Bridget: [00:00:00] Pink-haired thought leadership as a service is valuable enough for Pivotal to pay me to do it.
Matty: Hey, it’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast that helps you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m your co-host, Matt Stratton, @MattStratton on Twitter.
Trevor: I’m your co-host, Trevor Hess, @TrevorGHess on Twitter.
Bridget: I’m your co-host, Bridget Kromhout, @bridgetkromhout on Twitter. Arrested DevOps is brought to you by 10th Magnitude, a company that figures if you’re listening to this podcast, you must be pretty cool. 10th Magnitude empowers businesses to better collaborate across teams and achieve IT transformation using cloud. They enable customers to innovate, automate, and accelerate by leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure. You can find out more at arresteddevops.com/tenthmagnitude.
Matty: This episode is also brought to you by Datadog, a monitoring tool that helps bridge the gap between operations and dev teams. Datadog brings together system metrics, changes, alerts, and events from over 70 common infrastructure tools, such as Chef, Docker, and AWS, so that dev and ops teams share their key data and alerts in a single place and collaborate on issues in real time. Datadog is available for a free 14-day trial at arresteddevops.com/datadog. And if you would like to be a sponsor of Arrested DevOps and have us completely mangle your message, you can simply email us at shows@arresteddevops.com and we can make a deal.
Bridget: [00:01:35] Do we make special deals for people who write really entertaining things that we get to read?
Matty: Absolutely, yeah. If you can make it funny, then we’ll give you a 10% discount on your sponsor fee.
Bridget: Nice.
Matty: It’s on the internet, that’s legal, right? What I just said.
Trevor: I don’t know if you both realize, but we’ve made it through 2 years now. Of Arrested DevOps.
Matty: Slightly over 2 years.
Trevor: Slightly over 2 years. I mean, it’s almost, you know, it seems like yesterday that we recorded the, you know, the year in review episode where I was like groveling to Matt for all the wonderful things he did for me.
Matty: And now the tables have turned.
Trevor: I mean, even before that, it seems like, you know, just, you know, the day before that we were recording the first, like, episode 0 that for some reason Matt hosted on iTunes for like 6 months.
Matty: It’s gone now. Don’t worry about that.
Bridget: Am I hearing correctly that there’s a lost episode of ADO?
Matty: Yeah, I use the word episode lightly. It’s basically me and Trevor talking to each other. It’s the equivalent of, is this thing on?
Trevor: [00:02:36] That’s exactly what it was. And I was like, why is this a thing? I was saying things on there that probably make me look really silly. And I really wish that wasn’t on the internet. But it’s OK. It’s OK.
Bridget: Were you saying, Watson, come here, I need you?
Trevor: I wish. That would have been more interesting.
Bridget: This is historic. We’re going to have to dig this up.
Trevor: Anyway, we’re back now in 2015. We’re going to talk about what 2015 was to us, the world of DevOps, and for each of us.
Bridget: Hey, what the heck? I’ll just start really quick by saying that it’s been a little over a year that I’ve been with ADO.
Trevor: It’s been fantastic.
Bridget: It went really fast. I feel like we just—
Matty: Our little show grows up so quickly.
Bridget: I feel like we just recorded that episode where Ducey and Clanton decided, they hatched their You know, dastardly scheme to run the goat farm, and now they have like I don’t know eight nine episodes of high quality enterprise grade. You know, it’s like bring DevOps to your large organization advice right there.
Trevor: [00:03:38] So that’s really funny to me because I I just met him in person today.
Bridget: Clinton?
Trevor: Yeah.
Bridget: Okay, I was gonna say not Ducey.
Matty: You’ve met Ducey before.
Trevor: I’ve met Ducey several times before. Ducey and I have had had hung out in London, so that was that was fun.
Bridget: Yeah, so you’re you’re in Minneapolis as if you’re watching the video. You’ll note that Trevor and I are now where Matt and I were when we did the—
Matty: It was the marketing episode. That was the episode that we did back earlier in the year when I was in mini and we recorded from Kromhout Studios Incorporated.
Trevor: And I was at my mom’s.
Bridget: Oh yeah, I forgot to turn my lower third off.
Matty: That’s okay. I think people figured out that Trevor’s in there too at this point. To be honest, if you’re watching our year-end review, I’m thinking you’re not a new listener, and you probably can tell the difference between Bridget and Trevor, mostly because Trevor’s hair is shorter and isn’t pink.
Trevor: Only slightly shorter at this point.
Bridget: [00:04:39] I would have gone with Trevor knows things about Windows and I do not.
Trevor: I would have gone with you can tell that there are 2 people in the frame and not just one.
Bridget: Logic.
Matty: Yes.
Bridget: Tell us about this year. I think this year is the year that of all of us, Matt spoke at the most DevOps Days events.
Matty: I did. I did the circuit. Which was kind of fun considering last year was the first time I, you know, helped organize the DevOps Days. And so I, uh, yeah, I actually spoke at a bunch of stuff this year, not nearly as much as you did, Bridget, but, you know, working on it. I gotta sell shit too. I can’t just go speak and be a thought leader, um, as you can now.
Bridget: Pink-haired thought leadership as a service is valuable enough for Pivotal to pay me to do it. I’m just saying.
Matty: They let me do it as long as, you know, we sell some stuff too. But yeah, um, I guess I think the first thing was, uh, DevOps Days Rockies was in April, sounds right.
Bridget: Um, but wait, wasn’t that after ChefConf?
Trevor: [00:05:40] I thought it was after ChefConf.
Matty: That was after ChefConf. Okay, so I spoke at ChefConf. I gave it— then ChefConf, that’s a good point. So the kind of special thing about ChefConf this year was it was the first time that I think all 3 of us were in the same place at the same time, uh, because I think there was crossing of paths at DevOps Days Chicago last year, but Trevor wasn’t quite there or whatnot. So we were all at ChefConf and we all spoke. Now Granted, Trevor and Bridget gave talks about things that were technical and useful, but really I think we can agree that mine was the most applicable to people’s DevOps work, which was about how to automate your use of animated GIFs in HipChat. That’s so important.
Bridget: I mean, I think that that’s key to a lot of enterprise IT transformations, right? And I’m not even joking here when I say that being stuck in process that no one likes is one of the things that everyone feels like, oh, we have to move from a process that’s really heavyweight and that we don’t like, to we just have to learn a new one and it’s going to be terrible. When they realize that the new one with chat apps also comes with animated GIFs, like, a weight lifts, and they realize, you know, I could actually have fun with this DevOps thing.
Matty: [00:06:51] There’s some delight in that. That was one of the things that, speaking back to ChefConf, that Adam Jacob talked about a little bit in his keynote, and he talked about bringing delight, and that was the one feature in Chef Chef Delivery that Adam required was support for animated GIFs. He gave the example, too, and he said, you think about the things that get stuff working, but then what are the things that add delight? For example, he’s like, the system profiler in Chef, he said, doesn’t it make you grin every now and again to think that it’s called Ohai? Isn’t that fun? Does it add any technical value to call it Ohai? No, but it makes it more delightful. I find when I do a lot of demos of Chef Delivery to customers, we show embedding YouTube videos in comments. And animated GIFs. And it always— and I’ll be in places where I’m thinking, I’m not even sure I want to show this part of the demo because this is the stodgiest enterprise I’ve ever been in, and they love it, you know. So it’s, it’s really kind of, I guess, giving the— like Bridget said, sort of like giving the permission to have fun with this stuff even though you’re doing like real business. You get to, you know, I mean, we’re people, we want to have some good time with that.
Trevor: [00:08:02] I mean, everybody has a good push-it GIF.
