DevOps in the Windy City with Jeff Smith, Jerry Cattell, and Sameer Doshi

Jerry: [00:00:00] When I was at Orbitz, Graphite was developed there. I had nothing to do with it except for complaining about the UI.

Matty: 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 Matt, and today we’re talking about some of the interesting things going on with the DevOps community in Chicago with a pretty cool panel. And the show notes for this episode can be found at arresteddevops.com/windy-city. But first, a word from our sponsors. 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/10thmagnitude. This episode is also brought to you by Hired. Hired is a platform for top developer jobs, and they love DevOps people. Developers get an average of 5 to 10 offers on the platform, all with just one application, along with job offers and salary and equity upfront before you interview. So you don’t have to waste your time interviewing for jobs that you might not want anyway. And ADO listeners get double the $2,000 bonus just for signing up at arresteddevops.com/hired. And finally, this episode is brought to you 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. So I might be a little biased, but I do think that there’s some pretty cool stuff going on in Chicago that is in the technology and DevOps space, in addition to the pizza and large building and steak space too. So I kind of had this idea a while ago to say, I wanted to talk on the show about what we’re doing in DevOps, in technology in Chicago, why this area is different, kind of spurred by something J. Paul Reid said on an episode of our show after DevOps Days Chicago 2019. 2014, where he’s like, hey, I’m talking to people that are like doing companies that are real things, not Uber for kittens and stuff. So, uh, I thought I’d bring on a panel of some, some pretty cool local guests. Um, first guest on the panel is Jeff Smith.

Jeff: [00:02:47] Hey, thanks, Matt. My name is Jeff Smith. I’m a manager of site reliability engineering at Grubhub. Uh, hopefully when you’re hungry and you’re looking for something to eat, you’re using our site. Uh, we’ve been probably about 2.5 to 3 years inside of this DevOps culture transformation inside the org, and I largely serve as not just the manager of the SRE team, but as sort of the DevOps cheerleader in the organization. Been in Chicago for about 10 years, love the city, not going anywhere, and excited to be on the panel.

Matty: Next on our panel is Jerry Cattell. Jerry, Jerry Cattell. I should know better.

Jerry: Hi, I’m Jerry. So I’ve been, I’m the VP of engineering for a small medical startup called LifeSquare. That’s completely remote. I’ve been doing that for about a year.

Matty: You’re VP of engineering?

Jerry: Yeah. But there’s like 4 of us. So, you know, I’m sorry.

Matty: I just, I didn’t know. I just, I just know Jerry does cool stuff. And I was like, I didn’t know you were like a VP.

Jerry: Yeah.

Matty: But you don’t work at a bank, so it’s a real title.

Jerry: [00:03:48] Hopefully I get to hire more people. So I’ve been in Chicago for, I guess, about 12 or 13 years now. And I started in Chicago from Orbitz, which is, I’m sure, a company we’ll talk about a bit. And yeah, I’m one of the organizers for the DevOps meetup here in Chicago and also one of the organizers for DevOps Days Chicago.

Sameer: Awesome.

Matty: Which we’ll be talking about quite a bit. And rounding out our panel of Chicago DevOps celebrities is Sameer Doshi. So Sameer, Tell us a little bit about your background and what the listeners have won.

Sameer: I’m Sameer Doshi. If you tweet me, you’ll win a prize, but I won’t say what it was. It could be anything. I’ve been at kCura, a legal e-discovery company based out of Chicago, founded in Chicago, for 2 years. I am a DevOps architect there, but I really want my Wikipedia article to say I’m a DevOps enthusiast. So anything we can do in this episode to make that happen, Let’s make it happen. I’ve been helping kCura with a transition to a much more DevOps culture as we shift from offering an on-premise application for eDiscovery to offering a hybrid application and offering our services as a SaaS application as well.

Matty: [00:05:06] I want to like start with a little bit— we all alluded, I think, to kind of what we’re doing now. Well, I guess I didn’t, but people know. By the way, I work at Chef. Okay, ta-da! Okay, anyway, Kind of, you know, but everyone kind of gave a little bit of background about how long they’ve been in Chicago, been working in Chicago. So I personally have spent, I almost said almost my entire technology career in Chicago, but honestly it has been my entire technology career in Chicago. So I’ve been working in Chicago for about 20 years in the IT community, primarily for insurance and financial institutions, because that’s pretty much usually where you work in Chicago, or at least what most people think of when they think, you know, of the classic IT community in the Chicagoland area. Because we’ve got a lot of organizations like Aon, Allstate, Bank One— well, now Chase, but previously Bank One was a big piece of that, Heller Financial back in the day. Then one of my gigs, pretty much right before I— I guess right when I was starting to become a DevOps, hahaha, when I was starting to whet my DevOps appetite, was the tail end of a gig at a company called Classified Ventures. Which is one of the oldest e-commerce quote unquote startups in the Chicagoland area. And nobody knows what Classified Ventures is, but lots of people have heard of cars.com or apartments.com. Some people have heard of homefinder.com and they definitely have heard of a business that some of the folks from Homefinder who left went and started called grubhub.com. Jeff, I didn’t know if you, I don’t know if you know that whole Classified Ventures story.

Jeff: [00:06:39] Yeah, yeah, I’m pretty familiar with that. And, you know, I actually learned it too. So it’s funny, I don’t even know if he remembers, but the CEO, Matt Maloney, I actually met him at a Twitter meetup and it was probably like 2007 and he was trying to get me to come on board and I was just new to Chicago and I was like, ah, startup thing, that seems a little risky. Maybe I’ll go work at Accenture instead. That’s safe. So that didn’t work out the way I hoped it would have, but, you know, I finally came around and made the right choice. But if I hadn’t made the right choice, be on a boat right now doing this podcast.

Matty: A lot of overlap in this, in this, the industry in general, but I find Chicago’s community, if you will, or not tight-knit. I mean, that, that sounds bad to say it’s not tight-knit and we all like each other, but you cross paths with the same people over and over and over again. I mean, do y’all see that?

Jeff: Definitely. It’s a really, you know, I don’t know. I always think of it as like a really tight community. And, you know, it’s funny because like I’ve seen on occasion where people like, on the way out the door, light the match and burn the bridge. Like, and I’m like, ooh, ooh, that’s gonna come back and haunt you a little bit because, you know, like you say, you’re constantly, especially when you’re talking about quality people, you’re constantly sort of running into the same group or group of friends of friends. And, you know, that’s both exciting to me and at the same time, you know, it can be damaging if you don’t play the game right.

