Community, conferences, unconferences, and Platform SpringOne

Episode 6 · 2016-02-16 · 44:38 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Uh, I'm just coming off of a cold here. So you'll have to pardon me if I sniffle a little bit. Do you, do you, uh, when you get sick, do you like actually get, well, I know the answer to this. You're pretty functional when you're sick. I've seen you. Uh, relatively, I guess. Do you do this thing where you like, you store up your sickness and then you just like crash out after a few days? I think I do that normally. It's not sickness. It's just over. It's just life. Extending yourself. You know, I, my, my dad used to have a lot of bluster about, uh, I don't get sick and, and, and it's kind of, uh, I've inherited his genes. It's kind of true. Like I, I'll, I'll be sort of like, I'll be like down 30% on the little, like, uh, what do they call those games where it's like two dimensional fighting games and you've got the status bars. Your little hit points. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm down like 30% or so. I'm a little spacey, but, uh, with a little bit of Dayquil, I'm more or less functional. But then the, the, the problem is I've got like all this congestion afterwards, just sort of the after effect is terrible. And, and, uh, but you know, the, the, the sickness is tameable. Anyhow, that's a long way to saying I'll, I'll try to mute it, but I might have to do some sniffles here and there, which is, which is always painful, but we were, uh, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's just our high production values. Exactly. I mean, we, we want it, we want it to be, uh, we are from the school of, uh, I don't know, I don't know what you would call it is just realism. It doesn't have to be gritty, but we want high fidelity to what actually happened. We don't want to polish it over and gloss it. It's gotta, it's gotta be real. So we, a couple of weeks ago, we were at the, uh, the worldwide kickoff for, uh, for Pivotal. It was fun. Like we, uh, on the last day, our, our team ran an unconference, which I think went stupendously well. It's, it's always a little interesting to see how an unconference will work, but everyone was engaged in it. And it was also, you know, I, I think I was thinking it's, uh, it was sort of, uh, appropriate to a lot of the

stuff that our team does that we would be running an unconference because we do a lot of meetups and conference runnings and stuff like that. And you and I were just talking before recording this, we have a new conference coming up in the fall called a platform, right? Yeah. I've, uh, I've done a lot of conferences and a lot of unconferences actually. And as you noted, we're, we're going to have a, it's, it's called platform SpringOne. So it's, it's sort of an evolution of spring, the spring conference, but then we're wrapping more of the Pivotal capabilities, and narratives around that, that Java ecosystem. So tell, you know, really the whole story that you need to connect the dots, to deliver, you know, whatever you're trying to do software wise, you're probably going to need to deploy some, you're probably going to need some data. You're probably going to have some process that you manage and communicate your, your, your products, roadmaps. And there's a bunch of that stuff that Pivotal's pretty, pretty good at and, you know, well-suited to have some discussions. And so we're going to kind of put everything together under that banner and have a big conference that sort of pivotals. I don't know. I kind of think of it as pivotals coming out party. Yeah, no, I think I remember hearing about us putting this together, uh, maybe around the summer or so when I first heard about it, I forget, but it does, you know, we have, we have a SpringOne conference that back when I was an analyst, I used to go to that a lot. It was, it was fun. And, and I think, and there's also in the Cloud Foundry community, we have the CF summit, the Cloud Foundry summit. And I think, I think it is like now is like the exact right time to kind of in, in sort of like the Pivotal wheelhouse merge together that really like a developer and also operations sort of centric thing. That's, that's, I think it's good to have like CF have it, you know, the, the open source community have its own like summit around it to talk about that project and everything. But I think, I think we've got enough interesting stories to tell. And, you know, we always talk about having an opinionated stack and, and as I've

