power Query side. But it does seem like a UDF capability is at least much more feasible- Imke Feldmann (00:41:53): Absolutely. Rob Collie (00:41:54): ... For Power Query, which does execute row by row essentially. Other languages have this, right? One of the reasons that R is so popular is not that R is so awesome, is that R has tremendous libraries of commonly solved problems that you can just go grab off the internet or off the shelf and plug into your solution. Imke Feldmann (00:42:14): I have my own library I've created. You can go to my GitHub and you'll see 50, 60 custom M functions. You can package them in a record and [inaudible 00:42:24] them as a library and your M code, or you could even connect live to them and run them with an execute statement. But this is too difficult, although it's just a couple of clicks, but it's too difficult or at least intimidating for the beginners, who really Power Query beginners who start with the products, I think there's so much potential to make their life easier. And that's not through some coding stuff, or I know this function, I know that function, that's really can only come in my eyes through user interface with buttons. Rob Collie (00:42:59): Yeah, I agree. And just as importantly for me, is that I might actually come around and be like, just as much team Power Query as team DAX. Honestly, my frustration is just the M language and just my total lack of desire to learn it. [crosstalk 00:43:16]. It is what it really comes down to. It's not about M, it's not about Power Query, it's about me. Whereas again, I know the need that it fills is massively important. So it's not that I think it's a bad mission, I think it's like the mission in a lot of ways. I was obsessed with it long before I ever crossed paths with business intelligence, I was obsessed with data transformation, end user data transformation. It's just a problem that's about as ubiquitous as it gets. So let's make it happen. We agree, the two of us, that's it, right? It's like we need to go provide a unified front. Imke Feldmann (00:43:52): I think that that's an idea in the idea forum, I might send the link that you can maybe post. Rob Collie (00:43:56): We want that thing up, voted to the moon. I'll even go figure out what my sign in is on the ideas side. Imke Feldmann (00:44:08): Oh, good luck with it. Rob Collie (00:44:09): Which is absolutely impossible. I have no idea which of the 14 counts. And then I'll try to create a new one and it'll go, "Nah, you're not allowed to. We know it's you, but we won't tell you who it is, what your email address is." So I completely agree. So there's so many problems. I always struggle to produce the list. It's like I need to be writing down the list of things that are crucial, but here's an example. Remove duplicates, but control which duplicate you keep. That's a problem that can't be solved in the GUI today. Imke Feldmann (00:44:48): And you need the intimidating type of buffer that you have to write by hand around it, which is just pain. Rob Collie (00:44:56): Remove dups and don't care which one you keep. Okay, fine. That's a great simple button. There should be an advanced section that allows you to specify, oh, but before you keep the dups, sort by this column or sort in the following manner. Imke Feldmann (00:45:10): Exactly. Rob Collie (00:45:10): And then keep the first one of each group. It's easy for us to say outside the team, but apparently that is a, we just make a joke, right? That's apparently a Manhattan project level of software to add that extra button. Anyway, we'll get that. Thomas LaRock (00:45:27): That doesn't make sense to me though. I'm fascinated by all of your conversation and you guys are a hundred miles away from me in a lot of this stuff, but I could listen to it all day. But no, the fact that Excel can't do the remove duplicates, except for like the first of each one of something, that's a simple group by. In my head, I sit there and go that's easily solvable because Excel and DAX does such great stuff that I would never want to do in TSQL, how the hell do we stumble across a thing that's been solved by straight up SQL language that somehow can't get into an Excel? Rob Collie (00:46:01): Well, let's explain the problem very clearly and see if we're on the same page as to what the problem is, but either way it'll be valuable. So let's say you have a whole bunch of orders, a table full of orders. That is a really wide Franken table. It's got things like customer ID, customer address, customer phone number, but also what product they ordered, and how much of it, and how much it cost. Okay, and a date, a date of the order. All right. And you've been given this table because the people that are responsible for this system, they think that what you want is a report and not a data source. And this is incredibly common. Okay. So you need to extract a customer's dimension or lookup table out of this. You need to create a customer's table so that you can build a good star schema model. Okay. And Power Query is right there to help you. Power Query will help you invent a customer's look up table where one wasn't provided, and that's awesome. Rob Collie (00:46:58): Okay. So you say, okay, see customer ID this column. I want to remove duplicates based on that column. Okay, great. But now it's just that the order that the data came in from the report file or the database or whatever that will determine which duplicate is kept. What you really want to do of course is take the most recent customer order of each customer ID because they've probably moved. They may have changed phone numbers, whatever, right? You want their most recent contact information. You don't want their contact information for 15 years ago. And the M language allows you to solve this problem essentially sort by date, and then keep the most recent, but only if you get into the code manually, and as Imke points out, it's not even if you go into the code, the things that you would want to do, if you do a sort, you can add a sort step to the Power Query with the buttons, with the GUI, and then you do the remove duplicates and it ignores the source. Imke Feldmann (00:47:59): Yes. Rob Collie (00:48:02): The GUI almost tries to tell you that it's impossible, but if you know about table dot buffer. Imke Feldmann (00:48:07): So the question is why do we have a sort command in Power Query when it doesn't give the sort order? I mean, that is the question to ask. But that's how it is. Rob Collie (00:48:16): It sorts the results. It sorts the results, it just doesn't sort for the intermediate steps. Imke Feldmann (00:48:20): Why? No, that's quite technical. But would just be great if such a common task could be done with buttons that is reliable at the end. I fully agree. Rob Collie (00:48:35): So Tom, I think this one's really just an example of, again, I truly think that M and Power Query, just like DAX and data modeling, the Power BI data modeling, both of these things belong in the software hall of fame of all time. It is amazing, Power Query, M, is just ridiculously amazing. It's one of the best things ever invented. Remember this is someone who's associated with being a critic of it. Imke Feldmann (00:49:04): Yeah, you're making progress, it's great to see. Rob Collie (00:49:07): And yet I'm telling you that it's one of the top five things ever invented probably. And I think there's a certain tendency when you've done something that amazing to lose track of the last mile. I think it's more of a human thing. Imke Feldmann (00:49:19): Maybe, but I mean, what I see is that they are investing quite a lot in data flows, which makes a lot of sense as well in my eyes. Rob Collie (00:49:27): All that really does though, as far as you and I are concerned, Imke, is it makes it even more important that they solve this problem. Because it's now exposed in two different usage scenarios. Imke Feldmann (00:49:37): Yeah, you're right. Rob Collie (00:49:39): And I want my data flow to be able to control which duplicates are kept too. So that's what I'm saying. There's all these big sort of infrastructural technical challenges that do tend to draw resources. And it's not a neglect thing. Imke Feldmann (00:49:54): No, no. Rob Collie (00:49:54): It isn't like a willful failure or anything like that, I don't want to paint that kind of negative of a picture. Imke Feldmann (00:49:59): No. Rob Collie (00:50:00): It's just that out here in reality, the inability to do, even if we just identified the top 10 things like this, addressing those top 10 things with GUI, with buttons, what have I think in the world, maybe even a bigger impact than the entire data flows project, right? Because you would expand the footprint of human beings that are advocates of this stuff and then you go build data flows. You don't have to think of it as either or, right? They should do both. It's just that I think it's hard to appreciate the impact of those 10 buttons when you're on the software team. It's easier to appreciate the impact of data flows, which is massive. I don't mean to denigrate that. I think it's crazy good. It's just that this other thing is of a similar magnitude in terms of benefit, but it's harder to appreciate when you're on the software team. It's easier to appreciate when you're out here in the trenches, living it every single day. And every time I run into a problem like this, I have to put my hand up and say to my own team, I have to say, " Help." Thomas LaRock (00:51:02): So a casual observation I have is that you wish for there to exist one tool that will handle all of your data janitorial needs. And that tool doesn't necessarily exist because life is dirty, so is your data and you're never going to anticipate everything possible. Now, should that sorting functionality exist in that duplicates, the scenario gave me? Yeah, probably. But there's always going to be something next. And that's why I go to you and I say, the thing that you've described to me is you need your data to be tidy so that it can be consumed and used by a lot of these features that we've talked about today. And in order to get to tidy data, there's no necessarily one tool. Thomas LaRock (00:51:48): You're a big fan of the ETL, Rob. You know that, hey, maybe I need to take the source data and run it through some Python scripts, or some M, or something first before it goes to this next thing. And that's the reality that we really have. What you're wishing for is the one tool, the one button to rule it all. And that's going to take a while before that ever comes around. Rob Collie (00:52:09): The thing is though, is that M is ridiculously complete. Imke Feldmann (00:52:14): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:52:15): You can do anything with it. And it's a language that's optimized for data transformation. So I know you can do anything with C++ too, right? But this is a data crunching, data transformation, specialized language that is really complete. And its UI is woefully under serving the capabilities of the engine. And so I suppose we could imagine and deliberately design a data transformation scenario that maybe M couldn't do it. Imke Feldmann (00:52:45): No. Rob Collie (00:52:46): I think that'd be a very difficult challenge considering how good M is. Imke Feldmann (00:52:49): I think in terms of logic, M can do anything, but in terms of performance, there is some room for improvements. So because there's a streaming semantic running in the background, and as long as the stream runs through all the steps, if you have complex queries, this can really slow things down. And currently there is no button or command in the M language to cut the stream and say, well, stop it here and buffer what you have calculated until here, and then continue from there. So if you have really complex stuff that would benefit from an intermediate buffer, then you can store that in an Azure blob or CSV, or whatever. Specifically if you're working with data flows, you can create some automatic processes that would enable this kind of buffering. Imke Feldmann (00:53:45): And then you will see that the speed of the whole process that can really increase dramatically because in some situations, the speed in M drops exponentially. And these are occasions where a buffer would really helped things, but we don't have it yet in the engine of Power Query. So this was what really be something else that would be fairly beneficial if we wouldn't have to make these work-arounds through things. Rob Collie (00:54:14): Tom, that just occurred to me, I can't believe this is the first time that this thought has crossed my mind. But I think that you might fall into an abyss of love with M. Thomas LaRock (00:54:28): Well, I'm a huge James Bond fan, but... Rob Collie (00:54:30): Oh, no. I think you would really, really just dig it. Thomas LaRock (00:54:38): I don't think I have time to take on a new relationship at this point. I'm still with Python and R, so I mean, I don't know. I'm not going to disagree, I'm just, please don't start a new addiction for me. Rob Collie (00:54:51): Think of the content though, that you could produce over time. The M versus SQL versus Python treatises. Thomas LaRock (00:54:59): Cookbook. Rob Collie (00:55:00): You were made for this mission Tom. Thomas LaRock (00:55:03): Okay. So we'll have to talk later about it. You can sweet talk me. You know I've let you sweet talk me into any [inaudible 00:55:08]. Rob Collie (00:55:08): That's right, that's right. Come on, Tom. Get into M, you know that thing that I have nothing but praise for, that I just love to death, you need to do that. Thomas LaRock (00:55:18): For you. That's what you want to do, is you want to learn it but [inaudible 00:55:21] through me. Rob Collie (00:55:22): Oh, that wouldn't work. I would be, "Oh yeah, well this is still M." Thomas LaRock (00:55:29): You're going to be like, "Tom, where's your latest blog post on M so I can read it and hate upon it even more?" Rob Collie (00:55:37): No, I would not read. Just as the first step. Thomas LaRock (00:55:42): I'm going to read it, but not leave a comment about how much I hate it. Rob Collie (00:55:45): Let's go back to talking about how we did a bunch of big fat Fisher-Price buttons for me to mash my thumbs in the UI. That's what I need. Thomas LaRock (00:55:54): You know what? I'll do that. I'll open up VS code and I'll just build this one big button, it's Rob's button. Rob Collie (00:56:00): Hey, you won't believe this, but I recently installed VS code. Thomas LaRock (00:56:03): I don't believe it, why? Rob Collie (00:56:05): Well, because I needed to edit, not even write, because I'm not capable of it. I needed to edit an interface, add on customization for World of Warcraft. And the only purpose of this World of Warcraft add on interface modification was to allow me to drop snarky comments into a particular channel of the conversation based on the button that I press. I needed a menu of snarky comments to drop at particular points in time. It's hard to type them out all the time, right? So it's just like, now here we go. I dropped one of those. I dropped one of those. Thomas LaRock (00:56:37): We got to get you a real job or something. You got way too much time on your hands. Rob Collie (00:56:42): That was my number one contribution to the World of Warcraft Guild. For a couple of months, there was the snarky rogue chat. Thomas LaRock (00:56:48): You know that is on brand. Rob Collie (00:56:56): It prefixed every comment in the chat with a prefix, you came from rogue chat 9,000. So that people who aren't on the joke were like, "Why is this guy, he's usually very quiet, become so obnoxious. Look at the things he's saying." Anyway. So VS code. And that also involved GitHub. Because my friend who wrote the stub, the shell of this add on for me is a vice president at GitHub. So of course he puts the code in GitHub and points me to it and then points me to VS code, and I'm like, "Oh, you're making me work now? Okay. But you wrote the shell for me, so okay. All right. I'll play ball." So it doesn't sound like you regret your decision to go solo. Imke Feldmann (00:57:40): Absolutely. Rob Collie (00:57:41): You're not looking to go back to corporate life. Imke Feldmann (00:57:43): Absolutely not. Rob Collie (00:57:44): Not missing that. So what can you tell us about the last year or two? What impact, if any, did COVID have on your business? Imke Feldmann (00:57:52): Business has grown especially the last year. So people needed more reports than ever and solutions. So it really, I don't know whether it was COVID effect or just the fact that Power BI is growing and growing. Rob Collie (00:58:07): I'm sure it's both. So the dynamic we saw during 2020. So 2020 would be the, if you're going to have a year that was negatively impacted by COVID, it would have been 2020. And what we saw in 2020 was that we were definitely not acquiring new clients. We weren't making new relationships at nearly the rate we had been people weren't taking risks on meeting a new BI firm. That wasn't something that there was as much appetite for as there had been. However, amongst the clients where we already had a good relationship, we'd already been working with them for a while, their needs for data work expanded as a result of COVID because it did, it created all kinds of new problems and it invalidated so many existing blueprints of tribal knowledge of how we run the business. When reality changes, you need new maps, you need new campuses. Rob Collie (00:59:04): And so on net, we ended up our overall business still grew modestly over the course of 2020, year over year compared to 2019. But then when the new clients started to become viable again, people started looking, we're interested in making new relationships, 2021 has been a very, very strong year of growth, not moderate, really kind of crazy. How do you keep up with increased demand as a one person shop? Imke Feldmann (00:59:35): Saying no. Rob Collie (00:59:36): You have to make your peace with saying no. At one point in my history, I faced sort of the same thing and I decided not to say no, and instead decided to grow the company. That brought an enormous amount of risk and stress- Imke Feldmann (00:59:55): I can imagine. Rob Collie (00:59:55): ... Into my life that I did not anticipate its magnitude. I'm sure I anticipated it, but I didn't anticipate the magnitude of it. I'm very grateful that I'd made that decision though, because where we are today is incredible. That's a rocky transition. So today everything runs like clockwork basically. We have a lot of growth ahead of us that seems almost like it's just going to happen, we're just going to keep growing for a long time. But we had to set the table we had to build our organism as a company into a very different form than what it had been when it was just me. And that molting process it was very painful. I don't pretend that the scaling decision is the right decision, it's very much a personal one. I've certainly lived that. If the version of me that made the decision to scale the company knew everything that was coming, it would have been a much harder decision to make. You kind of have to have a little bit of naive optimism even to make that leap. Imke Feldmann (01:00:57): I can imagine that once you get these things figured out and with the dynamic that the product has, that has a good chance to get it going into a very successful business, I believe. Rob Collie (01:01:10): Well, with your profile and with the growing demand for these sorts of services, the percentage of no that you have to say is just going to keep going up. Imke Feldmann (01:01:20): Yeah. But I made my decision and that's just fine. Rob Collie (01:01:25): I'm very supportive of that decision. I don't have any criticism of it, again, especially knowing what I know now. But if there's going to be come a point where you're going to be saying yes 1% of the time, and the answer to that is ultimately, well, you just raise your rates, which is also very difficult to do. In the end, it's almost like an auction for your services. You need to run yourself like Google. There's a 40 hour block of Imke time coming up for availability. We'll just put it on eBay. Imke Feldmann (01:01:59): I mean, it's just nice to be able to choose with whom you work with. That's just nice. And I earned enough money, so that's fine. So I'm happy with that. Rob Collie (01:02:12): How do you choose who you work with? Is it mostly based on industry? Is it mostly based on job function that you're helping? Or is it more about the specific people? There's all kinds of things that could... Let's say if I came to your website today, I filled out your contact form, what are the things that I could say in that contact for a message that would lead you to say no, versus leads you to say maybe? Imke Feldmann (01:02:37): What I really like to do is to work with finance directors. So basically not people exactly like me, but I like to see that the managers approached me and they have an interest in the product itself and also therefore an interest to push it into their departments. So this is for me, a very, very good starting point because it's an area I'm familiar with. I know that there's enough critical support to get the decisions that have to be made and maybe also push IT to help with certain things. This is really one of my favorite set ups, I would say. Rob Collie (01:03:19): Yeah, we do a lot of work with finance departments as well. How long does sort of your average relationship run with a client? How long do you end up working with the same organization on average? Imke Feldmann (01:03:31): That's hard to say, that's really completely different. It can be the initial five days kickoff where we set up a PNL statement connect all the finance data and they go along with that. And basically, never hear again, or just occasionally hear again, "Can you help me with this problem or that problem?" And it could also be going on for years, basically with breaks in between of course, but some customers, they come every now and then when they want to expand things. Now I have a customer that I'm working on some hours or even days ever week since over a year by now. Rob Collie (01:04:15): That sounds similar to my experience as a freelancer, when it was just me, less similar to our business today, a little bit less. I mean, I think it's still more similar than not. It's just that the dial has moved a little bit. Imke Feldmann (01:04:32): So how long are your engagements then, usually? Rob Collie (01:04:35): Most of our engagements are, if we start out doing kind of that kickoff you're talking about, we started like a project with people, that tends to not be the end. We don't typically have people just immediately vanish after that because that's usually the point at which, I mean, they've got something working already, very often after the first week or so of working with a client, they've usually got some really amazing things built already at that point. But at the same time, that's really just at the beginning of the appetite. Usually there are things that are