Matty: [00:08:10] So, but now that being said, I guess that’s a good question. So like I’ve said, I’ve spent my entire career working in Chicago. Unless the rest of you have had very short careers, that’s not been the case. So can you tell us a little bit about where you have been besides Chicago and what you’ve seen to be a little different?

Sameer: So before I was in Chicago, I started off in Boston, and then I was in New York, and I was working for a bank, a little startup bank called Citi. And Citi had offices obviously around the world and around the country. And, you know, we had some exciting tech and it was in New York. Everything was really exciting, but I really needed to be closer to my parents. So for me, the decision was pretty clear that we wanted to move to a place where my wife and I could both be close to our parents and where we could kind of drive around where we needed to go. So family reasons, right? And the strangest thing happened when we moved to Chicago. There wasn’t just closer family personally, it was also The work culture was very different. It got to be a very, I don’t know, almost like a close family kind of thing that you would have at work. You would talk about personal stuff. You would make jokes. You know, you could go into work every day and say, hey, did you guys see that ludicrous display last night? And people would, you know, not really catch on that you hadn’t seen any baseball because you don’t know what baseball is. But it was a very, very different kind of atmosphere. And that really, for me, it really showed when on my first day at Keikura, I’m, you know, go through the orientation. And when I finally get a chance to sit at my desk, one of the first things I did is look through our Outlook directory because I’m a nerd. That’s what I like to do and see, you know, do I recognize any of these names? And oddly enough, I totally did. Like, Matt, you were in there. Trevor Hess, he was in there. And I was like, I know those guys from the podcast. I thought that’s kind of cool. Over the next few years, as people became friends at Kagura, as I started to know more of the community, I realized that I’d see the same people, the same resumes. If we’re trying to hire or even just going to the different meetups, you’d see the same people again and again and again. And it wasn’t a bad thing. It was like that family atmosphere that you get at work. It just happened to also be there in the community in general. The family atmosphere extended not just to being nice and talking to each other at work and actually trying to work through problems, you know, like true DevOps culture, right? It also extended to just how you work. Uh, when people needed to leave, they, they left. Uh, the work hours did not appear to be as crazy as they were in New York because of long commutes or what have you. A very different More friendly atmosphere, more suburban atmosphere is how I would describe it.

Jerry: [00:11:12] So I start— I grew up in Miami. And so that’s where my technical career started. I worked for FedEx, the Latin American division. So I got to do lots of traveling, going to lots of very nice tropical places for year 2000 things, switching out computers, nice job to have. And then I moved from there to the Bay Area actually. And I was there for probably 4 or 5 years. I mean, there’s, there’s, it’s definitely. A huge change. I mean, you mentioned before of like Uber for this, or, and, and I was there during the probably huge bubble where like, I think I got there in 1999 or something like that. So I, I was there for the highest part and then for the crash when the startup I went to work for ran out of money and everything.

Matty: Ah, Pets.com.

Jerry: No, no, they, they were out of business way before us. Basically, uh, my wife got an opportunity out here in Chicago and I thought it’d be interesting to, so I started researching all the companies. And, and of course, when you start looking online, all you really see initially are banks, lots and lots of banks, some trading companies and stuff like that. I mean, and because this was around 2003, 2004. Um, and then the one company that really stood out when I was looking was Orbitz. So I interviewed with a couple of companies. There was Orbitz and UBS. Orbitz was taking a long time to get back to me. So I unfortunately took the, took the job with UBS and was there for, I want to say 3 months before I quickly left and took a full-time position, or if it’s realizing I’d made a horrible, horrible mistake. And that was sort of the last time I worked for anything in the finance industry. But yeah, in terms of culture, it’s definitely a different environment. And from the Bay Area specifically, I think there is definitely more hanging out, at least for me since I’ve been in Chicago with my coworkers and everything. And there is definitely the— that I did not experience in there was like the train times. Like, I mean, here come what, 5:30, 6:30 on the hour, pretty much after that is the people leaving. So that was definitely a difference for me to get used to as well, since I, I’d never really lived in a place like that. It depends on the train time so much, but yeah, I mean, it’s been really interesting seeing sort of all of these, I mean, from Orbitz, they grew a ton and many companies grew out of people who cashed out of there, created their new startups and just have gone on to many, many things. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s definitely a tighter community where you do get to see all the same people. At various jobs again and again. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve gotten involved in sort of meetups so much here is because I feel there’s a good community around here. I mean, like, for the DevOps meetup, anytime I want, companies are willing to host us, are willing to sponsor the meetups, willing to give talks. Like, it’s a pretty active community, which has been definitely great to have.

Matty: [00:14:10] We interrupt this broadcast to update you on the Cubs game score. So it is the top of the first. Cubs are still up 1 to nothing. Those of you who are listening now or listening to this later, this is being recorded during Game 5 of the National League Championship Series of Cubs versus Dodgers. You listening in the future know how this happened. You know if we’re going to be in a good mood or not later on. We don’t know that. I didn’t realize when I scheduled this, I was like, oh great, awesome. Also, we didn’t ask. I should have done the straw poll at the beginning if we’re Cubs or Sox fans, although I’m the only native son, I think, right? Y’all are all— Jeff, you’re not from Chicago either, right?

Jeff: Not from Chicago, but I’ve been— since I’ve been in Chicago, I’ve been living around Wrigley, like a mile and a half away from there now. So I’ve been a Cubs fan since I’ve come and love it. I’d been taking a break from baseball for a while too, so it was easy to pick up a new team.

Jerry: Well, I will say that. So I am rooting for the Cubs this year because, I mean, lived in Chicago long enough that they’re kind of my adopted team. But, but I will say, since I grew up in Miami and was there when the Marlins started, I was actually, you know, watching during the Bartman series, rooting for the Marlins in that case.

Jeff: [00:15:22] Mute him.

Matty: Yeah.

Sameer: It’s the same thing, Jerry. Actually, when I was there in Boston, the thing that I really, really learned was to love the Red Sox. So I guess I’m a Sox fan, probably just not the right color Sox.

Matty: That’s an American League team, so it’s wrong anyway.

Sameer: But what do I know about baseball, right?

Matty: Yeah, but that’s, uh, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll continue to follow along and keep, keep you listeners posted on this thing that you already know what the answer is because you’re listening in the future. Jeff, what— and again, I don’t want to kind of get too, too much into all the different stuff, but different geos where you’ve lived, is there anything that strikes you as, as different?

