March 15, 2022 • 60 mins
This week we are joined by Matty Stratton, Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi and the global chair of DevOpsDays! Join us as we chat about tech, life, and everything in between!
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Episode Transcript
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Brandon Minnick (02:00):
Hello, and welcome back everybody to eight
bits, the show about the peoplebehind the Tech where we
interview them to learn abouttheir journey and how they got
into tech. I'm your host,Brandon Minnick. And with me as
always is the amazing PJ Metz.
PJ, how's your week?
Pj Metz (02:19):
My weeks gone? Great.
Now that I'm here, I mean, it'snot like this is the only bright
spot the dark week of work.
That's not what's happening.
Actually. No, it's been goingwell, I I'm doing very well. And
I'm excited to be here today. Ithink it's gonna be a good show.
I jelly. Yeah.
Brandon Minnick (02:40):
I'm excited to also excited because I am going
on vacation this weekend. It's aholiday weekend here in the US.
So we're gonna go to the beachand just relax.
Pj Metz (02:54):
It is a holiday. It's a three day weekend this weekend.
Brandon Minnick (02:58):
Monday is Presidents Day.
Pj Metz (03:01):
Next Friday, Family Day forget lab. So I've got Monday,
next Friday off. What was itlike to get like does a cool
thing called friends and familyday they started that during the
pandemic during the pandemic,they were like, Hey, are fully
remote workforce is like, crazyproductivity right now. And they
looked at their workforce.
They're like, Guys, what are youthere? Like, well, we're just
(03:22):
home and we're just working.
It's like, okay, stop. Everyonehas to take at least one day off
a month. And they createdfriends and family day.
Brandon Minnick (03:32):
Such a great idea. Because yeah, truly at at
companies, especially one set tounlimited vacation. And for
those on the audio podcast, Idid that in air quotes, because
it's not really unlimited.
There's always like, like, well,you're after three weeks of
vacation, people will startasking questions. But yeah. It's
it's always tough for folks tostep away break away. I mean, I
(03:55):
know, even though we'll be atthe beach, also be checking
emails and looking at stuff. Iwon't be responding to things or
necessarily doing anything butstay in the loop. And yep,
that's not me. That's shit, but
Pj Metz (04:17):
I'll probably have like Slack open and like maybe like
my, my to do list on GitLab upand just to see what's on there.
And I'll consider doing somework on so I like what I'm
doing. Like I'm buildingcontent. I'm making, you know,
videos and presentations andstuff for students. So like, I
like doing that stuff. I canonly read so much from my new
(04:37):
ereader that I just got so Ineed a break.
Brandon Minnick (04:41):
That's yeah, sorry. This part for me is Yeah,
I love what I do. And a lot ofthe job I'm in now is stuff that
I used to do in my free timeanyways, so a lot of it still
doesn't feel like work.
Pj Metz (04:55):
Right? Yeah, they say do you love what you do? then
you can teach a man to fish yep,I think that's the way normally
if this were in front of a liveaudience there would have been
uproarious laughter there, butall I have are audio clips, so
we'll just go with this instead.
Terrible All rightthis is a quality podcast,
(05:27):
y'all.
Brandon Minnick (05:30):
That's right.
So uh, BJ Devaney announcementscoming up, I know I'm, I believe
in for vacation. So I'm kind of,I've got one foot out the door,
I don't have anything queued up,actually, for the rest of the
month. I was supposed to speakat a conference in Las Vegas,
about two weeks, but gotcancelled because of COVID. So
(05:51):
stay at home.
Pj Metz (05:58):
I've got, we've got actually it finally was just
confirmed. I'm going to be inRhode Island at the beginning of
March for a computer scienceeducation conference. And we're
making a little, a little getlab photo booth for people to
show up and take a picture withour little DevOps school bus
because we're cute. But I'mexcited to be going to a
(06:18):
conference with my boss thissemester. And it's funny because
like, business thinks inquarters, but schools thinking
semesters, and so this semester,because I'm in education, I'm
looking to actually be oncampus, at least to university.
So that's something I'm startingto put together, it's going to
be kind of cool to show up andteach some students how to make
(06:38):
either a twitter bot or adiscord bot or something so they
can see how they can use GitLabfor their work and their play.
You know, making Twitter bots isjust fun, pure fun. So love it.
Brandon Minnick (06:50):
I mean, I don't think it was around when I was
in college, but it didn't reallydidn't teach us anything about
source control. Think back thenit was SVN. Which we don't have
to talk about that.
Pj Metz (07:06):
Well, listen, today's show is a great one. And it's a
guest that I was personally veryexcited to have on we got to
stream previously myself andthis guest on I believe that
pulumi twitch channel where Iwas said, I'm learning Python.
And our guests said, Well, youshould come on and show some
(07:26):
Python and build a twitter botlive and I was like, Oh, I'm not
there yet. But we did it anywayand we did. We basically
crowdsource the whole thing. Andimmediately people in the chat
started pulling merge requestson the file to fix some
problems. But I'd love tointroduce welcome to the stream
everybody. Matty Stretton. Hey.
Oh, look at all the soundeffects. I have a soundboard
(07:52):
that I never
Brandon Minnick (07:54):
used. Does it have lasers?
Matty Stratton (07:57):
No, I Well, it could. I never used it. I mostly
used it for the, you know, sortof rim shot and applause and
grown. You know, lasers are agood move, though. Yeah, I've
got this one. Oh, well, so howdid I get here? This is
(08:20):
apparently I was reading theother days everyone was like, So
where did that come from? Andlike, there's not like everyone
just started referencing it. Butit's not actually from
something. It's likeconceptually, like not that
exact implementation, but like,and I think what everybody would
think in their head is that itwould be saved by the bell.
Because it's like very ZackMorris like timeout. But that's
(08:43):
Yeah, but that's not what timeat the you know, yeah, that's a,
I think, Ferris Bueller. Right.
But that doesn't really happen.
It never stops. He just he justdoes what fourthwall breaks,
right, you know, talks to us.
Oh, you know what, you know whatit makes me think of actually,
you know what, it's, it's funnybecause you're gonna think it's
like an 80s comedy thing. Butyou know what that really is? Is
(09:03):
it's frickin Goodfellas abouthow Goodfellas starts. Oh my
God, it is right. It's it's thefreeze frame. And he's like, as
long as I could remember I'vealways wanted but you know, so
it's yeah, like
Brandon Minnick (09:20):
oh, this resolved? Yeah, heard it. Maybe
here. No. Yeah, it's been gonnatell us all along. Yes.
Matty Stratton (09:30):
As always has been you did the astronaut me
Right, right. Stretch is reallygood fellows. Always has been
mean for me, Brendan. Go makeit. Work to do. Maddie. Uh, tell
us who you are. What you do. Yougot you got the screen. It's
yours. Now tell us all about Oh,geez. All about myself. Okay,
(09:54):
well, we'll do this a little bitat a time. So currently, um, so
my name is Mandy. threatenedlike Job wise, because we define
ourselves by our job clearly,I'm a staff developer advocate
at pulumi. We do infrastructureas software, you can talk about
gloomy stuff at some point, I'vebeen been here almost a year
(10:14):
now, which is nuts. I have, youknow, I know we like to talk
about stories and origin storiesstuff. So I'm gonna, you know,
kind of treat this a littlelightly. But I. So I basically
worked in Technology Operationsfor a couple decades and then
kind of came over to the vendorside. And so when I've been on
the vendor table, I was at chef,for a fair amount of time I've
(10:35):
been at pager duty, I was at RedHat, and I'm at pulumi been part
of the DevOps movement for along time. I always feel like
I'm new to it. But every year,the percentage of time that I've
been part of DevOps is a greaterpercentage. We'll talk a little
bit of that, but the I'm aglobal Chair of DevOps days, I
started and continue to run the,the one that's here in Chicago,
(10:59):
big believer in the DevOpscommunity and the DevOps
movement. And now I'm at pulumi,because I, you know, I really
dig in for code. And all of thiscomes, you know, I've said
before, it's kind of a fun, funthing. Those of you if you're in
developer relations, and you'resingle one of the hardest things
is how do you explain to apotential date what your job is?
(11:19):
It's a Yeah, and the end resultis nobody actually cares that
much about how detailed you areyou don't have to explain it
that well. But I usually sayhey, I worked in ops for 20
years and now they pay me totalk about it so
Brandon Minnick (11:33):
that's perfect.
I still struggle to tell myparents what my job is. Friends
Pj Metz (11:39):
I work in tech and then I'm like, but like I'm not don't
worry like I don't have like apuffy vest or anything right
yeah no Patagonia Yeah, I do howyou can't get those anymore they
had to go to Patagonia won't dobranded shit anymore. Ah that's
what I heard they're like no wedon't we don't really do that.
(12:02):
Dang Alright, well Patagonia ifyou if you want anything branded
you got to do it yourself kidsso get your iron on patches out
like it's
Brandon Minnick (12:10):
North Face if you're listening we are still
looking for sponsorships That'sright we do an eight bits
Northwest north
Pj Metz (12:18):
northwest North by Northwest
Matty Stratton (12:31):
I told you this would be better with a live
audience it is it is theaudience you need to you need to
get a I you need like not DonPardo sounding but like a
recording at the beginning.
That's like eight bits isrecorded in front of a live
studio audience. You know howfar it I can? Yeah, yeah. No,
but we'll save it. That's forthe Patreon. You'll get my There
(12:52):
we go. Yeah.
Brandon Minnick (12:56):
That's right.
So So Maddie, let's let's go wayback because we were chatting a
bit before the show. And youmentioned that theater was a big
part of early life, maybe itstill is. So take us back there
and share with us how did a paththrough the theater get you into
now working with tech andcomputers?
Matty Stratton (13:20):
Yeah. So I definitely sort of nothing ever
goes the way that I expect andthat's, you know, what they say
life is thing that happens whenwe make other plans. So when I
was when I was in school, I youknow, got very involved with
theater, loved acting, lovedirecting, and my initially I
(13:41):
went to college, you know, forfor theater undergrad, and as I
but I also always have lovedtechnology, you know, going all
the way back to when I rememberbeing in second grade. And we
had the apple two's you know, atthe elementary school and this
(14:02):
is, you know, by the way justfor everybody listening like you
don't have to have this like oldschool dork origin story that I
do do well in tech. This is notlike my bonafides I just think
it's funny. Um, so back in thosedays, like I remember in the in
the Chicago Tribune, which waslike our paper, you know, like
(14:22):
in the in the Sunday funnies inthe comics, there was like a
section that was like aboutcomputers, and they would have
like, basic program likeprograms in basic that were
printed in the comics, right? Inthe Sunday comics. So I remember
I would cut them out, bring themto school and you know, type
them in and to do these programsand stuff. And that's sort of
(14:43):
how I you know, I just thoughtthat was fun. My dad always had
Apple computers and stuff and soI kind of would play around with
that and and so I but I wouldsay if you look at like my
senior bio for the theater clubin high school, it said it was
like where do you see yourselfin 10 years? mindset something
like either a successful butmiserable computer programmer or
(15:07):
a unsuccessful but happy actor.
And the reality was it wasneither of those it was a
disgruntled system administratorbecause, you know, at the time
nobody I mean, like nobodynowadays people will be like,
Yeah, I want to be an SRE when Igrew up or whatever, like nobody
wanted to be a sysadmin. Like,back in my day of sysadmin stuff
like, anybody I worked with anops in the 90s, in the early
(15:29):
2000s. Like, their origin storywas always there from the
military, or I was a geologymajor, and I had to get a real
job and whatever, like nobodywent to school to be a sysadmin.
