Building Your Personal Brand with Andrea Javor and Michael Hedgpeth

Matty: [00:00:00] This episode is about marketing, and we’ve completely screwed up speaking for both of our sponsors, so clearly we know what we’re talking about. It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast that helps you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m your co-host, Matt Stratton, @MattStratton on Twitter.

Trevor: And I’m your co-host, Trevor Hess, @TrevorGHess on Twitter. Arrested DevOps is brought to you by 10th Magnitude, a company that figures if you’re listening to this podcast, you must be pretty cool. 10th Magnitude empowers businesses to better collaborate across teams and achieve IT transformation using cloud. They enable customers to innovate, automate, and accelerate by leveraging the power of Microsoft Azure. You can find out more at arresteddevops.com/tenthmagnitude.

Matty: This episode is also brought to you by Datadog, a monitoring tool that helps bridge the gap between operations and dev teams. Datadog brings together system metrics, changes, alerts, and events from over 120 common infrastructure tools, such as Chef, Docker, and AWS, so that Dev and Ops teams share their key data and alerts in a single place and collaborate on issues in real time. Datadog is available for a free 14-day trial at arresteddevops.com/datadog.

Trevor: [00:01:22] Do you want to be a change agent inside of your organization? Your personal brand is a critical factor to your success. Being considered relevant both inside and outside of your organization gives weight to your opinions and recommendations. And will directly influence the impact you have.

Matty: And believe it or not, that was not an ad. That’s actually the intro I wrote for this episode. So I realized as you’re reading it, I’m like, this totally sounds like it’s another pre-roll.

Trevor: Tonight we’ll be discussing the methods for growing your brand without self-aggrandizing boasts or claims of thought leadership. First, we have Andrea Javor. Andrea, tell us about you.

Andrea: Hi, I’m Andrea Javor. I am the Senior Director of Global Digital and Media at Beam Suntory. Many people probably know Beam Suntory as the makers of Jim Beam as well as Suntory whiskey. So I’m based here in Chicago and work out in Deerfield.

Matty: Great. We’re also joined by Michael Hedgepeth, who I worked with to bring Chef to his company at NCR.

Michael: Yeah, thanks, Matt. I am Michael Hedgepeth. I’m a senior software architect at NCR. And NCR, basically we do ATMs, retail cash registers, we do restaurant point-of-sale, and I’m in the hospitality division, which does as the restaurant side of things. Like Matt was saying, we worked together last year to bring Chef into the organization. I’ve learned over the years that if you’re good in technology, you go pretty quickly into a place where the technical problems aren’t the hardest problems, and the people problems are the hardest problems. Navigating the people problems, especially within a large organization, is probably the most challenging part of implementing DevOps in an organization, so when Matt and I started talking about that. I had a lot of things that came up and of course Matt does too, because I know he understands that as well. So that’s why I’m excited to talk about this subject today.

Matty: [00:03:19] This episode kind of came about where I was thinking about this as an idea for a talk and I put together a little bit of an abstract and I shared it with some people for feedback, including Michael, who gave me a lot of feedback enough so that I said, so I guess you just wrote my talk for me. So that’s awesome. Now it’s actually going to be really hard for me to write the talk without feeling, without like ripping off what you said.

Michael: You’re going to have to credit me, Matt.

Matty: Yeah, I am. I am. I’m just— there’s no clean room for me. Then I think Michael actually even suggested, he said, this would be a really good show for ADO, which I said, yes, it would be, and you should be on it. So that’s what happens when you suggest a show idea.

Andrea: And a really good idea for me as Matt’s girlfriend, who is just starting to understand DevOps a bit after dating for almost a year, but working in marketing, totally agree with Michael what you’re saying about really figuring out the people problems, as I think building a personal brand is really about relating to other people at the end of the day.

Matty: Start with that. What does it mean to have a personal brand?

Michael: Well, for me, a personal brand is what people say about you when they go to lunch and you’re not there, or what your boss says about you when he’s with his peers and one of the other directors, she talks about you in a good way or in a bad way, and he might be defending you or not. So what is said about you when you’re not there? And there’s an element in that to me where you don’t really have control of your personal brand. And that’s key to it, that it’s not like you could push the compile button or run the tests on what people say about you or think about you. It’s more of a soft thing that you can’t really get a hold of ever, but you can really influence.

Andrea: [00:05:07] Yeah, I totally agree with you, and it is sort of like the energy that you exude in addition to what people say about you. It’s almost, I think, a personal brand is what would someone— if somebody wanted to get something done through you, what would your colleagues describe as the best approach in order to come to you and say, oh, Andrea is the type of person who really appreciates collaboration, or Andrea is the type of person who actually likes to work on her own. It’s kind of like those motivations of really how people would describe working with you. Clearly, that’s why it’s really important to optimize so that you can actually get things done within your organization.

Matty: What’s the difference between a brand and a reputation?

Michael: I think they’re very similar.

Andrea: Fortunately or unfortunately, I think your reputation as the way you like to work can actually really influence how others play back your personal brand. So I think if you have a reputation for sort of being hotheaded or if, you know, people would describe you as decisive, right? Like those are two things that could actually, you know, the decisiveness could be really good in a lot of situations and also could be really bad, right, to be hotheaded. I think it’s probably that your reputation plays into it because your reputation is going to be based on past experience that people have with you. I think it’s really important that you have a clear idea of what your reputation is in order to build your personal brand.

Michael: [00:06:33] Yeah, and I think that a lot of people who are in the technical arena think the branding thing is for the salespeople or the marketing people or whatever. What I’ve realized over the years is everybody gets a brand. You don’t really get a choice. Some people, their brand is total and complete asshole I never want to work with. Other people, their brand is helpful. That is kind of like a reputation, but you don’t— back to what my earlier point was and what you’re talking about too, you don’t really control it and you get one whether you like it or not. If your goals are being met personally and professionally with your reputation and your brand, whatever people think about you, then that’s great. But if you start trying to do bigger and better things, like I’ve done it, trying to do it at NCR with Chef, and then all of a sudden the way people view me and how I treat people really matters in order to meet my goals. And I can’t run away from a brand as being something that only the salespeople or management gets into. I have to really pay attention to it myself.

Matty: [00:07:43] One thing when I think about the conversations that we kind of had about this topic and about why it’s important, it helps you be a more effective change agent because it gives validity to your stances, to your points. I think the counter to that would be, well, isn’t that unfair? Shouldn’t every point stand on its own? Why should Matt get listened to more because he has gotten people to believe that he’s more expert in this particular topic? I think it goes back a little bit to your statement of saying, you can’t say, well, that’s not a thing that matters to me, because it’s going going to, and I think we can wail and gnash teeth and say that the stuff should rise on its own merit, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t know, I guess that’s— could you see how this could be abused, I guess?

