managing your mental stack

Matt Stratton: [00:00:09] Welcome to Arrested DevOps, Episode 8, Managing Your Mental Stack. Arrested DevOps is a high-level, biweekly panel discussion of DevOps concepts. We give our listeners a tantalizing taste of the basic technologies and ideas of DevOps to entice them to try more. I’m your co-host, Matt Stratton, @MattStratton on Twitter.

Trevor Hess: And I’m your co-host, Trevor Hess, @TrevorGHess on Twitter.

Matt Stratton: This episode of Arrested DevOps is brought to you by TenthMagnitude, helping businesses realize true agility through DevOps and cloud-enabled innovation.

Trevor Hess: Tonight on Arrested DevOps, we’ll be talking about learning: how to learn, what to learn, and why you should learn it. As always, we’ll start with our retrospective where we’ll talk about what we’ve learned since the last episode.

Matt Stratton: Lots of learning.

Trevor Hess: Such learning. So this week for me, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start us off. I’m really happy to say I got Chef running with Windows, having never really implemented it before. I will admit I asked Matt a couple questions here and there because I know he knows Funny about Chef.

Matt Stratton: [00:01:20] To be fair, my answer was usually, go on IRC.

Trevor Hess: Yes, that’s true.

Matt Stratton: #Chef on Freenode. There you go. There’s your answer.

Trevor Hess: Nobody answered me there. So I got IIS and Web Deploy configured using Chef. I wrote a recipe and a cookbook to set up the stuff we needed for IIS and Web Deploy for a couple applications. And then once that recipe was written, I had 3 VMs running that configuration in less than 20 minutes. It was wonderful.

Matt Stratton: Nice. And actually, if you’d like to know more about Chef and configuration management, our next podcast, which will be in a couple weeks, is called Fast and Furious Configuration Drift, and you can learn more about it at arresteddevops/9. That’s the number 9. So arresteddevops/9. We’ll tell you more about our next episode.

Trevor Hess: Yeah, so that’s pretty much what I got done in the past couple weeks. Matt, what about you?

Matt Stratton: Actually, mine was kind of similar, although it wasn’t around Chef, but it was definitely a lot of fighting with Windows. I spent a fair amount of time getting the Vagrant plugin for Amazon Web Services working for Windows guests, and I’m going to write a blog about it at some point explaining how I did that. It was something that, from what I could tell, at least everybody told me it couldn’t be done. It has to do with the fact that Vagrant expects SSH. I should explain what Vagrant is. According to Wikipedia, Vagrant is a free and open-source software for creating and configuring virtual development environments. It’s kind of a wrapper around virtualization software like VirtualBox, and you can use things like Chef or Salt or Puppet to provision the VMs. And what I was trying to do was use it actually to test Chef cookbooks. I wanted to spin up some VMs in AWS and then use Vagrant to define the VMs that were gonna go up there. And it required a lot of baking custom Amazon machine images and configuring SSH and rsync on those, and ended up getting it working at about— it took me about 12 hours straight, and about 5:30 in the morning I got it done, and I was pretty proud of myself. And then, you know, proceeded to sleep through meetings the next day. I’ve also been doing a bunch of work with a product called Go. Which is by ThoughtWorks, and that’s a continuous integration— or actually more of a continuous delivery tool. And the big news is that product is now open source, so it’s free. And it’s definitely worth checking out, and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. And I think internally we’re going to be moving— we’ve been doing some stuff on Jenkins, and we’re looking to move to using Go instead because it’s much more built for continuous delivery. So that being said, I think we can jump right into our panel discussion. As I mentioned, we have Sasha Rosenbaum joining us. Sasha, you want to tell us a little about yourself?

Sasha Rosenbaum: [00:04:19] Hey, so like Matt said, my name is Sasha Rosenbaum, and I am a consultant with 10th Magnitude. I have been on a little bit of a journey, I guess. I’m originally from Ukraine. I spent about 11 years in Israel, and I’m in Chicago for a little less than 3 years. And I’ve been with this company for about 2 and a half years, and I guess it’s been a real inspiration to me. And I find that we constantly learn more, and this is like— we’ve been having conversations with Matt about how to be effective in kind of figuring out what information you want to go after and how do you want to consume it in the most effective way. And I guess that’s what brings me here to this podcast today.

Matt Stratton: So we wanted to kind of kick off looking at it at a high level. You know, again, as Trevor said, this is really an episode that’s about learning and how we learn. And there’s 2 main things that I want— that I think we kind of break this into. One is what is worth learning, and then what are the best ways to learn them? I kind of think we see in technology, and especially in a space like DevOps and where things are constantly evolving, that there’s this big, like, fire hose of information that could just be blasting you. And the trick is, how do we filter through that fire hose and know what is worth— and know what’s worth knowing? Because you could spend a lot of time learning about something and then find that it’s not really, really relevant.

Trevor Hess: [00:06:03] How do you find the best balance between Renaissance man and specialist?

Matt Stratton: Correct. This is definitely a discussion. We can throw these questions out all day long, but I think we want to jump in. For me, I try to take the approach of let myself get blasted with the fire hose. And I’m going to talk more specifically rather than metaphors in a minute, but right now, and just sort of let everything come in and not necessarily understand it. But I like to think about that my ears are wide open, my eyes are wide open, all this information comes in and I let it come and reside in my brain, unprocessed, unfiltered. And then it just sort of rattles around in there. And then if something sticks, then I’m going to go and I’m going to dig a little deeper. That’s a lot of analogy. Then I guess a more specific way of saying how that happens is blogs, podcasts, Twitter. Twitter is the best analogy to this for me because my Twitter stream is full. There’s no way. I miss 90% of anything somebody says on Twitter because I follow— I don’t even know how many people. Thousands, right? And something just happens to come along and I’m like, oh, that looks interesting. Let me read about that. And I’ll read really quick. And if it resonates, like, oh, I want to know about that, then I mark— and I guess maybe in a bit I do want to talk about kind of information management, and I’ve got some tricks for that. But then I’ll put it into Pocket and say, I’m going to read this later and I’m going to dig into it later. What about you guys? First of all, where does your fire hose come from and how do you filter it?