Jeff: So I grew up in upstate New York, um, and I, I worked at an HMO for like 10 years before I realized like If I don’t get out of here, I’m going to think every place is fucked up like this place. So, uh, that’s kind of what, uh, you know, brought us to Chicago. It was a choice between a job in San Francisco, a job in Chicago. You know, I like the big city thing. I think that for me, that was strikingly different was there is— it was the first time that I recognized what a difference there is between IT and engineering, right? Like, we sort of use this generic technology umbrella, but, you know, the mindset in sort of an IT type function is very different than the mindset in sort of an engineering type function. So it was great to see these companies that I really didn’t have exposure to in upstate New York, where, you know, they were actually encouraging these sort of jack-of-all-trades type of resources, right, where you weren’t specifically siloed off into one particular area, like you’re the SAN guy, right? That’s what you do. You look at disk all day. You really needed to be multifaceted. And that was exciting because there was just like, you know, so much opportunity to learn and get involved with things. I think the other thing that was striking was just how humble so many people were in Chicago. Imposter syndrome is definitely a thing, but like people were cognizant of it and they were willing to help. They were willing to sort of teach and mentor in a way that I didn’t quite experience in New York, where it was much more like information hoarding and, you know, a little bit of shame, like, oh, you don’t have that command line memorized? What’s wrong with you, kid? You don’t belong here. So it was just sort of a warm welcoming from the very beginning. And a funny story, talking about like the closeness of things, when I was living in New York, I started my All Things Dork blog and I found this guy that was making templates for WordPress for like $10. So I paid him, he pooped one out for me, it was great. I was on it for a while. One of my first meetups in Chicago, I’m talking with this guy, we get along great, and he’s like, hey, what’s your email address, man? I’d love to email you. I was like, oh yeah, jeff@allthingsdork. Holy shit, I’m Matt Wolf. I’m the guy that developed your website like 4 years ago. I’m like, get the hell out of here. He’s like, yeah, he’s like, I totally remember this. So, you know, it was like one of my first connections in Chicago, you know, randomly from New York. And that, that sort of experience has sort of been like, you know, the norm for me. I always find people that somehow connect with someone else or somehow we have some sort of shared experience.

Matty: [00:18:31] Jeff and I almost started a group blog several years ago. I didn’t put that 2 and 2 together until like 2 years ago.

Jeff: I was like, oh yeah, it was some totally random, like, you know, hey, let’s do a geek’s dad blog. And yeah, it’s just hilarious how those types of things work out.

Matty: You know, Samir, you’ve come into Chicago full metal DevOps, right? You came to Chicago with the DevOps. You haven’t been here through the Chicago becoming the DevOps. Is that a safe statement?

Sameer: That is absolutely a safe and very accurate statement. When I came to Chicago, One of the things that I really brought from New York was a real desire to really do the engineering work associated with DevOps. And for me, coming into Chicago and coming into a place that was just really at the start of its DevOps journey was such a great experience. The unexpected part of that experience was really seeing an aspect of true DevOps, and that is of shared learning while things were in progress. So a lot of times, I don’t know if you guys have ever seen this, there’s this video online of a person who’s built a transmission out of Legos, and the thing is phenomenal, and it’s so awesome. And every time I see it, I always think, I really will never be able to build something that complex because there’s no instructions. I don’t know how to do it. And it kind of discourages you from really getting back into the Lego mechanics and the Lego robotics sets. But you see these things coming out from Google and coming out from Amazon about things like how to operate a monolithic repo, and you’re like, wow, that is a great and fantastic idea. I don’t know how we would really get to that. And we can try to plan for it, but it’s going to be very tough. What I liked so much about Kikura and about Chicago in general when you came to Chicago, no matter how much you wanted to do, you could start sharing things that were in progress and get reasonable responses. You weren’t getting responses like, this doesn’t work, you’ve got a long way to go to get to where you need to go. You got really nice responses of, wow, this is great progress, I can see how this is going to build up to where you want to go. So instead of having that a Lego transmission, what you got was a slow buildup of, I don’t know, a Lego axle and then the Lego, you know, the part of the transmission that spins around. And you get to slowly see that buildup happening. Coming to Kikure with full-on, let’s do this, let’s do the DevOps, let’s get everything to be automated nonstop, everything to be source controlled, getting the support to really do that from CEO down is amazing and fantastic. And it’s, it’s not something I’ve experienced in Boston or New York.

Matty: [00:21:38] One of the things that, that I think is, is interesting, like looking from an adoption perspective, and this is something that I saw both with my own career in terms of attempts to be a DevOps. By the way, if you’re new to the show, I’m being snarky when I’m referring to myself as a DevOps. And I mean that in 2 ways. One is to imply that I actually can do anything useful and 2, using DevOps as a noun. But so when I also see this in, you know, as a Chef employee, as we’re looking, you know, as someone who primarily worked for the— in the Midwest with adoption with stuff like this, we’re kind of slow in the Midwest, but that’s, that’s not because we’re hicks and farmers, right? It’s, we are, you know, measure 13 times, you know, we’re going to sit and see. And like, if you kind of look at the adoption curve of anything, I think within tech as a whole, We see it hit the West Coast, then it goes to the East Coast banks, and then in the Midwest we go, okay, we’re cool with it. Now we’re ready to go. And I think we saw that with a lot of stuff with DevOps, right? A lot of this stuff kind of came out of Bay Area startup stuff. Then it became— and then once it started to become a little more adopted by more traditional East Coast enterprise, we started to feel better about it in this area. But what I think is interesting at the same time this is happening, and this is the beautiful dichotomy of Chicago. We have a lot of very traditional IT here, and then we also have a ton of crazy startup. And what’s weird is we have very little in between. It’s basically you, Samir. It’s Kikuro, right? I mean, maybe not, but— and that’s something I think a lot of people aren’t as aware of outside of— maybe outside of the areas— is how much kind of incubator startup-y kind of stuff that’s happening in this town.

Jeff: [00:23:27] I think what you’re partially speaking to there too is like the sort of Midwest practicality, right? Like, you know, there’s all of this like cutting-edge technology that comes out of the West Coast and New York, and you look at it and you have to evaluate like, you know, is this something that’s going to be around? Is this something that’s going to catch fire, you know, become stable? And the Midwest is not necessarily interested in brand new shiny, right? There, it’s about solving actual problems. And generating revenue. You’re like, you can see that when you look at the types of companies that we have, right? We don’t have the Uber for kittens, like you’re saying, right? We have like things that have relatively straightforward business models, right? We’re going to deliver food, right? And we’re gonna take a slice of that order, you know, problem solved. We don’t have anything where it’s like, oh, you know, you can, you know, order pizza with 40 characters and, you know, emojis and, you know, hope for the best.

