And we're live with another episode of Adventures and Devlops. Warren, what's going on?
I wish I had something good to say. Uh, movie on the spot there. I guess I can lead with my facts, right.
My fault for asking you how you're doing? My God, I should have known better.
Yeah, I know, it's it's been quite a number of episodes already. I feel like, you know, you really got to spread that away before the I will I will say I was a little disappointed by this, but I found out recently that there are companies that leak their data on purpose. They use it as an advertisement strategy so people learn about the company, so vcs can learn about them and potentially buy them later, because it's such a great turnaround to say, hey, we had security problems in
the past, but then we fixed them. So if you see on your LinkedIn stream or social media accounts some companies saying oh no, this hotel, hell chain, or a healthcare provider or leaked all their patient records, it may have been an intentional strategy, just so that you will learn about them and then maybe start paying the money in the future.
I can only say that I'm disappointed, but not surprised but also joining us today. I'm super excited about this episode because I've been following Today's guests for quite a while, through on ninety days of DevOps and through all of your posts on x so Michael Caide, welcome.
Hey, thanks for having me guys.
Yeah, our pleasure and I'm excited. So for those who maybe have never logged onto Twitter, because I think that's the requirement to start seeing your post is just actually log on. So for someone who's never been on there, give us like the short version of your background.
So yeah, so I'm a The posh title is a field CTO at VM Software. If you know VM software, we focus on protecting workloads here, there, and everywhere. And what I mean by that is we started off with virtualization back up and then got into cloud based and SaaS based and even communities based backups. So running state for workloads, running databases, you name it, will protect it type of thing. And the important part is is back up is the boring part. The recovery is the the
easy part. But I guess more to the point where where you came in Will was around the project that I started kind of as we came out of the or even the last year of the pandemic was ninety days of DevOps And if you go to ninety days at DevOps dot com, it was really about learning in public, like being vulnerable and putting some structured learning out there. It never was intended to be as big as this to help as many people. It was there to help me.
It's just it started out as my notes, right, which my Twitter is a graveyard of notes really that I'm just shouting in my own little bubble. But yeah, been in the infrastructure world for twenty years. I would say the last three to five years has been focused around DevOps and then more recently around cloud and cloud Native. So yeah, definitely listening to the podcast and taking a lot in so yeah.
Right, and so ninety days of DevOps was your like learning and public thing, but that's been more than ninety days ago. So what's the current state of that.
Yeah, So we started in twenty twenty two, I think it was, and that was me going through the weird roads of DevOps, if you will, And I didn't want, like I've seen loads of people do one hundred days of code or one hundred days of communeties and one hundred days of this and one hundred days of cloud and I was like, I can't concentrate for one hundred days. I can't do that. And DevOps isn't you can't do it. Look, DevOps isn't just one area right as you as you
all know. So I took that concept of ninety days of DevOps and this was This was on New Year's Eve as we were going into twenty twenty two. We're just in a pandemic and as most of my my friends would be out drinking, I'm sat at home going right, how do we kickstart this year? And normally it's a
fitness challenge for ninety days or something like that. This year was no. What we're going to do is we're going to we're going to start a get repository and we're going to start loads of markdown files and we're going to go through twelve or thirteen different topics of DevOps and we're going to not deep dive into them,
but we're going to get a little bit. We're going to get we're going to get the big picture, we're going to get some theory around that, and we're going to get some hands on over all of these weird and wonderful words that we see in the in the industry. So there's a top pick around go, but go lang not as a developer. I'm not a developer by any stretch, But what does the programming language look like? From a
DevOps point of view? We need to know Maybe we need to know how to read the code, just understand it. Maybe we do need to understand how to create a little a little bit better than a bast script on how to achieve some automation. There's cumunetties in their containerization, Linux networking, all of that and how it pertains to the DevOps topic. So that was the first year. It was one hundred and ten thousand words. It was basically
a blogger day for ninety days. We fast forward to twenty twenty three and instead of me doing that, and I missed out so much around security, and I think the world missed out on. If you think about twenty twenty two, DevOps was the thing. Dev scops was the new thing as we went through twenty twenty three or twenty twenty two into twenty twenty three. So I went out to some friends and they as SMEs, they subject
matter experts. They came out and they provided the blog posts for each day of their section for the twenty twenty three edition and then just recently of March the thirty first, we finished ninety days again. But I wanted to we couldn't just do let's write a load more things, and I wanted to change up what that was. So we put out a call for papers and we actually had ninety one sessions from ninety one different people. It
was ninety one for a reason. It was a leap year this year, and so yeah, we had all of those, all of those sessions on YouTube as well. So it was about changing the format of what.
It was, greight Ie. So just taking the different topics and then dedicating a day to each of those topics so that you can do, you know, a little bit deeper than just Hello World on those and kind of walk away with not like an expert level knowledge, but like a conversational knowledge of that topic.
Yeah, exactly that. It was probably seven days for each of the topics. So we kicked off the first the first ninety days in twenty twenty two was what is DevOps Like I've seen your videos, will that that kind of touches on on this and it was about like, so, what is DevOps and why DevOps and where did it even come from? And why are we talking about it in twenty twenty two when it's been around since two thousand and nine, like that sort of thing, and some
of the use cases. And it's always the use cases that we hear about. Oh it's Netflix did this, Aws did that? It's so I wanted to actually, well, what about the company down the road, how are they using DevOps? So we went into a little bit more of a DevOps for the normal the normal company, not the fan company, and then we kick off for seven days of like, so, the first topic is go Lang learning a programming language,
and there was a mixed uh. I got mixed feedback on that because really, I'd be interested in what your programming language or choice would be to learn first. From a DevOps point of view, I expect I know what the answer would be, but I'd be interested in your takes.
