1
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So I was watching one of your old talks, and you made a reference to a, what was it, a Solaris storage admin job in the suburbs.

2
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And I was wondering, did you just make that up, or did you actually know a nice storage Solaris admin in the suburbs who was just happily going along reallocating space?

3
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Oh, hi, Coté.

4
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No, I actually got a recruiter contacting me in the last couple of years for a Solaris storage admin job out in some far-flung exurb that I'm pretty sure I would have to buy a car and then drive the car.

5
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And these are just things that are not going to happen.

6
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Yeah, yeah.

7
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You can't use your, what is it, your transit, oh my God, business to get out there.

8
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You'd have to buy a car.

9
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It's terrible.

10
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You know, this is one of the major criteria people in the tech world seem to have, is the transport to and from my job.

11
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Is it long?

12
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Does it require a car?

13
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It's very systems-type thinking that I think they get into.

14
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Honestly, I prefer a job that requires me to go to the airport from time to time rather than one that requires me to go to a specific place where I use my computer.

15
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Right.

16
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Yeah, yeah.

17
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You know, I didn't realize it until I was looking, but you have a lot of talks.

18
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You've been out and about.

19
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How did that start up?

20
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Well, let's see.

21
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I was the one-woman ops team at an ad tech startup called Eighth Bridge in Minneapolis, where I did go ride my bike the seven blocks to the office, to go into the office every day.

22
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And my boss at the time, Jamie Thingolstad, who was involved with this local unconference thing, said, you should go talk about our MongoDB there.

23
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And I thought, I could talk about MongoDB, but it's a very dev-focused conference.

24
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So I'm going to bring one of my dev co-workers to, you know, Mike Hobbs, to talk about, like, kind of the dev side.

25
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Sort of like your conference shield.

26
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Right.

27
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You know, I was like, there's not even an ops track at this conference.

28
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I felt a little weird.

29
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But it was actually a great experience.

30
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I got to talk about how MongoDB is sadness as a service, which I think everybody pretty much agrees with now.

31
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And it was, I realized that even if you're, you don't have all the answers or you're not an expert TM on something, it's still valuable to share your experiences with other people.

32
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Right.

33
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Now, as a little parenthetical, so what is the deal with MongoDB?

34
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It's sort of like, I haven't used all these newfangled tools that the kids are up to nowadays, but it seems like everyone loathes MongoDB and yet it's really popular.

35
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Or is it sort of like just making fun of, like, people wearing, like, the wrong type of pants or something?

36
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Like, it's sort of like an elitist thing to do?

37
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Or is it actually like a loathsome thing?

38
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What's up with it?

39
00:02:44,500 --> 00:02:55,640
So MongoDB is actually great if you want to prototype something as a developer and you just want to write some JSON and just store some documents and the interface is super simple and you don't have to write any SQL.

40
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It is great for that.

41
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Unfortunately, it made a lot of marketing claims as to being, you know, quote unquote, web scale, but to hilarious results.

42
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But also tended to have, you know, data losing bugs with every release.

43
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Oh, right.

44
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That's sort of not what you want with a database.

45
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One might argue it's the core feature.

46
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Right.

47
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So it kind of got a reputation for being kind of a pain for people who are, you know, trying to operate it.

48
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I opened a lot of bugs with them when they were first called Tension about things like the way their connection pool lazily checked connections such that if you've changed your master route, you would expect that all of the open connections would not be valid anymore.

49
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But no, you've got to handle that on the application side or every single one of the ones open in the connection pool will be tried and fail.

50
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And it's just like, what?

51
00:03:51,800 --> 00:03:57,180
So there were a lot of things like that that made it difficult from an operational perspective.

52
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But if you're just trying it out and don't actually expect to operate it in production or at any kind of scale, I'm sure it's perfectly fine.

53
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It's probably.

54
00:04:05,080 --> 00:04:05,980
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

55
00:04:06,060 --> 00:04:12,020
You know, MySQL aside, I always wonder if, like, the 2000s would have been different if Oracle just lowered their prices.

56
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If Oracle just stopped trying to sue everyone?

57
00:04:15,520 --> 00:04:15,920
Yeah.

58
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I mean, if the closed source alternative to all this stuff was people more gleefully used it for whatever reasons, they may not like it.

59
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But it is databases or a strange space because it seems like there's so many different ones of them nowadays.

60
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And they're all kind of, like, highly specialized to a task.

61
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And it'll be interesting if things consolidate down to just a few general purpose ones.

62
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But it doesn't really seem like that's the way stuff's going.

63
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Well, I think that there's definitely a lot of room for data stores for unstructured data, right?

64
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So, like, at 8thBridge that same couple of jobs ago now, I also ran an HBase cluster.

65
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And that was specifically because we had a firehose of data coming out of Facebook back when the OpenGraph API would let you harvest not only the data from people who had authed your app, but also some of their friends' likes.

66
00:05:12,420 --> 00:05:12,540
Right.

67
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So, we had a great deal of data coming in from Facebook.

68
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And it was not necessarily structured in a way that we could predict.

69
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So, having schema-less data being dropped into a wide-column data store is pretty handy, especially if you plan on mostly just running MapReduce jobs on it.

70
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Right.

71
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So, like, I think that there's a lot of room for data, you know, a variety of different kinds of data stores.

72
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And I don't want to malign MongoDB.

73
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Document stores have their place.

74
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I just think a lot of times you end up realizing that there is structure to your data.

75
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So, that's sort of the sort of thing where I think I've made jokes before about how you don't make your important technology decisions by running a Markov bot against the front page of Hacker News.

76
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Like, you don't necessarily want to choose a data store just because it's the hot-turning new data store that all the kids these days are using.

77
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Like, got to look at your problem space first and see what you're trying to accomplish before choosing a data store.

78
00:06:05,620 --> 00:06:21,900
Yeah, you know, and that brings up something I was interested to hear your take on because I encounter this quite a lot when we go out in our Pivotal world and tell people they need to do all this crazy, like, I don't know, cloud stuff and think about DevOps and things like that.

79
00:06:22,220 --> 00:06:26,740
And given your background as an operations person, I am not an operations person.

80
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I'm the – I used to be the bad developer who would choose easy things and then have other people suffer for it.

81
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That was my form of entertainment, I guess.

82
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But, you know, a lot of operations people, like, I go over and, you know, talk about, like, DevOps and cloud with them.

83
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And basically the question they ask is, like, so where's the part in your chart where I get fired?

84
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And there's – the other way of asking that is, is there – in a more genuine way or helpful way is, is there curious, like, what an operation person does beyond the obvious of, like, working with the developers?

85
00:07:03,360 --> 00:07:13,720
And, you know, the reason this popped up in my mind just now is it seems like – so if you have lots of different types of databases, well, someone's got to figure out how to run all those weird things, right?

86
00:07:13,840 --> 00:07:26,620
And so there's almost, like – it almost plays into the old Jevon's paradox or Jevon or however you say it of, well, now we have an unlimited amount of types of middleware and services we can run.

87
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So someone needs to work on that, which is not going to be the developers.

88
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Nice.

89
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How many things with VIA in the front of them do you want to run today?

90
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That's right.

91
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But, you know, I mean, the more general question is, like, as – I mean, you're well-traveled in the scene where people would ask this.

92
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But, like, how do you sort of, like – what do you tell ops people who are, like, freaking out?

93
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Right.

94
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So I would tell them that I totally am a system of the old school as they possibly are.

95
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Like, I poured one out on the curb for SunOS 413, okay?

96
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Like, I was sad about Solaris because, come on, really?

97
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We're going to go System 5?

98
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Like, even if we've been doing this – excuse me.

99
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Even if we've been doing this for a while, there's still always new stuff to learn.

100
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So, yes, of course, if you would like to, you know, just use Smitty or whatever the same way as you've done for the last 20 years, it's possible you're going to have a bad time.

101
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But as long as you're interested in learning new things –

102
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Or you could work in the suburbs, apparently.

103
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Well, I mean, I think that there's a very long tail of adoption, right?

104
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So there's probably always going to be places that you can do the thing you did 15 years ago.

105
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But if you are interested in learning new things, there's an infinite amount of new things to learn.

106
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And there's – I like to say that if there's – if it's possible to automate away some portion of your job, that was the boring part.

107
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And you should definitely automate that part so that you can do all of the more interesting, you know, scaling problems or all of the more, you know, all of the more interesting solutions you can provide that can bring actual business value.

108
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Because the part where you just ran, like, some script again and again, probably not the most interesting part of your job anyway.

109
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Yeah, I always think of that for as terrible as it ended up, that, you know, that wonderful part of Lost where they just had to push a button all the time.

110
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Right.

111
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Seems like something that needed to be automated.

112
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I mean, I guess it did have great value.

113
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If I'm not pressing the button, something terrible will happen.

114
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But it turns out not.

115
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But, like, what are – you know, what are some examples of, like, fun, interesting things to do instead of pushing the button that you've come across?

116
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Sure, exactly.

117
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So, for example, if you would like to migrate some of your workload to the cloud, which, by the way, I'll say that the cloud is kind of BS because the cloud is just someone else's computer.

118
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Like, in some cases, perhaps that computer is in U.S. East 1 in Virginia, and you're renting time on it.

119
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So, it's not this mystical, magical thing.

120
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It's just a series of computers somewhere.

121
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And if you're going to migrate some of your workload to, say, AWS, for example, there's a lot of things you can learn about how to scale, how to perhaps auto-scale up and down, how to connect their VPCs with, you know, internal VPNs you may already have.

122
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Right.

123
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How you can have better, like, data locality so that you're not constantly incurring the cost and also, you know, time sink of moving data around, depending on where you're processing it.

124
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That kind of comes in when you're talking about, like, you know, running massive jobs on some amount of data.