Bridget: Push it real good. And serious business also, like, no one can just concentrate on super dry serious stuff all the time. So they’re going to take a mental break at some point. And if they take the mental break and it doesn’t interrupt their productivity at all, then everybody is happy.
Matty: This is true. This is true. Better you’re posting animated GIFs in commit messages than posting them on Reddit.
Bridget: There you go. At least that’s driving the needle forward.
Matty: But Yeah, so we were at ChefConf. I was at Rockies, which was the first DevOps Days they did out there. I seem to have this thing where I like to go to DevOps Days the first time they ever do them. They did a great event. It was in a data center, which was really cool.
Bridget: Was it loud?
Matty: No, because it wasn’t in the raised floor part of the data center. It was just a big, empty room.
Bridget: I’m imagining everyone’s really cold and it’s really loud.
Matty: Well, I also thought it was kind of funny. They like, where they had tours of the data center and I’m thinking, how many people here are like, I really don’t care. Like, but there were some people that thought it was super cool. And I’m like, I think you, if you have a certain— it’s like the AC. What’s that?
Trevor: [00:09:18] Isn’t that just the AC?
Matty: That’s the tour is the air conditioning.
Bridget: No, no.
Trevor: That’s why it’s cool.
Matty: Oh, it’s cool.
Bridget: Yes.
Matty: It’s very cool and very hot. But I think some of us who’ve lived our lives in data centers, but then in the day, today’s world of virtualization, and cloud and things like that, you can absolutely be a pretty rocking DevOps person and not actually know what a hot-cool aisle looks like. So I could see how that could have been pretty neat for some people.
Trevor: Outside of a closet at Columbia, I have never been in a data center.
Matty: Oh, you should. You need to get someone to— you need to pull some strings to go see the Microsoft data center out in Elk Grove— or not Elk Grove Village. No, it’s off Route 83, but I’ve been in there. It’s pretty cool. Um, what they do. So you got Microsoft. Yeah, they have actually— well, it’s funny, they only have, you know, one, uh, one floor that’s like a hot-cold, you know, like a traditional raised floor, and they’ve got so much that’s just containers. And it’s, you know, they kind of talk about how every time they build it, they never build a data center the same way twice because every time they learn something and it’s different. It was just— it was fascinating. I mean, I’m— God bless people that work in facilities because it ain’t me, but someone’s keeping that stuff running.
Bridget: [00:10:37] Uh, not me anymore. I don’t miss it. I like—
Matty: yeah, that’s—
Bridget: I know I’m not worried about cable management arms anymore on those old ProLiant, or, you know, um, I’m not worried about the difference between designed-as and built-as plans for your data center, which, as it turns out, if you’re making a contract with HP to bring in $5 million worth of supercomputer and it’s like, you know, 2011 or whatever, um, it matters a lot how many square feet are available for them to put all those racks. And like, with like a day and a half to spare, I realized that the designed-as plans and the built-as plans didn’t match. Yeah, we had to move 2 racks of equipment in order to fix this problem. It was horrible.
Trevor: Darn those physics.
Bridget: Yeah, math.
Matty: And back in my day, we had to manage our cables and they were pretty and we liked it.
Bridget: Speak for yourself. We had undergraduates doing the cabling. They weren’t pretty.
Matty: Oh, but when you see some pretty, pretty cable management. Even today it makes me happy.
Bridget: They are nice.
Trevor: Okay, that is a good thing.
Matty: So anyway, back to things that happened in 2015 and not 1999. I was invited to also speak at the ALM Forum, which is really an application lifecycle management forum out in Seattle, and was sharing the docket with such luminaries as Pete Cheslock and J. Paul Reed, which meant that It was just really a lot of drinking. But it was kind of— it’s something I learned is that I’m actually really enjoying giving talks at non-DevOps-specific events. One of the reasons being is you don’t have to be super insightful, I guess, because you’re introducing some basic ideas, but they really resonate. You feel like if you’re going to want to try to go talk at Velocity, you have to step up to John Allspaugh. I’m like, okay, well, what smart thing am I going to say? That, that to all the people that go to Velocity are going to want to know about versus going in. I have a talk that I’ve actually given a bunch of times now called The 5 Love Languages of DevOps. And I actually gave it at DevOps Days Detroit. Um, but I found it to be really helpful and really useful at Agile conferences or app dev conferences and people who want to learn the beginnings of DevOps, you know, that maybe people going to DevOps Days are a little bit further advanced from. But, uh, it was a cool event. It was a lot of fun.
Bridget: [00:12:57] I should point out though that a lot of people go to Velocity for the first time all the time, and especially now that Velocity’s training day has a business track, a lot of those people stick around and try to go to talks, and they usually are going to end up in the culture track talks because those are the ones that feel more accessible. So I’m just putting that— and I know we’re going to talk about this later, but I’m just putting that pitch out there for everybody. Hopefully we’ll get this episode up before January 11th, and that’s your deadline for submitting a talk to Velocity Santa Clara for this summer.
Matty: I would say we will get it up by then considering it’s a year in review episode. I would be pretty falling down on the job to not post it before the end of 2015. It will come up in March. Mini was a lot of fun. I think the funny thing to me about Minneapolis, and I’ll let Bridget talk a little bit more about it because she kind of ran the show, but I had, I think, oh, I remember when the CFPs were closing and Bridget and I were just chatting on Slack, and I said, yeah, I almost submitted an Ignite talk where I was just gonna talk about tweets from Pete Chessbot. And Bridget said, why did you not do this? Why have you not done this? And I was like, ’cause it’s a stupid idea. And she’s like, no, you must do this now. And so, to give a little bit of background, and I’ll put a link to the video in the show notes, but if you’re not aware, Pete Chessbot is what’s called a Markov bot, which means it basically sucks in all the tweets that Pete Cheslock gives, at your tweets and it kind of mangles them together into somewhat coherent sentences. And it’s frighteningly smart. Um, the point is, at this point, I don’t— I think it’s pretty clear that Pete Chessbot is me. Uh, this may be me officially outing myself. Um, Pete thought he was very— Pete’s always known as me, but he found like a, like a GitHub issue comment I made once where I made— showed some code that was Pete Chessbot’s and that proved it. But, but the whole idea, and I just need to go on record here, uh, because this is probably the most seminal part of my entire DevOps experience of 2015 was I went to Pete and I said, look, for this to be funny, I have to not know what the slides are. So I said, I’m gonna send you a PowerPoint that has like 2 intro slides and the closing slide, and then I want you to populate the rest of the slides for the Ignite with tweets from Pete Chasbot and send it directly to Bridget, and I will not see it till we do it. So I’m like, okay, and very explicit about how this is gonna work. He He’s like, totally rad, I can totally do that. So then it’s time for Ignites, and it was like great, you know, John Willis’s son gave this cool talk about using R for baseball analysis. Jason Hand is right before me, he gets up there to give his, you know, chat ops talk, it’s awesome. So I’m walking up there and I’m like, I got 30 seconds to do a little bit of a— and I’m even thinking I can vamp because I know I’ve got 2 slides of intro. And the very first slide that comes up is a Pete Chesbott Out of nowhere, just completely disregarded. So now I have to waste the first 2 slides explaining the whole thing. I believe the very first lines of my talk are, fucking Cheslock.
Bridget: [00:16:08] Did he do that on purpose?
Matty: No, he just can’t follow directions. Because when I got back to my seat, he was texting me. He’s like, man, I am so sorry for ruining your talk. But I don’t remember. And I talked— I text him, I said, dude, I sent you a thing. He goes, no, no, no, you didn’t. And I went into my email right there sitting in the front row at DevOps Days Minneapolis and took a screenshot of the email I sent him. I literally said, dude, how do you DevOps while you’re illiterate? The good news, it was still funny. It still got lots of laughs.