Yeah, for me, my answer is very nuanced, Like my first answer is what's the team you're working with using? You know, because if like you're working with a full four stack JavaScript shop, just go with that so that you have some more connective tissue with the rest of your team. I think that's going to serve you much much more long term in helping that team then learning Go and being like the outsider who's always trying to
sell this, you know. So I approach it from a conversational point of view, where am I going to have the most conversation touch points with the people that I'm supporting, and so whatever their primary stack is would be my first choice. Assuming that you know they're not using Java. I wouldn't recommend Java the first language, but if you if the fields wide open, you know, I would. I think I would just stick with I would I would
recommend Go. It's just to me, it feels it feels very manageable to pick up as a first language.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
I mean I think, well, well, now the most important part here, which is really the context. I mean, if we think about what DevOps is, it's really about merging of the mind sets and applying it no matter where you are, so meeting the team where they're at, and I don't think i've sort I often will advise companies and their engineering departments are using all sorts of strange
things that I would never personally use. Will mention Java but I've seen Ruby and everything else, and there are some languages that I prefer to use personally more than more than others.
And I see sort of.
Concrete problems that show up because of the language of choice, and you can maybe overcome those by picking something different. Right the sorts of problems, you'll end up with a non strong type language versus ones such as Go or rusts or whatever. You know, there are concrete benefits of using those. But when you think about here's where the team is at, what is the problem that we need to solve, trying to pull in the tools to help you do it and not necessarily going out and changing
the language. Although you know, I've seen often there is this problem where a team may not be able to embody the mindset that comes with because potentially the language or frameworks that they're using, they're just not conducive to thinking about those things. There's still a very much built in you use this language language thinks about throwing stuff over the wall to another team to go and run it.
You're going to run into a problem there, and sometimes you got to change the tools to match we want. But you know, if we're looking on the other side.
You know what would I pick.
Personally, I've been super successful with Joba's script type script and RUSS, but I don't think the domain is super critical there No.
And you both you both hit on it right. And the reason I chose Go because being cast in an acquisition that we'd made in twenty twenty, they were using Go lang to write their cloud native products. I didn't know Go and in fact I didn't know any programming language. So that seemed like a good start. But the amount of people that were like, you should this should be Python, this should be Python, or this should be something else.
And I get that, but to both of your point, but I chose it for that reason, and I documented and bearing in mind we're on day I think we start this on day seven, the first time I've ever done this, And this is me writing notes like me and my mum know about this. That's it. So it's it's it didn't turn out to be the twenty five thousand plus stars that are on gethub for it now.
I can understand that then. But but and we covered Python in the second year as well, and there's obviously so many more, but it's about it was for me. It was so I could actually and it wasn't for me to have become a Go developer, because I don't. I think the point is is a programming language for devots is very different to being an app developer in that I just want to be able to read this language. I want to be able to potentially make a CLI or some sort of tool that helps with my day
to day job. And the fact is is that Go is a great language for that sore so are others, but I chose it for them read So I did point that out in there as well. But basically just to go back to why, like how how these modules if you will, like set up, is that the first day we talk about programming languages in DevOps. So I went away and I researched that for generally, I would have spent about an hour two hours watching YouTube videos.
A lot of yours will as well, and and others the smart people, and they're all referenced at the bottom of that the days as well. Right, I'm not again, this isn't This wasn't anything for me. This is about providing structured learning that we didn't have, and I still don't think. I'm not the answer to this is that oh learn DevOps, but Will's DevOps journey and yours, Warren
and mine are all different. And if we work at three different companies and your DevOps responsibilities are very different as well, Like we might touch the same similar things, but everything is everything is a little bit different, and it's more of a mindset on how can I learn quickly to understand the benefit of this, and if it's not right, throw it in the bin, let's go again,
Like that's the that's the premise. But I didn't. I couldn't find that one YouTuber that was like, well, fixing my addiction to YouTube following the pandemic that so many people had. So I thought, well, I'm going to create something that at least will help me because I forget everything, so I want to be able to go back and reference this. So we go through the big picture, We go through a bit of theory about what go is,
how it works, how it compiles, blah blah blah. Then we get hands on and we start interacting with the Twitter API that's now been changed so that I need to update that. But it was basically a little Twitter butt that would that you could write a bit bit more of that, like two oh one of the Hello world, how can I interact with an API to make it do something as and when something happens. So that long winded,
that was what we started with. But each one of those sections, those modules takes that big picture, a bit of theory, and then some hands onto that.
I mean, I think really shouldn't undersell this here. I mean, you've got a repository on GitHub that has over twenty six thousand stars and which really is which I know for sure, and in such a short period of time it seems, and it's really just you going and learning these individual topics one after another one to a sufficient degree that other people can go in and see it
and get that same sort of learning. And really it's not about the maybe physical tool, but the real mindset that's behind DevOps and having a whole new approach that they can take to even their own projects or back to their workplace and share it with others.
Yeah, it's it's been a it's been wild a while three years, that's for sure. And bringing on all of the community members to do the talks. Like if you look at some of those sessions, some of those are like gold, They're the sessions that you'd go to if you went, if you went to conferences, they're the ones that you'd actively like, are what I need to see this and perspective is so important in our in our
DevOps world. Is that again, just because I do something my way and that's my responsibility, it won't be the same as what will does or you weren't. So seeing these all these different sessions on a w S as your terrorform pollu me like all of the I guess competing products, but with a bit of an overlap as well, like it's pick it's about picking your picking, picking your horse, right, and but you can swap horses halfway through, like the
amount of pollue me and Hashi Corp as well. So yeah, I just I'm in a position as well at being where they give me the opportunity to do this, which is incredible. You think three years ago, pre pandemic, I was purely focused on storage and virtualization. I've done a bit of terror form, I've done a bit of answerable, I've done a bit of cloud, but that was it. Thrown me into this, gave me the opportunity to then go and learn a whole new community, a whole new ecosystem,
whilst still getting paid for it. I started a new job without having to start a new job, so it is, it's incredible, Like all of the community. There's a discord channel as well, with over a thousand people in there. It's brilliant and like always already being asked what we're doing next year, Well, we have to take a year to figure that out.
