Podcasts about web services

This episode is all about navigating change in the research and higher education world. Sarah's guest is Andrew Millar, Head of Web Services at the University of Dundee. Sarah and Andrew talk about Seeing change as an evolution not a revolution Why open communication is essential for anyone managing change The importance of finding a sense of control amid change What changes are coming for higher education in 2025 and beyond Find out more Read the show notes and transcript on the podcast website Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn Andrew's Predictions for 2025 LinkedIn article Download the Career Compass worksheet About Research Adjacent Fill out the research-adjacent careers quiz Sign up to the Research Adjacent newsletter Follow Research Adjacent on LinkedIn Instagram and BlueSky Email a comment, question or suggestion Leave Sarah a voice message

Den Namen .NET haben sicherlich viele von euch schon einmal gehört. Viele Windows-Updates bringen regelmäßig Neuerungen zur wichtigen Runtime der Plattform. Aber was genau verbirgt sich dahinter und warum ist diese Technologie auch außerhalb des Windows-Ökosystems relevant? Aber zuallererst klären wir auf, was sich hinter dem Begriff .NET alles verbirgt – denn das ist eine ganze Menge.Gemeinsam mit Dennis Oehme und Martin Deiss von Garden of Concepts sprechen wir über die Entwicklung, die .NET und C# in den letzten Jahrzehnten durchlaufen haben. Die beiden berichten Jan im Podcast-Studio, wie sie modernes .NET Core nutzen, um ihre Projekte und Web-Services nicht nur auf Webservern, sondern auch auf Embedded Devices zu bringen.Außerdem besprechen die drei die Nähe und Gemeinsamkeiten von .NET, C#, TypeScript und anderen Sprachen und Frameworks. Immerhin stammen beide aus der Feder von Anders Hejlsberg, einem der maßgeblich verantwortlichen Entwickler für Turbo Pascal und Delphi bei Microsoft.Und natürlich interessiert uns nicht nur das Framework und die Syntax der Sprache, sondern auch die Community und wie neue Entwickler:innen am besten den Einstieg in die sehr vielfältig nutzbare Welt von .NET und C# schaffen.Schreibt uns! Schickt uns eure Themenwünsche und euer Feedback: podcast@programmier.barFolgt uns! Bleibt auf dem Laufenden über zukünftige Folgen und virtuelle Meetups und beteiligt euch an Community-Diskussionen. BlueskyInstagramLinkedInMeetupYouTubeMusik: Hanimo

Kaum eine Woche vergeht auf heise online ohne Meldungen über neue Datenlecks. Zuletzt traf es einen großen Verbund von Rehakliniken, bei dem hochsensible Patientendaten offen im Netz einsehbar waren. Durch einen Hinweisgeber wurde aufgedeckt, dass Termindaten und sogar Befunddaten unverschlüsselt übertragen wurden und über das Internet abrufbar waren. Im aktuellen c't-Datenschutz-Podcast berichten die Newsroom-Redakteurin Marie-Claire Koch und c't-Redakteur Ronald Eikenberg davon, wie sie von dem Problem erfahren haben und was genau passiert ist. heisec-Redakteur Christopher Kunz kann überdies brandaktuelle Informationen zu zum Datenleak bei einem sogenannten Legaltech-Unternehmen beisteuern, auf das ihn ein Sicherheitsforscher vom Chaos Computer Club (CCC) hingewiesen hat. Wegen unzureichend gesicherter Webservices standen massenhaft Mandanteninformationen nahezu offen für jeden im Internet zum Abruf bereit. Zusammen mit heise-Justiziar Joerg Heidrich diskutiert die Runde, wie Unternehmen solchen Vorfällen vorbeugen können und wie sie sich verhalten sollten, wenn es dennoch dazu kommt. Wann besteht die Pflicht, Vorfälle umgehend bei der zuständigen Datenschutzbehörde zu melden? Wie sollte man sich gegenüber Mitarbeitern und Kunden verhalten, derden Daten eventuell in fremde Hände geraten sind? Nach Christophers Meinung ist es erschreckend, dass Patientendaten aufgrund grober Fehler wie fehlender Verschlüsselung und falscher Serverkonfiguration frei zugänglich waren. "Es geht hier um grundlegende Sicherheitsmaßnahmen, die im Jahr 2025 eigentlich selbstverständlich sein sollten", kritisiert er. Doch stattdessen würden immer wieder die gleichen Anfängerfehler gemacht. Auch die Kommunikation der betroffenen Unternehmen lasse oft zu wünschen übrig. Standardformulierungen wie "kein Hinweis auf Datenabflüsse" seien wenig vertrauenserweckend. Zudem würden Datenschutzbehörden und Kunden häufig gar nicht oder nur zögerlich informiert. Hier fordern die Experten unisono deutlich mehr Transparenz. Für Ronald liegt die Wurzel des Problems im mangelnden Risikobewusstsein: "Datenschutz muss als ernstes unternehmerisches Risiko wahrgenommen werden, genauso wie Arbeitsunfälle oder Produkthaftung." Nötig seien regelmäßige Sicherheitsaudits und die Einbindung externer Experten, um Lücken frühzeitig zu erkennen und zu schließen. Unternehmen sollten zudem offener mit Sicherheitsforschern zusammenarbeiten, die Schwachstellen aufdecken. Christopher rät Firmen, lieber einmal mehr als zu wenig zu melden, um sich nicht dem Vorwurf der Vertuschung auszusetzen. Auch Betroffene wünschten sich sicherlich mehr Informationen darüber, ob und wie ihre Daten in falsche Hände geraten sind. Insgesamt zeigt die Diskussion: Beim Schutz sensibler Daten gibt es noch viel Luft nach oben. Unternehmen müssen ihrer Verantwortung besser gerecht werden - im Interesse ihrer Kunden und auch zu ihrem eigenen Schutz. Denn Datenpannen führen mitunter nicht nur zu saftigen Bußgeldern, sondern können auch immense Imageschäden nach sich ziehen.

Eine Webseite ist schnell mit einem Baukastensystem oder WordPress erstellt. Doch drohen immer Hackerangriffe oder man wundert sich, warum die Seite nicht performt. Worauf man immer achten sollte, wenn man eine Webseite betreibt, erklärt uns Stefan Willautzkat von fairwilly. Wichtige Hinweise, die jeder kennen sollte. Shownotes:

To kick off Elixir Wizards Season 13, The Creator's Lab, we're joined by Zach Daniel, the creator of Igniter and the Ash framework. Zach joins hosts Owen Bickford and Charles Suggs to discuss the mechanics and aspirations of his latest brainchild, Igniter—a code generation and project patching framework designed to revolutionize the Elixir development experience. Igniter isn't just about generating code; it's about generating smarter code. By leveraging tools like Sourcerer and Rewrite, Igniter allows developers to modify source code and batch updates by directly interacting with Elixir's AST instead of regex patching. This approach streamlines new project setup and package installations and enhances overall workflow. They also discuss the strategic implications of Igniter for the broader Elixir community. Zach hopes Igniter will foster a more interconnected and efficient ecosystem that attracts new developers to Elixir and caters to the evolving needs of seasoned Elixir engineers. Topics discussed in this episode: Advanced package installation and code generation improve the developer experience Scripting and staging techniques streamline project updates Innovative methods for smoother installation processes in Elixir packages High-level tools apply direct patches to source code Progressive feature additions simplify the mix phx.new experience Chaining installers and composing tasks for more efficient project setup Continuous improvement in developer experiences to boost Elixir adoption Encourage listeners to collaborate by sharing code generation patterns Introduction of a new mix task aimed at removing the "unless" keyword in preparation for Elixir 1.18 You can learn more in the upcoming book "Building Web Applications with Ash Framework" by Zach and Rebecca Links mentioned: https://smartlogic.io/ https://alembic.com.au/blog/igniter-rethinking-code-generation-with-project-patching https://hexdocs.pm/igniter/readme.html https://github.com/ash-project/igniter https://www.zachdaniel.dev/p/serialization-is-the-secret https://www.zachdaniel.dev/p/welcome-to-my-substack https://ash-hq.org/ https://hexdocs.pm/sourceror/readme.html https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s10-e09-hugo-lucas-future-of-elixir-community/ https://github.com/hrzndhrn/rewrite https://github.com/zachdaniel https://github.com/liveshowy/webauthn_components https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Regex.html https://github.com/msaraiva/vscode-surface https://github.com/swoosh/swoosh https://github.com/erlef/oidcc https://alembic.com.au/ https://www.zachdaniel.dev/ Special Guest: Zach Daniel.