Matty: It’s very, very pragmatic culture.

Jeff: Yes, yes, and that’s something that I actually like because technologies come and go, right? So it’s being able to sort of focus on the problems of the business and apply some useful proven technologies without having to exist on the fringe. Because at the end of the day, this is what I tell my guys all the time. It’s like, how does this help us deliver food better, right? Like, what is it that we’re doing? Is this something that is absolutely gonna revolutionize what we do? If not, then there’s probably something out there that already solves our problem that is tried, true, and trusted. So I love that about the Midwest, quite honestly.

Jerry: [00:25:02] But it goes both ways. I mean, ’cause a little bit, ’cause there’s definitely things coming out of the Midwest in terms of like, I mean, when I was at Orbitz, Graphite was developed there. I had nothing to do with it except for complaining about the UI, but which clearly didn’t have a huge impact. Right. I mean, I mean, I don’t think when they created that they had any idea what sort of impact it would have, but I mean, there was a need that they had and found a solution to it in their world. And I think also, um, I’ve seen a number of like open source things coming out of various companies in Chicago. I mean, like at a DevOps meetup just earlier this week, Gogo was talking about Foremast, which is something to help automate the use of Spinnaker for deploying applications and setting up pipelines and stuff. I mean, now it’s, it’s a practical solution to something, but it’s also something that no one else seems to have built, or at least didn’t open source and make available. So I think there is It’s lots of innovation still, but it might be focused on solving practical problems.

Jeff: Right.

Matty: Pragmatic innovation. It’s very— it’s not to say that we’re, you know, to throw an East Coast thing at it. It’s very Etsy. Etsy develops cool shit, but they do it because it was to solve a problem for them. It’s not like a hammer in search of a nail. And I think that’s what you see, right? No one— I don’t say no one. I’m sure people are. But generally, the innovation that’s coming out of here is actually solving a real problem. It’s scratching an itch that was there. Versus saying, I think someone might have this problem, so maybe I should make a thing and then see if anybody wants it. I don’t know if that’s fair to say other people do things that way. Seems like someone’s business model somewhere.

Jerry: [00:26:33] I’d say many times people are doing things that solve their own problems and they hope it works for someone else, but they’re not really worried about it, right? I mean, and I think that’s usually the case for a lot of tools. Now, there are some people who just think, hey, Hey, this seems cool. Let me do this. But I think that doesn’t happen that often.

Sameer: The other thing I think that happens a lot with Midwest pragmatism, and it’s probably due to the fact that we’re having to work through a lot of problems, is a true iterative approach to engineering and solving problems. You’ll see things that are starting to solve problems, and then you’ll see little bits and additions that are made to those things again and again and again. And again, until we have the presentation at DevOps Days Chicago that shows something that’s so awesome that, you know, you think, wow, we could really use this. We do have a lot of pipelines and we have the same problem. We have a lot of the same problems versus when I look at some of the new tech out there and I think, well, that does solve a problem that we have, but it’s not really a big problem. I guess it must be for someone else.

Jerry: [00:27:41] Why not? I always feel that way when looking at some of the things. Just from a scale perspective that like you see some of these solutions that the Netflixes and the Googles have put out. And I’m like, that looks really cool. But I, those are not my problems that I have. Right. I mean, my problems are of a much smaller nature and are much more about automating stuff or just simplifying things. And I think that sort of is part of the Midwest pragmatism part of it. But I think there’s also a nature, part of the nature is just, um, having sort of some more established companies like the banks and stuff like that, that can’t go crazy with all this. And like you said, they do a lot of iterative stuff because they have to, because there’s just no other way that they could ever make progress besides doing little systems at a time.

Jeff: And it’s funny because we kind of talk about these large institutions, right, that have been around for a while, that are a little bit slow, right? They’re like these big behemoths, but we talk about them as if they’re not making money, right? Like as if they’re not bringing in revenue hand over fist, right? So I don’t know, there’s a certain bit of kid gloves that we kind of have to, you know, treat these shops and environments with, especially the people that are in them, right? Because, you know, they are— a lot of times when I talk to these people at DevOps Days and whatnot, they feel like they are being left behind by the rest of the community because they’re not able to adapt or iterate that fast. But, you know, sometimes you have to remember to keep the focus and just say, like, hey, look, you’re a business that’s making money. There’s a lot of things at risk, right? So you may not be able to move as fast as others, but it doesn’t mean you have to sit still. You can continuously evolve and iterate. Just at your own pace.

Matty: [00:29:11] That kind of segues a little bit into talking about— you talk about having conversations at DevOps Days Chicago, and I wanted to kind of talk about how over the 3 years that we’ve done it, the types of— I was gonna say the types of people, but what I mean by that is the companies that are sending, the types of companies that are sending people. Like when I think about who was there, when I think about like at the first year, and again, this is sort of anecdotal because I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I’m just thinking about people that I knew. I think there was a very small percentage of folks who were from the very traditional companies. Like one person from Allstate was what I knew was there, and, you know, kind of thing. And then I think about the conversations that I had with folks hallway track this year. It was a lot of frustrated folks from traditional type shops, but the good thing about the conversations that I thought was number one, that they were frustrated. That’s a good sign, right? That’s saying like, okay, you know, it was frustrated, but they weren’t frustrated in the, yeah, well, this will never fly at my company. Right? That’s the story I heard 2 years ago, was this all sounds cool, but that’ll never work here. What I’m hearing a lot more is this is really hard and we’re not moving as fast as I wish we were. And that’s a huge difference than this will never work here, because now you’re to the point that you can do something about it, or you can just manage your expectation a little better and say, yeah, maybe you aren’t gonna be full metal DevOps in 6 months at JPMorgan Chase. Maybe it’s going to take you a couple of years to get there, or maybe you need to look at it in a smaller scope. We’re seeing that adapt. We’re seeing different folks coming to DevOpsDays. I think in some ways, Jerry, I don’t know what you think. I would say maybe a little bit at the DevOps meetup. I honestly think that we’re, we’re still missing people at the DevOps meetup because a lot of these traditional companies are not downtown Chicago. They don’t want to, you know, I mean, that’s just a, that’s a local, inside baseball thing, by the way, speaking of baseball, it’s now tied 1 to 1, Chicago, LA. So great. Yeah.

Jerry: [00:31:15] No, I agree. I mean, cause I mean, I know there’s been talk of having like a Northwest suburbs meetup or something that, that might get together more with those companies. It’s a tough thing to ask for people to come from the suburbs to come just for a meetup in an evening. I mean, it’s—

Matty: that’s actually built to be at like after work, right? I mean, that’s, that’s sort of, and again, not, not to get into this, if we start at 5:30, though, right?