You touched on something I think really important, and that's especially in the DevOps mindset sort of corner of the world that we end up finding ourselves in. We don't usually have experienced mentors that are within the same company or same organizational areas as us, and it can be quite the challenge of actually figuring out how to level
up effectively within that scope. And you know, my usual recommendation is, you know, where are you getting information from the outside world that that's happening outside your company, and
there's usually silence there. Like obviously there's some amount of challenge to engage yourself with content or other companies because not everything is public, So going out and actually finding good streams of information is for sure actually a challenge, but it's something that everyone who has a devlop, you know, is embodying the devofs mindset really needs to do in some regard.
Interesting, you say that as well, that so the dead stats that you can get on the repo't I'll let the audience go and look up the big big companies that are behind it, and that they're not contacted anything. But there's some pretty big, big, big big vendors out there that are using this for what I can only see as a bit of an onboarding, like an onboarding kind of course, for their for their people.
Interesting.
To be fair, I don't do any sponsorship or anything like that on there, so there's no real way for them to reach out for that.
I could imagine companies reaching out to you though, and asking you to come and actually speak or you know, pick some of your favorite modules that are fit for their company and getting to actually talk through or workshop them.
So if it all goes wrong at them, maybe that's maybe that's the way to go. But I made it, I made it quite clear earlier on but none of this is sponsored content. So if I chose rg CD is because I wanted to, there was no there was no influence at all, And I had another how can
I put this without name in names? But everyone will know if I say it, a typical database company that have a very strong licensing opinion, they reached out about their cloud infrastructure and they wanted me to cover them and they pay and that's what And I said, but that's going to lose the spirit of the of the whole whole process, like I could do. And I can say this because I'm a Hashi Corp ambassador and it wasn't then. But I've suggested I could do seven days
of Hashi Corp. We could go through seven products. We could do ten days of Hashi Corp. I think probably, And that would be a great idea. But it'd have to be organic content. It wouldn't be you tell me what to write, you pay me to do that, because you lose the trust with the community a lot of the time with that element of of why we do this stuff, and really the whole again, it goes back to the reason why I did this? Why did I
start this? Because obviously when you start a project, you start with a logo and you start with a domain. That's before you even get into any of the hard work. It was it was all about it was all about learning. It was all about me just learning in public I've been around several different communities virtualization, VMware, NETAP from a storage perspective, Hashi Korp was then there on the edge before I jumped into the more of the cloud and
cloud native world, and there's never been that. I had a conversation about this the other the other week about it's all about putting down the ladder. Use the ladder to get up. You might have used some videos, some content somewhere, and you can there's some people in this world that will absolutely take that ladder with them and they're never going to drop it down. If you can drop that down and help one person, then it's going to be massively impactful for that person wherever they are
in the world. Right, And I've had that same ethos from doing blogs about open Stack fifteen years ago, is that even if you document something, blogs something and it only helps one person, then it's worth doing again. Same for this, right. That's why I did it on an open get hub RePOP was if it helps one person, then it's worth worth doing. And it helped me as well, so that was why.
Yeah, And I think it's admirable just to avoid the sponsorship route because you know, like you're putting in a ton of time and effort on nursuit, like not only just to learn your own thing, but because you're you're trying to do it in public and you're trying to share it so that it is helpful for someone else. So that puts a lot of additional steps in achieving a task, you know, because you could have done this yourself in a notepad doc on your desktop and gotten
all the benefits there. But choosing to share it, you know, as an extra level of work to it. That's a huge time commitment. And I think that's part of the allure of doing sponsored videos or taking on sponsorships, because it helps you feel like you're justifying some of that time. But at the same time, I agree with you whenever you choose to take on the sponsorship, in my mind, that changes the scope of work because now instead of creating something for me to share, I have to create
something for the sponsor that represents their brand. And those are in some and sometimes two entirely different pieces of content.
Absolutely, and I know, I know that there's a day and I'll let I'll let people go and find the day. But where I'm trying to get not Antimle. I'm trying to get Jenkins up and running a doctor container, which it clearly wasn't built for this situation right now. But we're like even in the comments, I know there's a paragraph there going I couldn't get this to work. Then there's an update. I got this to work, but I had to do this, this, this, and this and that.
I left it all in because people will have that same problem. They'll have that same issue. And but if that was if that was Jenkins paying for said said blog or said YouTube video, they wouldn't want me to fail. They'd want it to be clean, crisp cut, like this is how it works. Now. I know that's not that's
not fair to all vendors or projects out there. Some will like to see the like warts and all, but the majority would one hundred percent want it to be clean cut and look how good our software is.
Yeah, for sure, I think there's a huge brand component to this. Like when you're going out and you're creating content for the world, what does that say about the person who is creating that content realistically? And you take that with you when you go somewhere else. If you want to be someone who sells your content. You know that's your job or that's who you want to be, then you know there's something wrong with that. If you want to be someone who creates publicly available content, you
know that becomes part of your brand. And I feel like at the upper echelon levels of software engineering, there is this expectation that you are positively contributing to the community, and I feel like going out and selling your content isn't necessarily aligned with that. Being able to provide it for free or at conferences or through trainings.
Workshops, et cetera.
There's a very different perspective there, and I don't think we can get as far with just only sponsored content, as you said, for the obvious reasons of companies paying for I mean, if you're doing that, then you're likely going to end up competing with llms in the future who are going to optimize for just getting the work done rather than the actual you know, learning experience.
Not an issue.