Download Chris's FREE E-Book on “How To Find Ultra High Net Worth Clients" from https://UHNWC.com/   Karen Hite (https://thehites.com/) and his husband, JC, are passionate about helping agency owners scale their businesses and lead them to success. She is the CEO of the Committed Mastermind and co-founded Hite Digital with her husband, JC. Hite Digital is a Digital Marketing Agency focused on serving both their teammates and clients. They believe in empowering businesses by delivering effective digital marketing solutions through PPC, SEO, Web Services, and FB Ads, all while creating one of the best places to work in America. In this episode, Chris and Karen discuss: 1. The Secret to White Label Success 2. Finding Your Business's 'Number Two 3. Scaling Without Sacrificing Quality 4. Creating Repeatable Processes to Sustain Agency Growth LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen-hite-43909336/  Website: https://thehites.com/                 https://mastermind.digitalagencyhacker.com/                 https://committedmastermind.com/  Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/thekarenhite/?_rdc=1&_rdr  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thekarenhite/  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@KarenHite_  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Agency-Hacker-Forget-Tactical/dp/B0BR9CB2J6  Maximize your marketing, close more clients, and amplify your AUM by following us on:  Instagram:  https://instagram.com/ultrahighnetworthclients  TikTok: https://tiktok.com/ultrahighnetworthclients  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@uhnwc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UHNWCPodcast  Twitter: https://twitter.com/uhnwcpodcast  iTunes:  https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/ultra-high-net-worth-clients-with-chris-brodhead/id1569041400 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Guqegm2CVqkcEfMSLPEDr Website: https://uhnwc.com  Work with us: https://famousfounder.com/fa  DISCLAIMER: This content is provided by Chris Brodhead for the general public and general information purposes only. This content is not considered to be an offer to buy or sell any securities or investments. Investing involves the risk of loss and an investor should be prepared to bear potential losses. Investment should only be made after thorough review with your investment advisor considering all factors including personal goals, needs and risk tolerance. 

Episode 627: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to the socially rich, “Friends Billionaire”, Nick Gray ( https://x.com/nickgraynews ) about how to be a master networker, throw the perfect cocktail party, plus 7 simple business ideas. — Show Notes:  (0:00) Intro (4:12) If you had $10M, how would you live? (10:11) Find who your heroes follow (13:29) Speedrun of Nick Gray's career (22:15) Idea: White label enterprise sales (26:08) Idea: Millionaire Matchmaker (37:22) Idea: web-hosting services (45:00) Idea: Airbnb experiences (48:55) Idea: Geek Squad as a service (55:00) Idea: VHS to digital conversion as a service (58:58) Idea: Bring blogging back (1:04:05) The persuasion of liking (1:09:14) How to throw a Nick Gray party  — Links: • Get our business idea database here https://clickhubspot.com/mfm • Museum Hack - https://museumhack.com/ • “If I Had $10M” - https://nickgray.net/if-i-had-10m/ • vs3 Web Services - https://vs3.net/ • Airbnb Experiences - https://www.airbnb.com/s/experiences • Elemind - https://x.com/elemindtech • Nick's blog - https://nickgray.net • The 2-Hour Cocktail Party - https://tinyurl.com/4p6h4xnu — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it's called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam's List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

SPIN TO WIN

Join us for a conversation with Tanya Janka, also known as SheHacksPurple, as she discusses secure guardrails, the difference between guardrails and paved roads, and how to implement both in application security.  Tanya, an award-winning public speaker and head of education at SEMGREP, shares her insights on creating secure software and teaching developers. Tanya also shares with us about her hobby farm and love for gardening. Mentioned in this episode:Tanya Janca – What Secure Coding Really Means Tanya Janca – Mentoring Monday - 5 Minute AppSec Tanya Janca and Nicole Becher – Hacking APIs and Web Services with DevSlopThe Expanse Series by James S.A. CoreyAlice and Bob Learn Application Security by Tanya Janca FOLLOW OUR SOCIAL MEDIA: ➜Twitter: @AppSecPodcast➜LinkedIn: The Application Security Podcast➜YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ApplicationSecurityPodcast Thanks for Listening! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Adam presents the mental model behind T1 and T2 signals, a necessary lexicon for understanding production operations.Want more?

In Part 2 of this Pulse Check series on leadership, emerging leaders can learn about creating culture and setting vision at our institutions as Dr. Gann shares practical experiences from his own background, discusses strategies for setting culture and talks about how interconnected systems impact our work. Whether you're a new leader or a seasoned pro, this episode will help you in your work to set culture, build trust, and define the strategic vision of your institution. Guest Name: Dr. Matthew GannGuest Social: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewgann/Guest Bio: Dr. Matthew Gann is an accomplished leader in education and organizational intelligence, currently serving as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Marketing, Digital Strategy, and Public Relations at the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR). With a Doctorate in Education (Ed.D.) from Trevecca Nazarene University, his expertise is in enhancing educational outcomes and community engagement through strategic leadership and digital innovation.Prior to his current role, Dr. Gann advanced through several key positions within TBR, including Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief Marketing Officer, where he directed significant improvements in digital communication and marketing strategies. His earlier tenure as Director of Web Services and Digital Strategy established foundational policies and practices that continue to benefit the institution.Beyond his professional endeavors, Dr. Gann has been a prominent figure in community engagement, serving as President of the Tennessee College Public Relations Association, where he led initiatives to strengthen educational communications across the state. His career also includes impactful roles in the private sector, where he spearheaded marketing and web development initiatives, demonstrating a consistent ability to blend technical skills with strategic oversight. - - - -Connect With Our Co-Hosts:Mallory Willsea https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorywillsea/https://twitter.com/mallorywillseaSeth Odell https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethodell/https://twitter.com/sethodellAbout The Enrollify Podcast Network:The Higher Ed Pulse is a part of the Enrollify Podcast Network. If you like this podcast, chances are you'll like other Enrollify shows too! Some of our favorites include Generation AI and Confessions of a Higher Education Social Media Manager.Enrollify is made possible by Element451 — the next-generation AI student engagement platform helping institutions create meaningful and personalized interactions with students. Learn more at element451.com. Connect with Us at the Engage Summit:Exciting news — Mallory will be at the 2024 Engage Summit in Raleigh, NC, on June 25 and 26, and we'd love to meet you there! Sessions will focus on cutting-edge AI applications that are reshaping student outreach, enhancing staff productivity, and offering deep insights into ROI. Use the discount code Enrollify50 at checkout, and you can register for just $200! Learn more and register at engage.element451.com — we can't wait to see you there!

Today I interview Chris Misterek from Showit! As you all know I am a huge fan of Showit and we talk everything from Chris' own design journey, to the Showit design community, to creating websites that convert. Guest Information:Guest Name: Chris MisterekGuest Business Name: ShowitGuest Website: showit.comLinks Mentioned:Sign up for ShowitSpark Conference for Showit DesignersMec Labs formula: C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) - 2a (https://meclabs.com/about/heuristic)Steve Krug Books on Conversion - Don't Make Me Think & Rocket Surgery Made EasyInbox Question:"How can I sell Showit as my preferred web building platform to clients, even though they might be more aware of platforms like Squarespace and Wordpress?” - Lauren B.Connect With Us:Our Free Facebook CommunityOur WebsitePodcast InstagramSupport us on PatreonTags:designer, design, brand design, brand identity design, design studio, design business, graphic design, brand designer, better podcast, brand designer podcast, logo design, brand identity design

In today's episode of Pitch Cafe, we have someone who can manage work and life outside work with excellence and she spills her beans effortlessly. So much clarity in thinking and execution, only a mom, a sportswoman, an artist and a person who can throw an event for 500-800 attendees every two weeks can do. Shubha Prithvi Raj, President of Kannada Koota Northern California and also the Director, Technical Program Management at RingCentral, with us!