125
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Well, can you localize the data to some sort of place where you're actually running those jobs?

126
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Like, there's a lot of ways that you can add value that aren't necessarily repetitive action.

127
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So, I would discourage people from wanting to pursue repetitive action if they're interested in computers.

128
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Because I think computers are really good at performing repetitive actions the same many, many times in a row.

129
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Humans, less so.

130
00:11:00,260 --> 00:11:03,520
I think we should stick to our strengths, which is, like, creative problem solving.

131
00:11:04,100 --> 00:11:24,360
Yeah, no, and it's almost like the, I don't know, tell me if you think this is fair, but it seems like in the ops world, you can divide up into at least two categories of, you know, if we take out, like, I don't know, security and network admin and other kind of, not niches and small, but, like, specialized tasks.

132
00:11:24,580 --> 00:11:36,320
And there's basically sort of, like, here's off-the-shelf sort of software and stuff, and also desktops, and someone has to make sure that stuff operates correctly.

133
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And then there's another category of stuff of, like, here's uniquely combined together IT that, like, we have caused to come into existence, and we have to constantly make sure that it's operating properly.

134
00:11:49,800 --> 00:11:57,260
And so it's almost like a unique application or system that we've done in-house, and it might have our own, like, software we've written in or whatever.

135
00:11:57,900 --> 00:12:07,580
And that's where, like, probably the bulk of the interesting work is in maintaining your custom stuff versus, like, time to add more hard drives to the exchange server.

136
00:12:08,360 --> 00:12:12,800
And, you know, like, keeping your ERP system happy and things like that.

137
00:12:14,020 --> 00:12:24,880
So I've actually had an opportunity to talk to some individuals at some large enterprises where they are worried about things like their ERP system, but then also how people operate, you know, interoperate with it.

138
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And I think that there's probably interesting problems in all of the realms.

139
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Like, you don't have to be, like, a website, you know, public-facing, open API, whatever, in order to have interesting problems to solve.

140
00:12:38,260 --> 00:12:45,740
I do think that perhaps running an exchange server yourself in-house these days is possibly better not done.

141
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Like, I would say that you're probably going to add more value to your business by just going and getting one of the numerous cloud solutions that's available for that and having people actually help, I don't know, make the bring-your-own-device solutions work better for your enterprise or something.

142
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Yeah, yeah.

143
00:13:03,880 --> 00:13:14,760
And exactly, there's almost, like, even in that area of not your customized software, there's deciding what all that stuff is going to look like and then making sure it's wired up properly.

144
00:13:15,180 --> 00:13:20,520
Like, making sure that if I'm working from home remotely, if my kids watch Netflix, it doesn't ruin the day's work.

145
00:13:20,980 --> 00:13:23,640
That would be an interesting problem to solve for me.

146
00:13:24,640 --> 00:13:32,440
What, is your Netflix profile, like, something that is also affecting your work, or can you not set aside the kid profile?

147
00:13:32,900 --> 00:13:33,620
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

148
00:13:33,660 --> 00:13:38,620
No, it's just a matter of, like, sucking up the, you know, it's got this annoying, sucking up the bandwidth.

149
00:13:38,840 --> 00:13:44,320
It has this annoying thing of, like, my profile is now stuck in kids' profile, and it won't move over.

150
00:13:44,440 --> 00:13:45,500
And I don't know what's wrong.

151
00:13:45,560 --> 00:13:46,740
It's misclassified me.

152
00:13:46,980 --> 00:13:47,660
It's terrible.

153
00:13:48,560 --> 00:13:53,400
Well, it kind of sounds like for your internal routing in your house that you need some sort of QoS.

154
00:13:53,660 --> 00:13:54,020
Sure.

155
00:13:54,640 --> 00:13:56,200
I don't know what any of that is.

156
00:13:56,280 --> 00:13:59,560
I'm busy filling up a Mongo database with a bunch of unstructured data.

157
00:13:59,920 --> 00:14:01,660
I have no idea about that.

158
00:14:01,860 --> 00:14:04,260
But this does raise another small cultural point.

159
00:14:04,940 --> 00:14:10,900
Now, since you've been working here, I've been learning a lot about your buddy Joe there.

160
00:14:10,940 --> 00:14:12,400
I know who wears Red Wing boots.

161
00:14:12,700 --> 00:14:13,620
I've got to look those up.

162
00:14:13,620 --> 00:14:20,580
But do you guys use different, do you pay for different services on your, like, Netflix and Spotify and things like that?

163
00:14:20,620 --> 00:14:21,780
Or do you use one account?

164
00:14:22,400 --> 00:14:23,940
That's a funny question.

165
00:14:24,080 --> 00:14:27,140
I think that's probably one of those philosophical questions in any relationship.

166
00:14:27,740 --> 00:14:30,940
And the answer is we don't actually share any accounts.

167
00:14:31,400 --> 00:14:37,820
However, the person with the strongest opinions for whatever it is is the only one who usually bothers to have an account.

168
00:14:38,020 --> 00:14:40,440
Like, for example, I don't have a Netflix account at all.

169
00:14:40,540 --> 00:14:41,200
I never have.

170
00:14:42,160 --> 00:14:42,420
I see.

171
00:14:42,520 --> 00:14:47,740
Because I have very few opinions about what we actually watch movie-wise, but I have a lot of veto power.

172
00:14:47,940 --> 00:14:50,900
So he has a very long Netflix queue, and he watches a lot of it when I'm out of town.

173
00:14:51,020 --> 00:14:54,080
But then isn't he stressed out that you're going to, like, ruin the robot?

174
00:14:54,580 --> 00:15:02,020
Like, things you pick, like, if he doesn't like it, it's going to feed into the robot, and next thing you know, he's going to be recommended the wrong things.

175
00:15:02,560 --> 00:15:11,100
I'm not sure that he puts that much stock in the recommendation engines inside Netflix versus, like, I think he reads, you know, the Onion AV Club and talks to friends and what have you.

176
00:15:11,420 --> 00:15:11,820
Yeah.

177
00:15:11,820 --> 00:15:19,300
See, this is a crisis that's looming, is you have all these individuals, and you're going to be customizing stuff to the individuals, but then you have families.

178
00:15:19,640 --> 00:15:23,740
And if they intermix their stuff together, like, I don't know, it's going to pull families apart.

179
00:15:23,860 --> 00:15:25,460
They're going to realize how different they are.

180
00:15:25,780 --> 00:15:27,420
We've got to obscure and hide this.

181
00:15:27,940 --> 00:15:31,360
Or they can just learn to accept some of what each other likes.

182
00:15:31,480 --> 00:15:37,560
I mean, it took probably 12, 13 years into our relationship for me to actually start watching the Green Bay Packers.

183
00:15:37,940 --> 00:15:38,320
Oh, right.

184
00:15:38,320 --> 00:15:41,640
I just wasn't a fan of American rules football at all because I grew up as a hockey fan.

185
00:15:42,040 --> 00:15:49,340
Which, by the way, as a Texan, even though you're not from Dallas, you have some explaining to do about how Dallas stole our hockey team when I was a kid.

186
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That was unacceptable.

187
00:15:50,380 --> 00:15:50,720
I don't know.

188
00:15:50,780 --> 00:15:51,940
I'm sure money was involved.

189
00:15:53,540 --> 00:16:02,660
But, yeah, I eventually started, you know, I don't know, having sort of a Stockholm Syndrome appreciation for American rules football, and now I'm actually a Packer fan.

190
00:16:03,220 --> 00:16:04,560
We both have Packer stock.

191
00:16:04,640 --> 00:16:09,200
He got one in the original offering, and I got one for my birthday a couple years ago.

192
00:16:09,260 --> 00:16:10,240
We got them framed together.

193
00:16:10,840 --> 00:16:13,560
You know, some people put, like, a ketubah frame, you know, on the wall.

194
00:16:13,640 --> 00:16:15,420
We have, like, a Packer stock framed together.

195
00:16:16,100 --> 00:16:16,420
Hmm.

196
00:16:16,840 --> 00:16:17,240
Unifying.

197
00:16:17,440 --> 00:16:20,220
So, I guess your counseling is right.

198
00:16:20,220 --> 00:16:35,100
It's just like, well, this is an opportunity for you to get closer with your family by, you know, you've got your finely tuned music and Spotify, and every now and then, some, like, crazy 90s punk stuff is going to pop up in your list.

199
00:16:35,240 --> 00:16:36,760
And you're like, where did that come from?

200
00:16:37,420 --> 00:16:39,300
Are you telling me you have a problem with Fugazi?

201
00:16:40,300 --> 00:16:42,160
Well, I like that one where they're not talking.

202
00:16:42,500 --> 00:16:43,200
That's a good album.

203
00:16:44,740 --> 00:16:45,660
Oh, my goodness.

204
00:16:46,380 --> 00:16:51,600
Anyhow, that stuff's popular up in the Midwest, as I remember, so I should watch myself.

205
00:16:52,580 --> 00:16:55,580
But, you know, so it's changing topics drastically.

206
00:16:56,260 --> 00:17:03,160
Speaking of sysadminning, I was, so you do that Arrested Development podcast, which is good stuff.

207
00:17:03,660 --> 00:17:05,620
And I was listening to one of them recently.

208
00:17:05,760 --> 00:17:09,840
It was the one, I think it was episode 40 with Charity and that other guy.

209
00:17:10,480 --> 00:17:14,140
And she's pretty, pretty unescapable because she, like, giggles all the time.

210
00:17:14,300 --> 00:17:16,440
So it's a very, very known voice there.

211
00:17:16,940 --> 00:17:17,660
Charity's great.

212
00:17:17,920 --> 00:17:18,440
Yeah, yeah.

213
00:17:18,760 --> 00:17:22,740
And we had MCR and Patrick from Etsy on that episode as well.