Right. We all just sort ofbecame them.
But anyway, so I went to schoolfor theater, and I ended up
dropping out of college, I endedup dropping out of college
(15:50):
twice. The first time I droppedout was as a theater major, and
I needed to get a job. And Iended up going to work for this.
Like, it was like an appleservice centers, this little
company called Glen EllynComputer Services here in the
Chicago suburbs. I went there.
And it was like, a just to, Iwas fixing computers. But they
(16:10):
also we're an ISP. And this waslike 1995. So I learned HTML,
because it was just like, we hadto sort of know a couple things.
And I got a job as a webmasterat this company called Midwest
computer works, which at thetime, was the biggest competitor
to CW there was a time that ifnobody has ever heard of Midwest
computer works anymore. And thisis when it was all mailorder.
(16:33):
Right. So like, it was a bigdeal to move to online. So like,
I remember, having to learn howto write like a shopping cart in
Perl, you know, and all thisstuff. And this was blah, blah,
blah. I just kept sort ofstumbling my way around. And
let's be 100% Clear. It's a loteasier to stumble around and be
successful in tech when you looklike me. Yeah, I mean, like,
(16:54):
Yeah, but a lot of things. Mycareer has been very
serendipitous, which I think isa lot true for a lot of us if
you know you never know youryour plans, like the junctions.
If you ever played that gameabout how did I get to the PGA
like that record scratch? Okay,how did I get here, and I, I
ended up spending a fair amountof time in the Windows world,
(17:18):
and I never knew windows, likewhen I was growing up, we didn't
have PCs, it was all Apple andstuff I didn't know. And then
when I went to school, we wereusing Unix systems. I didn't
know shit about Windows. Butwhen I was doing Apple work, a
lot of these graphic designcompanies or graphic, you know,
graphic shops, they would thedesigners all use MAC's, but
(17:41):
then they would have this likeWindows NT machine is their rip
station. So Windows NT existedin my world, so I sort of had to
learn it a little bit. And thenI kind of fell into a job at a
system integrator. And they paidfor me to get my MCSC and learn
all that and it just and thenthat became 10 years of a
Windows sysadmin. And God blessme having to manage SharePoint
(18:02):
and stuff, right? Like and itwas all because of one random
thing. And I always lovetracking back to like this
inflection that happens. So Iwouldn't be sitting here.
There's two points what Imentioned in the greenroom time,
I'm going to mention in a secondbecause I think it's fun, but
one that goes way back. So, somuch of my history and why I'm
(18:23):
doing the job that I do why I'mwhere I am, is because I decided
to get involved in theater inhigh school, which was a little
bit of a whim. Now what hadhappened is I joined our speech
team, some schools call itforensics, because my buddy was
like, Hey, I get extra creditand speech class. If I go to
this meeting, will you go withme and I went to the fun. And I,
you know, got assigned. This iswhen I was like a sophomore. I
(18:48):
was doing duet acting was theevent that I got assigned into
right or that I tried out forand they said, Okay, we're gonna
have you do and actually, thescene we did was from the
producers I just remembered,which was the opening scene of
the producers with Bialystok andbloom and I played Leo bloom.
But the guy that I was matchedup with was a senior and he was
very involved in theater. And,you know, after we'd been
(19:10):
practicing and stuff, andsomething came up long story
short about what how were wegoing to practice together over
Christmas break? And there wastheater Fest was happening where
everybody goes down state, it'sa big thing. And my partner said
something about,you know, I couldn't do this
time because of theater fest.
And our coach said, Matt, areyou going to be at theater fest?
(19:30):
And my partner said, why wouldhe be going? And I was like, Oh,
it's on like John bar, right?
And so I decided to try out forthe play and do all that and
that got me into theater andthen that's how I met my first
wife. Like all sorts of stuffhappened when I went down that
and so I'm like, This guy waslike a jackass, but I guess I
got to thank him. Because Iwouldn't have like that I would
(19:53):
have that divergent. There's analternate universe, right?
There's a diverse thing wherethat's not me. And I went and
ended up getting an MBA right? Atheater through spite. Okay, so
the other important part of mycareer has come from spite as
well. Um, so a few years ago, Iwas, you know, I sort of towards
(20:16):
the beginning of DevOps, I wasat the beginning of DevOps days,
the beginning of the days ofDevOps. I was an organization,
and I wanted us to startimplementing it for code. I was
like, let's do this chef thing.
And so I propose that and I hadbeen running the tech ops team,
I'd been moved into an architectrole. And somebody else had sort
(20:38):
of taken over. And he didn'thave a whole lot of respect for
me or my team, as we found out.
And I was like, so I sort of puttogether a proposal. I'm like, I
think we should, you know,investigate, we should implement
chef and let's get going. And,you know, he was like, oh, no,
this will take us a year to getimplemented and 10s of 1000s of
dollars in training, and no, no,no, this is just too much for
your team. So I was like, Allright. So over the course of a
(21:00):
couple of weeks, like in myevenings and weekends, I wrote a
few chef cookbooks to handle notall of our infrastructure, but a
fair amount. And I kind ofturned up with it and was like,
Hey, man, this wasn't me, thisisn't done. But like this is,
you know, this wasn't that hard.
And then like three to fourweeks later, my job was
(21:20):
eliminated. But because of that,I went and got more involved in
the DevOps community went andworked for a consulting company
doing cloud and DevOps. Andagain, if that didn't happen,
you know, so I was said, Ilearned chef out of spite, but
if you know, this person hadn'tlet me go or late like I
(21:41):
wouldn't be I would not besitting here today, talking to
you all. So anyone who'swatching this, I'm sorry that
that happened.
Brandon Minnick (21:49):
Don't spite Mattie cuz yeah, you might
inspire him to solve worldhunger. That's
Pj Metz (21:55):
right. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I know how to build a car
that doesn't. Definitely doesn'tknow how to give me $20,000. How
often Brandon, how often do wetalk about that path? And how
(22:16):
strange that path can be forpeople on this show? It comes up
all the time.
Brandon Minnick (22:20):
It it is. It's super common. And that's one
thing I found is you use setgoals, but keep them flexible.
Because you never really knowwhere you're gonna end up. You
never know what opportunitiesare going to pop up. I mean, if
the pandemic had never happened,I don't think I ever would have
(22:42):
started coding and streamingwith PJ. And here we are 50 Plus
episodes into a podcast.
Pj Metz (22:51):
It's true. And I know especially that like, the only
reason I am involved in techright now is because you said,
You know what I do is kind oflike teaching. You just have to
learn how to code. So I waslike, All right, sure. And the
fact that I even met you eventhough we went to the same
college, we never met at thesame college. I only met you
(23:13):
because I was dating someone whowhen they graduated, moved to
Melbourne, Florida, and you gotone job offer in Melbourne,
Florida after you graduated. Sowe just happen to be in the same
town in the same group offriends. And here I am with
like, amazing things. I thoughtwith tech money behind me. Like,
(23:36):
thanks, fete. It's awesome.
Brandon Minnick (23:39):
Yeah, and I think it also goes to show and
that's kind of the the ethos ofthis, of this show of eight
bits, right is to demonstrateall these various paths to get
into the tech community towhether it's you learn to code
on your own, you get a degree,there's really no one prescribed
(24:00):
path. And, and there's really noone prescribed start date. So
you could be mid career, likeVijay was a high school teacher
for over 10 years, learn to codeand here we are. Whereas my path
was more of the traditionalroute. But you don't have to do
(24:21):
that anymore. Anybody can do it.
You can do it.
Matty Stratton (24:25):
I think it's a really good thing to point out
too is that because we tend tofocus and amplify like the
quirky stories and the nontraditional stories and
everything but like thetraditional story is just as
valid like you don't have tohave a like, super obscure
origin story to be awesome.
Attack. Yeah, I said, I went Igot my degree, I did this thing.
(24:49):
I went and I did an internship.
I just went through thetraditional path and you know
what, you are just as awesomejust the same way that like, as
you know, I referenced beforeI'm like, we all love to tell
the stories about iron, youknow, I you know, interrupts and
having to configure modem boardsand, you know, we all get grumpy
about this stuff. And it's not,it can feel gatekeeping. And I
(25:12):
would never tell someone to notfeel a certain way. But the
reason is because these thingsare just like, kind of funny, or
creative or there it's ofinterest, but it doesn't mean
it's the only right thing.
Right? So, um, and the otherplace where it's funny, I was
think about this, though I waslike, somebody not too long ago.
And we're, I think we're puttingtogether like a talk proposal. I
(25:35):
was like, I feel like nontraditional is the new
traditional, in a way, like,which I think is that I thought
about that. I'm like, I bet thenumbers don't back that up.
Because you know, but because ofwhat we talked about. So here's
my analogy. It's like aDevOpsDays. analogy. So when we
think about one of the coreconcepts of DevOps, we talked
(25:57):
about this idea of comms, itsculture automation, lean
measurement, and sharing. Andyou'll feel like it seems like
we talk about culture way morethan we talk about anything
else. And it's like, does thatmean it's the most important?
And it's like, no, it's just theone that we have to make people
pay attention to, I don't haveto convince engineers to play
with automation tools, they'rejust gonna do that. That's fine.
But are the same thing whereit's like, Why do we always talk
(26:20):
about empathy? Why are we nottalking about them? Like,
because that part you don't haveto be told about? You already
know, right? So like, we we onone hand, so we want to amplify
these non traditional stories.
But it doesn't mean it's morethat we just sort of have to
talk about them more so thatthey're heard, but it's to get
them to be heard as much as thetraditional ones that already
(26:43):
are normalized. But I just,yeah, want it to be fair that
like, you don't have again, youdon't have to have an amazing
exmon worthy origin story.
Attack, right? You can, youknow, and you can just show up
and do your shit and clock outat the end of the day. And
that's here anymore. And that'sawesome to just, you know, yeah.
(27:05):
I think that there's, there's a,I think it's that everyone has
an interesting path, whether youtook the traditional path into
tech or not, like Brandon says,His, his path was traditional,
but he wasn't really doing alot. He was doing some rack and
stack stuff at the company heworked out before, and he was
(27:26):
doing some communication stuff.
But it's still very differentfrom where he ended up. So like,
yeah, traditional in the senseof the right degree. But
sometimes these left turns comeout, like I don't think Brandon
was ever like, and I'm gonna endup in San Francisco, and I'm
definitely gonna be writing andXamarin. And it's gonna happen.
(27:46):
It's, it's the, the nontraditional paths need to be
highlighted and validated. Buttraditional paths, you're valid
too. And your story and your waythat you get here is a good
story. Because the reasons weget into things is very, you
know, it's intensely personal.
As I stumbled through thatsentence, like, that you got
(28:08):
into tech is related to theater,which came to you out of spite,
because a lot of theater isbuilt out of spite like you
don't you don't go to a bunch oflate night Rocky Horror Picture,
show showings without building alittle bit of spice somewhere.
Um, but I think that you'reyou're absolutely right. I think
there's a there's a focus on nontraditional roles, because I
(28:31):
think that historically, it'sbeen excluded. But you said, I
don't know that the data backsit up. I think I just read
recently that something likearound like 42% of working
developers have either gonethrough a boot camp or are self
taught, oh, like, those numbersare shifting and changing. And
the companies are taking notice.
