Fireside Chat with Alice Goldfuss

Alice: [00:00:00] Guys is gender-neutral. Well, guess what? Ladies is gender-neutral now.

Bridget: It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast where we help you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m Bridget Kromhout, and today we’ll be talking with a fabulous engineer and tech leader, Alice Goldfuss. The show notes for this episode can be found at arresteddevops.com/als-fireside.chat. But first, a word from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by VictorOps. Built for modern incident management, VictorOps provides a unified platform for real-time alerting, collaboration, and documentation. Driven by your IT and DevOps system data, VictorOps helps you to respond to incidents more effectively so you can minimize downtime and make being on call suck less. Visit arresteddevops.com/victorops to schedule a demo or start your trial. Mention you heard about VictorOps on Arrested DevOps and you’ll be eligible for some sweet discounts too. GoCD is the on-premise open-source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. With GoCD’s comprehensive pipeline modeling, you can model complex workflows for multiple teams with ease. And GoCD’s value stream map lets you track a change from commit to deploy at a glance. GoCD’s real power is in the visibility it provides over your end-to-end workflow, so you get complete control of and visibility into your deployments across multiple teams. Say goodbye to deployment panic and hello to consistent, predictable deliveries. To learn more about GoCD, visit gocd.org/arrested to download. It’s completely free to use. Commercial support and enterprise add-ons, including disaster recovery, are available.

Alice: [00:01:53] This episode is 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 120 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.

Bridget: Okay. So, today, I am excited to finally have Alice Goldfuss join the podcast for a chat. So, Alice, can you tell our listeners a little about yourself?

Alice: Sure. So, my name is Alice Goldfuss, and I am a site reliability engineer currently at GitHub. I love systems and lower-level problems, especially, like, kernel panics. And I also like tea, and cats, and chocolate, and making box forts, which I’ll be doing later with a giant box that has appeared at my house. That is me. I live in the rainy Northwest. I currently have a desk lamp aimed at my face because otherwise there would be no light in here, and I’m very excited to be on the podcast.

Bridget: [00:03:07] You know, I, I feel like we used to be able to make jokes about tanning by the glow of the CRT, and now that we have— we all have, you know, these flat panel monitors, I Like, what are we going to light our rooms with?

Alice: I know. And you can’t even rely on the plasmas anymore, right? Because they’re not making those anymore.

Bridget: Right. But tell me about this lamp. I want to hear more about— you were saying something on Twitter about this.

Alice: It’s like, this is just a normal desk lamp from IKEA. I also have my happy light. It’s literally called a happy light, which means that I have to say happy light to other adults. And it is, I think it’s by VeraLux. And it is like a light therapy light that mimics the light temperature of the sun. And there are different lenses you can put on it. I’m using the comfort lens, like a nice roomy station wagon of a light. And you use it when there’s almost no sun out, especially in the wintertime, to kind of keep you on an even keel. It helps emotionally, it helps with productivity, it helps with depression. And I find that most people in the Pacific Northwest own one or saying they need to own one, so they get one. This was given to me by a former coworker and friend, and I’m very excited to have it. I always forget to pull it out, and then when I do, I feel a lot better. So recommend it.

Bridget: [00:04:26] I’ll have to look into that. I’ll put a link in the show notes. But I also feel like I would need to also get the portable travel one. And maybe lately you would too. Tell me about— you’ve been busy with conferences and whatnot lately. Tell us about LISA that you’re one of the chief cooks and bottle washers for, right?

Alice: Well, I was this year. This year, I was very honored to be the talks co-chair. So, LISA stands for the Large Installation System Administration Conference, which I always feel like I need to break down for people. It’s been around for over 30 years, so thus sysadmin is in there. And people always say, well, what do you mean by large installation? Well, when Lisa originally started Large Men 10 Workstations. So, I know, we’re operating at massive scale. Just massive. The name has remained, but the conference has changed throughout the years. It’s put on by USENIX, which is a really great group of people that also do things like SREcon and the Enigma Security Conferences. And every year, so you have like a USENIX board and USENIX staff that actually handle logistics of the conference, which I’ve planned other conferences where I’m also responsible for the logistics, and that is a lot of work. But for Lisa, they handle logistics like hotel and venue and stuff, and then they bring in different people from the technical community every year to actually select the talks and the workshops and tutorials and keynotes. And I was one of the people that handled the talk selection this year. So, it’s a week-long event where you have, like, 3 days of intense training and workshops, which is my favorite part. I think You get a lot out of it. And then there’s 3 days of a more traditional conference that is also really good. And I like Leesa because it’s very non-vendor-specific. It’s very much for practitioners, and they have orchestrated this really good balance of, you know, getting vendor money but not vendor-sponsored talks or anything like that. So, I don’t know. I really recommend it to people. This year it was in San Francisco. Next year it’s in Tennessee, and the year after that will be in Portland. So, it bounces around quite a bit.

Bridget: [00:06:43] Those are, like, all the places.

Alice: Yeah, there’s all the places. And Tennessee, I was on the fence about doing Tennessee because Tennessee has never been somewhere that I want to go. But there are plenty of people in system administration and ops work that are in more of the Tennessee area that probably can’t justify going to San Francisco or Boston or the other places where this this conference has been. So, it’s a really great opportunity to go meet those people. So, definitely on board for Visa Tennessee.

Bridget: That’s super awesome. So, we’ll put a link in the show notes. I’m making a lot of show notes-related promises, so I should probably actually do this. But we’ll put a link in the show notes to the program that you’ve curated. But looking over it, I see the stuff you’re talking about with the tutorials. Oh, I see a coworker of mine, Jessica Dean from Microsoft, giving a tutorial. But I also see you have a pretty wide range of keynotes and speakers. I’m interested both for this, and I know that we can talk about DevOps Days too, but in general, when you’re curating the content for a conference, what are you looking for? And I understand that these things are going to differ based on the number of tracks and what the conference is being aimed at, but it’s a boatload of responsibility. What are you aiming for when you’re doing that?

Alice: [00:08:01] So, for me personally, when it comes to just content, I am very interested in, like, how something was done. I think it’s really easy to do a talk where it’s just, like, this tool 101. But there’s a difference between how to use Docker and how we used Docker to change up our infrastructure. And I’m interested in the latter talk. So, like, for Lisa, again, it’s not vendor-specific, but that means that we don’t have Docker 101. You can talk about using Docker in your talk. And how you used it, but you’re also talking about other software and the methodology and how you actually rolled it out and why you needed to make those infrastructure changes. And that is what’s really important to me, is giving this use case, this story that people in the audience can actually apply and use and say, oh, hey, this company did it and this is how, and we can do it too, as opposed to just being like, this tool is really cool. So, I really like some depth and the hows of it. I also really love a good outage story. I love, I love knowing like the behind the scenes of an outage and what broke and why and what was learned from it. Like, I really, really wanted to have Niantic give a talk at LISA about the Pokémon GO launch and what happened there. I really want to bring them into the community fold because we have a lot of people who would be interested in that story that could maybe help. And I mean, it’s People wanna see that product succeed. I wanna see that product succeed. And I feel that there are some untold infrastructure stories there that I’d love to hear about. So, things like that are what I’m interested in.

Bridget: [00:09:40] I feel like this is one of those things that it seems like large enterprises, or perhaps some of the more secretive businesses out there, really do not want their engineers telling stories with failure in them. They don’t want their engineers telling stories that make them appear vulnerable in any way. Like, can you address that from the point of view of, content curation for a conference, how do you get people to tell the stories that maybe somebody doesn’t want them to tell?

Alice: It is super hard. And the way that I see it, it’s always from a customer point of view, is why the companies don’t want you to share it, because then customers might be like, oh, I think you violated the SLA in my contract, even though I can’t actually prove that. Or suddenly I feel like less inspired to buy your product or something like that, where As, in my opinion, as an engineer or as an influencer with possible buying power, if I am engaging with engineers from a company and I feel like I can trust them to be making good decisions and failing and improving upon it, that makes me, like, I feel like I have a connection with them and I’m more likely to buy it as opposed to just going to yet another big company talk where everything is flawless and they did everything perfectly and just trust them. Just trust them. Because I don’t trust them when they do that. Magically, somehow. Yeah, right? It’s like, oh, you did it perfectly, and, oh, you’ll do it for us if I buy your boxed product. Interesting. Yeah, I totally trust that. I’ve tried those things before. I know they don’t work perfectly. Come on, give me something real. And as we’re getting people to actually submit talks like that, it’s easier perhaps if it’s, like, a startup, or people that— basically, if you can get people that feel safe talking about those things. And I’ve seen that from people who are in startups that are, like, moving fast and breaking things. And I’ve also seen that from large companies. Like, I have seen failure talks from people at Google, and they just, either the incidents are old enough or they’re vague enough where they get a sign-off from legal and they feel like, you know, they’re kind of too big to fail, and it’s okay, and you can talk about that. And so, it just, you just have to try.