214
00:17:23,200 --> 00:17:23,960
Yeah, there you go.

215
00:17:24,080 --> 00:17:31,780
And you guys started talking a lot about the usual sort of thing of, what's the part that I started keying into?

216
00:17:32,280 --> 00:17:39,940
The thing that I thought was really interesting was the point you guys were making about when everyone needs to understand that when you go to management, that's not a promotion.

217
00:17:41,200 --> 00:17:41,280
Right?

218
00:17:41,480 --> 00:17:42,000
Oh, right.

219
00:17:42,200 --> 00:17:44,460
Like it's a career change.

220
00:17:45,400 --> 00:17:52,940
We had Lindsay Holmwood on the podcast recently with Courtney Nash, actually, and talking about cognitive neuroscience.

221
00:17:52,940 --> 00:18:00,700
But he wrote a really good blog post that, if we have show notes for this, we should put it in the show notes, about how management's not a promotion.

222
00:18:00,940 --> 00:18:01,900
It's a different job.

223
00:18:02,420 --> 00:18:02,860
Exactly.

224
00:18:03,380 --> 00:18:04,900
I have actually done that different job.

225
00:18:05,020 --> 00:18:13,260
I did management from 2005 to 2012 before I decided, you know, stuff it.

226
00:18:13,280 --> 00:18:14,900
I want to be an individual contributor again.

227
00:18:15,500 --> 00:18:16,580
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

228
00:18:16,680 --> 00:18:27,400
No, and there was a good discussion of that kind of divide, which I think the – my lack of being able to talk about it quickly is the whole point.

229
00:18:27,400 --> 00:18:32,600
It's like an odd topic of like – for many people, management kind of blows, right?

230
00:18:32,920 --> 00:18:43,880
And yet, it's – counterintuitive is the wrong word, but it's almost like not the common sense of how you would go about thinking about your job, right?

231
00:18:43,880 --> 00:18:52,920
Like your goal is to get into management to – because you're sort of like excelling and, you know, it's a – you get the call from your parent and they're like, are you taking care of yourself?

232
00:18:53,080 --> 00:18:54,060
How's your job doing?

233
00:18:54,480 --> 00:18:56,320
Have you been promoted to management yet, right?

234
00:18:56,340 --> 00:18:57,260
They're checking in on you.

235
00:18:57,800 --> 00:19:12,700
And it struck me in listening to that that a lot of like what we talk about in the DevOps space is kind of like trying to emphasize that the simplistic common sense thing is what you should do instead of like what's normal to do.

236
00:19:12,700 --> 00:19:20,460
So like normally, like as we were joking about earlier, the developers write some stuff and put it in MongoDB and hand it off to ops people to take care of.

237
00:19:21,020 --> 00:19:22,060
And that doesn't work out.

238
00:19:22,660 --> 00:19:27,360
And a lot of stuff that we talk about in the DevOps world over and over again is like, hey, look, that doesn't work.

239
00:19:27,720 --> 00:19:29,320
So we should stop doing it.

240
00:19:30,240 --> 00:19:34,200
And possibly we should talk to each other about our needs before we choose a data store.

241
00:19:34,360 --> 00:19:39,240
I mean, in that particular case, I blame no one because I walked into a MongoDB already in progress.

242
00:19:39,460 --> 00:19:40,540
I made the best of it.

243
00:19:40,860 --> 00:19:48,160
But – and that is the sort of conversation that say I were in ops and working someplace where people wanted to put MongoDB in production.

244
00:19:48,300 --> 00:19:50,800
I would say, hey, let's talk about this.

245
00:19:51,560 --> 00:19:52,220
Yeah, indeed.

246
00:19:52,220 --> 00:19:56,340
And so like I used to – and I still do.

247
00:19:56,480 --> 00:20:00,460
Like I always get a little upset when it's sort of like, oh, you should just do the smart thing.

248
00:20:02,320 --> 00:20:12,300
But, you know, given the various – you know, you have an interesting job history of having been at basically like a – I don't know, not basically, a big ISP and then a university.

249
00:20:12,540 --> 00:20:15,120
Very normal, large, institutionalized places.

250
00:20:15,640 --> 00:20:18,540
And then several startups, you know, where they're doing things.

251
00:20:18,580 --> 00:20:21,200
And I wonder like – I don't know.

252
00:20:21,320 --> 00:20:27,540
I mean, what's the deal with people getting stuck in a rut of not just following the common sense?

253
00:20:27,540 --> 00:20:33,880
Like how do you – especially since you've managed, like how do you move them over to like doing something that's obviously better?

254
00:20:34,260 --> 00:20:39,900
Which the broader question is sort of like how do you do change management?

255
00:20:40,180 --> 00:20:51,980
You know, like cultural change management of moving stuff in because it's – that seems to be the part that everyone always bulldozes up against is people just keep doing the same bad stuff over and over again.

256
00:20:51,980 --> 00:20:53,800
And we can't convince them to do otherwise.

257
00:20:54,640 --> 00:21:09,680
I think in many cases – and I'm not going to say I was great at this when I was in management – but I think in many cases people are motivated by, you know, by local optimizations, as Andrew maybe would put it.

258
00:21:10,120 --> 00:21:25,280
So, they're thinking about what their day-to-day – or they're thinking about whether or not they get the thing that they want, if the thing that they want is, you know, the exciting, shiny new framework that they've tried at home and was fun or whatever.

259
00:21:25,980 --> 00:21:34,280
And they don't necessarily feel motivated to see either what's better for the organization or what everyone can agree on.

260
00:21:34,280 --> 00:21:47,220
So, like trying to get people to talk amongst themselves, like honestly, about what they need, what they want, what benefits they think this particular technology choice will bring.

261
00:21:47,700 --> 00:21:49,320
Like, I think those are the hard conversations.

262
00:21:49,320 --> 00:21:55,160
Like, a friend of mine tweeted just the other day that, you know, who was it?

263
00:21:55,220 --> 00:22:04,360
Something along the lines of, what was it this – what was this thing that they told us about how, you know, you don't need communication skills to write software?

264
00:22:04,580 --> 00:22:06,180
Software is mostly communication.

265
00:22:09,080 --> 00:22:11,520
Yeah, yeah, no, and that's a good example.

266
00:22:11,740 --> 00:22:14,820
Like, I remember seeing that, and I remember, do you ever read that book, Microsurfs?

267
00:22:15,020 --> 00:22:23,980
There's some episode – there's an episode in it where one of the programmers goes off into his room and has a flat food diet because the only food they can give him are things that can be slid under the door.

268
00:22:24,280 --> 00:22:24,900
Oh, gosh.

269
00:22:25,300 --> 00:22:31,920
And, you know, the flat food diet mentality doesn't really work out too well in that case.

270
00:22:32,400 --> 00:22:34,540
But it is like, you know –

271
00:22:34,540 --> 00:22:45,480
But to your point, I've worked in some of these really large organizations, and you end up really just optimizing for your tiny unit, however small you define that unit as being, right?

272
00:22:45,900 --> 00:22:51,940
So, like, when I worked at US West and then we got bought by Quest, they laid off a bunch of managers, including mine.

273
00:22:52,100 --> 00:22:55,140
I reported to a voice on a speakerphone in Denver.

274
00:22:55,280 --> 00:22:55,960
I never met him.

275
00:22:57,340 --> 00:23:02,480
And that was not what I would consider to be the sort of experience that really motivates humans, right?

276
00:23:02,560 --> 00:23:11,160
Like, I'm actually going to London next week and – or going to London tonight, speaking next week at a conference where I'm going to be talking about distributed systems and teams.

277
00:23:11,740 --> 00:23:20,920
And I think a big part of working successfully on a distributed team is feeling that human connection with the people you're actually working with, even if you don't see them every day.

278
00:23:21,180 --> 00:23:21,440
Right.

279
00:23:22,000 --> 00:23:25,040
No, I think that's definitely the case.

280
00:23:25,040 --> 00:23:27,920
And it is – so you've been at Pivotal, like, how long now?

281
00:23:28,340 --> 00:23:28,800
A month.

282
00:23:28,940 --> 00:23:29,720
A month, right.

283
00:23:29,780 --> 00:23:33,320
Yeah, yeah, and both of us work remotely.

284
00:23:33,540 --> 00:23:38,900
So it's – I haven't worked remotely at such a large company in a long time.

285
00:23:39,700 --> 00:23:47,780
And it's interesting seeing the different remote working patterns play out and not play out in a company like this.

286
00:23:48,340 --> 00:23:49,380
But no, I think you're right.

287
00:23:49,480 --> 00:23:59,640
That is – that's a good way of really drastically boiling it down is, like, especially with remote working, you need to make sure that you're not just a disembodied head somewhere.

288
00:23:59,900 --> 00:24:07,820
Because it's easy for each employee to kind of just slip back into, well, I'll do nothing helpful today, essentially.

289
00:24:08,540 --> 00:24:16,200
Right, and then in terms of also, like, whether you're remote or in person, isolation from the larger picture.

290
00:24:16,460 --> 00:24:28,260
So I think Pivotal does a pretty good job, from what I've seen so far, in spreading information amongst – you know, between teams, making sure that people on one team might understand some of the goals, some of the needs of other teams.

291
00:24:28,380 --> 00:24:43,380
And if you work someplace where that's not so much the case or there's a lot of entrenched battle lines and fiefdoms and people trying to hang on to their little area of control, that – I think in large organizations, that can be endemic.

292
00:24:43,580 --> 00:24:44,720
And it's a huge problem, right?

293
00:24:44,760 --> 00:24:46,500
Because that's the siloing that we all talk about.