No, No LLM can butcher the English language as badly as I can. I've got that market coy.
Yeah, you wouldn't believe the amount of contributions on the repo as well for a native English guy making mistakes it's a green it's a green tip, it's a green box, right, you can people have Well, the mind blowing thing is not only that, but there is a of a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes that have been corrected. But equally, it's been translated into different languages. If you go if you go to the to the repo and you go to twenty twenty two at the top there you'll see
it's been translated into Vietnamese, Chinese, Polish. It's not ridiculous, it's amazing, but it's ridiculous. That's so cool. I just hope, I hope they're not writing anything bad about me.
So what kind of feedback? I mean, obviously with twenty six thousand stars, you know, there's been You've hit a
chord in the community. It's definitely appreciated content. Have you gotten, like any any success stories or like really cool feedback moments, because I know, just in the YouTube videos I've done, there's been a few people who have reached out to me over the years and said, hey, I watched your videos and did the things that you suggested in this particular video, and it helped me land my first job, you know, and to me like that was just mind blowing.
I don't know what the rest of my life holds, but to hear something like that, like you had that kind of impact on someone's life, Like that's crowning achievement to me. So what what have you gotten back for feedback from this?
So so similar will similar things like people that are just starting out of college and they'll use the REPO and oh, I landed my first job. And also I think personal like so personally that's brilliant, like the same as you will. Like to think that I would ever have an impact on anyone's life is incredible, Like I never thought it. Probably the same as you is that I never thought that that would be a thing. I didn't think i'd build something that would impact someone, but
equally on a on a personal level as well. It's enabled me to go and speak at events. I've always done public speaking from a again virtualization storage like vm World before it was VMware Explore all of that. I've done the yearly conference trips, but I hadn't done the DevOps conference trips. I hadn't been to HASHIKM, I hadn't been to other like uh we are developers for example, and I strongly believe that doing this gave me a little bit more credibility to be able to go and
do that. And I think to your point, Warren, I think also the amount of people that I've had reached out to me saying like, if it doesn't if it doesn't work out, a beam, but just give us a give us a ring. But because that's it's a it's a community angle that they see that they could they could use within their within their efforts in the community as well. But yeah, I think I think overall is it's about helping helping people. That's the that's the biggest thing.
And then yeah, the thought leadership or the ability to be validated to go and speak at these events is nice and quite frankly strange as well, but people speak about it. I think the one, the one that really hits home for me is the Hashi Hashi comp when it was in Amsterdam two years ago. I was speaking there and it was they asked me to speak about
ninety days of DeVos. It was like a fifteen to twenty minute type community session and it was equally quite strange to talk about it then, and bearing in mind that's two years ago, we'd only just finished that first one. We were probably on ten thousand stars, and then having people come up to you and say, this is amazing,
I can't believe I haven't seen it. And to your initial point, will like, you only hear about it on Twitter or on x but I need to be better at sharing this stuff as well elsewhere.
That's the hard part, you know, I think, because that requires a completely different set of skills to promote your work, and you have to learn those, and it feels very awkward to learn those, you know, especially whenever you take this from the approach of like, I'm just doing this to to maintain my own skill set in my chosen career path, you know, and then you have you turn that around, you're like, oh, how do I promote myself and market my content that was never really meant to
be content anyway? And I remember, like, the one of the key moments for me was the first time I had to write a bio for a talk I was giving, you know, and you're you write, you write your own bio in the third person, and you know, to me, that was just like blue screen of death in the brain, you know, I just couldn't wrap my hair around that.
Yeah, yeah, I get exactly the same anything about myself. Is that to your point worry like whatever this is, it doesn't It just feels strange of like how how big it's become or even And I'm a I'm a ultimately I'm a pessimist at heart anyway in that you look at those those twenty five thousand stars and I just said, like are they important? Are they just vanity metrics? If that was software, you'd be up there with one
of the biggest And I'm like, that's that's crazy. So so yeah, it's it's it's a it's an interesting and I've seen others as well do like follow that into like creating content, sharing in public and all of that good stuff, and and yeah, it's been a yeah, it's been good, like people cloning the repository and then going off and doing their own journey, which was kind of the idea as well, in that if I could, if you could build a template repo for people to go
and walk and talk the same thing. You go and learn, and then you get a perspective and then we start sharing lots lots of different perspectives. That's we're all going to learn a lot more and Warren, actually, you brought up a good point and someone else said about this. Are you worried about LM's having all of this information? I'm like, well, I didn't make it up. This information is fully available if you go to the bottom of
each day. There's smarter people than me talking about this stuff all over the internet, and there's heaps of documentation that touches on all of this. If an LM can take ninety days of devop to make things easier, let's go like that's only a good thing as well. So yeah, for sure.
So one thing I want to talk about with you because you've got you know, you're you're all at them and then you're creating the US on the side. And then I know that you're also active physically, So how do you structure your day or what's your thought process for balancing those different areas of your life.
No, that's a good one. I don't know if I balance anything, but and for anyone that follows me on any social media, you know that I spend more time on a plane than I do in my own bed, or at least in a different country. And the one thing I absolutely love about working for VEMA and I'm sure other companies are like it. That my opportunity is, or my goal or my responsibility at being is to raise awareness and drive some sort of adoption to our software.
Now we have community addition and open source projects that to me is still driving adoption, and then we obviously have paid for products as well. And raising awareness is what I can do best by talking at events, talking about what we do, some cool use cases that we see out there in the field, and that means jumping on a plane generally and being and giving those those sessions at things like red Hat Summit, Cube Con, Hashi, KOMPF and others. But the other great thing about them
is that well, every day's every day is different. And you could wake up at eight o'clock on Monday morning and you think this is what we're going into and then by nine o'clock is completely different and your day change. That every day can be different at them, and that's the exciting bit. And because over the last ten years, I've been at Beam for nine and a half years now.