(28:51):
And I do think in what we all doin dev rel more likely to see
non traditional roles to get toDev Rel specifically. I couldn't
get to see that because youbecause it's a non. It's a non
(29:11):
traditional role. That's whatthat's what I started getting
that right. Like, it's notreally part of your pattern. And
it's, it's, this is a wholeother topic that I can and have
ranted about and thebecause I part of why the non
traditional I think, is helpfuland it doesn't even have to be
(29:32):
non traditional in that like noI you know, I said I said on a
webinar last week, it was like,you know, Dev Rel or empathy
engineers, right? And so this iswhere, why interesting and
different backgrounds acrossyour team are really powerful
because there's no one type ofperson of user that You have one
(29:58):
type of consumer, right? So, um,and I think that it, it's not
impossible to have empathy forsomeone if you haven't lived
their life, but it's a loteasier. And I've said this
before, you know, I say I do DevRel uneasy mode. When I do Dev
Rel for ops, because I was inthe shit for 20 years. Like, I
(30:23):
don't have to work hard to haveempathy for people that have a
rough time in OPS, like it'sthere, and 20 years ago was
definitely an absolutebattlefield. But it's
interesting, because there's athing and this is where I'm
going to tread lightly, becauseit's gonna start to sound a
little gatekeeping. And I don'tmean it that way. There are
certain types of Dev Rel that isvery, very hard to do if you
(30:46):
haven't actually done the job.
And I don't mean because youdon't have the technical skill.
And I don't even mean that youcan't own it. There's, this is
this was also the example I'mgoing to give in this. And this
is by the way, that doesn't meanthat all Deborah's, that's true,
because another statement thatMaddie has made many times is
DevRel contains multitudes,everybody does not do the same
(31:10):
thing, or bringing the samestrength. So that's the
important part to remember, itdoesn't mean you can't do DevRel
if you haven't done it, butthere's a style that works,
that's a lot easier to do, justby having it. So I'm going to
bring this back to a salesengineering reference. But it'll
be similar. So when I was atchef, before I was doing dev
rally things in the world, I wasa sales edge, right? And so who
(31:30):
are we selling to? We're sellingto ops people. And so two little
things about that. One was, I,you know, the rep that I work
that I was partnered with allthe time, you know, like, she
said to me, once, she said, youknow, she's a match, like, this
happens all the time, we go intothis room. And she's like, you
know, I see all the ops peopleare sitting back, you can't see
me crossing my arms if you'relistening to the podcast, but
(31:51):
they're sitting back in theirchairs, with their arms crossed,
when we start, and a few minutesin, they all start leaning in
and listening to you. And Isaid, you know why? Because I
made a joke about system D.
Right? I gave the Shibboleththat was like, we're, I've done
this. Yeah, you know, and itdoesn't mean you have to do
that. So where that connectedthough, is we had someone on our
(32:11):
team, who was a awesome salesENTJ. But like, he was younger
and didn't have a lot ofexperience. And it just was he
couldn't like it was nothingagainst him. And actually, now
he's done this, he could do thisamazingly, you know, years
later, but like, he couldn'thave done the job the way that I
(32:31):
did it. And it would have beenunfair to expect that, right?
Because it's like, hey, the wayyou reach them as in a different
way. And the same thing is truewith with like dev rel. So like,
I come from this, like, I'vebeen on the journey. So I can
put, I can talk to you in theway of someone who's been on the
journey, you don't have to havebeen on the journey to
(32:52):
understand someone's journey.
It's just easier if you have soit like so many other ways. I do
things on easy mode, right? I'mdoing Dev Rel on easy mode,
because what I choose to do DevRel for is a lived experience of
mine, you know, you know so butthere's other again, it contains
multitudes. And I think that'sone of the things that we have
(33:15):
to start to learn about this isthat, like, your teams don't
scale horizontally. And I knowthis isn't a DevRel podcast. So
you know, we don't have to go.
That's a whole other thing thatI have thoughts about, but like,
you can't expect everybody onyour team to have the same
thing. We're T shaped or Mshaped, you know, where that
where that comes. And I thinkthat's an overall better thing
(33:35):
for us to understand in ourteams. And that goes back to the
non traditional because of that,it means your your team is more
robust, because you've haddifferent backgrounds. You think
about things differently, youhave a different perspective,
you have a different context. Soit's just funny, I just, it's
stupid Whitney just right. Soremember what I was talking
(33:57):
about? Not I was talking tosomeone about non traditional
being the new traditional IT WASWhitney. So she missed it when I
said that, because I think shejust joined the stream now. So
anyway, shout out to Whitney,who is a great example of, by
the way, if you had Whitney onthe show. Oh, not yet. You need
to write it down.
Brandon Minnick (34:18):
Welcome to the show.
Matty Stratton (34:22):
I make another recommendation for you as well.
Annie Hedgepeth. So I thinkshe's still at hashey Corp. She
has a great story. So I'll,anyway, yeah, always. Yeah, I
love people that have funstories, right? Like both
because it's inspirational, butalso, because it's interesting.
Again, no offense to anybodywho's like I knew, you know,
(34:44):
like, I knew I got a computerscience degree. I went out and
did this. That's great. You'reinteresting for other reasons.
Just not that. So. That'sfantastic. You mentioned DevOps
podcasts that this is not andyou're right. This is not a
DevOps podcast. But I've heardrumors whispered across the
(35:04):
great oceans that you have aDevOps podcast. I do. So this
this has a fun store originstory too. And this is people
are usually tired of hearingstories about this stuff. But
that's what the show is about.
So anyway, so I have a podcastcalled the rest of DevOps. And
here's a little bit of it'sfirst of all, we are to the best
of my knowledge. Someone couldcorrect me the longest running
(35:25):
still active DevOps podcast. Sothere were shows before us about
DevOps, they have pod faded.
That's fine. They had the timethey did the thing they needed
to do. There definitely havebeen shows that have come after
us. That might be more popular.
But we're still we're stillaround. People been counting us
out for years. Wait, how doesthat go? Come on. PJ, you got it
(35:46):
for me like, ah, hold on. Yeah.
This one? Oh, no, not that. Iwas trying to get the rap lyric.
There's a rap lyric. I wantWhitney. I'll get it for me.
Like, oh, wait. Oh, no. Uh, oh,no, I like okay, well, we'll
find it. Okay, what's next, likeconscious rap right now? I'm
(36:08):
sorry. Anyway. So here's sort ofthe story about arrested DevOps.
It's kind of fun, I think. So itstarted with I was gonna write a
blog. And I needed a name. Andmy friend Jess, who doesn't work
in tech at all. She's the onewho coined the name arrested
DevOps, which is amazing. And Iwas like, What am I gonna do
with it? And then I was like,Well, I was like, I want to do a
(36:28):
podcast. And my intent was, sothe way that I learned about
DevOps, the way I learned DevOpsat first was through podcasts,
through listening to DevOpscafe, or the ship show or food
fight. But the problem was,like, none of those shows were
built around the idea that youwere new, nothing against them.
But like, I learned it throughosmosis, right? You know, I'd be
(36:50):
like, I don't know what you'retalking about. But I'm gonna
listen to your shows enough.
Over time, I'm going tounderstand what Continuous
Delivery means or whatever,blah, blah, blah. So I was like,
Alright, I want to do a show.
That is for the person who knowsnothing about DevOps, who like
the joke was always my bossright about DevOps in the in
flight magazine and told me todo it. Because apparently,
there's lots of articles in youknow, horizons magazine about
(37:12):
DevOps, and AI. Now, if you're alistener of the show, you know
that that's not really what ourshow turned into. Because one
thing is you can't control youraudience. We started to have
people that would be listeningto the show, I'm like, why are
you listening to the show, youshould be on the show. And so,
but I reached out to you, Iwanted an accountability
(37:34):
partner, because I'm very goodat starting things, and not very
good at continuing them. Sothere's a guy that I had met at
an Azure meetup here in Chicago,named Trevor and I was like,
hey, and he was more of a, youknow, a coder, a software
engineer, also, quite a bityounger than I am. So different
(37:54):
generation, so to speak. Andwe're like, let's do this show
together. And so we kind ofstarted doing it. And it, yeah,
it just sort of progressed overthe years, we've, you know,
added more hosts and gotten morepeople involved. And, you know,
(38:17):
I remember if you're one of myfavorite podcasts is greater
than code, which I don't know,if you are any of your listeners
are familiar with. And so justto try and who's one of the
hosts of greater than code, Imet her at redeploy a few years
ago. And I was just sort of liketotal fanboy, because like, I
(38:37):
love her talks. I love her ongreater than code. And she said
something to me about like, oh,we should we're having lunch.
And she's like, we should haveyou on greater than code. I'm
like, Oh, my God, right, youknow, when you get to be on when
your favorite shows. And then Iwas sort of, like, you know, I
have a podcast. And, you know, Igot her to come on the show. And
like, right after, she's like, Ihad such a great time. And then
she's like, if you're everlooking for more hosts and
(38:58):
stuff, I'm like, yes, yes. Yes.
So yeah. So so, you know, justto try and is one of our hosts.
And it's like, we just we keepgoing so I, you know, we it's
about every about twice a month.
It's very practitioner oriented,you know, like we
I don't know, and it's I everynow and again, I kind of think
(39:22):
about is it too much do we youknow, but it's, I feel like
we're part of part of thecommunity. And, you know, what
gets me is anytime I guaranteeany time I'm like, I'm done.
It's time for us to be done withthe show. Then you get that like
message on LinkedIn or you getthe Twitter DM, that's like, oh,
(39:45):
I learned this thing and itchanged my job or I mean, we get
that a lot and it's, it's a, itmeans a lot. So also that being
said, As hard as it is for me totake a compliment. I will tell
you if there's anyone who'screated content, who does this
show who does the thing that'shad an impact on you? Tell them,
(40:07):
even if you just tell them alittle bit, because it's, it
means the world. Yeah, andkeeping the people who are
creating content that you enjoy,whether it's a podcast, whether
it's a stream, whether it's ashow, whatever it is, if they're
creating something that youlike, tell them, shout them out,
tag them, like, those littletiny things. If you're, you
(40:28):
know, if you're around in thestream all the time, or if
you're always listening topodcasts, like promote it,
because like, it makes thecreators know that it's that
it's working, it's reachingsomeone, you know, on that note,
I believe, we need to take asecond to take an ad break, one
of our famous advertisers wantsto tell you all about a great
product. I if you're hearing myvoice, that means you've been
(40:53):
listening to or watching eightbits with Brandon and PJ, and
we're here to talk to you aboutyour product. And how it can
help you in your life by to dowhatever your product does. So
if you're an avid listener ofthe show, or you watch us on
(41:13):
Twitch, then you will know thatyour product, your product is
right for you.
Brandon Minnick (41:28):
That's right.
If you have anything you'd liketo promote, feel free to reach
out to us. You can find us atHello at eight bits.tv via
email, you can find us onTwitter at eight bits pod. Let
us know we'd be happy to chatand share your goods with the
world.
Pj Metz (41:48):
That's right.
Fantastic. I get excited everytime that little ad break runs.