been talking with customers and prospects more, they're always very interested in like, what is that, right? Like what is the Pivotal way of doing things? And I'm, I'm looking forward to in the conference having sort of nailing down as much as you can nail that jelly to a tree, like nailing down what that looks like and getting it documented pretty well more, more in the sort of Pivotal realm of doing things. I think some of that will happen, but I also think that we're, we're in a period of exploration and I don't, I don't mean Pivotal, just the industry in general and the types of things that you see evolving in, in our products, in our process are, are not really going to slow down in my opinion. And then I'd also add that what we're trying to do with platform SpringOne here is not just say, okay, like here's the developers and here's like an operations conference, which, you know, knowing my background and some of the stuff I did that is obvious, but like, what does it take to holistically deliver software? What does it take to, to manage the, the, the process? What does it take to think about the, the databases, the data science, all these things design that there's, there's not one thing that you can isolate in some, some sense, it's the most important thing. All of them holistically need to be handled. And I think that Pivotal is in a somewhat unique position with experience across that spectrum to put together those conversations. And, and we don't want this to just be a kind of a Pivotal infomercial. Uh, we, we obviously have a business we're trying to build by the same time we, and we're, we're working on, on nailing down some of the, some of the keynotes and some of the other people that will be there. But, but I think you'll see a, a program that offers a wide spectrum of opinions that has a lot of perspectives. And, and even if you think about the, you know, internals of Pivotal and how we see things, you know, from, from role to role with responsibility to responsibility, there, there's sort of a Pivotal way, but like each one

of those perspectives has an aspect that they're going to optimize for. Right. And so like, how do you optimize that whole system at once? Yeah. You know, it's, it's, uh, it's interesting you use the word holistic because it's something that I've been thinking through recently is, uh, I'll just rattle off a bunch of phrases that we've used in like software forever. There's like solutions and end-to-end and turnkey and holistic, but all of these things, I, you know, I think holistic and end-to-end are the best ones. Don't say platform. Exactly. But you know, it's, it's even, it's even something that, that is that definitely the platform is a huge, that I should say a platform is a huge part of, but the holistic thing is like all this other stuff that, that comes into account. And, and I'm bringing this point up because there's, uh, most of the visits with people out there I've been on recently, like most recently with, with one of the, uh, bigger retailers here. That's a, that's a customer of ours. What, what people are looking for is like the answer of how to do all aspects of software, like completely from the, the strategic planning part of it down to the project management of it, to like writing the software, what version control to use. And then of course, to the platform part where to deploy it and run it. And, and I, and I think, I think the, the theme of, of the platform conferences, as you were alludicating is right is, is I, I, I, I would love to find this reference because then I wouldn't have to travel as much with all the people we have to explain it. But like, there's not really a good, uh, a good cat, anything that's captured how all the stuff is going on at the moment. And to your point, and to my funny thing about nailing jelly to a tree, I think, I don't think it, there will be anything that's like perfectly, uh, frozen in time or etched in stone for a couple of years now. And so in a situation like that, you want to get people who are practitioners and let's call them vendors slash theoreticians, the people who are coming up with

probable and, and, and helpful ways to solve the problems. And also the people who are trying to solve the problems. You want to get them together to start discussing it more and more, which I think we've seen a lot of that happening in the, uh, the sort of operational and, and, and the, the, um, the high scale space and, and things like DevOps days and velocity. But, but I, I still am like hungering for the more, uh, the more, as always talking like having, having that more holistic view where it's not only the developers and operators talking, but also the product managers, the, the, and even the business people who are kind of going over how they're, they're using these things to, to shape it. And, uh, I don't know, it'll be interesting to see who we get to come talk to it, but, but that's my hopes and dreams for the conference. Plus I've never been to the ARIA so I can see what that's like. Well, we need to cross that off the list. Exactly. Yeah. I think the division that we have is to put together that, that space where all those personas can kind of have a conversation and, and, you know, obviously want to feature some of the stuff we do and some of the customers we have and the way that those transformations are unfolding. But we want to, we want to have an open dialogue as well with the, with the industry. And we're definitely hoping to bring in some, some of the people that people are already familiar with. They're kind of talking about, you know, the rest of the buzzwords around microservices and continuous delivery and DevOps and the rest of it. Well, let me, let me ask this, this, uh, you, you have a interesting moment from your past where, where you're introducing different groups of people together in this big chain of doing software. And that was it 2007 that you gave that talk at some agile conference that was like, Hey developers, you should care about your software when it's running in production. That was probably 2008. Okay. And, and, and like, so I imagine, and then going through lots of DevOps things, like you sort of witnessed marrying these two groups of people together who didn't really