So I started and we only had virtual machine backup VMware backups, and now we have we can back up everything, so I can I can flip and change, and there's all the different communities for each of those different different services, and diving into that learning something new, being able to like just the variety is the wind for me to keep that now. The one thing I've started this year, or actually just before Christmas because I've stopped playing rugby,
is at least moving five k a day. So walking five k day or running five k a day has been like, I have to do that because sometimes you can have. I've just spun off ten of those different things that we've got that becomes overwhelming when you and I don't know what number it is, whether it's twelve or fifteen things on my plate, but one of those numbers sends me over the edge. And I'm sure you're
the same, right. So being able to go for a walk somewhere and just out and about somewhere else or run it just gives you that level set, that reset. But equally, I don't work nine to five. I don't think many of us do any more. I think it's a nice like when it's light we work and when it's dark we sleep. But I don't think that. I don't think that masses anymore. I think we just get stuff done.
I thought, for sure you're gonna say when it's dark you also work because.
It depends on the week right all time zone, for sure?
For sure.
I mean my numbers too.
I feel like if I got something critical going on, something else trying to buy from my attention, I have to be very careful about pulling that in. I think I'm in a very unique position though compared to lots of people, where I get to push things on other people, So I have to be careful about that. But yeah, for sure, like things to buy for your attention, it's
very difficult to even keep track of them all. I was actually talking to Will about this before we started the stream about multitasking is death now, Really, we as humans can't really do it that effectively. Your priority list, you do one at a time until you're done, but you're never done. There's the next thing on the list. So rigorously prioritizing and pulling out what those things are important. And I think there's a lot to be said for
your subconscious because I'm totally with you. I go on short little walks to clear my mind, my conscious mind while subconsciously I'm working on some difficult problem that doesn't require me to write it down or look at visuals can be really really helpful, especially when the nature of the work we're doing. It's not just write some code in some ID somewhere, but it's think deeply about a problem and how it should look like and what that actually means.
And how to take the next step.
And so while you say that you don't have anything like super original there that you know, you pull the content from somewhere. I think what is important is how you think about the problem, which I do think may be unique to you know, everyone involved.
And I think that's important and worth remembering.
So back to doing a five k every day, I'm going to dig on this. Do you listen to music when.
You do that?
Or podcast or.
Running? I'm running, I will listen to music if I'm if i'm walking, it depends depends on where I'm walking. If I'm walking on a treadmill, in the in the in the gym, or in the in the living room, I will. That's that's YouTube time. But it's it's not. It's not DevOps or tech YouTube time. That's although Jeff Jeff Gilling seems to the sneak in there because he does some some good good home lab stuff that I tend to watch, and yeah, maybe a podcast or two. But I spend a lot of time in a car
as well, driving to the airport. I'm about ninety minutes away from the From the airport, it's a great time to listen to some really good podcasts.
Right, how You've been with with them for nine years, which I feel like it's pretty unusual in our industry to be with the same company that long. What's the reason behind that?
So I feel like I've had three, maybe four different jobs since I've been at Beam. So I started as an se SO systems engineer. I'll go out and keep our salespeople honest and so show prospect what we do, how do we protect this, what do we do? How do we do it? I was only doing it for eighteen months, But in that eighteen months, I was still creating content and I was still almost telling stories. Right the whole point, I would say, if you had to
define what my job is, it's about telling stories. It's about telling Beam stories that I hear out in the field where much smarter people than me suffer, so that they have a story to tell, and then they tell me the story and I simplify that, put it into
a demo some sort of story. After eighteen months, I moved into what we call now the Product Stratety Group or the office of the CTO, and this was full blown go anywhere, make noise, raise awareness, speak to engineering, build the product the way it needs to be for the field, go and speak to customers. Blah blah blah. Right, be part of the community we have. We have a great community around ving being just works. You've heard that tagline hopefully and yeah, we have some absolute fanboys who
who love love being technologies, which is brilliant. So be present there, listen to them. What's their feedback is great as well, and then feed that back into engineering or product management. Then so yeah, that's that's the two jobs. Then in the same group I was I was, we made an acquisition of a company called Caston. Caston is focused on communities backup, so PVC is running applications data databases inside of communities or even outside. If you using
URDS alongside of your application, we're protecting that. We made that purchase in October twenty twenty, the parachute got put on my back to go, go and make noise, go and go and be in that community about everything, all things communities like whoa, I've not even got I don't I've never done containerization yet, So I mean this is and this is the real start of the journey. You'll see where the devop scene comes in as well as we go through it. But yeah, parachute comes in, I
go in. I'm still very wet behind the ears. I still am today, I feel. And that was my job is be all things focused on cloud Native. And I ended up running some collocated events at Cubicon called Cloud Native Data Management Day and we had some really good speakers talking about databases on Kubnetes, databases outside of communities, just data in general around that then probably, well it must be two and a bit years ago. I got handed some more stuff to look after and talk about.
And it kind of fit because speaking to all of these kubunettes admins or even developers that were using communities, the the trend was they were never exclusively using just cubunettes. They were using virtual machines with databases on. Because the database is too hard to containerize, it was too important for everything else. Because traditionally we took that expensive Oracle database and we threw everything on. We threw everything into that.
In the cloud native world, we don't need to do that, but that doesn't stop the plane still having to fly right. So anyway, so I got given the remit of now go and look after our cloud products are being back up for a ws as you'r and Google and come up with stories to tell around that. So I did, and then fast forward is now we're looking at how what is Beam's cloud strategy whilst also still trying to
raise awareness drive adoption of everything that we're doing. So that's really so I think why nine years or how It's because I've had three to four different jobs within it within the company. To be fair, I've only reported into three different people as well, all in the same structure as well. But yeah, yeah, it's it's strange as well. When I was at when I was in my English class at school, and I'm sure you guys are the
same in the in the States. You stood up and you read read like a chapter of the book or a couple of pages of the book out loud to the rest of your class. I was so scared I would almost have sick days because of that. And now I get to speak to you guys, or speak in front of audiences at events. It's a funny, this imposter syndrome is such a funny, funny situation.