Bridget: I think it was better that way because otherwise, you couldn’t have faked that level of being surprised.
Matty: That’s true. That’s true. That was the fun.
Bridget: I think it was better that way.
Matty: Okay, you get a bye on that, Pete. There’s just a couple other shoutouts I want to give to some events to consider that maybe are a little off the beaten path. There’s an event I’ve wanted to go to for years called That Conference and takes place in the Wisconsin Dells. And it’s really, they call it summer camp for geeks. It’s a very family-friendly software and operations conference. And I was invited to speak there this year and we went and it was really a cool event. And unfortunately I couldn’t stay through the whole week. I had to go visit a customer, but, you know, I was kind of surprised because I was there to give a talk about Chef, and I knew it was a very application-focused audience, and especially a .NET-focused audience. And my talk room was probably 60 to 70 people came to hear me talk about, you know, making infrastructure s’mores with Chef. And got interviewed by Channel 9 from Microsoft when I was out there. So it’s really going to— what it showed me more than anything else is that in all these different kind of non-traditional places you would think to find talking about DevOps, It’s kind of everywhere, you know. It’s not just at DevOps Days, it’s not just at Velocity or SCaLE, you know, I mean, the normal usual suspects. It’s kind of everywhere. Um, yeah, so Trevor, where did you go? You went to some cool things this year, didn’t you?
Trevor: [00:18:14] Yeah, I, I, this was actually my first year really kind of doing any kind of speaking anything. So, you know, I, I made my speaking debut at ChefConf.
Bridget: Your, your rapping speaking debut.
Trevor: Uh, yes, that’s true as well.
Matty: Uh, so I’ll put a link in the Trevor was more pleased at ChefCon for being recognized as the Fresh Prince of Azure than as a host of Arrested DevOps.
Trevor: No, I think at that point I was still embarrassed.
Bridget: So I was on the podcast.
Trevor: No, no, no, no, no, no, about the rap.
Bridget: The rap was great.
Trevor: What are you talking about? Absolutely. Like, now I’m totally all about it, but like then I was like, ah, it’s a Fresh Prince, I don’t really care for rap, and like all that. Like, now it’s like, now I show every client I go to, I’m like, that’s my icebreaker. Here, you may not have— you may not know me from the podcast, may not know me from anything, but here, watch this. Ice Broken. Oh my God, awesome. So that was my speaking and rapping debut was at ChefConf, which was fantastic. And I just—
Matty: [00:19:17] a wonderful experience. All about how ZS got flipped, turned upside down. Now, I used to know the whole thing because I was there when they were filming the video and having to watch. They tried to do it in one take.
Trevor: If you have— if you have an eagle eye, you will catch Matt Stratton In the video.
Bridget: What?
Matty: Which Julian Dunn made it onto the cutting room floor, unfortunately, because he didn’t make it for the final cut. That was the night that we recorded the DevOps Job, the episode with Katherine and Jake.
Bridget: Yeah, that was great.
Matty: Yeah, that was after hearing the Fresh Prince of Azure 59 times.
Bridget: I think we should just totally take credit from the podcast because after that Jake went and got a job at HashiCorp. So I’m going to say that, like, you know, talking about starting new DevOps jobs is just inspiring to everyone.
Matty: It is. It is. So come on our show and get a new job or promotion. I’m sure people have come on the show and gotten promoted before. Correlation, causation.
Trevor: I’ve gotten a new job since I’ve been on the podcast and 2 promotions.
Bridget: [00:20:18] That’s true. And Katherine Daniels got a promotion after coming on the podcast.
Matty: And I’m pretty sure Jill Jablinski has had about 25 different jobs since she came on the podcast. So that works.
Bridget: It seems like every time I turn around, she’s worked for a couple of really awesome places.
Matty: I mean, it’s like she just keeps going and doing cool stuff, you know? Julian’s had lots of different jobs too. I haven’t.
Trevor: I think last year, maybe not on the Year in Review podcast, but at some point, I’m pretty sure I mentioned sitting in the old 10th Magnitude offices, listening to the review board for the 2014 collection of speakers for DevOps Days Chicago, and hearing my talk on the cutting room floor.
Bridget: Oh, brutal.
Trevor: Well, this year, I got to speak at DevOps Days Chicago. So that— I didn’t have to go through that again.
Bridget: Nice.
Matty: And I would imagine on a topic that a year ago or a year prior you might not have thought was something you even would have wanted to speak about.
Trevor: That’s right. Yeah, I talked about how to contribute to open source because as someone in the .NET space who steals a lot of open source, I wasn’t super familiar with how I gotta put it back.
Matty: [00:21:32] So we just got a tweet from our pal IT Fargo, Eric Harris, who says, I got mentioned on the podcast this year and I got a new job too. Your power is great. So there you go, people. Tell your friends, if you’re looking for a new job, come on our show and great things happen, you know? But then again, the same thing I always tell people, ’cause I don’t know if you guys run into, if you all run into this as much as I do, but I take it as a compliment that this happens. People say, well, why? Well, first of all, I get the, why haven’t you invited me to be on the show yet? And I say, well, do you wanna be on the show? And then they say, well, I wanna be on the show. And I say, what do you wanna talk about? And they say, I don’t know. And I say, well, come back when you got something to talk about. Yep, figure that out.
Bridget: We can think of topics and we can think of guests, but we probably don’t have to think of both of them.
Matty: Come on, I mean, we are highly paid podcasters. We are the podcasterati here. We’re not doing all the work. We have people to do this. So listeners, put our show together for us.
Trevor: I’m gonna embarrass my friend, but he’s my friend, so I’m gonna do it anyway. Matt Walter, who is on the, the Windows to Linux, Linux to Windows episode, said to me, um, getting asked to be on the show is one of the highlights of his career.
Bridget: [00:22:41] Oh my goodness.
Matty: So I hope his— I hope he has a long career ahead of him.
Trevor: He’s fantastic. He’ll do just fine.
Matty: Yeah, no, he was great. I really liked that episode a lot. And that’s actually— so that was our— yeah, the episode Trevor— that was Trevor’s first, uh, solo project, um, and it was pretty awesome. And it was actually really— this is the thing that made me laugh. So I used to, before, before we did this show—
Bridget: timeout, timeout. I do want to talk about memorable episodes, but if that’s the direction you’re going, I do want to give a shout out to coming on the podcast as a host and having that help me change jobs.
Matty: So, okay, okay, then go do that.
Bridget: So let’s, let’s not forget that part.
Trevor: Let’s finish with conferences and come back.
Bridget: Let’s finish with conferences.
Matty: I’m not going to remember this now, but that’s okay.
Trevor: Let’s go.
Matty: Okay. Hey, look, I told you that this agenda was going to be loosey-goosey.
Trevor: It’s fine.
Matty: It’s probably fine.
Trevor: Ending on a similar note to Matt, the last conference I spoke at this year was Days of .NET, and I also spoke about Chef. Twice, actually, because one of my coworkers got a new job at Microsoft after being on the show.
Matty: [00:23:56] After being on the show.
Trevor: So I had to do her talk also. It was super cool just seeing how receptive people were at a, literally at a .NET conference, to the config management concept. Yeah. So I got to speak this year. It was fun.
Bridget: That’s awesome. I spoke a bunch this year too. That is the thing I do. I spoke at OSCON, Velocity New York and Amsterdam, ChefConf, KubeCon, a bunch more. I think there were like, I tried to do a rough count and it was like 23 different events. So we’ll see if I can beat that in 2015 or 2016, because in mid-2015, because of probably, I’m going to assume it’s just because of being on Arrested DevOps, I did get a new job, as one does.
Matty: As one does when they’re on the show.