Bridget: [00:11:44] Yeah, I’ve actually seen, we had… A large local company speak at our local meetup, and then their legal reviewed the video afterwards and said, yeah, you can’t post that. And I said, well, we could edit things out. What needs to be redacted? Well, we just feel like they were sharing too much, but there’s nothing specific. It’s like, oh, you realize this would help you hire?

Alice: Yeah, I’ve definitely gone through intense legal review before, usually more along the lines of like, oh, you can’t use a picture of that ship because it has a company name on it. That owns the container chip. And I’m like, okay, all right. But yeah, it’s pretty tricky getting clearance for that. But conferences like Lisa have built up a bit of a reputation in— like, I consider Lisa kind of like the— I don’t know, not quite the whisper network of ops. It’s kind of like the— like, it’s at the end of the year usually, and people, like, are just relaxed, and they’re just more likely to talk about things because they’re just so used— they’re so tired from doing, like, the really fancy flashy conferences. They just come to Lisa and like hide in corners and it’s comfortable.

Bridget: [00:12:54] They can relax. I love it. And now you ran DevOps Days Portland as well, and that was a little bit earlier in the year. Can you talk a little bit about the small single-track event? Like, how are your decision-making around, you know, talks and focus different for the large multi-track versus the small, well, not entirely single-track, you had a couple of tracks, but We are single-track, and I will say that I learned that I cannot organize 2 conferences in 1 year.

Alice: Do not recommend it. I was actually not part of the talk selection process for DevOps Days Portland this year. I’m the MC of it usually, and I handle other things, like trying to get vendors in and stuff, but I didn’t handle talk selection this year. But I can say that for every conference, I think the best thing is getting content to begin with that’s good. So, getting people to actually submit talks in the first place. So, I did have some impact with DevOps Days Portland in that I found people and encouraged them to submit talks that they otherwise wouldn’t have. So, if you look at DevOps Days Portland, and you look at Leesa, you’ll see that there’s a pretty good variety in the diversity of speakers. And that’s because there were, like, it was more of a diverse selection committee than you might usually see at a tech conference. And so, we exercised our networks. And we reached out and said, like, hey, I’m running this conference, it’s going to be a good, safe space for you, please submit a talk, I want to hear from you. And just having those people that can reach out and leverage their networks means that you get a more diverse pool by default. And that’s super helpful.

Bridget: [00:14:27] If you have a— how do I put this? I think, and I’ve written ranty blog posts about this before, you may recall, that when you put a CFP out there and then you do nothing else, what you’re going to get is the people whose job it is to submit to the CFP.

Alice: Yep.

Bridget: And that doesn’t— I mean, I’m one of those people. Those aren’t bad people and those aren’t bad talks, but it is already selected down to be a more homogeneous population because those are the people who happen to have that specific job. So I think that if you’re looking for a broader range of talks from a broader range of people, with a broader range of demographic characteristics, with a broader range of companies they work at, with a broader range of roles. Like, if you want that at your conference, you do have to put more effort. And this is completely generic, not any specific agenda. It’s just, I have lots of agendas, but completely generic. If you want a wide range that will serve your community well, my thesis is you have to reach out for those talks, because those people don’t have a job of submit to all those CFPs. What’s your take on that?

Alice: [00:15:39] No, I totally agree. In fact, Leesa was the first conference I gave a talk at, and that was in 2015. And I had no idea it existed until a woman I knew who was working, I think she might’ve been one of the chairs that year, Selena, she works at Mozilla, she was fantastic. She reached out to me being like, you should submit a talk to this. That’s the only reason why I did it, is because someone reached out to me and said, I think you have something to add here. And then my talk got accepted, and I actually looked at past talks, and I was like, God, these are people with PhDs, why am I here? I’m glad I didn’t do that at first. I’m glad that I did not research the conference and I had someone tell me specifically that my input would be good, because otherwise I wouldn’t have submitted. And so you really do have to reach out to people and find those people that otherwise would not have been a part of it or thought that they would be welcome and do that extra work.

Bridget: Yeah. And the first thing I spoke at was a local unconference that my boss at the time said you should go. And speak about the stuff you’re doing. And I was like, but why? Who wants to hear this? And I think that it’s really easy to look at us and think, oh, well, you’re choosing talks for Leesa. Oh, you do stuff for DevOpsDays. It’s clear that you are some sort of, I don’t know, different species of expert, and you’re not like me. And it’s like, no, we’re actually just like you.

Alice: [00:17:02] Just like you, started at the same place, got asked to submit to a conference. I will say, like, we’re talking about, I feel like we’re kind of talking about getting a diverse pool of people to submit. And it matters a lot, I think, to have a diverse group of people reaching out, because then otherwise, so, like, I have definitely gotten invites to conferences that literally just say, we’re looking to have more women speak, please submit a talk.

Bridget: And you’re like, this is solving a problem for you. What problem is this solving for me?

Alice: I got an invite to a Python-related conference, and I was like, I haven’t written, I haven’t worked with the framework you’re asking me to give a talk on in years. And they said, that’s okay. And I was like, you just want a woman, that’s all this is. That is an insult to me.

Bridget: I don’t wanna be a decorative prop in your conference lineup.

Alice: No, thanks. I’m not getting out of anything for my career. Using that framework is not something I do for my job. So, I don’t really see the benefit in attending this conference and being part of your diversity lineup. So, yeah, it’s— but if a woman had reached out to me and been like, hey, I really follow your work. I think that, like, this specific thing that you are obviously passionate about would be good for this conference, and here’s why. That’s a completely different approach and one I would be much more amenable to. Yeah.

Bridget: [00:18:24] And I think that that’s key because I do a bunch of outreach myself, you know, trying to get people to speak at various conferences or even submit to various CSPs.

Alice: CFPs.

Bridget: And if you can say why you’re reaching out to the person— hopefully it’s not they exist in this world and have a demographic characteristic. Like, hopefully there’s some other reason that you think that person might be even interested, let alone suitable. So if you can say, when you’re reaching out to people, you can say, I really liked your fill in the blank, and it would be really cool if you could do something like fill in the blank for fill in the blank conference. Yeah. It’s a modicum of effort, but it’s like conference invitation Mad Libs.

Alice: Definitely also talking about, if there’s a speaker you really want, tell them why the conference would be good for them. Because, I mean, for me, I’m not a developer advocate. My job is not to actually go to conferences or speak at them. I like to do it, but it’s not my job. So, I have to eventually justify why I’m going to so many conferences. If I can be like, this conference covers these topics which I do for my job, and therefore, I can bring back knowledge to the company, that is an easier sell than just, I’m a woman, and conference.

Bridget: [00:19:39] Oh my gosh. So, speaking of which, I would love to segue to talking about your job, because I think you do really interesting work, and you also post about it in ways that would help other people understand how they could learn more. Learning. It feels like sometimes the stack is just this turtle upon turtle upon turtle of abstraction. Like, how do you dive in, and how do you decide what you’re learning about, and then how do you learn it? And maybe just kind of, you mentioned what you do at GitHub, give people a quick refresher. Why is this the specific stuff you’re learning as well?