Sasha Rosenbaum: [00:07:54] I don’t know. I think my fire hose— so I don’t use Twitter as much, although I’ve been thinking of starting using that because I think it’s very good for professional network kind of stuff. My fire hose, I guess, comes from Flipboard because I have like kind of I’m following technology news and it’s easy to pick your interests, so a lot of stuff comes from there. Then maybe a little bit of Facebook, a little bit of LinkedIn because you have this, again, specified content that you can follow things that you’re interested in. And just random things that someone drops you a note, oh, here’s this really cool thing that I’ve seen this week, and you go check it out.

Trevor Hess: So for me, it’s probably a combination of— largely it starts with Reddit. You know, our programming, our technology, but it also is largely influenced by what I need to work on at work, as well as kind of the subjects that come up at the various meetups in the city. You know, I’ll go to— I go to a lot of meetups. May not always be relevant for me, but if something, like you said, Matt, if something sticks, then I’m probably going to dig into it a little deeper as I go forward. But really, my biggest learning tool is probably the— beyond those is Google.

Matt Stratton: [00:09:11] In terms of when you know there’s something you want to know?

Trevor Hess: Right. Once I hear something, then I jump into Google and seek more information about it.

Sasha Rosenbaum: Right, so I guess there’s a pull request and a push request, right? So we can get some information from, you know, the news that are being dropped on us, and then we can go research it more once we think that it’s worthwhile.

Matt Stratton: Yeah, I think it’s— like, for me, when I— and it’s always funny to watch the little serendipity of how you end up where you’re at, and that now I’m such a config management junkie, and that’s a big part of what my job is. And I stumbled across it because of a small reference to it in the Continuous Delivery book, and I was like, oh, What’s this? I didn’t even know that was a thing. Let me do some digging on it. Again, it’s where the stuff resonates. I think that’s the biggest trick to me as I further myself professionally. Again, a big part of it, and I want to make a reference. We had asked on the Twitters, how do you like to learn and what works for you? Benjamin Moser, Moser? @BenjaminMoiser says, he said, I enjoy hands-on experience while building something for fun, but trial by fire with deadlines is the norm. I think we’ve all been there. A lot of times you learn what you learn because you have to, but that can be limiting because now you’re limited to what your company or your client is exposing you to, and I think that’s always the fine line. Of— and it depends on where you’re at in your career also, because at some point you’re like, I just need to learn some skills. I don’t really have to worry about concepts as much, but I need to learn how to implement something. And then as you want to go and you want to say, I want to understand new things, or I want to be able to bring things to my organization, that’s the hard part. And because that’s not going to be something where the the edict is going to come down from the CTO saying, go implement config management. It’s something that once you know it, you can bring the value of that. I think a lot of it is serendipitous, and a lot of it is sometimes blind trust that just something sounded interesting, so you’re going to dig into it a bit.

Sasha Rosenbaum: [00:11:39] I guess you’re now also talking about how do you pick the things that are worthwhile. In terms of learning on the job, I guess it’s like— kind of something that we do a lot. And the benefit of consulting to me is that we do a lot of very different projects, and then you get exposed to a bunch of different things, and you’re not always stuck with the same thing. But then in terms of managing your mental stack, it can be exhausting, because if you’re learning on the job and you’re constantly doing something new, it may be overwhelming to go home and read more about this technology or that technology. And I find that when I’m doing things that I’m more familiar with, then I have this energy to kind of go and research some other stuff after work. And when I’m learning on the job, it might be a little harder.

Trevor Hess: Absolutely. And I’ve, I’ve had that experience as well. It’s, it’s an interesting juggle because when I get faced with new things at work, even those I want to dig into sometimes, but it’s weird. It depends on how how much work I’m doing actually actively on that in the office, whether or not I’m going to have the energy, so to speak, afterward to go and dig more into it. For me, I know that I either learn by looking at visuals or I learn by doing. I’m very bad at conceptual learning, if that makes sense. But if I actually work through the problem myself, then I tend to have a— to really hold on to that.

Matt Stratton: [00:13:11] I think that goes both ways with the learning by doing, and I agree with it. Part of it is, to me, I’m the same way where I want a project. That’s what, you know, and we have someone who just started with our company who is learning a lot of new things, and we’re working on stuff, and that’s the point he’s made. He’s like, I can read books all day long, but give me a project to code. Give me a problem, and that’s how I’m gonna learn Ruby, you know, or whatever. I see that the same, but the other part about it, besides being a— maybe, you know, to say like, oh, well, this is how I understand it better, you actually are going to learn it better because if you’re just sort of reading a book, it’s very easy to go down this path of overestimating what something can do. And I’ve done that. I’ve made that mistake, right? Because you read literature, especially read white papers, you look at it and you’re like, oh, you know, the Config Manager can do this, that, and the other, and blah, blah, blah, and then you think you know it as an idea, and now it’s time to do it as a project, and you go, oh, yeah, it doesn’t do that. Or not so much that the product is not capable, but your understanding of it was misinformed. You were approaching it from the wrong direction because you never actually had to make it jump through a hoop.

Trevor Hess: [00:14:26] You never had to solve that problem with that tool.

Matt Stratton: Absolutely, and that’s huge to be able to— and then it’s also rewarding because you accomplished something rather than, hey, I got to the end of the book, I finished the webinar, yay, go me. It’s like, hey, I built my Hello World, awesome.

Trevor Hess: Right, because a lot of times that’s what you wind up with in a book. You don’t get to actually— sorry, Sasha, you seemed to be saying something.