Bridget: Yes, and I was on the show regularly enough that I went and got a new job, and I work at Pivotal, and it’s pretty awesome. And, uh, I actually just found out today that I’m going to be giving a tutorial, um, at OSCON in May in Austin about BOSH. So if you would— and so help me, Stratton, do not bleep that.
Matty: [00:25:08] I’m not— I’m—
Trevor: yeah, I’ll be honest and say I thought about saying boop.
Bridget: So I think that’ll be pretty cool. Also, one other fun thing that we got to do is I got to do some co-presentations this year, which I have done before, but not for some years. This year, I got to co-present at ChefConf and at Velocity New York with my former coworker, Pete Shannon, from Java Fever. I got to co-present at meetups in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and New York with my current coworker, Casey West, from Pivotal. I really enjoy the 2-person presentation when you are kind of talking to each other. I guess it feels more like a podcast. Like, I like that the conversational style of you two are having a conversation and the audience is invited to listen, you know, as opposed to a, like, I have my 8 minutes and now you have your 7 minutes. And it’s like, no, that’s for the birds. I like the interactive part. That’s what I wanted to say before we moved on to all the episodes we love.
Matty: Great. Well then tying into that from a transition point, so before I forget, and then we’ll talk about all the episodes we love, but maybe this is working backwards. But the thing that I, so I did love the episode, this with the Windows to Linux and back again, or whatever it was called. Uh, but what was funny is it reminded me of days gone past before I was on a podcast, and when I listened to The Ship Show and Food Fight and DevOps Cafe, and I always listen in my car. And I, I didn’t remember, I think it was a Food Fight episode, but there was someone on there who was talking about Windows and didn’t know what they’re talking about. And I just remember yelling. I do a lot of time yelling at the radio in my car when I listen to About something being wrong, and I want to argue about it. And that’s the beautiful thing about having a show is you do that, right? And so there was something, and I honestly don’t remember what it was that Trevor and Matt were talking about. I’m like, “But no, no, no!” And then the funny thing is, whatever one of the things was, I do distinctly remember. Then we got feedback from from Rob, the guy who created Chocolatey, who was like commented on the post and was like, “Well, well, this is not exactly right,” and blah blah blah. And then this has actually turned into. And then we said, great, why don’t you come on the show and talk about it? And Trevor’s recorded that, we just haven’t released it yet. But, uh, it was really— it’s, it’s, it’s— that’s one of the things that I guess is a new thing, something new that happened in 2015 that didn’t happen before, was there have been episodes of Arrested DevOps that I wasn’t on. And that was kind of a little— it was weird how, like, I was really resistant to it, and then we did one, and then I didn’t care anymore. I was like, oh, that’s fine. Okay, I guess I can’t be on that one. No big deal. But it’s kind of like fun to like, cause I edit them. Right. And so I think that this, uh, no, it wasn’t the disasters episode. I’m trying to remember which was that. Was it the building the ops team? I think was the first one.
Trevor: [00:27:58] No, the first one was, um, it was a cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience.
Bridget: Yeah.
Matty: Yeah. I just don’t remember the order of them, but yeah. And I remember listening to it as they edited it and going, wow. And then even, especially in that episode, kind of even thinking like, it’s kind of good I wasn’t on this cause I can’t think of a thing I would have contributed to this episode, but I certainly loved it.
Trevor: I always feel bad when I don’t talk during an episode, but sometimes I just get so engrossed in what other people are saying that I don’t have anything that’s substantive to add, especially on that episode. I was like, wow, this is just all super interesting. I could listen to both of you talk about this for, like, 12 more hours, and I would be happy.
Bridget: That was definitely a high point for me this year. I really enjoyed having Lindsay Holmwood and Courtney Nash on to talk about cognitive neuroscience. And I got to hang out with both of them in Amsterdam at Velocity, which was awesome. I mean, Lindsay lives in Australia, so it’s not like I see him all the time.
Matty: Yeah, so you get what you can, you know. I think we had a couple banner episodes, and not to say that— I mean, I don’t really— I will, I will go on the record and say I’m not going to name them, but there were episodes in our first year that I wouldn’t be upset if they disappeared from the internet in their entirety. They weren’t our favorite work or not, but I don’t think we had any turkeys this year. I’m pretty, pretty pleased when I went and looked back at all our stuff and I was like They were all really good. And just so we’re clear, this sounds like an awful lot of self-congratulatory stuff, but to Trevor’s point, I mean, most of our content is amazing because of the smart people that we have come on. I mean, we had some, I mean, when I kind of look at like the things that we talked about this year, and if I were to think about when we started the show, I mean, it wouldn’t even have occurred to me that we could have had this. Early in the year, we had Jeffrey Snover, and then Jessica DeVita also came on the show. We talked about DevOps and doing that on the Microsoft side. That particular episode is our most viewed YouTube video ever.
Bridget: [00:29:56] Oh, and Jessica got a job at Chef after coming on the show.
Matty: Jessica got a job at Chef.
Trevor: And Jeffrey got a promotion.
Matty: He did?
Trevor: Stover got the promotion to technical fellow or whatever.
Matty: Wasn’t he already that by that time?
Trevor: I don’t know.
Matty: I don’t track his career.
Bridget: Senior super chef. Special secret fellow.
Trevor: Yeah, yeah.
Matty: Also, by the way, we got a tweet from Glenn Sardi, @GlennSardi, and he says, I listened to Arrested DevOps and now I move countries to do the DevOps. So, you know, we are— we need to figure out a way to like get a piece of all this like promotion stuff that’s happening. So if you get a promotion from being on the show, you owe us a cut, a high five. I was thinking you get Trevor a high five, you give me $1,000, or you just tweet about it, or leave us a review on iTunes. There you go. There we go. That’s right. The least you can do if you— okay, Jeffrey, the least you can do for being promoted to technical fellow due to being on the show is leave us a review on iTunes. I think that’s realistic.
Trevor: So wait, that actually reminds me of— so my mom was at a Christmas party with the person who, when I was in 4th grade, first taught me how to write HTML. And she was trying to remember the name of the Microsoft person I told her that I’d met and added me on LinkedIn. And it was pretty funny because she thought it— she said, Jeffrey Snowbird.
Matty: [00:31:17] That’s what, that’s what we’ll call Jeffrey later when he retires and goes down to Florida in the winter. Jeffrey Snowbird. I love it. I was super— an episode that, again, talking about being the fly on the wall, was the Docker episode with James Turnbull, which I predicted and I think was accurate, was gonna be the Bridget and James talk about Docker and Matt like makes tacky jokes sometimes because that’s the level of what he knew anything about. But I learned a lot just from being on that show.
Trevor: So wait, you mean like the first half of the show in general when I would just sit there and make snarky comments?
Bridget: Docker, Docker, Docker.
Matty: Yeah. Glenn says he’ll buy us a beer when we’re in Portland, so we’ll have to hunt him down. No, but that Docker episode I thought was— and it was, it was a lot about not just about Docker, but we talked about just sort of some of the prevailing things and misconceptions that existed around there. Uh, I thought that was, was great. We, we snagged Andrew, Andrew Cliché, for finally, you know, although to be fair, it’s not like we had tried very hard before then.
Bridget: [00:32:20] Um, he’s a hard one to track down.
Matty: He’s a hard one to track down. And, and I was thinking about it when I was making the list. I’m like, oh, when we finally got Andrew. And then I was like, we also finally got him the first time we asked him to be on the show.
Bridget: Listen, no, we strategically asked him to be on the show when we had him for a day and a half in Minneapolis.