Alice: Okay. So, there’s 2 separate things. So, my job at GitHub, I started on what was known as the Edge Team. Which handled our network tier and our custom load balancer. That team has now split up into other teams. We had a little reorg. Now, I have brought that knowledge onto our team that manages our Kubernetes platform, because GitHub.com is all on Kubernetes. Very, very cool. I am going to be doing lower-level systems, like kernel work, and see how it interacts with Kubernetes. But I’m there because I want to be there, and that’s the kind of work I’m interested in. It’s always the kind of work that I have tried to get into in my tech career. But, like, for learning, so, okay, let me start with this. So, like, it’s like journey to the bottom of the stack, right? It’s okay. So, like, my whole learning thing is I grew up in a very small upstate New York town. Like, literally, the population of my town qualifies it as a hamlet. Like, that’s a real thing. It’s very small. And I didn’t have, like, I had a computer in my room, an old desktop running, like, Windows 95. But I didn’t have internet access until I was 16, and then it could be, like, cut off and stuff. So all I could do was mess around in my BIOS and read, like, Compton’s Encyclopedia. And that also meant that when it came to doing homework, I just did it on my own because all my friends were in other towns and I couldn’t see them after school on, like, school nights. So when it came to, like, AP Calc and stuff, it was just me and Compton’s Encyclopedia and figuring it out on my own for hours and bashing my head against it until I understood it. Which is a very lonely way to learn, but it’s actually helped me a lot because it means that I just have had to only rely on myself. And just, I kind of had to learn how to teach myself this material. And so when it came to learning more, like I messed around, I did HTML, I did HTML websites and CSS and stuff. But again, I didn’t have the internet. So all I could do was just like locally launch it in the browser. That was where I guess it was Internet Explorer, launch it and be like, look, I made a thing, but only I can see it. And so, I didn’t really go anywhere with that. I have a film degree. And then, when I started working in tech, it was in tech support, and I was very interested in servers. I was always interested in servers. I really wanted to get lower and lower in the stack, but I repeatedly found roadblocks on the job of being able to actually do that work. So, I started teaching myself at night. The first thing I did was learn a programming language. I tried Ruby, did not like Ruby. People keep telling me— well, back then, at least, Ruby was— it was, like, 6 years ago now— Ruby was the language to be learning. I was told it was really easy and approachable, and I think it was actually probably too easy and approachable, because I was basically just writing 5-year-old sentences. And it didn’t make sense to me, Bridget. It didn’t. It didn’t feel like I was talking to a machine. It wasn’t logical. So, I dropped that really quickly.

Bridget: [00:23:23] If you ask beer apps, they’ll say, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby.

Alice: Yeah, right? I was just like, I’m not— I did, like, the do.each, and I was not— it didn’t help me learn. But then I stumbled upon Python, and Python made a lot more sense to me. And I learned Python. I don’t know actually how to pronounce this website. I pronounce it Coursera. It might be Coursera or something. Course. It’s Coursera.

Bridget: I think in my head it’s Coursera.

Alice: Coursera. So back then Coursera was like completely free, and if you completed a class, you got a little PDF you could print out of your certification. And I took their first iteration on a class called Intro to Programming, which was an 8-week class where you made increasingly difficult games in Python, starting with a rock-paper-scissors text game and ending with an Asteroids thing with, like, a GUI and sound effects and, like, with object-oriented programming in 8 weeks. And, man, I had no life during those 8 weeks. And I had a lot of depression. I was basically a glorified receptionist at my job, and then I would just teach myself programming. And that got me a better tech support job, and then I started again, Basically, I’ve had a career of doing one job during the day and learning to do another job at night. And I feel like I’m going on a big tangent here, but basically I learn by finding things that are interesting to me and then figuring out ways to learn them on my own. I know people will call me self-taught. I don’t agree with the self-taught part because I didn’t just like sit in a room and like understand computers. Like, I found materials that other people have written down. Other people were teaching me just like a, like, async. So, I’m more, like, self-guided. Like, I found the resources, I figured out what I needed to learn, and then I found them. And it’s always been the way I learn is I’m always just doing, like, the Socratic why method. I always need to know why something is doing it. And so, that leads me lower and lower into the stack and down closer to the systems. So, like, currently, my laptop is resting on, let’s see, Understanding the Linux Kernel. The Practical Linux Security Cookbook, and Docker Up and Running. And so, these are books I had on my desk. And so, I’ll find books that I like. So, when I wanted to do more kernel work, I got this Understanding the Linux Kernel book, and all of the examples are in C. So, I was like, if I’m going to understand this book better, I should learn C. So, I started learning C. And I love C. I love it. People make fun of me for liking C, but again, I don’t have a CS degree, so I never had years of learning C as my first programming language and it being old hat and then going on to, like, cooler iterative languages. So, for me, C is like, no, I completely understand what’s going on when I write C. I understand the memory management. I understand the data structures, and it is really rewarding to me. It’s just like doing a long math problem. I like math. So, now I’m learning C, and I’m writing C and C++ for fun at night. I’m doing another Coursera class, Data Structures, although now they make you pay to take it. And, yeah, I’m just constantly learning. Like, I had jury duty earlier this year, and I brought my Understanding the Linux Kernel book with me to the courtroom.

Bridget: [00:26:48] They didn’t use that to say, oh, we probably shouldn’t pick her?

Alice: Like, oh, no, honey, this one is for, I don’t know, people with lives.

Bridget: Sorry, we need you to really relate to, uh, I’m just thinking like some folks have told me you say like, I believe in jury nullification, if you want them to not pick you because it looks like you know too much. And it’s like, well, if you understand C, you might be dangerous.

Alice: Right? I’d be like, let me tell you about Linux memory management. I’m thinking of your seat. Sorry, I said also I can sit on it as a booster seat.

Bridget: Nice. I feel like I always need that.

Alice: So, my learning style is a combination of books, YouTube videos are really helpful. When I’m first learning a new concept, especially if it’s some sort of platformy thing like Kubernetes, finding YouTube videos that have, like, diagrams is super helpful for me. When I was first learning networking and sysadministration, I found a series of YouTube videos called Eli the Computer Guy, I think, or Eli the IT Guy. It was just a guy with a whiteboard talking, and it really helped me learn that way. And so, like, a lot of free resources, a lot of Stack Overflow. And I know not to, like, just copy and paste Stack Overflow answers. I know that. But usually the answers, I find that they give me breadcrumbs to things I should be Googling to find in the man pages instead, because it’s just not something that I would know to look up. Like, I don’t know what I don’t know, you know? So, um, I mean, none of us do, right?

Bridget: [00:28:24] Like the whole unknown unknowns thing.

Alice: And so, like, finding that jargon in Stack Overflow that helps me Google it better and then read.

Bridget: Yeah. Well, and honestly, like, I do have a CS degree and I still have to Google things constantly because if you think about it, what’s in the curriculum and what your professors know and what your, um, you know, graduate students or whatever who are actually helping you with the homework know, like, that’s still not going to be everything that’s in those books on your desk, let alone the most current everything that exists in the world. So, even if you have a degree in something, you’re still not going to, by nature or by default, be an expert in it, just because that’s not the way education works.

Alice: I know. I just have this constant chip on my shoulder about not having a CS degree. So, there’s always just, like, this, what did I miss that all of my colleagues have, kind of a thing. But, on the other hand, I’ve made it this far without having to know really any computer science. If you know arrays and hashes, you’re good, from what I can tell. I have not been in a meeting where I’m just like, oh, what we really need is a linked list. That has not been something I’ve needed in my career thus far. Learning C and exploring the kernel, I do not need that for my job. That’s just things that I find interesting.

Bridget: [00:29:49] And I feel like this is probably famous last words, and later you’re gonna be a kernel committer, and we’ll be talking to you and Jess, and like, what? You fell into the trap of writing everything in C. Oh, I want to.

Alice: And I wanna commit to the kernel. I would love to put in kernel patches. It’s just, I’m kind of talking to people that, like, think, like, oh, I need to learn C because I don’t have a CS degree. I don’t need to know C. I’m doing it because I think it’s fun. Knowing Python and some Ruby has served me very well, and I’m just doing this because I think it’s fun and I’d love to put patches on the kernel. But I think you can have a very respectable software engineering career without it.

Bridget: Yeah, absolutely. I could not agree more. I could not agree more. Okay, so I feel like we could talk about, and maybe we will talk about that a little bit more, but I also noticed that I just had to retweet because you have more t-shirt designs. So I would love to hear, for our listeners who may not be familiar with Interrupt Designs, can you talk a little bit about what’s with the t-shirts? Yes. Okay.

Alice: [00:30:55] So I have a store on Threadless now. It’s interruptdesigns.threadless.com, I think.

Bridget: We’ll have a link in the show notes.