About TimTim's tech career spans over 20 years through various sectors. Tim's initial journey into tech started as a US Marine. Later, he left government contracting for the private sector, working both in large corporate environments and in small startups. While working in the private sector, he honed his skills in systems administration and operations for largeUnix-based datastores.Today, Tim leverages his years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with clients in his current role. Tim is also a father of five children, as well as a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. Currently, he is the reigning American National and 3-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in his division.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/elchefe The Duckbill Group: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Periodically, I have a whole bunch of guests come on up, second time. Now, it's easy to take the naive approach of assuming that it's because it's easier for me to find a guest if I know them and don't have to reach out to brand new people all the time. This is absolutely correct; I'm exceedingly lazy. But I don't have too many folks on a third time, but that changes today.My guest is Tim Banks. I've had him on the show twice before, both times it led to really interesting conversations around a wide variety of things. Since those episodes, Tim has taken the job as a principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. Yes, that is probably the strangest interview process you can imagine, but here we are. Tim, thank you so much for joining me both on the show and in the business.Tim: My pleasure, Corey. It was definitely an interesting interview process, you know, but I was glad to be here. So, I'm happy to be here a third time. I don't know if you get a jacket like you do in Saturday Night Live, if you host, like, a fifth time, but we'll see. Maybe it's a vest. A cool vest would be nice.Corey: We can come up with something.[ effectively, it can be like reverse hangman where you wind up getting a vest and every time you come on after that you get a sleeve, then you get a second sleeve, and then you get a collar, and we can do all kinds of neat stuff.Tim: I actually like that idea a lot.Corey: So, I'm super excited to be able to have this conversation with you because I don't normally talk a lot on this show about what cloud economics is because my guest usually is not as deep into the space as I am, and that's fine; people should never be as deep into this space as I am, in the general sense, unless they work here. Awesome. But I do guest on other shows, and people ask me all kinds of questions about AWS billing and cloud economics, and that's fine, it's great, but they don't ask the questions about the space in the same way that I would and the way that I think about it. So, it's hard for me to interview myself. Now, I'm not saying I won't try it someday, but it's challenging. But today, I get to take the easy path out and talk to you about it. So Tim, what the hell is a principal cloud economist?Tim: So, a principal cloud economist, is a cloud computing expert, both in architecture and practice, who looks at cloud cost in the same way that a lot of folks look at cloud security, or cloud resilience, or cloud performance. So, the same engineering concerns you have about making sure that your API stays up all the time, or to make sure that you don't have people that are able to escape containers or to make sure that you can have super, super low response times, is the same engineering fundamentals that I look at when I'm trying to find a way to reduce your AWS bill.Corey: Okay. When we say cloud cost and cloud economics, the natural picture that leads to mind is, “Oh, I get it. You're an Excel jockey.” And sometimes, yeah, we all kind of play those roles, but what you're talking about is something else entirely. You're talking about engineering expertise.And sure enough, if you look at the job postings we have for roles on the team from time to time, we have not yet hired anyone who does not have an engineering and architecture background. That seems odd to folks who do not spend a lot of time thinking about the AWS bill. I'm told those people are what is known as ‘happy.' But here we are. Why do we care about the engineering aspect of any of this?Tim: Well, I think first and foremost because what we're doing in essence, is still engineering. People aren't putting construction paper up on [laugh] AWS; sometimes they do put recipes up on there, but it still involves working on a computer, and writing code, and deploying it somewhere. So, to have that basic understanding of what it is that folks are doing on the platform, you have to have some engineering experience, first and foremost. Secondly, the fact of the matter is that most cost optimization, in my opinion, can be done on the whiteboard, before anything else, and really I think should be done on the whiteboard before anything else. And so the Excel aspect of it is always reactive. “We have now spent this much. How much was it? Where did it go?” And now we have to figure out where it went.I like to figure out and get a ballpark on how much something is going to cost before I write the first line of code. I want to know, hey, we have a tier here, we're using this kind of storage, it's going to take this kind of instance types. Okay, well, I've got an idea of how much it's going to cost. And I was like, “You know, that's going to be expensive. Before we do anything, is there a way that we can reduce costs there?”And so I'm reverse engineering that on already deployed workloads. Or when customers want to say, “Hey, we were thinking about doing this, and this is our proposed architecture,” I'm going to look at it and say, “Well, if you do this and this and this and this, you can save money.”Corey: So, it sounds like you and I have a bit of a philosophical disagreement in some ways. One of my recurring talking points has always been that, “Oh, by and large, application developers don't need to think overly much about cloud cost. What they need to know generally fits on an index card.” It's, okay, big things cost more than small things; if you turn something on, it will never get turned off and will bill you in perpetuity; data transfer has some weird stuff; and if you store data, you pay for data, like, that level of baseline understanding. When I'm trying to build something out my immediate thought is, great, is this thing possible?Because A, I don't always know that it is, and B, I'm super bad at computers so for me, it may absolutely not be, whereas you're talking about baking cost assessments into the architecture as a day one type of approach, even when sketching ideas out on the whiteboard. I'm curious as to how we diverge there. Can you talk more about your philosophy?Tim: Sure. And the reason I do that is because, as most folks that have an engineering background in cloud infrastructure will tell you, you want to build resilience in, on the whiteboard. You certainly want to build performance in, on the whiteboard, right? And security folks will tell you you want to do security on the whiteboard. Because those things are hard to fix after they're deployed.As soon as they're deployed, without that, you now have technical debt. If you don't consider cost optimization and cost efficiency on the whiteboard, and then you try and do it after it's deployed, you not only have technical debt, you may have actual real debt.Corey: One of the comments I tend to give a lot is that architecture and cost are the same thing in the world of cloud. And I think that we might be in violent agreement, as Liz Fong-Jones is fond of framing it, where I am acutely aware of aspects of cost and that does factor into how I build things on the whiteboard—let's also be very clear, most of the things that I build are very small scale; the largest cost by a landslide is the time I spend building it—in practice, that's an awful lot of environments; people are always more expensive than the AWS environment they're working on. But instead, it's about baking in the assumptions and making sure you're not coming up with something that is going to just be wasteful and horrible out of the gate, and I guess part of that also is the fact that I am at a level of billing understanding that I sort of absorbed these concepts intrinsically. Because to me, there is no difference between cost and architecture in an environment like this. You're right, there's always an inherent trade-off between cost and durability. On the one hand, I don't like that. On the other, it feels like it's been true forever and I don't see a way out of it.Tim: It is inescapable. And it's interesting because you talk about the level of an application developer or something like that, like what is your level of concern, but retroactively, we'll go in for cost optimization houses—and I've done this as far back as when I was working at AWS has a TAM—and I'll ask the question to an application developer or database administrator, and I'm like, “Why do you do this? What do you have a string value for something that could be a Boolean?” And you'll ask, “Well, what difference does that make?” Well, it makes a big difference when you're talking about cycles for CPU.You can reduce your CPU consumption on a database instance by changing a string to a Boolean, you need fewer instances, or you need a less powerful instance, or you need less memory. And now you can run a less expensive instance for your database architecture. Well, maybe for one node it's not that biggest difference, but if you're talking about something that's multi-AZ and multi-node, I mean, that can be a significant amount of savings just by making one simple change.Corey: And that might be the difference right there. I didn't realize that, offhand. It makes sense if you think about it, but just realizing that I've made that mistake on one of my DynamoDB tables. It costs something like seven cents a month right now, so it's not something I'm rushing to optimize, but you're right, expand that out by a factor of a million or so, and we're talking serious money, and then that sort of optimization makes an awful lot of sense. I think that my position on it is that when you're building out something small scale as a demo or a proof of concept, spending time on optimizations like this is not the best use of anyone's time or brain sweat, for lack of a better term. How do you wind up deciding when it's time to focus on stuff like that?Tim: Well, first, I will say that—I daresay that somewhere in the 80% of production workloads are just—were the POC, [laugh] right? Because, like, “It worked for this to get funding, let's run it,” right?Corey: Let they who does not have a DynamoDB table in production with the word ‘test' or ‘dev' in it cast the first stone.Tim: It's certainly not me. So, I understand how some of those decisions get made. And that's why I think it's better to think about it early. Because as I mentioned before, when you start something and say, “Hey, this works for now,” and you don't give consideration to that in the future, or consideration for what it's going to be like in the future, and when you start doing it, you'll paint yourself into corners. That's how you get something like static values put in somewhere, or that's how you get something like, well, “We have to run this instance type because we didn't build in the ability to be more microservice-based or stateless or anything like that.”You've seen people that say, “Hey, we could save you a lot of money if you can move this thing off to a different tier.” And it's like, “Well, that would be an extensive rewrite of code; that'd be very expensive.” I daresay that's the main reason why most AS/400s are still being used right now is because it's too expensive to rewrite the code.Corey: Yeah, and there's no AWS/400 that they can migrate to. Yet. Re:Invent is nigh.Tim: So, I think that's why, even at the very beginning, even if you were saying, “Well, this is something we will do later.” Don't make it impossible for you to do later in your code. Don't make it impossible for you to do later in your architecture. Make things as modular as possible, so that way you can say, “Hey”—later on down the road—“Oh, we can switch this instance type.” Or, “Here's a new managed service that we can maybe save money on doing this.”And you allow yourself to switch things out, or turn different knobs, or change the way you do things, and give yourself more options in the future, whether those options are for resilience, or those options or for security, or those options are for performance, or they're for cost optimizations. If you make binding decisions earlier on, you're going to have debt that's going to build up at some point in the future, and then you're going to have to pay the piper. Sometimes that piper is going to be AWS.Corey: One thing that I think gets lost in a lot of conversations about cloud economics—because I know that it happened to me when I first started this place—where I am planning to basically go out and be the world's leading expert in AWS cost analysis and understanding and optimization. Great. Then I went out into the world and started doing some of my first engagements, and they looked a lot less like far-future cost attribution projections and a lot more like, “What's a reserved instance?” And, “We haven't bought any of those in 18 months.” And, “Oh, yeah, we shut down an entire project six months ago. We should probably delete all the resources, huh?”The stuff that I was preparing for at the high end of the maturity curve are great and useful and terrific to have conversations about in some very nuanced depth, but very often there's a walk before you can run style of conversation where, okay, let's do the easy stuff first before we start writing a whole bunch of bespoke internal stuff that maps your business needs to the AWS bill. How do you, I guess, reconcile those things where you're on the one hand, you see the easy stuff and on the other, you see some of the just the absolutely challenging, very hard, five-years-of-engineering-effort-style problems on the other?Tim: Well, it's interesting because I've seen one customer very recently who has brilliant analyses as to their cost; just well-charted, well-tagged, well-documented, well—you know, everything is diagrammed quite nicely and everything like that, and they're very, very aware of their costs, but they leave test instances running all weekend, you know, and their associated volumes and things like that. And that's a very easy thing to fix. That is a very, very low-hanging fruit. And so sometimes, you just have to look at where they're spending their efforts where sometimes they do spend so much time chasing those hard to do things because they are hard to do and they're exciting in an engineering aspect, and then something as simple as, “Hey, how about we delete these old volumes?” It just isn't there.Or, “How about we switch to your S3 bucket storage type?” Those are easy, low-hanging fruits, and you would be surprised how sometimes they just don't get that. But at the same time, sometimes customers have, like, “Hey, we could knock this thing out, we knock this thing out,” because it's Trusted Advisor. Every AI cost optimization recommendation you can get will tell you these five things to do, no matter who you are or where you are, but they don't do the conceptual things like understanding some of the principles behind cost optimization and cost optimization architecture, and proactive cost optimization versus react with cost optimizations. So, you're doing very conceptual education and conversations with folks rather than the, “Do these five things.” And I've not often found a customer that you have to do both on; it's usually one or the other.Corey: It's funny that you made that specific reference to that example. One of my very first projects—not naming names. Generally, when it comes to things like this, you can tell stories or you can name names; I bias for stories—I was talking to a company who was convinced that their developer environments were incredibly overwrought, expensive, et cetera, and burning money. Okay, great. So, I talked about the idea of turning those things off at night or between test runs, deleting volumes to snapshot, and restore them on a schedule when people come in in the morning because all your developers sit in the same building in the same time zones. Great. They were super on board with the idea, and it was going to be a little bit of work, but all right, this was in the days before the EC2 Instance Scheduler, for example.But first, let's go ahead and do some analysis. This is one of those early engagements that really reinforced my idea of, yeah, before we start going too far down the rabbit hole, let's double-check what's going on in the account. Because periodically you encounter things that surprise people. Like, “What's up with those Australia instances?” “Oh, we don't have anything in that region.” “I believe you're being sincere when you say this, however, the API generally doesn't tell lies.”So, that becomes a, oh, security incident time. But looking at this, they were right; they had some fairly sizable developer instances that were running all the time, but doing some analysis, their developer environment was 3% of their bill at the time and they hadn't bought RIs in a year-and-a-half. And looking at what they were doing, there was so much easier stuff that they could do to generate significant savings without running the potential of turning a developer environment off at night in the middle of an incident or something like that. The risk factor and effort were easier just do the easy stuff, then do another pass and look at the deep stuff. And to be clear, they weren't lying to me; they weren't wrong.Back when they started building this stuff out, their developer environments were significantly large and were a significant portion of their spend. And then they hit product-market fit, and suddenly their production environment had to scale significantly in a short period of time. Which, yay, cloud. It's good at that. Then it just became such a small portion that developer environments weren't really a thing. But the narrative internally doesn't get updated very often because once people learn something, they don't go back to relearn whether or not it's still true. It's a constant mistake; I make it myself frequently.Tim: I think it's interesting, there are things that we really need to put into buckets as far as what's an engineering effort and what's an administrative effort. And when I say ‘administrative effort,' I mean if I can save money with a stroke of a pen, well, that's going to be pretty easy, and that's usually going to be RIs; that's going to be EDPs, or PPAs or something like that, that don't require engineering effort. It just requires administrative effort, I think RIs being the simplest ones. Like, “Oh, all I have to do is go in here and click these things four times and I'm going to save money?” “Well, let's do that.”And it's surprising how often people don't do that. But you still have to understand that, and whether it's RIs or whether it's a savings plan, it's still a commitment of some kind, but if you are willing to make that commitment, you can save money with no engineering effort whatsoever. That's almost free money.Corey: So, much of what we do here comes down to psychology, in many ways, more than it does math. And a lot of times you're right, everything you say is right, but in a large-scale environment, go ahead and click that button to buy the savings plan or the reserved instance, and that's a $20 million purchase. And companies will stall for months trying to run a different series of analyses on this and what if this happens, what if that happens, and I get it because, “Yeah, I'm going to click this button that's going to cost more money than I'll make in my lifetime,” that's a scary thing to do; I get it. But you're going to spend the money, one way or the other, with the provider, and if you believe that number is too high, I get it; I am right there with you. Buy half of them right now and then you can talk about the rest until you get to a point of being comfortable with it.Do it incrementally; it's not all or nothing, you have one shot to make the buy. Take pieces out of it that makes sense. You know you're probably not going to turn off your database cluster that handles all of production in the next year, so go ahead and go for it; it saves some money. Do the thing that makes sense. And that doesn't require deep-dive analytics that requires, on some level, someone who's seen a lot of these before who gets what customers are going through. And honestly, it's empathy in many respects, becomes one of those powerful things that we can apply to our customer accounts.Tim: Absolutely. I mean, people don't understand that decision paralysis, about making those commitments costs you money. You can spend months doing analysis, but those months doing analysis, you're going to spend 30, 40, 50, 60, 70% more on your EC2 instances or other compute than you would otherwise, and that can be quite significant. But it's one of those cases where we talk about psychology around perfect being the enemy of good. You don't have to make the perfect purchase of RIs or savings plans and have that so tuned perfectly that you're going to get one hundred percent utilization and zero—like, you don't have to do that.Just do something. Do a little bit. Like you said, buy half; buy anything; just something, and you're going to save money. And then you can run analysis later on, while you're saving money [laugh] and get a little better and tune it up a little more and get more analysis on and maybe fine-tune it, but you don't actually ever need to have it down to the penny. Like, it never has to be that good.Corey: At some point, one of the value propositions we have for our customers has always been that we tell you when to stop focusing on saving money because there's a theoretical cap of a hundred percent of the cloud bill that you can save, but you can make so much more than that by launching the right feature to the right market a little sooner; focus on that. Be responsible stewards of the money that's invested with you, but by and large, as a general piece of guidance, at some point, stop cutting and go back to doing the thing that makes your company work. It's not all about saving money at all costs for almost all of us. It is for us, but we're sort of a special case.Tim: Well, it's a conversation I often have. It's like, all right, are you trying to save money on AWS or are you trying to save money overall? So, if you're going to spend $400,000 worth of engineering effort to save $10,000 on your AWS bill, that doesn't make no sense. So—[laugh]—Corey: Right. There has to be a strategic reason to do things like that—Tim: Exactly.Corey: —and make sure you understand the value of what you're getting for this. One reason that we wind up charging the way that we do—and we've gotten questions on this for a while—has been that we charge a fixed fee for what we do on engagements. And similarly—people have asked this, but haven't tied the two things together—you talk about cost optimization, but never cost-cutting. Why is that? Is that just a negative term?And the answer has been no, they're aligned. What we do focuses on what is best for the customer. Once that fixed fee is decided upon, every single thing that we say is what we would do if we were in the customer's position. There are times we'll look at what they have going on and say, “Ah, you really should spend more money here for resiliency, or durability,” or, “Okay, that is critical data that's not being backed up. You should consider doing that.”It's why we don't take percentages of things because, at that point, we're not just going with the useful stuff, it's, well we're going to basically throw the entire kitchen sink at you. We had an early customer and I was talking to their AWS account manager about what we were going to be doing and their comment was, “Oh, saving money on AWS bills is great, make sure you check the EBS snapshots.” Yeah, I did that. They were spending 150 bucks a month on EBS snapshots, which is basically nothing. It's one of those stories where if, in the course of an hour-long meeting, I can pay for that entire service, by putting a quarter on the table, I'm probably not going to talk about it barring [laugh] some extenuating circumstances.Focus on the big things, not the things that worked in a different environment with a different account and different constraints. It's hard to context switch like that, but it gets a lot easier when it is basically the entirety of what we do all day.Tim: The difference I draw between cost optimization and cost-cutting is that cost optimization is ensuring that you're not spending money unnecessarily, or that you're maximizing your dollar. And so sometimes we get called in there, and we're just validation for the measures they've already done. Like, “Your team is doing this exactly right. You're doing the things you should be doing. We can nitpick if you want to; we're going to save you $7 a year, but who cares about that? But y'all are doing what you should be doing. This is great. Going forward, you want to look for these things and look for these things and look for these things. We're going to give you some more concepts so that you are cost-optimized in the future.” But it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to cut your bill. Because if you're already spending efficiently, you don't need your bill cut; you're already cost-optimized.Corey: Oh, we're not going to nitpick on that, you're mostly optimized there. It's like, “Yeah, that workload's $140 million a year and rising; please, pick nits.” At which point? “Okay, great.” That's the strategic reason to focus on something. But by and large, it comes down to understanding what the goals of clients are. I think that is widely misunderstood about what we do and how we do it.The first question I always ask when someone does outreach of, “Hey, we'd like to talk about coming in here and doing a consulting engagement with us.” “Great.” I always like to ask the quote-unquote, “Foolish question” of, “Why do you care about the AWS bill?” And occasionally I'll get people who look at me like I have two heads of, “Why wouldn't I care about the AWS bill?” Because there are more important things to care about for the business, almost certainly.Tim: One of the things I try and do, especially when we're talking about cost optimization, especially trying to do something for the right now so they can do things going forward, it's like, you know, all right, so if we cut this much from your bill—if you just do nothing else, but do reserved instances or buy a savings plan, right, you're going to save enough money to hire four engineers. Think about what four engineers would do for your overall business? And that's how I want you to frame it; I want you to look at what cost optimization is going to allow you to do in the future without costing you any more money. Or maybe you save a little more money and you can shift it; instead of paying for your AWS bill, maybe you can train your developers, maybe you can get more developers, maybe you can get some ProServ, maybe you can do whatever, buy newer computers for your people so they can do—whatever it is, right? We're not saying that you no longer have to spend this money, but saying, “You can use this money to do something other than give it to Jeff Bezos.”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: There was an article recently, as of the time of this recording, where Pinterest discussed what they had disclosed in one of their regulatory filings which was, over the next eight years, they have committed to pay AWS $3.2 billion. And in this article, they have the head of engineering talking to the reporter about how they're thinking about these things, how they're looking at things that are relevant to their business, and they're talking about having a dedicated team that winds up doing a whole bunch of data analysis and running some analytics on all of these things, from piece to piece to piece. And that's great. And I worry, on some level, that other companies are saying, “Oh, Pinterest is doing that. We should, too.” Yeah, for the course of this commitment, a 1% improvement is $32 million, so yeah, at that scale I'm going to hire a team of data scientists, too, look at these things. Your bill is $50,000 a month. Perhaps that's not worth the effort you're going to put into it, barring other things that contribute to it.Tim: It's interesting because we will get folks that will approach us that have small accounts—very small, small spend—and like, “Hey, can you come in and talk to us about this whatever.” And we can say very honestly, “Look, we could, but the amount of money we're going to charge you is going to—it's not going to be worth your while right now. You could probably get by on the automated recommendations, on the things that already out there on the internet that everybody can do to optimize their bill, and then when you grow to a point where now saving 10% is somebody's salary, that's when it, kind of, becomes more critical.” And it's hard to say what point that is in anyone's business, but I can say sometimes, “Hey, you know what? That's not really what you need to focus on.” If you need to save $100 a month on your AWS bill, and that's critical, you've got other concerns that are not your AWS bill.Corey: So, back when you were interviewing to work here, one of the areas of focus that you kept bringing up was the concept of observability, and my response to this was, “Ah, hell. Another one.” Because let's be clear, Mike Julian—my business partner and our CEO—has written a book called Practical Monitoring, and apparently what we learned from this is as soon as you finish writing a book on the topic, you never want to talk about that topic ever again, which yeah, in hindsight makes sense. Why do you care about observability when you're here to look at cloud costs?Tim: Because cloud costs is another metric, just like you would use for performance, or resilience, or security. You do real-time monitoring to see if somebody has compromised the system, you do real-time monitoring to see if you have bad performance, if response times are too slow. You do real-time monitoring to know if something has gone down and then you need to make adjustments, or that the automated responses you have in response to that downtime are working. But cloud costs, you send somebody a report at the end of the month. Can you imagine, if you will—just for a second—if you got a downtime report at the end of month, and then you can react to something that has gone down?Or if you get a security report at the end of the month, and then you can react to the fact that somebody has your root keys? Or if you get [laugh] a report at the end of month, this said, “Hey, the CPU on this one was pegged. You should probably scale up.” That's outrageous to anybody in this industry right now. But why do we accept that for cloud cost?Corey: It's worse than that. There are a number of startups that talk about, “Oh, real-time cloud cost monitoring. Okay, the only way you're going to achieve such a thing is if you build an API shim that interprets everything that you're telling your cloud control plane to do, taking cost metrics out of it, and then passing it on to the actual cloud control plane.” Otherwise, you're talking about it showing up in the billing record in—ideally, eight hours; in practice, several days, or you're talking about the CloudTrail events, which is not holistic but gives you some rough idea, but it's also in some cases, 5 to 20 minutes delayed. There's no real-time way to do this without significant disruption to what's going on in your environment.So, when I hear about, “Oh, we do real-time bill analysis.” Yeah, it feels—to be very direct—you don't know enough about the problem space you're working within to speak intelligently about it because anyone who's played in this space for a while knows exactly how hard it is to get there. Now, I've talked to companies that have built real-time-ish systems that take that shim approach and acts sort of as a metadata sidecar ersatz billing system that tracks all of this so they can wind up intercepting potentially very expensive configuration mistakes. And that's great. That's also a bit beyond for a lot of folks today, but it's where the industry is going. But there is no way to get there today, short of effectively intercepting all of those calls, in a way that is cohesive and makes sense. How do you square that circle given the complete lack of effective tooling?Tim: Honestly, I'm going to point that right back at the cloud provider because they know how much you're spending, real-time. They know exactly how much you spend in real-time. They've figured it out. They have the buckets, they have APIs for it internally. I'm sure they do; it would make no sense for them not to. Without giving anything anyway, I know that when I was at AWS, I knew how much they were spending, almost real-time.Corey: That's impressive. I wish that existed. My never having worked at AWS perspective on it is that they, of course, have the raw data effective immediately, or damn close to it, but the challenge for the billing system is distilling and summarizing and attributing all of that in a reasonable timeframe; it is an exabyte-scale problem. I've talked to folks there who have indicated it is comfortably north of a petabyte in raw data per day. And that was a couple of years ago, so one can only imagine as the footprint has increased, so has all of this.I mean, the billing system is fundamentally magic from the outside. I'm not saying it's good magic, but it is magic, and it's something that is unappreciated, that every customer uses, and is one of those areas that doesn't get the attention it deserves. Because, let's be clear, here, we talk about observability; the bill is still the only thing that AWS offers that gives you a holistic overview of everything running in your account, in one place.Tim: What I think is interesting is that you talk about this, the scale of the problem and that it makes it difficult to solve. At the same time, I can have a conversation with my partner about kitty litter, and then all of a sudden, I'm going to start getting ads about kitty litter within minutes. So, I feel like it's possible to emit cost as a metric like you would CPU or disk. And if I'm going to look at who's going to do that, I'm going to look right back at AWS. The fun part about that, though, is I know from AWS's business model, that if that's something they were to emit, it would also cost you, like, 25 cents per call, and then you would actually, like, triple your cloud costs just trying to figure out how much it costs you.Corey: Only with 16 other billing dimensions because of course it would. And again, I'm talking about stuff, because of how I operate and how I think about this stuff, that is inherently corner case, or [vertex 00:31:39] case in many cases. But for the vast majority of folks, it's not the, “Oh, you have this really weird data transfer paradigm between these two resources,” which yeah, that's a problem that needs to be addressed in an awful lot of cases because data transfer pricing is bonkers, but instead it's the, “Huh. You just spun up a big cluster that's going to cost $20,000 a month.” You probably don't need to wait a full day to flag that.And you also can't put this on the customer in the sense of, “Oh, just set some budget alarms, that's great. That's the first thing you should do in a new AWS account.” “Well, jackhole, I've done an awful lot of first things I'm supposed to do in an AWS account, in my dedicated test account for these sorts of things. It's been four months, I'm not done yet with all of those first things I'm supposed to do.” It's incredibly secure, increasingly expensive, and so far all it runs is a single EC2 instance that is mostly there just so that everything else doesn't error out trying to divide by zero.Tim: There are some things that are built-in. If I stand up an EC2 instance and it goes down, I'm going to get an alert that this instance terminated for some reason. It's just going to show up informationally.Corey: In the console. You're not going to get called about it or paged about it, unless—Tim: Right.Corey: —you have something else in the business that will, like a boss that screams at you two o'clock in the morning. This is why we have very little that's production-facing here.Tim: But if I know that alert exists somewhere in the console, that's easy for me to write a trap for. That's easy for me to write, say hey, I'm going to respond to that because this call is going to come out somewhere; it's going to get emitted somewhere. I can now, as an engineer, write a very easy trap that says, “Hey, pop this in the Slack. Send an alert. Send a page.”So, if I could emit a cost metric, and I could say, “Wow. Somebody has spun up this thing that's going to cost X amount of money. Someone should get paged about this.” Because if they don't page about this and we wait eight hours, that's my month's salary. And you would do that if your database server went down; you would do that if someone rooted that database server; you would do that if the database server was [bogging 00:33:48] you to scale up another one. So, why can't you do that if that database server was all of sudden costing you way more than you had calculated?Corey: And there's a lot of nuance here because what you're talking about makes perfect sense for smaller-scale accounts, but even some of the very large accounts where we're talking hundreds of millions a year in spend, you can set compromised keys up on GitHub, put them in Payspin, whatever, and then people start spinning up Bitcoin miners everywhere. Great. It takes a long time to materially move the needle on that level of spend; it gets lost in the background noise. I lose my mind when I wind up leaving a managed NAT gateway running and it cost me 70 bucks a month in my $5 a month test account. Yeah, but you realize you could basically buy an island and it gets lost in the AWS bill at some of the high watermarks for some of these larger accounts.“Oh, someone spun up a cluster that's going to cost $400,000 a year?” Yeah, do I need to re-explain to you what a data science team does? They light money on fire in return for questionable returns, as a general rule. You knew that when you hired them; leave them alone. Whereas someone in their developer account does this, yeah, you kind of want to flag that immediately.It always comes down to rules and context. But I'd love to have some templates ready to go of, “I'm a starving student, please alert me anytime it looks like I might possibly exceed the free tier,” or better yet, “Don't let me, and if I do, it's on you and you eat the cost.” Conversely, it's, “Yeah, this is a Netflix sub-account or whatnot. Maybe don't bother me for anything whatsoever because freedom and responsibility is how we roll.” I imagine that's what they do internally on a lot of their cloud costing stuff because freedom and responsibility is ingrained in their culture. It's great. It's the freedom from having to think about cloud bills and the responsibility for paying it, of the cloud bill.Tim: Yeah, we will get internally alerted if things are [laugh] up too long, and then we will actually get paged, and then our manager would get paged, [laugh] and it would go up the line. If you leave something that's running too expensive, too long. So, there is a system there for it.Corey: Oh, yeah. The internal AWS systems for employees are probably my least favorite AWS service, full stop. And I've seen things posted about it; I believe it's called Isengard, for spinning up internal accounts and the rest—there's a separate one, I think, called Conduit, but I digress—that you spin something up, and apparently if it doesn't wind up—I don't need you to comment on this because you worked there and confidentiality is super important, but to my understanding it's, great, it has a whole bunch of formalized stuff like that and it solves for a whole lot of nifty features that bias for the way that AWS focuses on accounts and how they've view security and the rest. And, “Oh, well, we couldn't possibly ship this to customers because it's not how they operate.” And that's great.My problem with this internal provisioning system is it isolates and insulates AWS employees from the real pain of working with multiple accounts as a customer. You don't have to deal with the provisioning process of Control Tower or whatnot; you have your own internal thing. Eat your own dog food, gargle your own champagne, whatever it takes to wind up getting exposure to the pain that hits customers and suddenly you'll see those things improve. I find that the best way to improve a product is to make the people building it live with the painful parts.Tim: I think it's interesting that the stance is, “Well, it's not how the customers operate, and we wouldn't want the customers to have to deal with this.” But at the same time, you have to open up, like, 100 accounts if you need more than a certain number of S3 buckets. So, they are very comfortable with burdening the customer with a lot of constraints, and they say, “Well, constraints drive innovation.” Certainly, this is a constraint that you could at least offer and let the customers innovate around that.Corey: And at least define who the customer is. Because yeah, “I'm a Netflix sub-account is one story,” “I'm a regulated bank,” is another story, and, “I'm a student in my dorm room, trying to learn how this whole cloud thing works,” is another story. From risk tolerance, from a data protection story, from a billing surprise story, from a, “I'm trying to learn what the hell this is, and all these other service offerings you keep talking to me about confuse the hell out of me; please streamline the experience.” There's a whole universe of options and opportunity that isn't being addressed here.Tim: Well, I will say it very simply like this: we're talking about a multi-trillion dollar company versus someone who, if their AWS bill is too high, they don't pay rent; maybe they don't eat; maybe they have other issues, they don't—medical bill doesn't get paid; child care doesn't get paid. And if you're going to tell me that this multi-trillion dollar company can't solve for that so that doesn't happen to that person and tells them, “Well, if you come in afterwards, after your bill gets there, maybe we can do something about it, but in the meantime, suffer through this.” That's not ethical. Full stop.Corey: There are a lot of things that AWS gets right, and I want to be clear that I'm not sitting here trying to cast blame and say that everything they're doing is terrible. I feel like every time I talk about billing in any depth, I have to throw this disclaimer in. Ninety to ninety-five percent of what they do is awesome. It's just the missing piece that is incredibly painful for customers, and that's what I spend most of my time focusing on. It should not be interpreted to think that I hate the company.I just want them to do better than they are, and what they're doing now is pretty decent in most respects. I just want to fix the painful parts. Tim, thank you for joining me for a third time here. I'm certain I'll have you back in the somewhat near future to talk about more aspects of this, but until then, where can people find you slash retain your services?Tim: Well, you can find me on Twitter at @elchefe. If you want to retain my services for which you would be very, very happy to have, you can go to duckbillgroup.com and fill out a little questionnaire, and I will magically appear after an exchange of goods and services.Corey: Make sure to reference Tim by name just so that we can make our sales team facepalm because they know what's coming next. Tim, thank you so much for your time; it's appreciated.Tim: Thank you so much, Corey. I loved it.Corey: Principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group, Tim Banks. 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, wait at least eight hours—possibly as many as 48 to 72—and then leave a comment explaining what you didn't like.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.