Jerry: I mean, to get downtown, you probably have to leave work. I’m just saying it’s, it’s, it’s a difficult thing to do and task. But so, yeah. And we do post a lot of videos online so people can, can at least see some of the things. Yeah. It’s definitely different than networking and actually talking to people and getting input on your specific problems and, and how you might solve that.

Matty: So I was just thinking maybe that’s why we saw more of this, this change in DevOps Days versus the DevOps Meetup.

Jerry: No, I completely agree.

Jeff: I think one thing you mentioned, Matt, that really could be talked about a bit is talking about the scope of DevOps in your organization. People think that when you’re doing DevOps, it’s got to be this huge, top-bottom approach. While that is very effective, you can do DevOps within a relatively small circle of people that you work with, just starting small and sort of letting that expand. If you’re an ops person, just spending a little bit of extra time with the dev that you work with the most or having lunch with the developer team for the service that you support, right? That’s sort of the beginning and the genesis of DevOps. While it’s not going to be this huge, radical transformation throughout the organization, it’s still something that starts and it becomes a seed. It becomes contagious. Before long, people recognize that sort of rapport that you have with developers. People recognize that you understand how your system runs a bit more than the average operations person. Why is that? You can sort of proselytize that out to the rest of the organization, and it really becomes a sort of ground up, this sort of groundswell from the bottom up. I think people really should kind of look at these opportunities when they have a chance to cross the aisle with the developers or the operations folks and really say, okay, how can we just, even if we pair for a half hour a day, that’s going to bring a lot of knowledge on both sides, and it’s going to ultimately result in smoother-running systems.

Sameer: [00:33:34] Jeff, I don’t think it’s just developers. Just bottom-up, it’s also middle-out that we see the groundswell happening. So what we’re seeing a lot, and what I saw at the DevOps Day Chicago and, and even at Kikura, is seeing a lot of one group, like you mentioned, that gets into DevOps, or maybe a central team that’s establishing best practices, something like that that happens and starts to build up that DevOps practice. And you don’t just it expanding within the other applications. What you start to see is you start to see developers and engineers really, really getting into it and saying, you know what? I bet we could make our deployments go faster. I bet if we made these tweaks to our build scripts and to our source control management system, we could make our lives a lot easier. Hey, let’s start doing this. You start to see, without mandate from senior leadership, groups starting to really embrace DevOps and I saw that at DevOps Day Chicago, there was a guy I was having a hallway conversation with who was saying one of the things that’s happened at his bank was that he was getting a lot more involved with engineers who were developing the software. It wasn’t being a, hey, ops guy, go do that stuff. It was a, hey, how can we help you to do the deployment so you don’t have as many errors? Realistically, it was probably so that we’re not always, always on call during the deployment days, but I think it also spoke to the fact that more people want to get engaged because the DevOps movement just makes sense. It makes everyone’s life easier. It lets you learn more about how your system works in production if you’re a developer, and if you’re an ops person, it lets you learn about the dev process and what happens with the code that sometimes you’ve just been given to deploy. Ultimately, I really like the idea of it leading to the happy place, the nirvana state that I see it happening and that I see the DevOps community leading to. That’s where engineers are doing the deployments to production. You have people there who are supporting them, who are actively engaged on the team, engaged throughout the dev process. You see that middle upswell happening all over the place.

Jeff: [00:35:57] I think the increased exposure between the two teams sort of helps to reveal some of the learned helplessness that happens on both sides of the orgs. What I mean by that is developers are like, oh, yeah, I would love to know more about this, but I don’t have access to the log aggregation system, or whatever. An ops person hears that and they’re like, oh, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have access to that. Let me correct that now. Or, oh, man, this thing paged us again, and we just restart it every time. The developer hears that and they say, oh, I didn’t know this was a problem. You know, this is an easy fix for us. So you get a lot of these sort of like organic wins just from spending more time together as a nature of just, you know, conversating and talking. Like, I just had a similar scenario where I was up in the NOC room and the phone rings and it’s pager duty. And I’m like, oh, what is that? It’s like, oh, it’s this dumb Splunk alert for log velocity. I was like, oh, you guys get paged for that every time? They’re like, yes. I’m like, I can turn that off for you right now. Oh, thank you, right? Now I’m a hero. I’m getting donuts and whatnot. Everyone’s like, yeah, Jeff for president, right? Like, but you know, all it took was me sitting upstairs talking with them, stealing a Mountain Dew Code Red from them, and you know, you know, this sort of fix comes about organically. So, you know, the increased exposure is always good.

Matty: [00:37:15] You shouldn’t diminish the power of groundswell, and that’s something that is— first of all, as a vendor, I see the power of it. I see when it happens, so I can tell you it happens. Now, when you’re inside the 4 walls of your organization, especially if it’s a larger organization and you feel powerless, you feel like that could never happen. The first thing is I’m the one telling you that, first of all, no matter what organization you are in right now that you feel is so big that it’s not happening or that it couldn’t happen, I’m gonna tell you there’s a part of your organization where it already is happening. It just might not be where you’re at, but the fact is it can happen and it will happen, and you can be part of of it. So don’t think that, oh, well, again, that’s— and it’s the most effective way, right? Because having the mandate from the CIO that we’re now going to DevOps all the things at our Fortune 10 company, that ain’t going to magically make it with the DevOps, right? Boots on the ground are who’s going to do the work. Now, it’s good to have the CIO backing you a little bit too, because otherwise, you know, but there’s nothing you can do about that, but you can do something about yourself. And I think that’s, Jeff, to your point, it’s like, what are the things that you can do? And I think a lot of times folks, especially if you’ve been working for the same company for the last 20 years or the last 25 years, we get a little— I don’t want to say myopic, but it’s really hard to see that things could be any different. And I think also when we’ve been in the same— in an organization for a long time, we feel like, okay, yeah, I’ve heard this all before, right? We’ve heard the thing that’s going to save everything and we half-assed it here and it never happened. You feel like you’re tilting at windmills. And I think that’s maybe that’s like the this silly optimist in me that as much as I’ve been in organizations where we’ve fallen on our face, I still feel like, okay, just because, you know, we’ve screwed this up 100 times before, maybe it’ll work the 101st time, you know, because it’s different. Again, doing the same thing 101 times is stupid, right? But I used to tell my, you know, my team when I was at apartments, I’d be like, I know you can think of 100 reasons why this won’t work. For a minute, let’s just pretend it will. Frankly, I think if you’re a manager of sysadmins, that’s the kind of person you have to be because sysadmins’ job is to think of the 100 reasons why it won’t work. But you need someone to say, okay, that’s great, but now for just a second, come along with me and let’s pretend this is going to work and let’s see what will happen.