Alice: Yeah, whatever. So basically last year I was taking a look at my wardrobe and I was like, all I have are unisex tech shirts for like products I don’t even like. And I need to start maturing my wardrobe. And I was like, what should I put in my wardrobe? Oh, just more t-shirts. Good call. And I was like, I want, I want to like have t-shirts that I like. And I came up with like Panic! at the Disco, except Panic! at the Colonel. I thought this was hilarious and I still do. So I spent one day making a Panic! at the Colonel design. And putting it up on a shirt, and then other people started buying it. And I was like, oh, a lot of people are buying this shirt. I don’t actually— I just wanted a shirt of my own, and I wanted someone else to make it for me, which is why I put it up on a site. But now I have this money coming in, so I started donating it. And the first place I donated was Women in Linux, which is a fantastic organization out of Florida. It is, it is a Black-run and owned by Black women organization that does streaming meetups and conferences for women trying and looking to get into ops. And it’s just, it’s a fantastic organization. And so I started donating. So all the Panic at the Colonel stuff goes to them. And then because I’m a troll, I came out with the ladies is gender-neutral shirt to combat guys. Hey guys, let’s go talk. You guys, let’s go back to the ops guys, do the ops guys thing, not the database guys. And then you say, no, don’t say guys, there are women here. They say, oh, guys is gender neutral. Well, guess what? Ladies is gender neutral now. And I made that shirt and I only offered it in fitted sizes. And then I told everyone that asked that they were men’s sizes too. And I gave them every line that everyone has ever told me at a conference, only handing out unisex shirts, you know? Oh, you can tailor it. Oh, make it as— use it as a bed shirt. Make it into a pillowcase. Give it to your boyfriend. Give it to your dad. You know, you’re crafty. It’s fine. It’s unisex. It’ll fit you. I just did all that and pissed off a lot of people and raised over $5,000 for Outreachy, which is a great group that helps place women and trans people in internships at large tech companies. And then this week I just came out with a new shirt, and it is a view of like— it’s kind of a play on a boot menu that says Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but Pixie is PXE, like Pixie Boot. And that one I’ve been waiting to do for a long time, and the proceeds from that are going to a local Portland organization called Free Geek, which takes donated equipment, fixes it up, and then sells it for cheap. And usually they provide a lot of laptops with Linux on them. And I know at least 2 people that have gotten them. They’re like $150 for a laptop, and then they’ll teach you how to use it. And it’s a really great organization that’s making tech more accessible and affordable for people. And so those are the 3 shirts I currently have up. And I don’t know, I really like doing that and giving back to the community in a way that also people can show off and like feel good because they get something in return. But I’m not making any profits off them. They all go to— they’re all donated. And I hope to have many more shirts out soon. It’s just when I can find the time to wrestle with Inkscape and get them made.

Bridget: [00:34:32] Yeah, I was checking those out. And one thing I really appreciate about your fulfillment on Threadless is so much optionality, because people should definitely go check out your store.

Alice: You can pick the color, pick the cut.

Bridget: And so if you like, you know, the giant boxy shirts, or if you like the fitted shirts, or if you like the V-neck, or, you know, the kind of drapier shirts or whatever, like there’s a lot of choices there. I mean, I suppose people could buy the Manic Pixie Dream Girl shirt not in Blue Screen of Death blue. I don’t understand why anyone would, but I feel like that one has to be that color blue.

Alice: I mean, yeah, you can have them in a bunch of colors. I originally launched the shirts on Teespring, which I do not recommend, and for a lot of different reasons. One of them being that they limit the number of cuts and colors you can provide. So it would be like, oh, I want to do like 4 different shirts, so I’m limited to like 3 colors each kind of a thing. Whereas Threadless, it’s like the sky’s the limit. So I try to offer as much as makes sense to offer. Like, I’m not going to offer a white design on a white shirt. Kind of a thing. But otherwise I do it. And the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ones also have long-sleeved, uh, options because I’ve— I don’t know, I released it in the winter. So anything that Threadless— any kind of color that Threadless allows me to do in a shirt design is usually part of it. And I do try to make sure that I can accommodate a bunch of different, uh, body types and sizes. Like there’s at least one shirt that I think goes up to a 4X. And, uh, yeah, I’ve heard good things about the shirts so far from people that have received them.

Bridget: [00:36:12] Yeah, well, like, I can tell that I’m gonna have to— it was kind of one of those things where I thought, oh, you know, I think I’m gonna finally get around to buying some of these shirts. It’ll be easy to— oh, there are choices now. I have to think.

Alice: So I have to go look at the style guides.

Bridget: Oh, and I mean, I went and I looked at their sizing guides, and I need to pull out a tape measure because I, I suppose maybe you have this problem. I don’t know if you do or not, but I have this problem where I feel like, um, the fitted shirt sizes are often a lie. And so like, they’ll say large, but like, is that large for 12-year-old girls? Or is it large for adult women? Yeah.

Alice: Is it your size? Is it a women’s size? And now especially in tech, since they’re no longer doing American Apparel, they’re switching over to Bella, like the sizes are even more different.

Bridget: I mean, not that, not that it’s bad for there to be very small fitted shirts. There are people for whom that’s wonderful. I am not those people.

Alice: Yeah, I need the smaller fitted shirts. Usually I swim in most tech shirts, even like the extra smalls. But I want to recognize the fact that, like, I always fight for women’s shirts because I just feel like it’s a good barometer for who— I feel like it’s one of those base things. It should be table stakes that you have fitted shirts or women’s shirts because it implies that you as a vendor, as a company, are expecting women to be at this event and that’s what you associate with them. But women’s shirts, fitted shirts, don’t fit all women. And so I want to, like, my offering always includes even, even in the ladies gender neutral one that are only women’s sizes, there is one in there called like women’s unisex, which is just the Threadless men’s shirt, but in the women’s, which means I still get to troll, but there’s still a 4X larger, more roomy cut for people. And that’s what’s important to me is making it accessible in that way.

Bridget: [00:38:03] Yeah. And I think that’s really great. And I think it’s also, it’s great that a lot of companies now are thinking about how are we doing our swag, how are we making it accessible to people. Maybe we’ll do some socks, or maybe we’ll just do charitable donations, or maybe we’ll do something that it doesn’t have to be the same all the time. DevOps Days Madison last year did scarves, and this year did hats, like winter hats, because they do their event in Wisconsin in November. So why not, right?

Alice: We did scarves this year for for DevOps Days Portland, and we made them, like, the Timbers, which is our local soccer team. And so, I’d like to do something like that next year. It also made it way easier as an organizer. You just, here’s a scarf. I don’t care what size you are or what you registered for, you get a scarf. Now, be gone. That made it a lot easier.

Bridget: Nice. Yeah, no, I appreciate that, definitely. I feel like there’s an— you mentioned earlier that you put up the ladies are, you know, ladies is gender-neutral to troll people. And I feel like it’s easy to label yourself as a troll, but it is something that we sometimes all poke the bear. You know, we put things on Twitter because we know it’s going to make people go, what? And it’s kind of hilarious. But like, in terms of the interactions that you have that you want to have with the public, like, what do you want them to take away from it? Because I feel like there is kind of an educational outreachy, if you will, you know, mission out there. Like, what do you want people when they they encounter the, the version of Alice Goldfuss that they encounter on the internet, because obviously we all have a lot going on in our lives that is not for the consumption of the internet.

Alice: [00:39:45] Yeah, there’s a lot more crying when I’m not on Twitter.

Bridget: Oh, I mean, my, my cats feature a lot on the internet, but I also have family members, and with the exception of Joe, who has opted in, they don’t feature so much.

Alice: Yeah, in the internet.

Bridget: Like, no. Um, but I’m just curious, what do you want people to take away from when you poke the bear, when you go out there and say hey about these, these major things? What are you looking to accomplish there?

Alice: So I feel that humor helps a lot because much like, like the traditional fool character in a Shakespearean, uh, play, like, you, you— comedy allows you to point out things that otherwise would be considered offensive or people would instantly shut down to. And comedy also, I guess what people want— I want people to take away from is I want them to remember it and remember the questions it raised for them. And having a shirt that says ladies is gender neutral, or remembering that time that I joked about, about being sexually harassed or something like that, like it’s a very poignant kind of twisting of the knife and people remember it and it sticks in their mind better than just like Here’s a blog post with some cited sources on why sexism is bad. If I constantly make jokes about it and people follow me for like that kind of dark humor, I feel like it makes them remember that these things exist. It makes them remember these specific interactions, and it also might embolden them to talk about it in the workplace because they see someone who is living it in a very loud way online. And other people are living it out loud with her, and so they feel more comfortable talking about it. And being— interacting in a comedic way on Twitter means that more people follow me to begin with, which means that more people are listening and talking about it. And so when people say, hey, did you see that ladies is gender-neutral shirt? It’s more likely that someone else already knows what they’re talking about, so that helps them start that conversation to begin with. So I mostly just want people to remember and know that these are real issues. And, uh, and do something about it, right?