Matty: We knew where he was going to be, and we could trap him in the auditorium. Technically, that was the person. The person now that we have been tracking down and unsuccessful was John Willis. Technically, John was on that episode with Andrew heckling him from the audience. But we did have John, we recorded an episode with him about a week ago, which should be going live soon, talking about DevOps Days in Review. But one of the funnier things about that is that John told us, he’s like, I was like, well, it’s about time you asked me. Then I went back and thought about it. We’re like, you’ve asked me like a dozen times. We’re like, it just hasn’t worked out. So, but it was— that was a win. And I— y’all, I’m, uh, looking forward to you being able to hear that, that episode. He was great to have on. And I’ve talked before about I would not be doing anything at all that I’m doing today if it wasn’t for, you know, uh, Damon Edwards and John Willis. So it’s huge to have had them both, uh, participate in the show. Um, so Trevor, I don’t see— you didn’t write any notes in here, but what, what were some of your more memorable moments of, uh, of episodes or moments in of 2015?
Trevor: [00:33:48] Oh, that’s a good question. I mean, I think, you know, one of the most interesting and exciting episodes was actually at ChefCon when we were all in the same room recording an episode together, because that never happens. Which is actually one reason why this episode is pretty interesting, because I’m actually sitting here with Bridget. It’s kind of fun, which is awesome because, you know, having that third dimension to a human being is really cool. With our special glasses.
Matty: We discussed earlier in the green room that we’ve don’t like 3D, so you will probably never see Arrested DevOps in 3D unless you see us at a conference. Yeah, so we should figure—
Bridget: we should try to do more live at conference stuff if we can.
Trevor: Mm-hmm.
Bridget: If we find another conference we’re all at, or 2 of us.
Matty: Well, Trevor and I tried doing some stuff at Community Summit, and it was challenging. We recorded— it was a good place to record interviews. We’ve got 2 interviews that, again, listeners, you haven’t heard yet, but they’ll be coming out in the near future. We had an interview with Dr. Nicole Forsgren talking about measurement and sharing in DevOps, and then Phil Dibowitz from Facebook talking about open source. And that was kind of nice to be able to do that. But yeah, we’ll have to figure out some events that we’ll get ourselves all to this year so we can record that and maybe get some listeners in there.
Bridget: [00:35:08] Absolutely.
Matty: Because then they can get a new job and pay me $1,000.
Bridget: Or a promotion. Hey, we have another success story. Kyle Kingsbury came on the podcast, we talked about failure in distributed systems, and then he actually opened his own consultancy, um, working specifically with his Jepsen tool to help people, you know, discover failures in their distributed systems.
Matty: Well, congratulations, Kyle. That’s awesome. I had not heard about that.
Bridget: So it’s very, it’s very exciting. And also, that was an episode that was so much fun. I know that we, we had, uh, some audio issues because, and this is Special announcement to guests: we are going to be doing everything we can to make sure we can capture your audio well, which will include a speed test if you are in your San Francisco office on a questionable Wi-Fi. Matt does not want to have to edit out all the places where your Wi-Fi drops, you know, half of each word.
Trevor: That was that was really funny, actually. So when when Rob and I were recording, Rob Reynolds and I were recording the chocolate episode. For whatever reason, there was like we think it was his laptop, like the fan, and so like he has like a nice podcast. Setup, but like the whole time there was like this— we spent like 45 minutes trying to tweak his audio settings so that it wasn’t there. I’m actually— that’s one of the things I need to talk to Matt about, is maybe there’s a way we can trick Audible— not Audible, Audacity— into making that white noise go away.
Matty: [00:36:38] So this is becoming the podcast about podcasting. If you would like to know more about tricks like this, I recommend you actually listen to the podcast, The Audacity to Podcast by Daniel J. Lewis, which is really awesome. So if you want to know how I learned all my podcasting tricks, it’s from Daniel J. Lewis at theaudacitytopodcast.com.
Bridget: Nice. And all of the— for more year in review, I gotta say giant shout out to Matt for handling all of the editing and sourcing of, uh, the occasional person who will write show notes, which is clearly not us, um, or the complete overhaul of the website, like all of the actual, you know, unsung hero labors that go into, you know, the wrangling iTunes, like all of the things that go into making this episode or these podcasts actually appear in, you know, Overcast or whatever for you. What makes that happen is Matt. So in case there was any doubt, like that, we gotta, we gotta like Trevor and I both need to like, you know, it’s like, no, Matt, totally metal.
Trevor: [00:37:42] Absolutely. So after, after editing that episode, I have a totally like— well, first of all, I have a whole new respect for all the things that Matt does to really make this happen. So again, thank you, Matt. Um, but alongside that, it’s also kind of interesting and fun.
Matty: Oh, it is. It’s, it’s, uh, it just gets, you know, it’s tedious. It’s tedious. And it’s one of the things that like, and I’ve talked to my my, you know, kind of friends in the podcasting community. And yeah, it’s like the procrastination. There’s 2 things podcasters procrastinate on more than anything else, and they’re writing show notes and editing. And you, like today, I actually had like 3 episodes I just, I had, ’cause I’m off this whole week and I was like, I’ve got a whole day today, I had nothing to do. And I’m like gonna sit down and I’m just gonna power through and cut a bunch of episodes so they can be ready and scheduled up. And what did I end up doing? I ended up going and doing a whole bunch of like minor administrivia on the ADO website. That was total, like, you know, procrastination. And then I watched, you know, Ant-Man and the Martian. So, so if you’re wondering why there’s not fresh new Arrested DevOps episodes on the CW, that’s why, because I watched Ant-Man and the Martian. CW, you know, it’s a fresh new One Tree Hill.
Bridget: [00:39:01] Terrified if we were actually featured on the CW.
Matty: You want to know something super rad though? I’m gonna check this out I came across. So if you have a Roku and there is an app in there that’s for podcasts, and because we’re part of a tech network, a podcast network called the Tech Podcast Network, so you can basically like find Arrested DevOps directly inside of your Roku. And like I stumbled across and I was like, oh my God, there we are. So, um, so that’s kind of a cool thing. Yeah, we actually, uh, I wonder how many listeners we have from Tech Podcast Network. If you are listening to us through the Tech Podcast Network and not directly through Arrested DevOps, shoot us a a tweet because I’m kind of curious because that’s an awesome network and I’m really pleased that we’re part of it, but I have no idea if we get listeners from it. Um, a couple things on those notes when you talked about redesigning the site and the show notes as well. So one of the things that we did with the show— with the site redesign is it’s all built— so first of all, all the source for it is on GitHub and it’s all dynamically— it’s all statically generated. So any changes to the content on the site are all done through commits. So if you find any errata in the show notes, or you want to add some show notes for us or something that you see, uh, you can send fixes. You know, pull requests are welcome, and it’s at github.com/arresteddevops/ado-hugo. And there’s a link to it somewhere on the website itself. But yeah, if you sit there and like— it was— and nothing— and by the way, like, if you find something that’s wrong and like you tell us about it, we’re not going to say like, PR is welcome, go fix it for us, we’ll fix it. But you could do it yourself. It might be fun. Like, Like somebody pointed out to me the other day, now weeks after we published it, that our Test-Driven Infrastructure episode was titled Test Drive Infrastructure. I was like, yeah, that means something different, doesn’t it? I finally fixed that one this morning. That’s awesome. You want to talk about some stats?
Bridget: [00:40:59] Sure.
Matty: Before we kind of go into some bigger DevOps stuff. I just crunched a few numbers. I wanted to calculate the percentages, but then I didn’t get around to it. To it. So if we talk about just visits to arrestedevops.com, we had over 10,000 more site visits in 2015 than in 2014, and that’s like a 50% increase, I think. I don’t know, I don’t know how to do percents. We had 14,000 last year, 24,000 this year. That’s a lot of people. This is the one that I’m, that I’m really like, kind of when I put the number on paper. So in 2014, there were 76,000 listens to various episodes. That’s a lot of listens. I remember looking at this number at the end of the year last year and saying, wow, a lot of people are listening to us yammering away. You want to know how many in 2015? 204,000. That’s like 3 times as many or something.