294
00:24:46,500 --> 00:24:58,160
But, you know, farm metaphors aside, it's basically if you're only optimizing for, you know, local rationality and you don't even look beyond that, you're going to have a bad time.

295
00:24:58,380 --> 00:24:59,200
As an organization.

296
00:24:59,960 --> 00:25:05,540
So then, no doubt, you've put together this talk already and rehearsed it countless times, right?

297
00:25:05,620 --> 00:25:07,180
So you probably know it forward and backwards.

298
00:25:09,540 --> 00:25:12,240
If I put together, you mean I have some slides and keynote?

299
00:25:12,940 --> 00:25:13,380
Sure.

300
00:25:14,220 --> 00:25:27,380
So, I mean, if you were to highlight, like, what you think some of the major things to get wrong that are fixable with remote working and distributed teams are, like, what would be those things?

301
00:25:27,380 --> 00:25:29,620
Like, what are the important things to get right?

302
00:25:30,240 --> 00:25:33,420
I really – I think that it mostly boils down to communication.

303
00:25:34,260 --> 00:25:48,540
Because if people feel like their management or their coworkers are distant from them, whether in terms of interest, in terms of connectivity, whether or not they're seeing them across a cubicle wall is almost immaterial.

304
00:25:49,120 --> 00:25:50,520
The important part is engagement.

305
00:25:50,700 --> 00:25:54,140
The important part is actually connecting with one another.

306
00:25:54,760 --> 00:25:59,860
So get that right and it doesn't necessarily matter where the people are since we're knowledge workers.

307
00:26:00,000 --> 00:26:02,180
We spend most of our days inside our own heads anyway.

308
00:26:03,180 --> 00:26:13,180
But being explicit, like yourself, being explicit about what you're doing and then also having everyone around you actually, from time to time, engage with what you're talking about, what you're saying.

309
00:26:13,460 --> 00:26:15,220
I mean, I think Chad is great for that, obviously.

310
00:26:15,600 --> 00:26:18,720
But any kind of collaborative work tools can help that.

311
00:26:18,820 --> 00:26:21,900
But people have to actually put in the effort to try to use them.

312
00:26:22,560 --> 00:26:22,840
Yeah.

313
00:26:23,000 --> 00:26:24,360
No, that's one thing I've noticed.

314
00:26:24,880 --> 00:26:40,380
And to a certain degree at Pivotal, but especially at other companies, is the idea of a information radiator in cyberspace is apparently very hard to get people to understand and do.

315
00:26:41,180 --> 00:26:54,020
Which is to say, exactly what you're saying is, like, it's somewhat easy if you're in person to sort of, like, just trust that information will disseminate.

316
00:26:54,360 --> 00:26:56,460
Just sort of, what do you call that?

317
00:26:56,940 --> 00:27:00,100
Face, not face to face, but word of mouth and mouth to mouth.

318
00:27:00,720 --> 00:27:02,260
It's starting to sound a little weird there.

319
00:27:02,740 --> 00:27:03,420
But anyways.

320
00:27:03,640 --> 00:27:05,820
Hopefully we're not resuscitating anyone, but osmosis.

321
00:27:05,940 --> 00:27:06,280
Exactly.

322
00:27:06,400 --> 00:27:13,620
You have one of those funny little mouth jobs that the lifeguards all have nowadays to keep it nice and sanitary, to pass your information from brain to brain.

323
00:27:14,220 --> 00:27:23,900
But it does seem like, I'm always shocked, I still am, like, looking in the white-collar world, like, how little information sharing there is.

324
00:27:23,900 --> 00:27:32,400
Like, because, you know, usually in the development world, at least in most places, there's at least the information sharing of your version control system.

325
00:27:32,560 --> 00:27:34,520
And there's probably a ton more than that, right?

326
00:27:34,980 --> 00:27:44,200
But in general, like, walks of life, just as you were saying, being explicit about things and sharing information, it's oddly hard to get people to do.

327
00:27:44,500 --> 00:27:46,920
Which is, I don't really understand why.

328
00:27:47,240 --> 00:27:48,920
It depends on how they're incented, right?

329
00:27:48,920 --> 00:28:06,440
So, if information hiding can advantage you, or if, you know, being the one with the scoop and getting in on the ground floor first or whatever, you know, cut some kind of competitive scenario with other teams or, you know, with people outside your organization.

330
00:28:06,820 --> 00:28:16,040
Like, if that, if security through obscurity is actually providing you some sort of perverse incentive, you're going to do it.

331
00:28:16,460 --> 00:28:19,760
Like, people do what they're incented to do, and they do what they're measured on.

332
00:28:20,440 --> 00:28:25,180
And would you say that's, like, an optimistic or a cynical view on life?

333
00:28:26,260 --> 00:28:33,940
I mean, maybe I'm being cynical in saying that if you incent people to hide information and to undercut each other, that's what they'll do.

334
00:28:34,680 --> 00:28:38,280
Because humanity is, we're all flawed human beings.

335
00:28:38,480 --> 00:28:42,920
But, I mean, I would say the solution to that is not just to tell people to be better, but to incent people differently.

336
00:28:43,280 --> 00:28:44,900
So, I guess that's where management comes into it.

337
00:28:45,040 --> 00:28:51,280
Yeah, no, and, you know, I asked the question because it's easy to think that it's, like, a cynical view of things, right?

338
00:28:51,380 --> 00:28:51,900
That people will...

339
00:28:51,900 --> 00:28:52,480
Because it's realistic.

340
00:28:52,780 --> 00:28:53,300
Yeah, yeah.

341
00:28:53,300 --> 00:29:03,880
But it strikes me for, like, all the exciting, like, business, like, lore and, like, white-collar stuff that I read all the time.

342
00:29:04,100 --> 00:29:09,340
It's very little spoken of, of, like, yeah, you need to set up incentives correctly, right?

343
00:29:09,720 --> 00:29:16,420
Like, this is a good example of one of those common sense things that we talk about in the DevOps world that people seem to, like, just not...

344
00:29:16,420 --> 00:29:19,000
It just doesn't really fit into their worldview, right?

345
00:29:19,040 --> 00:29:28,980
And it's sort of, like, if you set up a system where people are incented to do something, like, incented not to share information, then they won't share information.

346
00:29:29,300 --> 00:29:30,800
Like, I don't know what to tell you.

347
00:29:30,800 --> 00:29:38,300
I can give an example of something that I did wrong at the university, which is I tried very hard to keep our open tickets low.

348
00:29:39,300 --> 00:29:46,800
That did not necessarily translate to people being incented to make sure that those who sent in requests were happy with the result.

349
00:29:47,140 --> 00:29:50,260
It was more of a try to make them go away as quickly as possible.

350
00:29:50,360 --> 00:29:51,000
No, exactly.

351
00:29:51,140 --> 00:29:59,040
That's an example I've stolen from, I think it was a year ago, I saw a ThoughtWorks presentation.

352
00:29:59,260 --> 00:30:01,260
Or, no, it was at the beginning of this year.

353
00:30:01,640 --> 00:30:05,400
And they were presenting at a local cloud group, and they were complaining about traditional IT.

354
00:30:05,900 --> 00:30:14,300
And they were saying, well, the ticket people were paid on how often or how much, how many tickets they would close.

355
00:30:14,560 --> 00:30:18,320
So if you didn't fill out your ticket perfectly, they would close it.

356
00:30:19,320 --> 00:30:19,400
Right?

357
00:30:19,800 --> 00:30:26,580
Like, and so part of what, you know, we lost several months just learning how to write, learning the can't, if you will.

358
00:30:26,740 --> 00:30:29,900
The ticket can't, like, how to properly write the tickets.

359
00:30:30,560 --> 00:30:39,820
And it is, you know, I mean, it's another example of, like, studying the, as if you're in a management position or something like that.

360
00:30:39,880 --> 00:30:44,200
Studying the system and figuring out, like, what's operating correctly and not.

361
00:30:44,520 --> 00:30:55,580
And that's a huge part of what, you know, many of the conversations we have in the Pivotal world sort of start and revolve around.

362
00:30:55,780 --> 00:31:00,800
It's like, once you get this stack in here, now you need to change how you operate quite a bit.

363
00:31:01,280 --> 00:31:06,860
And I find myself, I mean, the reason I'm going on and on about this is talking about those issues pretty much all the time.

364
00:31:07,540 --> 00:31:09,000
Because apparently they're hard.

365
00:31:09,900 --> 00:31:10,300
Yeah.

366
00:31:10,660 --> 00:31:11,580
Who would have thought?

367
00:31:11,580 --> 00:31:23,060
I mean, I also think that there's been a lot of talk lately about, like, you know, more structured solutions or how opinionated would you like your software to be or your platform to be and that sort of thing.

368
00:31:23,520 --> 00:31:28,540
And I think that that might be the wrong way to look at it.

369
00:31:28,540 --> 00:31:32,300
Because, ideally, I mean, many of us, we're builders, right?

370
00:31:32,360 --> 00:31:33,540
We like to tinker.

371
00:31:34,240 --> 00:31:35,520
We like to play with things.

372
00:31:36,480 --> 00:31:43,920
A whole bunch of software Legos and Lincoln Logs that we get to glue together look like fun to a lot of people like us.

373
00:31:44,500 --> 00:31:55,300
And, at the same time, letting people decide what's going to be best for their business based on what looks the most fun to assemble is maybe not necessarily the most productive conversation to have.

374
00:31:55,500 --> 00:31:55,880
Right.

375
00:31:55,920 --> 00:32:03,200
So, it's like going in and saying, like, hey, what are you actually trying to accomplish?

376
00:32:04,100 --> 00:32:12,220
And starting from there, like, I think drives a better tool selection process than saying, what looks the most fun?

377
00:32:12,300 --> 00:32:14,140
Let's see if we can find a project that will use that.