Sasha Rosenbaum: Yeah, I had something to say about that. It’s the difference between conceptual learning and actually solving a problem because The books usually describe the good stuff. This tool is really good in solving this problem. And then you start working with it and you get, wait, I just need one little thing that it doesn’t do. But how do I go around it now? I’m committed to the tool. And you go in and solve this problem, whether it’s technological or you just find a new way or I don’t know what. But it can be a very interesting experience. And what I’ve been actually thinking about for a long time, and I haven’t done it yet per se, is once you solve this problem, probably write a blog about it, because it then commits it to your memory so much better. Because you learn, you solve, and then you teach, kind of, right? And you lay it out conceptually just for someone else. And I really like those blog entries that are solutions to a specific problem, as opposed to, oh, this is a very nice concept, and you should check it out.

Trevor Hess: [00:15:58] Absolutely. I mean, and even if it, you know, I’ve written a blog post after I solved the problem, and honestly, I don’t remember. I can’t say I remember it any better immediately, but I have a reference that I wrote for myself, basically, that I can just look back and say, oh, here’s the Google Doc from when I put that blog post together, and that’s how I solved that problem. You know, not only does it help teach others, but it’s kind of a secondary memory file.

Sasha Rosenbaum: Absolutely, it is.

Matt Stratton: I’ve told Sasha before, one of, one of the blog posts I wrote that still gets the most traffic was based on— it was a post about like how to configure SharePoint search in a cross-domain environment. And it was something where, again, I was— I had to solve the problem. And I think I wrote it in the blog partially for myself to remember, but also so I could share it just kind of internally, just with my team. And if I recall correctly, it also was when I was doing this thing where I was like, I’m going to blog every single day for a month, so I needed posts. But it’s still there and it’s still relevant. Well, it’s relevant to the internet, it’s not relevant to me, thank God that I don’t have to worry about configuring SharePoint search in a cross-domain environment anymore. But when you have to write, that’s another thing that is When you have to write a document that says how to do something, it makes you think about it in a different way. I think it’s— right? Is that sort of the thing? Like you’re saying, it sort of cements the neural paths differently. I always get it wrong. What is it? Talk to me like I’m 5, explain like I’m 5. What’s the Reddit thing?

Trevor Hess: [00:17:38] Explain like I’m 5.

Sasha Rosenbaum: I had this conversation, I had this very interesting example with a friend of mine who used to teach a course at a university. And I told him, like, sometimes I don’t know how to, like, kind of know if I’ve learned something. I don’t know if I’m really, you know, processing that information. So he gives me a PDF on something that I’ve never seen before, an algorithm. And he tells me, me, okay, now read that and tell me when you understand this. I’m like, okay. I invest like 5 minutes into reading the PDF and then go like, okay, I think I understand the concept. He’s like, okay, now teach it to me. And I started explaining that and realized that I don’t really understand the concept. I’m, you know, I can talk about the general overview, but I haven’t gotten into details. But if you get to a point when you can explain explain it to somebody, then you actually, you know, process the information. And it kind of, like, created those different neural pathways in your brain that, you know, will store information so much better and get you over little things that you haven’t thought about when you first read that.

Trevor Hess: [00:18:51] Absolutely. Once you can— it’s that weird kind of clarifying moment, I guess, when, you know, because there’s been times working on projects where I’ve had to explain the same problem or the same solution to 5 different people. And the first person, it’s kind of like I’m still thinking it through with myself. The second person, it’s a little better. By the time you get to the last person, you’re like, oh, oh, I actually truly understand what I— the solution I came up with myself now. And that’s one of the reasons why I really like passing information on and why I really enjoy pair programming. Is because you’re forced to teach each other, which forces you to understand better. Because not only are you trying to conceptualize it yourself, but you have to be able to express it in a way that the other person’s going to learn and understand what you’re doing also, which is kind of an interesting stretch that I find valuable.

Matt Stratton: I also, just thinking about the ways of learning we talked about, if you have a project, and especially if we’re talking about wanting to have concept, you know, learn concepts and stuff, it should come as no surprise that I’m a huge podcast junkie. And also, obviously, I think podcasts have value because otherwise I would not have one. Although, you know, I think Trevor’s starting to learn more about podcasts being on one now. But I—

Trevor Hess: [00:20:15] the dark side.

Matt Stratton: Yes. When we, when we think about value, I actually want to read, uh, I’m going to say, what did your friend say about— I know, I know. That’s exactly what I was, I was going to pull up and say what the, uh, The, the— we need to quote, uh, today’s special message brought to you by— yes, where’s my note? Here it is. This is from my friend John Smith, and he says, listening to podcasts is a terribly inefficient way of transferring actual information. It’s a bit like asking Grandpa Simpson for directions. It takes 45 minutes, consists mostly of historical inaccuracies and long rants about the messed-up state of the world today, and at the end you’re not really sure you aren’t more lost than when you started. But it sure is entertaining. And I know that was in jest and mostly was written to be funny, but what’s true out of that is I have a hard time with podcasts that are sometimes really specific. I get concepts really well out of podcasts. So for example, there’s a Rails podcast, and I’m not knocking these guys at all, it just didn’t work for me, but it was one of those podcasts that’s like 12 episodes long and that’s it. And each episode is about a certain kind of coding for Rails. And it’s not a video podcast, it’s an audio one. And to me, audio like that was just not a really efficient way of transferring information into my brain, just to listen to it and then try to have to think about how does the framework work and how am I gonna write this code, you know, without being able to see it. But whereas I can listen to something like Food Fight or, you know, DevOps Cafe or something where they’re gonna talk about a concept like continuous delivery, or they’re going to talk about, you know, the difference between environments and attributes and roles in Chef and why you should use them or not. And to me, I’m like, I can absorb that fine because, in fact, actually it makes more— that works better for me than reading the docs. I can read the doc all day and go, oh, da-da-da-da, but then I hear, you know, Lucius and Bryan and Nate arguing about it, and they all have opinions on it, and it cements in my head better because I’m like, That’s right. Like, what’s something that’s always in my head is a role should be an alias of a run list, because that’s something that, you know, was said, and it becomes this quote. And it could have been written somewhere, and I wouldn’t remember it, but I remember it because I can hear it in my head from that podcast episode. So I don’t know, what do you guys think? I know you’re both kind of getting new to being podcast consumers, but—