#128: You know that securing environments with a secrets manager is something that needs constant upkeep. Sometimes secrets management can be difficult and complex to handle. Thankfully, there are universal secrets managers which make the process of managing secrets simple for everyone, not just the DevOps and security teams.   Today, we talk with Brian Vallelunga, founder and CEO of Doppler, about how universal secrets management differs from secrets storage and secrets management will be changing over the coming years.   Brian's contact info: Twitter: https://twitter.com/vallelungabrian LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/vallelungabrian   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox/   Books and Courses: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints https://www.devopstoolkitseries.com/posts/catalog/   Kubernetes Chaos Engineering With Chaos Toolkit And Istio https://www.devopstoolkitseries.com/posts/chaos/   Canary Deployments To Kubernetes Using Istio and Friends https://www.devopstoolkitseries.com/posts/canary/   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

01:17 - Danielle's Superpower: Empathy & Communication 01:56 - Going From the Hospitality Industry => Tech * @CodeSchoolQA (https://twitter.com/codeschoolqa) / twitch.tv/thejonanshow (https://www.twitch.tv/thejonanshow) 04:58 - Education Technology (https://tech.ed.gov/) (EdTech) * Disruption = Reinvention 07:18 - Anthropology + Tech / Working With People * Anticipating Needs 10:25 - Making Education Fun + Inclusive * Cultural Relevance * Revamping Outdated Curriculum * Connecting With Kids 16:18 - Transitioning Into Tech 27:57 - Resources * Learnhowtoprogram.com (https://www.learnhowtoprogram.com/introduction-to-programming/getting-started-at-epicodus/learn-how-to-program) * Documentation * YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/) * Community * #TechTwitter (https://twitter.com/search?q=%23TechTwitter&src=typed_query&f=live) * Virtual Coffee (https://virtualcoffee.io/) * Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/) 32:39 - @CodeSchoolQA (https://twitter.com/codeschoolqa) / twitch.tv/thejonanshow (https://www.twitch.tv/thejonanshow) 34:08 - The Streaming Revolution * New Opportunities For Connection * Hybrid Events * Introvert Inclusive * Accessibility * Reaching New Markets 39:45 - Making Tech Safe, Secure, and Protected * Greater Than Code Episode 252: Designing For Safety with Eva PenzeyMoog (https://www.greaterthancode.com/designing-for-safety) 44:03 - Advice For New Devs: Work on Technical Things Sooner Reflections: Mandy: The secret in tech is that nobody knows what they're doing! Danielle: Ask questions and lean into community. Tech needs you. Arty: Don't be afraid to reach out to community members for help. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 254 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hey, everyone! It's Mandy Moore and I'm here with our guest today, Danielle Thompson. Danielle is a newly minted software engineer working in the education technology sphere of the nonprofit world, after making a major career change from working in hospitality and events for many years. As a code school graduate herself, she loves to help demystify tech for others with non-traditional backgrounds and works to open doors into tech with her friends at Code School Q&A, weekly on Wednesday nights at around 7:00 PM Pacific at twitch.tv/thejonanshow. Outside of work, she can typically be found with a nose buried in a book, hanging out with her doggo, and making delicious craft beverages. Welcome to the show, Danielle! DANIELLE: Thanks so much for having me, Mandy and Arty! MANDY: Awesome. It's great for you to be here. So before we get into the meat of our conversation, we always ask our guests the standard question of what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? DANIELLE: Totally. I think that my superpower is a combination of empathy and communication. I think I came by both pretty naturally—popped right out of my mom having both, I'm assuming. But both have definitely been amplified over the years by all sorts of experiences and hardships and just keep working to make them even more of a superpower. MANDY: That's really great. So I want to know about before we dive into your experiences as a new developer, I wanted to know about how you came into technology from your career change in hospitality, because I did the same thing. I was a waitress when my daughter was born 10 years ago and I was working for about a year before I was able to walk out. It was Mother's Day, my boss was being a complete jerk to me, and I was making enough money at that point that I just said, “You know what? I don't need this. I quit,” and I started my career in tech full-time. So I'm curious about your journey as well. DANIELLE: Yeah. Obviously, COVID has happened in the last couple of years and that was one of the major factors in me getting to this point of leaving hospitality and getting into tech. But I had already kind of been thinking about what comes next. I've been a manager for a few years and was trying to figure out how else I could grow and what new things I can learn and challenge myself with. And outside of ownership, which is a major headache, there wasn't really much that I could push further into, within hospitality. So when COVID happened and I lost my job because I was working as an events and bar manager for a local catering company, it was pretty obvious that things were not going to be coming back for the hospitality industry anytime soon and I needed to figure something else out then. And so, I started looking into different returning to education opportunities because I actually have an anthropology degree, of all helpful things that I could have gotten a degree in. But I found a code school in Portland, Oregon and jumped on that within a few months of COVID hitting to the full-time track and connected with a number of my cohort mates that we started doing the Code School Q&A on Twitch with the director of developer relations at New Relic and have been doing that for almost a year now and have officially made it in the industry as a software developer, too in the last few months. So you can do it, you can get into tech. [laughs] It's pretty funny, too because the type of job that I ended up getting is in education and technology sphere and I actually had a job in ed tech about a decade ago when I was still in college and had a remote job working with some family friends that got me hooked up with their company. And here I am doing something a little bit more in-depth technically than I was doing a decade ago, but it's funny how things come full circle. ARTY: Well, education in particular is something that also really needs some reinvention and innovation and with all the disruption, where do you see that area going? Just curious. DANIELLE: Yeah, absolutely. I feel that a lot of the changes that we've seen in COVID with remote work being such a prominent thing now and people wanting more balanced, more time with their family, more time with their critters, more time just not being miserable and commutes and stuff. I think that that's going to have a really long-term effect on how education happens and trying to make education more quality as well. I think it's really rad what the company I do works for. Our whole mission is to work to make education in America more equitable. So we do that by working very hard to work with experts in the curriculum sphere that ensure that our curriculum materials are as inclusive and culturally relevant as possible, that they are representative of a large and diverse group of people, and they even do a ton of anti-racism work as well and work to embed that within our internal and external culture, as well as the products that we create. So I hope that our company will continue to grow and make changes in the education world in America in general, because I think what we're doing is really, really, really important. ARTY: Definitely important and with all the change and stuff happening, I'm expecting some new and cool and exciting things that do make things better. One of the upsides of lots of disruption is it's an opportunity for us to sit back and rethink how things could be. DANIELLE: Yeah. ARTY: And one of the benefits of not being entrenched in the existing fields of the way things have been is it's also an opportunity to look at all the stuff we're doing with a fresh set of eyes from outside of that existing world and bring some new fresh insights to tech. Maybe my anthropology degree will come in handy in some different sorts of ways. I imagine some of those skills that you learned in that have some applicability in tech as well. Have you found your degree helpful in other ways? DANIELLE: It's funny. I think I ended up using my anthropology degree as a bartender far more than I ever would have as an actual anthropologist. That whole study of humans thing is something that is directly translatable to working with people no matter what field you're in. I feel that both my anthropology degree and my many years of hospitality experience have all led to a specific skillset that is very different from a lot of people that come into tech with more traditional backgrounds especially folks that go to college and get computer science degrees, and then they go to the tech industry and that's all they've ever known. I've known so many other experiences outside of that and my ability to think about what other people need and want, to be able to respond to that, and embed that in all of the work that I do as an engineer to really be thinking about the user and the people that are interacting with whatever I'm building and even just thinking about working on a team and how I have so many communication skills built up from what I've been doing for work in hospitality for many years. I think that it definitely gives me a very specific and unique way of moving through the world and way of being an engineer as well. That anthropologist hat definitely comes into play sometimes thinking about like, “Oh, like how do all of these dots connect?” and like, “How does this change over time and how do you see people like doing things differently now?” It's a definitely a fun lens to carry with me. MANDY: Yeah. Having been done hospitality, I'm just shaking my head because – [laughter] I know I've brought so many skills from being in that world for 10, 15 years at one point. DANIELLE: Yeah. MANDY: Just the way you talk to people and interact with teams and anticipate what other people need before they even know what they need, that's definitely a skill. DANIELLE: Yeah, definitely. I think that whole anticipating needs thing, too, it's like it can be both an internal and external benefit where you can think both about who you're building products for and also who you're building products with, and how best to communicate within teams, especially having management experience. That is definitely at the forefront of my brain a lot of the time, but then also thinking about like, “How can I make the best experience for somebody else that's actually going to be using this? How can I make this easy and intuitive and fun?” Especially within education, have to make sure that things are fun and interesting targeting kids that are K-12; it has to be meaningful, impactful, interesting, and engaging. MANDY: So how do you do that? What are some ways that you and your company make education fun for young kids? DANIELLE: I think I'm still figuring that out. We have many curriculum products that I'm still just touching for the first time, or haven't even looked at it yet and so, there's lots of fun, new things to discover. But I think the types of people that we bring on to work at my company, they're all experts in their field and renowned for the work that they do and so, I think that the quality of people that we bring into work with us and the kind of commitment that they have to work towards making education better and more inclusive, that is incredibly important. And how they also do an immense amount of work to make not just inclusivity a part of the major formula, but also that they work to make things culturally relevant. So like, thinking about how to tell stories to kids that actually means something to them today. I don't know, a weird example is thinking about some outdated curriculum that's talking about using a landline for a phone, or something. Kids are like, ‘What's that?” Actually integrating modern things like cell phones and things like that into the curriculum where kids actually touch that and use that every single day so it means something to them. Whereas, outdated curriculum that is just some story to them. It doesn't have tangible meaning. Being able to bring that into materials is really important to keeping things engaging and also, relevant and fun. MANDY: So the time when little Tommy was walking to the Xerox machine. DANIELLE: [chuckles] Yes, yes. MANDY: Somebody brought up a Xerox machine the other day. DANIELLE: Oh wow. MANDY: My goodness. DANIELLE: [laughs] Yeah, definitely. But I think it's just a constant looking at how we do things, and making improvements and making real connection with the people that are actually using our products to use. That both means working with teachers and getting a better understanding of what is helpful to them, what makes things easier for them, what helps them bring better quality curriculum to their classrooms? But then I think it's also connecting more directly with those kids that are engaging with our curriculum, too and figuring out what works and doesn't work for as many parties as possible. I think that's the anthropologist hat coming on again like, how can we bring as many people to the table as possible on the expert side, on the academic side, on the teacher side, on the student side? And even working to bring families to the table, too and looking at how families interact and not just parents, because it's really important to know that kids don't have just parents that are taking care of them—sometimes it's grandparents, sometimes it's foster families. And really thinking about a wider range of who is around these kids, and how to get them onboard and make things easy for them to interact. ARTY: It seems like getting into tech and these new tech skills that you've learned are also relevant in figuring out how to teach kids tech because we've got this new generation of kids coming into the world and learning how to code becomes more like learning how to read and write is fundamental skills move forward in the future. Are there ways that some of the things that you've learned through your own tech experiences you can see application for in education? DANIELLE: Absolutely. From what I've been seeing, I feel like there are a lot more resources out there for teaching kids how to code and teaching them more things about technology. I think that's amazing and should totally keep happening. I think having been a bit more focused on adults in my own outreach for helping people find their ways into tech I might be a bit more acquainted with reaching out to those folks. But I'm sure that that intersection of being in education for K-12 students and this passion that I have of helping to find their way into tech, or build more technical skills because they are skills that are so transferable in many industries. I'm in education, but I have a technical job. So there's lots of ways that those technical skills can be incredibly valuable and frankly, life-changing. The amount of opportunity and even just financial stability that can be found within tech is one of the main reasons that brought me to this industry and has really been a life-changing opportunity. It has opened so many doors already and I'm just like three months into my first developer job. Even before I was ever actually officially an engineer, I was able to find community and able to find an outlet for helping others and outreach to immediately turn around and hold a handout to try to help others make their way into tech as well. I hope to continue doing that work in more meaningful and impactful ways over time, and have wider and wider reach as well. ARTY: You had mentioned earlier about some of the difficulties of getting into tech and some of the challenges with finding resources and things that you were specifically missing when you actually showed up on the job. I'm curious, what was your experience like going through coding bootcamp and what were some of the gaps that you experienced that once you got on the job, you were like, “Oh, I didn't learn that.” DANIELLE: Yeah, definitely. Coding bootcamp was an incredibly grueling experience for me personally. I was on a full-time track six-month program and [chuckles] not having much technical experience whatsoever outside of editing my Myspace profile back when that was a thing and having [laughs] about a decade ago doing some basic HTML, CSS editing and maintenance for the company that I worked for an ed tech originally. That was what I was working with when I started coding bootcamp. So it was a real hard learning curve and a very fast-paced program for me to just dive into headfirst. My poor partner was like, “I basically didn't see you for six months. You were just a basement dweller at your computer constantly.” I would literally get out of bed, roll myself downstairs, get to my computer with a cup of tea in hand, and I would stay there until easily 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 1:00 every night just trying to keep my head above water. But a few months in, things started to click and I wasn't fighting with all of these computer puzzles [chuckles] trying to do this. Like, I always feel like learning coding languages is a combination of algebra and a foreign language. So at a certain point, my brain just started getting into that better and things started making sense. That was a very exciting moment where I got much less miserable [chuckles] in my code school experience and in the pace at which I had to move to keep my grades up and everything. But the gap in between finishing code school and actually getting that first job is also another often-grueling process. There's so many jobs open in the tech industry, but basically, it's mid-level and above. It's like, I think two-thirds of the industry positions that are available are for mid to senior roles versus one-third of roles that are for junior associates. That is a big struggle, especially if you're not able to lean into community and building real connections, just sending applications out to the ether and never even hearing a peep back from companies. I think that whole experience, it's really hard for yourself esteem, especially having put in many months around the clock of work towards this new career that you've been told that you can get, that you can achieve. It's almost as much as a process getting that first developer job as it is to actually build those tech skills. I think one thing that is so important to stress in that in-between time is to lean into community, to connect with as many people as you can that are already in tech, even if they don't exactly have a developer job. Like, talk to anybody that will let you talk to them—talk to people in QA, talk to developers, talk to managers, talk to project managers. That was one of the things that I felt I needed to do early on in my coding experience to really have a better understanding of what was even an option for me of getting into tech and what could all these different jobs look like, and then making that transition to actually getting the first job. Yay, hooray for first jobs and being employed again. But I think one of the things that has been most striking in that change for me is going from this incredibly grueling pace. 8:00 in the morning, or so until 10:00 plus at night, non-stop coding for the most part, and then going to a 9:00 to 5:00 job where I can also make my own hours and I can take appointments as I need to. Like, I can go and get a haircut if that's something on my schedule and it's cool. As long as I'm getting my work done and showing up and contributing to my team, things are fine. So that transition of like, “Wait, I don't have to be at my computer a 1,000% of the time?” [laughs] and the pace at which you learn things, too is just much slower because you can have balance. That transition of feeling like you're not doing enough because you're so used to this hefty schedule, that's been a major transition for me. I think also coming from hospitality, too where you have to be there in person and oftentimes, somebody is going to call out sick at least every other week, or so. So you might be working like a shift and a half, or a double. There isn't a lot of balance in the service industry, especially now with COVID adding so many extra layers of complication to how that job works. Being able to just be like, “I need to go make a doctor's appointment,” and can just do that. It's like, “Okay, cool. Just put it on the calendar. You don't really need to tell me. As long as it's on the calendar, that's great.” [laughs] That transition has also been very strange. And I think maybe just the trauma of [chuckles] working in hospitality and not being able to just be a human sometimes and now all of a sudden, I'm like, “Oh, I'm a human and that's allowed? Okay.” Still have to check in with my boss frequently about like, “You sure it's okay? You sure it's okay that I'm a human, right? Yeah.” [laughs] MANDY: [chuckles] That was one of the things that I really loved coming into tech was the scheduling, open schedule, making my own hours. DANIELLE: Yeah. MANDY: And you're right, it was very strange at first. When I was waitressing, it was just always a go, go, go kind of thing and you had to be there, you had to be on, and if you didn't have tables, if you had time to lean, you had time to clean. DANIELLE: [chuckles] Yeah. Always be closing. You know, ABCs. [laughs] MANDY: So yeah, sometimes I still find myself on a random Thursday. I'll have my work done and I'll just be sitting here and I'm like, “Why are you sitting at your computer? Go do something, then check it and if there's stuff there –” Like, you don't have to have your ass in the seat from 9:00 to 5:00, or 8:00 to 4:00. You don't have to sit here for 8 hours and just stare at your inbox waiting for work. It's totally asynchronous and it's totally okay. I find myself having to give myself permission to leave my desk and just go and do something and work that asynchronous schedule. So tech is a really big blessing when it comes to that. DANIELLE: I totally agree. I think also, not being neurotypical myself, I have ADHD, and so, being able to actually allow my brain to work in the way that is best for how my brain just naturally operates. Like, I can sit at my desk and fidget constantly, and it's not going to bother anybody because I work from home, [chuckles] or I can shift between sitting and standing and sitting on my bed, or sitting on my stool and just move at my desk as much as I need to. I can also step away and go clean some dishes if that's what's making noise in my brain. I can go and take my dog on a walk and get some fresh air. That whole shift of having balance and being able to be empowered to advocate for what I need and how I learn and people are like, “Yeah, cool. Let's do that.” I think that's also very much a part of the company that I work for and the ethos that we have, which is all about making education better. So why wouldn't that also translate to the staff and how can we help you learn? It's such a wonderful thing to be a part of a team that's super invested in how I learn and helping me learn. I think another thing that was a big, strange thing about my transition into tech was I ended up getting a junior engineer role in a tech stack that I hadn't worked with, which is pretty common from what I've heard from mid engineer on. Because once you have some of the foundational building blocks of a handful of programming languages and some of those computer science foundations, you can pick up most programming languages. But it's not so common as a junior engineer to get that opportunity to work with a full tech stack that you haven't really worked with before. So that was another big transition like, “All right, you trust me time to figure this out.” ARTY: So it sounds like you walked into another big learning curve with your new job, too. It sounds like you were also in a much more supportive culture environment with respect to learning and things, too. What was the ramp-up experience like at your new company? DANIELLE: In some ways, I still kind of feel like I'm in ramp-up mode. I'm about three months in. But because we have so much of our product that is built around very specific curriculum components, that has very specific contextual knowledge, it's just going to be a process to figure out which projects have what information and have certain numbers of records, and are tied to certain standards that are required in different states and for common core versus for some of the states that we work with, what that looks like. But figuring out a whole new tech stack was and continues to be a very interesting challenge. I have to remind myself when I have gaps in my knowledge that it's actually to switch gears back into learning mode, that that is a thing that's supported and encouraged even. I even have little sticky notes on my desk that say, “Start with what you know, not what you don't know,” and that tension of when I reached the end of what I know and then going and finding maybe not necessarily the right, or correct resources, because there's so much out there that's good. That can be helpful. I think it's more about finding something that does work with how my brain learns things and being cognizant of how I learn. But also, remembering to dig into that fate that is being a developer, which is constant learning and ever-growing evolution of how we do things, and what things we do within the sphere of the developer. So I've signed up for perpetual learning and that's pretty great. MANDY: What are your favorite resources that you used and continue to use as you're still learning, and finding community, and things like that? DANIELLE: Yeah. I have certainly continued to lean on the curriculum for my school. It's online and it's free and that's rad. It's learnhowtoprogram.com. It's all put on online from Epicodus in the Portland area. Anybody can access it and that's wonderful. I'm a big fan of really great resources being available for free and making that more accessible. So continuing to use platforms that have that kind of ethos in mind is pretty great in my opinion. Reading the documentation is another great way to keep learning what you need to learn and sometimes documentation can be kind of dry, especially as a new developer, you don't always know what exactly it is that you're looking for. So being able to parse through documentation and figure out what's most important, but then also filling in the gaps of some of the things that you don't yet know, or understand with YouTube videos, or deeper dives into like, what does this one specific term mean? I don't know, let's go find out and plugging in some of those gaps is really helpful. I think figuring out how you learn, too whether that be very hands-on, whether that be visually, whether that be with audio, getting lots of repetition in; it's super helpful to lean into whatever works best for your brain for learning. I think perhaps even more important than digging into resources that are online is lean into community. I really can't say it enough, build community. If you work with Ruby, like I work with Ruby, build community within the Ruby community. Connect to people online, get on Twitter, connect to tech Twitter, follow different people that work with the languages and the tech stack that you work with, and join places like The Virtual Coffee and other really rad developer spaces that are meant to help you find the answers that you need and to maybe do it in a way that's a little less arduous because you're with people that are like, “Yes, happy helper.” Like, “How can I make things easier for you?” It seems like a much easier way to go through tech when you can do it with others and remember, that there are human resources out there for you, too. MANDY: You also had mentioned that you were connecting with folks over Twitch. DANIELLE: Yeah. MANDY: Can you tell us a little more about that? DANIELLE: Absolutely. So a friend of mine in my Epicodus cohort, she reached out to the director of developer relations that had done a lunchtime chat with us at one point and she was like, “I don't know what I'm doing. I am so stressed out. I don't know if I can actually finish this school and let alone finish school, but actually make it as a developer and I have questions. Do you have some time for some answers?” And he was like, “Yeah, do you want to actually do this online on Twitch? And how about you bring a couple of friends and let's just ask lots of questions and I'm going to record it?” She reached out to me and another friend of mine and here we are many months later still answering questions online about how to get into tech and what even are some of these things that we're talking about technically, or let's look at other roles outside of just developer, or engineer, that you can get into. So that has been an ongoing theme of how can I help others? How can I help provide community for people that might not have been as lucky as I have been to already have a preexisting community with many of my friends and my partner that were in tech? How can I help create that advantage for others and how can I help reach more people and help them understand what their options are and connect them to the people that need to know to get jobs? I think Code School Q&A, we are super, super excited about open doors for people to whether that be better knowledge, whether that be real human connection; what's most important to us is just supporting people as they are making transitions into the industry like we've been doing over this last year and a half. MANDY: So what is the Code School Q&A look like when you join? Walk me through it if I were to show up, what would I get? DANIELLE: Absolutely. So there's generally four of us on the stream and we ask a handful of questions, whether that be from our own experiences of like, “Okay, I'm a developer now and I've got some questions about some of these transitions that I am experiencing.” But we also lean into the audience as well and see what kind of questions they have, whether that be folks that are still in code school, or folks that are thinking about maybe potentially going back to school, whether that be computer science in a university setting, or bootcamp, or even self-taught people. We even have a number of folks that are already in their careers, too that are there to reach out and chat and provide additional feedback and support. So I really feel like it's a bunch of friends just getting together on Wednesdays and that group of friends just keeps building and expanding. It is very much like a support group, but it's also fun. Like, our first question of the day is what are you drinking and how are you doing? Because we all hang out and chat, and drink while we're talking about how to get into tech and definitely try to make it as fun as we can and crack jokes and interrupt one another and it's a good fun time, but helping people is what's most important. MANDY: And this is all live? Unedited? DANIELLE: All live. Unedited. Yes, yes, and 7:00 PM-ish AV is a whole beast in and of itself. I just had to set up a Twitch stream for the first time in this whole time of streaming over the last year. I've been writing my princess pass and just shown up [chuckles] for every Twitch stream and now I know how much goes into that. I still had probably another few hours of set up to get past just a minimum viable product of we need to be online on the interwebs and you need to be able to hear and see me. Got there, but it's a whole thing. MANDY: Twitch is certainly interrupting the industry, I believe. DANIELLE: [inaudible]. MANDY: Especially since the pandemic. All of a sudden everyone's on Twitch. We're doing conferences live, we're doing like – how do you feel about the whole Twitch revolution and how is it different from how people traditionally came and connected in tech? DANIELLE: Yeah. Having been in events myself—that was part of what my role was within hospitality—I personally really love that there's now this whole new opportunity for connection. I think it also makes connection way more accessible because folks that were already living some kind of quarantine life because of autoimmune disorders, or disabilities, or whatever that looks like, they couldn't easily make it to those conferences and now they have a way to connect with those conferences because of hybrid events. I think it's a really rad innovation that we're seeing and it's a really wonderful way to even just as an introvert. I'm like, “I don't have to leave my house to be able to see my friends and have a good time? Yes! I am super interested in this.” I can – [overtalk] MANDY: [inaudible]. DANIELLE: Yeah. I can hang out with my dog and give him scritches whenever I want, and still see my friends and build community within tech. Heck yes. Very interested in this. I think that accessibility feature that it provides is just, it's really wonderful to know that more people can become a part of tech communities because there's now this whole online outlet for folks that couldn't otherwise afford a flight to get halfway across the country to make it to this conference, or couldn't afford to get in the conference. There's lots of ways that just makes things more accessible. MANDY: Do you think it's going to continue much beyond the pandemic? Like, do you think when it's all over, we're just going to be like, “Oh, we're back to conferences,” or do you think this is going to continue to the streaming and the slack chats and the live Q&As and things like that. Do you think that's going to continue? DANIELLE: I hope so and I think so. I think that even just from a business sense, you can tap into whole new markets by having this addition of hybrid events. You can reach a whole new subset of markets and I think quite frankly, it'd be kind of foolish to not take advantage of the new ways that we've figured out that we can still have meaningful and authentic community. [chuckles] There's definitely a way to monetize that and I'm sure plenty of people out there doing it, but I think it's also given voice to people that couldn't previously access those spaces and now they're like, “Don't take this away. This is community. This is this is what I've built,” and I think people are going to be willing to fight for that and I think that companies will see the business benefit of continuing to do both. ARTY: So anthropology question then. [laughs] DANIELLE: Great. ARTY: How do you think this will affect us as a society of connecting more virtually instead of in-person in that we're significantly more isolated now than we were before, too in terms of in-person connection? How do you think that's going to affect us? DANIELLE: One of the first things that comes to mind is infrastructure has to change. I think that support for higher speed internet across the states across the world has become much more of a priority that is striking to people, especially thinking about kids having to figure out how to do online school. All of a sudden, when COVID first hit, some kids didn't have access to the internet, let alone a computer, or a tablet, or a phone that they could go to class and do their homework on. So I think that we're going to be forced to make technology and the internet more accessible by building better infrastructure to support those things and I think it's only a matter of time before there is better social support for getting technology in the hands of kids, especially, but getting them devices. Like, I know there are a number of initiatives out there that are giving small grants and stuff for people to be able to get computers, or tablets, or whatever and I think that we're going to just keep seeing more of that. Hopefully, fingers crossed because it's super important to be able to keep connection moving and I think keep moving our society in the right direction. ARTY: So do you have any concerns about that as well as how –? We all get plugged in and are affected and in not so good ways, too. On the flip side of that, where do you see things going? DANIELLE: My partner is in InfoSec. He is a security person. So that's definitely my first thought like, how do we keep the things that are most important to us and that are now online? How do we keep those things secure and safe and protected? Figuring out how to fill the gaps that are inherent within the security industry right now of there's just not enough bodies to fill all the jobs and build all of the security that needs to be built and maintain those things. That's going to be a whole new ball game that tech has to figure out and it's going to take a lot of manpower to make sure that we can protect people and protect the things that are most important to them, and even just protect those communities, too. Make sure that those communities can continue to thrive and also, be carefully moderated and curated so that there is safety for people to interact; that there is less bullying happening online, that there is less hate crimes that are being perpetuated online. Creating safe spaces for people and providing agency for them online is a whole new ball game when we're not even really that great at doing so in real life, in-person. There are a lot of groups that are going to have to fight harder to be heard, to be seen, to feel safe, and I think that's just an ongoing thing that we need to work at being better at. ARTY: So we need ways to improve the connectivity community stuff and then also, need ways as we do those things to create safety in our communities. DANIELLE: Absolutely. MANDY: Yeah, we just had a really great discussion with Eva PenzeyMoog about two episodes ago. She wrote the book Design for Safety and it was an excellent, excellent conversation about ways that as designers and engineers, we should be building our infrastructure safe from the beginning and not just going back – [overtalk] DANIELLE: Yeah. MANDY: And doing it after the fact, but realizing who the most vulnerable people are and protecting them from the get-go. DANIELLE: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's actually something that my company works really hard to do while we're designing our curriculum products is designing from the most vulnerable within our communities and using that as a starting point for how we build things and how we continue to maintain them. Because if you can keep the folks that are most vulnerable in mind, more people are actually going to be allowed to be safe, allowed to have agency, and allowed to grow. It's a far more inclusive space when we can think about the folks that don't always have access, or don't always have safety, or don't always have agency and designing with those people in mind first. MANDY: And that's how we'll end up filling all these empty seats right now that are available in tech – [overtalk] DANIELLE: Exactly. MANDY: Is by not eliminating these people, designing a safe environment from the start, and attracting different kinds of people into tech because tech needs more diversity. DANIELLE: Tech needs more diversity. Yeah, absolutely and I think that's one of the reasons why I keep doing Code School Q&A is because I want to see more people that look like me in tech. I want to see more people that don't look like me in tech. I'm very excited to bring as many people to the table as possible because I think that's when we also get the most creative and innovative. When more tool sets are brought to the table, more diverse experiences are brought to the table, we build far more robust systems, products, and things just get better when we have more differences from which to pull and more experiences from which to learn. MANDY: As we said in the beginning, you're a fairly new developer. So I wanted to ask you the question: what was one thing you wish you knew, that you know now, that you would have known back then? If you could give Danielle advice a year ago, what advice would that have been? DANIELLE: I think that advice would have been to start actually working on technical things sooner; to start digging into the educational materials that were provided for me for free before I ever started school. I think that actually digging into those materials and having the courage to not just wait until I was in a classroom setting to be able to interact with coding languages and learning how to program, I would have had such a less fraught time getting through school and giving myself the opportunity to get a bit of a head start and more of a foundation before just diving in head first and hoping that I kept my head above water. But I think also, again, leaning into community and not being afraid to ask for help, not being afraid to advocate for myself because it took me a good 2 and a half months before a really felt like I could speak up and say what I needed. That's 2 months of time that I could have been getting more of what I needed, getting more help learning faster and more efficiently, and just being less miserable in the early stages of learning and entirely new skillsets. So don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't be afraid to advocate for yourself. I think especially as a woman coming into a technical space, there is some extra fears of not looking like I could do this, or not feeling like I belonged not knowing what I was doing. But the thing to remember was that nobody knew what they were doing; we were all figuring it out together in that school program. Being the one to be like, “Hold up, this is not making any sense to me. Can we start this over again? Can we dig into what's happening here?” Often times, other people were like, “Oh, I'm so grateful you said something because I also don't know what's going on.” MANDY: Well, with that, I think that's an amazing thing to end on and we can move over to reflections, which I can go and start off with right away is that's the secret. Like, nobody knows what we're doing in tech. DANIELLE: [laughs] Nobody knows, no. [laughs] MANDY: Nobody knows. DANIELLE: Nobody knows yet. MANDY: That's the secret. Ask questions. Lean on your community. There are so many people out there. I know you mentioned tech Twitter, #techTwitter. There are so many nice amazing people that will have your back if you just put those questions out there and even say, “Hey, tech twitter, anybody free? Do you want to pair?” They'll be like, “Yeah, let's hop on for an hour, or two,” and especially right now is when people aren't really doing much again. [chuckles] People are out there. So again, it's a secret. Nobody knows. DANIELLE: [laughs] Yeah. I think I am totally on board with your reflections for the day lean into community and don't be afraid to ask questions. I think it's so important to know that tech needs you. Whoever you are, tech needs you and whatever valuable skillset you bring to the table, whatever diverse experiences you bring to the table, it's needed. You need more people that aren't traditional and whatever that looks like. There is space and there is need for you. I think come and ask your questions at Code School on Wednesdays. We need generally every Wednesday, 7:00 PM Pacific time. We are happy to answer your questions and help connect you to the people if we don't know answers because none of us totally know the right answer most of the time. MANDY: And how can people do that work? What's the URL? DANIELLE: Yeah. Come visit us at twitch.tv/thejonanshow. We also have Code School Q&A is participating in Oktoberfest, too. So you can find us on GitHub by looking up the Oktoberfest hashtag tag and you can find us on Twitter at Code School Q&A as well. MANDY: Awesome. ARTY: I just wanted to add that a little bit with lean into community, I was thinking about Mandy, when you were mentioning your story, when I was learning electron new technology I didn't know. I had this code base that I had to learn. I didn't know what was going on, I was frustrated, I couldn't get anything working, and then I tweeted and asked for someone to pair with me. Lo and behold, some random person from the internet was like, “Sure! I'd be happy to help! Let's meet up air on this,” and I managed to get over the major hurdles I had with getting my environment to set up and getting unstuck, figured out how to run the debugging tools, and all those things really happened as a consequence of nothing afraid to reach out. Even when you might feel like you're struggling with these things alone, there really is a community out there and people that are willing to jump in and help and I think that's really great cool thing. MANDY: All right, well with that, I think we're pretty set to wrap up. If you want to join us you are in Slack. Danielle will receive an invitation to join us as well in our Slack community. It is a Patreon where you can fudge to support us monetarily on a monthly basis. However, if you're not comfortable with that, or do not want to, you can DM anyone of the panelists and we will get you in there for free. So with that, I want to thank you, Danielle, for coming on the show. DANIELLE: Thanks so much for having me for a great conversation. MANDY: Awesome, and we'll see everyone next week. Special Guest: Danielle Thompson.