Because like I keep noticinglittle things in the video that
I like like most of what I likeis that I can tell I recently
had a haircut and that video somy hair I thought I thought it
was gonna be the opposite, whereyou're gonna say every time you
(42:08):
see a thing you wish you diddifferent, which is more how I
live my life now. 2022 and I'mliving positively dammit. I had
a I had a talk that I gave a lotin mostly in 2019. And it was
funny because you know, you givethe talk a lot. Everyone's like,
okay, but like, again,especially in non virtual, it's
(42:29):
like most people don't go tolike 20 conferences a year. So
most people don't see it all thetime. But some of your friends
on the circuit do and so like solike Aaron aldric had seen that
talk like a ton of times healways liked it always said nice
things. But there's one slidethat had a typo in it. And every
time I'd hit the slide, I wouldgo, Oh shit, I haven't fixed
this typo. And it happenedenough that we were about I
(42:51):
think it was like DevOpsDaysNashville. I was sitting in the
audience next to Aaron and I wasgonna like my talk was gonna be
next. And he goes oh, hey, he'slike, quick. Did you did you fix
a typo? What? Oh, shit. You'reright. Okay, good. Awesome. Oh
my god.
Brandon Minnick (43:09):
So. So Maddie, we were chatting earlier about
how there's different paths toget into tech, and all of them
are absolutely valid. But I'mcurious. If somebody for
somebody who's listening rightnow says like, wow, like, This
guy used to be a teacher. Thisguy used to be in theater, and I
(43:30):
don't really have any of that.
But I still want to get intotech. But I don't have the
degree. Maddie, where do Istart? What advice would you
give him?
Matty Stratton (43:41):
Okay, well, I'm gonna 100% temper this again
with it. I am a sis hat whitedude. So my advice is to be
taken in that my personalexperience is different and is
easier. But that said, I thinkthe if someone's like, Okay, I
(44:05):
don't know how to get into thisthing, like the industry in
general is where it's somethingwhere I don't I don't have a lot
of like, I don't think there'sone wrong way to do it is what I
mean. Like, it's also I guesswhat I'm what I'm getting at is
like, find some way to get yourfoot in, right? Like, even if
you're like, I don't know, if Iwant to be a front end developer
or as SRE or whatever. It'slike, the good news is you don't
(44:29):
need to know that right away.
Right? Like, who's somethingright, you know? And I would
imagine, that's where again,sort of the same thing if
someone's like, Hey, I thinkinfrastructure is really
interesting. There aren't reallya lot of infrastructure boot
camps. But you know what, like acoding boot camp might not be a
bad idea because it could getyou in that place. And one of
the hardest parts I think, Ithink it is hard to break into,
(44:50):
quote, infrastructure, becausethat really interesting
infrastructure challenges happenat a scale that you can't just
sort of teach yourself Right,you know, so you kind of have to
come up in a different way, youknow, like, like do some other
work. But then thankfully,because of the world we live in
now with DevOps and with, youknow, greater areas, like, you
(45:12):
can be a front end developerthat's also interested in
infrastructure and sort of dothat along the way and where
that comes, so it's a little biteasier, I want to say easier,
but there's less of a, of a of arut that you that you go into.
And now you're following it,because you made this decision
early on, you were an enterprisedevelopers. So now you just
(45:33):
start stuck with Java for therest of your life write like, a
horror story. Yeah. Um, I think,yeah, I guess that's the one
thing I just want to be reallycautious because I think there
are people who are betterequipped to give better advice
to under index people than I am.
So the best advice, you know,sort of tongue in cheek is like,
(45:56):
be born a white dude. Right.
That's, that's how I did it.
Right. Um, but that sucks. So,but that doesn't mean you can't,
but this is the only way that Ican tell you how to follow my
experience. Um, I think that thedon't try to do things alone.
(46:18):
That's the other thing too. Ithink if you have when you're
trying to just anything, if youhave not just the countability
partner, but it's just it's alsoit's more fun to learn with
other people. And it doesn'teven mean even if it's informal,
but like if you know, people, ifyou have friends that are like,
I'm kind of interested in likethese study buddies, so to
speak, do co challengestogether, because also, that is
(46:40):
going to, you can't really showthat in a in your resume that
that gave you that skill. Butthat collaborative skill of
getting used to working togetheris powerful. And then that can
lead you into some some stuff. Ithink, learning in the open, I
will tell you this, that'sanother interesting way. And
everyone's not comfortable withit. But I had recommended, you
(47:02):
know, one of the people I'drecommend to be on the show is
Annie Hedgepeth. And Annie, I'mone of the main ways she got
involved in tech was learning inthe open she she has a non
traditional background, shewanted to learn something and
she decided to learn to be open.
And she did such a good job ofbeing that that her. So I'll
tell you what she wanted tolearn in spec, which is a you
(47:23):
know, policy as code testinglanguage. And it wasn't really
well known. There wasn't a lotof Doc. So Annie, as she was
learning going through, shedocumented everything she did in
our blog. And for the longesttime, I just don't know if this
is still true. But for years,the official inspect
documentation basically justlinked to Andy's blog. They're
(47:43):
like, you just did this better.
And then because of that, youknow, so learning in the open is
way easier to do these days thanit ever has been with streaming
with blogging with whatever andyou'll get people that will help
you. And it helps you then youhave something to point to as
well, right. Like, you know, soso maybe that's a fun thing to
(48:04):
do is you know, get some somefriends and be like we're gonna
work through some training likePJ's, that's what PJ was doing
with Python, right? You know, onyour stream. Like, you know,
that's that's one thing. Andyeah, maybe it'll make you learn
that you like doing this kind ofthing. And maybe you'll want to
do, you know, training,education, deverill, stuff like
(48:25):
that, because you're like, thatwas actually more fun than the
thing I built.
Pj Metz (48:29):
Something you said in that response that really struck
me was, you don't have to knowexactly what you're gonna do.
You just have to get started.
And I think someone who's who'sjust deciding they want to do
tech, and they're like, Okay, Ijust learned that there's a
bunch of different jobs, butthey find a job that seems
interesting, based on thedescription, a couple articles
they've read, they're like,Okay, but how do I become blank.
(48:50):
And it's almost like, Well,don't worry about necessarily
how you become blank. If you areover here and you haven't like
started written a Hello Worldyet. Knowing that I've got to
get some basics in here, I'vegot to start learning something,
the path towards blank willstart to open up as you start to
(49:11):
develop just tech skills andstuff like that. And I can't say
enough good things for learningin the open because that's what
I did. When I was learning Csharp, I did it on Twitch. When
I was learning dotnet I did itwith Brandon and Brandon learned
that right alongside me. Hehadn't used a ASP dotnet core
before. And he was like, we'regonna build a website. Well, I
(49:34):
was like, Let's build a website.
He was like, Well, I'm a Xamarindeveloper, but Okay, let's do
this. And we worked on ittogether. And we would just sit
there for you know, about twohours a week working on stuff
and making mistakes and breakingour database and calling errors
that we couldn't fix for threehours and but it was this great
(49:54):
experience of one learning howto collaborate to showing other
people the work you're doingLike you said, it creates a it
creates a record of what you'vedone that can be extremely
useful.
Brandon Minnick (50:07):
Absolutely and, and also love the idea of
essentially announcing andsharing with the world what
you're doing. So what theexample that came to my mind was
I'm I'm currently training forthe Napa Valley marathon, which
is in just a couple of weeksnow, which is kind of
terrifying. But it's, it's justme training on my own. But I've
(50:33):
told so many people that I'mtraining for a marathon, that if
it doesn't happen, I feel likeI've let those people down. And
I'm sure they'll still be proudof me. Either way. But yeah,
like, Sunday, Superbowl Sunday,here in the US, I had to do a 22
(50:53):
mile training run. And I couldbarely sleep that night, because
I was so anxious, nervous, Ididn't want to do it. But that
that was my motivation for goingit was like, I know, I, I've
told people about what my goalsare for this marathon, I want to
try and run it at an eightminute mile pace, which I've
(51:14):
never done before. And if I wantto do that, then I've got to
wake up at 6am on Sunday to gothis 22 mile run. You can almost
essentially inspire yourselfjust by sharing your goals with
your friends, family, on theinternet, wherever, because
(51:36):
everybody's cheering you on, andthey want you to be successful.
Pj Metz (51:39):
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. So we talked about,just get just get involved. And
we talked about that the pathtowards that specific job within
tech isn't necessarily it's,it's important to have your
goals set and have that like,focus on what you want to do.
But there is no like you said,there's no, there's no class for
(52:02):
being like, I mean, there's nolike DevOps class. Really.
There's no degree in DevOps,there's no not yet not in some
places. But also, you may changeyour mind, because as you come
in, you now know more aboutdifferent things. So you you
want to have you want to beginwith the end in mind, but
(52:23):
understand that it can be fluid,right? Like, we sort of, you
know, not to get the thing, butthere's always like, remember,
what was the big thing thateverybody you know, got all you
know, about John Kerry? Oh, he'sa flip flopper. And you're like,
Wait, you mean, they changed, hechanged his mind his mind with
new, new information. So thatcan happen, like be dedicated
and committed to your goal. Butas you learn more things, Mm
(52:45):
hmm. You know, cuz the map isnot the territory, right? You
know, so like, we have anunderstanding, I'll put it this
way. It's not just about peoplethat are new. This happens all
the time. So I used to do my jobat Red Hat, it was around, sort
of like, you know, culturaltransformation, and especially
with government agencies, butthat was neither here nor there
(53:07):
on that last part. But one ofthe things that would be funny
is, you know, you would asksomeone to like how they would
rate themselves, like you'relike, okay, in these areas, and
people will be like, Oh, we're afive out of five. And you're
like, but because you only knowthat it can go so far. But wait,
yeah, there's this whole morethat can be right. And Dr.
Nicole Forsgren had a greatshe's she's talked about this
(53:31):
multiple times about why whyNicole and I agree with her wide
maturity models are not greatbecause they have a maturity
model implies an end state. Andshe she gave this MC did a
couple of her talks where shesort of talks about the map,
like if you play World ofWarcraft, right? Like, how big
as Roth is continually changing,right? Like three, expansion,
(53:53):
that map gets bigger, andthere's more things, right. But
if you're at the beginning, youdon't know. Right? So like, you
know, again, think about me,like, you know, right in that
bio in 1993, where I was like, Iwas gonna be a you know, what do
you call it a computerprogrammer, cuz it was the only
thing I knew you could pewtersthat was it. Yeah, I mean, to be
(54:16):
fair, that might have been allthere was so I mean, well, when
you're young, also, the onlyjobs you know, are like baseball
player, astronaut, marinebiologist. Fine. Like that was
it?
Brandon Minnick (54:30):
I wanted to be a ninja turtle when I grew up.
Yep, sadly, still hasn'thappened.
Pj Metz (54:34):
Yeah, I was gonna say there's still times where this
is this branch is gonna leadyou.
Brandon Minnick (54:40):
Yeah. Well, so one of the thing I like about
that idea is just, you know, getstarted on your journey, because
you you don't really know whatwe're where you'll end up. My
first internship in it taught methat I didn't want to work in
it. And that's okay. And So, Igot I got a little lucky because
(55:02):
it was just a summer internship.
So I knew in three months thiswas going to be over. But I
respect people who work in it somuch because it is a thankless
job. Nobody contacts it, becausethey want to say thank you. They
contact it because they're madat you for maybe something they
did, and maybe something Iconfigured wrong on their
(55:25):
computer. Sure. But yeah,nobody's happy when they call
it. It's a very thankless job.
So make sure to thank your ITworker every now and again,
Matty Stratton (55:36):
I was just gonna say so just like we talked
about, like the content creator.