No, I can totally get that.
As long as your career is changing in some way, migrating from one area to another one and having those different jobs even over a long tenure, the brand of the company that you're working for is sort of less relevant in a.
Way because your role is growing with you and me be on that.
I may ask in the context of the ninety days of devlops, has there been like some particular area that you really enjoyed learning more than others that maybe comes out more or as you know, more fleshed out, like you you see people gravitating towards more than some of the other areas, or you know, was particularly thing for you.
So so for me personally, it was around databases, learning more about databases because I was in the traditional shop where Microsoft, Sequel, Oracle, and maybe we started to see a bit of Mango, but they were the three. They were the three de facto databases. Maybe some of my squel postgress, but now if you look at the cloud native ecosystem and the amount of databases that we have available to us. It's incredible, like you can really pick
and choose the right tool for the right job. And I feel like that that could be the next space for like some huge, big hitter that that really changes what we do with data. And I've always been like a massive fan around like data visualization and being able to use data for for something good. So we're obviously backing up a lot of stuff. I would a lot have worked on prototypes where and take that data from
our backup and glean some insight out of that. So that those were the two big areas in I guess they span twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, two different topics that I think I probably could do a few more days on on there because I was learning a lot more about what is aws, neptune and just things that you like. I've personally never spoke to a customer that uses that and needs to protect it, so
it's good. It's better that it's not glazed by oh, this is a customer meeting, you have to talk about this. It's actually my interest on data. Yeah, I don't know, like I think go lang and if I had a chance to change if I could go back and change it, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have started talking about a programming language upfront, like we started talking about
it here because it's the first module. I would have moved that because I feel like that is a barrier to entry, to think that someone, Oh, I'm gonna learn DevOps today. They come in, they've never learned a programming language. Oh, we've got to go and learn go Lang or Python or something. And you're like, maybe maybe that was just a little like, maybe I should have moved that down.
Maybe maybe we should have started with the Linux module, which was second, and then the networking, and then we should have got onto a like containerization, and then I feel like there's a better, a better flow that I would have used. But the programming language. Do I really need to learn a programming language to be in DevOps? Well, actually, yeah no, you could probably get away with not until way down the line. You can you write a bass script?
Are we classing that as a programming language? Probably not? But it gets it gets a job done, and it it might just be enough if you If you can't write a basscript, though, then probably don't bother learning Golang. Yet that's that's kind of yeah, So that would be that if I had any regrets, that would be that would be one to move.
It's interesting you bring that up.
Actually, I feel like it's easier to learn a programming language than it is to try to write a bash script correctly.
And I think there is something to.
Be said about the complexity of understanding what you're deploying or what you're running or what you're evaluating is can be quite complex, and I get the sense that learning a programming language is something that has well more complex to work with, has a much smaller impact, Like I can write a small little app on my machine and not have to think about what the data layer is going to be like, or what of the thousands of different kinds of databases out there providers you know which
one to pick or even which cloud you go do, or how to deploy things, or you know, credit cards being involved and money to actually pay for those resources. Where I feel like all of that does come in to when you're working more in a DEUBL space, and so I can totally see the well, if you don't program, here may be is an easy way to get into it, rather than you know, immediately start trying to think about.
What you're doing, because I think there is this hesitation or.
Even maybe a crutch in the world where it's like, I want to go learn something infrastructure, What should I do? You know, what should I go? I was like, well, what's your business problem? You know, what are you actually trying to do? And then there's this disconnective Well, I don't know. I just want to learn how databases fit together. I'm like, well, it's a good start if you have a need, you know, like I want to build a
recommendation engine or a website or something like that. And then I feel like you're sort of stuck if you don't have at least willing to go and take the step forward of building something out.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, you just made me think about So I have a lot of ideas. I'm sure you guys do as well, about little project, little project ideas, and I know this goes out to fair few people as well. Well. I'll be interested in what people think about source code, repository back up. Completely changing the direction, but think about gethub, think about get lab. How do we protect that and is it is it important just to go on the
business outcomes I had that conversation this morning. I thought, I know two people that will that will have an answer or I have an idea or a theory on that.
Well, well will want you to just you know, your code is backed up directly in production because that's where you're edited it right.
Right right CICD means VIILM on the production server, and it's.
Already replicated to multiple machines, right because you need to scale up, so you have you know, all your code automatically replicated to you know, tens, maybe hundreds, thousands of machines already.
No, but that's that's actually a problem I've never thought of, you know, with get lab, for sure, because when I think of get lab, I think of running your own get lab servers on your own infrastructure. So there is a definite need there for GitHub. Though I'm paying for the service, I'm assuming and maybe that's my fault. I'm assuming that they're backing it up.
You, I mean, realistically, you are paying for that. Then there's the second question of whether or not it's happening. And I think we know of recent like just recent incidents involving some companies who we thought would have had a.
Better strategy to avoid a.
Full incident related to individual customers losing all of their data. So I mean, realistically, it's something you could be concerned with, I think understanding the business continuity strategy that your company has or needs to have, and what the risk is and what the impact is of that. For instance, if you have lots of engineers who are working across multiple repositories, you have well defined teams with a well defined remit. I bet you've got the source code cloned end times already.
It's unlike you actually do need something stronger than that.
However, you're going to try to get fed ramp certification or ISO twenty seven KO one, you may actually need to do something else. And so I have seen people run if they're using GitHub or get lab managed, they'll run like get tea or something else, or another get provider and run some sort of script to back that up. Because while it's actually I think a really easy thing to do to actually achieve backing it up, the thing that another provider gets you is sort of the insurance.