Danielle Hayden is a reformed corporate CFO (chief financial officer) who is on a mission to help rule-breaking female entrepreneurs understand their numbers so they can gain the confidence needed to create sustainable profits. After spending 10+ years in the boardroom as a corporate finance officer, Danielle is now in her sweet spot as the co-owner of Kickstart Accounting, Inc. where she helps business owners with bookkeeping, financial analysis, and education and as the author of the Profit Planner book series. www.kickstartaccountinginc.com Schedule a discovery call- with Danielle to see if Kickstart Accounting can help you with your business's finances. https://hello.dubsado.com/public/appointment-scheduler/602317d9aefa856bbf502376/schedule 5 Day Video Bootcamp- 5 days to transform your financial fear to financial clarity https://profitplannerbookkeeping.com/Bootcamp Daily Dashboard worksheet and videos- Learn how to transform your financial fear to financial clarity through creating and using dashboards https://profitplannerbookkeeping.com/Dashboards   *** Are you interested in starting or growing a podcast AND business with the support of my team and a community of experienced podcasters? Join my Podcaster Pod. You get... Full access to my 8-module podcasting course taking you from idea to launch and everything in between. Equipment and tech, Recording and publishing. Scripts and templates. Everything! Access to me, my team, and a group of experienced podcasters through a private Slack channel​ Monthly Q&A calls with me and the other Podcaster Pod members. Quarterly Expert Calls​ Access to me and my network –– meaning I will introduce you to other influencers and people who can help you where it makes sense.​ Consider joining my new membership site for $27/month. Go to https://dannyozment.com/pod Use code JOINPODPOD to get a 1-month free trial. *** Do you have a website for your business or personal brand or are you building one? If so, then you need WPX hosting. I use WPX for all of my sites and so do many of our clients. For $25/month, WPX's Business Plan gives you Hosting for 5 Websites 10 GB Storage 100 GB Bandwidth Free SSL certificates The WPX Cloud Content Delivery Network They average around 30 second support response time 24/7/365 around the world Provide free unlimited site migration from any host to WPX, usually completed within 24 hours And they are fast because they never overload servers with hosting accounts, unlike so-called 'cheap' hosting which crumbles under any traffic load Sign up for the WPX Business Plan by visiting https://dannyozment.com/wpx *** Are you building an email list for your business or personal brand? If so, then you need ConvertKit. I use ConvertKit for my list and so do most of our clients. For $29/month, ConvertKit's Creator Plan  manages up to 1,000 subscribers Provides unlimited landing pages & forms Sends email broadcasts Provides the ability to Sell digital products & subscriptions Has super fast Email support AND MOST IMPORTANTLY... Gives you Free migration from another tool AND Automated funnels & sequences Get a free 14-day trial of the Creator Plan by visiting https://dannyozment.com/convertkit   *** My Recommended Resources - https://dannyozment.com/resources 

TWICE's "The Feels" introduces an all-English track with a disco feel. So, from a western perspective, was the song daebak or not? Joining us for this discussion we welcome Girl Group Enthusiast, Lai Frances. Read her interview with TWICE on Glamour: https://www.glamour.com/story/twice-shares-the-stories-behind-five-of-their-memorable-songs Join us on Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/kpopcast/shared_invite/zt-93kzxcv6-YNej2QkyY6vaPnhEQJxk0A Our Newsletter: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/thekpopcast The Kpopcast Crew: twitter.com/TheKpopcast twitter.com/Sparker2 twitter.com/michaelajkpop twitter.com/DJPeterLo kpopcast.net

Pin Important Browser Tabs Instead of crowding your browser with numerous open tabs, pin the most important ones that you access more than once a day for easy reference. Tabs you may want to pin include: OneTab Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud file storage CRM, if your client has one already Google Calendar Gmail Chat tool (Convo, Slack, etc.) Dashboard (on Notion, Trello, ClickUp, etc.) I often pin 1K work that I am doing. If you are curious about 1K work and want to learn more, check out the Rad Read's 10K Institute. This is where I learned all about assigning value to my tasks. For more productivity tips, check out Workflow Wonder and subscribe to this YouTube channel, Productivity Tip of the DayⓇ. https://www.workflowwonder.com/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/productivitytip/message

Mike Slaats is the founder of Upvoty, an instant feedback software which has recently hit $17k MRR. Mike also runs the SaaS pirates community, where he talks all about running a SaaS company. Previously, he scaled Vindy, an only marketplace for home development to 1m ARR in 5 years.What we covered in this episode Why did you start Upvoty? Stopping a $1m business to start from scratch Why your work should be fulfilling Should you be passionate about your audience? How to validate your idea How Mike got his first customers for Upvoty The value of an MVP and a landing page Why you should build runway or have an alternative income source How you can make your own luck Why indie hackers should build a personal brand Mike's one bit of advice for founders; validate How to build an MVP with the BML framework Recommendations Book: Intercom on Marketing Podcast: How I Built This Indie Hacker: Arvid Kahl Follow Mike Twitter YouTube SaaS Pirates Upvoty Follow Me Twitter Indie Bites Twitter Personal Website Buy A Wallet Thanks to Weekend Club for sponsoring Indie Bites.‘I absolutely love being part of Weekend Club.'‘Huge fan of Weekend Club and I love being part of it.'‘Absolutely love this community.'These are real testimonials for Weekend Club - the internet's most helpful community for bootstrappers. If you've ever struggled meeting other solo founders and staying accountable, then this is for you.We offer weekly Saturday deep working sessions with up to 30 bootstrappers, such as the founders of Simple Poll and VEED, an active Slack community and over 100 software discounts.Go to weekendclub.co and enter a very limited promo code ‘Indie Bites' for 50% off your first month.

The @UclaBTeam is now part of the What's Bruin Network! Subscribe to one feed to get three great shows!What's Bruin Symposium - A conversation about all things Bruin over drinks with Bruin Report Online's @mikeregaladoLA, @wbjake68, Jamaal (@champspapa1015) and BillThe B Team - insightful Bruin talk with @MichaelMHanna and Nathan (@Sideoutpar)West Coast Bias - LA Sports (mostly Lakers, Dodgers and NFL) with Jamaal and JakeSupport WBS at Patreon.com/WhatsBruinShow for just $2/month and get exclusive content, access to our SLACK channel and the new WBS Sticker. Please rate and review us on whatever platform you listen on. Call the WBS Hotline at 805-399-4WBS (Suck it Reign of Troy)

The @UclaBTeam is now part of the What's Bruin Network! Subscribe to one feed to get three great shows!What's Bruin Symposium - A conversation about all things Bruin over drinks with Bruin Report Online's @mikeregaladoLA, @wbjake68, Jamaal (@champspapa1015) and BillThe B Team - insightful Bruin talk with @MichaelMHanna and Nathan (@Sideoutpar)West Coast Bias - LA Sports (mostly Lakers, Dodgers and NFL) with Jamaal and JakeSupport WBS at Patreon.com/WhatsBruinShow for just $2/month and get exclusive content, access to our SLACK channel and the new WBS Sticker. Please rate and review us on whatever platform you listen on. Call the WBS Hotline at 805-399-4WBS (Suck it Reign of Troy)

The @UclaBTeam is now part of the What's Bruin Network! Subscribe to one feed to get three great shows!What's Bruin Symposium - A conversation about all things Bruin over drinks with Bruin Report Online's @mikeregaladoLA, @wbjake68, Jamaal (@champspapa1015) and BillThe B Team - insightful Bruin talk with @MichaelMHanna and Nathan (@Sideoutpar)West Coast Bias - LA Sports (mostly Lakers, Dodgers and NFL) with Jamaal and JakeSupport WBS at Patreon.com/WhatsBruinShow for just $2/month and get exclusive content, access to our SLACK channel and the new WBS Sticker. Please rate and review us on whatever platform you listen on. Call the WBS Hotline at 805-399-4WBS (Suck it Reign of Troy)

Russell Brown and Damian Parson are back to give you a "would you rather" segment! Listen in as they go over some of the top prospects for the 2022 NFL Draft! Who would you rather have? QB: Matt Corral, Malik Willis, Carson Strong and Sam Howell LB: Devin Lloyd, Christian Harris, Brandon Smith, DeMarvin Overshon All that and more on Cover 1 | Draft Podcast! Be sure to follow Russ on Twitter: @RussNFLDraft We would love to hear your thoughts on this topic and the show in general. Comment below and let us what you think! — Don't miss out on our PREMIUM CONTENT -Access to detailed Premium Content. -Access to our video library. -Access to our private Slack channel. -Sneak peek at upcoming content. -Exclusive group film room sessions. & much more. SIGN UP HERE: https://www.cover1.net/premium-content-plans/ Thank you for watching this video, we can't do it without the support of our fans. If you have any ideas for content you'd like to see from us, comment below. — DOWNLOAD THE COVER 1 MOBILE APP! ► Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coverapp ► iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cover-1/id1355302955?mt=8 — ► Subscribe to our YouTube channel ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on iTunes ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on Google Play ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft Podcast on iTunes ► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft on Google Play — Cover 1 provides multi-faceted analysis of the NFL and NFL Draft including: Podcasts, Video blogs, Commentary, Scouting Reports, Highlights and Video Breakdowns. NFL footage displayed is not owned by Cover 1. — — Follow Us Here Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cover_1_ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@Cover_1_ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cover1NFL/ Official Merchandise:https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/cover-1 The Cover1.net web site and associated Social Media platforms are not endorsed by, directly affiliated with, maintained, authorized, or sponsored by the NFL or any of its clubs, specifically the Buffalo Bills. All products, marks and company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners. The use of any trade name or trademark is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association with the trademark holder of their product brand.

Russell Brown and Damian Parson are back to give you a "would you rather" segment! Listen in as they go over some of the top prospects for the 2022 NFL Draft! Who would you rather have? QB: Matt Corral, Malik Willis, Carson Strong and Sam Howell LB: Devin Lloyd, Christian Harris, Brandon Smith, DeMarvin Overshon All that and more on Cover 1 | Draft Podcast! Be sure to follow Russ on Twitter: @RussNFLDraft We would love to hear your thoughts on this topic and the show in general. Comment below and let us what you think!—Don't miss out on our PREMIUM CONTENT-Access to detailed Premium Content.-Access to our video library.-Access to our private Slack channel.-Sneak peek at upcoming content.-Exclusive group film room sessions.& much more.SIGN UP HERE: https://www.cover1.net/premium-content-plans/Thank you for watching this video, we can't do it without the support of our fans. If you have any ideas for content you'd like to see from us, comment below.—DOWNLOAD THE COVER 1 MOBILE APP!► Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coverapp► iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cover-1/id1355302955?mt=8—► Subscribe to our YouTube channel► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on iTunes► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on Google Play► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft Podcast on iTunes► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft on Google Play—Cover 1 provides multi-faceted analysis of the NFL and NFL Draft including: Podcasts, Video blogs, Commentary, Scouting Reports, Highlights and Video Breakdowns. NFL footage displayed is not owned by Cover 1.——Follow Us HereTwitter: https://twitter.com/Cover_1_Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@Cover_1_Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cover1NFL/Official Merchandise:https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/cover-1The Cover1.net web site and associated Social Media platforms are not endorsed by, directly affiliated with, maintained, authorized, or sponsored by the NFL or any of its clubs, specifically the Buffalo Bills. All products, marks and company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners. The use of any trade name or trademark is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association with the trademark holder of their product brand.