Bridget: Almost 3 times as many.
Matty: Audience, we love you.
Trevor: Thank you so much.
Matty: Our most listened to episode in 2015 was our Docker episode, which makes sense because DevOps means Docker, right? Hype cycle. Yep, in 2014, we would average, every episode averaged between 2,500 and 3,000 listens. In 2015, that’s doubled to between 5,000 and 7,000 listens per episode. And I already mentioned that our most watched YouTube video was the Microsoft episode. That was an episode that kind of blew up on Reddit, and I think that’s why there’s a lot of views of it. And we’ve had a lot of awesome linkage this year, like a lot more incoming links from people who are writing blog posts about awesome podcasts that they love, plus us, I guess, or places to get started DevOps. You know, Bridget was featured in a list of like the top 20 awesome women of DevOps or something like that. I apologize for not remembering the title, but that’s what it was. I don’t remember either, but whatever it was, it had a link to Arrested DevOps and we get a lot of traffic from it. And you were in good company. I kind of— it was fun to read that list and go like, I feel like Jeff Spicoli and, you know, Fast Times at Ridgemont High be like, I know that dude, you know.
Bridget: [00:43:08] Uh, so like, I follow her on Twitter.
Matty: And yeah, actually it’s always fun when you’ll get that like list of people you should follow and you like look and the follow button’s grayed out on all of them because you’re like, I already knew that, thanks TechCrunch.
Bridget: Um, but see, if you’re getting your news from the, uh, Banana Stand newsletter or from this podcast or from Twitter, you probably don’t need TechCrunch to tell you what to do.
Matty: You probably don’t. So before we kind of move into our checkouts, I want to talk a little bit about what we’ve seen over this year in the overall world of DevOps, you know, kind of some of your observations. Bridget, what have you kind of seen this year?
Bridget: Oh, this year has been so interesting because I finally get to do what you two do, where you go visit customers. Like, I’ve actually gotten to go and spend a bunch of time with, you know, actual customers who are at large organizations of the sorts who are going to have folks like me show up. And it’s, it’s fascinating, the large organizations, the usual suspects, the ones you would think of, and then the ones that you wouldn’t think of, you know, like government types, um, who are working really hard to actually change and to move more quickly. There are, of course, the occasional people who would very much like to have some of that DevOps, but they would like to know how they can do it without changing anything. We’re like, good luck, have fun, that’s not going to work out so well for you. But, um, but they, they do, there’s like a hunger there. They do want it.
Matty: [00:44:40] I think this has been the year that the C-levels get it right. Um, and I know that’s something that, that, that, you know, we’ve seen is that these are coming down. I hate to say mandates, but they’re part of the strategic planning for these organizations now. And when, when you marry that with, you know, kind of the boots on the ground folks, kind of that ground well is where you’re seeing some stuff start to happen. So I mean, at least we’re getting to the point that I think a lot of these organizations are starting to understand the need to do, you know, what we call at Chef the right hard thing. You know, the problem though is sometimes, to your point Bridget, you know, is sometimes organizations, they don’t want to do the hard part of it because it is hard, right? It’s, it’s getting into the devil of the details.
Bridget: And this is actually— before we, before we move past that, I would love to have Trevor tell us about the stuff that he’s seen lately that giant organizations might be doing right there.
Trevor: [00:45:47] So for me this year, it’s been a lot of Windows places understanding test-driven infrastructure. Yes, it’s a poke at you, Mac. It wouldn’t be Arrested DevOps if I don’t poke fun at Matt.
Bridget: Listen, kid.
Matty: Hey, I get to edit it. Let’s see who comes off looking smart now.
Trevor: Well, I mean, I suppose it’s easy to make me sound not. But yeah, so seeing a lot of Windows shops go down that configuration management with testing and really understanding how it can help them accelerate and get that next piece of the DevOps concept underneath their belt. Most of them have some semblance of, or in a lot of cases, actually, a strong presence in test-driven applications. But on the infrastructure side, that story doesn’t exist yet until this year, where people really have started saying, hey, how do we do this? How can we leverage that goodness?
Bridget: [00:47:02] And is this— is this the devilish details that you’re getting to, Matt?
Matty: Yeah, I think so. And I think it’s a lot of— there’s a lot of fuzzy ideas, which is good that the ideas are happening, but you also get a little bit of new shiny syndrome coming in. I’ll tell you, like, it’s not uncommon, you know, for me to come into a shop and they’re asking about Chef, and I get asked almost every time, well, what’s your container story? And I’ll say, great, well, that’s cool. What are you doing with containers? Well, I don’t know, but we’re gonna do something with them. And you’re like, okay, well, come back to me when you know what you wanna do and we can talk about how we can help you. But, you know, that’s like saying, what’s your computer strategy? Well, we’re gonna have some computers and they’re gonna do some thinking for us. Okay, great.
Bridget: This is like at a— I was at an Agile Day conference here in the Twin Cities. And we had, they asked those of us who spoke to host an open space about our topic. And some of my, since my, I had spoke, Speaking about platforms, maybe you don’t want to build one from scratch, and if you do, here are some of the things you definitely want to think about, because I’ve done it wrong a bunch. But then they asked us to host an open space about this, and one guy came to it and said, so my VP says that this year we’re going to do microservices.
Trevor: [00:48:25] Oh, good.
Bridget: So what do I do now? Are there any downsides to microservices I should know about? Because it’s something that my VP really wants.
Trevor: I was like, oh dear.
Bridget: This is going to take the whole hour, isn’t it?
Matty: Well, again, it’s like, yeah, it’s taking that. And it makes me think back to Bridget, like to your talk you gave at ChefConf about, you know, the Docker plus configuration management scenario at Drama Fever, right? Where you can start with the Docker, all the things, and then go, well, wait a minute, maybe this is, hey, guess what? There’s not a panacea, right? Or I get this a lot. People are like, well, can you run Chef Server in a container? And it’s like, well, you can, but why again would you want to do that? Um, well, because things are better when they’re in containers, right? I think the other thing that I’m seeing a lot of is kind of— there is still— I’m glad— well, I will say one thing that I think disappeared in 2015 that makes me happy is this whole notion of enterprise DevOps versus regular DevOps. That was a big theme in 2014, which was the, oh, well, the enterprise does it differently, and you get the culture is for yogurt stuff. And the enterprise DevOps is AAMs, no CAMs. And I think props to DOSE, to DevOps Enterprise Summit. I think that just put that all on its ear, right? To say, okay, we can have a place where we talk about DevOps in the enterprise, but guess what? It’s all still the same. But that being said, I think a lot of times those folks who do not work in an enterprise environment, or not even from enterprise, I think also sometimes it’s just a company that’s been around for a long time that doesn’t have the luxury of being totally greenfield. Uh, things move slowly, potentially. Sometimes they move really fast, but it’s sometimes they might just be getting— and I’m sorry that maybe your new hip containerized Uberific, you know, microservice, you know, artificially intelligent Lambda doodle thingy is way better than, you know, using Puppet to manage VMs. But guess what? That doesn’t mean that you’re right and they’re wrong. You know, um, not everybody can Lambdify their doodles to drive an Uber. You know, to ship money around, right?