You want to be able to say, hey, while we can do it, we don't want to because you want to be able to have someone pay you or compensate you when it does go wrong. And if you're in charge of your own backup strategy, then you're almost you know, putting more of the eggs in that same basket, and so you really want to be careful there if you do decide to take ownership of it.
So I feel like there's a story here, Michael, Like that didn't just come out of nowhere.
So I write a blog post so I'll get asked about it the time, literally more than any other feature request. And we as a company have never never gone down that road because and I think to your point, Will like it's a SaaS and I'm talking about get up here. But we all trust Microsoft, don't we Microsoft don't get herb We all trust them. Yeah, they have data.
I'm counting on the on.
Yeah. And if they turn around and charge you on a per repo basis, we're going to get rid of a load of homegrown projects pretty damn quick because that just like I wrote a blog post where basically I'm using I'm using Canister. Canister is an open source project that we maintain that is more of an application freight application specific framework. And you can push this blueprint to go and put a lot basically interact with any API.
And there's a great open source project out there, gick up gick up, and I use that basically to go and protect it and send it to S three just to say, look, we can do it, but if you want to do it, do it this way. Are other possible. But even then you're going to get hub and you go to the marketplace or the app store or whatever it's called. I think there's either fifty seven or one hundred and fifty seven back up tools natively in their marketplace.
So to your point, Warren, there's definitely a use case, but people just want to offload it to someone else, like can you just can you just look after that? But that was really the only I realized I was talking a lot and needed to need to switch gears and change it into something else. So I wanted to get your guys view on that as a topic.
You can't do that. We're here to grill you, not the other way around.
Now, think about what other services, what other sad because you'd be you'd be wrong in thinking that get hub back up your data. It's a shared responsibility model. So the data and the information that you've put in there is your responsibility. They'll keep the service up and run in for even free free tier users, but they're not going to back up your data. The data is your response toility.
I mean, I think we have to sort of dive into what we mean by backup, so you know, we're talking about what is the reliable the durability of the of the repositories we give to get hub. I mean, I think everyone would believe that that it's as durable as possible, which is different from if you accidentally believe the data from there, whether or not. Like if you accidentally go into lead a repository, what's your remediation strategy there?
So you know, if that's the risk, then for sure you need something else.
If get hub does go down in some way permanently, you know, zero zero, zero one percent or whatever, you know, what's.
Your business continuity strategy.
But like if if someone came to me today and said, hey, you know, your data could get.
Accidentally deleted from GitHub or get lab.
Or whatever the provider you're using, and they're not going to do anything, like they have no strategy to do with that. That data isn't replicated across at least two physical drives somewhere. You know, I think they're going to lose a lot of customers, you know, just listening to this podcast.
One hundred per right, and they're going to keep that infrastructure up and running. And the accident of deletion is kind of hard, Like you've all deleted it, we've all deleted a repo on there, like you have to go
through some boots to make that happen. But what about this is a sonar like, so hopefully all three of us have MFA on our GitHub account as access, but it's a SAS service, right, so anyone could get if someone bad or malicious gained access, or a malicious internal user had access to a repo and they decided to delete or not even delete. Let's look at the open source issue that happened, is it x Y a couple of months ago, the Impression library? Sorry, yes, and and
that that's not the same scenario. But you you let people in in to maintain, they can make changes, blah blah blah. Someone makes a change that's malicious to the code or potentially many different malicious activities within that. Do you want to go back to all of your developers laptops and hope that get clones of happened and or do you want a point in time restored? I think I think we're all onto something. But I think I think I think I think it's an interesting topic. That's where I was.
Yeah, for sure, I think it's one of those things that's a long poul Like it's a very long tail responsibility, Like there are tons of companies not even thinking about that, and then there are but there are things that they should be doing first, like they still have passwords as the requirement for authentication for their UIs for their users, and so like, please do something about that first before you even start to think about you know, source code
backup or you know, you mentioned MFA, like companies that don't you know, have passwords but no MFA. Right, It's like passwords are like eighties, Like if you have passwords as any sort of authentication, like eighty six percent chance it will get popped in the next two years. It's it's like ridiculous. And yet they're, you know, they're thinking about these long teraim things. Oh well, what if one of our developers like exposes their source code or takes it with them.
I'm like that is not the biggest risk.
Yeah, the CEO right in his or her password on the post it note in their office, is that that's the biggest risk.
But they have to show that their assistant has access to the password when they don't make it into the office.
And the calendar. Obviously they need to be able to get into their Zoom account.
Right absolutely, Yeah, I'm if we're going to go down the rest page right now, I think it's the deep fakes being sent to your finance or accounting department on behalf of the executive team saying that they should pay out an invoice to a third party company, and they go and do that, and so I think, you know, that's that's the biggest risk to a company right now, is a direct attacks on their their wallet more so than anything else.
That was so that made that reminded me of another massive knee jerk change of direction on I watched a YouTube video of Ryan Goslin explaining the one oh one of l l M's It wasn't It wasn't And he's got a ridiculously huge left arm, but yeah, it like he's nailed it. He's really good at explaining because someone someone has put that data in there, but a huge deep fake. Yeah, that is the biggest, a bigger risk.
So yeah, fully just to get away from structured open source learning as far as possible, source code, repository back up and deep fake.
Ryan Goslin's well, I mean I think it's super relevant, right.
You have such a good source of knowledge here that would be a shame to lose in some way. And I think, you know, even Getthub has this idea of the Arctic code backup program where they're locking it in some vault hypothetically. I don't know what that actually amounts to, so I can imagine you know, I didn't I didn't check. But maybe you've got an award here associated with this that says it's being saved somewhere important.
I don't know what they did with their awards.