SUBSCRIBE TO SALES SECRETS PODCASTITUNES ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/s...​SPOTIFY ► https://open.spotify.com/show/1BKYsQo...​YOUTUBE ► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVUh...​THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY SEAMLESS.AI - THE WORLD'S BEST SALES LEADSWEBSITE ► https://www.seamless.ai/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/seamlessai/JOIN FOR FREE TODAY ► https://login.seamless.ai/invite/podcastBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson, entrepreneur and founder of Seamless.AI. Twice a week, Brandon interviews the world's top sales experts like Jill Konrath, Aaron Ross, John Barrows, Trish Bertuzzi, Mark Hunter, Anthony Iannarino and many more -- to uncover actionable strategies, playbooks, tips and insights you can use to generate more revenue and close more business. If you want to learn the most powerful sales secrets from the top sales experts in the world, Sales Secrets From The Top 1% is the place to find them.SALES SECRET FROM THE TOP 1%WEBSITE ► https://www.secretsalesbook.com/LINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/sales-secret-book/ABOUT BRANDONBrandon Bornancin is a serial salesperson (over $100M in sales deals), multi-million dollar sales tech entrepreneur, motivational sales speaker, international sales DJ (DJ NoQ5) and sales author who is obsessed with helping you maximize your sales success.Mr. Bornancin is currently the CEO & Founder at Seamless.ai delivering the world's best sales leads. Over 10,000+ companies use Seamless.ai to generate millions in sales at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Slack, Dell, Oracle & many others.Mr. Bornancin is also the author of "Sales Secrets From The Top 1%" where the world's best sales experts share their secrets to sales success and author of “The Ultimate Guide To Overcoming Sales Objections.”FOLLOW BRANDONLINKEDIN ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonbornancin/INSTAGRAM ► https://www.instagram.com/brandonbornancinofficial/FACEBOOK ► https://www.facebook.com/SeamlessAITWITTER ► https://twitter.com/BBornancin

Fresh off the sales of BTS' upcoming LA Permission To Dance concert series, fans had something to say about what they look forward to, and would like changed in the future of k-pop concerts. This episode is a recording of a Twitter Spaces conversation held on Oct 11, 202NE1, suggested by listener and frequent #kpopchat contributor Liz C. Give Liz a follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lizcook Join us on Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/kpopcast/shared_invite/zt-93kzxcv6-YNej2QkyY6vaPnhEQJxk0A Our Newsletter: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/thekpopcast The Kpopcast Crew: twitter.com/TheKpopcast twitter.com/Sparker2 twitter.com/michaelajkpop twitter.com/DJPeterLo kpopcast.net

Howard Kurtz on Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) not saying if the 2020 Election was stolen when asked by FOX News Sunday host Chris Wallace, President Biden's plummeting approval rating and why Slack is working better for women in the workplace.