talk with each other. And, and if, if we think about all those personas we were talking about, like what are some common, I don't know, sort of like conversations of ways of getting them to talk together or, or interact with each other more that from, from your previous history of joining kind of two disparate silos together that, uh, you might think would be helpful for people to think through. Yeah, I think there's, I want to, I want to come back to another topic about conferences in a minute, but for now in this, in this day and age, I think that a lot of people just kind of get into their function and in many ways our, our behaviors are reinforced to do that, especially in larger organizations where you just think about your function. And there's some, there's some, I can't remember, I'll look it up and post in the notes, but there's, there's actually a, a word for that and a way of protest where if you just do what your job is, then it, you can basically prove that everything will fall apart and stop. So in some real measurable sense, the health of an organization and the, and the throughput and the, and the functionality is, is predisposed and dependent on everyone not doing their job, doing all those little things that fill in the gaps between the functions. Right. And, and, and taking that a step farther. And we saw this in the conversations around DevOps and obviously the kind of trying to marry those two, two groups together has been a big part of my career over the last few years. But in, in many cases, the, you know, the fashion and tribalism that rules everything humans do makes it so that we don't even see the other. And, you know, by definition, they are the other group as, as actual humans. So there's, there's a lot of things you can do just by getting people in the same room, just by putting them in proximity. When you walk by someone's desk and you see the, the picture of their kids, you know, framed on the, on the desk that just kind

of changes the dynamic because now they're, they're a human being. They're, you know, Bob or, or Coté instead of just this other thing that keeps making these requests that don't match exactly the lifestyle I want to optimize for. Yeah. I mean, to a certain extent, it's just like, uh, realize that there are other people they're, they're, they're probably more similar to you than you think they are, which, which I, I think, I think is a, uh, is a fair way of, uh, it's, it's always a good thing to point out. Like I, uh, it makes me think like our, our son is in kindergarten and, uh, you know, it's odd to send your children, as you well know, off to like some other authority for a huge part of their day and therefore their life. And, uh, it's easy to get caught in the trap of, of thinking that the authorities at school are someone else, but as long as you go and talk to them and get to know them, like, uh, you're kind of on the same team and everything works out well, but you have to make that step to, to reach out and, and, and go deal with them. Yeah. Once, once you humanize someone else, it makes it much harder to do things that would be whatever. And, and in contrast, my, my son has gotten into watching those, uh, you know, the BBC does these great HD, like, uh, like animal series, like, I don't know, some six part series narrated by David Attenborough on like caves and oceans and stuff. And man, I don't know if you know this, but in the animal kingdom, stuff is brutal. They are not nice. They, they just like will eat you without really thinking about it. It's, it's kind of their job. That's, that's right. Exactly. And, and it almost feels like, you know, to some extent the, uh, the corporate structures can be like that. You got to, uh, you got to find some way to get that nice balance, like in finding Nemo where the seagull likes the fish in the tank. I don't know how that happened, but they became friends by talking with each other instead of, uh, eating each other. So I don't know how this applies across a full organization. It'd be an interesting exercise to try to

do. But once a long time ago when I was doing, uh, an engagement in, inside of an organization, we just had the developers and operations in the room. And I kind of made this up on the spot as an exercise, but it just turned out so well that, that I've, I've done it a few times. And, and I made, uh, our team kind of do this, uh, earlier in one of our, in one of our offsites, but you, you have all these people that sort of know by job title, like these other people exist, but they don't really know what they do and they rarely understand why they do it or how they think they're adding value. So what I, what I did in this exercise is I tried to match people in the room that had the, the least knowledge of each other, at least understanding of each other. And I, I paired them up and we spent an hour and both of them had to get to know what the other person did. And then the exercise was each person had to write a quote unquote press release, you know, a paragraph or two about the other person and how they, you know, a little bit about their personality and their accomplishments in their career, but then really focus on how they add value to the organization. And that, that exercise just changed the dynamics in that, in that room. And, and I don't know, I thought it was, it was something that other people should take advantage of. Yeah. No, I, I mean, I think, you know, having, as you mentioned, having done that, like, I think, I think what was nice about it is, and again, like all this stuff, it sounds so ridiculous when you say it out loud, but it's still powerful. It's just like, now, you know, about all these people. And once, once you have like something, like anything to latch onto about knowing about someone and immediately humanizes them. And then at that point, like it makes it, it makes you give them the benefit of the doubt and it makes them more approachable and vice versa. And it works out well.