Bridget: [00:50:37] I think it’s also important to remember, though, that the minute you’ve committed something and rolled it out to prod, somebody wants to do something different. And oh, look, now you have some legacy. DramaFever had been around for 5 years and was Dockerizing all the Dockers. And yet, you know, they’re still around, obviously, but, like, you know, at the time I was giving that talk at ChefConf, they’d been around for almost 5 years. They were Dockerizing all the Dockers. Talkers. We still hadn’t figured everything out, and we had legacy stuff that we hadn’t even containerized yet. There was one piece I was very happy that we finally got that migrated off, like my last week at Drama Fever. It was like Tim Gross and I were like going through this migration process because it’s one of those things where, oh God, he didn’t want to leave that for anyone else to try to clean up. And it was nice that he actually was able to get almost all of it like completely gone. This is, this is the sort where it’s like, even if you’re a small org, you’re still going to have things that you did yesterday that you still have to deal with. So, I mean, there is no such thing as greenfield, you know, unless you’re in some sort of Groundhog Day scenario.
Matty: [00:51:41] Right, right. Yeah. So greenfield was the wrong term. I mean, I guess I think back to, we talked about this a little bit on the Puppet episode with Erik Sorensen, but one of the things Luke Kennise mentioned in his keynote at PuppetConf is it’s like less than 15% of organizations are doing anything with configuration integration management. There’s— that’s the thing we forget about because we live in this echo chamber where everyone’s like, oh, Puppet and Chef is old and busted because I should be doing immutable Lambdas or whatever thing. And it’s like, you are like 1% of 1% of 1% of IT in the whole world, you know? So anybody that’s moving the needle is a good thing in my mind, and we shouldn’t be like talking down at it, right?
Bridget: Like, actually, I think this is— that’s one of those conversations that I like now that I’ve spent some time talking to I mean, I’ll tell them, obviously, Pivotal has some enterprise software that we would be happy to sell you. We also have open-source software that is the entire core of the product that we would be happy to have you go and look at on GitHub, and maybe download, and maybe run. It’s a lot more valuable and important to have you do something that’s going to work for you than to have you write us a check and then later come back and say, we’re not using this, this doesn’t work for you, or this doesn’t work for us. Why did you sell us this thing that we weren’t ready for? And it’s like, I think that there’s a lot of pressure in sales to, um, and in, uh, you know, upper echelons of IT organizations to say, we’re going to write a check, or, you know, we’re going to sign a PO, we’re going to solve this. And it’s like, you can’t just, you can’t solve all of your people problems by throwing money at them, or this would be a peaceful and serene world indeed. But this, that is not something that is actually feel. Everyone has to actually buy in and do the work. It’s like, yeah, of course, we work for vendors, that’s great. We would very much like to have you. It’s kind of one of those things like, is the answer Cloud Foundry or Docker or Chef? What we should be saying is, the answer is, what are you going to use? What are you going to get value out of? What are you going to actually enable change in your organization with? In that case, if you’re going to use one or more of these tools, please use them. This is how you make— this is how you make the world better. And like, I don’t care which one you use, just use something.
Matty: [00:54:05] Well, right, it’s about asking the right questions, you know, because you’ll run into this constantly, you know, kind of in a pre-sales world with the, well, why should I use Chef over doing something over Cloud Foundry? I mean, this is kind of a silly question in the first place, but you know, and the thing is, what question What question are you actually asking? Because the question isn’t, should I use this thing or this thing? It’s like, how do I do this thing? I think a lot of times people have a hard time getting their arms around. Why that’s hard, that can be very, very hard to distill that question down in complex organizations that have years upon years upon years of political layers, of ownership layers. It’s very common in organizations. And for, I’m sure, good reasons is why we got there. And I know I felt this way before. People want to have ownership of things. And we come along with some of this stuff and we go, well, here’s tooling that crosses boundaries. Like, but who owns it? And you’re like, well, you all do. And they’re like, get out of here, hippie. You know, I need to own it because I need to know whose throat to choke when it doesn’t work, blah blah blah. And the good news, the thing that’s most important is that it’s happening, you know what I mean? We continue to see great success, and, and that’s the beautiful thing more than anything else that I feel is empowering over the last few years, is companies willing to talk about what’s happening behind their firewall. You know, companies like Target talking about their transfer, because then when you know someone can do it, you know you can do it, right? Like, the hardest thing is being the adventurer, being Lewis and Clark or whatever, and, you know, going into the wilderness and not knowing that anyone ever made it back alive. But if you know that Ross and Heather made it back alive through the DevOps wilderness, then you might say, hey, I can strap on a pack and give it a shot because I know that it’s possible.
Bridget: [00:56:09] And yeah, and I don’t know if you’ve made it up to Target’s campus and seen the dojo action. I mean, I have been up there and seen it, and I know you’ve been up there and seen it.
Trevor: It’s so awesome.
Bridget: It’s awesome that they— this is, you know, we were mentioning Ross Clanton and Heather Mickman from Target, and people can look in the show notes, perhaps we’ll link to some of these talks, but they’ve given great talks at, like, DevOps Enterprise Summit and DevOps Days Minneapolis and other conferences in the past. But the idea is that Target is investing in making sure that they actually have Um, not just that small group of people who is ready to— ready and able to have change, but they’re actually like investing in making sure that they have— sorry, they’re, they’re investing in making sure that they have, um, they’re bringing that change to their whole organization. So they take a group of people, they bring them through and give them 30 days to do a challenge Then pair with them, hold their hands, give them a collaborative space to work in, and make sure that those people feel empowered to actually take that change that they’ve learned and take it back out into their wider organization. I think that organizations that do stuff like that, whether they’re working with 10th Magnitude or ThoughtWorks or Pivotal Labs or whatever, or in dojos internal to their organization, this idea of change isn’t something you just talk about it in a meeting, at a conference room, whatever, and then suddenly it’s magically possible. It’s like, no, you actually— it’s practice. You have to actually practice it and work on it with your team. At that point, you can actually see real change.
Matty: [00:57:56] If you have an upcoming conference you’d like to see promoted on Arrested DevOps, you can go ahead and fill out a handy form we have at arresteddevops.com/conf, as in C-O-N-F. F as in short for conference. Upcoming conferences, there will be a one-day DevOps Days Los Angeles on January 22nd. Velocity Santa Clara, I think that’s the Velocity that’s for, has their CFPs open until January 11th. Over the next couple weeks, it’s holiday time, so I’m gonna be just out and about with the kids and doing as little work as possible and maybe editing some episodes of ADO.
Bridget: Yeah, and I’m gonna be mostly Mostly up in the Northwoods of Minnesota, hopefully snowshoeing on frozen lakes, but if they’re not frozen enough, then just doing some winter hiking at Bayloon Lake. Then I’ll be in Toronto January 9th through 13th. Then it’s pretty far out still, but hey, why not? I am gonna be in Bangalore for Agile India.
Matty: [00:58:57] That will not be a conference opportunity. We’re doing an episode.
Bridget: Probably.
Matty: Most likely. Most likely not.
Bridget: March 18th at Agile India, if you wanna see me speak in Bangalore. That’s not the upcoming Fortnight, but that is if you wanna take the time to get your tickets to India now.
Trevor: I’ll be in New Hampshire, New York, New Hampshire through the New Year. Then the first few weeks of January, I’ll be in Minneapolis.
Bridget: So part of that time I will be in Toronto, but maybe I’ll see you some of it, right?
Matty: Yeah, I’ll be in Seattle the first week of January if anybody’s around. Uh, so let’s do some checkouts and, uh, let’s get the heck out of here, uh, and close out the year. So Bridget, what do you got?
Bridget: Um, I want everyone to go check out cloud.gov. Uh, so if, if your organization says like we are too old, too entrenched, we can’t possibly innovate and change, they can go take a look at what the fine folks from AT&F are doing. So if the US government can innovate and change, like, you probably can too.