How is inflation becoming a thorn in the side of U.S. banks, despite many reporting big earnings? And will AI turn into Amazon's “fourth pillar” along with its Marketplace, Prime and Web Services businesses? Plus, is there an end in sight for Boeing's troubles? Host Francesca Fontana discusses the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How is inflation becoming a thorn in the side of U.S. banks, despite many reporting big earnings? And will AI turn into Amazon's “fourth pillar” along with its Marketplace, Prime and Web Services businesses? Plus, is there an end in sight for Boeing's troubles? Host Francesca Fontana discusses the biggest stock moves of the week and the news that drove them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Google komt met een heel offensief aan nieuws, vooral gericht op werken met hun cloud én AI-systemen. Joe van Burik vertelt daarover in deze Tech Update. De cloud-markt is behoorlijk competitief, waarin Amazon met Web Services nog steeds marktleider is, Microsoft staat al een tijdje op plek twee en Google heeft als derde tien procent van de mondiale markt in handen. In een poging dat te vergroten, nu dus een heel salvo aankondigingen. Zoals dat Gemini, Google's tegenhanger voor ChatGPT, nu ook in databases AI-taken kan vervullen. Of je kan helpen met programmeren, daar doen AI-assistenten ook al bij tal van andere platforms waar code wordt ingeklopt. Die AI-tool wordt zelfs inzetbaar om cyberdreigingen te analyseren, door code de analyseren op kwaadaardige kanten. En in de bekende kantoorsoftware van Google, maar dat wisten we eigenlijk al. Opvallender daar is de introductie van Google Vids: een tool die van alles wat je kunt bedenken een video maakt, ook met hulp van AI - een animatie, bijvoorbeeld met plaatjes en teksten uit een Powerpoint. Ook belangrijk is een door Google zelf ontwikkelde chip voor datacenters, naar een ontwerp van het Britse Arm (sinds enige tijd beursgenoteerd) en uiteraard specifiek bedoeld voor AI. Die heet Axion, wordt nu al gebruikt voor bijvoorbeeld advertenties in YouTube en is straks ook beschikbaar voor klanten via tal van toepassingen. Daarmee loopt Google in de pas met Amazon Web Services, dat levert al sinds 2018 eigen chips in datacenters, en Microsoft kondigde vorig jaar aan eigen chips te maken hiervoor. Daarmee zijn ze alledrie minder afhankelijk van de echte chip-makers, zoals Intel en Nvidia. Verder in deze Tech Update: Mensen die moeite hebben met digitale zaken, moeten daarin beter ondersteund gaan worden door de overheid, dat heeft Alexandra van Huffelen, demissionair staatssecretaris van Digitalisering bekendgemaakt in een kamerbrief Eén van de meest gezochte termen in Google's zoekmachine slaat op de zonsverduistering boven de VS, en niet per se in positieve zin  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We can use archives to unlock our past. But how can these vast analogue data sets utilise technology and still retain their value? Today's guest is John Sheridan, Digital Director at The National Archives. In his role, John looks after all things digital. He shapes the strategy and direction of its numerous digital services including the vast and extensive National Archive website.We discuss the power of being able to easily access archival material, the increasing quality of document digitisation, and why archives are critical to the retention of primary sources.00:00 - Intro01:48 - What are the Archives up to right now?07:31 - Why the Archives are important in a wider cultural context17:35 - How archives save the world23:00 - What challenges does new technology present?26:18 - Dan's final thoughtsLINKSJohn Sheridan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnlsheridan/?originalSubdomain=ukThe National Archives: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/Dan Klein: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dplkleinZühlke: https://www.zuehlke.com/enWelcome to Data Today, a podcast from Zühlke.We're living in a world of opportunities. But to fully realise them, we have to reshape the way we innovate.We need to stop siloing data, ring-fencing knowledge and looking at traditional value chains. And that's what this podcast is about. Every two weeks, we're taking a look at data outside the box to see how amazing individuals from disparate fields and industries are transforming the way they work with data, the challenges they are overcoming, and what we can all learn from them.Zühlke is a global innovation service provider. We envisage ideas and create new business models for our clients by developing services and products based on new technologies – from the initial vision through development to deployment, production and operation.

Digital accessibility can be intimidating for faculty and staff. In this episode, Michele Thornton, Laura Harris, and Kate DeForest join us to examine one example of a gamified approach to professional development. Michele is an Associate Professor of Management at SUNY Oswego, Laura is the Web Services and Distance Learning Librarian at SUNY Oswego. and Kate is the Digital Content Coordinator at SUNY Oswego. A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.

Let's take a quick look at implementing REST endpoints in Golang. We'll go over routes, services, models and make some code changes to see how they take effect. At the end of this 20-minute course, you should be able to start creating Web Services in Go. We'll be using Gin Framework for implementing these endpoints. Purchase course in one of 2 ways: 1. Go to https://getsnowpal.com, and purchase it on the Web 2. On your phone:     (i) If you are an iPhone user, go to http://ios.snowpal.com, and watch the course on the go.     (ii). If you are an Android user, go to http://android.snowpal.com.

Let's take a quick look at implementing REST endpoints in Ruby. We'll go over routes, services, models and make some code changes to see how they take effect. At the end of this 20-minute course, you should be able to start creating Web Services in Ruby. We'll pick one of the Ruby Frameworks we have a preference towards, but the learning should be agnostic to the framework. Purchase course in one of 2 ways: 1. Go to https://getsnowpal.com, and purchase it on the Web 2. On your phone:     (i) If you are an iPhone user, go to http://ios.snowpal.com, and watch the course on the go.     (ii). If you are an Android user, go to http://android.snowpal.com.

Shawn Wildermuth has been tinkering with computers and software since he got a VIC-20 back in the early '80s. He has been a Microsoft MVP, Pluralsight Author, and filmmaker. You can reach him at his blog at Wildermuth.com and he makes films at Twainfilms.com.   Topics of Discussion: [5:34] What got Shawn excited about coding? [9:26] How should developers be thinking about just the concept of an API? What are the categories that they should be aware of? [16:04] Shawn's first steps in designing an API. [18:37] What are the newer concepts and newer advances that are worth taking a look at? [19:10] Maturing minimal APIs. [24:53] Endpoint filtering. [27:01] Does the core logic need to be aware that it might be in a caching workflow, or does caching as a concept belong to the interface for the application programming? [31:45] Shawn's favorite method for testing the complete set of web service APIs. [34:59] Helping young developers not get lost along the way of feeling the need to be perfect. [39:25] How developers make the decision of where and how to run the applications they built.   Mentioned in this Episode: YARP Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us at programming@palermo.net. Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! Shawn Wildermuth on Next-gen Web Services Twain Films   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Episode 180 contains the important Digital Marketing News and Updates from the week of Sep 25-29, 2023.1. Is Google Lying About Using Clicks in Rankings? A X-Googler Testimony - The debate over whether Google uses clicks as a direct ranking factor has taken a new turn. Eric Lehman, a former 17-year Google veteran who worked on search quality and ranking, recently testified in the ongoing U.S. vs. Google antitrust trial. Lehman stated that Google's machine learning systems, BERT and MUM, are becoming more critical than user data for search rankings. He believes that Google will increasingly rely on machine learning to evaluate text rather than user data.Lehman's testimony has sparked controversy, especially among SEO experts, who have long questioned Google's transparency about its ranking factors. Google's Gary Illyes, at a recent AMA, confirmed that Google uses historical search data for its machine-learning algorithm, RankBrain. However, he clarified that clicks are not necessarily a direct ranking factor. Instead, they are used for evaluating experiments and personalization.The Department of Justice (DOJ) also attempted to challenge Lehman's statements by questioning Google's advantage in using BERT over its competitors. Lehman clarified that Google's edge comes from inventing BERT, not from its user data. The DOJ's attempt to impeach Lehman's testimony seemed to backfire, adding more credibility to his statements.Lehman also touched on the sensitive topic of using clicks in search rankings. He mentioned that Google avoids confirming the use of user data in rankings to prevent people from thinking that SEO could be used to manipulate search results. This adds another layer of complexity to the ongoing debate.In summary, while clicks may not serve as a direct ranking factor, they are part of a more complex system that includes machine learning algorithms and personalization. Lehman's testimony has reignited the discussion about Google's ranking factors, raising questions about the company's transparency and the future of SEO.2.