And, and, you know, to kind of steer a little bit back to conferences in communities, I was, I was thinking when we were a couple of weeks ago, when we were doing the unconference that are at our kickoff meeting, you know, I, I thought usually when people, I thought you did the one, not the one, but the major sort of symptom of, of a good introduction to an unconference is you put up, what are the rules called? The, you can move to different things if you want. The law of mobility. Yeah, exactly. Like not everyone always goes over that. And, and I think setting that expectation is very important for like an unconference. And I, I, I try to do a good unconference. I've, I've had a few, few practice runs. And why don't you go over the, the, those, those, those principles, if you will, for people who don't know them. Oh, you actually want to go look at that. All right. So the, the main thing, and this is all on the open space technology, Wikipedia, or, you know, some of their other thing is it was initially called the law of two feet, but then not all people have two feet. So it was changed to the law of mobility. Seeing right away, a nice joke that everyone laughs at. Oh, that's hilarious. Hopefully everyone listening. Yeah. Anyway, so in the metaphor of feet, you have one foot of passion and you have one foot of responsibility. And this expresses the core idea of taking responsibility for what you love and that in practical terms, you're, you're either contributing and adding value by sharing or you're learning and, and getting value because there's, there's information you don't have. And if those two things aren't true in a room, then you should use your two feet or whatever your form of mobility, it was, you know, whatever mobility is available to you to go somewhere where you can. So you want to just get people together. I feel like the unconference is actually, it's essentially

what people want to do. It's what people naturally do in, in effective meetings anyway, which is put information in, get information from, you know, multiple voices, have, have those conversations and try to get to the point where all those perspectives can be put into account. And then, you know, if there's actions or whatever, I think it's particularly powerful when you're in a group that has, and this is also discussed in open space, but has some mission, like you're, you're actually trying to solve a problem as a group. Right. If you, if you have no problems or no mission, then you, maybe you don't need to talk to those people. Yeah. But let's assume that you do, then this is, this is a great format for, for kind of getting complex problems, uh, enough surface area and enough exposure to all the different personas that you can make progress. Yeah. And, and, and I, I really liked that first, uh, that first item because it, it, it, it, it also, uh, it's analogous to like ultimately how you make meetings effective. The way you make meetings effective is you realize why you're having a meeting, which is to like do something and, and like, and then you kind of work backwards. It's like, and so in order to do something, we must first know what it is we want to do. Right. Like we want to have an agenda. And the second thing is by the end of the meeting, we should have come to a decision. And I mean, I'm grossly simplifying it, but it's sort of making explicit. And in the, in the, um, uh, the case of like, uh, this, uh, an open session or an unconference thing, it's sort of like, the point is that we're trans, you're either getting information or working on a problem and you should totally feel free to leave if that's not happening. Yeah. If that's not your problem, go find one. There's exactly. And there, there's an implicit thing in there is like, the point is not to be social and nice. Right. So it's not rude if you leave. Right. Like, so it's fine. So it's, it's a way of optimizing your time and everyone else's time as well. I mean, in some ways you're, you're selfish for not maximizing the opportunity. Like

what, what are you doing if you're not doing that? Right. Here's another thing that I added, uh, and you know, more of this is on the, on the website, but there's this overarching theme around, you know, come and be prepared to be surprised that you can actually make progress. And I don't know what you think, but I think most people who've experienced the unconference in other formats like DevOps days or whatever have had great experiences, but you always want to remember that whoever comes is the right people. Right. That whatever happens is the only thing that could have, and that we collectively create this. I mean, you could, you could extend that to like everything that's going on in all of our society, but at least for that room, for that space, for that hour, 45 minutes or whatever, um, you know, you've set up, we're going to come in that room and we're going to put energy into it together. And what we take out of it is a hundred percent of function of that energy that we put into it. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think, I think that point is good. That's a good illustration obliquely of like a blameless postmortem in the sense of whatever happens is, is what is, what should have happened to some extent, uh, you know, let's, so I said obliquely. So like, let's remove the, the, the doubt and sort of blame about things going perfectly or not. And once you do that, I think, I think there's two things that that does one, like, so there's people like myself who like one are very lazy and I would like to just sit there and do nothing. And then two, like, I'm always a little hesitant to sort of like speak out in, in a group because, uh, I always think someone else will have something better to say, or, you know, it'll just sort of be a waste, but like you sort of explicitly strip away, maybe not the laziness, but, but that concern in others. And you're kind of, again, it's like being very explicit about what should be going on in this session. And, and I think, you know, what I've witnessed, not only at the one that we did, but at other good unconferences that happen is like, once everyone knows what the game rules are, people will play the game to use another analogy. And I, that's why I think it's really