Sean McCabe is the founder and CEO of seanwes media, and Daily Content Machine. Sean is a prolific and successful creator, author, and influencer. His course, Learn Lettering, made $80,000 in the first 24 hours. For nearly a decade his podcast, blog, and courses have helped creators grow their brands, content, and skill sets.Sean's website is a treasure trove of courses and resources for anyone looking for business knowledge and creative support. Sean's book, Overlap, shows creators how to turn their passion into a successful business while working a full-time job. His podcast includes almost 500 episodes on content creation and entrepreneurship. His latest venture, Daily Content Machine, turns creators' best content into clippable moments they can share across their social media accounts.I talk with Sean about what it's like being a successful creator. We talk about growing your audience and connecting with them. We cover how to learn new skills fast, and about developing a growth mindset. We also talk about managing stress as a founder, how to handle burnout, and much more.In this episode, you'll learn: Why good writing is the foundation of great content How to connect better with your audience Leveraging short-form content to grow your brand Pricing at full value without feeling guilty How to avoid burnout, and what to do if you're already there Links & Resources Sean McCabe on The Nathan Barry Show episode 003 Craft + Commerce conference ConvertKit Enough Ryan Holiday James Clear Marie Forleo Ramit Sethi Sean McCabe's Links Follow Sean on Twitter Check out Sean on Instagram Sean's website Daily Content Machine Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Sean:If you are a founder, you should be in therapy. Full-stop. You need a therapist. I thought I didn't. I had a great upbringing. I'm all good. Everything's healthy. I don't have any problems. The problem was I didn't know the problems that I had. I didn't realize what I was stuffing down. I didn't realize what I was avoiding.There is so much to unpack that you don't know you need to unpack.[00:00:30] Nathan:In this episode I talk to my friend, Sean McCabe. We've known each other for seven years now. It's been a long time. We've been in a mastermind group together. He's actually been on the show before. Sean is a wildly talented designer. He got his start hand-lettering.I think last time he was on the show, years ago, we were talking about that aspect of his business and how he built this substantial course business. Selling courses on hand-lettering, on marketing, on writing. He's spoken at our conference Craft + Commerce, all kinds of things. Sean is one of the most prolific creators that I've ever known.It's also super fun that he's a friend and lives right here in town. We just have a great conversation. We talk about how you create content, which is one of those things that it's not even how you create content, it's why. Where that comes from. The internal drive in what you use. Where you choose to have as a source of fuel and energy to put into that creative output.How some sources are really good and productive, and others can be kind of like a house of cards, and it can be harmful. We also talk about scaling teams as a creator. How do you know when to build out a team around your business? He's done that two different ways. So I get to ask him about some of the things he's learned and applied differently.I'm going to stop there. There's a lot of good stuff. So with that, let's dive in.Sean. Welcome to the show.[00:01:59] Sean:Hey, Nathan, just saw you recently. We were playing volleyball, or something.[00:02:03] Nathan:Or something, like two days ago. You moved to my city. It's kind of…[00:02:08] Sean:Yeah. It's horrible. It's a terrible place. Boise. Don't move to Idaho.[00:02:15] Nathan:You mean Iowa? Boise, Iowa.[00:02:17] Sean:Iowa. Yeah. Don't, yeah. Did I do okay?[00:02:21] Nathan:Yeah. That's exactly what you're supposed to say. If you Google something about Boise, Google has the accordion of extra questions, or things you might want to know. One of them is, “Does Boise smell?” and it's just like auto complaints in there.And I was like, what is up with that? I clicked on it, and it's this satirical article that has 12 reasons you shouldn't move to Boise. One of them is the city dump is right in the middle of the city. Another one is like that the Ebola outbreak hasn't been fully contained yet.So it's not really safe. I think there was something about lava. Anyway, it's just an article about all the reasons to not move to Boise. So I think you're right in line.[00:03:08] Sean:Stay, away. That's what they tell me to say.[00:03:11] Nathan:Yes, but if someone were to ignore that and move to Boise, they could come to our weekly volleyball game on Wednesday nights.[00:03:19] Sean:It's casual. It's open.[00:03:21] Nathan:Let's try it. Yeah. It's been so fun having you and Laci here. It's also been fun because you started a new company. Your company is producing and editing and creating all the clips for this podcast. So, connections on so many levels.[00:03:37] Sean:Yeah. We produce this show, like the video show, the audio show, and then find clips and make those clips for social media. It's been great. We love this show. Our team's favorite content. So, I'm a little biased, but it's fun to be on. Because my team's going to work on this.[00:03:58] Nathan:Yeah, exactly. I made sure to spell your name correctly in the setup, and I know they'll get it all.I wanted to ask what sparked—like maybe first give a summary of Daily Content Machine, since that's what you're spending nearly all of your time on. More than a normal amount of time on. So, what sparked it, and what is it?[00:04:19] Sean:Fun fact. This is not the first time I've been on the show. The last time was episode three, 2,624 days ago.[00:04:30] Nathan:Give or take[00:04:32] Sean:I was doing different stuff then. It's been a crazy journey. Right now the newest iteration is an agency.We produce video clips. We turn long form video shows. If you have a video podcast or other kind of long form video content, we found that the hardest part is finding all the good moments in there, and turning those into short clips. That's what we do. I designed it for myself, really.I wanted it to be where you just show up, you record, and, everything just happens? What is your experience, Nathan, with having a video and audio podcasts made, and clips and all that published? What do you, what's your involvement.[00:05:14] Nathan:Yeah. So I think about who I want on the show, I email them and say, will you come on the show? And then I talked to them for an hour, and then I read no, either way. I don't even do that. Yep. That's my full involvement. And what happens is then really what I see is when the show comes out, which I don't touch anything from that moment on. I actually probably notice the show coming out like, oh yeah, that's the episode that we post this week. Cause we have a three week delay on our, production schedule. And so I noticed like, oh yeah, I had a David Perell on the show when I get the Twitter notification of like, David, Perell just retweeted you.And I'm like, oh, what did oh, right. Yeah. Because his episode came out and then every, I mean, David was especially generous. Right. But every clip that week seven in a row, he retweeted and posted to his, you know, hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Right. Cause it makes him look really good. It's clips of him delivering these, you know, soundbites of genius, perfectly format.And he's like great retweet share with my audience. I think that one, I picked up like hundreds of new Twitter followers, just, you know, maybe more just from, from, that. So it's a, it's a great experience. The side that I haven't done as much with that I really want to. and you and I talked about this a lot when we. Like early days of Daily Content Machine and what could it be? And, and then, getting my show set up on it is the transcripts in the show notes that you all do. cause first you found the most interesting points of the show and then second there's text versions of all of that. And then they're all like neatly edited and, and everything.And so,[00:07:01] Sean:A lot of re-purposing options.[00:07:04] Nathan:Yeah, so like if you ask the same question or a similar question, like, Hey, how'd you grow from a thousand subscribers to 10,000. Tell me about that process. If you ask that consistently, which I'm not great about asking the same questions consistently, but then over the course of 20, 30 episodes, you have this great library of answers to that question and you could make like compile it all, write some narrative and it's like, oh, there's an ebook that would be 15 pages long and could be a free lead magnet or a giveaway or anything else. It's just a total by-product of the podcast and Daily Content Machine. So I'm a huge fan. That's my experience.[00:07:42] Sean:Well, it's great to hear. yeah, we wanted to make it, I wanted to make it, so I just show up. I record myself doing a podcast with the camera on, and then I walk away. Like I don't have to, the footage sinks. It goes to the team. They produce it. They made me look good. They make me sound good. They find all of the best things. I said, things my guests said, they think about my target audience. What are their struggles? What are their goals? What do they want, what do they need? How would they search for it? How would they say it themselves? And they work together to come up with good titles for them, then produce it, flawless captions, you know, do the research, how's the guests build their name.How does their company name capitalize? Like make sure it's, it's all polished and then publish it everywhere. So I just show up once a week for an hour and record, and then I get to be everywhere every day. That's that's at least the goal. And I'm hearing you say like one of the benefits, but one of the benefits of finding clips out of your long form shows to post on social media is you give your guests something to share.And there's kind of two, two ways of approaching podcasts. And one is kind of the old school way, you know, People used to blog and the used to subscribe to RSS feeds and like, you know, that's how they consumed their content. And definitely you still want to build your own platform, have a website, have a blog, you know, definitely have an email newsletter on ConvertKit but now we're, we're posting Twitter threads. We're posting more content natively and people are consuming more natively on the platforms. So there's the old idea of, I have a podcast, here's a link, go listen to my podcast, go watch my podcast, go watch my video shifting from that to, Hey, why don't we deliver the best moments of the show?Because people are consuming short form content, and that's how they're evaluating whether they want to subscribe, whether they want to spend an hour listening in depth to that interview. We're giving them all of these entrance points and just providing value natively on the platform. Instead of asking them to go off the platform and interrupt their experience, it's here you go.Here's some value here's where you can get more.And, and that that's such a great way to. Bring new listeners on as well as to give the guests something to share, because think about the experience between a guest, being told like, Hey, your episodes out, will you, will you share a link to it? And they're like, Hey, I was on a show, go listen to the show.It's such a great interview. You know, we, we do it. We want to help out that, that person with the podcast. But imagine if the best moments that, where you said that the smartest things with all of your filler words remove and your tangents remove was tweeted, and there's a video right there. All you have to do is hit retweet.It's free content for you. It looks good. But then also for you as the show host, it promotes your show and gives you a new awesome.[00:10:28] Nathan:The other thing in it, like the retweet is fantastic, but a lot of people want that as original content on their social channel. And so having like the, the deliverable that I get from you all is, is. Yeah, it just shows up in Dropbox of here's all the videos for all the platforms and everything, you know, from my archives and all that.And I've sent those on to the guests when they're like, Hey, can I post this? Not every tweet. Like I want to post it with my own, title or tweaks on that. And so I can just share that whole Dropbox folder and they'll, they'll go find the exact thing they want to share and, and use it in their own softens.Like, yes, absolutely. Because the pre-roll or like the, or the post roll on that video is like, go subscribe to item newsletters. It's like, yes, please.[00:11:14] Sean:And it's not like Nathan, that you would have trouble getting guests, but if one had trouble getting guests for their show, or you want to get someone that's like really big, really busy, they get all kinds of requests all the time. Well, imagine if they're evaluating between these different shows, you know what, what's the audience size?What am I going to get out of it? You know, especially if you don't have millions of downloads on your podcast. Well, if you're providing these additional assets, like, Hey, we're going to make clips of this. You're going to get content out of this. It can help people make that decision to come onto your show as opposed to maybe another.[00:11:46] Nathan:Yeah, totally. I want to go, so somebody different directions. This is, we talked about an agency and the business that you're starting. I have a question that I've kind of asked you one-on-one sometimes. And I want to know why build a business with a team and like build this X scale of business rather than go the indie creative route.Right? Because if we want to, if you wanted to say independent, no team, you could probably make a business doing $250,000 a year. Work on it, maybe 20 hours a week, something like that, you know, hanging out in the studio, you'd still have your podcast. You could sit down and like, you're one of the most prolific writers I've ever met. so you could do a bunch of those, those things. And yet you keep trying to do and succeeding in doing these much harder businesses of building a team. And I have to know why.[00:12:39] Sean:Nathan, I don't know. I don't know why. I kind of know why, uh it's it's like it's going to get deep. I mean, it, it probably really goes back to childhood and being, being the oldest of 13 kids feeling like. I don't know if my parents are watching, but like, I felt this, this pressure to be successful, to be a good example, to be, to be a leader, you know, like to be productive.And, you know, I'm working through a lot of that stuff in therapy, like learning, like where did my motivations come from? And like, you know, it is this healthy because, you know, you know, my, my background of extreme workaholism for like 10 years, like, Nope, no joke. It was really bad. Like 16 hour days, seven days a week for 10 years, like all I did was work and like that's, that's my tendency.And I think something beautiful came out of that, which is this sabbaticals idea where since 2014 now I've taken off every seventh week as a sabbatical. So I work six weeks and I, I take off a week and we do that with our team and all of our team members. I paid them to take off sabbaticals and it's just been beautiful.The heartbeat of the company. And like, it's been really good for me as well in terms of, you know, burnout prevention and just unlocking my best ideas, but that's, that's my tendency. And, you know, th there's, there's all kinds of reasons. And, you know, there there's messages that we hear that maybe were said or implicit, you know, growing up that we internalize.And so I think, honestly, Nathan it's, it's probably just like chasing, like, I'm going to be dead honest, like, like it's, it's just like, I think of your post that post that you titled about enough, you know, and, you know, thinking through it, like, like if I were to just think of a number, you know, it's like, no, that's not enough, you know, and I know that's not healthy.So like, yeah, I could totally, I could totally do the solo thing. I could totally make 600. Work part-time, have less stress and maybe I should, you know, maybe I will eventually, but there's something in me that wants to build something bigger, but at the same time, it's just so much fun. Get it, like, I just love processes and systems and like, you know, building things that can scale.And so, yeah, it's.[00:15:08] Nathan:Well, let's lean into it more because I have the same thing on two different sides. Like I made the same leap from a solar creator to having a team. and there's sometimes I miss aspects of the solo creator thing. Like there's a level of simplicity and like, I look at somebody's product launch or something, and it does $25,000 or $50,000.And I'm like, oh, I remember when that amount of money was substantial in that it moved the needle for the business and like, and drove real profits. Now, like 25 or $50,000 gets eaten up by that much of expenses, like immediately, you know, cause the, the machine is just so much, so much bigger. And so I have the same thing of, of pushing for more and trying to figure out what. Like, what is that balance? And, and, yeah, I guess, how do you think about the balance between gratitude and enough and drive and ambition?[00:16:08] Sean:Yeah, that is a great question. It is. It is a balance. And as someone who has a tendency towards all or nothing thinking like, I'm, I just get obsessed. Like if I'm, if I'm about something like, I'm just all in, or I don't care at all. Like I'm really not in between. And that I think is a double-edged sword.Like it's a reason for my success, but it's also a reason for all of my downfalls and like, you know, going years without exercising and losing relationships and friendships, because I was so consumed by what I was building, you know, it is very much a double-edged sword. And so I think the answer is balance, you know, in what you're saying, w what do you, what do I think about the balance?I think it is a balance. It has to be, you have to be operating from a place of enough and then have things that are pulling you forward. You know, something that you're working towards having goals I think is healthy. You know, it's. Something that gets you out of bed in the morning. You're excited about what you're doing.You have this vision for where you're going, but it's operating from a healthy place of, I'm not doing this to fill a void in my soul. Right? Like I'm not doing this because I believe I'm not enough because I believe I'm not worthy of something. But, but because I know, yes, I matter I'm worthy. I'm important.And I'm excited. Like, I think that's the, I'm not saying I'm even there. I just think that's the balance to strike[00:17:34] Nathan:Yeah. I think you're right in this. It's interesting of the things that you can do in your, I guess, life, maybe the creative Dr.. I think there's a tendency of using that insecurity to drive creative success that can work really, really well for an amount of time. Like if you need to finish a book, grow your audience to a thousand subscribers, you know, like accomplish some specific goal.And he used the chip on your shoulder and the feeling of like, this person doesn't believe in me and that like triggers those deep insecurities on one hand, it's wildly effective and on the other, it can be super destructive and it's such a weird balance and place to sit in.[00:18:21] Sean:Yeah, a double-edged sword, for sure. Like it can, it can be what helps you succeed? And it can be your downfall. So you have to wield it wisely. unintentional illiteration you ha you have to be careful with that because it's so easy to just get consumed by it, to drown in it, to let this, you know, whatever it is, this, this, this drive, this motivation, the chip on the shoulder, whatever it is to let it take you to a place where you're just like, along for the ride, you know, on a wave, going somewhere on a, on a, you know, a tube floating down the river, right.You're just being taken somewhere, but are you being taken where you wanna go?[00:19:05] Nathan:Well, yeah. And then realizing, like, it might feel like you are up into a point, but then I guess if you're not aware of it and you're not in control of it, then you'll get to the point where the thing that you were trying to succeed, that the book launch, you know, hitting $10,000 in sales or whatever else, like that's not going to have any of the satisfaction and.[00:19:25] Sean:If I can take an opportunity here just to speak very directly to a point. If you are a founder, you should be in therapy. Full-stop like you, you need a therapist. I thought I didn't. I was like, I had a great upbringing. I'm all good. You know, everything's healthy. I don't have any problems. The problem was, I didn't know the problems that I had.I didn't realize what I was stuffing down. I didn't realize what I was avoiding. There's so much stress, you know, being a founder or even any, any C level executive in a company, like there's just so much going on, and you're responsible for so many things it affects your personal life. It affects your relationships.It affects how you see yourself. There is so much to unpack that you don't know, you need to unpack. And there's probably also stuff that, you know, you need to unpack. and Maybe you don't want to, but I went my entire life until the past year. Never going into therapy, never went to therapy. I'm like, yeah, that's great.You know, if you have some serious problems or a really bad childhood or whatever, like yeah. That's, you know, I support, it like positive, you know, like golf clap and I'm like, oh my gosh since I've been going on. I'm like I didn't know why I was doing the things I was doing, what my reasons were, what my motivations were, the ways that it was unhealthy to me, the way that it was affecting my relationships.So I just want to encourage everyone to go to therapy. I promise it's going to be beneficial[00:20:53] Nathan:Yeah.I cannot echo that enough. I've had the same experience and just having someone to talk through whatever's going on in your life, whatever, like even just interesting observations. When someone said this, I reacted like that. And that doesn't quite add up. Like, can we spend some time digging into that kind of, you know, and you realize that like, oh, that wasn't, that wasn't a normal, like healthy reaction.And it had nothing to do with what the person said or who they are or anything like that. I had to do it. This other thing, the other thing that I think is interesting about therapy is when you're following people online, you're partially following them for the advice and what they can do for you and all of that.But I think the most interesting creators to follow are the ones who are on a journey and they bring their audience, their fans, along that journey with them. And a lot of people are on a really shallow journey or at least what they put out online is a really shallow journey of like a, I'm trying to grow a business from X to Y I'm trying to accomplish this thing.And it's like, Like, I'm happy for you. There's like tips and tactics that you use along the way. And that's moderately interesting, but I think if you're willing to dive in on therapy and why you do, or you make the decisions that you do and what really drives things, it makes for as much deeper journey, that's a lot more interesting to follow. And all of a sudden the person that you followed for like learning how to do Facebook ads is talking about not only that, but the sense of gratitude that they were able to find in the accomplishments that they made or how they help people in this way or other things that's like a really authentic connection.And I think that, even though like growing a more successful business is not the goal of therapy and, and all of that. Like, it has that as a by-product.[00:22:42] Sean:It does. It definitely does. Although I'm, I definitely look at things the way that you're saying, which is like, what is. Productive output of doing this thing. And it's like, yeah, that's why I need to be in therapy to understand why I apply that lens to absolutely everything. but I I've found it immensely helpful.I would say I would echo what you're saying. in terms of sharing your journey, both the ups and the downs. I think that the highs of your journey are only as high as the lowest that you share, because otherwise it's just kind of it's, it's flat, you know, there's nothing to compare to like th th in the hero's-journey-sense you know, we we're rooting for the underdog who is going through challenges, and then we're celebrating with them when they have the wins.If you know, if you're not sharing the, the, the low points, it's not as relatable. Now that doesn't mean you have to share everything you're going through. You don't, you know, you can keep some things, you can keep everything personal. I'm just saying, if you have the courage to share what you're going to find is that you're not alone.You're not the only person going through these things. You're not the only person feeling these things. And sometimes the biggest failures or, or the things that, that hurt the most or the most difficult to go through when you share those, those can actually resonate the most. That can be where your, your community really steps up.And you, you feel that, more than any other time.[00:24:07] Nathan:Yeah. I think that, like I wrote this article a few years ago, titled endure long enough to get noticed, and it was just actually wrote it, it was off the cuff. I was on a plane just like needed to get something out that week. And it was an idea about serum on my head and I wrote, wrote it out, send it off.And, just the replies from it, because it took a more personal angle and it was talking about some of the struggles and a bunch of the replies were like, oh, that's exactly what I needed in this moment. Like, I was about ready to give up on this thing, you know? And, and that was that bit of encouragement. It ends up being this thing that feeds both ways. If you're able to take care of your audience and then if you let them, your audience can take care of you of saying like, oh, that that was really, really, meaningful.[00:24:49] Sean:Can I turn it around on you for just a second and, and ask, I, I know Nathan, you've been writing recently, you're on a bit of a streak and for those. Following your journey for a long time. They know you've, you've gone on streaks for periods of time. You made an app to log those things. We're talking about this recently.And I was just curious, what, what made you start writing again? And it may be, if you can touch on like the identity piece that you were sharing with me.[00:25:17] Nathan:Yeah.So most good things that have come in my business. Many of them, at least for a whole period of time, he came from writing. I wrote a thousand words a day for over 600 days in a row. And like, that was. Multiple books, a 20,000 subscriber audience, like just a whole bunch of things so I can work it from and everything else. And I've, I've tried to restart that habit a handful of times since then. And yeah, you were asking the other day, I'm trying to think, where are we out of the brewery? Maybe? I don't know.[00:25:51] Sean:Yeah. Something like.[00:25:51] Nathan:Well, I've all something. And you're just asking like, Hey, you're restarting that what what's driving that. And the thing that came to, I actually came to it in a coaching therapy conversation was like, I'm a writer. That's who I am. You know, it's part of my identity and yes, I'm also a, a creator and a startup founder and CEO and whatever else, but like, realizing that. I'm most at home when I'm writing, that's not what I'm doing. Writing is my full-time thing. And like, here's the cadence that I put out books, you know, obvious thing of like Ryan holiday, he's super prolific, like a book or two a year, you know?I'm not a writer in that way, but I, I have things to say and, words have an impact on people in the act of writing has such an impact on me that I realized that I feel somewhat of this void if I don't exercise that muscle and stay consistent of not just like teaching and sharing, but also taking these unformed thoughts that bounce around in my head and it, and like being forced to put them out in an essay that is actually coherent and backs up its points and like, Yeah, it makes it clear.So anyway, that's the, that's why I'm writing again. And so far it's been quite enjoyable. I'm only on, I think, 20 days in a row of writing, writing every day, but it's coming along now. I have to look. 21 today will be 22.[00:27:19] Sean:Nice. Yeah. Right. Writing is so great for clarifying thinking. And I love the, the identity piece. It's like, I'm a writer, you know, that's what I do. And I think it's interesting to think about whether it's kind of chicken and the egg, right. Maybe, maybe James clear would, would disagree, but like, does it start with a belief that you're a writer and therefore you write, or is it the act of writing that makes you a writer?And if you, if you aren't writing, then you're not.[00:27:50] Nathan:Yeah. I wrote something recently and maybe it's a quote from somebody of, if you want to be the noun and you have to do the verb, you know, and so we're looking for, how do I become a writer? How do I become a painter? How do I become a musician An artist, any of these things? And it's like, if you want to be a writer?Yyou have to write, you know, like, and I think we, we get so caught up in the end state that we start to lose track of the, the verb, the thing of like writers, write painters, paint, photographers, take photos, you know? And so if you're not seeing progress in that area, then it's like, well, are you actually doing the verb?And yeah, that plays a lot into identity and, and everything else.[00:28:37] Sean:I like what James, James clear says about like casting a vote for the person you want to[00:28:43] Nathan:Yeah, I think I referenced James on. So it's the, I reference you probably every fourth episode. And then James, maybe at like, just on alternating ones.So the thing that I quote you on all the time is the show up every day for two years, like I always had create every day as a poster on my wall, and I really liked the for two years, angle. And so I I'd love for you to share where does the for two years part come from and why, why that long? Why not for two months or two decades or something else?[00:29:16] Sean:Right. It really, the whole show up every day for two years, idea came from me, drawing letters, hand lettering. You know, you think of the Coca-Cola logo. That's not a font. That's, you know, customer. That's what I would do is draw letters. Like, like what you have behind your head, that type of style of lettering.And I just enjoyed doing that and I, it wasn't a job or anything, and I really didn't pursue it seriously for a long time, even though I enjoyed it as a kid, because I thought I could never make a living at this, you know? And it's that like productivity filter again, what can I be successful at? You know, as opposed to like, Hey, what do I enjoy?You know? And, it took an artist telling me, Hey, if you enjoy it, just create. because cause you enjoy doing it. Just create. I was like, yeah, I don't know why I needed that permission, but I did. And I just started creating and I was creating for me, like, because I loved it. And I was sharing on Instagram and Twitter and places like that, the drawings I was making, but nobody really cared or noticed for the first two years.And it, it, it, that was okay with me because I was doing it for myself. I loved the process. I love the act of. But somewhere right around two years, it was just this inflection point. It's kinda like you say, you know, like do it until you're noticed, right. And people started asking for custom commissions, do you have posters?Do you have t-shirts? And the reason I recommend that people show up every day for two years is it's not going to happen overnight. You know, hopefully in that time you find the reason for yourself that you're showing up. and the two years part is arbitrary for some people within eight months, they're on the map and people notice their work and maybe they could quit their job or, or whatever.Right. But two years is really just to give people a mark, you know, to, to work towards. by that time they figure out like, oh, it's not actually about two years. It's about showing up every day.