Michael: I’ll tell you a story, and I guess I’ll start with the point that when you’re trying to change things, the way people feel when you’re trying to influence them is really, really important. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a colleague and they were dictating a policy that I needed to adhere to. On the inside, I was frustrated. I was confused. I didn’t understand it. I thought the person was being kind of a jerk, but I outwardly complied to their policy because they had the right to impose that policy on me, but when it comes to really following them, I’m not really going to follow them. If I’m the person trying to influence a lot of people or an organization or something like that, and people are feeling like I’m a jerk, or people are feeling like they’re not being heard, or people feel like their interests aren’t being paid attention to, then they’re going to fight me. The elements of the organization that are the most resistant to change are going to win in the voice because they’re going to say, you know, this guy, he just doesn’t really understand us. He’s living in an ivory tower and he’s not— he doesn’t have our best interests. And that’s when I think you can play a real, really a truly sales role of coming in and aligning people’s true interests with a solution. Then you can really get people on your side and all of a sudden they’re working with you. I think it’s kind of the difference between trying to go upstream or downstream in a river. It’s just impossible to go against people’s feelings of what they think and feel. And if you get them on your side, then you’re kind of swept up in a rush of everyone helping you reach the goal.

Matty: [00:10:40] It’s like we’ve talked about before, the compliance versus commitment. You’re not gonna get In that kind of an example, like even in the anecdote you gave, right? You literally said you complied.

Michael: Absolutely.

Matty: But you’re not committed, right? He didn’t win you over. He made you do it and you said, that’s all right.

Andrea: Yeah. I mean, so much of business, right? It’s just getting up in the morning and figuring out how to work with people to get things done. You know, I think if you, you know, Michael, what you said, it’s about how you make people feel in the process of getting those things done. At the end of the day, you need both. You do need to manage up and you need to manage down if you’re in middle management, and you need to manage laterally, right? You have to figure out how to get things done with people. The best thing is, when you start thinking about how you fit into the culture of your organization, is just as important as sort of how you fit in at happy hour, right? I think when you have congruence. Congruency with the way that your company operates. You know, Beam Suntory, it’s known as a very fast-moving, dynamic organization. You can move very quickly, make a difference, be a change agent very quickly, and be rewarded for that. And that’s something that, for me personally, it really motivates me because that’s kind of how I do things, right? I’m sort of the fixer, the problem solver. And I think it’s really critical that you can sort of live authentically and help people rally around how you want to get things done based on the way the culture moves. I think you see examples of people who just don’t have great reputations or great personal brands when the way that they operate is not congruent with the way the organization fundamentally operates because, culturally, it’s just a bunch of people working with other people, right? At the end of the day, the tasks get checked off the list, whether they’re, for me, marketing tasks, media-related tasks, or IT-related tasks. You know, I think it’s about how those things get done that really shape the culture.

Michael: [00:12:38] Maybe I’m wrong with this, but I think that technical people have a unique challenge because when we start out our career, nobody expects us to be very social. Like we were the people with no friends in high school, or we were playing Dungeons and Dragons off in the corner. Right. And, and so everybody just zero expectations. And then if we’re, if we’re doing our career the right way, I guess we, When we get into a meeting early on in our career, somebody gets up and says, here’s the way we’re doing something, and we raise our hands and we say, you’re doing it all wrong. We’re loud and we’re proud and we’re right. We get rewarded for that. Even when you grow that part of your career, you’re the subject matter expert, you’re right, nobody expects anything from you socially. Then what What businesses sometimes do is surround you with people like a product manager or a manager or whatever who will just cover for your social awkwardness. Then you continue to grow, and you’re all of a sudden doing really well in your career, but you just have been sheltered from the reality of exactly what you’re talking about in a normal business sense. I guess I would like to see more technical people line up with exactly what you just said, Andrea. But it is about managing up, managing down. It’s about interacting with other people and all that stuff. I think that if a technical person thinks that they are immune from those things, I guess I would say behind every technical person who thinks that they’re immune from those things is a manager getting a big, fat bonus.

Andrea: [00:14:23] That’s so interesting you say that. The first thing I thought of when you were talking about that is that I actually feel the burden of the opposite, the counterpoint, right, of assuming that I was playing Dungeons and Dragons are really super antisocial, I lead the media team, which includes a large group of very talented social media professionals. Lucky for me, actually, this all works very congruently with who I believe I am as a person, both outside and inside of the company, which is someone who really believes in connections. I love connections between brands and people, between people and people, and that’s kind of how I live my life in general. But, it’s really funny because I think I probably couldn’t, I guess, play that role or really have any kind of credibility in the space of building connections if I weren’t as extroverted as I naturally am. So funny, my funny little aside story is they do, we do something called the Predictive Index, which is like a Myers-Briggs, like a personality test. And it measures you on different scales of personality. And out of our entire marketing department, I am the second most extroverted person at the company, you know, out of hundreds of people around the world. And it’s funny, the only person who is more extroverted than I am on the swing is the woman who runs our distillery down in Clermont, Kentucky, who is interfacing with people daily. Anyway, I think it’s interesting, as this is directed towards IT professionals, to think about maybe what you could learn from your marketing counterparts in terms of how things get done being just as important as what gets done.

Matty: [00:15:59] I think, especially as we’re talking about driving change, and that’s one of the things that, if you go back and listen to— I’m going to try to do this one from memory, and I think I can do it. I think it’s episode 30. It was the culture change episode with Bill Joy. But, that was one of the things we talked about is when you want to drive change in an organization, you need to be a salesperson, which, again, is taking a line out of the playbook from someone else in your organization. Then, if we’re going to take that same thing, like Andrea just alluded to, and this is where I kind of think it ties back to that question earlier when I said, what’s the difference between your brand and your reputation? We kind of went into this and, Michael, you said, like it or not, you have one. Again, we can complain that that’s not fair and I should be able to just do whatever, not have to worry about this stuff. But the reality is it does exist and you can either let that brand slash reputation come up the way that it just naturally does or do what you can to influence it. Also, we haven’t heard from Trevor in like 20 minutes.

Trevor: So, so I was thinking about it a lot more external to a company. And so it’s interesting to kind of hear it reflected that way, because it makes me think of a couple, a couple of questions of my own. Some of the folks I’ve worked with in the past have kind of along the lines of being the problem solver. And being that kind of, on some level, the antisocial IT worker, constantly trying to solve all the problems to the point where you become— the reputation, the personal brand becomes one of someone who, whenever there’s a problem, you throw it at them, whether they have time to or not. There’s no longer— you lose the concern. The person’s brand is they’re almost no longer a person. They’re just something that you push tasks to. How do you go about changing that? Because I’m sure you— I’m sure everybody on this podcast can think of somebody who fits that bill.

Michael: [00:17:51] To me, I think that those people, when I’ve talked to them, they secretly like being that person. And so if your brand is somebody who likes to take the tasks, wake up at 2 in the morning, put the fires out, if that’s how you see yourself, it’s going to be very difficult for you to get out of it. And that might be another That’s another point of branding is you cannot get out of your real brand without looking fake. If that’s really them, then go with it. Enjoy it. Maybe ask for a raise, something like that. If that’s who you are, and I think that a lot of times people in that role will outwardly complain about it, but then when you get to the bottom of it, they really like putting out fires and being the one everybody counts on and spending a ton of time on it and not really having a life. They just like that. That’s their brand, and they should go with it if that’s what they want to do. If they don’t want to do that, then just think about different changes that they can make and start at an action level.

Andrea: [00:18:54] One thing I was going to say, I agree with you completely. If that’s really who you are, don’t fight it. Just embrace it and figure out ways to embrace it that sort of make you happy in the way that you work with people. I was going to say, in that case, I have the pleasure of working with some really talented business solution IT professionals within our organization and externally at other companies we’ve hired. It’s really interesting. That’s interesting because I can think of one person in particular who I work with at my company who had one specific task he was hired for that was sort of related to marketing, more related to HR, and I’ve ended up working on several different projects with him. It’s all because he will swing by my desk and be like, hey, what are you working on today? What’s important to you? We’ve had a couple of coffees and a couple of lunches, enough to know that I have issues that he could potentially help solve. A really nice sort of way that he has gotten more exposure for himself by reaching out to people like me and marketing, other people within sales, other people within legal and different departments. You sort of see him becoming a lot more of a thought leader cross-functionally because he is able to sort of have those discussions and ask people just in a really authentic way, you know, what else needs to happen or what else could he help with?

Matty: [00:20:14] I think that that goes into a mechanism for, again, developing your own brand awareness as well, right, is those, those conversations. I was thinking about how Trevor and I probably think about personal branding a little more externally than internally, just from a professional standpoint. So being working in kind of a consulting or a customer-facing, you know, I think that I think about being a change agent within Shep, but most of the time I’m working with affecting this stuff to my customers. Trevor, probably similarly, while you want to make things better at 10M, most of your time and your reputation is— your capital is greater realized when it’s what can it do to help you promote your work to do better work for customers of 10th, right? Versus Michael doing the same thing inside of NCR. So I think that’s one thing too to think about is like, You might be realizing that in different ways, and so as you’re thinking about, when we go into the next thing I want to talk about, which is the how, like what are some techniques for doing this in a genuine way, you need to, I think, think about where your brand is being consumed. If your brand is an internal brand, then perhaps, for example, having a whole lot of, and this is going to, I’m just overreacting to this sort of, but having a whole bunch of followers on Twitter who retweet everything you say about Ansible, and you’re trying to sell Ansible defensible within your company doesn’t really help you at all. But if you’re a consultant, right, or you’re an external, or you’re someone who’s giving talks or doing things like that, then that external reputation carries some more weight. I mean, I think the external reputation maybe can— I’m just, I don’t think it’s an either/or. I think it’s how the mix happens.

Andrea: [00:21:54] Maybe.

Trevor: Absolutely. I think there’s a question we can ask before that, and that’s how do you identify kind of your core archetypes? So like we’ve talked about, you know, the person who’s kind of the overachiever. We’ve talked about the person who wants to do better and solve problems. We’ve talked about people who are kind of introverted and don’t do as many things— like, don’t do anything— as many things, but focus and don’t communicate as openly. We’ve talked about people who work in marketing and how they can be more extroverted. How do you suss out the framework of your personal brand?

Andrea: I think you’ve got to get some data, right? I think it’s about a heightened level of self-awareness. And as a prof— as any professional, entry-level, mid-level, senior level, I think it’s really critical to have self-awareness, right? Like the best people who I manage have very high self-awareness and can understand feedback very simply when it’s something they need to develop or can take in feedback as something that they’re doing well and continue to focus on. So I think it’s things like, you know, asking others, uh, people who you trust in your current role, you know, people who you work with who can give you authentic feedback. It’s those— I think it’s those over-the-counter tests too. Like I mentioned Predictive Index or PI being something that we use at the company. There’s, there’s lots of great books out there. There’s a— I did, I did a workshop recently for a women’s leadership initiative with a woman named Sally Hogshead. And Sally Hogshead wrote a book called How the World Sees You. And it’s really interesting. You take a, however, you know, 20-question diagnostic and it will tell you exactly the kind of the overwhelming characteristics that people will see from you. So I think that’s a great way to start, is gathering data.

Matty: [00:23:43] I think that’s starting— this is all starting to crystallize a little bit to me again around that difference of reputation and brand.

Michael: Yeah, I recently read a book called Branding Pays by Karen Kang. She talks about how a brand is composed of cake and icing. So the cake is the rational value, and icing is the extra spice, right? And, and she says that most technical people are focused on the cake. What are you, Matt? I am an expert chef person, and I’m good at sales, you know, that kind of thing. And I can, I can bring people along the sales cycle, and I do Arrested DevOps podcast, right? And then everybody stops there. But then what is the icing? And the icing is how do people feel when you’re around? And so that’s where the being helpful is, but it’s being helpful is almost like in a rational way. Do people feel like they are being helped when you’re around?

Matty: [00:24:44] Like a chef.

Michael: Yeah, right.

Matty: So I can see how the icing ties the cake, holds the cake together, right? It doesn’t matter.

Michael: Yeah, and people go for both. People want a little— the icing separates you from somebody’s resume that just says expert at chef and good at sales. You know, and it is your—

Trevor: you can have your asshole too who’s good at .NET, but if the icing’s shit, you’re still not going to want to eat the cake.

Matty: You don’t want to eat it.

Andrea: It’s so true.

Michael: Well, and just another thing to say about the asshole. The problem with data is if you’re an asshole, no one’s going to tell you because they think you’re an asshole. And so that takes a very iterative self-awareness where you show people, you get to that one person who’s really going to tell you and you show them that you are really, willing to change, that you’re willing to be better. Then, over time, if you have some things that people are scared to tell you, you need to build trust over time for them to really tell you. I think, from a technical standpoint, we’re just so used to pushing the run button or the test button, and it gives us the clear answer, that you’re not going to get a clear answer at first. You have to iterate. And experiment and find the people you trust to really get to Andrea’s point of measuring where you are with what people think about you.

Matty: [00:26:06] I’ll put a link in the show notes to a great blog post by Dave Shackelford at PagerDuty called Empathy is CI for the Soul. It’s the idea that, again, using empathy as your tests for that. He spoke about the same kind of stuff, that it’s tough to get that, first of all, to receive that feedback in general, but it’s also tough to get it, to get it in the first place. When you’re in a position that people will do that for you, that’s a really wonderful place to be, as much as it may be hard to hear. I mean, we did a proof of concept with a customer not that long ago, and I had some folks from other parts of our company were along to sort of see how we did things. One of them was someone that I have a lot of respect for. I won’t name names because then he’ll get full of himself. Frank Weber. Afterwards, he asked me, and I will give him respect for saying he asked He said, would you like some direct feedback? And I said yes. And then, and he gave it to me and it was, it was hard to read because he was very, it wasn’t cruel empathy. It wasn’t, you know, it was just, it was direct.

Andrea: [00:27:10] Tell us.

Matty: Well, the funny thing is, cause I just said it so much, right? But one of the things was that I talked too much. I don’t think anybody who’s participating in this episode. So Michael, who sat and watched me do trainings and sessions and Trevor, who’s been doing this podcast with me. So we spent how many hours and Andrea, who spent— has probably spent almost as many hours listening to me talk as Trevor has. So having that awareness is really powerful. And when you can get that, that’s great. But I think, Michael, your point is right, because if you’re an asshole, no one’s going to tell you. You may not even know, and you don’t think you are.

Andrea: It is, right? I think I like that cake and icing thing. It’s like, it’s the what and the how, right? It’s, you know, like the what of my brand is being a leader, a dynamic leader, being a media expert, but the how is building positive, authentic connections and sort of like radiating positive energy. That’s kind of the thing that the how that I try to stand for, if I were to summarize. I like that a lot.

Matty: [00:28:11] I think a lot of times it can be really hard for people who suffer from imposter syndrome or just in general, depending on where you’re at, to work this up, to work on building your reputation or building your brand without feeling like you’re bragging and to feel and just continue to be genuine.

Michael: Yeah, I think in technology and even just in our culture today, authenticity is so important and being real is so important. If you’re not who you really are, people are going to see through it. I think the branding metaphor is a bit unfortunate because of what people think about when they think of branding. They think of somebody who’s full of themselves or somebody who is not real. I just look at it kind of like I said earlier. It’s how people view you, what people will say about you if they go to a work lunch and you’re not there and the topic of you comes up. What I want them to say is the truth, and the truth only comes about by results. If I’m able to bring people to a place where they feel listened and they feel understood and they feel like I’m on their team and they actually succeed with the initiative that I’m a part of, then I don’t have to worry about what they’re going to say about me at lunch. It’s probably going to be very positive. I think that at the very basic level, it’s all about results, and that’s what business is about too. If you can’t get results, it doesn’t matter what people feel or how you come across or whatever. Results are the basis, and then are people feeling like they’re a part of it, or are they feeling like you just stormed in and did your thing? And are getting all the credit for it. I think humility is a good part of it. Something that I’ve really been working on myself is making the transition from being the person who is always right, being the person with the answer, that technical person, being the person, like you were saying, Matt, being the person who talks all the time, to being the person who’s listening, being the person who lets people come up with the idea and who facilitates that idea and makes it a reality. Being the person who’s calm, being the person who’s humble, who’s sitting back and relaxed and not anxious about trying to prove myself to everybody. And I’ll be honest, it’s a real hard transition to make when you’ve been rewarded for so many years for being the guy who raises his hand first and asking the tough questions and being direct when people are wrong and stuff like that. But I think that that’s critical as somebody wants to broaden their scope and influence inside of an organization or outside of an organization to be that type of person in order to get more stuff done?

Andrea: [00:31:09] Yeah, you just really— I can’t agree more. You just have to be who you are. I think, I mean, going back to the question about can this come off as being braggy or overly self-promoting, I mean, as long as you’re authentic to who you are and that person is not a completely arrogant asshole, as we’ve said, who only cares about themselves. It’s not going to come off that way. It’s going to come off as who you really are. I think one of the things, as I’ve talked about making connections being an important part of what I like to do within my organization, one of the things I do externally is I try at least once a quarter or so to get out there in one of the universities and do a guest lecture on the topic of social media or traditional media or whatever the case may be, just to make sure that I’m out there sort of making connections in the community because that’s kind of something that I’ve said is authentic to who I am. So it’s something that’s just natural and again, I think exactly what Michael said. If you’re authentic to who you are, it doesn’t matter what anybody’s gonna say about you because they’re not gonna go there. They’re not gonna say that you’re overly braggadocious or anything like that because you’re just being who you are and living out your values.

Michael: [00:32:23] Maybe I can describe 3 projects. The first project was, years ago, introducing TeamCity into my organization for continuous integration. JetBrains is an awesome company, and I stood up the server, put it on my project, and basically felt a moral duty to help anybody get onto that server because of how much it helps people improve their effectiveness. I would tell people, I’ll meet you at 2:00 in the morning. I’ll wake up, and we will set this thing up for 30 minutes so that this will be a reality. TeamCity is basically just about all we use for continuous integration within hospitality at NCR, and it’s awesome. Everybody uses it. People love it. It was great. What came out of that was a great product. Product and the willingness to help and go along with people. Then another project, which I will be very vague in, was one which I was doing a multi-product initiative to improve a particular part of our product. Unfortunately, not all products really were on board with the improvement, and it had to be It had to be everybody on board or else the thing wouldn’t happen. It’s kind of like a unification design type, type of effort. And unfortunately, I ignored the lack of alignment and the lack of buy-in to my vision and just thought that by the sheer awesomeness of my technical prowess, I was going to be able to make this thing happen. And the whole time, the half of the people that did not that weren’t really on board with it weren’t happy with being interrupted with my meetings and weren’t happy with their schedules getting interrupted and having these commitments thrust on them that they didn’t want. They probably didn’t come away from that feeling very good about me. I had to resort to a lot of, well, this is what we’re doing, guys, kind of thing. It’s just sort of over time, it just feels like you’re walking up the wrong— or you’re swimming upstream. So, that was a situation in which I failed. What I learned from that is, contrasting TeamCity with this other project, I learned the power of people being on board with what you’re doing and the power of a good tool that you can that you can leverage that people will get into in its own regard. When we started doing a configuration tool search, I was looking for that type of experience. I was looking for people to get on board on their own merit, and I was looking for the ability to bring people together without having to try very hard, but also leveraging my skills and my technical abilities and my ability to network and all those things to bring that together. And I was looking for something that would be natural to move forward. And that’s what I found with Chef, working with Matt. I remember talking with Matt on the phone. I think it was like mid-December of 2014. And I was asking him, I don’t know how we’re going to make a decision for this. And Matt says, it’s gonna be great. It’ll be 45 days. We’ll have a decision. I remember hanging up the phone thinking, there is no way this is going to happen, but I will do whatever I can because I believe that this is going to be great for our organization. I’ll do whatever I can to make it happen. Chef has been just like TeamCity for us. People do it on their own. I’ll have somebody come out of the blue, hey, I was working with Chef, and I have this thing with Test Kitchen. I want to ask you a few questions about it.

Trevor: [00:36:43] I’m like, who are—

Michael: what? Okay, great. That’s an example of if you’re going with something, if you’re truly yourself, if it’s going to be something that you don’t have to fight, then all of a sudden you’re in your element, kind of that authentic self. You’re being your authentic self, and I think that you can then be the fill-in-the-blank person in your organization. And it took me, took me some time to find that role for me, but I think the chef role really does fit nicely with me for those reasons I laid out.

Trevor: Yeah, so I kind of get that balance too, where you’ve kind of got the products that you care about versus the products that you’ve got to bring in. And where I have the hardest time is I— my— what I do, a lot of what I do at Tenth is I’m a chef expert, and I participate in the the Hangouts Slack. I participate in the DevOps Library Slack where all these people communicate and ask questions, including a lot of the customers I’ve both worked with or may work with in the future. And so one of the, one of the things that I wouldn’t— I don’t know that terrify is the right word, but it’s almost terrifying— terrifies me is appearing vulnerable in those community participation and GitHub, in those Slack channels. Even if I’m 90% certain I know the answer to somebody else’s question, I’m afraid that somebody else is gonna come out and say you’re wrong, and that somebody who— somebody who then has to accept me as an expert is gonna see that and they’re no longer going to accept me as credible. Which is— I finally kind of gotten past— got to the point where I’m comfortable asking questions, but I haven’t been able to get myself to shake the want to be, to be not necessarily to be right, but not to be told that I’m wrong and lose that credibility.

Matty: [00:38:40] Yeah. I kind of thought you were going in a different direction when you were thinking about this at first, but I want to speak to that because it’s something I have struggled with. And because again, when you, when you’ve built a brand around being an expert in something, you almost feel like you have to be you have to back away from displaying that expertise for fear that it will be revealed that you’re marching down the street naked, and that little boy’s gonna pop up in Slack and point out that you’re not wearing any clothes. And the reality is, and this is a thing that last summer, because I was being very frustrated with this, and Joshua Timmerman, who, if you are listeners in the Chef community, you know, if there’s anyone who, you know, should know everything there is to know about Chef, Joshua is one of them. And he pointed out to me, he said, you have to realize that you’re— that these things are so big, you’re not going to know everything about it. And he’s like, that was one of the hardest things for him because there was a time when he knew everything there was to know, but it’s gotten too big and that’s okay. And there’s nobody, not even, I mean, just to take, again, take, you know, Chef as the example, Adam doesn’t know everything there is to know about Chef. And Adam will say things that are wrong, you know, because he doesn’t necessarily know what’s up to date with what. And I felt the same way. So to, you know, to say like, wait a minute, if my reputation is supposed to be that I know a lot about chef, well, and then something comes up, I can either say, well, I’m only gonna answer questions where I’m 100 billion percent sure that I’m right. And the thing is, I think that actually eventually over time probably damages your brand because now you don’t talk about it anymore.

Andrea: [00:40:12] Well, right, and I think being an expert should be that you’re endlessly hungry to learn about how your space is evolving, not that you— I work in the social media field. When I start— I started at my company 6 years ago. When I started, Twitter was barely around for brands. I’ve had to learn how that works, not only what the advertising product looks like, what the organic opportunity looks like, how to build authentic connections with consumers on Twitter without feeling like a creepy brand. But that’s all done right through just the constant knowledge and sort of working it out. I think if you don’t put yourself out there to try to answer those questions as a professional, at least in marketing, you’re not going to have the right discussions in order to actually get to progressive answers in that. I think that so much of business is about not black or white or right or wrong, but very much could this gray area work for this specific case for us? And maybe I’m speaking a little too fluffy as a marketer, as you guys work in a tech field and it’s much more You know, well, yeah, exactly the same.

Michael: [00:41:30] Yeah, I do too. And I think also, Trevor, you might think about your value not necessarily being the cake or the rational value, because I think that’s another trap that technical people get into, is, well, I must be the expert and chef, and that’s my only value. And if I don’t bring that to the table, then I’m nothing. You know, where it’s, uh, you’re Trevor because you’re an expert chef, but also because of things that nobody else has that you bring to the table. That’s the real value proposition. You don’t have to be all in on the rational value. You’re building that. As you’re saying, Andrea, you’re constantly learning. You’re constantly evolving. But then that icing is there at all times that separates you from somebody who just has the exact same resume that you do, and you can trust in that icing to lead you you through the times when you’re rebuilding your rational value.

Matty: [00:42:32] As you continue to grow in your knowledge of something, you raise the bar of what you think is the minimum requirement of knowing jack crap about anything along the way. So right now, like the things where you’re like, well, this is just table stakes for knowing Chef. So you’re embarrassed if you blow one of those answers is like 300 million times higher than it was a year ago. Right? Like you would have been impressed that you were knowing the stuff down here. And I thought about this actually, I don’t know, you may have even witnessed this. I think it was yesterday, Trevor, or the day before in Hangouts. I think it was in one of the Chef channels somewhere. Someone was asking a question. I remember you contributed to it about validator lists or about multiple validators, and I answered something, and then Noah’s like, oh my god, I can’t believe this. And my first response was I kind of recoiled a little bit and went, oh no, I just look stupid. And then I kind of went, oh wait a minute, this is an opportunity to learn. And I learned, and I don’t think anybody reading that discussion sat there and said, wow, Noah just took Matt to school and he’s so stupid and I’m never going to listen to him again. It was actually by virtue of me bringing it up, you had sort of like writing to the lurkers happening, right? There were people who were watching that who learned everything that I just learned along the way. So sometimes the value of the expert is knowing how to ask the questions that people haven’t realized they even want to ask, but then they’ll be ready for the answers later. Right? Like, you’re at an advanced level, so you’re gonna like say different stupid stuff than a beginner is gonna say. But then the beginner won’t have to say the stupid stuff later because you already said it for them. So that’s one way to, I guess, think about—

Trevor: [00:44:07] so I did see that, and that was part of why that was on my head. Not because I thought you looked stupid, but because it made me think that I should be responding more.

Andrea: Or you could just go with the whole— you could go with the whole theory that as long as you’re 80% confident it’s right, just go for your opinion, right?

Trevor: I mean, because, you know, these are the sorts of questions that if, you know, if I’m working with some, some people in a room, you know, doing my job as a consultant, I would absolutely just say the answer that I know. And, you know, even if, you know, the next converge failed or, you know, whatever didn’t compile, I’d still just, you know, find the right answer and fix it. But it’s that, it’s that kind of public situation that raises that discomfort. Because I’m afraid of what the broad spectrum will think. I mean, that’s why, you know, it’s sort of the same reason why I always joke about how I don’t talk enough on the podcast or how I don’t do anything because I feel bad because Matt does everything. My reputation is that I don’t do anything.

Matty: Well, but I think this goes back to that thought about you and I thinking about our brand different in terms of an external brand. So like if I was, for example, um, you know, not to put words in your mouth, Michael, or something like that, but if you were in that same type of a situation, you’re gonna be probably more willing to take a risk on the mailing list or in an IRC channel or something like that because your capital within NCR— chances are most of your coworkers are not lurking on the chef channel on Hangouts because you’re the chef guy, right? So it’s kind of okay. You may not care as much about your reputation within the chef community, whereas Trevor, who’s trying to make a living by being an expert in the chef community, feels like it’s a little risky riskier. But then he’s also willing to talk to the company like, I’ll just say whatever. And you would not do that probably, right? You’re like, wait a minute, I need to be sure.

Michael: [00:45:57] Well, I will say though, it’s been a shock to me to learn this in the past year as I’ve been doing self-awareness and growth that, um, people really hate a know-it-all. They feel stupid around a know-it-all. They feel belittled. They feel like they can’t talk. They feel like they don’t have a voice. And if you feel like you have to have all the answers, answers and know everything, you’re probably making people feel that way. I’m speaking to myself. I’ve been constantly recently just— I’ve been trying recently to clamp down on the urge to answer every single question and to take over every conversation. Back to what I was saying earlier, you get rewarded for that as a technical person early in your career, but as you get into consulting and as you get into bigger and better things within an organization like NCR, if you’re making everybody in the room feel like they’re stupid or feel like they should know these answers, but you’re the one who knows them, and they should be reading these books or listening to these podcasts, but you’re the one who did it, if you make them feel that way, then you’re not going to be as effective as if you made them feel comfortable.

Matty: [00:47:14] That actually goes into— I was just going to ask for some practical tips. And I think that’s leading into one of them, which is if you’re trying to build your reputation or your brand or whatever you want to call it in this subject, is letting other, you know, just you’re sharing your knowledge of it, right? When you’ve been successful, you’ve brought other people along for the ride. Like you gave the TeamCity thing, which was not that you were successful with that because you went and you told everybody it was the right thing to do. You enabled them, right? And helped them get it going, helped them do their thing. And then the same thing, like you said, instead of sitting there and saying, well, you know, I’ve read Jez’s book and I’ve done blah, blah, blah, and listened to this podcast, but just sort of saying like, hey, here’s some things I know about, I’d love for you to know about them too. Here’s like a whole bunch of different ways to learn about them, and then let’s talk about them together. You actually didn’t have to really contribute any content for that, but you are now cemented in the head as the person who knows about that thing. So that might be one practical tip. Andrea, I’d be interested to know some other things people can do to help genuinely build awareness and brand around their expertise.

Andrea: [00:48:18] Yeah, I mean, I think I can just point to some practical examples. I mentioned doing guest lecturing externally. I think it’s really important to talk to other people in your community, to participate in industry events. It’s something that I think people do, but if, you know, it’s like I’ve gone to South by Southwest Interactive a couple of times, and it’s like you can get swallowed up and lost in the madness of all of that. It’s really critical. If I go to South by Southwest or CES or any of the kind of bigger marketing conferences, I’m actually there to network with other people. I’m— nobody’s giving away trade secrets up at the podium or on a panel, you know. It’s like, it’s great and it’s inspiring and you hear some super dynamic speakers, but, you know, you’re really there to network with others. So I think you just honestly have to put yourself out there in industry-appropriate venues. And then, you know, I’ve thought about this a lot, like, you know, building a website, you know, my own website that would just be more of a, you know, career link kind of thing and just a little bit more exposure. But I will say, I think we haven’t talked about this much, but Michael did touch on this a bit, is that you just have to be who you are inside and outside of the walls of the business. So I don’t have a separate Facebook for work or a Twitter for work or a, you know, I mean LinkedIn’s a bad example because it’s for work. It’s like, you know, I’m friends on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and all these things on a personal level with many of my coworkers. And that’s not purposefully trying to build a personal brand with them. It’s really just because this is who I am and these are the things I’m interested in. You know, I play volleyball and I like craft projects and I like hanging out with Matt and his kids and that’s who I am. And that’s what I talk about at the water cooler at work as well. Think just being who you are and sort of finding outlets to represent yourself, whether it be industry events or social media or other related fields, it’s— that’s what’s important.

Matty: [00:50:26] And Trevor and I proved that anybody can start a podcast.

Trevor: This is true.

Matty: Anybody could be on a podcast. So if you’d like to increase your personal brand by appearing on Arrested DevOps, send us an email with what you want to talk about. Yes, yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, don’t just say, I wanna be on the show. Tell us what you wanna talk about, what your brand is, and why it’s important. Andrea, you know, you talked about, you know, going and speaking at events and things like that. I think sometimes that can feel intimidating for a couple different reasons, and I wanna put that a little bit to maybe help people understand that it’s not so super scary. First of all, if you’re not the kind of person who likes to speak in public, that’s okay. So we’ll take that type of person and put them aside for a minute. We’ll talk about some things they can do that aren’t public speaking, but I know a lot of people who have no problem with public speaking. That’s part of their job even. Think about people who are consultants or sales engineers or whatever, and they talk to people all day long, but do not wanna give talks. And it’s, I think that’s where things like imposter syndrome or specifically what Trevor just talked about, which I think is a variant on it, rear its ugly head because it’s like, wait a minute, you’re gonna have me go speak at the— I’m gonna go talk to all these people at Velocity or something, and there’s gonna be all these people out there who are way smarter than me, and they’re They’re going to destroy everything I had to say. The first thing is that if you really believe that your colleagues in this industry are that big of jerks, then why do you work here? Maybe you should go work somewhere else because people tend to not be like that. Then the other thing is to remember just that anything you have to say is valuable. Your particular story is valuable. Think about things like local meetups or DevOps Days, or even if it’s not that your thing isn’t speaking, but you are more extroverted than the average bear, maybe. Andrea kind of talked about going to events and networking. Working, or like, we’d like to talk about the hallway track. What you can do with those connections, because think about how this could be a really powerful thing, and again, we’ll kind of pick on Michael and say this could be another for instance. Let’s say throughout your journey of trying to do this adoption, you had gone to a DevOps Days and you’d met someone who had already done this migration to Chef, and you weren’t in any kind of a competing business, you know, they worked for, you know, someone completely opposite of what you did. Would probably be willing to talk to your team about what they did, right? And now you’re a huge expert because you’ve— again, it’s just like saying you’re bringing that in. You’re being able to say, I can leverage my connections, not my like cool connections in the industry, but someone else can— you’re gonna find people who can help validate what you’re trying to say or help you realize it doesn’t necessarily work.

Andrea: [00:53:02] And I would just add, you know, speaking at conferences is great. It’s also equally as impactful to get out of your cubicle and walk around the floor and just talk to people. I give, I give this advice a lot to people who are more introverted, and it’s something that I hate to give the advice on because I have no issue. In fact, I usually don’t go a half day without walking around and talking to people on the floor. But I can understand that that doesn’t feel authentic to some. And all I would say is give yourself a little goal, you know, like just decide that, hey, this week I’m gonna have 3 3 hallway conversations unprompted and give yourself a little bit of a prep on what you might talk about if just going up and kind of shooting the breeze is not part of what you would do normally. I think it’s good to have a couple goals around there. I think it’s okay to be deliberate about networking. I think it’s actually a really good thing to be deliberate about networking as long as you’re doing it in a way that’s genuinely being interested in what the person is going to say, not just the topic you bring.

Matty: [00:54:07] I think you can also, if you’re not someone who’s going to feel comfortable reaching out in the physical space, there’s a lot of— maybe one practical thing to think about extending your virtual networking, to really mess that metaphor up, is to say, hey, you know what, next time I have an issue with this particular software, instead of calling the vendor directly, I’m gonna go try Stack Exchange, or I’m gonna reach out on Slack, on Hangouts, or something like that. Because number one, for First of all, you’re actually going to probably get better results because you’re going to have lots and lots of eyes on it, but now you’re starting to interact, right? And then you start to know people and it gets into this idea of, again, you’re building that understanding of each other. And then that’s someone who can be helpful to you in lots of different ways, not just answering your question, but being able to be someone who can help bring, again, validity as you’re trying to make these changes within, within your group or your org. I guess there’s just sort of one, one final thought, although I think I know what the answer is to it, but this is something that’s been, been brought up, which is when we talk about this topic, and I guess I just want listeners to think about this. I imagine quite a few of you saw the title of this episode called Building Your Personal Brand, and we’ve talked about that term a lot and might’ve had some instinctual reactions to it because it seems snake oil. It seems, and maybe a little bit like a self-described thought leader who’s invented themselves a brand. I think we’ve talked a lot about how if you try to invent your brand, if you just sit down— like if I were to sit down tomorrow and say, I’ve decided I’m going to be the foremost authority on the proper way to test things written in Go, that would be kind of ridiculous and very ingenuine. Now, I could sit down and say, I want to learn a whole lot about it, but if my goal is to become a big expert on it so that I can write a book, or so that I can be, you know, booked to keynote GopherCon, that’s gonna probably come across as completely ingenuine from day one, right? I think the way that you distance yourself from the self-described thought leader is that you’re accentuating something that you already feel strongly about or you already believe in.

Michael: [00:56:24] Yeah, I think that people know who the self-promoter fake people are. I was at dinner with some industry colleagues and a topic of a person came up and I actually respected that person and the colleagues were like, oh man, that guy. Told me all about him. I think anybody who wants to go on the thought leader track or the disingenuous thought leader, a fake, and trying to build up an empire that doesn’t exist, might need to think about that business dinner that people like me have where the topic of them comes up. Because you just— there’s no escaping results and authenticity. And if you don’t get them, then you are— you’re talked about in that way, and it’s, it’s not a pleasant thing.

Andrea: Couldn’t agree more. It’s, you know, it’s like you’re constantly trying to sell somebody on something that, again, if you don’t have the results, if it’s a fact that is not true, you’re not going to be able to sell somebody on that. You’re actually not going to be able to stand for those— for any values. You’re going to, in the short term, perhaps, you know, fool some people, and perhaps you can get away with sort of not really being who you are and calling yourself a thought leader. But in the long term, real thought leaders don’t consistently call themselves thought leaders. They’re humble enough to know that they need other thoughts to lead any thought of their own.

Matty: [00:57:59] I was gonna say, I imagine this is probably something that comes up in your, your industry, especially in the social space, especially in anything. I think it probably is something that comes up in anything that’s new, right? You’re probably not seeing a lot of thought leadership in, you know, AIX system administration these days, but you’re seeing a lot of it in DevOps, right? And same thing, you’re probably seeing a lot of it in social, but not a lot of big thought leaders in direct-to-consumer mailing marketing.

Andrea: Or legal.

Matty: Yeah.

Andrea: Yeah, I know a lot of people, like when I’ll speak at something, they’re like, Andrea Javor is a thought leader in social media and a guru. And it’s like, no, I really am like endlessly passionate about the media space and about how people interact with companies and brands. I’m, I’m nothing more than someone who is very passionate and excited to learn. And I don’t say that just to try to be humble. I truly— there’s so many things I don’t know. The social media space, and I’m not at all afraid to tell my colleagues that and to say, hey, instead of calling me an expert and asking for the answer, why don’t we look at the data we have and figure out the answer together?

Matty: [00:59:05] If someone called me a thought leader, I would say I’m an opinion-haver.

Andrea: You have lots of those.

Trevor: I do. You do have lots of those.

Matty: Any final thoughts there, Mr. Hess?

Trevor: Yeah, I mean, first of all, I agree entirely. I think there’s a, there’s a really fun fine line between having passion for something and the desire to learn it and the desire— maybe fine line is not the right way to approach it, but the difference between the goal being to be a master at something and the goal being to talk about being a master at something. And that is the, that is the fine line between where femme flemming becomes disingenuous.

Matty: Well said. Well, on that note, On that note, that fine line between genuine and disingenuous, or stupid and clever, as the boys in Spinal Tap may have said, let’s talk about some community event stuff that’s coming up. So, opportunities for you to work that hallway track or potentially even speak at some conferences, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Remember, if you do have an upcoming conference you would like to see us promote, fill out the handy-dandy form at arresteddevops.com/conf. So, some upcoming conferences: DevOpsDays Rockies will be April 21st through the 22nd. Attendees can save 10% off the regular price with the discount code of ADO2016. DevOps Days Atlanta is April 26th through the 27th, and you can get 20% off the regular price with the discount code ADO2016. Then we have the very first DevOps Days Seattle, which will be May 12th through the 13th, and you can get 15% off with the discount code ADO2016. We have a whole bunch of open calls for proposals. DevOps Days Vancouver and Minneapolis. Annapolis are open until March 31st, so devopsdays.org. Abstractions is also open until March 31st. I don’t have the URL for that, but you could probably find it. We’ll put a link in the show notes. DevOps Days Washington, D.C., they’re doing that again, and their CFP is open until April 15th. Salt Lake City’s is open until April 19th. DevOps Days Amsterdam is open until May 30th. I also see that the CFP for that conference will be open March 1st through the 31st, so that conference is lot of fun. Build is summer camp for geeks. It’s up in the Wisconsin Dells. I spoke at that last year. Andrea went along and she, you know, was there. So I will tell you that water park’s a lot more fun with kids.

Andrea: [01:01:35] I went to the spa and then I listened to his talk and then we basically went home.

Matty: So, but we do have some exciting, very, for the very first time, Arrested DevOps news. So you can now purchase an Arrested DevOps t-shirt. They are available.

Andrea: Yeah. Yeah!

Matty: I’m the only one that has one yet because I haven’t given Trevor his yet. They are available at store.arresteddevops.com. We only have the unisex version right now, but there are more styles coming soon. Buy one today! Or don’t. We’re not the boss of you. Let’s go ahead and move into our checkouts, though, speaking of the boss of me. Andrea, what do you have for our listeners to check out?

Andrea: All right. Well, first of all, I would not be building my brand if I didn’t mention that I also drink whiskey because whiskey is an important part of my job. Maker’s Mark is part of our portfolio. I suggest it on the rocks or with ginger beer and a lime, or really any damn way you like to drink it. It’s a great product, so check out Maker’s Mark. And there’s a couple of books I talked about— the Sally Hogshead book, which is called How the World Sees You. There’s also something, a book I recently read by Danny Meyer called Setting Cleaning the Table. This is a really odd recommendation from me as a marketer. It’s actually about a restaurateur whose whole premise of starting sort of the world that he’s become successful in is by paying attention to the detail and giving customers, in his case patrons at a restaurant, a little bit more than what they expected. It’s kind of that idea of surprise and delight, which I think is a great idea for people who are trying to build their brand. Give people a little more than what you expect, what they they might expect. And finally, because I really am completely obsessed with this right now, this is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I decided— this has gotten a lot of press. I heard about this at my annual girlfriend’s holiday dinner in December. It’s by Marie Kondo. She’s a Japanese woman who actually talks about how your life will improve dramatically if you just organize your shit. And I cannot agree more. I started with my desk about a month ago, and my coworkers can tell you that I am quantifiably happier and more productive at work because my desk is completely neat and clean. And I’m starting to do my apartment, and Matt could attest that I am happier and better at life.

Matty: [01:04:08] I am very cluttered and less happy. So there’s some more empirical evidence for that. Michael, what do you have for us?

Michael: Well, I will mention the book that I mentioned earlier in our conversation called Branding Pays by Karen Kang. The The book has a really good exercise in the middle where we’re talking about the cake and the icing where she walks you through what you would write for yourself on a one-page table. She walks you through a really good exercise. So I found that to be very helpful. Another thing that I really like is a website called Mr. Money Mustache. This is a guy who was a programmer and his wife was a programmer. They live in Colorado and they worked their asses off until they were 30 and then they retired. And they live on $25,000 a year. So they’re kind of big in frugality and big on financial independence. And I think that’s really cool. It’s also kind of cool for a technical audience to sort of think about those things. And then similarly, on the subject of money, I’m really a huge fan of the budgeting software You Need a Budget, which is really awesome. And they recently came out with a new web app version. So I’m big on budgeting, kind of a nerd in that way. So check that out if you are wanting to get your financial shit in order, as they would say.

Trevor: [01:05:36] All right, thank you. So one of my favorite shows is the Venture Brothers, which is notorious for having large gaps between seasons. Well, we are in the middle of a new season. Venture Brothers Season 6 is airing now. And it’s awesome. You should check it out. WMF 5 went RTM again. And I mean, there’s nothing wrong with breaking the PS module path, right?

Matty: Is that important? Did you care about that? No.

Trevor: And we also— another thing we mentioned during the show today was— or tonight, or whenever you’re listening to this was the HangOps Slack, which is a public Slack channel. If you Google HangOps Slack, you’ll find the signup for it. I believe it’s billed as—

Matty: signup.hangops.com.

Trevor: I believe it’s billed as the Slack for DevOps people to be great to each other, or something along those lines. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s awesome. There’s tons of good people in there. You can ask questions and communicate and It’s nice.

Matty: [01:06:45] I’m a very big fan of Hangouts. I’ve got a couple. One of them is a book called How Google Works. This was written by Eric Schmidt of Google and Jonathan Rosenberg. Larry Page wrote the foreword. It’s a lot of digging into kind of the business of Google and how things work within their organization. I found it to be really fascinating. Highly recommend it. Actually, when I’m looking at most of my checkouts, I’m realizing they’re things that I read or watched or did a while ago, and I’m just remembering them now. Another one which I may have given as a checkout before, but if I haven’t, or even if I have, is Visual Studio Code. So that’s Microsoft’s open source and free, as in beer or air, whatever is the right type of free that it is, text editor. And I gotta say, one thing I find especially amusing about it is that its Git integration is better than Atom’s, and Atom comes from GitHub. So figure that one out. Also, if you haven’t seen the show The Newsroom, I know it’s been over for a while, but it’s on HBO Go, but it’s also on Amazon Prime Video. So if you haven’t watched The Newsroom, you should watch it because I like it. And finally, I’m gonna put out a request that if anybody can help me figure out the right tools or books or websites to read so that I can learn how to use OmniGraffle properly, I’ll feature it as a future checkout because Visio is the only thing I’ve been missing from a Windows PC, and everybody tells me to use OmniGraffle, and for the life of me, I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to do anything in it, and I I can’t. So I would love for someone to tweet at me, like, how to do OmniGraffle, or just teach me through a series of tweets. It’ll be hilarious. We have a newsletter, by the way. You can sign up for it at arresteddevops.com/bananastand. It is the best way to know about upcoming podcast episodes and cool news with DevOps.

Trevor: [01:08:35] Thanks to our sponsors. Be sure to visit them at arresteddevops.com/tenthmagnitude and arresteddevops.com/bananastand. Thanks to Andrea and Michael for joining us tonight, today, whenever this podcast is. Loyal listeners, if you enjoy Arrested DevOps, we’d appreciate it if you would visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes Store. We’d love to know what you thought of tonight’s episode or whenever this episode is being listened to. Please leave us a comment at arresteddevops.com/personalbrand. It’s been a while. I think we’re due for reading another joke. Tweet soon.

Matty: You mean another review?

Trevor: Yeah, that’s the real thing.

Matty: I meant to say a review, actually. Um, oh, well then, uh, but we should have read it at the top of the episode. We’ll do that, um, on the next one we do, which we need to schedule. Hey, so, but speaking of, um, like talking to us and, and tweets, which wasn’t what we were supposed to be talking about, we would love if you would follow us and talk to us on Twitter. We are, guess what, @ArrestedDevOps. We’re also Arrested DevOps Ops on Facebook if you’d like to do that. So we’re happy to get your input, ideas, or feedback via that old-school email jive at shows@arresteddevops.com. Let us know any ideas you have for future episodes. As Michael can attest, we probably will make you come on and do the episode with us. I’m Matt at Matt Stratton, and I’m Trevor at Trevor G Hess.

Trevor: [01:09:59] We’re Arrested DevOps, and remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.