important to go over those, uh, those games there, the rules. That's also why I prefer to have unconferences span two days. And we, we didn't have that opportunity this time with, with our internal Pivotal meeting, but the, the types of topics you get and the depths of discussion you get after people kind of get the game, you know, get their juices flowing around what's possible in those, those types of discussions, then the, the quality of the game sort of changes as everyone understands what kind of energy to expect from other people and how they can put their energy into the exercise and get it back. And, and that's why, I don't know, I wouldn't say that you can't have a great unconference on one day, but I've just noticed that the, the, the quality and kind of the nuance that you get in that second day tends to be, at least for me personally, more, um, more interesting, kind of more nuanced, more depth. Yeah. And that, that brings up the point why I was bringing up these, uh, going back to the, the unconference of bringing up these four rules I was going to get to is I think, you know, usually, usually when I go to your point to an event like this, not like the way we went to, but an unconference where no one knows each other, it's a little like, it's not as awesome as it could be. But, uh, now that I've been at Pivotal for a year, there's lots of people that I know who were, who were there. And when we were in actual sessions, like it was, we could just get started right away talking about interesting things. Like the, uh, the session that I guess I more or less led was, uh, I was basically talking with some of our sales and field people about what type of content and things would be valuable for you and going out and working with prospects and customers. And it was great. Cause there was like four or five people in there who I've been working with all year and we could just immediately talk about different types of content and really get into it. And I think, I think that is because, you know, not that it was the second day of it, but we had these established relationships. And I think that goes all the way back to, uh, you know, not eating your fellow colleagues as it were.

And once you kind of establish this rapport and you have this knowledge with them, you can really have these very high performance working sessions with them, which given the proper boundaries of kind of like, here's a topic that we're going to discuss freely. I think it's, uh, it's very encouraging to like have that kind of high transaction nature with them. And, uh, a lot of it rests on, you know, I, I'm, I'm just kind of thinking out loud to explain a lot of the, the sort of like empathy and high performance stuff we talk about in this extended community we're in a lot, but like with me and also the conversations other people were having that room, we have sort of proven trust with each other that, that we can ask questions and almost show doubt and make suggestions of things like that and have a lot of back and forth without a lot of like judgment. And it was, uh, I don't know. It's nice when you can get in that state of talking about things. And that's, that's what would be great to establish in the community. It's so hard to get me in that state of talking about things. Exactly. Exactly. But you know, I mean, going back to the platform conference, right? So we have those various stakeholders we were talking about. Actually, let's back up. Cause I, I have a topic that I want to explore. Um, that I came in my head a minute ago when you asked that other question, but I just want to talk about why people should go to conferences at all. Yeah. Yeah. I wrote that down actually. Like not, not platform, SpringOne, any of the stuff that's going on, you know, DevOps days, the rest of the stuff that we do, like why as a, as a technical person, should you go to these social conferences? What do you think? Why would I go? Uh, well, I'm mainly, I'm mostly go to, uh, find out information from people and, and also to like meet people that, uh, to sort of like be kind of like an outboard, uh, outboard, uh, sort of brain or library for me, right? Like, uh, just to like hook up with more

people who will tell me things that are interesting and, uh, that help out with tasks that I have in the future. It's sort of like, uh, you could think about it as, um, I want to maximize the optionality I get out of relationships with people. So I think that is, well, one adorable, um, and to like a particular function of, so your, your role in relationship to industry and information for the last decade or so. Indeed. And you've, it's been a while since you were, uh, a developer or kind of worked in that technical capacity. So, so like, it totally makes sense what you just said for you, but I'm arguing that as a technical developer, that you get a huge boost in your career, huge boost in your understanding by participating in these, these larger communities opportunities and the face-to-face interactions that you get at a conference and the dynamics that you can have, especially once you're, uh, you're brave enough to start speaking at conferences that will change the trajectory of your whole career. Yes. Yes. The better. Yeah. I think, I think come August of this year, it'll have been a decade since I was a developer. So, uh, so yes, my, my needs have changed a lot, but yeah, when, when I would, uh, I remember going to Java one when I was a developer and it was, uh, yeah, it was very educational. It was great. And, and it was also good to, to get introduced to new topics and ideas and things to learn that you would, you would literally like bring back to work with you and, uh, start applying. Yes. The, if you have a, this is not to name any names, but when you have a focus on the enterprise customers, the Pivotal does, and you end up going into see some of the stuff that they're doing and how they're doing it, it's almost like a time warp where, and this doesn't apply to everyone. And it's