Jeff: [00:39:40] There’s an incredible amount of power in that sort of thinking, right? When you look at a problem and you can say, yes, we’re going to get there, and the things that we encounter are just problems to solve, that really sort of turns everything on its head in terms of how you go about approaching these things, right? It’s very easy to, like you said, get yourself down with like, oh, it’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna work. But if you can just say, yes, it’s gonna work, but these are the hurdles that we have to encounter and solve for, you know, everyone’s mindset suddenly shifts and everyone’s worried about and trying to figure out how to attack the problem instead of trying to, convince everyone else that the ship’s not going to fly.

Sameer: Sometimes it really takes that one person being the person who’s going to stand out there and say, you know what? Let’s keep doing it. Let’s pass this hurdle. I know personally, for me, I don’t want anyone to think that I’m just a hyper-DevOps enthusiast Wikipedia article, but really what has happened for me in my history is I mean, I spent 5 years implementing config management at Citi. It’s 5 years. And I remember when we first started, it was exactly what Matt was speaking to, to people saying, well, I mean, this works on— I could see something like this kind of working on our Linux servers, but it’s not really going to work on our Windows servers. Let’s just not do it there. It’s going to be easier for us to manage this this by hand and submit tickets and just really tightly control it. And, you know, after saying again and again, let’s think about how this is going to work, let’s keep doing it. Sometimes we kind of had to, you know, quite frankly, do it in secret and say, well, let’s just keep track of the changes even if our managers are saying, just do it, just get it done because it needs to be done, this needs to go out into production. Being the person who wants to make that change happen and following through with that, even if that means you’re kind of putting yourself out there does have an impact and you absolutely can make the change. It might take you a little bit of time, but in the grand scheme of things, I mean, 5 years for a career of 20 or 30 years really isn’t all that much and it makes a huge difference.

Matty: [00:41:59] Yeah, you’ve probably heard the story that what you just talked about, maybe doing it in secret, there’s my— the story I like to tell about how I learned Chef out of spite, just because I was working working for a person who told me that implementing Chef in our organization was going to cost us tens of thousands of dollars of training and it would take at least a year. And, you know, everyone was too dumb to be able to do it. That was reading between the lines. And so I was like, well, I’m just going to teach this to myself and I’m just going to write some Chef to do our stuff. And I did that. And yeah, that, uh, doing things out of spite for your boss is not always a good idea, by the way. I’m not recommending that by any means, but it’s a powerful motivator. It is. But hey, I work at Chef now, so maybe you should do it.

Sameer: I don’t know.

Matty: I am not a career advisor.

Jeff: Turn your shitty boss into an asset.

Matty: So we talked a little bit of things different in the place we’ve been, and Jerry, you started to allude to this, but I’d like to talk a little bit about what are some of the companies that when we think DevOps or cool tech or Chicago tech in general, who do we think about? Besides Grubhub, of course.

Jeff: [00:43:12] Oh, all right. Forget it then.

Matty: Yeah. You’re like, I’m done.

Jerry: Gogo is doing lots of good, interesting stuff. Um, Hyatt is—

Matty: Internet listeners, raise your hand if you knew that Gogo was Chicago-based. Bet you didn’t.

Jerry: Hyatt is doing some interesting conversions to Docker with all their sort of website stuff. Uh, Braintree, DRW, the trading company, is doing lots of bare metal DevOps. And then, I mean, ThoughtWorks is also, They’ve been doing DevOps-type stuff for a number of years, more on the consulting side, but I mean, they have their own tools now that they sell and stuff. I mean, that are focused on continuous delivery and all those things. I mean, so they are definitely bought into that. I mostly know the ones that are at the meetups and that are involved in DevOps Days Chicago, but I know there are a lot of larger ones too that you probably have more experience with. There are a number of them out there that are just doing some Really interesting stuff.

Jeff: I think what Hyatt is doing is really interesting in the way that they’re sort of approaching it as this large organization with a bunch of history and legacy stuff, right? And they’re sort of building their— they’re sort of building this DevOps culture inside of the organization, right? And it’s almost like a startup within a well-funded company. It’s really interesting about how they’re approaching it, and I’m curious to see if other large companies adopt a similar model once they realize that it’s time to sort of blow the house up, so to speak, with a particular product or website or something like that. If they say, well, now’s an opportunity to sort of look at this DevOps thing and sort of institute it from the ground up at the very beginning or inception of a new group.

Jerry: [00:44:58] I was at a meetup, like a New Relic meetup, I think last year where US Foods was talking about sort of their DevOps stuff. And I mean, US Foods has been around for like 100 years or something. It’s, it’s a very old Chicago company, but they’ve been, they started doing, taking a DevOps approach to some degree, at least. Um, I don’t know if that’s still the case, but, but definitely they were, they started small. And I think that’s definitely something that I’ve seen work at a number of companies of like, hey, we have this new application, let’s try and figure out this lifecycle and all these things with this one application and then expand that out to the rest of your systems once you, once you have a good thing in place, a good process.

Matty: But I think it’s tricky. Like you, you do have a little bit of a, of a dance you have to do there so you don’t fall into bimodal bullshit. Right. Like, I think there’s the way to do that, right. Where it’s, you know, so like Jeff, you talked about like, hey, it’s like a startup within the other company. And if that’s the way that you do that to prove it out, but then you figure out how you make that be the thing. And, you know, I know we’re talking about Chicago and not the Midwest in general, but I’m gonna overreach for a second and talk about Target, right? Like, ’cause that’s like how Target sort of did it and is doing it. And that’s working well, right? Where they’re like, okay, we had to start with our little dojo or a little specialness, ’cause you gotta start somewhere, but it’s everybody. That’s not this bimodal bullshit, right? But that’s what can happen, I think, if you’re not careful. With that approach, which is you have this, like, okay, this group does it this way, the legacy is a legacy, and never the twain shall meet, and that’s dangerous.

Jerry: [00:46:35] This team has the good life, and these people are left dealing with all this old stuff.

Jeff: Yeah, I always look at bimodal as an end state versus this sort of transitional state that you’re in, because you’re right, like, you know, some of these organizations, it’s too large just to it all at once, right? But to be able to do it, get a success, prove it out, and then if nothing else, other managers will look at that and say like, wow, you know, these guys are extreme, right? I need that. I want that. These guys are extremely efficient and I need to be a part of that. So again, you know, it sort of becomes infectious, hopefully.