378
00:32:14,440 --> 00:32:15,720
Because I've totally done that.

379
00:32:16,140 --> 00:32:20,620
But is it, like, is it necessarily the most constructive use of time?

380
00:32:20,840 --> 00:32:21,400
I don't know.

381
00:32:22,200 --> 00:32:22,440
Yeah.

382
00:32:22,620 --> 00:32:22,840
Yeah.

383
00:32:23,020 --> 00:32:23,240
Yeah.

384
00:32:23,580 --> 00:32:29,480
It's the having – we even have a common way of putting it as having the right tool for the job.

385
00:32:29,680 --> 00:32:32,780
But there's even a rule before that, which is, like, do you need a tool?

386
00:32:34,120 --> 00:32:37,800
Or have you defined your, like, problem space?

387
00:32:38,240 --> 00:32:38,600
Exactly.

388
00:32:38,600 --> 00:32:43,780
And so, like, you go hang out at a lot of DevOps days and things like that.

389
00:32:43,860 --> 00:32:50,840
And you even help run the one up in Minneapolis or the Twin Cities, I guess.

390
00:32:51,080 --> 00:32:52,460
I'm never sure what I'm supposed to call it.

391
00:32:53,000 --> 00:32:53,200
But –

392
00:32:53,200 --> 00:32:55,980
We're technically – I mean, our DevOps days takes place in Minneapolis.

393
00:32:56,720 --> 00:32:58,760
And the Twin Cities are, in fact, the area.

394
00:32:59,200 --> 00:32:59,740
There you go.

395
00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:05,980
Do you know why the C on their baseball hat is, like, the – as you say, what do you call it?

396
00:33:06,000 --> 00:33:07,080
American rules football?

397
00:33:07,520 --> 00:33:10,900
Like, why it's the same C that, like, is up in Chicago there?

398
00:33:11,160 --> 00:33:13,360
Like, what – how did that happen?

399
00:33:13,560 --> 00:33:14,460
I have no idea.

400
00:33:14,720 --> 00:33:17,480
Don't ask me how the sports ball people come up with logos.

401
00:33:17,760 --> 00:33:18,440
For someone –

402
00:33:18,440 --> 00:33:23,580
I mean, I assume they did that before – it probably happened before they started naming all the stadiums after various banks.

403
00:33:23,700 --> 00:33:24,580
But I have no idea.

404
00:33:24,900 --> 00:33:27,740
I mean, apparently you own shares in the Packers.

405
00:33:28,260 --> 00:33:29,520
So, you're committed now.

406
00:33:29,900 --> 00:33:31,520
You're on the vacant side of things.

407
00:33:32,760 --> 00:33:33,920
We'll have to look this up.

408
00:33:34,040 --> 00:33:35,140
Maybe someone listening knows.

409
00:33:35,860 --> 00:33:47,800
Anyways, so when it gets to this idea of, like, looking at the job and the value, like, how would you say in the DevOps community we are at kind of, like, I don't know, getting product managers involved?

410
00:33:47,980 --> 00:33:56,400
I don't really know how to say it, but, like, every now and then, like, you know, Damon Edwards always comes in and gives his talk about value stream mapping and things like that, right?

411
00:33:56,860 --> 00:34:02,080
But, like, do you think the maturity of the – maturity is the wrong word because it's always cyclical.

412
00:34:02,200 --> 00:34:07,920
But do you think at the moment in the DevOps days world, like, we talk about sort of, like, product definition enough?

413
00:34:08,920 --> 00:34:12,460
I think that that's – I hope that that's where things are moving.

414
00:34:13,060 --> 00:34:15,680
I mean, there's definitely been a lot of talk about tools.

415
00:34:16,100 --> 00:34:24,120
And I think tools are one of those visible ways that somebody can sell to their boss why they need to take two days off of work to go hang out with a bunch of their fellow nerds.

416
00:34:24,240 --> 00:34:26,160
Well, I'm going to learn about X, Y, and Z.

417
00:34:26,400 --> 00:34:27,960
Just, like, training, essentially.

418
00:34:28,260 --> 00:34:28,360
Right.

419
00:34:28,880 --> 00:34:40,300
But I think the larger value is when you start stepping away from a specific tool and seeing how people interact with the tools, how the tools can help us drive value.

420
00:34:40,600 --> 00:34:51,620
And so I have seen more and more talks being proposed and accepted for DevOps days that, you know, kind of like some of the talks you've been giving that talk about the larger businesses' needs.

421
00:34:52,580 --> 00:34:56,020
Andrew Cliff Schaefer was talking about this at DevOps days Pittsburgh back in 2014.

422
00:34:56,580 --> 00:34:58,880
And it's like, I think we have started going in that direction.

423
00:34:59,500 --> 00:35:02,740
I think there's still an awful lot of emphasis on tools.

424
00:35:02,860 --> 00:35:05,900
And then people kind of wonder, why is there all this squishy culture stuff?

425
00:35:06,320 --> 00:35:09,420
I want to learn about, you know, fill in my favorite tool here.

426
00:35:10,580 --> 00:35:11,740
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

427
00:35:12,100 --> 00:35:12,940
No, no, that's true.

428
00:35:13,120 --> 00:35:13,460
Yeah.

429
00:35:13,460 --> 00:35:21,560
I mean, there's – I don't know what the percentage breakout is, but it kind of whacks back and forth over the years.

430
00:35:22,060 --> 00:35:36,700
It's – like, I think it was the goat can podcast where there was a bit of a diatribe about how, like, we're deep in a DevOps culture conversation cycle now, which a couple years ago we kind of escaped.

431
00:35:36,700 --> 00:35:55,640
And now that there's more and more people who are interested in DevOps, we sort of have swung back to talking about that, sort of like the – I don't know, the introductory stuff of DevOps, which is encouraging people to think culturally, which, to be fair, is a lot of what we've been talking about, right?

432
00:35:55,640 --> 00:36:04,540
Like, you need to start switching around your process and doing things, which, you know, is yet more softening of, like, it's actually okay to talk about culture stuff.

433
00:36:04,880 --> 00:36:05,900
We shouldn't get sick of that.

434
00:36:06,680 --> 00:36:13,480
I don't think we should get sick of that just because humanity is going to continue to have these issues.

435
00:36:14,280 --> 00:36:29,040
And also, especially when you're going with a – just from conference design, if you're going for a single-track conference and it's not super hyper-focused, like, say, Monodorama, then when you have a really tool-specific talk at a DevOps days, you do risk having people tune out.

436
00:36:29,840 --> 00:36:39,460
So I think it's pretty important that even your technology-specific talks have some takeaways in them for the wider audience who may not be using that specific tool.

437
00:36:40,460 --> 00:36:40,860
Right.

438
00:36:41,060 --> 00:36:44,200
And so that gets to another topic I wanted to talk to you about.

439
00:36:44,200 --> 00:36:50,800
So you not only, like, go speak at a lot of conferences, but you help organize several of them, as I was talking about earlier.

440
00:36:51,000 --> 00:37:05,340
And, like, what – like, in the space of, like, infrastructure software, cloudy stuff, DevOps, whatever, like, in your mind, what's the ideal setup for a conference, right?

441
00:37:05,360 --> 00:37:09,720
Like, what are the – like, let's say it's kind of, like, a general purpose one, not, like, a specialized one.

442
00:37:09,820 --> 00:37:14,100
Like, here's a conference dedicated to just monitoring.

443
00:37:14,100 --> 00:37:19,760
But, like, how are you starting to see and, like, balancing conferences out?

444
00:37:20,300 --> 00:37:22,420
Like, like, is it all talks or all not talks?

445
00:37:22,480 --> 00:37:24,280
Or, like, what's your kind of ideal format?

446
00:37:26,800 --> 00:37:30,760
Open space, as we see at DevOps days, definitely has a lot of value.

447
00:37:31,180 --> 00:37:37,120
But if that doesn't fit into your specific kind of conference, like, say, there's no open space at Velocity.

448
00:37:37,620 --> 00:37:39,900
On the other hand, there are birds of a feather sessions.

449
00:37:40,220 --> 00:37:42,020
There are, like, you know, topical lunch tables.

450
00:37:42,460 --> 00:37:45,360
But more importantly, there's enough time for hallway track.

451
00:37:45,660 --> 00:37:45,920
Right.

452
00:37:46,040 --> 00:37:48,080
Like, I like single track conferences.

453
00:37:48,340 --> 00:37:50,840
I'm also fine with multi-track conferences.

454
00:37:52,100 --> 00:38:09,620
But the conferences that just have talk after talk after talk after talk are not only bad for people with small bladders, but are also sort of bad for letting people digest the information, talk to the speaker, talk to other attendees, even have time to get from one room to the next.

455
00:38:10,000 --> 00:38:15,600
So, I mean, I would say, like, if you're choosing topics, theming things in a room is okay.

456
00:38:16,260 --> 00:38:23,860
Spreading them out to make sure people do have time for those serendipitous encounters in the hallway is also a strategy.

457
00:38:24,720 --> 00:38:41,380
But making sure that there is enough time in between talks is, I mean, just kind of like passing time in the hallway in high school is actually important or people are going to have not, I'm not going to say a bad time, but they're going to have a better time if they have an opportunity for those serendipitous connections.

458
00:38:42,160 --> 00:38:42,360
Right.

459
00:38:42,700 --> 00:38:51,120
And then, so, I mean, if you were to give out advice for conference goers, like, what are some things you would throw out to them?

460
00:38:52,860 --> 00:38:53,440
Let's see.

461
00:38:53,960 --> 00:39:01,240
I would tell them, don't be afraid to sit in the first couple of rows at a talk.

462
00:39:01,360 --> 00:39:01,660
Right.

463
00:39:01,660 --> 00:39:05,160
Because speakers don't actually enjoy talking to empty chairs.