obviously a spectrum, but there's, there's things that are people, people are doing every day right now that everyone knew was a bad idea in like 2005. Yeah. And, and that's just the way they do it. And, you know, there's probably some people in the room and in the building who know there's better ways to do things or they wouldn't be talking to Pivotal, but the fact that they still do them, the fact that they still have that there, like what were, what were the choices that were made from 2005 till now that made it so you're still doing that stuff? So that, that fresh flow of information, that seeing what's possible, that, and this was an important one for me personally, that enthusiasm, that, that excitement about what's possible, what just opened up a lot more possibilities of what I could accomplish with my own, with my own tools and teams. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, you're hitting on, uh, the positive version of, of there's a slightly more cynical way that people sometimes say that is like, you want to look them in the eyes and make sure, and like really, you know, make sure they're being honest. And, and there is, you know, the way you put it as a positive version is like, one of the ways you want to judge going down, you know, what seems like a potentially scary, but high payoff path is, is to see how, how other people talk about it and how they react about it, what their enthusiasm is and their passion. And, and it's, that's one of the only things that you can really see in person or, or I guess at really high resolution video. But, uh, it's, it's good to like, in a very unstructured way, get a sense of how it's going, as I would say, for people who, who are a few steps ahead of you, if you will, and, and kind of get a, get a sense of, uh, of, of the safety of it, so to speak. Absolutely. The other thing that I would encourage anyone, you know, and this is, this applies to

our conference, but there's also lots of other opportunities in, in lots of conferences now. The, the, the things that you learn and the things that you become capable of when you learn how to speak, when you learn how to communicate effectively with, with, uh, with words and with writing, that will have a bigger positive impact on your career than knowing, you know, the intricacies of some library or knowing, you know, the APIs of Amazon right now. Yeah. Being able to communicate effectively. Well, because not to take anything away from knowing APIs and it's fun to like, and it feels very powerful to be able to spin up a hundred machines or whatever on Amazon and make them do your bidding. But the way that you communicate ideas, not just, you know, in a conference setting, but in a meeting, going back to the meeting that that's how you kind of help your organization coordinate the, the rest of the human beings. And just, you know, and you see, you see this all the time. There's people I know in industry, when you do a lot of work that are as good or better than almost anyone you've ever seen at a conference, but no one knows who they are. Right. And they're the, you know, going back to understanding the games that people are playing, like your, your personal value, your ability to contribute to your family, to contribute to your society. Like there's, there's things that you can leverage beyond just that technical expertise that will, that will give you the ability to do more things you want to do than just kind of focusing on the, the narrow problem of the technology. So, so do you, do you think, uh, in our tech world, people like, uh, I shouldn't say people, do you think, do you think when it comes to sort of like career management, people put enough

emphasis on conferences or too much, or how do you think, how do you think that's sort of like, uh, I think it depends in different pockets. You know, I've been, I've been in many different orbits and I think that there's, you know, in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, in the startup ecosystem, um, you know, some of this stuff that goes on that ends up being, um, purely social doesn't have a high value. I think that there's, there's people there that are over, over investing in that. Yeah. But, but then there, there's a lot of communities of practice that are high value and there's a lot of people in different, you know, pockets of, you know, geography or, or industry that aren't doing that. And if you're, yeah, I mean, I think this is something everyone has to attune to their own thing, but if you've never experienced what I'm talking about, like of all the stuff that I just said about being empowered and advancing your career and getting excited about technology, does it make any sense to you? Then I will almost guarantee you need to go to a conference this year. That's for sure. Yeah. You know, I'm also thinking I've, uh, I've, I've, I've had the, uh, the opportunity to speak at several internal conferences, uh, over the past year and then a little bit before that. And those are another interesting dynamic. And I've been to some internal conferences and especially as, as a third party outside of the company, you get a very interesting perspective on things. But I, I remember one that I went to many years ago that was, uh, there was almost like, uh, you could almost feel the sense of the employees, like sniffing out the management and seeing if they were legit and, and then, and then equally, equally distressing and fascinatingly, the management was like trying to be as genuine as possible about like, we want to do things in a new way and unlock all your potential. You know what I mean? All those, all those, those sort of trite