Matty: Pilot it like you pilot anything else, right? I mean, the thing at the end of it, there was— it was Damon, I think, who made the joke a couple years ago that was like, we need to rename name this just DevOps to Common Sense, because the thing is, when you distill it down, it sounds so simple, right? Like, make a thing that’s better, and people will want the thing. That’s what DevOps adoption is. That’s all you need to know. When you want to figure out how to drive DevOps adoption in your company, prove it. Do a thing with it, and then everybody will want that thing. It’s the same thing about how we did Agile adoption when it was successful, if you do it successfully, You pilot it and you stack the deck for that pilot, right? You pick the right people that’ll make it kick ass and all this stuff, and then it will perform. And then everyone’s going to go— other teams are going to go, well, hell, I want that thing. I want the magic button, you know? And, but then the challenge is to make them realize that it’s not actually just a magic button. It’s a change of work, right? And that’s going all the way back to John Allspaugh and the 10 deploys a day talk, right? Where everybody missed his point and they’re like, oh cool, you’re deploying 10 times a day. Let me see the button that lets you do that. He’s like, that’s not the point. The point is not the button. I was thinking too, with like tech going on in Chicago, I don’t know if any of the rest of you have this experience, but I remember, Jerry, was it like over the summer? There was like some— no, it must’ve been whenever, whenever. Okay. Again, not a sports guy, still tied 1 to 1, by the way. Um, whenever brackets happen, that’s in the spring, right? Someone did like a bracket thing of like Chicago startups. And I remember going through it and going, I know 2 of these and I am supposedly like, know this industry. Like, did anybody else have that experience?

Jerry: [00:48:54] Well, I, I had even the experience, cause I don’t know if it was that bracket or there was another one shortly after that. I want to say about like the Chicago unicorns, like the billion-dollar companies. And I had no idea who most of them were. I’m like, how is that possible? Right.

Matty: I mean, it’s like you’re, you’re, Your DevOps thought leaders of Chicago, ladies and gentlemen.

Jerry: Yeah, I definitely had that feeling.

Matty: I think that’s the thing is besides the unicorns or whatever, again, like even when you’re talking about Gogo, I think there’s a lot of companies that would surprise some people either A, that they’re here, and that was, I think, the experience that Paul Reed had at DevOps Days Chicago in 2014, where he’s like, hey, I was talking to someone from L.L.Bean, right? I didn’t even know that was like a Chicago company, you know, that they were were doing. Maybe it wasn’t Ella Bean. Now I’m gonna totally screw it up.

Jeff: Whatever.

Matty: Paul, if you listen to the show, tell me what I said wrong. But there are also, I think, some— I think you’d see— you’d be surprised by some of the organizations that seem more traditional in the Chicago area that really have started to embrace this change. Are they— I mean, Hyatt is, again, is a good example, right? I mean, that’s a hotel, right? I mean, that’s pretty Again, we do one thing. We put people in rooms and charge them money to be in the room. You know, like it, it, there’s not, you know, you don’t think about them as cutting-edge technology necessarily, at least not if you travel in hotels a lot. You definitely don’t think of hotels as being very technology cutting-edge if you’ve had to be on their networks. I was just going to say like McDonald’s is a local Chicago company that has been, uh, really, I mean, just an overall digital investor. Really pushing towards how they’re doing that. Walgreens, which, again, it’s one of those Chicago locals, like me, I just assume there’s a Walgreens every 20 feet countrywide. Apparently, that’s only here in Chicago, but they exist pretty far, right? I mean, even companies like the Mercantile Exchange, I mean, that’s the thing about Chicago. Chicago is known as a trading city, right? The Merc, it’s a pretty big deal. They’re adopting and have been adopting a very DevOps-oriented kind of approach to stuff because they have to move with velocity with safety. And I think that’s just an interesting thing.

Sameer: [00:51:15] For me, it’s not— for me, it’s not just the Merck, it’s also other financial institutions that I see. I happen to be across from the Fed, and I know I used to see Morningstar reports when I was at Fitch. And Morningstar has a really pretty amazing startup process where debt devs rotate to various teams. They’re doing this before DevOps is a thing, and they’re doing it because, like you said, Matt, it just makes sense. It makes it so much easier for, as I’m developing an application, I’m thinking about, man, I remember that time I was on the ops team and how much it stunk that I could not get diagnostic messages out of my app. I mean, they’re a financial services company, And they’re doing that right now.

Jerry: Well, one thing I, we didn’t get into is the whole notion of all the other incubator ones like 1871, which are the cutting-edge type ones, these small startups that are doing lots of really interesting things because they are doing the more West Coast, like starting from scratch where you can do all the latest, greatest technologies and stuff and put them into production right away and start building your applications. Um, yeah, 1871, like there are a number of companies there that that are doing just great work.

Jeff: [00:52:38] You know, it’s funny, ’cause I was part of a couple of like startup challenges and I was, when I went into it, I was so focused on the technology, you know, not knowing anything about like what it takes to build a startup or anything. I’m assuming it’s like this everywhere, but it felt very Midwest the way they were like, you know, I don’t wanna hear about your technology right now. I wanna hear about like your business, right? Like, what can you do to get this thing going right now? Like, what can you do? What is the minimum, minimum, a minimum viable thing that you can do. I thought that was a— it was a very interesting and great experience for me to kind of go through this, but also to see like some of the other ideas that people were coming up with and coming up with sort of creative solutions for how they can deliver their product without actually investing a lot in technology. So I think that’s something that 1871 has brought to the city, and we’re gonna see some great companies coming out of it.

Matty: They also provide the fact that I say the number different every time I refer to it because I can never I can’t remember, but everybody knows what I’m talking about, so that’s good. We’re like 75.7 whatever. It’s like a radio station. Yeah. We are nearing the end of our episode, so we need to wrap this up. The one thing I would like to point out that I think is probably the coolest thing about the DevOps community in Chicago is that the DevOps meetup here has the best URL. We actually have meetup.com/devops. To me, that means that we invented DevOps in Chicago, I might say. Feel free to take that quote out of context. But that being said, you probably have a pretty awesome meetup in your city you should check out, for sure. But speaking of checkouts, Jeff, what do you have for our listeners to check out?