Yeah, I've got a badge for contributing to the Arctic Vault program, although I have no idea what that program is or what I did to contribute to it.
You shoud actually should actually tell you, like mine was like contributing to some AWS source code and some things that were used on like one of the NASSA rovers.
I just saw a bunch of colorful badges there one day and Howard out them for them and then moved on with my life. You know, like in the I try not to get involved in side quests.
How do you know what the main quest does?
So funny story, because at the end of every day, the last thing I do at night is I write down the five things that I'm want to be focused on for the next day, and anything that's not one of those five I just ignore a barring, you know, like, hey, we've got a production outage. You know, I can't really go up. Sorry didn't schedule that. I'll see if I can get it on tap for tomorrow.
But I use that.
I've used that method four years and it's been the only way for me to stay focused and on track.
I think that's a really great idea.
Actually, I've tried the every electronic version of it I can find. I've even tried like just doing it in notebooks. But for me personally, the only thing that works is is the three by five card, and then it's just either on my desk or when I leave my desk, I put it in my pocket, so no matter where I'm at, I know what I'm supposed to be focused on.
That's the legacy units for anyone who doesn't know. He's saying inches, which not centimeters.
That's three centimeters by five centimeters.
Pretty small.
Yeah, it keeps me from taking on too.
Much each day.
By limiting the writing space, my day has gotten so much better.
There's something that goes you know, when you're actually physically writing it out. I do find that has an imprint in you more than say typing it into it. So like when I'm in my meetings, I tend to have a notebook and I write things down.
Actually it's not like saved.
I usually write on a piece of scrapaper and then throw it away after the meeting. And it does wonders for me realistically to remember what I've gone or what I've discussed with really has nothing.
To do with medium which I've chosen.
Yeah, agreed, physical, physically writing something is increases my retention and comprehension immensely. What about you, Michael, you're digital or analog, so.
A bit of both. You can probably see there's pa paper all here. Yeah, so bitter boat. But because I'm constantly it seems, but at least recently on an aeroplane, there's a lot of notes and a lot of draft emails actually that I seem to use. I use email for that that I do actually communicate.
Definitely got the emails of my outbox for sure.
When I'm traveling, there's there's no ultimate unfortunately excellent.
Well should we move on do some pics? All right, let's do it. What'd you bring? Warren?
Yeah, so I'm on my book rants. So this week is going to be management three point zero.
By you're gonna pillow.
I found that very early on in my career. It was a great way to think about as an aspiring leader, to how to build the work around a team and even move to an agile perspective. There are still companies out there that aren't doing agile, and whether it's.
Not totally married to that aspect, it really does.
Help you think through what to do in certain situations, how to prioritize work effectively at a team level. And I just I can't recommend it enough for those that are thinking about not just the code that they should write or what they should work on that day, but how to collaborate effectively, how to track that work and prioritize requests that are coming in from either.
Other teams or from the business speaking of collaborating effectively, hearing is such a key part of that, and I have terrible hearing like between just like the background roar and tonight is with the really loud ringing. It's really hard for me to hear. And I've had my hearing tested multiple times and they say, oh, there's nothing that here in ads can do for that. Best of luck
to you. Okay, thanks, But I did get recently a pair of AirPod Pro AirPods Pro two and they've got like a background noise reduction feature on them and that's actually been super cool. So that's my pick for the week because it does a great job of like filtering out that roaring background noise, especially when you're in a big, open environment, so that you can hear the conversation going
on around you. The downside to it is that everyone sees you have AirPods in, so they assume that you're listening to the Adventures in DevOps podcast and not really interested in talking one on one.
So that's the.
Trade off there. But that's gonna be my pick of the week. Michael, what about you.
I guess mine goes. I know we spoke about the five k's a day, I think, but my background is rugby knocking seven bells of stuff out of people on a Saturday after a busy week of weird and wonderful things. Obviously that's gone a way you're getting older. I can't really do that anymore for that five k a day.
Just as Warren kind of put it as well, is it just takes you out of that that busy, busy mode, and I massively encourage it to any Everyone should be moving anyway for health and fitness, but that brain rest as well, Like I get some of the best ideas when I'm at least two and a half k away from my house. So just that mindfulness of escaping from something that you're potentially stuck on trying to fix takes you away from it like that. That seems to be
working for me at the moment. I'm up to one hundred and fifty odd days of continuous, continuous walking or continuous five k in the spirit of Devils nice.
You know. That's why I asked you about listening to podcast or music, because I've had a similar experience when I'm out on runs. It's number one meditative, but number two just so helpful for sorting the mental clutter and reflection. And I've gotten to the point now where I don't take any I don't listen to anything, no music, no podcast, nothing, just out there, just me and my thoughts. And that's been pretty wild.
Yeah, don't laugh more.
This is the Homer Simpson quote. All right, brain, I don't like you and you don't like me, but it's just the two of us. So we got to get through this, or let's get through this so I can get back to killing you with beer. Yeah, so that's I hear you on that. Like, getting out and moving is just great, not only physically, but it's so helpful
mentally as well. And I would I would highly recommend at least giving it a shot without anything, you know, just you and your thoughts, because it's going to be it's going to be wild. But so there we go. Michael, thank you so much. I really enjoyed having you on the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me guys.
I would love to have you back at any point. Just hit us up and let us know, and for sure, when we're ready for the I got to figure this is twenty twenty four, so when we're ready for the twenty twenty five edition of ninety Days of dev Ops. I look forward to having you back.
Awesome. We'll figure out what it needs to be. I'm sure there'll be some llms and AI associated to it as the trend keeps going.
Right, just ask chat GPT to create it for you.
Yeah, there you go, because there won't be any hallucinations in that right.
Awesome, Warren, thank you for joining me today of course, and for all of our listeners, thank you for listening, and we will see y'all next week