Bridget: [00:41:56] And that’s huge. And I really, as someone who, um, walks through this life as a lady, I very much appreciate that.

Alice: Yeah, I mean, also I talk about technical things and, uh, and I don’t know, baking. Those are good things too.

Bridget: And tea.

Alice: And tea. Love tea. Um, I need to figure out what tea I’m gonna have today. I have a cup here, but there’s nothing in it. Fix that later. But yeah, there are other parts of me out there, but people often associate me with that old SJW gimmick. And yeah, I am pretty vocal about that stuff, but it’s just because I’m vocal about things that make me mad and that keep me from doing the things I actually want to do, which are things like sexism and racism. So I talk about them a lot because I want them to go away.

Bridget: You know, I for one am excited and happy to be on a warrior team that is fighting to make the world better. That actually sounds great. Like, do they issue us Wonder Woman outfits? I don’t know, but it sounds great.

Alice: [00:42:59] Like, Microsoft has an Amazon island now, right?

Bridget: I’m so lucky. I have wonderful coworkers.

Alice: Oh, I’m going to see a bunch of them next week at KubeCon.

Bridget: Yay!

Alice: Yeah, I could not go to KubeCon this year. I was traveled out. But, uh, I’ll try to go next year. Have a lot of fun.

Bridget: Nice. Um, so like the— speaking of completely tangent, uh, you were talking on Twitter about chairs, and I’m wondering if you would like to tell our viewers, or well, mostly listeners, though those of us who are watching the podcast live or later on YouTube could perhaps see this wonderful chair. Can you tell us for many of us who work from home care about chairs. Can you talk about this one?

Alice: So I’ve been at GitHub for over 7 months now, and I only ordered an office chair a couple of weeks ago. And that’s because that I am, when it is up to me, I research all the time and I research things to death. If I just walked in and someone had been like, this is your chair, deal with it, I would’ve dealt with it, Bridget, ’cause that’s what I do. I adapt to things. I am like the missing stair enabler of office equipment. But because it was up to me, I was like, I really had to make sure I got the right chair. So I have been sitting on kitchen chairs. They’re out of view right now. I basically did that thing where you just, like when you’re talking to your parents and you just shove all filth to the corners of your room. I did that for this podcast. I have multiple kitchen chairs just hiding out here. But today my new chair arrived. Steelcase Gesture. And what I really like about this chair— well, you’re gonna see my dirty floor, but, um, so it’s, it’s a very narrow chair. And often the problems that I have with chairs is that the arms are usually out here and I rest my arms on them, but to like get to my mouse. But this is really uncomfortable, so I always end up like shifting to the side of my chair to do this. But with this chair, they, they want you— they think you’re gonna use this chair to like be on your phone. So like you can go like this on your phone, but for me it just means that I can bring the armrest in to an actual comfortable position, like this narrow position that I can’t get on any other chair. That’s why I really want it. And that’s why I super recommend it to other smaller framed people, ’cause that has been really nice. And it’s also—

Bridget: [00:45:23] We’re gonna need to put a link to this chair in the show notes, clearly.

Alice: Yeah, no, I like it. It is an expensive chair. My company paid for it. So otherwise I would be, I don’t know, There’s like some office depots and warehouses that I’d probably go to otherwise, but this means I get a warranty, so I like that. But yeah, it just arrived. My back already feels better, and I do have a standing desk as well, so I can stand and now sit in a non-IKEA kitchen chair.

Bridget: So I feel like I should probably fess up to the part where I am in fact sitting on a bar stool.

Alice: Oh, I thought, you know, I thought ergonomic, man, I was not fine.

Bridget: Well, so the reason it’s probably fine is because I’m on the road like more than half the time and I’m at coffee shops the rest of the time. Like, the amount of time I work right here is pretty much limited to podcasting and slightly other times.

Alice: So how do you— I cannot just work at my laptop. I wish I could. I wish I could be that cool hacker in the coffee shop with my laptop and my like my hood and my fedora on top of the hood, but I can’t. It ruins my hands within 5 minutes. I need to have my stupid ergo keyboard and my ergo mouse and my special setup, and I have to— that’s how I function.

Bridget: [00:46:42] Maybe I’ve just spent enough time like typing on a tiny laptop in coach that I just don’t even notice.

Alice: I wish I had your wrists. I wear them like bracelets. They empower me.

Bridget: Nice. Um, okay, so for our, for our listeners who don’t already follow you on Twitter, which I assume many of them do, like, where can they find you both, um, online and in person, like coming events?

Alice: Sure. Um, so I am on Twitter, just @alicegulfuss. I always wanted to have a cool hacker name, but then it’s just my name because my name is pretty unique, I guess. So I’m there. I have a blog, blog.alicegoldfuss.com. And I don’t have any upcoming conferences in general. I was going to give a keynote at a conference in January, but that conference has been indefinitely postponed, unfortunately. So I can’t— otherwise I would totally be bragging about it, but I can’t talk about it right now. Let’s see. If you’re in Portland, I run the PDX DevOps Meetup. We meet every last Wednesday of the month. In fact, we have one tomorrow that I’m super excited about. And also, if you’re in Portland and you want to talk at the meetup, you should totally ping me on Twitter and I’ll get you on the docket.

Bridget: [00:48:07] I feel like what meetup attendees don’t understand is that there’s a constant need for content. Like, as a meetup organizer, you need to come up with something for pretty much every month.

Alice: Every month. And people, I know public speaking is not the funnest thing in the world. I actually do not like public speaking. I like having done it, but not— but for meetups, the bar is way more relaxed than at a conference. Like, at my meetup, you’re not being recorded. I’m not going to be checking the time on you. It’s just really a social event where people come together to have a common experience, which is seeing someone talk. And then talk about it and network. That’s really what it is. And you as the speaker are providing that hinge of that common experience. And that’s it. Very low pressure. Like, if people are watching this and there’s local meetups that they’re not sure about, you should go give a talk at them. It does not have to be new content, by the way. If you’ve given the same talk at other meetups or at conferences, people usually want those even more because they’re tried and tested. So you should totally just give that talk and you will make a meetup organizer’s life a lot easier.

Bridget: [00:49:23] Or conversely, if you’re the sort of person who has gotten yourself somehow signed up to speak at an upcoming conference, a really good pro tip is commit to giving that talk, like, the previous month at your local meetup. So, the nice— we just had at our local meetup, we just had Dana Angebratzen gave a talk about using Kubernetes that she was then going— and serverless, and scaling serverless, and that sort of stuff, rather, that she was going to be giving at— what conference was she giving it at? KubeCon in San Francisco. So, like, she gave the talk at the meetup in Minneapolis the month before, and she said she changed about 50% of the slides after giving it the first time, because, you know, there were things she wanted to add, and there were feedback questions, comments she got from people. But it’s like a life pro tip, to get yourself going before you have to be on a stage in front of a lot more people?

Alice: [00:50:23] I always try to give at least 2 practice talks when I’m doing a new talk. It was a lot easier when I was in office with a bunch of people. Now that I’m remote, my plan is the next new talk I give to actually just give it at my own meetup and ask for feedback and just completely abuse my power that way. But, yeah, definitely, if you are thinking about giving a talk somewhere or you’ve been accepted to give a talk at a local DevOps Days, perhaps, You should do it at the meetup beforehand.

Bridget: Well, and I should mention, like, speaking of speaking at events, like, devopsdays.org is a place you can find open CFPs for a lot of DevOps Days. There are probably— there was, I think we had a DevOps Days in 2017, we had them in 51 cities on 6 continents.

Alice: That’s not bad. Yeah.

Bridget: So, chances are good there’s one that’s not incredibly far away from you.

Alice: As an organizer, I really like seeing what the people local to me are working on in that space. As opposed to Leesa, where it’s focused heavily on the content, DevOpsDays, it’s the content plus where people are coming from. Because I know, especially with DevOpsDays, people from out of state or even out of country will apply to it because then, you know, they get to visit. And Portland is a pretty vacationy town these days, pretty touristy. And so, but, but like, I want to see someone who’s working at a local company propose something because that means that they are already part of my community and I’m bringing them in closer and that they can meet other people in the community and perhaps form good working relationships. And I want to provide like the area for them to do that.

Bridget: [00:51:59] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, local companies. I’ve also tried to get people from local educational institutions, governments, nonprofits. I mean, just, you know, like the, the whole range of local endeavor is really good for other people locally to learn from. Because, you know, like Andrew Clay Shafer likes to say, tribalism and fashion. It’s a lot harder for someone to say we couldn’t do that here when it’s somebody who has a lot of, you know, overlap with them.