Jeff: [00:54:26] So I was recently reading about Netflix’s new OSS project, Winston, which is basically automated runbooks for recovery in particular failure scenarios. It reminded me of a, of an actual— I think they were a sponsor at the 2015 DevOps Days, Neptune.io. But basically, it’s a great way for you to automate some of these recovery tasks that are pretty standard that happen all the time. Oh, when we have this issue, we need to clear the number of busy DB connections in the C-3PO library. Automating these things that you do automatically all the time, you can document that, put it into a runbook, and use either Winston or Neptune.io to you know, kind of take the human out of that. So that’s one that I would say check out. And then if you’re also, if you’re in the city of Chicago, we’ve started a DevOps book club that we actually do in person. Last month we read the Google Site Reliability Engineering Handbook. This month, by popular demand, we’re reading The Phoenix Project. There were a lot of people that haven’t read that. So if you’ve been looking for an excuse to pick that book up, now you’ve got one. Check out meetup.com/devops and join the book club.

Matty: [00:55:43] Sweet. Jerry?

Jerry: So mine is— my checkouts are basically hours and hours of videos. First, the videos for DevOps Day Chicago have been posted online. Yeah, I went over that program and sort of watched them. There are some great talks, Ignites, everything. I’ve just started going over them again because when you’re there, you don’t get a chance to really be focused on some of the talks and definitely worthwhile. And then the second one is a Vimeo page for SpanTree, which is basically a meetup recording company that also happens to do consulting. I don’t know if you’ve— based in Chicago, they record tons and tons of meetups in Chicago.

Matty: I just got that.

Jerry: They have videos from basically, I’d say, at least 10 or 15 different Chicago meetups and definitely worth going there and watching some of them.

Matty: Cool. Sameer, you got something else?

Sameer: I am still getting such a kick out of Edmund Lau’s The Effective Engineer. It’s, if you’ve read Time Management for Sysadmins, it’s a lot like that, but more of a developer, an engineer perspective. Fantastic book. I am sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for the Halloween finale of the Edgar Allan Poe Murder Mystery Dinner Party series. It’s a fantastic little web series and just great. Can’t wait for it to end. Then finally, I am in love with ARM Visio. It’s a way to visualize any of your Azure ARM templates, and it just makes such a big difference, not only to see when you’ve got a big ARM template, makes a huge difference to see how it’s all going to look before you put it together.

Matty: [00:57:31] Cool. Again, all these things we’re talking about, there’ll be links in the show notes at restdevops.com. .com/WindyCity. My checkouts, first of all, just discovered that there is a Stormtrooper-shaped whiskey decanter based on the original molds. I’ll put a link in the show notes or just Google, you need this Stormtrooper whiskey decanter in your life. And that’ll take you to the sobadsogood.com site. It’s not really a checkout. Like people don’t know this, but I’m just going to tell you that Hamilton is awesome. And I saw it last week. I think it’s in previews here in Chicago. Jerry, you’ve already seen it and you’re going again, or what’s your story with that?

Jerry: I saw it, I guess, a week and a half ago, 2 weeks ago, and seeing it again with some friends in like March of next year.

Matty: So, okay. Yeah, I mean, the Chicago cast is pretty— I don’t, I mean, I don’t know anything about the New York cast other than the recordings, but you know, it’s super great. But again, like, who doesn’t already know that? And then also something that I think is super fun is if I’ve been watching— I don’t know if anybody else has been watching Westworld on HBO. I love the original film. It’s so campy. And the new one is just super well done. So I’ve been enjoying that a lot. Another win from the hippos. So guests, is there— where can people find you on the internet or in real life if you’re going to any upcoming events?

Jeff: [00:58:53] You can find me at Dark and Nerdy on Twitter. You can check out my often not updated blog at allthingsdork.com. Yeah, those are probably the best 2 places to find me?

Jerry: You can find me at, uh, @jkittel on Twitter, 2 Ts and 2 Ls. And then, uh, pretty much at any DevOps meetup.

Matty: So I think we just discussed in the green room that you’re not making it to any more DevOps Days this year, probably, right?

Jerry: Probably not. I’ll probably make the re:Invent, but probably no more DevOps Days for the year.

Matty: So Sameer, and where can people find you online besides Wikipedia eventually?

Sameer: Uh, if you want to find me online, you can find me on Twitter. It’s @sameersdoshi. So S-A-M-E-E-R-S-D-O-S-H-I. If you’re trying to find me in person, you can probably find me at the DevOps book club that I just heard about. That sounds amazing. And also, if you, if you happen to see me in Chicago, because we are a small place, and say hello, I probably will not see you.

Matty: [00:59:55] By the way, 3-1 Cubs right now. Addison Russell, boom, home run. Thank you. I’m not going anywhere interesting upcoming, but there are some cool upcoming DevOps Days. DevOps Days Ohio is October 31st and November 1st, so Halloween, scary DevOps. DevOps Days Madison is right on the coattails of that guy, November 2nd. Bangalore is November 4th, so right after that one, and right after that is Cape Town, November 7th, and Nashville will be November 10th. I really had hoped to be able to make it down to Nashville. Sorry, also had really hoped to go to Madison too, so sorry Madison friends, I’m not throwing shade at you. If you’re looking to speak, DevOps Days Baltimore’s CFP is still open until December 9th. You can find out about all these DevOps Days and more at devopsdays.org. Also upcoming is the FutureStack conference, so you can check that out at futurestack.io. I don’t remember exactly when it is. But go look online. You’ve got the internet.

Jeff: [01:01:00] I totally spaced too, because I was staring at the Cubs score. I’ll be speaking at DevOps Days Madison.

Matty: Oh, so you’ll be there?

Jeff: Yeah, so I’ll be there. So if you’re there, come say hi.

Matty: What are you talking about, Jeff?

Jeff: Interestingly enough, I’ll be talking about starting with C, you know, how to implement the DevOps culture from the ground up.

Matty: Oh, cool. I’m looking forward to watching that video sometime. So yeah, so head over to arresteddevops.com/windevops. City for this episode’s show notes. Uh, the site’s also got how you can get on our newsletter, check out our merchandise, support us on Patreon. Um, I gotta tell you, somebody on a Slack I was on the other day was like, wow, I didn’t even know you had a Patreon. I’m like, really? I thought we were obnoxious about it. So apparently I’m not as spammy as I thought I was. But yeah, we do have a Patreon, patreon.com/arresteddevops. And yeah, so Jeff, Jerry, and Samir, thank you, uh, for joining me tonight. I really appreciate I hope you had fun.

Jeff: Yeah, thanks. I had a great time. Okay.

Matty: So with that being said, this is— these endings are always weird when I’m by myself. So anyway, I’m Matt, @MattStratton. This is Arrested DevOps. And remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.