[00:31:16] Nathan:Yeah. And a lot of what I like about two years is it since your time horizon correctly. and it helps you measure your like past efforts. I think about, you know, if you've thought about starting a, like learning a musical instrument or starting a blog or any of those things, you're like, eh, I tried that before, you know, and you're like, yeah, I showed up most days kind of for two months, maybe, you know, like when you look back and you analyze it, you're like, oh, I didn't show up every day for two years. And there's also sort of this implicit, I guess conversation you have with yourself of like, if I do this, will I get the results that I want? And cause the, the most frustrating thing would be to put in the effort and to not get the results and how the outcome you're. Like, I tried it for so long and I didn't get there. And so I believe that if you're doing something like creating consistently showing up every day, writing every day for two years and you're publishing it and you're learning from what you, you know, the results you try and consistently to get better, you almost can't lose. Like, I don't know of examples of people.Like no one has come to me. I actually emailed this to my whole list and said, like, what is something that you've done every day for two years, that didn't work. And people came back to me with story after story of things that they thought would be that. And then it like started working a year or year and a half in, or at some point in there because it's really hard to fail when you're willing to show up consistently for a long period of time.[00:32:54] Sean:And I think there's a point of clarification there kind of a nuanced discussion where some people might say, well, you know, where where's, where's the other end of the spectrum, where you're just continually doing a thing that doesn't work, you know, doing the same thing and expecting different results.And I don't think that's what we're talking about here. Like when we say show up every day, Showing up everyday to your craft, you know, for yourself to better yourself, whether that's writing or drawing or working on your business. This doesn't mean never course-correcting, this doesn't mean adapting or adjusting to find product market fit.We're talking about showing up for yourself. This doesn't mean even posting every day. It's not, it's really not for others. Like share what you want. If you want to tweet every day, if you want to blog or post your art every day, go for it. I actually tried that and, you know, it was pretty exhausting and that's part of why I made Daily Content Machine.I was like, how about I show up one hour a week and you turn that into Daily Content for me. but still on all the other days, I want to show up for myself. And, and often for me, it starts with writing as well. I think it all starts with writing, whether it's a business idea or a course or a book or content like writing is just the seed of all of that.So I like writing, not because I. It was born a rider or anything. I just see results from it. So for me, it's showing up in writing, even if I'm not posting that, or I'm not posting it now, you know, it's just for me.[00:34:19] Nathan:Yeah. And that's an important point because a lot of the time my writing is just chipping away at some bigger thing. Like some of the long essays that I've written have been written over the course of three or four months, you know, it's not like I got it together and like published it and it was ready to go.It was like an ongoing thing.What, like, what are some of your other writing habits? Because you're someone who has written a ton, I've seen you consistently write like 4,000 words a day for an entire month and stuff like that. yeah. When someone asks you, how do I become a better writer? How do I write consistently any of that? What are some of your tips?[00:34:55] Sean:Yeah. I'll tell you how not to do it, which is how I've done it, which is back to our earlier discussion. Just kind of all or nothing. my first book I wrote in 14 days, 75, 80,000 words, and my, my second book, which I still haven't edited and published. I was like, I want to show people that things take, as long as the amount of time you give them, how long does it take to write a book a year, 10 years a month?You know, two weeks, I was like, I'm going to try and write a hundred thousand words in a single day. So I live streamed it, and my idea was to speak it and have it dictated, right. Have it transcribed. I made it to 55,000 words. And these are like, it's, it's all you, you can find it. it's, it's coherent words like this.Isn't just feel like, like the book was in my head. I made it to 55,000. My voice was going and I'm like, I think I've got most of the book. I'm not going to kill my voice. And that's, as far as I made it. So I failed on the goal, but still got 55,000 words. But then for the next, like three, three or six months or something I hardly wrote.Cause I was just like, oh yeah, you know, look what I did. You know, I wrote all those words and it's like, no, that's not the right way to do it. Like I actually, I think there was a point to what I was doing and it was, it was a fun stunt or whatever, but I kind of regret that, you know, I wish I just stuck to, you know, you had that, that idea of like write a thousand words a day and this is something I would share with people as like an idea for starting out, Hey, try and read a thousand words a day.And I found out people would get stuck on that. They'd be like, I wrote 830, 2 words. I'm a failure. I'm just gonna give up and wait until the weekend when I have more time. And it's like, no, that's not the point. The point is to just show up and, and put some words there. So maybe for you, it's a time like write for 20 minutes, write for 15 minutes, write three sentence.And maybe you keep going, you know, but like put in the reps, show up, you know, put on the running shoes and go out the front door. If you don't run the five miles, that's fine. You know, walk around the block, but show up. And so I I've done it both ways and I don't prefer the stunt way where I write 50,000 words in a day.I prefer the, the, the ones where I write 400 words every single day, that week[00:37:06] Nathan:Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I've, I've, had that a lot of times where I was like, oh, I can't write today because I, I wouldn't have time to hit 500 or a thousand words. And so that's something I'm doing differently this time around of like, look even a hundred or 200 is a, is a success, any amount of, of doing the reps as good.[00:37:26] Sean:I want to lean in on that idea of defining success as less. What I mean by defining success as less is, and this is especially helpful. If you're going through a hard time, if you're feeling burned out, if you're feeling depressed, w with remote work, growing and growing, you know, w we're commuting less, we have more time.We have more flexibility in our day, but we, we tend to fill that time with just more and more work. And it's really easy to get to the point where you feel overloaded. And you, you go into your day just too ambitious thinking. You can get too many things done and ending with disappointment. Like I didn't get all the things done, you know, and you're just on this perpetual cycle of disappointment every day, setting yourself up for disappointment, trying to do too much.And instead of defining success as less. And so if you're, if you're feeling depressed, I mean, this gets as small as today as a success. If you brush your teeth, like today's a success. If you shower, today's a success. If you walk around just your block, that's it not run a mile, you know, not come up with a new business plan or outline a whole course or something.Less defined success is less, when I would do podcasts, I, you know, a podcast is what an hour, maybe two hours or something like that. But it takes a lot of energy. If you've never been on a podcast, you know, it takes energy to record. And I would feel bad after I record a podcast, not getting as much done afterward, you know, like, oh, I didn't get that much done.I mean, I recorded a podcast, but then I was supposed to have this and this and this, and just beat myself up. And I realized like, Hey, that, that podcast I recorded, that's going to be heard by thousands of people. That's really high leverage work. And I brought my best self and I really showed up and I really delivered.And that was good work. And you know what, on days where I have a podcast, I'm going to define that day as a success. If I show up and record that podcast, anything else is a bonus. And, and you just make that smaller and smaller and smaller until it's accessible to you until it's attainable for you. So maybe it's like write three sentences.If you show up at all to your writing app and write three sentences, the days of success. And what you'll find is more often than. You'll keep going.[00:39:34] Nathan:I think that's so important in, and I imagine most creators have been in that position of no motivation feeling depressed. And then you beat yourself up because you didn't get anything done, like deriving yourself worth. This kind of goes back to the earlier conversation, driving your self worth from what you create can both be very powerful in that it can feed itself really well.And then it is also incredibly fragile. And I've gotten to that point where if you end up in the downward spiral version of that, then like not creating, not accomplishing something. Leads you to feel more upset and depressed and so on. And it like when it works, it works well. And when it stops working, it fails spectacularly.And I think you're right. That the only way out of it is to lower that bar of success to something crazy low that you can't consistently. And then, you know, gradually you're way out of it from there.[00:40:34] Sean:Yeah, you, you are more than what you do. You are more than what you create. You are more than what you produce. You are more than your job. You are not your company. You're not the money in the bank. You're not how much you make each month. You're not the decline in revenue from this month compared to last month.Like you're none of those things. You're a person you're a human outside of that with independent work. And that's such a hard thing to internalize, but, but if you can, I mean, you, you, you just become impervious to all the things that can come against you. You know, you just become unstoppable. Nothing's going to phase you.Like you can embrace the highs and embrace the lows and just ride the rollercoaster. And I'm just describing all the things that I don't know how to do, but I'm working.[00:41:20] Nathan:Yeah. It's all the things that we're trying to, like lean in on and remind ourselves of, in those, in those tough times, I have a friend who has his game, that he played his, a few little kids, and his sort of a little game that he plays with them over time. And he like in a playful, joking voice, he asked them like, oh, what do you need to do to be worthy of love? And it's like turned into the thing for they, like, they're like nothing, you know? And he's very purposefully trying to counteract this idea of like, oh, I need to earn worthiness. I need to earn love. If, if I like show up for my parents in this way, if I take care of my family in that way, if I'm not a burden on other people, then like, Then I'll be okay and I'll be worthy of love and all of that.And so he's just playing it, like making it a playful thing with his kids from a very young age to basically instill this idea of like, you are a complete whole person and you can't, like earn worthiness of love and you also can't lose it.[00:42:19] Sean:I'm just thinking of the titles for this episode, that my team's going to come up with, like how to be a founder worthy of love.[00:42:26] Nathan:Yes, exactly.[00:42:28] Sean:Don't use that title.[00:42:31] Nathan:Okay. But I want to go, you've built a, a team twice, for first for Sean West, as a business, you know, of the course and content, community business. And then now for Daily Content, I want to get into, like what you like, how you built the team differently between those two times and what you learned. but before we do that, let's talk about as a solo creator. When you're thinking about making that leap to something where you need a team to build it to the next level, maybe you're at a hundred thousand dollars a year in sales, and you're looking at maybe the roommate's eighties and the Marie Forleo's of the world where like a few, rungs above you on the same ladder.And you're like, okay, that would require a team. What are some of the things that you think people should consider in that leap?[00:43:22] Sean:My biggest mistake was applying the right advice at the wrong time.Like I'm not a, I'm not a reckless person. Like I'm going to do my research and learn and like get all the smart people's advice. And so every, every big mistake I've made was as a result of applying great advice from smart people at the wrong time.And so it's, and, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone really, really talk about this. There's a lot of people slinging advice who should really be asking questions, but at the same time, you can't even blame them. Cause like Twitter, there's no room for nuance. Like you tweet fortune cookie tweets, you know, with, with advice and like, hope that people apply it at the right time.Like, that's just kind of how it goes. But like, you know, to, to your point of like looking to other people and what they've built and like, oh, that's what I would need and stuff, you know, I, I heard things. Delegate, you know, you don't want superhero syndrome. Like you need to empower other people and delegate the things you're not good at delegate the things you don't like to do, delegate the things you're good at.And you like to do, but you shouldn't do because you're the founder and you need the vision, you know, like, so it's like delegate, delegate. And so, okay. All right. Hire. This is going to sound really stupid, but no one told me that you need to make sure the thing that you're doing is working before you hire, because hiring is scaling, which means to make something bigger.And if you've got a bucket at the beach and the bucket has holes in it, and you scale that bucket, you have a bigger bucket with holes. Like th th that's not better. That's like, do you, do you like the stressful problems you have now? How would you like problems with another zero on that? Like you have $30,000 problems.Do you want $300,000 a month problems? Like, you know, it's not fun. so nobody's told me that and looking back, it's like, it's so dumb. Like, do you think making this big. Automatically makes it better. It's just going to automatically make the problems go away. No, you need to, you need to scale. What's working, do more of what works and, and, and slow down and hold off and make sure the thing you have is working before you grow it.I don't know if I answered the question, but I'm just speaking to my past self.[00:45:32] Nathan:You totally did. So what are the things that, like, how does that play out as you're building Daily Content Machine, versus the previous team?[00:45:40] Sean:The difference here is my, my previous business required me to function and I hired people around me, you know, to support me. So I wasn't doing all the work, but I had to show up. I had to, you know, whatever I had to write, I, you know, come up with an email or blog or. Or live stream or podcast or whatever.It was like, it was built around me and there's nothing wrong with that. Like, that's totally fine. You can build a business where you do what you love and you're supported by your team. I just found that you can, you can do something that you love and burnout, like after you do that for years and years and years, it's not even that I don't like podcasting or I don't like writing cause I actually do what it ultimately came down to is that I don't like having to do it.And if I don't, if I don't, then everything falls apart. And so with this new business, the agency, it was like, okay, like the first thing I want to build from is this can't require me to function. It has to be built in a way that the team can run things where it's like, I don't have to be on the strategy call.I don't have to do the marketing. Like my face isn't necessarily the reason people are coming to. and that, that really shifted how we build things.[00:47:01] Nathan:Yeah. I mean, that, that's a huge thing. And like, I imagine you defining all of these roles and early on, you might be doing a bunch of them to test if it works and to build out the systems, but none of them are like defined by your own unique skillset. Like you actually I've loved watching your systems and the, as you've shown me behind the scenes, because you're breaking it down and you don't need one person who is a fantastic video editor and copywriter and project manager talking about that, actually, because I think so often we're trying to find the employee or the team member. That's like the, the unicorn perfect fit. And you've made a system that doesn't require.[00:47:42] Sean:Exactly. And we did start out that way, where, when, when I was initially hiring for, you know, this Daily Content Machine service that we have, what's involved in that process and we talked. Clients and prospects all the time that like the Mo one of the most common things they try to do is either build a team in-house that can find all the best moments scrubbed through the long form content, edit it.Well, you know, titles, research, all of that, the build that team in house, or hire a freelancer and the problems with either of those is like what I've identified as it comes down to the person doing, doing content repurposing well requires nine key skills among them like copywriting and marketing and design and animation and rendering, and like, you know, SEO and all of that stuff.And I'm not saying there's, there's no one out there with all those skills, but, but those people are doing their own thing most of the time,[00:48:38] Nathan:I think I'm a pretty good Jack of all trades. And I think if we get to five of those, probably maybe on a[00:48:45] Sean:You could probably do most, I can do most too, but I don't scale, you know, so I'm trying to, I'm trying to scale me. and the first thing I tried to do was hire someone who could do all the things like, okay, you need to be able to, and that very quickly was not the way that was not going to work.So we realized we need specialists. We need people who are really good writers. We need people who are really good animators. People who are good editors, people who are a good quality assurance, reviewers, people who are good project managers, you know, all of that. And that's, that's what probably sets us apart.You know, the most unique thing is like, we learn about your audience and we find all of the moments and like teaching people, I've talked to people who have their own teams, or they're trying to build teams for doing this. And that's the hardest part is how do you teach someone how to find those moments?Like video editing is commoditized. You can find a video editor anywhere, but what happens when you try and get a freelancer who can just chop up clips and animate it and put a slap a title on it? Yeah. Th they're not, they don't care about the quality. They're not capitalizing the book titles and the company names and spelling the guests.Right. You know, and the titles of the clips, that's like half of it, you know, like half of it is the title, because that's going to determine whether someone sticks around and clicks or watches or whatever, and they're not thinking the right way, or they're not finding the right moments. And so the person who's outsourcing, they're trying to go from, I've been doing this myself.I've been editing my own video. I've been scrubbing through my own long form content to now, okay, you have got this freelancer, but now you're a project manager and a quality assurance reviewer because their work isn't up to par. And so I have people asking me like, how do you teach people how to do this?Well, how to find those moments, what's going to provide value to the audience. How do you title it all? and that part, I'm not giving away because that's, that's our home.[00:50:33] Nathan:Yeah. And that, that makes sense. So you described Daily Content Machine as an agency and it is, but I was like, great. You're an agency. Here's my other idea for a show where. Like a dream it up and produce it. Or actually we build my website for me, like your, your designers on all that.Right. And your answer would be like a flattened and I think that's really important for the business. So can you talk about the difference between the agency that you're running in productized services and how you think about making that scale versus like a, an agency of, Hey, this is our hourly rate.These are the projects we're best at, but we'll kind of take on anything.[00:51:11] Sean:So maybe I'll I'll I'll title the clip of this moment, how here's, how you will try it like this. Here's how you create a six figure agency. And for. It is by saying no to almost everything and getting really specific about what you offer and to whom. So my previous, the previous iteration of my business, I was out of a scale of one to ten I was working at a level 11 effort, you know, to bring in six figures with this version of the business. It's like a one or two in terms of, you know, getting people to give you vast amounts of money. And the difference is in what you're providing and, and to whom. So you've kind of got this, this matrix of products or services that either make money for your clients, or they're just nice to have.And then on the people side, you have, it's a generalization, but people who have money and people who don't, and I was always playing on hard mode, you know, I was trying to sell like kind of more premium stuff to people who didn't have money. And I'm like, you know, feeling bad about not being able to give stuff to the people who don't have money.And it's like, you know, what a really great way to do this would be to provide premium services that make money for people who have. So I decided I'm going to start with six to seven figure business owners. What is it that they need? And what is it that, that I'm good at, you know, core competencies. And that's where we came up with this idea.And the hardest part has been not giving into shiny object syndrome. All of the things that we could do, all of the services that I want to build. And it's like, no, there's so much more juice in this one thing. If we just stick to this and just become the best at finding, identifying, and producing and distributing clips from long form content and just be really, really good at that.There's enough complexity in that, you know, and just see that as the game, like, how can we get really good at this? How can we sell this better? How can we deliver it better? How can we increase the quality and just getting really focused and aligning what you offer the value of that to the people you're offering it to within four weeks with just a page and a form.This was a six figure book.[00:53:16] Nathan:When I think about the price of the offering. So I think I have. for what I pay for and Daily Content Machine paying about $5,000 a month. Is that right? I think somewhere in there.[00:53:28] Sean:So, what we didn't say is you, you kind of talked me into, adding another service, which is, we also do the video and audio show notes, transcript, like podcast production piece. So like, we'll produce the full thing. You just show up and record sync the footage to us. We'll produce the show and we'll make the clips.That's actually been a really nice bundle, but I'm like, okay, that's it, that's it. You know? So you kind of have some extra services in there.[00:53:53] Nathan:Yeah.To be clear, you don't want to let your friends, even if they live in the same town, as you convince you to like change your agency,[00:54:00] Sean:Nathan's very convincing.[00:54:03] Nathan:I distinctly remember. I even invited you over for dinner and convinced you of it,[00:54:07] Sean:How am I supposed to say no,[00:54:08] Nathan:Exactly.[00:54:10] Sean:You made an offer. I couldn't refuse.[00:54:13] Nathan:But in that, so you're talking about like what you're selling to someone who might not be able to afford it, or like you might make a course that you charge $5,000 for that is absolutely worth every bit of that when in the right person's hand and apply it in the right way. But you're going to have a bunch of people trying to buy it, who like, aren't that person who's going to get the leverage to make it a clear 10 X value or something like that. And so you might have in this position where someone's like, oh, $5,000 is expensive. Should I buy it? I don't know. And you're like, honestly for you, I don't know if you should buy it.Like you're not in the target market and that's, that's $5,000 one time in the case of this. And this agency, this productized service, I guess, $5,000 a month. And so actually two of those clients, and you've got a six figure a year agency business. And it's just interesting. The thing that you said made me really drove home the point of, there's not necessarily a correlation between effort and income and, and effort and output. And so you found a model and kept, kept tweaking until you found one where it was like, look, there's a ton of work that goes into this, obviously. And there's a bunch of really smart people working on editing and transcribing and captioning and everything in the show. but like, it, it doesn't have to be crazy complicated, whereas some of the other business models that you and I have both tried have been way more effort for way less.[00:55:40] Sean:Yeah. And what can really hold you back is not realizing who you're trying to market to. And. getting Talked down in your prices by accidentally catering to the wrong people. So like people who can't afford your services, you could get on call consultation calls with them. And they're just like, I just don't have this much money and can you do discounts?And you, you almost start to feel bad. Like, you know, how can I charge this much? I must be charging way too much. And it's like, or maybe you're serving the wrong customers. Like, you know, when you talk to the right people, that may actually be really cheap. I remember when I started designing logos, this is like a decade ago.My first logo, I charged like 150 And then, once I sold that I got enough confidence to charge 300. And then I was like, I, you know what, instead of doubling again, I'm going to charge $750[00:56:30] Nathan:Ooh.[00:56:31] Sean:I did that. And you know, I'm like slowly building on my portfolio and I got up to like, $1,500 and clients were paying that and right around there, you start to get people resisting.Now you've got a price with a comma and it gives people. pause And they're like, can you come down? Can you do a little bit cheaper? And it's so tempting. You, you want to do that because you want the job. You, you want them to be happy. It could be a good portfolio item. And I remember just kind of fast forwarding through this, but like, you know, just mindset shifts and stuff.Eventually I got to the point where there was this startup out of San Francisco they wanted a logo. And I was like, this would be really valuable for this company, you know? And I somehow mustered up the courage to charge $4,000. And I found out later from a friend of a friend, you know, from someone that worked there that they thought I was like super cheap because someone else they knew or some other agency was going to charge $25,000 And I was like, wow, like I'm over here. Just like feeling bad about my prices, thinking I'm going so big. And really I'm. I was just serving the wrong code.[00:57:34] Nathan:Yeah. And it's so interesting because the person who's only able to pay $500 or only thinks the logo is worth $500. It's not that they're wrong or they're devaluing your service or something like that. It's that maybe it's for a side project or it's for a business that just got off the ground or any of that. And so it's not worth getting offended over or something like that. It's like, we just don't have product market fit, like product customer fit. It's not a thing here, you know, and my services are better for, you know, bigger, more established companies. So the saying no to, to, services, occasionally getting talked into specific services by your somewhat annoying local friends. but then where does it go from here as far as what are you looking to, to, to add more clients and, and keep scaling and growing?[00:58:30] Sean:Yeah. That's what we're trying to figure out right now is it's always tricky. It's a blessing and a curse when you have an audience, because it can kind of create false product market fit. Like you, you think you have something and then you exhaust your audience and then you're like, oh, like I kinda need to figure this out.You know, that's like, we're experiencing that right now because like, I was getting like 40% close rates on consultation calls on sales calls, and now we're not, and it's. Oh, no, like what's happening. And it's like, well, I think those people probably knew me for several years, you know? And then like, there's just all this trust and still Nathan we're a year in and we don't have, like, we don't have a proper website for, for the agency.It's like a page with a form. That's it? There's no, there's no examples. There's no case studies. There's no portfolio item and we've made it this far. but you know, when people don't know you, they need that social proof and they want the examples and they're looking for past versions of success. And like the sales cycle is a little bit longer.And so that's where we're at right now is like figuring out kind of like Mar marketing channel fit. And I know well enough to know, like it's better to, and back to right advice, wrong time. it's a good idea to be everywhere if you can, you know, cause different people consume on different platforms.Even if you don't use Instagram. Other people do, even if you don't use YouTube, other people do it's. Beyond LinkedIn, even if you don't, you know, that like there's, there's some, there's some sound reasoning to that at the same time. You don't want to try to do all of that all at once, you know, and, and spread yourself too thin, like pick one channel, do one channel.Well, and when you've got that down and it's easy and you have systems and it's not taking too much time, then expand to another channel with the goal of like, ultimately diversifying kind of like investments. You don't want to just diversify all at once. You know, like, like try some things out, you know, focus on one thing at a time, see what works for us.I, at least I know that much. And so it's like, okay, I'm not trying to do every version of marketing, you know, like, oh, do we do affiliates? Do we do ads? You know, do we do content? Do we do cold outreach? You know? I'm trying not to do everything at once. So we're kind of dabbling in one thing at a time and seeing what fits.[01:00:48] Nathan:So how many clients do you have now for the agency that are the consistent tenders?[01:00:53] Sean:Not a lot. It's still very small. And we've had like, I it's under a dozen cause like some, we had like several accounts, like not renew and stuff. So it's still very small. And for three or four months, I stopped marketing and sales completely because I did not want to break this thing with scale because I notice things in operation that were the operations that were not going well.I'm like, this is going to be really bad. Like if we just sign more clients, it's going to be really bad. So, I had clients pay upfront for like six months or 12 months of service, which kind of gave us time to focus on operations. And now everything's humming along smoothly. Like the systems we've built can support like dozens or hundreds of accounts, even like, we don't need it right now, but it'll support where we want to go.But it's still a very, it's actually very small, like again done, like almost no marketing a year end, still don't have a website. Like it's pretty much just been all internal focused.[01:01:52] N