Alice: Yeah, like, oh, we can’t do it here. They did it 3 blocks away, that kind of a thing.

Bridget: With a very similar organization.

Alice: Totally.

Bridget: Okay, so I think in terms of upcoming events next week, if we get this out this week, it’ll be next week. I will be at a Top Women in Cloud event in, um, at the Google campus actually early next week, which is so funny. Like, I wanted to argue with them when they sent me this because I was like, hmm, well, if we’re going to have some sort of criteria by which we’re measuring what women are doing what in cloud, and, um, then we’re going to, you know, time box this, say, to the last year, I’m going to name some other women who have probably done more in the last year. And then I was like, you know what, I’m not gonna argue with this because they’ll give me 3 minutes on stage. I’ll say some things that I wanna say. And there are some other wonderful women who are also getting this award this year, like Erica Windisch, who spoke at DevOps Days Minneapolis, and she just did a big launch of some of their I/O pipe work at re:Invent this week. Like, Erica’s great, and she’s gonna be there. So, I’m like, you know what, instead of arguing and nitpicking, I’m gonna say, yeah, Thank you, which is sometimes hard to do.

Alice: [00:53:42] What does it mean to be a top woman? Were you guys— no idea.

Bridget: I have no idea.

Alice: Write a Terraform, uh, config in 15 minutes and serve it to the judges?

Bridget: Like, I think it would be exciting if that were involved. I don’t think it is, but, but hey, you know, Vince Cerf is going to be there, so maybe I’ll get a chance to selfie with him. That could be kind of fun.

Alice: Proud of you for being a top woman in the cloud.

Bridget: Oh, I feel like I— if, if it’s a measure of how much time you spend flying right above the clouds, I definitely have taken all those pictures out of airplanes.

Alice: So you need to have earrings that just have like 5 9s attached to them. 9 earrings.

Bridget: Oh my gosh, I, I saw somebody saying something, maybe it was Maybe it was you, or maybe it was somebody. Oh, I know what it was. It was, remember that t-shirt that Charity Majors made that said, like, nines don’t matter if the users aren’t happy?

Alice: Yep.

Bridget: And people replying to her on that thread were saying, oh, the nines tattoos on my hands aren’t gonna make sense. And I was thinking, like, you know, temporary tattoos of nines that you could just be like, what?

Alice: [00:54:51] That’d be hilarious. I’m reliable at punching you in the face. I know, right?

Bridget: Oh my God. But anyway, then I have to take a red-eye, which is going to be horrible, to go to Austin to hang out with my team and work at the Microsoft booth at KubeCon. Do we say KubeCon or CubeCon?

Alice: I say whichever sounds more annoying. So, just so you know, it’s KubeCon.

Bridget: KubeCon.

Alice: I don’t know. Like, Oh, I call Kubernetes kubies.

Bridget: Oh my God. Wait, do you say kubectl?

Alice: Oh yeah, I say cuddle for everything.

Bridget: I feel like there’s a lot of cuddle-related controversies.

Alice: I annoy people with cuddle so much that I named one of my laptops cuddle just to mess with people.

Bridget: Oh my God, I love it. So, yeah, I also don’t have any of my conference talk stuff for 2018 announced yet. It’s a bunch of in-progress, and I probably am at least a week late in giving the workshop description to the people sort of thing. So, that’s what I’m working on when we get done with this podcast.

Alice: [00:56:01] I’m very much a planner. I like to just know the whole scope of my year before I set out to it. So, because I have to, like, really plan, like, my emotional highs and, like, introvertness. So, I have to make sure I’m not doing too many things close to one another and traveling and stuff. So, usually, I marinate on it during the holidays at the end of the year. So holidays 2017 is when I plan out my 2018. And I’m thinking about keeping it more domestic this year. Like, keep it within the country, couple of conferences, not too many new talks, and, you know, I don’t know, like take a yoga class or something.

Bridget: Awesome.

Alice: I don’t know what, like, old computer ladies do, but I’m gonna be one someday and I gotta prepare.

Bridget: As a personal, I am an old computer lady and I think yoga’s awesome. I also, I think, 2016, I counted, I wrote a blog post about it at the end of the year. I’m exhausted thinking about it, but I wanna say I gave 29 public conference talks. And that was too many. I haven’t counted up 2017 yet, but I think it was less than half that. But when people say, I gotta say, as a conference organizer, when someone I’m trying to get to come speak at a conference says to me, well, I’m only gonna do 4 this year, and I’ve already agreed to 3, I’m like, So it’s very panic-inducing to think about.

Alice: [00:57:18] This year I switched jobs. I’ve been to San Francisco like 3 or 4 times. I was in Europe for a few weeks. Like, I’m— that’s, that’s enough. And so next year, like, doing it, doing something more domestic. I’d like— I’d really like to give a keynote next year, especially since I was gonna give a keynote in January and that was thwarted. I would like to give a technical keynote next year.

Bridget: So, to our listeners, Alice Goldhus could be one of your technical keynotes.

Alice: Get on that. I’ve been planning that talk for, like, months, and then when I found out it wasn’t gonna happen, I was like, but I have all these opinions now.

Bridget: Do you wanna give us, like, a one-sentence elevator spoiler for what your topic is?

Alice: 3 or 4 years’ experience running containers in production, what does and does not work.

Bridget: That’s relevant to a lot of people’s needs.

Alice: Yeah. I was working at New Relic, and we put Docker into prod when it was at 0.6. Yes. So, coming from that to now, I’m at GitHub, where we run Kubernetes in production, and I’ve run Dockerized databases before. So, I have a lot of opinions about, like, what people say is going to work versus, like, the operational overhead involved and stuff like that. And so, I have a talk about that.

Bridget: [00:58:40] Are you telling me that tech comes with trade-offs?

Alice: If you’re in ops, it does.

Bridget: Or possibly if you have to live in the reality that all of us live in. I feel like a lot of people want things to be magically perfect, and it’s like, no, no, no.

Alice: Yeah, I feel like it’s kind of like the mechanic’s view, like a mechanic’s view of containers. Where I just lean against the podium with a rusty wrench and I just go, yeah, well, that right there is, um, it’s gonna break.

Bridget: Well, here’s your problem.

Alice: Your problem is all of the whales that you put all your apps in.

Bridget: Oh my gosh, I can’t wait to be sitting in the front row live tweeting that keynote when it happens.

Alice: I’d love to give it at some point. But, uh, so yeah, otherwise, I mean, I just bought a baking scale on a Cyber Monday sale, so things are There’s so many British recipes that rely on weight, and so I finally have a scale that I can do weight. I will have a scale that I can do weighted measurements on, so that’ll be fun, I guess, for some definition of fun.

Bridget: [00:59:40] No, I— and we should, we should definitely put a link to your baking scale in the checkouts. But let me, let me mention a couple of other community and event stuff before we start telling people about checkouts, which is to say lots of CFPs open right now on devopsdays.org, um, Velocity San Jose, Sorry?

Alice: SRECon is—

Bridget: SRECon? We’ll get the link into the show notes for the SRECon CFP. I’m writing that down. That only has another couple of days, I want to say, right?

Alice: Yeah, it’s very soon. I don’t know when this podcast will be posted, but there’s multiple SRECons.

Bridget: Velocity San Jose, June 12th to 14th. The CFP closes January 17th. There’s a discount code of ADO2017 for 20% off lots of DevOps Days, possibly other things. The fine folks who run SCaLE Conf Colombia asked us to tell people about their CFP, so we’ll have a link in the show notes, scaleconfco.com. So, there’s a lot of good opportunities to speak at amazing things. But let’s move to our checkouts, and we’ll need to add a link to the the scale that you mentioned. But tell us more about your scale.

Alice: [01:00:58] I can’t give a review on it yet. I just went to like Wirecutter and was like, what’s a good baking scale? Okay, it’s round metal and it’ll be here in like a week and then I can weigh something on it and make like scones or something. So, okay, so I got the baking scale. Let’s see, checkouts. Oh, it is that time of year for SysAdvent. So, I encourage people to check out SysAdvent. If you don’t know what it is, it’s an advent calendar in a blog form for systems and operations stuff. And it starts on December 1st. There is a new blog post every day by someone else in the community writing about different interesting topics. And they do it every year, and it’s super cool. I did it last year. It’s a lot of fun. And you should check out SysAdvent. This event is so much fun.