464
00:39:05,280 --> 00:39:06,540
They could probably do that at home.

465
00:39:06,620 --> 00:39:07,700
They probably own chairs.

466
00:39:08,480 --> 00:39:13,340
So, they're not going to, you know, hate on you, probably not call on you.

467
00:39:13,880 --> 00:39:16,900
There's usually not a the first three rows will get wet sort of sign.

468
00:39:17,060 --> 00:39:18,380
We're not at SeaWorld, so.

469
00:39:18,580 --> 00:39:19,780
Or a Gallagher event.

470
00:39:19,840 --> 00:39:20,200
Right.

471
00:39:20,340 --> 00:39:20,740
Right.

472
00:39:20,740 --> 00:39:22,560
So, it's usually fine.

473
00:39:22,700 --> 00:39:26,740
Yeah, you're not usually at an improv show where if you sit up front, you risk getting pulled onto stage.

474
00:39:27,180 --> 00:39:33,040
So, it's probably fine to sit up where you can actually, you know, engage and interact with a speaker.

475
00:39:33,040 --> 00:39:36,020
If you're worried that you might have to bail, just kind of sit on one of the sides.

476
00:39:36,640 --> 00:39:40,820
And then, if you get paged or whatever, because hashtag OpsLife, you can sneak out.

477
00:39:42,220 --> 00:39:47,200
But then, I would also say, like, at lunch, go sit at an empty table.

478
00:39:47,200 --> 00:39:53,620
This is advice from Tom Duffield, actually, one of my DevOps Days Minneapolis and DevOps Minneapolis meetup co-organizers.

479
00:39:53,800 --> 00:40:00,940
He gave a really good Ignite about conference tips for introverts, where he says, sit at a table by yourself at lunch.

480
00:40:01,040 --> 00:40:02,340
There's a limited amount of tables.

481
00:40:02,500 --> 00:40:05,120
People will have to sit with you, and they will have to talk to you.

482
00:40:06,400 --> 00:40:08,640
Because at the very least, they'll say, hey, can I sit here?

483
00:40:09,020 --> 00:40:10,160
Oh, that's good.

484
00:40:10,240 --> 00:40:16,620
You know, I was just going to ask that, because I feel like, over the years, I have mastered the art of sitting at a full table and not making eye contact.

485
00:40:17,180 --> 00:40:20,040
If you go into the full table already, you can get away with that.

486
00:40:20,260 --> 00:40:23,940
Oh, yeah, because you can sort of hide in plain sight, as it were, right?

487
00:40:24,440 --> 00:40:28,660
And they probably have a conversation started, and you can just kind of, like, look at your food or look at your phone.

488
00:40:29,300 --> 00:40:36,940
But if you would like to interact with the other people at the conference, which I would say is often a goal, because we can all watch conference videos for free on YouTube.

489
00:40:37,420 --> 00:40:42,440
So, if we didn't want to interact with any other humans, there would be very little point going to the conference.

490
00:40:42,760 --> 00:40:43,020
Indeed.

491
00:40:43,460 --> 00:40:43,620
Yeah.

492
00:40:43,680 --> 00:40:51,580
And so, if you want to go to the conference and interact with other humans, I would say, feel free to actually go up and say something to the speakers.

493
00:40:52,140 --> 00:40:56,920
And feel free to actually talk to the person sitting next to you in the audience before things kick off.

494
00:40:57,420 --> 00:41:05,520
You might end up finding out that they're actually, because they're sitting in the same talk as you, there's a very good chance that they're also trying to learn similar things.

495
00:41:05,520 --> 00:41:06,820
Or that they have similar problems.

496
00:41:06,960 --> 00:41:09,880
Or maybe they work someplace super cool that you would like to work.

497
00:41:10,340 --> 00:41:13,280
Or maybe they have exactly the skill set that you're trying to hire for.

498
00:41:13,760 --> 00:41:15,980
I mean, if you don't talk to them, you'll never find out.

499
00:41:16,340 --> 00:41:20,000
And, like, you know you already have something in common with them because you're both sitting there at that talk.

500
00:41:22,080 --> 00:41:26,800
So, then back when you were at the universities, I was reading through stuff you were up to there.

501
00:41:26,860 --> 00:41:30,160
You listed, like, Usenet as something that you monitored and set up.

502
00:41:30,300 --> 00:41:31,200
Like, what was that like?

503
00:41:31,640 --> 00:41:33,180
That was actually in ISPville.

504
00:41:33,380 --> 00:41:35,180
That was in the university, I would say.

505
00:41:35,400 --> 00:41:35,500
That's right.

506
00:41:35,640 --> 00:41:36,560
But even better.

507
00:41:36,780 --> 00:41:39,500
Like, so, that seems like it would be a lot of work.

508
00:41:39,840 --> 00:41:42,940
Like, what was involved in that wacky Usenet stuff?

509
00:41:43,540 --> 00:41:51,800
Honestly, the part that was the most work for running new servers in the early 2000s was the fact that we had this kind of ITIL-like process.

510
00:41:52,080 --> 00:42:00,900
Where, to make any changes to production, we were supposed to fill out this 42-page form and then wait two weeks for some people on the change control review board to decide whether or not we could do the thing.

511
00:42:01,480 --> 00:42:09,300
And so, when somebody would complain about missing parts for their binaries, we can draw a veil over exactly what it was they were trying to, you know, download.

512
00:42:09,960 --> 00:42:11,420
But when somebody would complain…

513
00:42:11,420 --> 00:42:11,680
Pictures of cats, probably.

514
00:42:11,860 --> 00:42:12,120
Cats.

515
00:42:12,300 --> 00:42:12,700
Probably.

516
00:42:12,920 --> 00:42:14,300
Probably pictures of cats, yes.

517
00:42:14,340 --> 00:42:15,440
That is what the internet is for.

518
00:42:15,540 --> 00:42:16,300
Or maybe cars.

519
00:42:17,900 --> 00:42:21,800
But when people would complain, the easiest solution was just to add some more news peers.

520
00:42:22,080 --> 00:42:26,000
And it was a completely non-invasive, simple change to production.

521
00:42:26,840 --> 00:42:28,600
And we did it all the time routinely.

522
00:42:29,440 --> 00:42:39,300
And every single time, I think the statute of limitations has expired on me admitting this, I would just do it and then I would file the emergency change control process, which was a much shorter form.

523
00:42:39,480 --> 00:42:39,840
Right.

524
00:42:40,180 --> 00:42:46,800
Because I was not going to wait two weeks for some people who had no idea what Usenet was to tell me it was okay for me to do a simple thing that we needed.

525
00:42:47,740 --> 00:42:51,140
And ideally, the sooner the better, so that the missing parts could trickle in.

526
00:42:51,460 --> 00:43:02,940
So, like, that's the kind of – that's an example, I think, of how heavy-handed IT processes can end up making even the simplest tasks unbearably painful and then also incent employees to lie.

527
00:43:03,500 --> 00:43:12,800
Yeah, and it also highlights the example of it's – to steal a metaphor from a famous book of that time, right?

528
00:43:12,860 --> 00:43:16,020
You've got to smell the cheese often to figure out if it's gone bad.

529
00:43:16,580 --> 00:43:24,400
And in the sense of, like, at some point, it was a good idea or there was a reason to set up this two-week process, right?

530
00:43:24,740 --> 00:43:31,440
And instead of revisiting that and figuring out if it's still a good idea to have it, if it's satisfying the needs that you have, you don't revisit it.

531
00:43:32,000 --> 00:43:35,860
And, like, you know, it's yet another example of, like, well, that seems like common sense.

532
00:43:37,020 --> 00:43:44,060
But it's almost the – I mean, it's hard to go, you know, make up why something like that would happen.

533
00:43:44,120 --> 00:43:53,040
But often it seems like people just kind of slip into autopilot and they don't really look at their job as sort of, like, continual gardening of IT processes they have in place.

534
00:43:53,560 --> 00:43:56,760
And instead it's just, like, fortification of unchangingness.

535
00:43:57,900 --> 00:44:04,120
But what I really strongly believe is there is no such thing as standing still, right?

536
00:44:04,160 --> 00:44:08,920
Because if you choose to take no action, that's still a choice and the world's going to keep changing around you.

537
00:44:09,300 --> 00:44:16,760
Whether it's just the environment that your servers are operating in or BitRot or the way your users interact with it.

538
00:44:17,260 --> 00:44:19,120
Like, there's always going to be change.

539
00:44:19,300 --> 00:44:24,860
So trying to enact some sort of change freeze is just freezing your ability to react to the change.

540
00:44:24,980 --> 00:44:26,900
It's not going to prevent change from happening.

541
00:44:28,360 --> 00:44:28,800
Indeed.

542
00:44:29,360 --> 00:44:30,300
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

543
00:44:30,440 --> 00:44:35,220
You know, like you said, you're not going to be able to check your binaries.

544
00:44:35,500 --> 00:44:36,460
That's going to be terrible.

545
00:44:37,680 --> 00:44:38,800
Yeah, no, it was great.

546
00:44:38,960 --> 00:44:44,840
Like, I found that because, man, I often, Usenet is one of those things I forget about often.

547
00:44:45,060 --> 00:44:48,440
And then every now and then I'm reminded of it and it's like, what a crazy system that was.

548
00:44:48,720 --> 00:44:58,560
I mean, and not, like, really crazy, but how different the whole attitude and architecture and everything of Usenet was versus the way things are nowadays.

549
00:44:59,800 --> 00:45:01,760
Did you ever have to set up, like, gopher servers?

550
00:45:03,160 --> 00:45:08,040
Despite the fact that I worked at the University of Minnesota, I never had to admit a gopher server.