So it reminded me when I was atapartments, calm, my colleague
who like I, you know, I wasdirector of, you know, tech ops,
and then my colleague who ranlike data ops stuff for us, he
was like, you know, so Hal wasalways like, Matt, like, how
come you always have a newlaptop, or you get the new phone
(55:57):
or you get whatever. And I'mlike, because at Christmas, I go
down to the help desk, and Ibring them cookies. And in the
summer, I bring them homemadejam, and I treat them like
people. I mean, it wasn't justdriving, but it was like, I know
them, and I know who they are.
And I'm friends with them. Andso it means that I'm like, But
you, they only know you when youhave a problem. So you're just
(56:18):
another person, it doesn't meanthat they don't do good work,
but doesn't mean you have tobribe your help desk to get work
done by again, just like the barfor being a non terrible dude.
And tech is so low, the bar fortreating your helpdesk your HR,
the gate agent at the airport,all these people just don't be a
(56:40):
jerk. Like, and you will be likea breath of fresh air. That's
the thing. People are like, Oh,you're bribing. I was like, No,
I'm just being nice. And Ibrought my co workers to Yeah.
Like, you got to explain some ofthe spaces. It really is just,
(57:01):
it's it's building goodrelationships. And that's what
I've started to learn all DevRelis building honest, real,
authentic relationships withpeople, be yourself connect with
people. And on thoseconnections, you can talk about
work stuff, but the connectionsand the people come first. And
that's true of DevOps, you saidearlier, culture isn't the most
(57:23):
important, but it's the one wegot to teach you all the most
about because you're resistantto it for some reason. It's
culture. It's it's the people,right? Yes, be people be nice.
You can't hear it on thepodcast. But my shirt says Be
kind to
Brandon Minnick (57:42):
love it. So Maddie, we only have a couple
minutes left. In You are a very,very busy man. So I want to make
sure we share all the amazingthings you're doing. We've we've
talked about the podcast thatyou do. We've talked about
DevOps days, what else areyou're working on that we can
share with the world.
Matty Stratton (58:01):
So another thing so I just and maybe this is
breaking news, I'll put thishere. So for the last couple
years, I've hosted an onlinegame show called DevOps party
games, we actually decidedrecently that we're not doing it
regularly anymore. So we'regoing to keep doing it. Kind of
here. And there. We do it aspart of events. But still check
out DevOps party games.com It'sbeen super fun. I threatened I
(58:24):
am sorry, I told PJ he could beon and that was right before we
decided not to do it anymore. Sowe just do it can be on it's
yes, we just do them morespecial events now rather than,
you know, every month orwhatever. Yeah, totally fine.
Um, the other thing is, so I dofrom a work perspective. But
still, it's fun. I do a streamat Twitch tv slash pulumi. I do
(58:47):
that every Thursday. If you'relistening to this, it's already
happened in the past. But if youare watching the stream right
now, I decided I just decidedthat this Thursday, I'm going to
take my personal Hugo websiteand deploy it all with pulumi.
And you know, just sort of do astatic site build. I don't know
how it's gonna go. I just gonnajust sort of figure it out and
(59:08):
have some fun. But yeah, gotwitch.tv/pulumi Twitter is your
best place to find out whatevernonsense I'm up to. I'm at. At
Matt Stratton on Twitter. Andyeah, DevOpsDays Chicago is
hopefully coming up soon. Imean, it's hard to make any kind
of plans, but go todevopsdays.org to see any
(59:29):
upcoming DevOpsDays there's alot that are going on. I'm
excited to be back and I hope tosee you all on the internet's Mm
hmm. That's fantastic. Well,listen, you can follow us at a
pit stop TV. Make sure to checkout everything that Matt just
told you about DevOps days,DevOps party, all the all the
(59:50):
great stuff. And make sure tolike and subscribe to us on
YouTube so you can always seewhen we're on and live and we
will see you all next time.
Hello, and welcome back everybody to eight
bits, the show about the peoplebehind the Tech where we
interview them to learn abouttheir journey and how they got
into tech. I'm your host,Brandon Minnick. And with me as
always is the amazing PJ Metz.
PJ, how's your week?
Pj Metz (02:19):
My weeks gone? Great.
Now that I'm here, I mean, it'snot like this is the only bright
spot the dark week of work.
That's not what's happening.
Actually. No, it's been goingwell, I I'm doing very well. And
I'm excited to be here today. Ithink it's gonna be a good show.
I jelly. Yeah.
Brandon Minnick (02:40):
I'm excited to also excited because I am going
on vacation this weekend. It's aholiday weekend here in the US.
So we're gonna go to the beachand just relax.
Pj Metz (02:54):
It is a holiday. It's a three day weekend this weekend.
Brandon Minnick (02:58):
Monday is Presidents Day.
Pj Metz (03:01):
Next Friday, Family Day forget lab. So I've got Monday,
next Friday off. What was itlike to get like does a cool
thing called friends and familyday they started that during the
pandemic during the pandemic,they were like, Hey, are fully
remote workforce is like, crazyproductivity right now. And they
looked at their workforce.
They're like, Guys, what are youthere? Like, well, we're just
(03:22):
home and we're just working.
It's like, okay, stop. Everyonehas to take at least one day off
a month. And they createdfriends and family day.
Brandon Minnick (03:32):
Such a great idea. Because yeah, truly at at
companies, especially one set tounlimited vacation. And for
those on the audio podcast, Idid that in air quotes, because
it's not really unlimited.
There's always like, like, well,you're after three weeks of
vacation, people will startasking questions. But yeah. It's
it's always tough for folks tostep away break away. I mean, I
(03:55):
know, even though we'll be atthe beach, also be checking
emails and looking at stuff. Iwon't be responding to things or
necessarily doing anything butstay in the loop. And yep,
that's not me. That's shit, but
Pj Metz (04:17):
I'll probably have like Slack open and like maybe like
my, my to do list on GitLab upand just to see what's on there.
And I'll consider doing somework on so I like what I'm
doing. Like I'm buildingcontent. I'm making, you know,
videos and presentations andstuff for students. So like, I
like doing that stuff. I canonly read so much from my new
(04:37):
ereader that I just got so Ineed a break.
Brandon Minnick (04:41):
That's yeah, sorry. This part for me is Yeah,
I love what I do. And a lot ofthe job I'm in now is stuff that
I used to do in my free timeanyways, so a lot of it still
doesn't feel like work.
Pj Metz (04:55):
Right? Yeah, they say do you love what you do? then
you can teach a man to fish yep,I think that's the way normally
if this were in front of a liveaudience there would have been
uproarious laughter there, butall I have are audio clips, so
we'll just go with this instead.
Terrible All rightthis is a quality podcast,
(05:27):
y'all.
Brandon Minnick (05:30):
That's right.
So uh, BJ Devaney announcementscoming up, I know I'm, I believe
in for vacation. So I'm kind of,I've got one foot out the door,
I don't have anything queued up,actually, for the rest of the
month. I was supposed to speakat a conference in Las Vegas,
about two weeks, but gotcancelled because of COVID. So
(05:51):
stay at home.
Pj Metz (05:58):
I've got, we've got actually it finally was just
confirmed. I'm going to be inRhode Island at the beginning of
March for a computer scienceeducation conference. And we're
making a little, a little getlab photo booth for people to
show up and take a picture withour little DevOps school bus
because we're cute. But I'mexcited to be going to a
(06:18):
conference with my boss thissemester. And it's funny because
like, business thinks inquarters, but schools thinking
semesters, and so this semester,because I'm in education, I'm
looking to actually be oncampus, at least to university.
So that's something I'm startingto put together, it's going to
be kind of cool to show up andteach some students how to make
(06:38):
either a twitter bot or adiscord bot or something so they
can see how they can use GitLabfor their work and their play.
You know, making Twitter bots isjust fun, pure fun. So love it.
Brandon Minnick (06:50):
I mean, I don't think it was around when I was
in college, but it didn't reallydidn't teach us anything about
source control. Think back thenit was SVN. Which we don't have
to talk about that.
Pj Metz (07:06):
Well, listen, today's show is a great one. And it's a
guest that I was personally veryexcited to have on we got to
stream previously myself andthis guest on I believe that
pulumi twitch channel where Iwas said, I'm learning Python.
And our guests said, Well, youshould come on and show some
(07:26):
Python and build a twitter botlive and I was like, Oh, I'm not
there yet. But we did it anywayand we did. We basically
crowdsource the whole thing. Andimmediately people in the chat
started pulling merge requestson the file to fix some
problems. But I'd love tointroduce welcome to the stream
everybody. Matty Stretton. Hey.
Oh, look at all the soundeffects. I have a soundboard
(07:52):
that I never
Brandon Minnick (07:54):
used. Does it have lasers?
Matty Stratton (07:57):
No, I Well, it could. I never used it. I mostly
used it for the, you know, sortof rim shot and applause and
grown. You know, lasers are agood move, though. Yeah, I've
got this one. Oh, well, so howdid I get here? This is
(08:20):
apparently I was reading theother days everyone was like, So
where did that come from? Andlike, there's not like everyone
just started referencing it. Butit's not actually from
something. It's likeconceptually, like not that
exact implementation, but like,and I think what everybody would
think in their head is that itwould be saved by the bell.
Because it's like very ZackMorris like timeout. But that's
(08:43):
Yeah, but that's not what timeat the you know, yeah, that's a,
I think, Ferris Bueller. Right.
But that doesn't really happen.
It never stops. He just he justdoes what fourthwall breaks,
right, you know, talks to us.
Oh, you know what, you know whatit makes me think of actually,
you know what, it's, it's funnybecause you're gonna think it's
like an 80s comedy thing. Butyou know what that really is? Is
(09:03):
it's frickin Goodfellas abouthow Goodfellas starts. Oh my
God, it is right. It's it's thefreeze frame. And he's like, as
long as I could remember I'vealways wanted but you know, so
it's yeah, like
Brandon Minnick (09:20):
oh, this resolved? Yeah, heard it. Maybe
here. No. Yeah, it's been gonnatell us all along. Yes.
Matty Stratton (09:30):
As always has been you did the astronaut me
Right, right. Stretch is reallygood fellows. Always has been
mean for me, Brendan. Go makeit. Work to do. Maddie. Uh, tell
us who you are. What you do. Yougot you got the screen. It's
yours. Now tell us all about Oh,geez. All about myself. Okay,
(09:54):
well, we'll do this a little bitat a time. So currently, um, so
my name is Mandy. threatenedlike Job wise, because we define
ourselves by our job clearly,I'm a staff developer advocate
at pulumi. We do infrastructureas software, you can talk about
gloomy stuff at some point, I'vebeen been here almost a year
(10:14):
now, which is nuts. I have, youknow, I know we like to talk
about stories and origin storiesstuff. So I'm gonna, you know,
kind of treat this a littlelightly. But I. So I basically
worked in Technology Operationsfor a couple decades and then
kind of came over to the vendorside. And so when I've been on
the vendor table, I was at chef,for a fair amount of time I've
(10:35):
been at pager duty, I was at RedHat, and I'm at pulumi been part
of the DevOps movement for along time. I always feel like
I'm new to it. But every year,the percentage of time that I've
been part of DevOps is a greaterpercentage. We'll talk a little
bit of that, but the I'm aglobal Chair of DevOps days, I
started and continue to run the,the one that's here in Chicago,
(10:59):
big believer in the DevOpscommunity and the DevOps
movement. And now I'm at pulumi,because I, you know, I really
dig in for code. And all of thiscomes, you know, I've said
before, it's kind of a fun, funthing. Those of you if you're in
developer relations, and you'resingle one of the hardest things
is how do you explain to apotential date what your job is?