Bridget: I wrote a post for it one year called Wide Columns, Shaggy Yaks, that was all about HBase and horrible problems I had with it.

Alice: I did the No More On-Call Martyrs last year and made a lot of people mad.

Bridget: [01:02:02] And gave great conference talks based on that too. Write a blog post, get some buzz, do some conference talks.

Alice: Yeah, it is a good way to prepare for a conference talk because you can get all your talking points down and see what people resonate with.

Bridget: See what people wanna argue about.

Alice: Poke at it more in a talk later. Another checkout is Increment Magazine.

Bridget: And the link, I know you wanna just link to the magazine, and Susan Fowler and the whole crew there at Stripe are amazing, but I’m putting the link to be directly to your article.

Alice: I did write an article for Increment Magazine that I’m actually pretty proud of. It’s about staging environments. I don’t know if it’s just, like, a me thing, but I never feel like I have anything to add unless someone tells me I do. And so, having someone reach out to me and be like, I think I want you to write about staging environments, and please keep it technical. I was like, oh, they think I can do technical things about staging environments. Okay, I trust them. And then I wrote, like, I don’t know, like, 3,000 words on it. So, Increment Magazine is run by Susan Fowler and other women, and it’s operated out of Stripe. And it is a magazine that’s a quarterly publication. That pays its writers to talk about technical topics, and it’s very well put together and well curated. And if you do get the chance to write for them, it was an absolute delight for me. They have editors that really know what they’re doing, and I’m gonna have, like, a physical issue show up here at some point, which will be super fun. And, yeah, I think it’s a really good resource, and I’m really— I’m very excited to see where that magazine goes because I think it has a very strong showing so far. It’s in, like, its 3rd or 4th issue.

Bridget: [01:03:39] Yeah, I think Increment is really cool. So, we’ll definitely link people to that. Okay, you have more stuff for us.

Alice: I have more stuff. The problem is that you told me I was gonna be doing checkouts for this podcast, and I started out going, I don’t have anything to talk about, I’m very boring. And then I went on a few walks, and I was like, oh, I should talk about, you know, my favorite tea or something, and it was too long. So, one other thing that I will tell people to check out is There is a website that I can’t remember now that I will get you the link for, for the notes. And all it is is this guy that goes around and critiques airplane food. I love airplane food. I think airplane food is a delight. I really like efficient and interesting packaging science. And you find that a lot in airplane food and like how they present an entire meal that fits on like a foot by foot tray. And so this guy, I think he’s more in it for like the dining experience. And so he rates like the food and stuff, but he takes a lot of pictures of the packaging. And I find it very calming in a very weird way to see all the little packages that showed up for all his many course meals on these different airplanes. And it’s also good if you’re planning like a nice vacation where you can actually plan out and care about the airline you’re taking. You can get a pretty good idea of the food you’re going to get before you you get on there. It matters to me. I think, like, I don’t know. I don’t get out much. So like being on an airplane where I’m served like a hot meal that’s included on the ticket is basically the vacation for me. So being able to plan that ahead is nice. And I don’t know. It’s fun.

Bridget: [01:05:16] And airline food varies wildly.

Alice: It varies wildly. Yeah, it’s not like a 2-hour flight from Portland to San Francisco where you get like some pretzels. I’m talking about where it’s like those long flights or the international flights where you get multiple meals. On the flight or like Virgin Atlantic. I love flying Virgin Atlantic because if you’re flying it during the daytime internationally, you get tea and it’s super cute.

Bridget: Oh, that’s awesome.

Alice: Love it. So I guess those, those are my checkouts. I have too many checkouts. So those, those are them for now. And I guess the big scale that I can’t actually review yet.

Bridget: Well, we’ll, we’ll nevertheless link and let people try to decide for themselves. Okay, so I have, I have 3 checkouts myself. Joe and I were just driving back from Wisconsin where we were at his, you know, family’s for Thanksgiving. And he, we trade off who’s picking the podcast that we’re listening to. And I try not to bore him with too many tech podcasts and he tries not to bore me with too many football podcasts. But we can agree on Go Pirates, which is a Veronica Mars podcast, and it’s previously.tv. We’ll have a link in the show notes. But this is a podcast put on by the people who used to run Television Without Pity. So like SARS and those folks. And so if, if this means nothing to you, that’s cool. But if it means anything to you, you’re like, I really want to see what the commentary from those folks is about TV shows that interest me now because they were really funny a decade ago. And they are still in fact very funny. So yeah, so Go Pirates is one. I already had, I had someone come up to me at All Things Open in Raleigh, I think it was, telling me that they went and bought the Bombshell leggings that I linked to. I was like, that is really awesome. And someone else asked me recommendations. Yeah, like the Bombshell leggings are, they’re really great. They’re heavy duty and opaque and you could wear them as pants if you’re into that sort of thing or they’ll keep you warm. And they come in all sorts of geeky patterns like circuit board patterns or Settlers of Catan patterns. So I like strong recommend on these leggings.

Alice: [01:07:32] I need like stockings. I know those aren’t the same thing, but if you have any recommendations for stockings that cover your feet for like, like winter holiday party kind of things.

Bridget: Yeah, yeah, I never buy them that way because I only wear Smartwool socks even in the summertime. I wear the lightweight ones. So because I don’t want the socks, I don’t want— I would, if I bought stockings, I would want to cut the feet off of those and like replace them with Smartwool. So, so I don’t have recommendations on anything that comes with prebuilt-in feet just because I already know what I want.

Alice: Wire cutter.

Bridget: Nice. Probably. Um, and then the third, uh, checkout I have is Jewelbots. Uh, so I saw this, uh, at All Things Open. I saw Sarah, I believe her name is, talking about Jewelbots. And then I got Joe’s 10-year-old niece in the gift exchange. And spoiler alert, small child, in case you’re listening to this, you’re definitely not, um, you’re getting Jewelbots.

Alice: So I’ve heard such good things about them. Jewelbots look super cool.

Bridget: They look super awesome. And for people who aren’t familiar and haven’t gone to check, um, the link yet, uh, Jewelbots are— it’s sort of shaped like a watch, but it’s like this bracelet that is programmable with like Arduino or whatever. And it’s apparently aimed at kind of the, I don’t know, 10 to 14-year-old girl set. And the important, exciting hook is that it’s social. So they can program them such that their bracelet lights up with their special code when their friend is nearby, or they send their friends messages.

Alice: [01:09:08] I love it.

Bridget: It’s so great.

Alice: That’s a perfect gift.

Bridget: So of course, I bought a 2-pack. There was like a Cyber Monday deal where you could, you know, 2 for the price of I forget what the deal was, but I think it was maybe 2 for the price of 1. Or anyway, um, they had a deal going on. They might still— I don’t know, I’m not really sure. But because I got 2, because I found out from, um, Joe’s sister that, you know, his niece does have, you know, a best friend, and I was like, excellent.

Alice: Yeah, that’s really cool. I think that’s an awesome, uh, gift for someone that age. If people are looking for other gifts, any of Sailor Mercury zines would be sweet, or like the Get It Girl strips. I love Sailor Mercury and all of the things she puts out. She’s Sailor HG on Twitter, and she has these really accessible zines that are very feminine and very accessible for femme people. So it’s like these pink zines that tell you how to make a calculator and stuff. Really cute.

Bridget: Sailor Mercury zines. Yeah, I’ll put that in the show notes. And then I also should put a link to the thing that I just tweeted. Actually, I think it was yesterday, maybe. The Nerdy Baby is— it’s not all baby focused, but it’s like kid focused, kind of STEM, like science gifts. So it’s like some of us who have an agenda of STEM for nieces and nephews, like, we need links like this. It’s very useful.

Alice: [01:10:29] I love it. Jewelbots sounds— now I have to like go be a scout leader or something so I can give them Jewelbots.

Bridget: Oh my gosh, love it. Okay, so I know that you have a hard stop. I feel like this is— every time I do a podcast with someone, it feels like we run out of time and there’s so many more things to talk about.

Alice: Another 10 minutes. 10 minutes is fine.

Bridget: Oh my gosh. Okay, so like, before we, we went into, you know, all of the cool stuff out there that people should look at, but I feel like stepping back, you know, taking the 10,000-foot view.