551
00:45:08,040 --> 00:45:16,280
I think Mark McCahill actually left the University of Minnesota, went to some other university where I think he had plans to, like, bring gopher back.

552
00:45:16,420 --> 00:45:18,080
I have no idea whatever came of that.

553
00:45:18,520 --> 00:45:20,100
Yeah, that one just lost out.

554
00:45:20,400 --> 00:45:23,440
It got creamed like everything else by the old web.

555
00:45:24,440 --> 00:45:33,460
Hey, you know, Waze and Archery and Veronica were something, but we at least got to something that works okay most of the time.

556
00:45:33,460 --> 00:45:42,680
I mean, if you think of, like, the original, you know, RFCs that were, you look at, like, say, RFC 822, you think about how email started out.

557
00:45:42,980 --> 00:45:49,920
Well, obviously, they had to add on a lot of stuff like SPF and DKIM and all sorts of things later to try to deal with the abuse of the system.

558
00:45:50,320 --> 00:45:59,940
But it's like that constant iterating, you know, informed by conditions is a super important part of how the internet works.

559
00:46:02,140 --> 00:46:11,840
So you've been here a month, as you've been saying, and I watched, I forget where it was, but it was a pretty short presentation you gave where you're, like, in a very nicely wood-paneled room.

560
00:46:12,080 --> 00:46:15,940
And you're like, in a, you know, I'm going to go work in marketing.

561
00:46:16,180 --> 00:46:19,260
And the whole audience kind of erupts in laughter along with itself.

562
00:46:20,140 --> 00:46:25,360
Was that my adventure, excitement, and Jedi create these things?

563
00:46:25,540 --> 00:46:26,420
Yeah, yeah. There you go. There you go.

564
00:46:26,520 --> 00:46:31,240
So I hadn't thought about it, but ironically, it's sort of ironic.

565
00:46:31,480 --> 00:46:34,600
So what made you want to sign up for the adventure and excitement of marketing?

566
00:46:34,980 --> 00:46:37,960
What attracted you to this lot in life?

567
00:46:38,480 --> 00:46:45,560
I mean, because tell me if I'm wrong, but this is, like, the first non-practitioner job that you've had, essentially?

568
00:46:45,560 --> 00:46:55,000
Yeah. Yeah, it is. So I was perfectly happy working in ops at Drama Fever, and then my boss, Tim Gross, was leaving.

569
00:46:55,700 --> 00:47:01,860
And, you know, when important life changes, like your boss leaving, happen, you reevaluate what you want to be doing.

570
00:47:02,060 --> 00:47:03,160
Smell the cheese often.

571
00:47:04,340 --> 00:47:11,360
And so my reevaluation had me talk to Andrew Clay Schaefer, and he's a very convincing sort of man.

572
00:47:11,780 --> 00:47:16,300
So I had not, I had talked to a few other people, and it was just seriously about ops jobs.

573
00:47:17,120 --> 00:47:29,100
And then I talked to Andrew, and he made this very compelling argument over the course of a 90-minute phone call as to how I could still play with tech

574
00:47:29,100 --> 00:47:34,500
and also talk to people about and educate people about and continue to learn about tech, and it would be fun.

575
00:47:35,200 --> 00:47:37,160
So I figured I'd give that a shot.

576
00:47:37,540 --> 00:47:40,920
So I hadn't really thought to myself, I want to work at Pivotal, or I want to work in marketing.

577
00:47:41,040 --> 00:47:43,480
It's more Andrew convinced me that this could actually be really interesting.

578
00:47:43,840 --> 00:47:44,760
And so far it is.

579
00:47:45,340 --> 00:47:48,520
And what do you, what would you call it?

580
00:47:48,520 --> 00:47:52,080
And I'll, as always, ask a question and talk a lot.

581
00:47:52,460 --> 00:48:02,100
But, like, it seems like there's this taboo nowadays of just calling it what we're used to, which is evangelism, which I don't know if that's good or bad.

582
00:48:02,240 --> 00:48:05,980
And so it's always a question I have of, like, as the job you described there, right?

583
00:48:06,340 --> 00:48:09,160
Like, how do you call that thing?

584
00:48:09,420 --> 00:48:10,020
What is that?

585
00:48:10,800 --> 00:48:12,020
You know, I really don't know.

586
00:48:12,020 --> 00:48:19,200
I mean, the problem, I think, with the term evangelism is that sort of sounds like you're just out there trying to promote your thing.

587
00:48:19,740 --> 00:48:23,060
And that's not really what this conversation is about, right?

588
00:48:23,540 --> 00:48:29,300
Because I'm interested in learning a lot about all facets of the ecosystem and trying all sorts of different stuff.

589
00:48:29,720 --> 00:48:36,440
And maybe collaborating, cooperating with people who are, you know, competitors or frenemies or whatever you want to call them.

590
00:48:36,660 --> 00:48:43,560
But, like, I don't have to be in a, strictly speaking, like, I am only going to talk about how great our thing is.

591
00:48:43,880 --> 00:48:45,140
Like, that's actually not my role.

592
00:48:45,660 --> 00:48:48,840
So I think maybe that's why evangelism kind of sounds like you're doing that.

593
00:48:49,080 --> 00:48:52,740
And this is more, you know, just kind of general technologist, I guess.

594
00:48:53,100 --> 00:48:53,320
Yeah.

595
00:48:53,880 --> 00:49:02,000
It's, I don't know enough about the security word, but I always think it's kind of funny that people will describe themselves as a security researcher.

596
00:49:02,000 --> 00:49:09,820
Which is, which usually seems to mean I hack into people's systems and tell them about it.

597
00:49:09,940 --> 00:49:11,940
And then that is a researcher.

598
00:49:12,600 --> 00:49:28,780
And to some extent, that's an interesting term for, like, what you're talking, like, what all of us, many of us on the team here do is, like, we're sort of, like, I always explain what I do is, like, I try to understand what problems are happening in industry.

599
00:49:28,780 --> 00:49:32,920
And explain how people are fixing them, right?

600
00:49:33,060 --> 00:49:38,340
And sometimes I'll say something corny, like storytelling or something like that, because that just sounds, like, quaint.

601
00:49:38,920 --> 00:49:43,360
But to some extent, there is sort of, like, it is sort of, like, researching, right?

602
00:49:43,420 --> 00:49:47,160
Like, you're still looking at technologies, not even still.

603
00:49:47,240 --> 00:49:50,820
Like, you're figuring out how these technologies work and fit together and solve people's problem.

604
00:49:50,820 --> 00:50:01,800
And then in sort of, like, instead of publishing it in a classic research type of way, you're just, like, disseminating that information, which seems like it would be helpful.

605
00:50:02,520 --> 00:50:02,760
Right.

606
00:50:02,940 --> 00:50:14,000
So, like, you know, whether it's blog posts, conference talks, podcasts, whatever, contributing to the general store of information and knowledge out there, I think, is super valuable.

607
00:50:14,840 --> 00:50:19,880
I mean, I did a lot more, you know, case study type talks as a direct practitioner.

608
00:50:20,480 --> 00:50:25,920
And I think that moving forward, like, my talks look like they're going to be a little bit more of a synthesis.

609
00:50:26,620 --> 00:50:29,080
Like, still some actual practical stuff.

610
00:50:29,840 --> 00:50:34,320
Also, like, observing some possibilities, looking at some larger patterns.

611
00:50:37,120 --> 00:50:37,800
Researching.

612
00:50:39,160 --> 00:50:39,600
Perhaps.

613
00:50:40,340 --> 00:50:41,420
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

614
00:50:42,280 --> 00:50:43,360
Security researcher.

615
00:50:44,160 --> 00:50:45,380
Always a fun category.

616
00:50:45,720 --> 00:50:53,500
Well, so to that end, before we wrap up here, so what do you have planned out there, speaking of traveling out there into the world?

617
00:50:53,500 --> 00:50:59,960
As you humorously wrote somewhere, not all of the tech conferences are in the Twin City area yet.

618
00:51:00,700 --> 00:51:10,200
So, as you're going about, like, what are things you have in the books that people can look up to you and maybe make eye contact and talk to you at?

619
00:51:10,800 --> 00:51:11,300
Let's see.

620
00:51:11,560 --> 00:51:14,580
I'll be at operability.io in London next week.

621
00:51:16,040 --> 00:51:20,200
I will also be at, let's see, be at reInvent.

622
00:51:20,300 --> 00:51:21,160
I'm not speaking.

623
00:51:21,160 --> 00:51:25,120
I'll be at the Pivotal booth, talking to people about AWS and Pivotal stuff.

624
00:51:27,280 --> 00:51:28,040
Let's see.

625
00:51:28,840 --> 00:51:29,980
Velocity New York.

626
00:51:30,260 --> 00:51:31,240
I am speaking.

627
00:51:31,480 --> 00:51:40,500
At that one, I'm actually, one last hurrah of talking specifically about a drama fever case study, because that talk I submitted some months ago with a now former co-worker, Pete Shannon.

628
00:51:41,800 --> 00:51:48,320
Velocity EU, my talk is actually going to be a little bit more of a general platform sort of talk.

629
00:51:49,340 --> 00:51:52,380
Not just, like, you know, the drama fever Docker and production story.

630
00:51:54,120 --> 00:51:55,980
Then, let's see.

631
00:51:56,280 --> 00:51:58,300
I think I'm on a panel at FutureStack.

632
00:51:59,200 --> 00:52:09,440
I'm giving another, the same talk from London about distributed systems and teams at Recon, and probably some other stuff that I'm not remembering at this very moment.

633
00:52:09,580 --> 00:52:17,320
Oh, we did submit, Casey and I, from Casey West, from our team and I did submit a joint talk to Cloud Foundry Summit in both Berlin and Shanghai.