(11:19):
It's a Yeah, and the end resultis nobody actually cares that
much about how detailed you areyou don't have to explain it
that well. But I usually sayhey, I worked in ops for 20
years and now they pay me totalk about it so
Brandon Minnick (11:33):
that's perfect.
I still struggle to tell myparents what my job is. Friends
Pj Metz (11:39):
I work in tech and then I'm like, but like I'm not don't
worry like I don't have like apuffy vest or anything right
yeah no Patagonia Yeah, I do howyou can't get those anymore they
had to go to Patagonia won't dobranded shit anymore. Ah that's
what I heard they're like no wedon't we don't really do that.
(12:02):
Dang Alright, well Patagonia ifyou if you want anything branded
you got to do it yourself kidsso get your iron on patches out
like it's
Brandon Minnick (12:10):
North Face if you're listening we are still
looking for sponsorships That'sright we do an eight bits
Northwest north
Pj Metz (12:18):
northwest North by Northwest
Matty Stratton (12:31):
I told you this would be better with a live
audience it is it is theaudience you need to you need to
get a I you need like not DonPardo sounding but like a
recording at the beginning.
That's like eight bits isrecorded in front of a live
studio audience. You know howfar it I can? Yeah, yeah. No,
but we'll save it. That's forthe Patreon. You'll get my There
(12:52):
we go. Yeah.
Brandon Minnick (12:56):
That's right.
So So Maddie, let's let's go wayback because we were chatting a
bit before the show. And youmentioned that theater was a big
part of early life, maybe itstill is. So take us back there
and share with us how did a paththrough the theater get you into
now working with tech andcomputers?
Matty Stratton (13:20):
Yeah. So I definitely sort of nothing ever
goes the way that I expect andthat's, you know, what they say
life is thing that happens whenwe make other plans. So when I
was when I was in school, I youknow, got very involved with
theater, loved acting, lovedirecting, and my initially I
(13:41):
went to college, you know, forfor theater undergrad, and as I
but I also always have lovedtechnology, you know, going all
the way back to when I rememberbeing in second grade. And we
had the apple two's you know, atthe elementary school and this
(14:02):
is, you know, by the way justfor everybody listening like you
don't have to have this like oldschool dork origin story that I
do do well in tech. This is notlike my bonafides I just think
it's funny. Um, so back in thosedays, like I remember in the in
the Chicago Tribune, which waslike our paper, you know, like
(14:22):
in the in the Sunday funnies inthe comics, there was like a
section that was like aboutcomputers, and they would have
like, basic program likeprograms in basic that were
printed in the comics, right? Inthe Sunday comics. So I remember
I would cut them out, bring themto school and you know, type
them in and to do these programsand stuff. And that's sort of
(14:43):
how I you know, I just thoughtthat was fun. My dad always had
Apple computers and stuff and soI kind of would play around with
that and and so I but I wouldsay if you look at like my
senior bio for the theater clubin high school, it said it was
like where do you see yourselfin 10 years? mindset something
like either a successful butmiserable computer programmer or
(15:07):
a unsuccessful but happy actor.
And the reality was it wasneither of those it was a
disgruntled system administratorbecause, you know, at the time
nobody I mean, like nobodynowadays people will be like,
Yeah, I want to be an SRE when Igrew up or whatever, like nobody
wanted to be a sysadmin. Like,back in my day of sysadmin stuff
like, anybody I worked with anops in the 90s, in the early
(15:29):
2000s. Like, their origin storywas always there from the
military, or I was a geologymajor, and I had to get a real
job and whatever, like nobodywent to school to be a sysadmin.
Right. We all just sort ofbecame them.
But anyway, so I went to schoolfor theater, and I ended up
dropping out of college, I endedup dropping out of college
(15:50):
twice. The first time I droppedout was as a theater major, and
I needed to get a job. And Iended up going to work for this.
Like, it was like an appleservice centers, this little
company called Glen EllynComputer Services here in the
Chicago suburbs. I went there.
And it was like, a just to, Iwas fixing computers. But they
(16:10):
also we're an ISP. And this waslike 1995. So I learned HTML,
because it was just like, we hadto sort of know a couple things.
And I got a job as a webmasterat this company called Midwest
computer works, which at thetime, was the biggest competitor
to CW there was a time that ifnobody has ever heard of Midwest
computer works anymore. And thisis when it was all mailorder.
(16:33):
Right. So like, it was a bigdeal to move to online. So like,
I remember, having to learn howto write like a shopping cart in
Perl, you know, and all thisstuff. And this was blah, blah,
blah. I just kept sort ofstumbling my way around. And
let's be 100% Clear. It's a loteasier to stumble around and be
successful in tech when you looklike me. Yeah, I mean, like,
(16:54):
Yeah, but a lot of things. Mycareer has been very
serendipitous, which I think isa lot true for a lot of us if
you know you never know youryour plans, like the junctions.
If you ever played that gameabout how did I get to the PGA
like that record scratch? Okay,how did I get here, and I, I
ended up spending a fair amountof time in the Windows world,
(17:18):
and I never knew windows, likewhen I was growing up, we didn't
have PCs, it was all Apple andstuff I didn't know. And then
when I went to school, we wereusing Unix systems. I didn't
know shit about Windows. Butwhen I was doing Apple work, a
lot of these graphic designcompanies or graphic, you know,
graphic shops, they would thedesigners all use MAC's, but
(17:41):
then they would have this likeWindows NT machine is their rip
station. So Windows NT existedin my world, so I sort of had to
learn it a little bit. And thenI kind of fell into a job at a
system integrator. And they paidfor me to get my MCSC and learn
all that and it just and thenthat became 10 years of a
Windows sysadmin. And God blessme having to manage SharePoint
(18:02):
and stuff, right? Like and itwas all because of one random
thing. And I always lovetracking back to like this
inflection that happens. So Iwouldn't be sitting here.
There's two points what Imentioned in the greenroom time,
I'm going to mention in a secondbecause I think it's fun, but
one that goes way back. So, somuch of my history and why I'm
(18:23):
doing the job that I do why I'mwhere I am, is because I decided
to get involved in theater inhigh school, which was a little
bit of a whim. Now what hadhappened is I joined our speech
team, some schools call itforensics, because my buddy was
like, Hey, I get extra creditand speech class. If I go to
this meeting, will you go withme and I went to the fun. And I,
you know, got assigned. This iswhen I was like a sophomore. I
(18:48):
was doing duet acting was theevent that I got assigned into
right or that I tried out forand they said, Okay, we're gonna
have you do and actually, thescene we did was from the
producers I just remembered,which was the opening scene of
the producers with Bialystok andbloom and I played Leo bloom.
But the guy that I was matchedup with was a senior and he was
very involved in theater. And,you know, after we'd been
(19:10):
practicing and stuff, andsomething came up long story
short about what how were wegoing to practice together over
Christmas break? And there wastheater Fest was happening where
everybody goes down state, it'sa big thing. And my partner said
something about,you know, I couldn't do this
time because of theater fest.
And our coach said, Matt, areyou going to be at theater fest?
(19:30):
And my partner said, why wouldhe be going? And I was like, Oh,
it's on like John bar, right?
And so I decided to try out forthe play and do all that and
that got me into theater andthen that's how I met my first
wife. Like all sorts of stuffhappened when I went down that
and so I'm like, This guy waslike a jackass, but I guess I
got to thank him. Because Iwouldn't have like that I would
(19:53):
have that divergent. There's analternate universe, right?
There's a diverse thing wherethat's not me. And I went and
ended up getting an MBA right? Atheater through spite. Okay, so
the other important part of mycareer has come from spite as
well. Um, so a few years ago, Iwas, you know, I sort of towards
(20:16):
the beginning of DevOps, I wasat the beginning of DevOps days,
the beginning of the days ofDevOps. I was an organization,
and I wanted us to startimplementing it for code. I was
like, let's do this chef thing.
And so I propose that and I hadbeen running the tech ops team,
I'd been moved into an architectrole. And somebody else had sort
(20:38):
of taken over. And he didn'thave a whole lot of respect for
me or my team, as we found out.
And I was like, so I sort of puttogether a proposal. I'm like, I
think we should, you know,investigate, we should implement
chef and let's get going. And,you know, he was like, oh, no,
this will take us a year to getimplemented and 10s of 1000s of
dollars in training, and no, no,no, this is just too much for
your team. So I was like, Allright. So over the course of a
(21:00):
couple of weeks, like in myevenings and weekends, I wrote a
few chef cookbooks to handle notall of our infrastructure, but a
fair amount. And I kind ofturned up with it and was like,
Hey, man, this wasn't me, thisisn't done. But like this is,
you know, this wasn't that hard.
And then like three to fourweeks later, my job was
(21:20):
eliminated. But because of that,I went and got more involved in
the DevOps community went andworked for a consulting company
doing cloud and DevOps. Andagain, if that didn't happen,
you know, so I was said, Ilearned chef out of spite, but
if you know, this person hadn'tlet me go or late like I
(21:41):
wouldn't be I would not besitting here today, talking to
you all. So anyone who'swatching this, I'm sorry that
that happened.
Brandon Minnick (21:49):
Don't spite Mattie cuz yeah, you might
inspire him to solve worldhunger. That's
Pj Metz (21:55):
right. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I know how to build a car
that doesn't. Definitely doesn'tknow how to give me $20,000. How
often Brandon, how often do wetalk about that path? And how
(22:16):
strange that path can be forpeople on this show? It comes up
all the time.
Brandon Minnick (22:20):
It it is. It's super common. And that's one
thing I found is you use setgoals, but keep them flexible.
Because you never really knowwhere you're gonna end up. You
never know what opportunitiesare going to pop up. I mean, if
the pandemic had never happened,I don't think I ever would have
(22:42):
started coding and streamingwith PJ. And here we are 50 Plus
episodes into a podcast.
Pj Metz (22:51):
It's true. And I know especially that like, the only
reason I am involved in techright now is because you said,
You know what I do is kind oflike teaching. You just have to
learn how to code. So I waslike, All right, sure. And the
fact that I even met you eventhough we went to the same
college, we never met at thesame college. I only met you
(23:13):
because I was dating someone whowhen they graduated, moved to
Melbourne, Florida, and you gotone job offer in Melbourne,
Florida after you graduated. Sowe just happen to be in the same
town in the same group offriends. And here I am with
like, amazing things. I thoughtwith tech money behind me. Like,
(23:36):
thanks, fete. It's awesome.
Brandon Minnick (23:39):
Yeah, and I think it also goes to show and
that's kind of the the ethos ofthis, of this show of eight
bits, right is to demonstrateall these various paths to get
into the tech community towhether it's you learn to code
on your own, you get a degree,there's really no one prescribed
(24:00):
path. And, and there's really noone prescribed start date. So
you could be mid career, likeVijay was a high school teacher
for over 10 years, learn to codeand here we are. Whereas my path
was more of the traditionalroute. But you don't have to do
(24:21):
that anymore. Anybody can do it.
You can do it.
Matty Stratton (24:25):
I think it's a really good thing to point out
too is that because we tend tofocus and amplify like the
quirky stories and the nontraditional stories and
everything but like thetraditional story is just as
valid like you don't have tohave a like, super obscure
origin story to be awesome.
Attack. Yeah, I said, I went Igot my degree, I did this thing.
(24:49):
I went and I did an internship.