Matty: [01:00:06] Trevor, you got anything?
Trevor: Yeah, I don’t know if I recommended it yet or not, but Fallout 4 was a lot of fun. I watched something recently that was also fun, but I don’t remember what it was. I’ll put it in the show notes if I remember.
Matty: Sounds memorable.
Bridget: But it wasn’t The Force Awakens, which you haven’t seen yet. How is that even possible?
Matty: That, however, is my first checkout.
Trevor: I’ll lie and say I’m waiting to see with my brother when I go home.
Bridget: Huh? All right.
Matty: Uh-huh.
Bridget: But I know that Matt does, in fact, have— Matt has seen it.
Matty: Yes, I have. That was my first checkout is The Force Awakens. Go see it. Don’t get all wound up in all sorts of posturing and crap on the internet. It’s frickin’ good. Best one since Empire, period. Don’t argue with me. You’re wrong.
Bridget: I agree with you. I’ve seen it twice already. It’s good.
Trevor: La, la, la, la, la, la, la.
Matty: Oh, I’m sorry. Was it a spoiler? Tell you the movie was good.
Bridget: I had someone complain to me on Twitter.
Trevor: Setting expectations.
Bridget: Whatever. I had somebody complain to me on Twitter because I said, hey, good job, JJ, you had, uh, multiple female characters with agency and you had minimal lens flare.
Matty: [01:01:16] Yeah, I was expecting to be surprised by the lens flare.
Bridget: Well, and I had somebody say like, you know, spoiler alert, and I’m like, these are not spoilers, right? This is like the kind of stuff you get in a movie review.
Matty: And I will tell you that due to some jackass commenter on an article that was completely unrelated to Star Wars, I was actually spoiled on something major. And you know what? My life didn’t end and I still enjoyed the movie, so whatever.
Bridget: There we go.
Matty: On to more positive things. Today I found this cool website called devopsconferences.org, and it’s a list of, as its name would imply, a bunch of DevOps conferences and when their CFPs are and all sorts of cool stuff. If you follow them at DevOps Conf’s on Twitter. That Twitter account tweets out the upcoming stuff. I was talking to the guy who runs it, Neil, and he’s talking about figuring out how to make it a little more collaborative and stuff. So we might be— we’ve been looking to add this kind of a feature to ADO, so we’ll see how that works. And then finally, I want to say, speaking of people who got new jobs after being on the show, I can’t recommend enough— so Sasha Rosenbaum gave a talk at DevOps Days Silicon Valley called Single Person That Failure. I will put a link to it in the show notes. It’s a really, really fun talk. Really did a really great job. And speaking of talk, occasionally we remember that we have a feature where we recommend another podcast. I don’t know if we recommended this one before or not, but I’m gonna do it anyway. The show is called Software Defined Talk. You can find it at kote.io/podcast/sdt. Hey, Kote, get a real domain, make it easier for people to find find it, or just Google Software Defined Talk Podcast, or check out our show notes. It’s really one of my favorite technology podcasts, and I think it’s because of the entire I don’t give a fuck attitude that the show tends to have.
Bridget: [01:03:09] Plus lots of really good advice about Costco.
Matty: Oh yeah, yeah, that’s true. And he said— and I have to admit, in the episode they did after DevOps Days Detroit, Kote said, like, really nice things about me and literally referred to me as a class act.
Bridget: So, so, Kote, you are a And Koti is on the same team as me at Pivotal.
Matty: Well, nobody’s perfect. I have no idea what that was even supposed to mean. That’s like a burn that doesn’t even make sense. He does have a magnificent beard.
Bridget: He does have a magnificent beard, and he has a very soothing podcasting voice.
Matty: Oh, yes, yes, Stentorian tones. We have a newsletter, by the way, you can subscribe to it at arresteddevops.com/bananastand. It’s the best way to know about upcoming podcast episodes and cool news with DevOps. We have an iPhone app if you want to download it, which you can do at arresteddevops.com/iphone.
Trevor: That is always the most abrupt transition for me.
Bridget: [01:04:11] Also, I’m sitting here thinking—
Matty: All transitions for you are abrupt, Trevor. They’re never smooth.
Bridget: It was awkward because I was sitting here kind of going, like, making a hand gesture, like, I want to say something here, which is—
Trevor: Oh.
Bridget: Not notice that I put like a subtle product placement for the banana stand in the episode?
Matty: You did.
Trevor: I did notice that.
Matty: You did.
Bridget: Just saying, like, good job.
Trevor: So thanks to our sponsors, the banana stand. Banana stand doesn’t sponsor anything.
Matty: That’s us.
Bridget: Though people do spill out— they fill out the spam form sometimes saying that they would very much like the banana stand to like, you know, exchange links with them. Or when are we getting a CAPTCHA, Matt?
Matty: Yeah, it’s, it’s not as bad as it used to be. No, it has a CAPTCHA on it now.
Bridget: I think it’s not as bad as it used to be because I just filter all that mail now.
Matty: No, I don’t think we get— I don’t think— no, I think I fixed it. It was like— it was—
Trevor: I haven’t seen any in a while.
Matty: [01:05:12] Yeah, there hasn’t been any in a while.
Bridget: No, I haven’t checked it in a while.
Trevor: Thanks to our sponsors. Be sure to visit them at arresteddevops.com/10thmagnitude and arresteddevops.com/datadog. Loyal listeners, if you enjoy listening to Arrested DevOps, we’d appreciate it if you would visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes Store.
Matty: That’s actually kind of a big deal. I just want to stress that a little bit because more ratings and more reviews drive us up in traffic in iTunes, which means more people find our show, which means more people get to hear the lessons and the love of Arrested DevOps. And it just means more people get new jobs and promotions, which is good for the economy.
Trevor: That’s right.
Matty: So it’s good for the economy to leave a review of Arrested DevOps on iTunes.
Bridget: So what you’re saying is that we aren’t gonna be Software Defined Talk, who actually did an episode entitled Leave Us a Review in the iTunes Store, which, by the way, I did.
Matty: That is the episode where Kote calls me a class act. That’s where they decide they’re gonna have an entire podcast called Leave Us a Review in the iTunes Store. They’re basically making fun of us at the beginning of it. They’re making fun of people asking for iTunes reviews. And to that I have to say, Kote, I left you a review, so ha! I don’t know what that means.
Bridget: [01:06:36] I left them a review and then Kote screencapped it and put it on Twitter, which I thought was adorable and sweet.
Trevor: Oh, so usually this is where we thank our guests for joining us, but I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Jason Hand and Julian Dunn for being our special random co-hosts all the time. Yeah, absolutely. So, thanks to both of you.
Matty: They don’t get any cut of it when somebody gets a new job because of Arrested DevOps because they’re guest hosts.
Trevor: They don’t even get an elbow tap or something.
Matty: That’s right.
Bridget: Some percentage of the high five?
Matty: That’s right. The pinky.
Trevor: That’s mine. We would love to know what you thought of tonight’s episode— of this episode. We’d love to know what you thought of this episode. Please leave us a comment at arresteddevops.com/2015inreview.
Matty: I’d love to know if you made it all this far in the episode when you’re listening.
Bridget: Be sure to check us out at arresteddevops.com or @ArrestedDevOps on Twitter. We’re always happy to get your input, ideas, or feedback at shows@arresteddevops.com, which we’ve established I don’t actually read unless Stratton posts it in Slack because I’m just that way. Please let us know any ideas you have for future episodes. I’m Bridget at Bridget Crumhub.
Matty: [01:07:52] I’m Matt at Matt Stratton.
Trevor: And I’m Trevor at Trevor G Hess.
Bridget: We’re Arrested DevOps, and remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.