Lyle Wilson on RadioA1A Broadcast from Some Beach Studios in the Tropics of Indiana.info@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's illuminating episode, listen in as I chat with Kirk McLaren, founder of Foresight CFO, about thriving in finance and business. Kirk lifts the veil on the strategic growth CFO role beyond tasks. Discover pivotal client habits and Kirk's innovative fractional model. An intriguing question prompts Kirk's life-shaping reflections. Dive into Kirk's book exploring transformational practices. Thought-provoking topics include Tesla's budgeting, lean innovator Joe Justice, and the power of tales. I also share leadership lessons from my CEO collaborations. Finally, uncover a CFO's higher mission. Kirk illuminates the Growth CFO Certification, empowering professionals as strategic partners. If you seek financial stewardship strategies or a richer purpose, this episode presents a treasury of wisdom for cultivating sustainable growth in your organization and career.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS This episode features Kirk McLaren, the founder of Foresight CFO, and we discuss his unique role as a growth CFO and the innovative tactics he uses to provide fractional CFO services. McLaren shares his three key habits for growth, which are crucial for any manager to adapt for successful financial management. We dive into McLaren's book 'The Growth CFO Void', which offers practical habits that can transform a manager's life and has been published in collaboration with Forbes. McLaren and I discuss the intriguing idea of Tesla's non-existent budgeting process and its influence from lean manufacturing guru Joe Justice. We also explores the importance of employees taking ownership of their numbers and the critical role of daily dashboard tools for effective financial management. McLaren highlights the importance of CFOs becoming true allies of the CEO, stepping beyond tasks, and helping in decision-making processes. We talk about the CR Growth CFO Certification, an initiative that empowers financial professionals to enhance their role as a CFO. We explore the importance of meaningful connections in the financial growth and management sphere. He touches upon how Foresight CFO uses a three-person team approach to provide fractional CFO services, and the importance of having a learning mindset for successful financial management. We conclude with a discussion on the bigger purpose of a CFO in a company and how their role is not just limited to financial operations, but also involves strategic decision-making and navigating the company towards growth. LINKSShow Notes Be a Guest About IC-DISC Alliance About Foresight CFO GUEST Kirk McLarenAbout Kirk TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) David Spray Hi, my name is David Spray and welcome to another episode of the IC-DISC show. My guest today is Kirk McLaren, the founder of Foresight CFO. Foresight CFO describes themselves as a growth CFO, and we learn more about what Kirk means by this. During the interview, we also learn about the three habits that all of his clients utilize to help grow their companies. We also learn about Kirk's unique three-person team approach to providing fractional CFO services. And then Kirk also gave me an answer to a standard question. I ask of what do you wish you knew when you were 25 years old? And his answer is different than anyone else's I've heard. So Kirk brings a novel approach to outsource CFO and I really learned a lot about what's possible with a fractional CFO. So I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Kirk. Welcome to the podcast. Kirk McLaren Yeah, David, I'm so glad that you invited me here to talk to your guests and kind of explore backgrounds, that kind of stuff. David Spray Well, awesome, well, thank you for being on. So first off, I'd like to thank you for your service to our country. So, thank you for that. Kirk McLaren Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in 1991, and I was a long way from the bullets but literally left school, joined the army, became a behavioral scientist and that's how I ended up going from Houston, texas, you know, growing up as a young man there, and then dropped out of school, and that's how I ended up going from Houston to Washington DC and stayed here ever since. David Spray That's awesome, so let's get right into it. Talk to me about your company. Yeah, oversight. Cfo. Kirk McLaren Yeah. So the company started I mean roughly 30 years building mostly private business. I did some nonprofits and some quasi government stuff with the telecom industry and then, 30 years into, I started to notice that business owners oftentimes I'm the finest guy, I can see a clear opportunity, but the business owners were hesitate, they'd hesitate on making decisions and sometimes the fall through wasn't strong. And so I came to learn that a lot of business owners, their business becomes the monster of their own making. Right, they got all these hats on, they go on vacation. They're actually working remotely versus enjoying other things in their life like their family. And meanwhile, most CFOs including me, you know we occupied ourselves with financial management, the accounting operations, maybe treasury. If it's a bigger business, there could be like import, export taxes, kind of the things where your expertise come into play. We focus on those kind of things instead of alleviating the CEO's pain. So around 2015, I mean I kept getting hit in the head with things in life where, hey, maybe there's a better way, right, yeah, yeah, maybe, right, you know, things keep coming in and maybe I should pay attention to something here. And so in 2015, it started to reimagine that the CFO's role as a true navigator with the CEO, and by this I mean you know, learning. You know, as a CFO, a navigator side by side with the CEO, learning how to help the CEO escape the owner's trap. Like you know, they were born. There's something that the CEO is really good at but they're oftentimes not doing. They're not focused on that area. So how do we help them focus on that area? And how does, as a CFO, how do I collaborate with subject matter experts across the company, like like the CMOs and the salespeople and delivery people to help them obliterate the obstacles to growth? Right? So it's a broader partner than just the financial operation. And then you know, at the same time, while doing that, it's definitely those financial habits or profitability that allow us to see okay, where are we coming from, where are we going to? That was really the birth of the foresight CFO. It just kept seeing that business owner or private companies they get hung up, they're trapped, you know, by their business and so maybe there's a better way. David Spray That's where it all started, and so the foresight and the name means, I guess, looking forward instead of backwards no-transcript. Kirk McLaren Yeah, yeah, like, where do you want to? You got a business, you got into your business for a reason. What is your destination? Where do you want to end up? And a lot of times for me, I'm a big freedom guy. I mean, I want you know. I want freedom of time, freedom of money. I want freedom of purpose to do what I really care about, versus being tethered to some obligation that's not worthwhile. So that's the force. David Spray Don't forget the fourth. Don't forget the fourth freedom, freedom of relationship. Kirk McLaren Yeah, that's a big one right. So, dave, what does that mean to you? David Spray freedom of relationship, what it means associating, you know, serving who I want to serve, work with who I want to serve. So the reason I knew the fourth freedom was because I've spent many years in strategic coach, which is probably where you learn the four freedoms as well, I'm guessing, or from Dan Sullivan. Kirk McLaren Yeah, dan Sullivan, strategic goals are brilliant and so, but that's a key point when you can actually choose who you work with, you're both inside and outside. You know that's liberation, it is. David Spray It is, and so I know your tagline is that you're a growth CFO, and so I can appreciate that the looking forward has kind of one component. But then the growth CFO piece, you know, that strikes me as more unique, because that almost sounds like a blending of you know, being the chief revenue officer, if you will. So talk to me about how you are able to leverage that CFO role into you know, revenue growth. Kirk McLaren Yeah, and that's one of the five obstacles. It used to be the number one obstacle is how to help clients when new clients and closely behind that was the number two obstacle, which is keeping and growing existing clients. Now the number one obstacle is people. So we might want to talk about that in a moment. But, to answer your question, the growth CFOs are definitely CFOs. Right, we're not trying to become master, you know, with jack of all trades, master to none, but it's more if you have, doesn't matter about whatever the title. It is the chief sales people, the chief marketing officer, whatever title they have. In our world. The growth CFO works hand in hand and we have certain strengths. That doesn't numbers people, finance people, you know, are we minding the data? Like, oftentimes you have companies that are doing well and they think of all their customers as the same, like, hey, we need more, we have 14,000 customers. These are real examples, by the way. We have 14,000 customers. We need more of those. Really, you need more of those Because if you run the data, if you mind that data, using the skills that you know the CPAs and the finance people brings to the table, you actually find out. You know the 80 20 rule plays out, where roughly 20% of your clients are producing 80% of that. You know the financial outcomes and those people love you. They love you, love work with them. You can do your best work with them. It's good synergies, you ring value. They want you to be paid well, it's great, right, all the way around. And likewise vice versa. The bottom 20% you're losing money. They don't like you, right? You don't get along. People don't want to go to work on that site. So when you mind the data kind of kind of coming in, you know how growth stuff will work with the CMO or the sales team. Hey, let's look at who can actually do our best work with using that data. Let's figure out who are these people. What is the voice of the client? Why do those people sign up with us? Why do they keep going with us and then align everything to that, like bundling services. Maybe there's cross sell ups, so maybe you can do even better work with them. Pricing strategy you know a lot of times, you know, you know CEOs are private businesses. They're very risk adverse when it comes to pricing. But can we value price If you're making this kind of outcome for those best clients? Can you share that, that doing well by doing good and then aligning everything, aligning the the, you know lead generation, marketing, aligning the sales process to that best top 20%. And then maybe, once you get confident there you know this is not overnight do things step by step, crawl, walk, run, so that you're not betting the farm on any one decision, but you're making decisions with clarity, you're making phone calls with the clarity of the habits right, the financial habits, and then maybe the bottom 20%. That's you eating up everything you got. Maybe refer them to your competition, right, maybe you work with who you want to work with, that freedom of relationship. So that's kind of a picture. An actual example would be a client that had had software as a service, kind of online platform 14,000 customers. Exact scenario you can't. I want more customers, do you? Really? Because we do the data and these people buy from you and keep coming back. These other people, man your calls, customer service, call centers loaded up with people who you will, customers, clients that you will never make happy. Yeah, how about right? David Spray So yeah, in fact, I believe the official name of that 80 20 rule is called the Pareto principle, named after an Italian economist from a long time ago. But you know, the most interesting part of the Pareto principle is when you take it to a second level. So if you look at, you know 20% of your customers are accounting for 80% of your revenue. Well, if you take the 20% of your 20% and the 80% of the 80%, you'll find that 4% of your customers are accounting for 64% of the revenues yeah right. Which is even more powerful. It's interesting, the book. There's a guy that wrote a book called the 80 20 principle and I cannot remember his name. I can picture the book and he had an exercise where you would take your clients and rank them in descending order by like revenue or profit, and then you'd have a cumulative column, right, so your first customer counts, you're for 5%, your next one accounts for 4%, so that's 9%. And he had this exercise. You'd go through there and you would just see how many customers down you'd have to go to. You got to, like you know, a significant amount of your revenue. And it was really interesting looking at centers of influence and, like I discovered when I did that, like 80% of my referrals came from five centers of influence. Is that right? And I realized I didn't even need to go into any more networking events. All I had to do is spend more time with those five people and you know these were the five people who I met with once a year. So you're like wonder what happens if I met with them quarterly, just those five people. So anyway, so I'm always fascinated by that, the 80 20. And the other funny thing about that, I'm sure you know this it doesn't have to be 80 20, it doesn't have to add up to 100. It can be an 80 10 or a 70 20, or it's really just pointing out that there's these disproportionate outcome from you know, limited inputs, but anyway. So yeah, I always love talking to somebody about Pareto principle, but let's go deeper there. Kirk McLaren I mean, look what it just did for you. Wow, five relationships produce most of my outcomes. So now if I wanted to, I could definitely put more attention to those folks right, because that's your bread and butter, makes total sense. Probably more will come from that. If you more attention, more outcomes, that kind of stuff. So in addition you essentially could work half as much. Don't do the things that are complete ways. Focus on those five and actually produce more. So now you got freedom of time. You got that freedom of relationship. You work with people, you really get to know each other. David Spray That's the irony, those five people were also some of my favorite five centers of influence too. Kirk McLaren Yeah, Beyond trust you really get to know each other. Your interest for each other becomes very sincere. They help each other to do well kind of stuff. But that's brilliant Liberation. David Spray Yes, yeah, I know those dance solvents for freedoms are really powerful, because that's what. That's why we become entrepreneurs is for freedom, anyway, yeah. Kirk McLaren It's funny because Matt contacted me from strategic coach and I'm pretty sure I'm coming in. I've been reading his books like who, not how, that kind of stuff, and so it's funny that he's been a big influence, that community, big influence for you. David Spray Yeah, I've been. I'm currently on sabbatical from strategic coach and, but I've been, I did a sabbatical before, but I guess I've got about 10 years total and just a wonderful. In fact, anytime I talk to somebody about strategic coach, I start thinking that my sabbatical should perhaps be over. Kirk McLaren Yeah, back years ago in previous life I worked for Richard Rossi, who's been a strategic coach. I remember when I was his finance guy questioning him on the investment time and money kind of stuff and it's not a big investment in money, but finance guy or someone questioning things. It may have learned a lot since then, yeah, but how important peer group and coaching is I mean night and day versus working in isolation for CEOs. David Spray For sure. Yeah, I would strongly recommend strategic coach, because it gives you a chance to think about your thinking. That's one of Dan's lines, so let's switch gears. So you and I have something in common We've both authored a book. Yours was a best seller, mine was not. So talk to me about the book. What's the name of it? When was it published? What prompted you to publish it? Kirk McLaren So the book title is called the Growth CFO Void. So that missing team member, right that basically the missing navigator to the CEO who's a pilot at the plane, and there were a number of things that kind of prompted. Like what I teach at Georgetown School Continues Studies, kind of a fun thing. I'm big on developing people A lot of times go beyond their self-imposed limits, so I love teaching and the geez man, the textbooks and resources for what business owners and business people really need, like what are practical financial habits? There's really the three practical habits that can change any manager's life Right, just clarity and confidence on where we're at and engineering that path going forward. And the material on that was my book is not a textbook. There are more stories, that kind of stuff. I think that's how people learn and the material on that is like man, it's just overly loaded with jargon. Not everybody is designed to be a CPA. Most people are not designed to be a CPA and most people if you pull up a spreadsheet you literally put them into the checkout zone and so that kind of prompted I need something better. And then also telling our story, since we reimagine what a CFO is. There's plenty of CEO business owners who they know what a traditional CFO is. So this whole new role not redefining the existing role, I should say better, it's just a new concept. I needed a way of telling stories and case studies where they can start to see themselves oh that's what a better way might do. And that prompted it. And so, you know, teamed up with Forbes and they accepted my idea for the book and we published last September last year. Oh, that's great. David Spray So what are the three habits that you mentioned? Kirk McLaren Yeah, the first one is, across the company managers use the monthly financials like a scoreboard, okay, and a lot of times that's very awkward for them, initially because it looks like hieroglyphics. The second one is getting your hands around cash, so positive cash for both, like 12 week cash forecast, but also how about measuring the cash conversion cycle and see it and then comparing that to benchmarks, because maybe there's something there. And then the third one is we call it engineering profitability with a rolling 12 month budget, okay, and we call it actually a flight plan 12 month flight plan and it then also the multi-year flight plan, like how do we get if you want to end up at a certain place or destination? This has some visibility on how we're going to do that year to year. But the detail work is that third habit the 12 month rolling budget. David Spray Okay, that's you know. I learned something interesting about Tesla. You know, supposedly they don't use any budgets. Kirk McLaren Really yeah. David Spray What do they do they? They're all, apparently. As I understand it, they're all about innovation. Speed of innovation drives everything there, and I've heard they do like dozens of rolling improvements to their cars every week. Most car makers have annual changes. You know they save it up, but yeah, but supposedly they have no budgeting and every employee has, like, the authority to spend money to buy stuff that they think will, in will, improve the speed improvement, the speed of innovation. Anyway, that just happened to think of it, isn't that bizarre? One of the largest market cap companies in the world has no budgeting process, isn't that interesting? Kirk McLaren It really is interesting. I wonder how that plays out. So they're putting emphasis on that speed, to creativity and local ownership of outcomes Right, some? David Spray kind of way. That's what I thought. Kirk McLaren I don't understand. I wonder if they have forecasts for the business overall. I wonder. That's something that I'm going to make a note of the dive into. I'm always interested if there's a better way. David Spray Yeah, I wonder. So the guy to look up is a guy named Joe Justice, who's a lean manufacturing guru and he worked at Tesla for like four years, and he's who a lot of that data comes from. As far as no budgeting, yeah, it just sounds like a. In fact, I was so intrigued by when they opened their factory in Austin I live in Houston, I was. If they would have let me, I would have gone to work there for six months, just like for the hell of it. It just seemed like such an amazing place to work, but they probably wanted me there more than six months and I wasn't going to because I've got a buddy in Austin. you know their kids are all grown. I probably could stay in a spare bedroom and but anyway, you're the first person I've shared my pipe dream of going to work in the Tesla factory in Austin. Kirk McLaren It'd be interesting in six months, right Because I'm sure there'd be learning not just beyond no budgets, I'm sure there'd be learning in mind, expanding somewhere. David Spray Yeah, so. So let's get into the stories. This is my favorite part of the interview. You've mentioned you had stories in the book, so, and I agree, stories, I think, are the best way to learn, illustrate a point. So what are some success stories that come to mind? Either from the book, not from the book. If you're allowed to share who the name of the person or company is, feel free to if you, if that's not appropriate, and they just need to be anonymous. But let's talk about some stories. What's one that comes to mind? Kirk McLaren What are my favorite ones? I'm going to keep the names anonymous because if I say something financial after I say a name, I want to respect confidentiality. And first I think back the last eight years with Foresight. You know the CEOs. I mean, these are remarkable people, right, they have an idea. Sometimes they have circumstances that force them into entrepreneurship. Sometimes they're inspired by an idea, sometimes they're just not corporate people and they want to do the same. And the conversation for nominal I've been humbled because they I knew they were smart. I mean, I've been around for a few days but you know, behind closed doors they really care about their teams and you know, capitalism gets a bad rap. But you talk to business owners, they do want to do well, they do want their team members to do well. Sometimes they're up to their neck and you know, can't even make payroll. Right, they're doing, they're putting payroll on its credit card, their credit card, right and emulsion in their house. That's what they're doing and they really do. There's a just a decency that goes beyond what I would. I don't know people like it. Credit for mainstream. So there's a CEO of a technology company when Amazon Web Service was coming out and moving companies from their internal structure, like you know, the financial industry, there's insurance industry and everybody else going to the cloud for all the benefits, and cool little company, I mean it started out. You know a bunch of software engineers and they're really good at what they do and you know we started out on the small side for us at the end of the point of two and a half million and quickly grew to five, seven and a half, 10 million and in way, imagine these engineers I mean there were times like, like early on, the engineers are getting ready for the big, you know, industry event and you know engineers want to do a good job. So they take everybody off billable projects and put them into prepared. I say everybody. They took like 20% of their top people off billable projects, put them into doing this event, which, okay, that makes sense until you find out what happened to the cash, right, you just man, right, and yeah, so, so, so that's where we came in like, oh, you know they're not making decisions, knowing that you got to. Yeah, you want to fly the plane and at the same time, make sure there's enough fuel in the tank and you got to see options you know going forward. You know what if we do a versus B and be able to see, you know, profit cash to value the business, kind of stuff. So, coming in on that, what happened to cash situation where the owners literally put money back into the business to to make payroll because bill Bowers went down with no visibility into it. So how do you put those instruments in the place where you know? Teach engineers how to take ownership of their numbers. You know where they're at, like multi financials going forward, teaching them understand right if they go below a certain place and how to get them to a point where daily dashboard where they get where every employee across the company come in, log in in red, green, yellow, based on what they control, they know where to lean in that day and if something's not working they can speak up. So that's a better way of flying the plane versus, oh, no cash right. David Spray So what was you know kind of the outcome of that then? Did their you know amount of cash increase? Did their you know days, you know receivables outstanding improve? Did they recall some of the objective outcomes? Kirk McLaren Yeah, we literally put in those controls right, the daily dashboard, using the monthly financials. They took ownership of their 12-month rolling budgets. They control the historical plus, the forward. But by month three they're getting comfortable with the financial. At first, nobody wants to look at the financials You're keeping me from doing my job, that kind of stuff. You know we call it financial scoreboard, but it's financials. And then by month six, like man, I can't make a decision. Hey, I'm not making a decision on that event. So I see my financials, where I stand in regards to budget. What do I have? And so by month six, they're really. You know, engineers tend to be better than most with numbers and for most people about three, they're kind of getting used to the habit. Month six is like, hey, I need to see my numbers before I can decide about that event and who I dedicate to it. And so the outcome overall is the company grew right, more visibility, profit was strong and this lot of tech companies are kind of built to sell mindset. They don't want to be the best versus the biggest. You know these kind of entrepreneurs and they want to at some point pass the torch. So that's on the flight plan. In this case that space, amazon Web Service became a hot property and it roughly two and a half years ahead of expectations. The business owner was getting multiple offers, competitive offers to sell at a price point above his target and that the valuation is that second payday. So now you got financial freedom. You know, beyond that day to day work. So that was the outcome. We've become friends and last Saturday we were bike riding in Washington DC on the hill there. Yeah, you do something like that. That's that brotherhood. Right when you got the CEO, who's a pilot, and then the growth CFOs and navigator and man, you create some good friends. David Spray Yeah, now, that's some of my favorite people are my clients. So, speaking of that, so describe to us what the elements are of a perfect fit, or a strategic coach calls it a right fit client for you. Kirk McLaren The two, two things one mindset right, if a person has a learning mindset, like some of the things you and I are talking about here, that's going to be fun, that's going to be a good outcome because there is a better way and that will always be true. And you have smart team members with different expertise. And so learning mindset to be able to see something, make a decision, follow through, make adjustments, sometimes on version one of the rollout. Yeah, you know, okay, let's evolve to version two, but not changing some of the tactics, but not losing sight of the division, the mission and the purpose of the organization. So something that learning mindset is critical, both inside foresight and external. Like imagine, you know CFOs coming in who want to be a growth CFO. They have a fixed mindset, want to do status quo. There's nothing I can do to help them Ever Sure, and roughly one out of 17 financial talent can actually do this work. So it's similar internal and external. And we work in three person teams, right, so three minds are better than one and that's how we get beyond status quo and comfort zones and stuff. So it's a very it's a very confident way of working. And then the other thing is some level of revenue, like the, you know, for the full three person team doing work weekly at five million, it starts to make sense right? We have clients going up, you know, from one million to two, 119 million in revenue. We do certain things for each of them. At below five million more of a. We kind of have a hybrid hands on and advisory. It's once a month where we look at the financial scoreboard and work on the business together. But a smaller business capacity is so limited For all the right reasons. There is owner trap issues because at a smaller business each team member is going to do more things and so. But we can help them even at a million dollars of revenue we can help them get. We have a clearer path, you know, by working on the business together and establishing a good financial habits early on. That's adjusted to the size that they're at. Like you know, one million dollar company is going to do financial practices very different than a 15-month dollar company or 25 million dollar company. David Spray So what would you say is like your sweet spot, you know revenue-wise, where you just really feel like you really can gel. Kirk McLaren Somebody coming in at that five to 20 million level and if they want to double or triple outcomes and maybe it's top line, maybe it's bottom line, but they want to double or triple outcomes that's a good bet, okay that is helpful. David Spray And talk to me about the three-person team. Is everybody on the team the same or do they have different skills that you're trying to bring together to serve your client? Kirk McLaren Yeah the team consists of. There's a growth CFO which is the front stage weekly interaction and collaboration and action with the client and their team. Then, somewhat behind the scene, there's a growth CFO partner we call leads, who's making sure that we're not stuck or seeing things. They're working somewhat behind the scenes. They come in maybe quarterly with the client, you know, just to make sure that it's broader. And then the third person is an analyst or a accountant, right depending on kind of what the business needs, and they're doing lots of legwork. Like, for example, we come in to a client, we do a financial health check to make sure we don't miss something useful, including looking at, you know, tax incentives like export and R&D and stuff. We're not the expert on that by any means, but we'll look. Level one. You know what is there a possibility that's being done by the analysts and accounting team roughly 20 to 40 hours of laywork all backstage. We're not trying to put any more burden on the client. You know the CFO and their team, so that they have a case. We work, we have a multi-year view to your destination and then we plan in detail and follow through in 90 day sprints where your project may be level what we over or under you know on a day to basis and that's kind of the cadence, but it's a very you can imagine an account and accountant or analyst is going to see some things differently than a CFO and a CFO partner to say, huh, we're status quo, there's a bigger opportunity. This is the kink in the hose for this CEO. We do the diagnostics in the areas of new client acquisition, people capacity. We've seen a lot of best practices, so we kind of have these. Let's look at from recruiting to onboarding, to that performance management. What's what could help these be even better for that to create a remarkable people environment that they want. Okay, so the team members sometimes it's the part of guy saying, hi, it's not here, it's here. David Spray Yeah, and then you said the front stage person another strategic coach term front stage backstage. So you've you've just absorbed all this. It's second nature to you. So what's the cadence that I hear you say weekly? Is that the typical meeting cadence, or is it twice a month? Kirk McLaren Yeah, it's for for the full service. You know companies doing five million plus where it's good fit. Every week we're doing a huddle at least 25 minutes is the calibrate and then the growth ceo is working with whoever the right person is in that in the client's company. Okay, get the outcomes they're looking for and that clue is developing the managers to use the numbers, and but that it's a weekly cadence for internally we're dedicated one full day. The growth ceo is one full day to each client, totally blocked off, dedicated in the zone, and there's roughly over the course of a year there's roughly a full second day with the other two members of the team. You know that kind of thing, there's certain periods of the year that have more work and other periods that have, like the diagnostics, or there's more work for the backstage team members. David Spray Okay, no, that's that's really helpful and that's it. I've met other fractional CFO type companies, but the three person team seems seems like a unique concept. Well, I can't believe how quickly the time has gone by. A couple more questions. What do you wish? What do you wish you knew when you were 25? Kirk McLaren I wish I was kind of guy, very task-oriented, tell her to the desk driving outcomes. I wish that myself now could have said hey, Kirk, that's great, but you also get out there and meet remarkable people and develop beyond trust, develop a relationship with them, because that's how you're going to unlock the bigger purpose, the bigger impact. David Spray I really like that. I ask that question to most of my guests and some of the answers have a constant theme, but that's really a unique answer. Get away from the desk and go meet remarkable people, yeah. Kirk McLaren I mean even next week I've been working with a person by the name of Janet Hogan and she's in Australia. So just by the accent alone she's worth working with. And come to learn that this is recent right. I come to learn that the way I do vacation, I like freedom, so I go any place. I went to Venezuela years ago when I was in my twenties nothing better backpack lived there for a year. I had no agenda, that kind of submit people, things, great things came out of including my wife, 26 years, married two boys, that kind of stuff. Never expected that going in, but I was there. So that's how I do vacation and I work with Janet Hogan. I come to realize wait a minute, janet, do you mean I can just travel places like next week I'm going to Florida. All week I have a few meetings that have no agenda. These are clients, prospects, partners. I just want to get to know them and you see me get excited. You mean that's work because it feels like vacation. You mean I can actually do that. So I've got lined up now one week per month I'm just going to no agenda line up meetings, meet people, kind of see where they are and what's going on. David Spray I'm more freedom involved in that, isn't it. I love the Australian accent. My iPhone Siri is an Australian woman. Kirk McLaren Yeah, so that's how the wisdom goes by, you can see with the Australian actor. David Spray Oh, you mean wait a minute, yeah, so yeah in fact it seems like if all the people from, I guess, the English Commonwealth the Australian seemed to me just to be the most freedom focused. I mean they just seem all about walk about. I think is their term to just kind of go wandering. Kirk McLaren Yeah, yeah, they do seem to value, like there's a level of individualism but also consideration for others that you need uniquely Australian, and I remember we had team members there in Australia and they would have. Yeah, I think they're agreeing, but they're not agreeing, they're just being friendly, they're just being wild, say wait a minute. David Spray How about that? So, kirk, what else? What did I not ask you that you wish I would have, as we're wrapping up, A good question. Kirk McLaren So I'm really excited. Like for me, the bigger here's one, the bigger purpose, right? Okay, yeah, I have a business. What's coming out of from the? From launching the book, I'm becoming the freedom guy. So you know, beyond reimagining the CFOs, actually going out and coaching people how they gain freedom, but more from a speaking, so speaking is becoming big. Right, I'm going out talk to groups of all sizes. The bigger purpose is like, like CPAs, you know, accountants have the CPA certified public accountant exam. So I would love the CR growth, cfo certification which every employee who comes into the business goes through that and they re certify every year. I would love to see that catch on. And you know the bigger impact for financial people to go beyond tasks, how to become that beyond trust, that true navigator with the CEO. Because with the rise of the machine, with the machines doing more of the labor, more of the analytics, more of the tasks, like I think machines will do easily 80, 90% of what normal accountants, normal CPAs, do. So the best financial people, the ones who succeed, are going to have a great life or the ones who can take that last, the last mile of work and able to help other people across the organization and external use that information. Wow, you mean these are the customers. And then you brought up in more focus than that. That is the financial professional who's going to have an awesome life, the ones that are holding on to the past trying to compete with AI. Good, luck. David Spray Yeah, great, I agree. Well, that is awesome. So we talked about the bigger purpose, we talked about the history, talked about the three person team, talked about what a growth CFO is, talked about the book. I think we've really packed a lot of information into a little over a half an hour. Well, I really appreciate your time, Kirk. This has really been fun and I've enjoyed getting to know you a bit more. Discover the cradle principle commonality, the strategic coach commonality. This has been fun. I think we should continue this conversation offline in the future. What do you say? Kirk McLaren I would love to do that and I'm going to be in Houston soon. My son moved down there, the Army officer teaching at the University of all things. So, accident, that's not an Army duty either, but so I'll be in your neighborhood often. David Spray That sounds great. Well, we definitely need to get together. Well, hey, kirk, again, I really appreciate the time, and best of luck is you're helping these companies reimagine their future. Kirk McLaren Yeah, and David, thank you for inviting me to tell my story, because I don't get many opportunities to do this, so I thank you really so much. David Spray Oh, hey, my pleasure. Have a great day, Kirk. Thank you, see you. Special Guest: Kirk McLaren.

Lyle Wilson on RadioA1A Broadcast from Some Beach Studios in the Tropics of Indiana.info@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lyle Wilson on RadioA1A Broadcast from Some Beach Studios in the Tropics of Indiana.info@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lyle Wilson on RadioA1A Broadcast from Some Beach Studios in the Tropics of Indiana.info@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lyle Wilson on RadioA1A Broadcast from Some Beach Studios in the Tropics of Indiana.info@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lyle Wilson on RadioA1A Broadcast from Some Beach Studios in the Tropics of Indiana.Harry@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.MusicSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lyle Wilson on RadioA1A Broadcast from Some Beach Studios in the Tropics of Indiana.Harry@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.MusicSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lyle Wilson hosts a Jimmy Buffett Tribute on RadioA1A Broadcast from LA Studios in Mobile, Alabama.Harry@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.MusicSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Weekdays With Wilson on RadioA1A hosted by Lyle Wilson. Independent Tropical Singer-Songwriters playing and singing "Music For The Road To Paradise" mixed by a Pro.RadioA1A from LA Studios in Mobile, Alabama.Harry@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Weekdays With Wilson on RadioA1A hosted by Lyle Wilson. Independent Tropical Singer-Songwriters playing and singing "Music For The Road To Paradise" mixed by a Pro.RadioA1A from LA Studios in Mobile, Alabama.Harry@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services & Design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.MusicSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Weekdays With Wilson on RadioA1A hosted by Lyle Wilson. Independent Tropical Singer-Songwriters playing and singing "Music For The Road To Paradise" mixed by a Pro.RadioA1A from LA Studios in Mobile, Alabama.Harry@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services & Design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.MusicSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Harry Tea talks with Singer-Songwriter Kirstie Kraus about her upcoming performance at The Biloxi Box Set Music Festival in Biloxi, MS September 15-16, 2023.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

LIVE from the Swanky Studios. A K.L.P Entertainment Broadcast station-News Station-over 43 International Countries. Now Streaming and broadcast on Spotify,Apple Podcast,ITunes, Podcast Addict. The new hit radio station that focuses on everything K.L.P Entertainment, Swanky Studios, and Grizzly Talk Podcast. with the collaboration of news such as entertainment, Films, Music, Video Games, and media. Integrated our listeners in Atlanta.

Weekdays With Wilson on RadioA1A hosted by Lyle Wilson. Independent Tropical Singer-Songwriters playing and singing "Music For The Road To Paradise" mixed by a Pro.RadioA1A from LA Studios in Mobile, Alabama.Harry@A1A.Productions www.RadioA1A.com and on A1A Smartphone Apps.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services & Design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.MusicSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Harry Tea from LA Studios, home of RadioA1A, Cruisin' Country Radio & Paradise Road Radio presents the Weekly Trop40 Chart-topping Ray Boone and his new Tropical Americana Music Video, 'I Wanna Live Like That'.Become a Patron of the A1A Media Network here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia.A1A Media Network... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services and design, and the Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's YOUR time to #EdUp In this episode, recorded LIVE from ⁠⁠⁠⁠the Anthology Together 2023 #AT23 Conference in Nashville, Tennessee! YOUR guest is Camille Tisdel, Director of Web Services at Syracuse University, Advancement & External Affairs YOUR host is ⁠⁠⁠⁠Dr. Joe Sallustio⁠⁠⁠⁠ Listen in to #EdUp! Thank YOU so much for tuning in. Join us on the next episode for YOUR time to EdUp! Connect with YOUR EdUp Team - ⁠⁠⁠⁠Elvin Freytes⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠Dr. Joe Sallustio⁠⁠⁠⁠ ● Join YOUR EdUp community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠The EdUp Experience⁠⁠⁠⁠! We make education YOUR business! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/edup/message

The Tropical Americana Showcase with Jeffrey Randall features his new album Rusty Old Flocker and a new Music Video of the song, Boatin' Problem. LIVE from LA Studios and RadioA1A hosted by Harry Tea and Joe Anderson.Become a Patron of A1A Media here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia. Thank you for your support.A1A Productions... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services & Design. The Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You will remember that we had previously spoken to Allyson Fryhoff of Amazon Web Services, who explained how AWS provides many tech tools to ...

Harry Tea from LA Studios, home of RadioA1A, Cruisin' Country Radio & Paradise Road Radio interviews Bob Durand songwriter and producer, now on RadioA1A, Cruisin' Country Radio.Become a Patron of the A1A here: https://www.patreon.com/A1AMedia. Thank you to our Patron Supporters.A1A Productions... Media Production Network, LIVE Streamcasting, Media Editing, Digital Media Publishing, Social Media Marketing, Web Services & Design, Coordination, Production, and Promotion of Audio/Video, Entertainment Projects, and Special Events.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/a1a-media-network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For those of us that live in Central Florida, I4 is more often than not, a long and torturous travel. However, the i4 Web Services owned and operated by Ed Pisani is anything but a long and torturous journey. He stopped by the GRP Studios for Episode 107 of the Check Your Six podcast and shared a glimpse of what he does and how he operates. There is so much ground to cover in the web design/web development space that we did not get even close to covering all of the topics but I loved hearing how he works, his "why" in regards to clients, family, community and so much more. It really was an honor to sit and listen to him talk about he much he values those he works with and interacts with on a regular basis. We both agreed that our friendship with Sean Esler is something to be treasured and we are both honored to consider him a friend, even if he doesn't like the computer platforms I choose!!

In today's episode, Sophie DeBenedetto emphasizes the importance of the Elixir community's commitment to education, documentation, and tools like liveBook, fostering an environment where people with varying skill levels can learn and contribute. The discussion highlights LiveView's capabilities and the role it plays in the future of Elixir, encouraging members to share knowledge and excitement for these tools through various channels. Sophie invites listeners to attend and submit their talks for the upcoming Empex conference, which aims to showcase the best in Elixir and LiveView technologies. Additionally, the group shares light-hearted moments, reminding everyone to contribute to all types of documentation and promoting an inclusive atmosphere. Key topics discussed in this episode: • Updates on the latest release of the Programming Phoenix LiveView book • The importance of community connection in Elixir conferences • The future of documentation in the Elixir ecosystem • The Elixir community's commitment to education and documentation • LiveBook as a valuable tool for learning and experimenting • Encouraging contributions across experience levels and skill sets • Importance of sharing knowledge through liveBooks, blog posts, and conference talks • Core Components in Phoenix LiveView, and modal implementation • Creating a custom component library for internal use • Reflecting on a Phoenix LiveView Project Experience • Ease of using Tailwind CSS and its benefits in web development • Advantages of LiveView in reducing complexity and speeding up project development • LiveView's potential to handle large datasets using Streams • The role of Elixir developers in the rapidly evolving AI landscape Links in this episode: Sophie DeBenedetto – https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiedebenedetto Programming Phoenix LiveView Book – https://pragprog.com/titles/liveview/programming-phoenix-liveview Empex NYC - https://www.empex.co/new-york SmartLogic - https://smartlogic.io/jobs Phoenix LiveView documentation: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenixliveview/Phoenix.LiveView.html Live sessions and hooks: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenixliveview/Phoenix.LiveView.Router.html#livesession/1 LiveView: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenixlive_view/Phoenix.LiveView.html Tailwind CSS: https://tailwindcss.com/ Reuse Markup With Function Components and Slots (https://fly.io/phoenix-files/function-components/) LiveView Card Components With Bootstrap (https://fly.io/phoenix-files/liveview-bootstrap-card/) Building a Chat App With LiveView Streams (https://fly.io/phoenix-files/building-a-chat-app-with-liveview-streams/) Special Guest: Sophie DeBenedetto.

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Dennis Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Postalytics, a fast-growing software company that automates direct mail marketing, measures the results from direct mailing activity and connects such campaigns to CRM and marketing automation systems to accelerate the way online marketing connects with offline marketing.  With expertise building VC-backed businesses and self-financed businesses, Dennis is a 6 times entrepreneur with the companies he built. He exited 4 of these businesses to larger corporations. Postalytics has grown fast with no VC investment and today is scaling in the US and Canada with an aspiration to come to Europe. During the podcast, the pair cover 1) Dennis' lessons on building VC-backed and self-financed businesses, 2) what PLG (Product-led growth) means, 3) why every business needs to learn a little bit about PLG and 4) Postalytics' proposition and roadmap to success. KEY TAKEAWAYS I grew up on a farm where my family and I worked very hard and were entrepreneurial in trying to make extra money. I'd reach out to neighbors and people in the community to offer my services and help them with whatever they needed doing. Some of those lessons apply today, such as... not being afraid to knock on someone's door, telling them what you're doing and how you can help them.  Postalytics is a direct mail automation software tool designed to solve three big problems with the direct mail marketing workflow. This legacy marketing channel has been around for many years and is still very useful and successful, but it hasn't had much technology applied. We've taken some of the best practices from digital marketing and combined them into a software tool that enables marketers to deploy direct mail campaigns in minutes rather than weeks rapidly. We connect direct mail – a physical channel where a printed piece of paper is sent through the postal service – to the marketing tech stack (CRM, CDP), which drives and accumulates knowledge of what happens in a direct mail marketing campaign through Postalytics. Similar to how all digital marketing channels are driven from central locations. We've created a method of assigning a unique QR code to each recipient of a piece of mail. The opportunity is to use that physical piece of paper that offers you something while holding it and drive them to your website through the QR code – which everybody is comfortable with now. BEST MOMENTS ‘Each time you participate in the design and launch of a startup, there's always tremendous learnings you can take away from that experience.'‘One of the challenges with any offline marketing channel is measuring what is successful and who is/isn't responding. We've created some proprietary methods of measuring both the delivery of the mail and who's responding and where they are going on your website.'‘It's impossible for the QR codes to be manipulated by a third party because each one is unique and fully encrypted.'‘The cost of creating a highly scalable, high-performance platform in the cloud has plummeted. You can do so without spending a huge amount of money. Our business model allows us to capture customers without a tremendous capital outlay. We didn't need to raise much money to get this business off the ground. Once the business got going, it became self-sustaining.' ABOUT THE GUEST Denis Kelly is CEO of Postalytics, a fast-growing software company that automates direct mail marketing, measures the results, and connects it to CRM/Marketing Automation.  Postalytics evolved out of Boingnet, a software tool used by direct mail service providers and agencies to provide landing pages and email campaigns that complement personalized direct mail. I was co-owner of Wireless City - a chain of 37 Verizon Wireless stores based in Florida, Massachusetts, and Georgia. The company was acquired by Go Wireless in October 2011. Before Wireless City, I was CEO at Adesso Systems, an enterprise mobility software company. Previously, I was CEO and Co-Founder of Adjoin Solutions, Inc., an early Web Services Management market leader. Adjoin was acquired by Computer Associates in July 2003. Before founding Adjoin, I was VP of Web Services at Palm (PALM), leading the Palm.net wireless business, the MyPalm web and mobile portals, and other Palm web properties. Previously, I was COO & Co-Founder of AnyDay.com (sold to Palm), headed sales for Achieve Healthcare, the largest provider of enterprise software and services to the post-acute healthcare industry. And COO at Genesis Business Systems (sold to Achieve). Dennis holds a BA in economics from Colgate University. I build companies, typically having something to do with technology. My role typically spans product development, sales, marketing, finance, and HR. I started life as a sales guy, spent time building products, and running data centers, have been CEO of venture-backed startups, and have built self-financed businesses. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennisjohnkelly/   ABOUT POSTALYTICS With automated direct mail marketing, marketers use Postalytics to stand out from their competitors. Drive new leads and sales with personalized direct mail that complements email and digital marketing. Deep integration with HubSpot, Salesforce, and other CRM/Marketing Automation tools enables direct mail to look, act and feel like a digital marketing channel that happens to produce trackable postcards and letters. Website - https://www.postalytics.com/  ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, and commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers and accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.  Twitter: SabineVdL LinkedIn: Sabine VanderLinden Instagram: sabinevdLofficial Facebook: SabineVdLOfficial TikTok: sabinevdlofficial Email: podcast@sabinevdl.com Website: www.sabinevdl.comThis show was brought to you by Progressive Media

Software itself is constantly being updated, but are some conventional approaches used by tech leaders also in need of an upgrade? David Heinemeier Hansson is the Co-owner & CTO of the software company 37signals, producer of the successful web services Basecamp and HEY. On this episode, David explains the forward-thinking methodologies that his company has successfully implemented, like championing prospective customers rather than current ones, enforcing a short six-week planning cycle, and placing a higher value on intuition over data.Tune in to learn:David describes the “six-week cycle” approach at 37signals (03:30)How did 37signals develop its short-term planning method? (08:30 )The relationship between designers and programmers at 37signals (13:30)David's reliance on intuition over data (29:15)The importance of writing and advice David received from Jeff Bezos (37:50)IT Visionaries is powered by Salesforce Platform and Dreamforce 2022. Catch the news and insights coming out of Dreamforce this year for free on salesforce.com/plus. Content will start rolling on September 20th.Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Jon Udell is community lead for Steampipe, an open-source tool that populates a database table with data retrieved from APIs. They use Postgres, which means that data is easy to explore and retrieve using SQL. Subscribe: Apple • Android • Spotify • Stitcher • Google • AntennaPod • RSS.Detailed show notes can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Nick Gray is an entrepreneur and the author of The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. He is the founder of Museum Hack. Nick started a web hosting company called vs3 Web Services in high school, and he has sold two multi-million dollar businesses. In this episode, Nick talks about his new book and shares the secret to the success of the 2-hour cocktail party. To learn more about Nick and his businesses, check out the following links. How to Host a Party Website The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: Website The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: Amazon How to Host a Clothing Swap How to Plan a Networking Event How to Host a Happy Hour My Parents Hosted a Party: Here's What They Learned Mocktail Party: How to Host When You Don't Drink Alcohol If I Had $10 Million Dollars, How Would I Live Differently? Nick Gray's personal website Nick Gray's blog Key points include: 06:05: The NICK formula 18:08: Icebreakers 27:07: Cocktails and concluding the evening Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which has a mission of connecting independent management consultants with one another, creating opportunities for members to meet, build relationships, and share lessons learned. Learn more at www.umbrex.com.

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

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