I just went through thetraditional path and you know
what, you are just as awesomejust the same way that like, as
you know, I referenced beforeI'm like, we all love to tell
the stories about iron, youknow, I you know, interrupts and
having to configure modem boardsand, you know, we all get grumpy
about this stuff. And it's not,it can feel gatekeeping. And I
(25:12):
would never tell someone to notfeel a certain way. But the
reason is because these thingsare just like, kind of funny, or
creative or there it's ofinterest, but it doesn't mean
it's the only right thing.
Right? So, um, and the otherplace where it's funny, I was
think about this, though I waslike, somebody not too long ago.
And we're, I think we're puttingtogether like a talk proposal. I
(25:35):
was like, I feel like nontraditional is the new
traditional, in a way, like,which I think is that I thought
about that. I'm like, I bet thenumbers don't back that up.
Because you know, but because ofwhat we talked about. So here's
my analogy. It's like aDevOpsDays. analogy. So when we
think about one of the coreconcepts of DevOps, we talked
(25:57):
about this idea of comms, itsculture automation, lean
measurement, and sharing. Andyou'll feel like it seems like
we talk about culture way morethan we talk about anything
else. And it's like, does thatmean it's the most important?
And it's like, no, it's just theone that we have to make people
pay attention to, I don't haveto convince engineers to play
with automation tools, they'rejust gonna do that. That's fine.
But are the same thing whereit's like, Why do we always talk
(26:20):
about empathy? Why are we nottalking about them? Like,
because that part you don't haveto be told about? You already
know, right? So like, we we onone hand, so we want to amplify
these non traditional stories.
But it doesn't mean it's morethat we just sort of have to
talk about them more so thatthey're heard, but it's to get
them to be heard as much as thetraditional ones that already
(26:43):
are normalized. But I just,yeah, want it to be fair that
like, you don't have again, youdon't have to have an amazing
exmon worthy origin story.
Attack, right? You can, youknow, and you can just show up
and do your shit and clock outat the end of the day. And
that's here anymore. And that'sawesome to just, you know, yeah.
(27:05):
I think that there's, there's a,I think it's that everyone has
an interesting path, whether youtook the traditional path into
tech or not, like Brandon says,His, his path was traditional,
but he wasn't really doing alot. He was doing some rack and
stack stuff at the company heworked out before, and he was
(27:26):
doing some communication stuff.
But it's still very differentfrom where he ended up. So like,
yeah, traditional in the senseof the right degree. But
sometimes these left turns comeout, like I don't think Brandon
was ever like, and I'm gonna endup in San Francisco, and I'm
definitely gonna be writing andXamarin. And it's gonna happen.
(27:46):
It's, it's the, the nontraditional paths need to be
highlighted and validated. Buttraditional paths, you're valid
too. And your story and your waythat you get here is a good
story. Because the reasons weget into things is very, you
know, it's intensely personal.
As I stumbled through thatsentence, like, that you got
(28:08):
into tech is related to theater,which came to you out of spite,
because a lot of theater isbuilt out of spite like you
don't you don't go to a bunch oflate night Rocky Horror Picture,
show showings without building alittle bit of spice somewhere.
Um, but I think that you'reyou're absolutely right. I think
there's a there's a focus on nontraditional roles, because I
(28:31):
think that historically, it'sbeen excluded. But you said, I
don't know that the data backsit up. I think I just read
recently that something likearound like 42% of working
developers have either gonethrough a boot camp or are self
taught, oh, like, those numbersare shifting and changing. And
the companies are taking notice.
(28:51):
And I do think in what we all doin dev rel more likely to see
non traditional roles to get toDev Rel specifically. I couldn't
get to see that because youbecause it's a non. It's a non
(29:11):
traditional role. That's whatthat's what I started getting
that right. Like, it's notreally part of your pattern. And
it's, it's, this is a wholeother topic that I can and have
ranted about and thebecause I part of why the non
traditional I think, is helpfuland it doesn't even have to be
(29:32):
non traditional in that like noI you know, I said I said on a
webinar last week, it was like,you know, Dev Rel or empathy
engineers, right? And so this iswhere, why interesting and
different backgrounds acrossyour team are really powerful
because there's no one type ofperson of user that You have one
(29:58):
type of consumer, right? So, um,and I think that it, it's not
impossible to have empathy forsomeone if you haven't lived
their life, but it's a loteasier. And I've said this
before, you know, I say I do DevRel uneasy mode. When I do Dev
Rel for ops, because I was inthe shit for 20 years. Like, I
(30:23):
don't have to work hard to haveempathy for people that have a
rough time in OPS, like it'sthere, and 20 years ago was
definitely an absolutebattlefield. But it's
interesting, because there's athing and this is where I'm
going to tread lightly, becauseit's gonna start to sound a
little gatekeeping. And I don'tmean it that way. There are
certain types of Dev Rel that isvery, very hard to do if you
(30:46):
haven't actually done the job.
And I don't mean because youdon't have the technical skill.
And I don't even mean that youcan't own it. There's, this is
this was also the example I'mgoing to give in this. And this
is by the way, that doesn't meanthat all Deborah's, that's true,
because another statement thatMaddie has made many times is
DevRel contains multitudes,everybody does not do the same
(31:10):
thing, or bringing the samestrength. So that's the
important part to remember, itdoesn't mean you can't do DevRel
if you haven't done it, butthere's a style that works,
that's a lot easier to do, justby having it. So I'm going to
bring this back to a salesengineering reference. But it'll
be similar. So when I was atchef, before I was doing dev
rally things in the world, I wasa sales edge, right? And so who
(31:30):
are we selling to? We're sellingto ops people. And so two little
things about that. One was, I,you know, the rep that I work
that I was partnered with allthe time, you know, like, she
said to me, once, she said, youknow, she's a match, like, this
happens all the time, we go intothis room. And she's like, you
know, I see all the ops peopleare sitting back, you can't see
me crossing my arms if you'relistening to the podcast, but
(31:51):
they're sitting back in theirchairs, with their arms crossed,
when we start, and a few minutesin, they all start leaning in
and listening to you. And Isaid, you know why? Because I
made a joke about system D.
Right? I gave the Shibboleththat was like, we're, I've done
this. Yeah, you know, and itdoesn't mean you have to do
that. So where that connectedthough, is we had someone on our
(32:11):
team, who was a awesome salesENTJ. But like, he was younger
and didn't have a lot ofexperience. And it just was he
couldn't like it was nothingagainst him. And actually, now
he's done this, he could do thisamazingly, you know, years
later, but like, he couldn'thave done the job the way that I
(32:31):
did it. And it would have beenunfair to expect that, right?
Because it's like, hey, the wayyou reach them as in a different
way. And the same thing is truewith with like dev rel. So like,
I come from this, like, I'vebeen on the journey. So I can
put, I can talk to you in theway of someone who's been on the
journey, you don't have to havebeen on the journey to
(32:52):
understand someone's journey.
It's just easier if you have soit like so many other ways. I do
things on easy mode, right? I'mdoing Dev Rel on easy mode,
because what I choose to do DevRel for is a lived experience of
mine, you know, you know so butthere's other again, it contains
multitudes. And I think that'sone of the things that we have
(33:15):
to start to learn about this isthat, like, your teams don't
scale horizontally. And I knowthis isn't a DevRel podcast. So
you know, we don't have to go.
That's a whole other thing thatI have thoughts about, but like,
you can't expect everybody onyour team to have the same
thing. We're T shaped or Mshaped, you know, where that
where that comes. And I thinkthat's an overall better thing
(33:35):
for us to understand in ourteams. And that goes back to the
non traditional because of that,it means your your team is more
robust, because you've haddifferent backgrounds. You think
about things differently, youhave a different perspective,
you have a different context. Soit's just funny, I just, it's
stupid Whitney just right. Soremember what I was talking
(33:57):
about? Not I was talking tosomeone about non traditional
being the new traditional IT WASWhitney. So she missed it when I
said that, because I think shejust joined the stream now. So
anyway, shout out to Whitney,who is a great example of, by
the way, if you had Whitney onthe show. Oh, not yet. You need
to write it down.
Brandon Minnick (34:18):
Welcome to the show.
Matty Stratton (34:22):
I make another recommendation for you as well.
Annie Hedgepeth. So I thinkshe's still at hashey Corp. She
has a great story. So I'll,anyway, yeah, always. Yeah, I
love people that have funstories, right? Like both
because it's inspirational, butalso, because it's interesting.
Again, no offense to anybodywho's like I knew, you know,
(34:44):
like, I knew I got a computerscience degree. I went out and
did this. That's great. You'reinteresting for other reasons.
Just not that. So. That'sfantastic. You mentioned DevOps
podcasts that this is not andyou're right. This is not a
DevOps podcast. But I've heardrumors whispered across the
(35:04):
great oceans that you have aDevOps podcast. I do. So this
this has a fun store originstory too. And this is people
are usually tired of hearingstories about this stuff. But
that's what the show is about.
So anyway, so I have a podcastcalled the rest of DevOps. And
here's a little bit of it'sfirst of all, we are to the best
of my knowledge. Someone couldcorrect me the longest running
(35:25):
still active DevOps podcast. Sothere were shows before us about
DevOps, they have pod faded.
That's fine. They had the timethey did the thing they needed
to do. There definitely havebeen shows that have come after
us. That might be more popular.
But we're still we're stillaround. People been counting us
out for years. Wait, how doesthat go? Come on. PJ, you got it
(35:46):
for me like, ah, hold on. Yeah.
This one? Oh, no, not that. Iwas trying to get the rap lyric.
There's a rap lyric. I wantWhitney. I'll get it for me.
Like, oh, wait. Oh, no. Uh, oh,no, I like okay, well, we'll
find it. Okay, what's next, likeconscious rap right now? I'm
(36:08):
sorry. Anyway. So here's sort ofthe story about arrested DevOps.
It's kind of fun, I think. So itstarted with I was gonna write a
blog. And I needed a name. Andmy friend Jess, who doesn't work
in tech at all. She's the onewho coined the name arrested
DevOps, which is amazing. And Iwas like, What am I gonna do
with it? And then I was like,Well, I was like, I want to do a
(36:28):
podcast. And my intent was, sothe way that I learned about
DevOps, the way I learned DevOpsat first was through podcasts,
through listening to DevOpscafe, or the ship show or food
fight. But the problem was,like, none of those shows were
built around the idea that youwere new, nothing against them.
But like, I learned it throughosmosis, right? You know, I'd be
(36:50):
like, I don't know what you'retalking about. But I'm gonna
listen to your shows enough.
Over time, I'm going tounderstand what Continuous
Delivery means or whatever,blah, blah, blah. So I was like,
Alright, I want to do a show.
That is for the person who knowsnothing about DevOps, who like
the joke was always my bossright about DevOps in the in
flight magazine and told me todo it. Because apparently,
there's lots of articles in youknow, horizons magazine about
(37:12):
DevOps, and AI. Now, if you're alistener of the show, you know
that that's not really what ourshow turned into. Because one
thing is you can't control youraudience. We started to have
people that would be listeningto the show, I'm like, why are
you listening to the show, youshould be on the show. And so,
but I reached out to you, Iwanted an accountability
(37:34):
partner, because I'm very goodat starting things, and not very
good at continuing them. Sothere's a guy that I had met at
an Azure meetup here in Chicago,named Trevor and I was like,
hey, and he was more of a, youknow, a coder, a software
engineer, also, quite a bityounger than I am. So different
(37:54):
generation, so to speak. Andwe're like, let's do this show
together. And so we kind ofstarted doing it. And it, yeah,
it just sort of progressed overthe years, we've, you know,
added more hosts and gotten morepeople involved. And, you know,
(38:17):
I remember if you're one of myfavorite podcasts is greater
than code, which I don't know,if you are any of your listeners
are familiar with. And so justto try and who's one of the
hosts of greater than code, Imet her at redeploy a few years
ago. And I was just sort of liketotal fanboy, because like, I
(38:37):
love her talks. I love her ongreater than code. And she said
something to me about like, oh,we should we're having lunch.