Join Anthony Prohaska, Erik Turner and Greg Tompsett LIVE immediately following the week 5 SNF match-up to recap the Buffalo Bills vs Kansas City Chiefs in this week's Post Game show presented by Uncle Jumbos and West Herr.Buffalo Bills Kansas City Chiefs Post GamePresenting Sponsor - Uncle Jumbo'shttps://www.unclejumbosdistillery.com/Segment Sponsor - West Herr Auto Grouphttps://www.westherr.com/Fantasy Sponsor - Underdog FantasyNew Users receive free $25 when using Promo Code: COVER1Link: https://play.underdogfantasy.com/p-cover1-sportsGreat merch available through Cover 1 Affiliate partner Playbook Products below:https://bit.ly/2ETuWjSCover 1 would love to hear your thoughts on this topic and the show in general. Comment below and let us what you think!—Don't miss out on our PREMIUM CONTENT-Access to detailed Premium Content.-Access to our video library.-Access to our private Slack channel.-Sneak peek at upcoming content.-Exclusive group film room sessions.& much more.SIGN UP HERE: https://www.cover1.net/premium-content-plans/Thank you for watching this video, we can't do it without the support of our fans. If you have any ideas for content you'd like to see from us, comment below.—DOWNLOAD THE COVER 1 MOBILE APP!► Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coverapp► iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1532587486—► Subscribe to our YouTube channel► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on iTunes► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | Buffalo Podcast on Google Play► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft Podcast on iTunes► Subscribe to the Cover 1 | NFL Draft on Google Play—Cover 1 provides multi-faceted analysis of the NFL and NFL Draft including: Podcasts, Video blogs, Commentary, Scouting Reports, Highlights and Video Breakdowns. NFL footage displayed is not owned by Cover 1.——Follow Us HereTwitter: https://twitter.com/Cover1Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@Cover_1_Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cover1NFL/Official Merchandise:https://teespring.com/en-GB/stores/cover-1The Cover1.net web site and associated Social Media platforms are not endorsed by, directly affiliated with, maintained, authorized, or sponsored by the NFL or any of its clubs, specifically the Buffalo Bills. All products, marks and company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners. The use of any trade name or trademark is for identification and reference purposes only and does not imply any association with the trademark holder of their product brand.

Anirudh Singh sits down with Meka Asonye, Partner at First Round Capital. In this episode they discuss: - Meka's early career, including spending time with the Cleveland Indians - Heading Stripe's Startup/SMB business - How Meka became an angel investor and later decided to join First Round Capital - Being fluent in Pig Latin And much more! Meka Asonye is a Partner at First Round Capital based in San Francisco. Before moving into venture, Meka was an active angel investor backing companies such as Coda, Common Room, Rimeto (acq. by Slack), Snackpass and Stytch. Previously, he served as the VP of Sales & Services at Mixpanel, where he ran the more than 100-person global revenue team and owned the customer lifecycle from first website visit to renewal. Before Mixpanel, Meka spent four years at Stripe as it scaled from 250 to 2000 people and matured its sales org. When he first joined in 2016, Meka served as one of the payments company's early account executives, leading their first attempts to go upmarket and land enterprise logos. For the next three years, he headed up Stripe's Startup/SMB business, which involved launching outbound sales, optimizing self-serve, building a customer success function, opening new offices, and finding creative ways to holistically support startup customers. Prior to joining Stripe, Meka served as Case Team Leader at Bain in San Francisco, partnering with the C-Suites of Fortune 50 companies across different verticals. Meka started his career working in Player Development & Baseball Operations for the Cleveland Indians, where managed operations of the Minor League system and advised the General Manager on Major League roster and payroll allocation through advanced statistical analysis. Meka earned a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude in Economics and Finance from Princeton and his MBA from Harvard Business School. He's an instrument rated private pilot and diehard Chicago Bears fan. For more FinTech insights, follow us below: Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/wharton-fintech-club/ WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech Anirudh's Twitter: twitter.com/avsingh_24

Kris & David are joined by Dave Prazak (@DavePrazak) to discuss the almost-week that was October 6-10, 1999 as we covered the 11th & 12th on a previous episode. This show starts with a fantastic discussion of the infamous Heroes of Wrestling PPV—the reason Kyle Rieger asked for this week as a $25 Patreon pick—and folks, if you haven't watched this show, you need to, as it's one for the ages. Of course, we talk about Jake Roberts, but there is so much other stuff that was crazy as well, both on camera and behind the scenes, so this is a can't miss segment. We also talk about the death of Gorilla Monsoon and the tragic career ending injury suffered by Darren Drozdov, including how the WWF really dropped the ball in many ways with how they handled the injury publicly on SmackDown two days later. Other things discussed are the pro debuts of Wataru Inoue, Katsuyori Shibata, and Hiroshi Tanahashi in New Japan, Ray Gonzalez becoming “Mr. Raytings” in WWC, Tammy Sytch's infamous sit-down interview on ECW's TNN show, Jerry Lawler coming up short in the Memphis mayoral election, Jesse Ventura's Playboy interview, then, finally, World Championship Wrestling. There, the top story is the immediate aftermath of Vince Russo & Ed Ferrara joining the promotion, including all of the details as to how it went down. This is a fantastic show, as it always is when Prazak is on with us, so LISTEN NOW!!!!!Timestamps:0:00:00 Heroes of Wrestling1:55:19 WWF3:09:22 Eurasia: AJPW, NJPW, BattlARTS, FMW, NOW, Osaka Pro, SPWF, Toryumon, RINGS, Arsion, GAEA, VDB Top Catch, & BWF3:32:34 Classic Commercial Break3:37:24 Halftime3:51:30 Other North America: Stampede, AAA, CMLL, IWRG, WWC, & MMA4:07:27 Other USA: CZW, UCW, NWA Wildside, IPW, OVW, HWA, Jerry Lawler's failed mayoral bid, Power Pro, KAW, Dale Gagner's AWA, APW, & Jesse Ventura5:20:45 WCW6:25:32 Patreon Preview: Vince McMahon's initial public response to the nWo/Outsiders angleTo support the show and get access to exclusive rewards like special members-only monthly themed shows, go to our Patreon page at Patreon.com/BetweenTheSheets and become an ongoing Patron. Becoming a Between the Sheets Patron will also get you exclusive access to not only the monthly themed episode of Between the Sheets, but also access to our new mailbag segment, a Patron-only chat room on Slack, and anything else we do outside of the main shows!If you're looking for the best deal on a VPN service—short for Virtual Private Network, it helps you get around regional restrictions as well as browse the internet more securely—then VyprVPN is what you've been looking for. Not only will using our link help support Between The Sheets, but you'll get a special discount, with prices as low as $1.67/month if you go with a three year subscription. With numerous great features and even a TV-specific Android app to make streaming easier, there is no better choice if you're looking to subscribe to WWE Network, AEW Plus, and other region-locked services.For the best in both current and classic indie wrestling streaming, make sure to check out IndependentWrestling.tv and use coupon code BTSPOD for a free 5 day trial! (You can also go directly to TinyURL.com/IWTVsheets to sign up that way.) If you convert to a paid subscriber, we get a kickback for referring you, allowing you to support both the show and the indie scene.To subscribe, you can find us on iTunes, Google Play, and just about every other podcast app's directory, or you can also paste Feeds.FeedBurner.com/BTSheets into your favorite podcast app using whatever “add feed manually” option it has.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/between-the-sheets/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands