Theatre Geeks Unite and Tech Over the World

Nathan: [00:00:00] The only people that do theater are the people who can’t do anything else.

Trevor: It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast where we help you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m Trevor Hess, and show notes for today’s episode can be found at arresteddevops.com/theaternerds. Before I intro our guests, a word from our sponsors.

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Trevor: ChefConf will be held May 23rd through 26th in Chicago. Chef has been a longtime supporter of the DevOps movement and of this podcast. ChefConf will have talks on infrastructure automation with Chef, compliance automation with Inspect, application automation with Habitat, and a ton of other relevant content. Register with discount code ADO2018 to save 10%. Visit chefconf.com for all the details. And remember, code ADO2018 gets you 10% off the ticket price at chefconf.com. Episode 108, then, A Dialogue in Pieces. Some of you may recall the strange allure of drama or the theater, a mystery never fully explained. We are told, ladies and gentlemen, that these very guests once participated in these wondrous staged affairs. We are joined by 3 folks who left the air of the limelight and took a path into DevOps and technology. Chloe Condon, Nathan Harvey, and Nell Shamrell-Harrington. Perhaps we may frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little elimination. Roll call! Chloe, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Chloe: [00:02:09] Hi everyone, my name is Chloe Condon and I’m a developer evangelist at Sentry.io in San Francisco.

Trevor: Awesome, thank you for joining us, Chloe. Nathan? What part do you play?

Nathan: Hi, Trevor. Thanks for having me. I’m Nathan Harvey. I’m the VP of Community Development at Chef, also a co-host of the Food Fight Show podcast.

Trevor: Awesome. Thank you for joining, Nathan. And Nell, what is your role?

Nell: Well, there’s a few different roles I play on a regular basis. The first is I’m a senior software engineer at Chef. I work mainly on the Habitat project. I am also the Chief Technology Officer of Operation Code, which is a nonprofit that’s dedicated to teaching software engineering skills to military veterans. And I am also Nathan’s fellow co-host for the Food Fight Show. It’s fantastic to be here.

Trevor: Awesome. Thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you, Nell. So tonight, well, first let’s take a break from my terrible rephrasing of Phantom of the Opera. That was my—

Nathan: [00:03:12] It was awesome. It was super awesome.

Trevor: Thank you, Nathan. It was always my dream to play the Phantom and I never got to do it, so I figured I may as well just, you know, I’ll work it in. I’ll work it in. But today we’re gonna talk about the journey from theater into tech and how interesting it is that so many of us seem to come from a theater background. So let’s start. What was everybody’s experience with theater or acting or the stage, what have you, on the call?

Chloe: I guess I can start. So I grew up in a trunk, as my parents used to say. My dad is a director and playwright, and my mom was a costume designer. So I literally grew up in the theater, grew up behind the audition table, hanging out in the costume shop, you know, selling snacks at the concession stand when I was 4, and ended up kind of Theater was sort of the thing that I had my blinders on and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. And I grew up around it and I went to theater summer camp. I went to a performing arts high school. I did, you know, community theater shows and then eventually got my degree at San Francisco State, which is what inevitably brought me to the city and working in tech eventually. So I come to theater kind of by DNA in a sense. The theater life kind of chose me in a lot of ways.

Trevor: [00:04:37] That’s super awesome. What was your favorite show or your favorite role or both?

Chloe: Oh man, I really loved 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, mainly because one of the reasons that I kind of, I think kind of peaked in theater, or not peaked, but kind of got to a point where I felt that I, it was very weird to do the same thing over and over again for, you know, 4 or 5, 6 weeks. And Spelling Bee was different every single night. So I’m not sure how many people are familiar with the show. So I’ll just kind of explain. It’s partially improvised. All the songs and the lines are pretty much like set in stone, but you bring on about 5 or 6 different audience members to be guest spellers. And depending on how well they spell the word or don’t spell the word or how extroverted or introverted they are, there’s kind of different ways that the show can end up going. So it was always fun. It kept us on our toes every night. We didn’t know if it was gonna be some old Jewish grandfather or, you know, a 4-year-old or who was gonna come on stage and who we were gonna have to interact with. So I really loved Spelling Bee. And as far as other shows, I mostly did musicals. So I did a lot of plays in college, but I was a musical theater girl through and through. Never got to do Legally Blonde, but Elle Woods was always my dream role. Still on my list, very much so.

Nell: [00:06:01] I have to ask, so I saw the original cast of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee several years ago. What part did you play?

Chloe: I played Logan Schwartzengrubenier. Oh, fantastic. Liberal, passionate, uh, young lady with 2 gay dads. Um, it was super fun. Um, probably one of my favorite casts that I’ve ever worked with too. And it’s hard to just not fall in love with whatever cast you do that show with because you rely so heavily on each other. And, um, just such a beautiful score. It’s William Finn. So, um, just really looked forward to going to the theater every single day for that show because we didn’t know what was going to happen.

Trevor: That is so cool. Nathan, how about you?

Nathan: Uh, sure. So I always wanted to be an actor when I was growing up, uh, and so I went to college and I started my freshman year as a double major. I was going to be comp sci and theater. It took me about a week to realize that there was a lot of math in comp sci and the kids in the theater department were a lot more fun to hang out with. So I immediately dropped that portion of my studies and went full on into theater. But then I, in college, I discovered my love for technical theater and actually have a degree in theater with an emphasis in lighting design. So I spent my college years all doing backstage work.

Trevor: [00:07:28] How about your favorite show or role?

Nathan: Yeah, probably, um, one of the scenes to light, maybe. Well, there are so many, so many good ones, um, but one that, uh, one that kind of sticks out in my mind is, uh, while I was in college at the University of Maryland, we were lucky enough to do, uh, one of the— maybe the very first production of a musical called Quilt, which was about the AIDS quilt, um, which at the time was actually touring the US. So now we all can sort of If you do the math and look at the Wikipedia, you can figure out how old I am. It’s old. It’s probably older than you. But in any case, while we were doing it, the quilt actually came to DC. So we got to take the whole cast and crew, and we actually did a performance of the show, a run of the show at the Smithsonian on the National Mall, like a block from where the quilt was laid out on display. So that was a really powerful moment, and just, it was a really cool show and a great time.

Trevor: I don’t know how that’s— that’s— I’m jealous. Nell, what’s your theatre background?

Nell: [00:08:38] Sure, I started doing theatre in high school, uh, and I mean, it was something that I enjoyed, but there was this moment we did a production of West Side Story, which sadly I was not involved in because I had some other stuff going on, but there’s a scene that usually gets cut when they’re singing the Somewhere song, that there’s a moment where the chorus sings kind of in a round, there is a place for us, there’s a place for us, and you can hear this yearning. And the most beautiful thing about theater is that— is the moments where something someone wrote a long time ago that has been performed millions of times speaks to your personal truth. And it was that moment that I knew, okay, this is what I’m meant to do, to move people like this and to be moved like this. So I went to college originally intending to be a pre-med major, but Chemistry 161, I survived it, but not by much. So I, like Nathan, decided I was going to be a theater and computer science double major. The problem is there was absolutely no way to do that in 4 years at the college I was at, which was at University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. So, I was there on a number of theatre scholarships and I figured I may never have this opportunity again to focus on theatre fully. My specializations were sound design and also acting with an emphasis on stage combat, which I loved. So, I got my BA in theatre and that passion has never gone away.

Trevor: [00:10:17] That’s awesome. I hate that my— I hate my personal different reaction words because I feel like I have 4 of them and I feel like I’m giving a generic response every time. Anyway, what is your favorite show or favorite role?

Nell: Absolutely. My senior thesis at University of Puget Sound, we did a play. It’s a lesser-known one called The Arabian Nights by Mary Zimmerman. And what it is, is it’s several interweaving tales from the classic 1,001 Nights. But she doesn’t take the really well-known known ones like Aladdin and the 40 Thieves or stuff. She takes several of the lesser-known ones and weaves them into stories upon stories upon stories. And I played several parts in this. Everyone did. But my main part was Sympathy the Learned. And what Sympathy, that character does, is she goes to the court of the king and challenges all the learned scholars there. So all men to a contest of knowledge. And I had to learn everything she learned, which included, you know, science, astronomy, tons of stuff about religion and Islam. I can still name all the prophets in the Quran. And I remember the first time I read the script, I thought, this is a role I was meant to play. And everyone who saw me in it said the same thing. My mother actually said, you know, I cannot think of a better role for you. And I do a lot of technical speaking now at various conferences. And I feel like I channel that character, that character of sympathy. She’s become me. I become her in these moments of being in front of all these people who sometimes ask very weird, challenging questions and trying to answer those questions, kind of not defeat them, but I don’t know of a better word. Let’s say defeat them in a graceful way, which that character very much did. So that was the role of a lifetime for me and one that I remember very, very fondly.

Trevor: [00:12:18] It’s so cool that you’ve got such a, like, a deep personal connection to, to, like, to a character like that. Thinking about some of my own experiences with theater and, like, liking, like, having Phantom be my favorite, like, that was, that was, that was personal to me as a, like, as a teenager because it— I related to the angst of the Phantom. But, like, it’s so much cooler that you’ve kind of got that, that connection that’s, like, meaningful going beyond like the first time you were part of it.

Nell: And I’ve got to ask, what’s your background in theatre, Trevor?

Trevor: So I started doing theatre in high school and I super loved it. I actually did— I started doing it in middle school, actually, and I super enjoyed it. And I forget even how I found out about it, but somebody told my mom or something about like a local stage production of Pippin, and they needed more guys. And so I went and I auditioned, and I was a part of Pippin. And I’m still friends with people from that cast to this day. And that was 2005, which was awesome because some of those are some of the longest-lived friendships of my life. And I just got— like, I got involved in community theater, and then I actually got paid to do theater once, which was cool. My favorite role would probably be when I played Matt in The Fantasticks because I also love musicals and love to sing, which is why you’ll find me at ChefConf karaoke wherever that winds up being this year, or you’ll see anytime there’s karaoke like asked, I will be involved because that’s, that is my stage outlet now. It’s where I get to sing and Um, enjoy that part of myself, um, because I could never really do the dancing part. That was— that, in fact, in The Fantasticks, we cut a dancing scene because I couldn’t do it.

Chloe: [00:14:16] Um, I will absolutely duet on Soon It’s Gonna Rain with you if we’re ever in the same karaoke situation.

Trevor: Oh, hell yes!

Chloe: I never got to play Louisa, but it was always on my list.

Trevor: Oh, it was so much fun. Uh, What’s the song? Uh, I Can See It. I love that song. It’s so much fun to sing.

Chloe: It’s funny because early on in my musical theater career, I played mostly ingenues because I was this, you know, kind of like blonde, big-eyed, you know, girl. And then I realized like towards kind of the end of when I was doing theater that I really enjoyed comedy. And I got to play these really fun roles like Logan, or like I played Penny in Hairspray. I got to do Xanadu where it’s just totally hammy, campy, you know, lots of laughs. And once I kind of discovered like, oh, like I’m the quirky sidekick, not the pretty girl who parks and barks. That was a huge eye-opener for me. So now when I actually give talks, um, I always preface my talks and say, there’s a lot of dad jokes in here. Please laugh. Like you are allowed to laugh. Cause that’s actually the biggest difference for me between giving tech talks and doing musical theater is I feel like I have to tell people it’s okay to be entertained and to enjoy it. Cause we’re just so used to some of these like very monotonous, like, thank you for coming.

Trevor: [00:15:36] Absolutely.

Chloe: I bring the quirk, you know, I bring that Penny from Hairspray into my talks, much like you were mentioning you brought in your character. And I think sometimes that’s like, for some audiences, they love it. And other audiences, they’re like, they don’t get it. Crazy woman on stage. Like, is this Zooey Deschanel’s little sister? Like, who is this?

Trevor: That was actually—

Nell: oh, sorry, go ahead.

Trevor: I was gonna say, that was an important lesson that I learned too, is kind of learning to pick the role that, that, that you want to do. Because that was— I remember my senior year of high school, I was irate because we did You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. And I’m sorry if any of you love that musical, it’s not for me. Um, and like, I was so excited because it was my senior year, I was gonna get to be the lead, and I didn’t want to be Charlie Brown. Like, I did not want to be Charlie Brown at all. So I looked like— I researched the musical. I was like, you know what, Snoopy’s the best character in this show. I’m gonna go for Snoopy. And I had so much fun being Snoopy. Uh, like, I had— it was a blast. But like, learning, learning to like be like, well, you know, the, the lead role isn’t necessarily the best role.

Chloe: [00:16:47] And there’s also Snoopy the Musical, which is one of the only musicals that has, I think, 4 exclamation points in it that I got to do a couple years ago. And it’s just like Snoopy’s the star.

Trevor: So that’s awesome.

Chloe: You want me to come back, that’s got your name on it.

Nathan: You know, I think, I think honestly the first play I did in middle school was Snoopy, and I was Snoopy. Um, and yeah, I have very fond memories of that. I’m sure it was terrible, um, but man, did we have fun.

Trevor: So, Nell, you made me think of something else too, the, the, the round song and how that connected with you. It wasn’t theater, but it was one of those moments. I went and saw The Decemberists a week or two ago, and I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear the entire Chicago Theatre singing Hear All the Bombs Fade Away. In the chaos and torment that has been the last 2 years of the political struggle of the world, hearing an entire auditorium singing about peace was just wonderful.

Nell: [00:17:53] I want to add just a quick story to that. I’ll make it quick. But, uh, in college, uh, we did a production of The Laramie Project, which is about— not— I wouldn’t say it’s even about the death of Matthew Shepard. It’s about the community’s reaction to it. And there’s a moment in the play where they’re showing, uh, what’s-his-name of Westboro Baptist Church, uh, his— they protested Matthew Shepard’s, uh, funeral in a very, you know, vile way. And this is a true story. What happened was, uh, some counter-protesters put on giant angel wings and surrounded the anti-gay protesters to protect the family from them. And what they did was they started to drown the anti-gay protesters out by singing Amazing Grace. And in this production, it was a black box production, it was a smaller audience, but still a couple of hundred people, the audience joined in. And this was in 2003 or something when gay rights was still a contentious issue in this country, but even more so than now. And I’m actually getting extremely emotional thinking about this that, but it highlights that the audience is as much of a part of the creation in theatre as the performers.

Trevor: [00:19:03] Absolutely. Yeah, that’s much better audience participation than Rocky Horror.

Nell: That’s fun, but in a different way.

Trevor: Exactly. It’s fun, not poignant.

Chloe: I feel like I missed that window of like when you’re supposed to get into Rocky Horror because I have seen it on stage, I’ve watched the movie, and I’m like, I All right, I don’t know, man.

Trevor: I can say that I, I went to Rocky Horror many times in high school and in college. Uh, I have not been since, and every time I think about like, yeah, you know, it’d be fun, it’d be fun to get in a dress again and, you know, and go, uh, gallivanting around town for Rocky Horror, then I think, uh, maybe not. Not that, not that I don’t look good in a dress, but But unfortunately, I lost that picture because I looked great in that dress. I won the costume contest that night.

Nell: I’ve unpacked most of the photos on Facebook that involve me at Rocky Horror shows.

Trevor: [00:20:04] Anyway, so how did everybody transition from theater into technology? I know everybody kind of touched upon it a little bit, at least from the, like, how you got to a place where you were around tech or how you you majored in, did or didn’t continue in tech, and then came back. When did you realize that theatre wasn’t going to work for you?

Nathan: I realized it right before I started my senior year of college, actually. I realized that, like, I had the bug and all I wanted to do was theatre, but then I also realized that, you know, having a family and raising a family was really important to me, and I didn’t I didn’t really see a way that I could do that and sustain my love of theatre and do that all in and raise and support a family in the way that I felt like I wanted to. I know, looking back on that, part of that was just the same imposter syndrome that so many of us feel today, like, I’m not good enough. I can’t do it. Part of that was also just the commitment. I say the theatre bug was in me, but I think there is some truth to the fact that the only people that do theater are the people who can’t do anything else. And so I did find something else. And so interestingly, what I did was I found my love of children and hanging out and helping children discover the world. And so I decided I was going to become an early elementary school teacher, like think 1st through 3rd grade. But then I quickly It maybe took me a year to realize that there wasn’t a whole lot of money in that either. Then I brought my love of software and my love of tech together with my love of teaching and helping people discover new things. I thought, you know what’s harder than teaching kindergartners is teaching adults how to software. I got my first job at a software company and I just followed the old adage that those who can’t teach, so I got a job in the education department and I was off training on how to use our package, our software package that we were using, so I was training all of these people that were way more technical than me, but I knew the product well enough to stand in front of a classroom and teach people over 3 days and they walked out knowing more about it, so from there, like, I just continued to self-teach until, you know, I was full-on doing tech all the time, yeah, tech Not tech theatre, just tech all the time.

Nell: [00:22:41] I graduated college in 2007, right on the cusp of the whole US economy crashing. So at that point, 2007, 2008, 2009, it was hard to find a job, I think, in any industry. But all the smaller— because when you do theatre, you very rarely start at the, you know, the big Broadway houses in New York City. In fact, I don’t know. I know very few people who have. You start at the lower community theaters, then you go up to the— I mean, Seattle fortunately has plenty of really good professional theater, but a bunch of those theaters closed because they just were not getting enough, uh, audience members because people just did not have discretionary spending or discretionary money to spend on the theater. So I got a job as an office assistant at the University of Physics or University of Washington Physics Department, and once they figured out I could code, they started giving me more and more coding assignments, and that eventually led to a career in development because I’ve always had an aptitude for technology and frankly, lighting design, sound design, these are extremely technical fields and that knowledge transferred well into the software field. However, I realized a few years into my career as a software developer that there was a piece missing. I mean, I desperately, desperately missed being on stage. I desperately missed being in front of an audience, working with a crew and cast to bring a production together. And that’s why I started doing conference speaking, was to fulfill that part of my soul, my right side brain, I guess, if you will, while still being able to make enough money to support myself. And I now support both myself and my spouse while she’s in law school, but still engage. So that’s the left side of the brain, but still engage in, you know, to bring those two halves together.

Chloe: [00:24:40] So my path’s a lot different. So I’m very new to this industry. I actually pounded the pavement as an actress for quite a long time. I graduated in 2011 from San Francisco State and was working while, like, doing community theater and professional regional theater in the Bay Area up until, gosh, 2 years ago. So basically I viewed my day job in San Francisco as a way to support my theater habit. So I did everything from— I worked at Yelp in sales, which was really interesting because I went, whoa, startups are cool, but I don’t want to do sales. This is awful. And that kind of opened the door to working at companies. I was the first virtual assistant at Zirtual, which was this virtual personal assistant company. I was like, my headshot was on all the pictures of like, have Chloe be your personal assistant. So I was doing a lot of tech, like jobs in tech, but I was doing everything but engineering. I was an executive assistant for a long time. I did office management. I did a little bit of everything. I did customer support for a video game company, which was a whole other universe. So basically, I got to a point where I was working as an office manager. I had just met my boyfriend, Ty Smith, who’s an Android developer. And I was working— I happened to see a talk at Google that was all about getting young women interested in programming, but we’re talking like Girls Who Code, Black Girls Who Code. Of course, I Google it immediately because I’m like, where was this when I was a kid? I would have loved to have done this, and I couldn’t find anything. So I just didn’t think about it, and I mentioned it to my boyfriend. We’d been dating maybe 2 months, and I said, I think my ship has sailed, but it would have been so cool to do Girls Who Code when I was younger. He’s like, you can still learn. That’s still a thing. There’s boot camps, which were very new-ish. Boot camps maybe had been on the scene for a year or two, so it was hard to tell if these things were legit or a scam or a pyramid scheme. Scheme. I had no idea. So I basically spent the next, like, couple months just taking classes on Udemy and Udacity and Code School and Treehouse and kind of teaching myself how to do it. And I’d really gotten to a point with my theater career where I kind of crossed out all the things on my bucket list. I got to play all the roles I wanted to do. I worked at, you know, I kind of had this, like, list in my head of, like, do a show in Union Square, do a show at this place in Berkeley, do a show in Redwood City. And I got all of it. And then I went, oh, like, I did it and I’m not satisfied. So I thought, what if I put all of my time and energy that I put towards theater, which was a lot of time and energy, it was all my nights, all my weekends. Also, I was dating this really cute guy that I liked. And the only time I would see him would be nights and weekends. And I did anything else. So like, I started to do yoga for a little bit just to like, And I was like, oh, cool, I learned how to do yoga, like, never had time for this. And then, like, started learning how to code. And at the time, I was in this office management role. And I hated my life because I spent a majority of my day putting LaCroix in a fridge. I’ve had a very interesting relationship with LaCroix because I hated it up until I’ve been an engineer. Now I love it. But I kind of was in this place where I was like, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna learn how to code, I’m gonna, you know, and all my theater friends were like, you’ll be back. Like, we’ll see you in like a month. And I kind of, in this weird way, I mentioned before that Legally Blonde was my dream role, dream show. I kind of channeled my inner Elle Woods because I don’t look like an engineer. I’m very quirky and I’m very blonde. And I would like go on the treadmill and like listen to Legally Blonde the Musical and like hype myself up about like learning JavaScript that day. And then I did Hackbright, which was a 12-week software engineering, all-female boot camp, totally like pushed me like firehose of information, imposter syndrome out of control. Oh my God, what am I doing? Everyone here is super smart. I’m an actress. This is crazy. So it wasn’t until we presented our final projects that I realized like, oh, I have this like weird advantage because nobody here likes to do public speaking. Everybody is terrified of it. And I’m like, this is the best, easiest part. Like, what are you all talking about? So I actually had full intention of going straight into a junior developer position. But once I realized that evangelism was a thing and that I could not only be a technical person, but also do all the aspects of event planning and organizing communities and interacting with people in sort of this network way, that just kind of seemed like a no-brainer. So, it’s funny because I think I kicked myself a lot when I was learning because My boyfriend, for example, has been doing this since he was like 6 or 7. And I’m like, oh my God, like I’m 27. Like, what am I doing? Like, there’s kids who know more. Like, I’m about to teach a Duel Bots thing this weekend. I’m like, these kids are gonna know more than I do. But I actually think that for how much I kicked myself for getting a 4-year theater degree and doing theater my whole life, it’s been such an advantage in so many ways in this industry. And I’m very, I’m in the end very thankful for it, but it took me a long time to get there mentally.

Nell: [00:30:04] Something I just realized in the past year. For the longest time, I thought I was successful in software engineering despite my theatre background. But in actuality, I’m successful in engineering in this highly technical field because of that theatre background.

Trevor: Absolutely. So why don’t we expand on that a little bit more? So what elements have we all brought forward? From being in the theater world to our everyday lives? ’Cause I think, no, that’s a super great point. Like, I know that I also have done better in this career because I have experience doing public speaking. I’m not afraid to get on stage. I’m not afraid to look silly, that kind of stuff.

Nathan: Yeah, I think that that idea of public speaking, of course, is something that’s super powerful. The idea of sometimes just making an ass of yourself. I definitely have done that on a number of occasions. I think that all of that is really important. I also think that one of the things that you learn in the theater is that it takes, like, it takes everyone to come together and put on a production. And I think that relates so well to, specifically to DevOps, where it’s not just the developers, it’s not just the operators, it’s not just the people who came up with the ideas. We all have to work together and play off of one another’s strengths and weaknesses. To put on a performance that’s worthy of the audience that’s in front of us. And that audience in front of us might be our customers. It might be, you know, if we’re working in the federal space or in the public sector, it might be our constituents. But whomever that is, like, keeping our eye and our thoughts on what is that experience like, I think that that is so beneficial. Yeah, that’s— I have other things, but I’ll stop. We can talk about that.

Nell: [00:32:01] I’d say one of the biggest ones is I learned very early on in theater that 2 people can have different reactions to the same thing, and neither one is right or wrong because we all react based on our experiences, based on our emotions. And the funny thing is emotional— that really is the foundation of emotional intelligence. Which is quite the buzzword and has been for a while in the business sector, as it should be. But I learned that through creating experiences for people and trying— learning to evoke emotions or evoke reactions, understanding people will have different ones for different reasons while not directly manipulating them.

Trevor: Yep. That’s something that took me a long time. Like, there’s a lot of stuff that I, that I took as like innate ability. When really it was the things that I had learned as being involved in theater about how to kind of analyze who’s in front of me and realize that that kind of person may not react well to this kind of a joke. Like, this kind of audience is going to respond better to focusing in these areas, right? But that’s really helped in, A, you know, when I was doing more consulting work, and B, like, now that I’m doing stuff in a partnership capacity, understanding which things make what partners excited about what conversations, you know, and it’s going to get them to drive forward.

Chloe: [00:33:29] And I think outside of like the obvious public speaking, because obviously that’s, that’s something that, that comes from theater. What was the biggest shock for me coming from a performing arts background into theater was how boring some content and events can be like. Specifically meetups and specifically, like, tutorials. So something that I’ve really made sure that I do with every decision that I make at Sentry, be it, like, you know, a tutorial of a feature that we have, but specifically our meetup, our monthly meetup that we have, is I was so tired of going and having cold pizza and having some guy go on stage who did not want to be talking, talk about a product and the demo going wrong. And it was just from an audience member standpoint, I’m like, oh my God, like, we’ve all been coding for like 8 to 10 hours. The last thing we want to go see is this. So I’ve made a really big effort with our meetup to like make it entertaining. We do PowerPoint karaoke before each one. We have like musical guests. It’s all camp-themed. There’s Pop-Tarts, there’s s’mores. Because to me, like, gathering people together and bringing a community together, you want— like, you can go to a meetup any night of the week. Like, literally, if you don’t want to pay for food, like, just go to a meetup every night in Mountain View in San Francisco, and you will be fed, and you’ll probably learn a little bit about technology if you don’t fall asleep. But that’s been probably the biggest thing for me, and the biggest, like, whoa kind of moment for me was how little that kind of creative market is tapped for not just events like conferences. I found that, like, the community-based events like DevOps Days certain user conferences around certain technologies or communities that are very passionate are so different than, say, the monthly in the cloud, we try to, we try kind of event. That’s probably been the biggest thing that I’ve tried to bring in is just like developers are people too. They like to laugh, they like to be engaged with. Some people are going to stay in the back and introvert, and that’s totally fine. I do that too. But at the end of the day, people are not only going to want to come back, to, but look forward to a meetup that’s enjoyable.

Trevor: [00:35:46] That’s a super great point. And that makes me think of the, like, the thing we tell each other often about, like, when you’re writing a presentation, write a presentation that you would want to be a viewer of. And that’s something like I’ve always kind of tried working some of my quirkiness into my presentations as well, but maybe I haven’t embraced it as much as I could. And that makes me think I should do more of that.

Chloe: I’m extremely lucky that I have a manager that when I say, hey, I’m going to be expensing some Star Wars props in the next expense report, that he’s like, okay, cool. Because he knows that, like, you know, we’re creating content that people are gonna go like, oh, Sentry has some content on that. Also, it’s Star Wars themed. Like, oh yeah, I’m gonna watch that.

Nell: So another big lesson I took was learning how to handle criticism. There was an article that went around, I’ll try and find it to put it in the show notes, saying that one of the advantages of having engineers who come from an arts background is if you come from an arts background, whether it’s performing, visual, you have received criticism. If you have any sort of competent teachers, you have received criticism and you have to learn how to take that and incorporate it into your work. But recently I’ve been learning how to take that a step further was I have a speaking coach, Anna, from— what’s that? Message Glue? Is that the name of their company? Yeah. Who’s fantastic. I’ll put a link to her site in the show notes. Knowing what criticism is valid and what’s not. Because one of the things I told her was, you know, I speak at a lot of events. The reaction is almost always very, very positive. But occasionally there’ll be a couple of people in the audience who just want to tear me apart. And it’s not about the content. It’s not even about me. It’s them showing, trying, you know, going on an ego trip, basically. But what she told me was, because I said people have told me I just need to build my confidence, I feel like I already have. I need to overcome imposter syndrome. I know I belong there. And the advice she gave me was, you’re at a point in your career where it’s about learning to live with the fact that some people will just be awful to you when it comes to performing or when it comes to your engineering work or whatever, and learning how to understand there’s no value in it. And it’s always— I mean, it’s always going to hurt no matter how tough your skin is, but understanding there’s no value in that and that doesn’t have to stop you.

Trevor: [00:38:13] Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that’s— that makes me think of the first time I had to deal with that was when I was doing the community theater up in New Hampshire. There was the, the local theater reporter hated our theater, and no matter what it was, she would write a scathing review about it. And I remember there was that when I did The Fantasticks, actually, it was, it was like this whole story set of issues where like they changed the show and then our like our leading actress left 2 weeks before we went up and another one of my friends took the role and like learned it in 2 weeks and totally crushed it. But she had never performed at this theater before. So she didn’t realize that this person hated the theater. She was bawling when she got the review back that said that she was just, she was terrible. She should never be doing theater. And this, like this, I mean, now she’s a woman, but like, She, you know, she was performing in operas at all the different local places. Like, she was crushing it. But this, like, this one review from this person who just had it out for the theater, like, just destroyed her. And it was, like, so depressing. And, like, but yeah, that’s, like, you have— that was one of the first times where I had to realize, like, oh yeah, maybe, maybe not everybody’s opinion is actually valid. There’s, like, there are caveats to opinions, and some people are just, you know, they’re not gonna give you value.

Nathan: [00:39:37] Yeah, and imagine, like, that’s enough to cause that person to no longer want to do that thing that they love. And so, if you think about that from a technology perspective, look, things break all the time. So, how do we handle those failures when they happen, and who do we go after to assess the blame on those, right? We could take an engineer who is, you know, is a very good engineer or has the potential to become a great engineer and just The wrong sort of feedback at the right time can just destroy that career and can shut that down. And I think that that, like, that’s— I think we all need to just reflect on the power that our words have on other human beings, intentional or not. Like, that could have some really, really tragic consequences for that person.

Trevor: Totally. And like, it can be something like— I have experience where I feel guilt that I may have done that to somebody. You know, I, when I was like, it’s my first job out of college and another developer didn’t know what the BIOS options were in the system. And for whatever reason, I was like, why don’t you know what the BIOS are? And like, I wasn’t trying to be mean or anything. I was just surprised. But like, and I know that wasn’t the only reason why they stopped being a developer, but I feel like that was my contribution to them choosing a different path in the future. And it wasn’t much longer after that that they chose a different path. So like, yeah, you got to be aware of what you’re saying and who you’re saying it to and realize that the thing that you— like, your view of the world is different than anybody else’s view of the world, and you can’t make assumptions about how other people see it.

Nathan: [00:41:24] So I think another thing, Trevor, from your story was that your lead actress, she left. 2 weeks before the show or whatever. And so someone, another actor, had to come in and pick up that part. And I think that, that, you know, my own experience with that was I was running the light board on a show and on press night I was running through the, just the light cues to make sure all the lights are working, right? You bring up one light at a time, you have an electrician that says, yes, that one is on, or what have you. And at the end of that, I went to do something with the disc, but what I ended up doing was I saved the turn one light on, turn it off, turn the next light on, turn it off. I saved that over all of the cues for the show. So I wiped out all of the data for the show about an hour before curtain on press night. And so that, you know, I learned a lot about, you know, data safety and data recovery at that moment. But also what I learned was you have to have that grace under pressure or grace under fire, if you will, because things are going to break. And in the moment, it’s time to move forward and we have to resolve these things.

Trevor: [00:42:36] Absolutely. That’s one of the ethos of the stage. The show must go on.

Nathan: Exactly right.

Trevor: And that is definitely something that’s been a part of my career. I don’t know, has that been part of everybody else’s career as well?

Nell: Very much so. I remember I was TAing a stage combat class, and another lesson I learned was passion within the bounds of safety. And what I mean by that is, if I’m performing a fight on stage, yes, as an actor, you’re supposed to appear passionate and such. But I have encountered actors who get so passionate and so into the moment that they lose control. And that’s when you stop it and say, no, this person is not safe for me to do this, you know, very intricate fight scene with because someone is probably going to get hurt. And I think in technology, we really worship the idea of very passionate people, but we don’t realize some of those people are tearing apart the world of everyone around them. And it’s really— I mean, no matter how good someone might be technically, if they cannot operate within the bounds of emotional safety, let alone physical safety, then that’s not an effective person to have in your organization, whether it’s in your cast or in your technical group.

Trevor: [00:43:58] Absolutely. Those folks can kind of strain the relationship among everybody else too. You know, I’ve worked with folks who, they’re those very passionate people who can’t help but do the work. I’ll talk to them and they’ll be doing really— they are burned out squared. And they’re just like, I can’t stop because everybody expects me to do these things, not realizing that those expectations have been defined by their own actions and behaviors. And there’s nobody actually expecting that of them except themselves. So what other things have we brought forward from the theatre into our everyday lives as non-theater people.

Nell: Chloe, I’d love to hear more from you.

Chloe: Well, I think when I really think about the biggest difference between coming from the theater world and going into kind of the world of engineering and technology, well, there’s 2 really big differences. The one being theater is so competitive and it’s mostly women, so it’s the exact opposite of software engineering. We have like this huge amount of jobs and not enough people to fill them, and a lot of dudes, not a lot of women. I always make the joke of like, hey, if you’re like a guy who can somewhat believably play straight and carry a tune and you’re doing tech, like musical theater is wide open. And I say the same to my actress friends, like, hey, want to do tech? Like, we’ve got jobs. I think the biggest thing for me is when I first started kind of exploring this path and thinking about doing this, my boyfriend said, oh, let me introduce you to some women who who’ve also gone through boot camps or some other female software engineers. And my immediate reaction was, oh my God, they don’t wanna talk to me because theater was so competitive. And, you know, if I took another actress out to coffee and picked her brain, it would be very guarded, like, oh, well, you should audition here, but don’t take my parts. And it’s actually just been completely opposite, both male and female, of how helpful and open and wonderful everybody is in the community. I think part of that, I mean, you know, obviously this is more of a career, like I’m actually able to make a living off of doing software engineering, which is great. But I think also when I think about how much time and energy I put towards theater, for how much you put in, so like you can take dance class every day, you can take voice lessons, you can audition, you can move to New York. I know so many people, so many good friends, some who are working on Broadway currently and doing, you know, tryout runs in San Francisco currently, and it’s awesome. But for a majority of them, they’re in New York, they wake up at 4:00 AM every morning, they go to the cattle call, or even here in San Francisco, they work day jobs in customer support and they do theater just how I was doing not too long ago. And I think the biggest— you put your percent into theater and not get anything back. Like, you can be the most talented, beautiful, amazing performer and But if they’re not looking for a 5-foot-2 blonde girl, you’re kind of shit out of luck. And it’s very, very different with software engineering. Like, the amount of time and energy you put in, you get back 100%. And that was sort of the biggest change for me was, oh, I’m gonna work hard and I’m gonna be recognized for it. And I’m gonna be able to, like, move up in my career. And my fate is not based on if I’m taller than the guy I’m auditioning with, or if the costume doesn’t fit me because we’re renting it. And I think the thing that I really try to instill in a lot of, like, women coming from theater into software engineering is this is not a competitive space. Like, sure, like, we’re all trying to get the good jobs and work at the cool companies, but it’s just such a welcoming, warm community. And, you know, you have all those people who don’t work in tech who go, well, what about Uber? My boyfriend works at Uber. Or what about Google? James Damore? And I’m like, these companies are huge and this is just such a tiny piece of that. And those people do exist, but like for the most part— and again, I’m newer to the industry, of course, so maybe I’m like one of those substitute teachers who’s like, everything’s beautiful. But from where I’m sitting, I mean, as a new person in this industry with a non-traditional background, the only like negative kind of energy I’ve gotten whatsoever other than, you know, I do blog about feminist stuff, so So, there are trolls that exist, of course. But, you know, being a bootcamp grad, it was really hard to interview. And I think that was probably the most negativity that I got. It was more like, come back in a year, which is still super nice. So, I think just the warmness and the welcomingness and just the willingness to teach and to share information has been just drastically different than the theater world.

Nell: [00:48:42] Yeah, even though I still think of the software engineering world, in DevOps in particular, as kind of a small world, it’s still not nearly as small and insulated as the theatre world. I mean, you can make a mistake at a tech company and still be— depending on the mistake— but make an honest mistake in a tech company and still be able to get a job at another tech company. In theatre, if you make a mistake in front of certain very influential people, it’s going to be very hard for you to find work unless you switch towns, and in the age of the internet, possibly not even then. So that That, that is nice, being in a slightly bigger world, but there are smaller communities within that world where everyone wants you to succeed.

Trevor: Absolutely. And so with that, let’s, uh, why don’t we start wrapping up here? Um, so I know I have one. I don’t know if everybody else does, but is it— do any of you have a line that’s etched into your memory from a role you’ve done in the past? Mine was from the Fantas— or not from the Fantastics. I’ve been talking about the Fantastic It’s from The Sound of Music when I played Friedrich von Trapp, and it’s when I stepped forward and stepped back in the marching style and said, I’m Friedrich, I’m 14, and I’m a boy.

Chloe: [00:49:57] Always Sound of Music, always a solid reference. I think for me, it wasn’t a role that I played, but it was a song that I sang in the car and in my bedroom many times from Into the Woods, and it’s a quote from Cinderella. So Stephen Sondheim, really, that says, how do you know what you want till you get what you want and you see if you like it? And that’s kind of like how I’ve felt about a lot of things in my life. Like, I don’t know if I’m gonna like engineering. I’m gonna try this thing and see if I like it. And just kind of this idea of you can have a picture in your brain of like how something is gonna go and how wonderful it’s gonna be, and it could totally turn out that your dream is something completely different.

Trevor: Did you ever get to go to the festival?

Chloe: I feel like I got to go to the Twitter holiday party once. It felt like a festival.

Trevor: Into the Woods is full of like perfect anecdotes about life.

Nell: One that comes to mind, which I didn’t expect to be the first one that came to my head, but from The Arabian Nights, Sympathy was at the end of the scene after she defeats all the various various knowledgeable men in the king’s court, the king asks her to marry him and she says no. And the line she says is, kings don’t need sympathy. She must lie with those less fortunate. So what I interpreted that as was she was being offered, you know, to be a queen of Arabia at that point. And but she knew that her life’s work would not be fulfilled by being in that very insulated area. So no matter how appealing it seemed, she knew her life’s work still needed to be out in the real world. And that’s, that’s always spoken to me.

Trevor: [00:51:42] That’s beautiful.

Nathan: All right, mine is going to be super cheesy, um, and it’s not a line that I ever had, but it is something that has just stuck in my head lately. Anytime I hear someone say, uh, the state name of New Jersey, I immediately echo in my head, everything is legal in New Jersey. Um, just because I do. Sometimes I say it out loud and it makes no sense to whomever mentioned the word New Jersey to me.

Chloe: That’s how I feel every time I’m on BART and it goes by Lafayette Station. I’m like, oh, Lafayette, your favorite fighting Frenchman.

Nell: I don’t know if I can say that without getting in copyright trouble, so edit it out.

Trevor: But anyway, I’m sure it’s— well, fair use, right? Anything less than 30 seconds and we can call it derivative, whatever. We’ll be fine. Yeah, there’s— I can’t tell you how many times I get like a reference that pops into my head. We’ve been playing Dominion over lunch, some of us in the Central Time Zone at Chef, and I keep getting War Is a Science stuck in my head from Pippin.

Chloe: [00:52:53] Am I the only person in the world who never did Pippin? I feel like everyone I know did Pippin but me.

Trevor: The first act is a ton of fun. The rest of the show I don’t care super much about. So do we all— do we miss theater? I know there’s always gonna be a part of me that misses theater, and I get my fix by doing the podcast, by doing karaoke, and by speaking at conferences and things.

Nell: I miss it pretty horribly sometimes. It comes in waves. Technical speaking, things like that help fulfill that part of my soul. But as much as I love programming, I love the tech industry and working with people, if I could make— this might be a confession moment— but if I can make a living to support myself and support my wife and the rest of my family through theater, I would do it in a heartbeat. That doesn’t mean I don’t like the work that I do. I very, very much do. But yeah, that, that’s always gonna be where my heart is, I think.

Chloe: [00:53:56] I think as someone who’s left it most recently, my answer is no. But I do think that I got to like kind of fulfill a lot of my like theater dreams. Of course, if someone calls me and wants to do Legally Blonde the Musical, I am available and I will do that. I think there’s certain shows definitely that are still on my list. And that I would still love to do, but when I think about the amount of time, like even in the last year or two, I’ve actually, the best advice I can give to people to be successful in theater is to leave theater because that’s when I got all the opportunities I ever wanted and people called me and said, what part do you want to play in this? And I was like, where were you like for the last, I don’t know, 6 years? But I don’t, like I thought it would be a lot harder to go and see theater ’cause I still do go and support a lot of friends, I miss using and subscriber now at The Current. And I don’t yearn as much as I thought I would be like, oh, I just long for the stage. But maybe ask me in a couple of years and I might be singing a different tune.

Nathan: [00:54:59] And I definitely have nostalgia for my days in the theater. And I also feel like I get to do a lot of acting, do a lot of technical work, you know, through organizing conferences and so forth that, you know, that it feeds that bug a little bit. But yeah, I definitely miss it. There are parts, you know, that are very similar now in my role, and there are parts that are very different. One of the things that I probably miss the most is when I give a presentation, when I give a talk at a conference, it’s usually me giving a talk at a conference, and there aren’t other people on the stage to interact with. You don’t get to play off of one another. I definitely miss that part of the performance. It’s, you know, here’s a monologue where the other player in this monologue or dialogue is the audience, which is, of course, a very important part, but I miss having other actors on stage with me.

Trevor: [00:56:04] That’s funny. I totally— I have felt that from you when you’ve been on stage before. And like, I felt it, I felt it last year at ChefConf a little bit, but it felt like you got to get a little bit of that. That’s why I had so much fun. I got to emcee with one of our other coworkers at Chef, the internal conference at Chef, and we got to play off each other and it was so much fun and I had such a great time. And I like, yes, that like, it’s the, it’s the playing with others that’s, that’s, that’s hard to get a fix from in the conference world.

Chloe: When I just took a step back and kind of thought to myself, okay, what are the things that I like about theater and what is it that I’m not enjoying anymore? Kind of like wrote out this list and I walked away from it going, oh, I really love wigs and costumes and I really love singing. And so from that I pulled apart, oh, I should just be cosplaying and like going to Martoonies on weekends or karaoke to fulfill that. Like, I, I can just like set my own truths on this.

Nell: [00:57:06] Yes, you mentioned the actors playing off each other. Uh, for anyone who’s interested in what we mean by that, I always used to, uh, recommend to acting students watching the movie Notes on a Scandal with Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett, both of whom are brilliant, you know, among the best actresses in the world by themselves. But when you watch the way they play off each other and how the emotion— emotional intensity, you know, rises and rises and rises, I mean, there’s just something absolutely magical about 2 people, 2 people who have good chemistry, who know each other, who, who know how to evoke the best in each other, to see them do that live.

Trevor: Awesome. We’ll have to put that into the show notes. And with that, let’s move on to the community and event stuff. So hey, we all tend to do some speaking type things or be at conferences at least. Where are y’all gonna be in the next you know, month or two?

Chloe: Um, well, I’m taking a little break from doing conference travel for a while, but every month I host Sentry Scouts in San Francisco. We have rotating topics every month. In 3 days, which I’m not sure when this podcast is going live, or on Wednesday I should say, we’re doing our security-themed one, then we’re doing an arts and technology one. So I may bug y’all for some opinions on that. I’m kind of highlighting how people are using the arts in their different jobs. And that can be anything from visual arts— we’re having a really amazing speaker named Caitlin Hova who has synesthesia and plays the violin and built a 3D-printed violin that shows the colors that she sees. It’s absolutely incredible. But we also do very technical topics. In the past, we’ve done DevOps and UX and open source. So definitely find us on Meetup, just Sentry Scout. Um, and I’m not really doing a whole lot of conferences for a while, but I am going to RuPaul’s DragCon. So if you’re there, I will be there, most likely dressed in cosplay. So, um, check out DragCon in LA.

Trevor: [00:59:07] That’s super awesome.

Nell: Oh, I wish I could go to that. Uh, I, I’ve done drag in my past and it’s so much fun, and someday I might reveal the pictures of that, but we’ll see. Uh, for me, uh, coming up I’ll be going to ChefConf, which is May 22nd through 25th in the beautiful city of Chicago. I will be doing, along with regular conference stuff, be doing a demonstration of service discovery in Habitat. So if you’re interested in that, you should definitely check it out. Nathan and I are also talking about doing a live Food Fight show, which would be a lot of fun if we can figure out how to make that happen. And then in June, June 6th through 7th, I will be at DevOps Days DC and just found out this morning that I’m going to be speaking there. Along with theater and technology, another big interest of mine has always been politics. And the talk I’m giving is DevOps and Politics, and it’s about my experiences working on the Approve Referendum 74 campaign in Washington State and the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign last year. And not only the technology parts in it, but learning to take a loss and build on it. So it’s probably my favorite talk that I’ve done, and I’m really looking forward to sharing that with the DC audience.

Trevor: [01:00:30] I’m jealous of the DC audience.

Nathan: I mean, tickets are still on sale. You can always come to DC and hang out with us. It’ll be awesome.

Trevor: This is true.

Nathan: For me, I’ll be at the London Infrastructure as Code inaugural meeting, but that’s Wednesday of this week. If you’re listening to the podcast, you missed the inaugural meeting, but I’m sure they’ll have others. I’m not speaking there, I’m just attending because that’ll be fun. I’ll definitely be at ChefConf, and I’m helping organize DevOps Days DC, so I’ll be there along with Nel. Another one that I’m excited about is Velocity in San Jose, which is coming up in the middle of June, like the 11th, the week of the 11th or something. But there I’m offering 2 workshops, one on Habitat and one on Inspect. So one on how do you build, manage, and deploy applications, any application anywhere, that’s Habitat, and then one on sort of trusting your infrastructure automation and managing your compliance as code, which is a workshop on Inspect. So you should definitely come to those.

Trevor: [01:01:42] I’m actually going to be somewhere for once in a while. I’m going to be at Microsoft Build, May 7th through 9th, and I will also, as with Nathan and Nell, be at ChefConf, May 22nd through 25th. As for CFPs, there’s always CFPs on DevOps Days, so go to devopsdays.org/cfp. To check out the open CFPs for different DevOps Day events. Discount codes: ADO2018 will get you 20% off lots of DevOps Days events, 10% off of ChefConf, and 5% off GopherCon. And MongoDB World, if you use code JGORDON, you get 25% off. If you have an upcoming conference you would like to see promoted on ADO, you can fill out this handy form at arresteddevops.com/conferences. Conf. C-O-N-F. So we always talk about some things that we’ve, we’ve been up to, we found interesting lately. So Chloe, what have you been up to lately or been checking out?

Chloe: [01:02:45] Well, I just had some very long flights to and from Italy where I binge-watched Search Party. It’s an amazing series that I had heard a lot of my nerdy comedy podcasts mention, and I’m really glad that I watched it. It has Ali Shawkat from Arrested Development. She plays Maybe, and some really awesome comedians and actors in there. And it’s a mystery and a thriller, but also a comedy and extremely relevant. And I would, I would very highly recommend watching it. I just finished season 1 and it’s excellent. I also just watched my very good friend Eric Butler’s talk. It’s an older talk, but it’s from DEF CON, I think a couple years ago. And it’s all about how he and a bunch of other people put together a conference that was kind of in the middle of nowhere. It was in this sort of camp area, and they basically created their own cell phone service and SIM cards and how they did that, and they open-sourced the whole thing. And it’s an incredible talk, and I highly recommend watching it and listening to it. It’s very, very cool. And then for theater nerds, if you’re not listening to Off Book podcast, you need to, especially if you like musicals. It’s an improvised musical theater podcast with a lot lot of guest comedians on it, and it’s probably been one of my favorite things that I literally laugh out loud while I’m on my bike to work too. So definitely check that out.

Trevor: [01:04:10] Awesome. Nathan, how about you?

Nathan: Sure. So I have 3 picks or 3, sorry, checkouts tonight. So the first one, a little insight into me. Sometimes when I travel, I have a bad time sleeping. It may or may not be caused by the fact that I decide now would be a good time to watch a new show on Netflix. So yesterday, that show for me was Lost in Space. I’m now, you know, in the past 24 hours, I think I’ve watched 6 episodes. So I’m powering my way right through Lost in Space. It’s been really, really good. Not good for my sleep habits, but whatever. It’s a good show. You should totally check that out. My second one is a meeting format called the World Cafe. So I’m at this conference right now in Berlin called delivery of things. And one of the, one of the pieces that they use there is a meeting format called World Cafe. It’s kind of like open spaces in that the agenda is somewhat emergent based on who shows up, but it has slightly more structure to it. It’s really framed around conversations around questions that matter in service of work or in service of real work. So it does kind of help focus in the conversation relative to what you might have in an open space. I also kind of think of it as open space for the enterprise because open spaces are too hippie-dippy, like too, we have no idea what we’re going to talk about, but it’s going to be awesome. Whereas the World Cafe, you do have a little bit more structure, and so it’s a little bit easier to convince people to sort of step out of their comfort zone maybe and have that conversation. And then my last checkout is, you know, I was thinking about my time in the theater. And when you’re, when you’re in the theater and when you know people in the theater, it’s very rare that you pay list price to go see a show. And so I thought it would be good to remind our listeners that there is no reason, no reason you should ever pay list price for a conference. You know someone that can help you get into that tech conference that you want to go to, and there’s no reason to pay list price for for it. So just use your network, find the discount codes, they are out there.

Nell: [01:06:23] All right, I’ll go next. Uh, first one, this is a recent discovery of mine, the musical Dear Evan Hansen, which I believe won the Tony for Best Musical last year. I just started listening to the soundtrack after finding a video of a mashup between one of the songs from Dear Evan Hansen and one of the songs from Hamilton. And, uh, I was a very lonely teenager, but also someone who had a lot of hope that I could connect with people, that there would be something better. And that’s exactly what happens in the musical. So it very much speaks to that yearning for connection in all of us. So I highly, highly recommend it. And I’m really looking forward to seeing it when it comes to Seattle or if I’m out in New York for some reason. The other one is a particular episode of Black Mirror. Now, I want to say first, I think it was either the first or second episodes of Black Mirror, and this is not my pick, but someone showed me the White Bear episode, which scared the hell out of me. So I swore off Black Mirror until someone told me you have to see the San Junipero episode. Trust me, it’s not going to leave you in a bad emotional space. I, I mentioned I used to be involved in sound design, and besides being an extremely moving story and very uplifting, which is rare for a Black Mirror, uh, it showcases how key songs, key pieces of music can take the plot and take it up to new And if you watch it, you’ll see why I now always burst into happy tears whenever I hear the song Heaven Is a Place on Earth.

Chloe: [01:07:58] So fun fact, you can’t see it here, but we have art in our home by this really cool comic book artist that does all the different Black Mirror episodes, and we have the San Junipero one in our apartment.

Nathan: That’s awesome.

Chloe: I totally agree, it’s an amazing episode.

Trevor: Cool. So for me, I’ve been watching— I also watched Lost in Space and will also say it was fantastic. And you should watch it. And if you have a Google Home, you should tell Google to play the Lost in Space game with you. It’s fun. It’s short, and— but it’s got all the actual actors and stuff in it. It’s fun. But I’ve been watching Barry on HBO, which is actually pretty timely for this episode because Barry is a hitman who’s decided that he doesn’t want to be a hitman anymore. He wants to be an actor. And so the 2 worlds, kind of polar opposites, it’s It’s super funny.

Chloe: It’s a great show. And someone sent me a picture on the New York subway. They have ads for Henry— is it Henry Winkler, The Fonz? He plays an acting teacher on it. And they have ads on the New York subway for his acting class. But it’s just like, it’s like, go to this website, like, take acting classes from me. They’re doing some really, really cool stuff with that. And I’ve loved The Fonz.

Trevor: [01:09:13] That’s awesome. The other one, since you mentioned the soundtrack, made me think of— it’s not a musical, but it is a rock opera. The Hazards of Love by the Decemberists is a fantastic listening album experience, and I would highly recommend it. Other than that, for technical things, I’ve been, I’ve been decrypting a new API while it’s being written. And so I’m reminded of how wonderful and invaluable JSON Viewer and Postman are in doing such things and working against an API that is undergoing development.

Nell: That’s not the Habitat API, is it?

Trevor: No, it’s, it’s the other one. Come to ChefConf, learn more.

Nell: You’ll see.

Trevor: Anyway, those are my checkouts for the day. So thank you, Nell, Chloe, Nathan. Thank you all so much for joining today.

Nell: [01:10:18] Thanks for having us. I’ve done a lot of podcasts and this has been by far my favorite one that I’ve done.

Trevor: Well, thank you. So for those who are listening, if you want to head over to arresteddevops.com/podcast, theater nerds for this episode’s show notes. And also, our site has a newsletter. We also have a Patreon which has all the Arrested DevOps stuff you could ever want. Visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes Store if you want to help other people find this podcast. I’m Trevor, @trevorghess. We’re Arrested DevOps, and remember, there’s always DevOps. In the banana stand.