things that were easy to dismiss. They actually were very interested in fixing problems. I mean, I was only there for a day, so who knows like if they were operationalizing it correctly and all that. And then in contrast, I've also been to other conferences that are, you can almost sense these internal summits that you go to the openness of the culture based on the questions people ask in a big open room, right? And, and the things that they do and, and, you know, those internal conferences are another interesting, uh, it's another good opportunity that I guess is maybe one, it might be more efficient because you're not to fly a bunch of people around, but two, it allows you to talk about sort of internal company things a lot more openly. But I've been noticing a lot of what I would characterize as healthy companies doing that in, at least in, in their tech departments a lot more than, than I previously heard about. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I don't have a ton of perspective on how things were, you know, the decade or two before, but I I've noticed that there's, and maybe it's sort of this, this wave of transformation as people are trying to figure out how to do new things. And I've been a part of some of these internal conversations, uh, conferences as well, but it, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're putting like 200, 300 people in a room and having speakers from the industry come talk to them. I think that's, uh, that's a leading indicator to me that like someone's at least trying to change the game. Yeah. Trying to transform the culture. Yeah. And, and they usually even like give out pretty nice swag. It's all about, it's all about you. That's right. That's right. Uh, yeah, I went, I went to one down in San Antonio a while ago and they had, they had a fantastic buffet, lots of fajitas and everything. It was great. Oh yeah. Uh, so, so what are the, what are the dates of the platform conference? Did, did we, uh, did we go over that yet? It's in the fall sometime, right? I don't know if I'm memorized yet. It is August 1st through 4th in Las Vegas.

That's right. So there will be air conditioning. That is assured. And, and it wasn't, as you can imagine, the, it wasn't the first choice of venues or, or dates, but as a, as a consequence of, of other things, like that's, uh, that's the best one we could find that would accommodate the, the goal. Yeah. I, I, I think, I think, uh, what was that? That's like four days. That'll be fun. And so, you know, do you have some sort of preview, like, do we have any of the, uh, uh, like the ideas or tracks hammered out yet? What's going to happen during it? Here's the beauty. There are no tracks. Oh, wonderful. Yes. Is it, is it just one track? What, what, what does that mean? No tracks? It's too, it's too many people to have a, a, a one track conference, I think. And there's too many personas to do that. Although that would be a fun experiment to try. So the, the, the, the thing that we're trying to do that's different than it, you know, you go to conferences that have tracks is, and especially you think about our portfolio and, and spring and, and some of the other things we're doing. If you have a, a spring cloud data flow talk, then is that a talk about the platform? Is that a talk about spring? Is that a talk about data? There's, you know, and then who knows what you're even doing? Like you could be data science, whatever. So the, the thing we're going to do for, for platform is have a taxonomy and you'll have tags. And there'll be, we'll put, try to put together the best possible program, you know, across the different themes. But there's, there's so much mixing and kind of going back to the stated goal of, of mixing personas. It's like, oh yeah, what we're going to do, try to do is like, we're going to have a conference and it's for developers and operators. And this is the developer track and this is the operator track.

It was like, well, right, right. Now that makes sense. Let's get away from that. You, you, you want to have a, uh, you want to have a smoothie, not a deconstructed casserole. Did I ever tell you about the deconstructed casserole ate in Minneapolis? I'm, I'm starting to picture it. Yeah, it was, it was very literal, right? Like someone, someone, one of our, uh, one of the other Andrews we have around here, Andrew Ripka, he told me about this place. They deconstruct casseroles and, and they literally do that. It's like, they take what would normally be one big giant casserole, like all mixed together and they serve it to you in its component parts. And, and it was, uh, I was not expecting that when we went there. I thought it would just be like, you know, some kind of hipstery type of place where you've got like small portions on big plates and like handcrafted cocktails. But it was, it was very, uh, they just took apart the ingredients and cooked them. They were delicious and serve them to you as a separate thing. So, so what did they do? They got, got like a bowl of macaroni and then like another bowl of cream of mushroom soup. Yeah. Like I, I think what I ordered was like the lamb casserole or something. Cause I have this rule that when I'm traveling, if there's lamb on the menu, I order it. I, I don't know why, but you know, I like it. And, and so there was like, there was like lamb ribs and some sort of, yeah, some sort of like macaroni polenta blob or whatever. And some vegetables. And then, and then sadly there was like some like lamb testicles, which were not very good. Uh, but normally, but they were all separate. And normally those things would, I guess would have been together in a casserole. Um, but, uh, you could experience them bite by bite. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to put it all together in a, in a delicious casserole. That's that, that normally that's what you would, you would be served. Yes. It would be one unit. It's like to use another analogy. We have this delicious dish here in Texas called the King ranch casserole, which is basically like a lasagna, except it uses corn tortillas instead of lasagna noodles. And cheese and taco meat instead of, uh, you know, spaghetti filling and, and then a bunch of cheese on top.