Alice: If—

Bridget: because I get this question a lot, and maybe Maybe someday, as you become Old Lady Programmer TM, you’ll get this question too. When people ask, how do I grow up to be you? Like, how do I, you know, follow this formula that you didn’t have to do the awesome stuff that you’re doing? I feel like people will look at you and they think, she works at GitHub, that’s so cool. How do I do stuff like that? I mean, here is where you insert the GitHub is hiring plug, but, like, how do people turn into you? Because I know they want to.

Alice: [01:11:33] Well, I’d just be like sexually harassed a lot, I guess. So it’s a combination of like, for me, being a very— having a constant need for validation through achievement has helped. And so being a consistent self-starter and self-guider and learning all the time, like I really like learning. So traveling, going to things that are interesting to you. But then also knowing that in tech, there is a very real deficit of so-called soft skills. That is the ability to talk to another person. And so if you leverage that and you get good at it, and you also become known in the community through giving talks and things, giving talks and having some sort of social media presence really helps your career. It’s difficult to do. Like, I don’t really like doing it, honestly. It’s a lot of work, but it really helps. And it’s— I consider kind of like giving talks and networking and creating that social media is kind of like a bridge between all of your jobs. And it also can act as like a safety net if you lose a job because you still have like other people to rely on. You don’t want to be in a situation where your only network is within one company. And so when you get kicked out of that company, you have no one. So it’s a combination of doing a lot of self-guided activities that help you further your career within a company, and then also putting yourself out there and making friends and doing things that build up a stronger network outside of that company, just in the greater community. And if you do both of that and you don’t let the bastards get you down, Which, by the way, became a lot easier for me when I befriended a lot of women in tech. I think a lot of us— I came from that special snowflake thing where you were like, oh, well, I only hang out with guys because girls are so much drama. That happened a lot to me in high school and college. I had one girlfriend and the others were all guys. The longer I’ve been in tech, the more women I have befriended, and it has made a lot of my life really easier being among supportive women who celebrate each other’s accomplishments and help you get jobs because they have gone through the same exact things you have. So building a strong— and it doesn’t have to be women, whoever you connect with, whoever you are like, finding that network of people who are also outside of your company that can be your friends, that really helps on the bad days. So I don’t know, it’s a complicated recipe between following things that you’re interested in, and curating a supportive network for when those things let you down. Don’t let your job be your whole life, because when you fail at your job, you don’t want the rest of your life to go down the drain with it.

Bridget: [01:14:25] And I think that’s, that’s incredibly important too for people to remember that, like, sometimes things at a job don’t work out, um, the way you want them to. And that doesn’t mean that somebody walked you out the door. I mean, that does happen sometimes through no fault of your own, sometimes just because circumstances, whatever. But when a job is not what you want it to be, recognizing that and realizing that, hey, you could be doing something different. And that’s not to say that, like, every time somebody switches jobs, it’s because things were bad. I mean, I loved my last several jobs. And, like, it’s— I think it’s still really important to be able to interact with a lot of people who will help you see what else is out there too. And that does not mean— like, I don’t like the interview all the time, um, advice, just because I think it’s so disappointing to the people who, unbeknownst to you, unbeknownst to them, they’re interviewing you and they are so excited at you, you’re the best candidate ever, and then you’re like, psych, I was just practicing on you. Like, don’t do that to people, that’s really crappy.

Alice: [01:15:26] But interviewing is also exhausting, right?

Bridget: But like, I think it’s really— I think it’s really important what you’re saying about building up your network of connections with people outside just your coworkers. And these are people you could meet at meetups. You know, these are people you could meet at conferences if you’re able to go to conferences. It’s people you could meet on Twitter. That doesn’t mean that, like, you should follow someone on Twitter and then, like, you know, click the stupid little heart on every single thing that they say within 30 seconds, and then be really mad when they are not your BFF. Like, that’s, that’s not actually how this works.

Alice: I feel personally called out right now, but okay.

Bridget: No, no, I’m just saying, hey, I, I probably click on your things almost instantly all the time, but I’m just saying that, like, don’t assume that anyone that you’re interested in their work and you want to follow them on Twitter are going to instantly have all of the bandwidth to be your BFF.

Alice: Yeah, it’s also helpful when you have people locally that you can talk to and invite over when you’ve had a bad day at work. And they also help you, like, basically on a personal level, be able to enact change on things that you can actually control. Like, given a certain amount of money and time, you can learn a new programming language. But you cannot say something like, I’m going to make lead engineer by the time I’m 30, because you can’t control everything that goes into a promotion or a hiring process. So you have to be comfortable with the things that you can actually control and find fulfillment in those.

Bridget: [01:16:59] Yeah, and I think the other thing too, back to, back to what you were saying about, um, networking with people, I think it can sound like this cheesy, self-serving, false thing to be like, and now I’m gonna go network. But I don’t think it has to be like that because it can be about connecting with people over common interests and then caring about what’s going on with them too.

Alice: Yeah, when I was first doing conferences and getting out of my shell, it was exhausting. ’Cause I am an introvert and I had to, like, you know, put myself out there and go to the mixers and act interested in people. And, you know, you might meet like 10 people where you’re like, oh God, just not anymore, please. But then you meet the one person where you’re just like, what? You, you played Rabbit Algebra games in DOS as a kid too? Like, suddenly you have like a connection with them. That’s a very common connection to have, Bridget. And then now you have someone in your corner and you’ve already broken down those barriers. And the next time you see them, it’s way easier to connect. I have so many first-time awkward conversations with people who are now my friends, but the first time was just like egregiously bad and just super awkward. But you get over that hump, you put yourself out there, and now it’s better.

Bridget: [01:18:12] And I think that’s, that’s one of the reasons that I work to run a local meetup, and I suspect you do too, because you see people in your community making those connections, getting those opportunities having the ability to meet people who are sharing an area of interest with them or an area of their career, but outside their own companies. Like, I don’t know about you, but at least for me, seeing and helping enable that inside my community is really important to me.

Alice: I love seeing that. I love when I, like, I can stretch out the breaks at the meetup because, like, people are in groups and they’re talking and I have to be like, okay, it’s time for another talk. I love seeing people make those connections and catch up. Like, you know, they only see each other once a month at this meetup, and so they catch up. It’s really great. To see. I love it.

Bridget: Yeah, absolutely. So, all right, so we, we do need to wrap up. Uh, I guess, do you have any final words of advice since we’re doing the fireside chat thing here, which there’s no fire, it’s a metaphorical fire, at least I hope there’s no fire. But do you have like final words of advice for our Arrested DevOps listeners who are, maybe they’re trying to dev some ops for the first time and they’re like, how do I even DevOps in my company? No one even listens to me. I try to beat them about the head and shoulders with this podcast, but, like, what advice do you have for them?

Alice: [01:19:27] For them specifically, things are always easier when you get buy-in from the top. I’ve been put in situations where I’m told, like, oh, you should make it a grassroots effort, like, show us it works with your metrics. And I’m like, I’m an engineer, you’re a VP, like, why aren’t you backing me up on this? So, the more buy-in you can get from the top, the easier it will be. A lot of tech and company cultures trickle down from the top, and it’s much easier to go into a meeting and say, we’re going to try error budgets now, or what have you, when you know that you have people higher above you who will have your back in subsequent meetings. And so, yeah, you might not be able to convince your coworkers or even your direct manager, but if you can convince their manager, then you’re in a better place. But I will also say that if you find yourself in a company where you’re repeatedly being have obstacles thrown up, and you’re really being challenged, and you feel like you can’t get forward, and you’re not enjoying going to work anymore, then you might try looking elsewhere and seeing what other companies there are for you. Because, again, your job shouldn’t be your whole life.

Bridget: [01:20:33] That is so very true and excellent advice. Thank you, Alice.

Alice: Thank you for having me.

Bridget: Oh, yeah. So, if people want to head on over to arresteddevops.com/alice-fireside-chat, Not right this second, because I have not put the page up yet, but eventually, this episode’s show notes will be there. The site also has our newsletter, merchandise, Patreon, like, all the Arrested DevOps stuff you could ever want. You can visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes Store if you want to help other people find the podcast. Not really sure how discoverability works in iTunes, but apparently, that’s a thing. So, yeah, so thank you so much, Alice, for joining today.

Alice: If I knew this was a fireside chat, I totally would have set something on fire in the background. So, missed opportunity.

Bridget: Maybe we can, you know, like green screen it in or something.

Alice: Yeah, except Joe, just fix it in post. It’s fine. We’ll let him know. Thank you so much for having me. It was great to see you.

Bridget: Thank you. I’m Bridget at Bridget Kremhout. This is Arrested DevOps. And remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.