Sasha Rosenbaum: [00:22:47] Right. I actually, like, I really liked the concept of podcasts. I think— so I think I would agree with you that if they were really specific, that would probably not work as well. But this is really good for getting kind of a conceptual picture of something that you’re not familiar with, or getting some opinions on something that you are familiar with, and like hearing people discuss it and bring up like maybe tough questions or like some things for consideration which don’t come come up when you’re consuming information from a book, again, that usually talks about the great stuff about something, right? And one good thing about podcasts that I discovered— so I have about a 40-minute bus ride each direction, which is very, you know, time-consuming. And I can’t really— I couldn’t really get myself to read on the bus. I get carsick and I don’t know what. And turns out the podcast is a very useful way to spend this time and consume information. The only thing is, when I’m listening to this podcast, I go like, oh no, no, I just really want to react right now. I’m on the bus and I can’t do that. Yeah, so yeah, I don’t know. I think podcasts and maybe probably meetups too, podcasts probably are a very good way to get conceptually exposed to something, and then maybe you want to learn more and maybe you don’t, but It’s, you know, it’s an easier way to consume this information than just reading about it.

Trevor Hess: [00:24:22] Right. I think it helps you cement the concepts in your head a little better than, you know, they say a picture’s worth a thousand words. I think podcasts and meetups put some mental images in your head about the person who’s not necessarily in podcast form, but in meetups, you’ve got a person in front of you. In a meetup, you’ve got, or in a podcast, you’ve got someone’s voice that, you know, As you start thinking through a concept, you can, you know, that voice will come back to you. Sometimes I can’t help but repeat and try and emulate the voice. I tend to do that probably more often than I should.

Matt Stratton: Isn’t it funny how, I don’t know about you, but how you, how podcasts start to become authoritative? Like I’ve, I’ve done presentations for clients and I quote Sasha Bates or J. Paul Read or somebody or Damon Edwards. And not that they’re not quotable by themselves, but I’m quoting from something I heard in a podcast. Like that they said, and I’m just like, that’s authoritative. That’s just as good as—

Trevor Hess: because why shouldn’t it be?

Matt Stratton: I mean, well, I know, but it’s just kind of— it’s just a funny thing how that becomes a frame of reference because it’s a medium, right? It’s a way that that information is being communicated.

Trevor Hess: [00:25:29] It’s a medium. Not only is it a medium, but it’s a mutually agreed-upon medium. You know, there’s the Ship Show and the Food Fight show, they have a significant following of developers and ops people, and, you know, the community has agreed that these guys have valuable things to say. So yeah, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be authoritative.

Matt Stratton: I want to think back— it was kind of a funny thing when Sasha was saying about how she always wants to argue with us when she listens to ADO, and that’s kind of a funny thing about podcasting being time-shifted. And I like how we do ours and Food Fight does the livestream because you do have the opportunity to contribute But I rarely do because for me, I listen to podcasts in the car, which has its problems because A, obviously I’m not listening to them live, and you can communicate back with people in the podcast, and we get that here, right? We’ll get— yeah, someone will tweet like about an episode we did 2 weeks ago and that are listening to it now, and they’re like, hey, I was just listening to the blah blah blah, and you know, you guys are a bunch of idiots. Actually, we haven’t gotten that tweet yet, but I expect it’ll, it will, it’ll happen. And now it’s gonna happen for sure.

Trevor Hess: [00:26:42] ’Cause hell yeah.

Matt Stratton: But, but I’ve definitely done that kind of yelling at the car stereo when there’ll be someone on, like, you know, on an episode that doesn’t know Windows. And so they’ll be like, oh, well, in Windows, you can’t do blah, blah, blah. I’m like, but you can.

Trevor Hess: I mean, it’s funny ’cause, you know, my introduction to podcasts has been from kind of from doing this. And so I was listening to the Ship Show and like I went to actually continue the conversation because I’m so used to just being able to discuss with the panelists and—

Matt Stratton: Yeah. Wait, you just started talking?

Sasha Rosenbaum: I’m listening. Yeah. Oh.

Matt Stratton: So then you were just sort of talking to yourself?

Trevor Hess: Oh yeah, on the screen, you know, it was great. Wait, oh, this isn’t live.

Matt Stratton: This isn’t—

Trevor Hess: there’s not real people here right now except the actual people on the train.

Matt Stratton: But I do find myself often, because again with those, and it’s the downside of me listening in the car, is because I’m not going to tweet while I’m driving or something, so I sort of have to remember. But I’ll go back and I will tweet at these guys, usually in a very feedback way, because it’s rare that I’ll be like, I’m disagreeing, or whatnot. But that’s the advantage of the meetup though, right, is that it’s real time, it’s not asynchronous. And you can directly ask your questions or get clarification about something if someone says something or makes a comment. It’s more real-time, which I think has a great advantage in addition to it being— and this is what, again, like why I like the podcast or IRC. That’s something we haven’t talked about that yet, or Twitter, is it puts a personal face on it as opposed to a this sort of, I’m gonna go read, because a blog, I mean, blogs, yeah, you can comment and stuff, but it still is in this feel of like, I’m coming—

Trevor Hess: [00:28:32] very delayed feedback.

Sasha Rosenbaum: Yeah, I’ll tell you what, there’s another thing about meetups or podcasts that is different, and it’s that you’re a part of the discussion. Even if you’re not on the podcast and you can’t react in real time, you’re a part of the discussion, as opposed to— think of a lecture, even not a blog post, but maybe someone given a lecture about a certain subject. It’s very, very different. It’s passive consumption of information as opposed to active. And if you get a strong emotional response to something, you’re more likely to remember it for a long time and then quote it to your clients or I don’t know who else. So yeah, this is a nice way, and it’s kind of like an easy— I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like another overhead, another thing that you have to do, another thing that you have to invest your time in. It feels like having a discussion with your friends about things you care about. It’s kind of nice.

Matt Stratton: I want to think about another thing too, is the when. How do we manage this? We’re talking about how to manage your mental stack. How do you keep from being overwhelmed? How do you expand your knowledge without going crazy? It’s the rare I believe this to be honestly true. It is the rare job that will afford you the time to go and just say, hey, just go learn some stuff. And to be quite frank, basically what will usually happen, if anything, is they’ll say, well, great, we’ll give you some training and you can go to a conference for a week, or you can go to a workshop for a week, or do whatever. And then you grab what you can grab, but 5 days out of the year, or whatever it might be, First of all, I love conferences, don’t get me wrong. I learn nothing at a conference directly. I go to a conference and I make connections and I meet people and I learn who people are, and then I can learn from them in the future. And I’ve seen, I mean, don’t get me, that sounded bad, like, oh my God, I’ve never seen a great keynote or I’ve never seen a great breakout. But to me, that’s not what a conference is for. A conference is to make connections that you can then build on through the year, ’cause otherwise I’m limited to learning that one time. In a very roundabout way, what I’m getting at is if we can’t expect our employers to fund our learning time, so to speak, to sit there— I mean, it would be great if they could say, hey, great, you have one day a week, just go fuck around on the internet and listen to a bunch of podcasts and read some blogs, and it’s your training day. Awesome. If you have that, let me know, and I will be right there. So how do we do that? And I want to know, I’ll give you my answer, and this is something Sasha and I talk about a lot. So I’m curious, how do you make that not painful?

Trevor Hess: [00:31:18] It’s hard. I mean, we kind of facilitate it in our office a little bit by trying to do brown bags. We’ll do our brown bags, and we’re trying to get them to be— so there should be a brown bag once a week. About some kind of topic. We’ve not really gotten there. We’re kind of lucky we have one right now, but we’re moving towards having multiple brown bags. So that’s kind of the office trying to facilitate some learning, some cross-learning. But that doesn’t necessarily— they’re not necessarily people from outside the company. It’s people inside the company sharing the things that they know. And it is— it’s really hard. You know, a lot of times I come home, I get home, after work and I’ve just been working on it, bashing my head against a problem all day, and either there’s one or two things that I wind up doing typically, and that’s either I’m going to keep working on the problem so I can try and get it done, or I’m just completely done for the day and I need to veg for the rest of the night. There’s a lot of— very, very little time I feel that I have where my mind is not fogged up by by having been working that I can actually investigate new things on my own. That’s why usually what I do is I read the— when I want to learn something new, I’ll read about it on the train in the morning before I’ve really overloaded my brain with other things.

Sasha Rosenbaum: [00:32:37] I guess for me, first of all, it’s definitely true that you feel overloaded so much and you like sometimes you just— I constantly find this if I plan to learn something over the weekend, it just never happens. ’Cause one day you spend, like, you know, doing stuff around the house and stuff like that, and then the other day, just like, my brain goes like, okay, I want some rest. And just like, no matter what I set on the priorities, it just usually gets— I don’t get around to it. But a couple of things. So one of the things that, Matt, you mentioned about learning on the job and, like, having a day to learn something. So to me, I find if you would give me a day and say, just go learn some random thing, it would probably not be very effective. But if you give me a task that says, do a proof of concept on how to solve this problem, that would be very, very effective. And that would be something that would get me interested and probably get me working after hours and whatever because I just feel like I have to, you know, get to the solution of whatever I’m working on. And wow, I had another thought. And yeah, and another thing that’s helpful is just switching context. So like, I don’t know, for instance, when you come back from work, don’t learn about technology, learn about, so I don’t know, something about business values or networking or whatever else. And there are so many things in the world that will probably be beneficial to you or your company or, you know, your professional development that you could learn about. Or, I don’t know, go read about neural pathways, which is also very interesting.

Matt Stratton: [00:34:29] So I think that’s actually a really good point because we do a lot of— again, we’ve been talking about, okay, how do I learn this technology? How do I do this this piece. And so that what you’re doing in a way is you’re expanding that fire hose when you’re saying, let me think about the business. Not even necessarily the business that my company is in, which you should know and you should be learning about, or the business that your customers do, but business in general, what’s happening in that, because that’s how you’re going to provide your solutions, right? You know, I mean, I’m still working my way through The Goal, through Eliot Goldratt’s book, and it’s all about what’s the point of of your company and everything you’re doing should drive to that. And we should be thinking about that. And if you don’t understand what’s the bigger ramification, like that’s the thing we should be making, every decision you’re making is gonna be something that’s driving your business. And even if you know like how cars are made, right? And you work for Chrysler, you know, but you still need to know how does that, What’s your company’s position in the global economy, right? You know, these are all things that are important to know, and to Sasha’s point too, it provides context switching, so you’re not sitting there going, oh my God, this is just more. I mean, we love technology, we love tools, we’re nerds, that’s fine, you know, but you get bored with it sometimes, and it can make it work, and yeah, it is work. We’re going to work, we’re not going to fun, but why wouldn’t we go to fun? And I think if you’re doing that, it makes it refreshing, that makes it something you might want to learn on your own time because you haven’t spent 40 hours doing just that. Yeah, I know too one thing that’s been hard for me is my commute changing. I mean, I have the advantage now that my commute is 2 stops on the public transportation, whereas before I had a 45-minute or half an hour to 45-minute train ride each way, and it was a train ride so I could read. And that’s where I did most of my reading. And so I learned a lot more that way. Now it’s most of my time I’m in the car and I can’t read, so it’s podcasts and like audiobooks. Technical audiobooks don’t really work, but I guess it’d be a good way to learn more of the MBA, more of the business side of stuff.

Trevor Hess: [00:36:51] Yeah, I could see that.

Sasha Rosenbaum: Also to that point, I find that everything I’ve ever learned, however unrelated it seems, seemed at a time, it’s useful at some point. Even if it’s not useful in a technical sense, it will be useful conceptually because you can see things differently or see a bigger picture on something. So every bit of information you can consume. And again, once you switch your context, it’s much easier to spend your time consuming that information. Yeah, but definitely there’s not enough hours in a day, and you find yourself wishing that you had more. And another question that I know that Matt raised in the beginning was, how do you decide which things you want to invest your energy in? And I don’t really know how to do that, because there’s a lot of knowledge out there that I would like to go after, and it’s sometimes very hard to choose what’s the main priority and what I want to spend the extra 2 hours a day reading about.

Trevor Hess: [00:38:02] Right, it can be overwhelming because you’re right, there’s— you can spend your time focusing on learning business sensibilities and about your own business. You can continue your knowledge search about the technology you prefer to work with or learn about a new technology or learn underwater basket weaving because it’s interesting to you. You know, there’s just so many things out there that we can learn, and I know I’m interested in— I don’t think there’s much that I’m not interested in knowing about, and so it makes it very difficult to pick something.

Matt Stratton: I think I just had a thought, and follow me through on this as I paint myself in a corner. So there’s kind of that trite cliché of do one thing every day that scares you or whatever. I don’t remember who said it, and frankly, I don’t care. But I think about how I approach my learning is I do spend most of my time when I’m deciding what to learn, I have a certain focus, right? I have the areas that already interest me, that I know that I’m good at, that I like, and I’m gonna get deeper on, right? Like Trevor, earlier you said, what’s the line between being Renaissance versus specialist? So I’ll spend a lot of time on specialist stuff. I’m going to sit there and I’m going to read the blog posts on the new version of Vagrant and automation and this and that and the other. But then I try to— and I don’t really have this hardcoded down, but it probably works out to be about an hour a week where I say, you know what, I’m going to do something different. I’m going to learn Ruby. And yeah, okay, that’s tangentially connected to writing Chef recipes, but I’m not learning Ruby for Chef. I’m going and saying, I want to learn how to write programs in Ruby. And that may never apply to me professionally, but it’s context switching, it’s changing a neural pathway, and it’s helping. And now to bring it all back to DevOps, because it’s the first time that that word’s come up and we’re now like, you know, I don’t know, How far into the episode of An Arrested Development? About 3/4. About 3/4 of the way in.

Trevor Hess: [00:40:10] We mentioned it at least 4 times.

Matt Stratton: Yeah, and it was all like in the first 3 sentences. But that’s okay. But it does— the point is I’m not going to sit down and say I need to be as good at developing as a developer, but I need to know a little bit about how it works because I want to be able to get in their mind. And I know, Sasha, and I’d like to hear you say this. I’d like to hear you say these words I’m about to tell you to say. You and I have had this conversation about how you’re a dev, you love coding, but you’re like, I want to learn a little bit. I want to understand that ops side of it. And how do you figure out that— I’m not even going to say how do you. I’m giving the example. I’m saying it’s the inverse of what I said. Maybe you say, hey, I just take a little bit of time to get shallow on it and just say, I kind of understand it a little bit, but I’ve got people for that. But I know how to talk to them now because I know what they do.

Sasha Rosenbaum: So I can— this was actually a very interesting topic to me because I guess we went through a transition in the company where we brought infrastructure automation people onboard, and we were doing a lot of infrastructure work. And I remember that I had this reaction. I was like, okay, I am a developer. I don’t want to do infrastructure. And it’s not like I have— I even had a little bit of experience with kind of sysadmin side of things, so it wasn’t like completely— it isn’t completely Greek to me. It makes a little bit of sense to me. Like, if you put a script in front of me, I could probably read it modify it, and I don’t get so scared. But it’s— I was really—

Matt Stratton: [00:41:56] Not my scripts. You would not be able to follow mine. Not because they’re good.

Sasha Rosenbaum: I’ll try. I’ll try. It’s a challenge.

Matt Stratton: It’s the other way.

Sasha Rosenbaum: But I remember I was really kind of anti this change, and I was like, okay, I’m a developer. Why are we doing infrastructure all of a sudden? And then I guess Matt came on board, and we started talking about DevOps as opposed to infrastructure. This suddenly made total sense to me because yes, this is exactly something that I can get exposed to and I can find my way into doing maybe automations where it makes sense for me. And yes, you want to have this guy who’s responsible for tech operations and not in a sense responsible, but knowledgeable about it and is an expert on it and you can ask them questions so you don’t have to figure it out from scratch because it’s probably going to take you a week to just, you know, get inside of this problem. But you do want to get exposed a little bit more and just, I don’t know, just like set up a CI or just, I don’t know, automate the delivery of— oh my God, I’m getting so confused. I’m sorry. English is not my first language. I’m making up excuses right now. Yeah, so this is an interesting thing. If you get exposed to just a little bit of the other side, a little bit of like a switch into something adjacent to what you’re doing right now, it can be very— it can be a very smooth transition and you can get very interested in learning more about this and, you know, actually becoming good at this.

Trevor Hess: [00:43:51] See, that’s part of the stuff that I have a hard time with. You know, I said Renaissance versus specialist, and I think I probably skew towards trying to be— and keyword being trying to be— more of a Renaissance guy. You know, I find the developer challenges I run against really fun to solve. I find that the ops challenges that get presented to me, like setting up a CI or configuring servers or, you know, getting any of that stuff together, to be really fun. And I really like digging into those things.

Matt Stratton: But so basically all problems are fun to you is what it sounded like you just said. I didn’t see the difference. I didn’t see the difference. You basically are like, Well, so the thing is the developer problems are really fun, but then the ops problems, those are really fun too.

Trevor Hess: Yes.

Sasha Rosenbaum: That’s what I said.

Trevor Hess: So it’s hard for me to decide what I would rather focus on because I enjoy solving both problems. I can’t honestly say that there’s a problem I’ve enjoyed solving more than another on either side of the fence. Each one of them presents different mental challenges and I enjoy solving them.

Sasha Rosenbaum: [00:44:59] I can definitely attest to, if you present me with a calculus problem, I’m probably not going to have much to do with it.

Trevor Hess: Calculus can stay somewhere else.

Matt Stratton: We just received a tweet that says that it sounds like Sasha wants to be put on the infrastructure as a service team at 10th Magnitude. Not sure about that. Was that from Nate or Jeff?

Sasha Rosenbaum: That was from Tim.

Matt Stratton: From Tim Bentham, @TimBentham, who is now working for Microsoft. I want to talk— we’re getting close to the end here, but I want to talk about some specific strategies. We’ve alluded to it a little bit. Sasha mentioned something about Flipboard. I kind of talked a little bit about Pocket. We want to talk about, okay, so there is this firehose. We talked conceptually about managing it. Maybe we can put on our pretend life hacker hats and say like, hey, how do we actually— what’s your workflow? And I’ll go first because maybe that’ll help explain what I’m talking about. So for me, I use primarily when I’m looking at— so my firehose comes in 2 different ways. It either comes in through links and Twitter or it comes in through Flowdock. And Flowdock, if you’re not familiar— I think everybody knows what Twitter is. If you’re not familiar with Flowdock, it’s basically kind of like a newsmagazine, you can subscribe to different topics, you can have your Facebook and your Twitter feed into it as well, and the stuff all comes up in this really beautiful way. But my thing is I never read stuff in Flowdock because I have it integrated to a read-it-later service called Pocket that’s cross-platform. I can get to it from my iPad, my iPhone, my computer, whatever. So as I’m flipping, haha, through Flipboard, if I see something that I say, oh, this is interesting, I say send it to Pocket. I’m like I’m going to read this later. So I kind of do this quick curation almost where I’m like it’s not even curation; it’s just sort of a filter. I’m like, and I’ll do the same thing in Twitter if I see an interesting link when I’m really quick taking a few minutes when I’m taking what it boils down to is I do this all while I’m taking a quick break, and then I’ll save that all to Pocket. And then when I’ve got some time, if I’m like okay, I can sit down for twenty minutes, I can sit down for half an hour. Then I’m going to go through my Pocket and I’m going to read the stuff and I’m going to actually read the articles. And that’s what that’s letting me do is when I have my focused reading time, I’m focused because when you’re doing that sort of first triage, it doesn’t require a lot of thinking. It’s just like good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. You know, so you can do it standing on the L platform. You don’t have to pay a lot of attention to it. So that’s my main method of kind of aggregating content that I want to read later.

Trevor Hess: [00:47:45] For me, like I said, I can’t— we kind of went over this a little bit with earlier. For me, I usually will assemble some links from Reddit, leave them open in a tab, or if I know that I’m going to be shutting down my computer, which I almost never do with my laptop anyway, I’ll bookmark them and just start crawling through them as I have time to.

Matt Stratton: Or, you know, I have noticed I left off making a joke about you running Windows with never shutting down your computer. See how nice I was to not say that?

Trevor Hess: Yeah, until you did. I do restart the computer often, but not usually before I read the links. Not that my train of thought has crashed, burned, and been left to Trevor. Trevor reads his links once a month on Tuesdays, conveniently right before the updates force the machine to restart. Exactly.

Matt Stratton: Patch and Read Tuesdays.

Sasha Rosenbaum: [00:48:46] Okay, let me rescue you for a second. You can think about it later. So I think first of all, that was a nice idea. We haven’t tried it yet, but me and Matt were talking about using Pomodoro and just setting up kind of 30-minute tasks for yourself so you’re forced to take a break after 30 minutes. So you can probably go on and, I don’t know, read something during that break. And this should be a very good idea because your concentration only lasts for about an hour and a half, and after that you’re probably not productive. So it’s really good sometimes to force yourself to take a break because you don’t always remember to do that. And I think I probably read, like, a couple articles every week about how to be more productive and more efficient.

Trevor Hess: I think you just introduced our next Arrested DevOps Challenge. I think we should challenge everybody to try the Pomodoro method and come back, get back to us a little bit more about what it is.

Matt Stratton: Well, yeah, let’s— we’ll do that in a minute. So that’s a good— or we could do it now. I’m sorry, but we’re— I don’t know, Sasha, are we hijacking you or was that—

Sasha Rosenbaum: [00:49:53] I, I, I— so I wanted to, um, to kind of like— there was this article I read this week on how to be productive and it started off really nicely with like the first First thing, take more breaks. Sounds good to me. Second recommendation, take naps. Sounds really good to me, but we kind of don’t have any space in our office to take naps. I wish we did. I was bringing it up to—

Matt Stratton: We kind of barely have enough space in our office to sit right now, much less take naps.

Sasha Rosenbaum: That is absolutely true. And then the third recommendation went into spend more time in nature. I’m like, OK, I’m going to go find a tree in Chicago and stand next to it.

Trevor Hess: There are plenty of trees in Chicago.

Sasha Rosenbaum: Yeah, I mean, I wish we were closer to a lake so you could take a break on the lake maybe. Maybe we should go to the river or something. But yeah, definitely there’s a lot of stuff written on how to be productive and how to be more efficient. Some of it works. One thing that works for me is checking email in chunks and not every time an email comes in. Drives you nuts, things like that.

Matt Stratton: [00:51:04] Yeah, so that’s good. So I want to— we need to start wrapping it up and get to our check-ins, but I do like Trevor’s idea of the Pomodoro Challenge, and we will also participate in the Pomodoro Challenge. Oh yeah, that too. I was going to say we would put some links in the show notes to some resources about Pomodoro, but the basic gist of it is that you work in time slices. For example, you say, okay, I’m going to work on this one task for 30 minutes, and at the end of it, I’m going to take a 5-minute break, or I’m going to work in 2 30-minute chunks and then do a 5-minute break. But I think the idea, which I like, is to say some of those breaks, use them to catch up on your blog reading. Take 5 minutes to read a blog post or something. So we would like to see you guys try that. We’ll try it ourselves. I’m actually a big fan of it. I use a tool on the Mac called VitaminR. When I remember that I have it for time slicing. So I’m going to make, I’m going to make an effort to actually do that between now and our next episode. If you’re already using the Pomodoro Technique, send us a tweet @ArrestedDevOps and let us know how it works for you, if you have any tips. But if you’re not, take a look at the links we’ll put in the show notes, and those show notes can be found at ArrestedDevOps/8, and let us know how it works for you. We’re going to— we’re wrapping up, so we’re going to go to our checkouts. This is the part of the show when we give you, the audience, something to check out, something that we find interesting that you think would be awesome. I’ll go ahead and go first since I’m talking. And I have 2 checkouts. One is continuing my topic of my retro about Vagrant. So today version 1.5 of Vagrant was released. And that includes a whole bunch of things like support for local— for the local version of Hyper-V as a hypervisor if you’re running Windows, whereas previously it only shipped with VirtualBox support. You can do shared folders over rsync or using SMB and a whole bunch more things. I would recommend you make sure all of your existing Vagrant plugins have been updated to be compatible. We’re already seeing a few that don’t work. So it might not be quite ready for primetime, but it’s certainly going to make life a lot easier. My other checkout is an app, and I’m going to be honest, I don’t know if it’s for iOS only. Maybe there’s an Android version, but it’s called QuizUp, Q-U-I-Z-U-P. It’s a little online quiz game that you can challenge your, you know, either friends on Facebook or just random people. I am already at the level of House Targaryen. On the Game of Thrones questions. I’m also actually playing—

Trevor Hess: [00:53:49] It is on Android.

Matt Stratton: It is? Awesome. Okay, Trevor, we’re going to throw down when this is over. You got some catching up to do. There’s a Doctor Who category too that I started, and an Arrested Development one. I started that one.

Trevor Hess: 30 megabytes?

Matt Stratton: Oh my God. Anyway, so check it out. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. So yeah, my 2 checkouts are Vagrant 1.5 and QuizUp.

Trevor Hess: Trevor? So my tech one this week is going to be— I’m sure everybody’s seen JSFiddle by now. They just released .NET Fiddle. I think it’s a different group altogether, but using the new Roslyn compiler for C#, some folks have put together a nice online sandbox for .NET code. It’s got some IntelliSense features and some other stuff that’s really cool. That you can play with online. I really hope to start seeing, like you see with JavaScript Stack Overflow posts, people will post a fiddle about how to do something. I’m hoping that soon we’ll start seeing some .NET fiddles in some of the C# questions, although it actually works with C#, VB.NET, F#, etc. As for the other ones, it’s kind of really poor timing, but my friend had recommended that I watch Air Disasters on Netflix. It’s a Smithsonian series about— it kind of dramatizes some of the biggest air disasters that have happened over the past 40 years. It kind of walks through how the investigation happened, and then it talks about the new regulations that were introduced as a result of these accidents. It was actually a really interesting series.

Matt Stratton: [00:55:34] And finally, is that on Netflix, did you say?

Sasha Rosenbaum: It is.

Matt Stratton: So you’ll be— we’ll be able to actually share that with people?

Trevor Hess: Yeah, I can share that as a direct link.

Matt Stratton: It’s not like it was something that was on and you recorded and no one will be able to see it again?

Trevor Hess: No, it is on Netflix. And then as a more funny note, I guess, I don’t know if everybody’s heard of the Dollar Shave Club yet. Yes! I just got my first shipment of One Wipe Charlies.

Matt Stratton: Oh yeah, those are pretty good too. Yes, we’ll just put a link to the video and you guys can watch it yourself and find out what it is.

Trevor Hess: Exactly my thoughts.

Matt Stratton: I’m a big fan of Dollar Shave Club, although as you can see, I actually had to suspend my subscription because I’ve got about 3 months worth of razors now.

Trevor Hess: Yeah, if I didn’t want some One Wipe Charlies, I would have not gotten any this month myself. I wanted some One Wipe Charlies, so I I switched to the dollar option again so that I could get some One Wipe Charlies.

Matt Stratton: All right, Sasha, rescue us from talking about One Wipe Charlies, please.

Sasha Rosenbaum: [00:56:36] OK. First of all, Trevor, thank you for the checkout. It sounds very interesting. Second of all, so my technology-related checkout is a tiny one. So there’s— for Visual Studio 2013, there’s something called Visual Studio Extensions. And I haven’t used it to the full capacity so far, but one great thing about it is that it compiles LESS to CSS, which we used to use an external tool for. So that’s kind of a nice thing. The non-technology-related ones— so one is, not so long ago— so all my life, I thought I was an extrovert because I like to talk. A lot, and then I discovered that the definition of introvert versus extrovert had nothing to do with talking, it had a lot to do with other things, and apparently I’m an introvert after all. And so I bought this book a while ago that’s called Self-Promotion for Introverts. It’s really interesting, it addresses a lot of stuff that I find really difficult about kind of networking with people and kind of, you know, talking about yourself and talking about how great you are. And, you know, everything that goes into like kind of self-promotion and, you know, creating a good network. And so yeah, definitely check it out. And the last one is a children’s book that I loved, that I love, that I was reminded of a few weeks ago. It’s called The Little Prince. It’s probably— you can probably read it in an hour, and it’s just a beautiful thing. So try it, maybe you’ll like it.

Matt Stratton: [00:58:26] So I want to remind everybody that our next episode, which will be airing sometime in the end of March, will be Fast and Furious Configuration Drift, and we’ve got some great guests for that. You can check it out at arresteddevops.com/9. Thank you, Sasha, for joining us, and everyone be sure to check us out at arresteddevops.com or @ArrestedDevOps on Twitter. I’m Matt, @MattStratton on Twitter, and I’m Trevor, @TrevorGHess on Twitter. We’re Arrested DevOps, and remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.