So you could get that as one big casserole or that you could get corn tortillas, cheese, taco meat, and like sour cream, like separately. That would be the deconstructed King ranch casserole. I don't know if that would be good. I think, I mean, honestly, in some sense, that's what all the different conferences are now. So we're, we're trying to put them all, put them all together, all the things that we touch, all the things that we do, all the things that we think we're helping people do. We want, we want to bring that together and kind of tell that in a, in a choir. Well, let's go to a different metaphor. That's not the, not the food metaphor, but, but, but kind of bring up this, this, um, this choir of all the different personas and voices and, and sing one song. That's right. It's all, there is no deconstruction in team, as I recall. How the saying goes. That's exactly how the saying goes. Exactly. All right. Well, uh, I, I think, I think as we get closer to it, we'll have to, we'll have to check in again, you know, amongst our various other, uh, exciting topics we traipse around. But, uh, yeah, that'll be a fun conference to go to. And, you know, also there, there's a, there's a bunch of, uh. Yeah, the very least you should be able to come hang out with me and Coté. Okay. Exactly. And, and also like, you know, if, if you need to get some training before you do that, I think we're going to have, I don't know if we have the dates ironed out, but we're going to have some road shows and like mini conferences that we'll be doing geographically. Oh, I mean, we're going to put some, uh, air miles on the, on the team this year. That's right. That's right. Yeah. I saw that one of our teammates, Casey has like a hundred thousand miles from last year. That's crazy. And he hasn't even, didn't even travel the whole time. I, I. Josh Long probably got close to 200 or something. Oh, no doubt. That's, that's, he, he's always a special case. He's, he's the outlier. That's, that, that should be his new nickname. On many spectrums. But we, we actually have a lot of, uh, a lot of stuff we'll be doing, uh, at various cities and locally that that'll be fun as well.

And then also I was, I've just started looking at the DevOps days list that we have. And, uh, we're like right before the quiet of the storm of that. There's, there's a lot of really good DevOps days locations, uh, coming up. That'll be fun to be at as well. But, uh, yeah, I mean, hopefully we've gone over some, some good notions of, uh, of what to do, what conferences and why they're valuable. You got to get out of the office, see what everyone's doing. Exactly. You have anything else you want to go over before we wrap up? I mean, I think that was a good run. We should, uh, you know, it's been a couple of days since we did the podcast and this was, uh, this was an interesting one for me, but we should do another one soon. That's right. Well, you know, as always, uh, if, if you want to hear more about the difference between a casserole and a deconstructed casserole, or just how to improve what your software is doing, you can always check out this podcast. Pivotal Conversations. If you go to, uh, pivotal.io slash podcast or podcast, you can find the show notes and the RSS feeds and everything like that. And we, we, we should throw one out to the audience that, what would you like to hear Uncle Andrew rant about? Oh, sure. We're all, we're always hungry for topics. We could do that on a, on a weekly basis. That's right. So, so just, uh, if, if you want to, if you want to write something in Twitter and tag it with hashtag Uncle Andrew, well, uh, that, that would be a great way to, uh, to, to send topics our ways. And, and, and, uh, we'll see about incorporating those. We'll see if we get anything. That would be fantastic. Uncle little idea. Either one of those will work. Old man Schaefer. That's right. Yells at cloud. Uh, well, perfect. Well, great. Well, uh, as always, thanks for listening and we'll see everyone next time. Cheers.

Tanzu Talk · 🍕 Get more pizza.