634
00:52:17,600 --> 00:52:21,580
So, I guess it's possible, if that gets accepted, that people could chat with me at one of those.

635
00:52:21,740 --> 00:52:23,500
Well, what was the topic of the talks?

636
00:52:24,120 --> 00:52:30,660
Um, that one is about platforms that enable continuous delivery.

637
00:52:30,980 --> 00:52:31,500
Oh, right.

638
00:52:31,560 --> 00:52:42,700
And, um, the tooling and, uh, also, you know, organizational choices and, um, operability of your platform that can allow for, you know, a CI, CD sort of workflow.

639
00:52:42,940 --> 00:52:43,200
Right.

640
00:52:43,340 --> 00:52:44,780
Making sure your stuff works.

641
00:52:46,920 --> 00:52:48,360
Ideally, our stuff would work.

642
00:52:48,580 --> 00:52:49,040
That's great.

643
00:52:49,160 --> 00:52:51,420
That is something that almost everyone wants, I would imagine.

644
00:52:51,680 --> 00:52:54,600
And then, and then we've already mentioned the, uh, the Arrested DevOps.

645
00:52:54,960 --> 00:52:56,440
Is that, is that, is that like weekly?

646
00:52:56,600 --> 00:52:58,960
I lose track in my podcast listening.

647
00:52:59,180 --> 00:53:01,820
Like, I just listen to whatever's there, but how often does that come out?

648
00:53:01,820 --> 00:53:01,900
Sure.

649
00:53:02,300 --> 00:53:07,180
Arrested DevOps, um, it comes out, uh, usually twice a month is what we aim for.

650
00:53:07,520 --> 00:53:08,520
Oh, that's relaxing.

651
00:53:09,080 --> 00:53:09,340
Mm-hmm.

652
00:53:10,020 --> 00:53:14,120
So, uh, we're not quite as ambitious as a software-defined talk can be from time to time.

653
00:53:14,580 --> 00:53:15,180
Yeah, yeah.

654
00:53:15,320 --> 00:53:18,000
Well, that, that, we, uh, we slack on there all the time.

655
00:53:18,480 --> 00:53:23,860
Well, we also try to schedule guests, so it probably makes the scheduling a little bit more spaced out.

656
00:53:24,120 --> 00:53:25,260
Oh, scheduling guests.

657
00:53:25,280 --> 00:53:26,040
That's the worst.

658
00:53:26,780 --> 00:53:27,080
Scheduling.

659
00:53:27,080 --> 00:53:29,320
See, that, that is a problem that needs to be solved.

660
00:53:29,760 --> 00:53:30,160
Scheduling.

661
00:53:30,160 --> 00:53:33,060
I think that's, that's beyond all of our capabilities.

662
00:53:33,680 --> 00:53:38,580
We, we, we're, we're down here at the Moorlach levels, but, but someone, someone way up there needs to figure out scheduling.

663
00:53:38,880 --> 00:53:40,300
I don't know what the deal is.

664
00:53:41,040 --> 00:53:41,260
Yeah.

665
00:53:41,740 --> 00:53:43,420
Calendaring, not a solved problem.

666
00:53:44,220 --> 00:53:46,080
Teleportation, also not a solved problem.

667
00:53:46,720 --> 00:53:56,240
Uh, this, uh, large array of, you know, various and sundry conferences on multiple continents is something that I think is going to require me to spend a lot more time on airplanes than I really prefer.

668
00:53:56,500 --> 00:53:57,080
Oh, yeah.

669
00:53:57,080 --> 00:54:05,240
I mean, I got me some of that TSA global entry and, you know, pre-check business, but it's, it's still a, you know, giant airport shaped hassle, so.

670
00:54:05,640 --> 00:54:06,040
Yes.

671
00:54:06,360 --> 00:54:06,800
Yes.

672
00:54:07,240 --> 00:54:09,520
Next thing you know, you'll be installing the Starbucks app.

673
00:54:10,720 --> 00:54:15,720
Oh, I don't even want to think about what kind of life choices would lead me to the Starbucks app.

674
00:54:15,880 --> 00:54:20,960
You just, you just, you just start preparing yourself and then when it happens, it'll be completely normal.

675
00:54:21,360 --> 00:54:21,560
It's fine.

676
00:54:21,560 --> 00:54:28,440
I already have the, I already have the set of life choices that makes it, um, cheaper to have the monthly go-go in-flight wifi subscription.

677
00:54:28,660 --> 00:54:29,240
All right.

678
00:54:29,980 --> 00:54:30,720
There you go.

679
00:54:30,920 --> 00:54:36,680
That's what we'll talk about that next time when you've had some, some, uh, some, some more travel, even more travel under your belt.

680
00:54:36,780 --> 00:54:37,760
We'll have travel tips.

681
00:54:38,820 --> 00:54:40,140
I'm sure there's a laundry list.

682
00:54:40,140 --> 00:54:42,760
Travel, travel tips for former practitioners.

683
00:54:44,160 --> 00:54:47,060
I think it's, uh, that's, that's a good bit.

684
00:54:47,240 --> 00:54:50,980
A good bet is there being a great deal of information that could be gotten there.

685
00:54:51,060 --> 00:54:53,600
Certainly from you, possibly from me at some point.

686
00:54:53,700 --> 00:54:58,780
So, so where, what you, you have, you have some main, uh, some main hub of information on the interwebs there, right?

687
00:54:58,840 --> 00:55:00,620
What's, what's your main place people can go to?

688
00:55:01,180 --> 00:55:10,280
Uh, probably the easiest way to keep up with me is to, um, either follow me on Twitter, uh, Bridget Krumhout on Twitter or, um, Bridget Krumhout.com.

689
00:55:10,280 --> 00:55:16,100
I tend to link an update to like any talks I'm doing, any podcasts that I've been on, possibly this one.

690
00:55:16,180 --> 00:55:18,220
I think we'll be out on the public internet at some point.

691
00:55:19,120 --> 00:55:28,040
Um, yeah, uh, if they, if they send me email, it will go to the bottom of the pile and it will take me a non-zero amount of time to reply to it.

692
00:55:28,120 --> 00:55:29,940
That's, that's my warning, my warning on email.

693
00:55:30,240 --> 00:55:30,540
Yeah.

694
00:55:30,860 --> 00:55:38,080
There's a lot of people who like to email me requests for my time and that is probably not the optimal way to get my attention.

695
00:55:38,400 --> 00:55:38,720
Yeah.

696
00:55:38,840 --> 00:55:39,100
Yeah.

697
00:55:39,240 --> 00:55:39,500
Yeah.

698
00:55:39,500 --> 00:55:46,240
I, I, I have, I have some emails sitting in my inbox from my, uh, financial planner of like some forms to fill out.

699
00:55:46,400 --> 00:55:49,680
And it's just like, uh, that's never going to happen.

700
00:55:50,020 --> 00:55:50,760
I don't, I don't know.

701
00:55:50,840 --> 00:55:56,920
I don't know how, I don't know how to fix that problem, but filling out the forms, it's, it's too big of a batch.

702
00:55:57,060 --> 00:55:57,700
It's a good metaphor.

703
00:55:57,820 --> 00:56:00,540
And I need to have a small, if he asked me like two questions over the,

704
00:56:00,540 --> 00:56:06,540
every day over the series of like two weeks, it's probably more likely than if he sends me a big spreadsheet I have to fill out.

705
00:56:07,180 --> 00:56:07,520
Yeah.

706
00:56:07,520 --> 00:56:18,760
We had the, uh, we just actually just signed the contract for the venue for DevOps days, Minneapolis, 2016, which is going to be July 20th and 21st in Minneapolis in 2016.

707
00:56:18,760 --> 00:56:20,060
Mark your calendars now.

708
00:56:20,200 --> 00:56:22,100
Do not schedule conferences on top of it.

709
00:56:22,300 --> 00:56:22,880
That's right.

710
00:56:23,440 --> 00:56:24,160
I entreat you.

711
00:56:24,740 --> 00:56:26,540
Um, but we just signed that contract.

712
00:56:26,640 --> 00:56:31,920
But I think the thing that took me the longest was just, there is no change control or change tracking.

713
00:56:32,120 --> 00:56:35,620
There's no versioning of any sort when they're sending you hotel contracts.

714
00:56:35,980 --> 00:56:36,420
Right.

715
00:56:36,420 --> 00:56:38,560
So just going through and reading it.

716
00:56:38,700 --> 00:56:39,260
The red lining.

717
00:56:39,540 --> 00:56:40,000
Again and again.

718
00:56:40,520 --> 00:56:40,760
Yeah.

719
00:56:41,420 --> 00:56:41,860
Ugh.

720
00:56:42,580 --> 00:56:43,960
That stuff is a nightmare.

721
00:56:44,380 --> 00:56:45,020
We, yeah.

722
00:56:45,360 --> 00:56:50,980
This is another, another problem we'll put on this problem to solve, uh, introducing diff to the rest of the world.

723
00:56:51,100 --> 00:56:51,540
Right.

724
00:56:51,540 --> 00:56:53,140
And building that into the system.

725
00:56:53,420 --> 00:56:59,100
Getting people who send you, you know, banquet equipment orders to use version control would be a thing.

726
00:56:59,640 --> 00:57:00,000
Yes.

727
00:57:00,140 --> 00:57:03,900
Well, on that note, as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations.

728
00:57:04,380 --> 00:57:08,180
You can find, uh, the show notes that we've referenced that don't exist yet, but they will.

729
00:57:08,180 --> 00:57:16,640
Once you're listening to this at, uh, pivotal.io slash podcast with an S or without an S, depending on, on how you're feeling about, about it.

730
00:57:16,760 --> 00:57:19,120
And with that, we'll see everyone next time.

731
00:57:19,480 --> 00:57:20,260
Bye-bye.