And she's like, we should haveyou on greater than code. I'm
like, Oh, my God, right, youknow, when you get to be on when
your favorite shows. And then Iwas sort of, like, you know, I
have a podcast. And, you know, Igot her to come on the show. And
like, right after, she's like, Ihad such a great time. And then
she's like, if you're everlooking for more hosts and
(38:58):
stuff, I'm like, yes, yes. Yes.
So yeah. So so, you know, justto try and is one of our hosts.
And it's like, we just we keepgoing so I, you know, we it's
about every about twice a month.
It's very practitioner oriented,you know, like we
I don't know, and it's I everynow and again, I kind of think
(39:22):
about is it too much do we youknow, but it's, I feel like
we're part of part of thecommunity. And, you know, what
gets me is anytime I guaranteeany time I'm like, I'm done.
It's time for us to be done withthe show. Then you get that like
message on LinkedIn or you getthe Twitter DM, that's like, oh,
(39:45):
I learned this thing and itchanged my job or I mean, we get
that a lot and it's, it's a, itmeans a lot. So also that being
said, As hard as it is for me totake a compliment. I will tell
you if there's anyone who'screated content, who does this
show who does the thing that'shad an impact on you? Tell them,
(40:07):
even if you just tell them alittle bit, because it's, it
means the world. Yeah, andkeeping the people who are
creating content that you enjoy,whether it's a podcast, whether
it's a stream, whether it's ashow, whatever it is, if they're
creating something that youlike, tell them, shout them out,
tag them, like, those littletiny things. If you're, you
(40:28):
know, if you're around in thestream all the time, or if
you're always listening topodcasts, like promote it,
because like, it makes thecreators know that it's that
it's working, it's reachingsomeone, you know, on that note,
I believe, we need to take asecond to take an ad break, one
of our famous advertisers wantsto tell you all about a great
product. I if you're hearing myvoice, that means you've been
(40:53):
listening to or watching eightbits with Brandon and PJ, and
we're here to talk to you aboutyour product. And how it can
help you in your life by to dowhatever your product does. So
if you're an avid listener ofthe show, or you watch us on
(41:13):
Twitch, then you will know thatyour product, your product is
right for you.
Brandon Minnick (41:28):
That's right.
If you have anything you'd liketo promote, feel free to reach
out to us. You can find us atHello at eight bits.tv via
email, you can find us onTwitter at eight bits pod. Let
us know we'd be happy to chatand share your goods with the
world.
Pj Metz (41:48):
That's right.
Fantastic. I get excited everytime that little ad break runs.
Because like I keep noticinglittle things in the video that
I like like most of what I likeis that I can tell I recently
had a haircut and that video somy hair I thought I thought it
was gonna be the opposite, whereyou're gonna say every time you
(42:08):
see a thing you wish you diddifferent, which is more how I
live my life now. 2022 and I'mliving positively dammit. I had
a I had a talk that I gave a lotin mostly in 2019. And it was
funny because you know, you givethe talk a lot. Everyone's like,
okay, but like, again,especially in non virtual, it's
(42:29):
like most people don't go tolike 20 conferences a year. So
most people don't see it all thetime. But some of your friends
on the circuit do and so like solike Aaron aldric had seen that
talk like a ton of times healways liked it always said nice
things. But there's one slidethat had a typo in it. And every
time I'd hit the slide, I wouldgo, Oh shit, I haven't fixed
this typo. And it happenedenough that we were about I
(42:51):
think it was like DevOpsDaysNashville. I was sitting in the
audience next to Aaron and I wasgonna like my talk was gonna be
next. And he goes oh, hey, he'slike, quick. Did you did you fix
a typo? What? Oh, shit. You'reright. Okay, good. Awesome. Oh
my god.
Brandon Minnick (43:09):
So. So Maddie, we were chatting earlier about
how there's different paths toget into tech, and all of them
are absolutely valid. But I'mcurious. If somebody for
somebody who's listening rightnow says like, wow, like, This
guy used to be a teacher. Thisguy used to be in theater, and I
(43:30):
don't really have any of that.
But I still want to get intotech. But I don't have the
degree. Maddie, where do Istart? What advice would you
give him?
Matty Stratton (43:41):
Okay, well, I'm gonna 100% temper this again
with it. I am a sis hat whitedude. So my advice is to be
taken in that my personalexperience is different and is
easier. But that said, I thinkthe if someone's like, Okay, I
(44:05):
don't know how to get into thisthing, like the industry in
general is where it's somethingwhere I don't I don't have a lot
of like, I don't think there'sone wrong way to do it is what I
mean. Like, it's also I guesswhat I'm what I'm getting at is
like, find some way to get yourfoot in, right? Like, even if
you're like, I don't know, if Iwant to be a front end developer
or as SRE or whatever. It'slike, the good news is you don't
(44:29):
need to know that right away.
Right? Like, who's somethingright, you know? And I would
imagine, that's where again,sort of the same thing if
someone's like, Hey, I thinkinfrastructure is really
interesting. There aren't reallya lot of infrastructure boot
camps. But you know what, like acoding boot camp might not be a
bad idea because it could getyou in that place. And one of
the hardest parts I think, Ithink it is hard to break into,
(44:50):
quote, infrastructure, becausethat really interesting
infrastructure challenges happenat a scale that you can't just
sort of teach yourself Right,you know, so you kind of have to
come up in a different way, youknow, like, like do some other
work. But then thankfully,because of the world we live in
now with DevOps and with, youknow, greater areas, like, you
(45:12):
can be a front end developerthat's also interested in
infrastructure and sort of dothat along the way and where
that comes, so it's a little biteasier, I want to say easier,
but there's less of a, of a of arut that you that you go into.
And now you're following it,because you made this decision
early on, you were an enterprisedevelopers. So now you just
(45:33):
start stuck with Java for therest of your life write like, a
horror story. Yeah. Um, I think,yeah, I guess that's the one
thing I just want to be reallycautious because I think there
are people who are betterequipped to give better advice
to under index people than I am.
So the best advice, you know,sort of tongue in cheek is like,
(45:56):
be born a white dude. Right.
That's, that's how I did it.
Right. Um, but that sucks. So,but that doesn't mean you can't,
but this is the only way that Ican tell you how to follow my
experience. Um, I think that thedon't try to do things alone.
(46:18):
That's the other thing too. Ithink if you have when you're
trying to just anything, if youhave not just the countability
partner, but it's just it's alsoit's more fun to learn with
other people. And it doesn'teven mean even if it's informal,
but like if you know, people, ifyou have friends that are like,
I'm kind of interested in likethese study buddies, so to
speak, do co challengestogether, because also, that is
(46:40):
going to, you can't really showthat in a in your resume that
that gave you that skill. Butthat collaborative skill of
getting used to working togetheris powerful. And then that can
lead you into some some stuff. Ithink, learning in the open, I
will tell you this, that'sanother interesting way. And
everyone's not comfortable withit. But I had recommended, you
(47:02):
know, one of the people I'drecommend to be on the show is
Annie Hedgepeth. And Annie, I'mone of the main ways she got
involved in tech was learning inthe open she she has a non
traditional background, shewanted to learn something and
she decided to learn to be open.
And she did such a good job ofbeing that that her. So I'll
tell you what she wanted tolearn in spec, which is a you
(47:23):
know, policy as code testinglanguage. And it wasn't really
well known. There wasn't a lotof Doc. So Annie, as she was
learning going through, shedocumented everything she did in
our blog. And for the longesttime, I just don't know if this
is still true. But for years,the official inspect
documentation basically justlinked to Andy's blog. They're
(47:43):
like, you just did this better.
And then because of that, youknow, so learning in the open is
way easier to do these days thanit ever has been with streaming
with blogging with whatever andyou'll get people that will help
you. And it helps you then youhave something to point to as
well, right. Like, you know, soso maybe that's a fun thing to
(48:04):
do is you know, get some somefriends and be like we're gonna
work through some training likePJ's, that's what PJ was doing
with Python, right? You know, onyour stream. Like, you know,
that's that's one thing. Andyeah, maybe it'll make you learn
that you like doing this kind ofthing. And maybe you'll want to
do, you know, training,education, deverill, stuff like
(48:25):
that, because you're like, thatwas actually more fun than the
thing I built.
Pj Metz (48:29):
Something you said in that response that really struck
me was, you don't have to knowexactly what you're gonna do.
You just have to get started.
And I think someone who's who'sjust deciding they want to do
tech, and they're like, Okay, Ijust learned that there's a
bunch of different jobs, butthey find a job that seems
interesting, based on thedescription, a couple articles
they've read, they're like,Okay, but how do I become blank.
(48:50):
And it's almost like, Well,don't worry about necessarily
how you become blank. If you areover here and you haven't like
started written a Hello Worldyet. Knowing that I've got to
get some basics in here, I'vegot to start learning something,
the path towards blank willstart to open up as you start to
(49:11):
develop just tech skills andstuff like that. And I can't say
enough good things for learningin the open because that's what
I did. When I was learning Csharp, I did it on Twitch. When
I was learning dotnet I did itwith Brandon and Brandon learned
that right alongside me. Hehadn't used a ASP dotnet core
before. And he was like, we'regonna build a website. Well, I
(49:34):
was like, Let's build a website.
He was like, Well, I'm a Xamarindeveloper, but Okay, let's do
this. And we worked on ittogether. And we would just sit
there for you know, about twohours a week working on stuff
and making mistakes and breakingour database and calling errors
that we couldn't fix for threehours and but it was this great
(49:54):
experience of one learning howto collaborate to showing other
people the work you're doingLike you said, it creates a it
creates a record of what you'vedone that can be extremely
useful.
Brandon Minnick (50:07):
Absolutely and, and also love the idea of
essentially announcing andsharing with the world what
you're doing. So what theexample that came to my mind was
I'm I'm currently training forthe Napa Valley marathon, which
is in just a couple of weeksnow, which is kind of
terrifying. But it's, it's justme training on my own. But I've
(50:33):
told so many people that I'mtraining for a marathon, that if
it doesn't happen, I feel likeI've let those people down. And
I'm sure they'll still be proudof me. Either way. But yeah,
like, Sunday, Superbowl Sunday,here in the US, I had to do a 22
(50:53):
mile training run. And I couldbarely sleep that night, because
I was so anxious, nervous, Ididn't want to do it. But that
that was my motivation for goingit was like, I know, I, I've
told people about what my goalsare for this marathon, I want to
try and run it at an eightminute mile pace, which I've
(51:14):
never done before. And if I wantto do that, then I've got to
wake up at 6am on Sunday to gothis 22 mile run. You can almost
essentially inspire yourselfjust by sharing your goals with
your friends, family, on theinternet, wherever, because
(51:36):
everybody's cheering you on, andthey want you to be successful.
Pj Metz (51:39):
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. So we talked about,just get just get involved. And
we talked about that the pathtowards that specific job within
tech isn't necessarily it's,it's important to have your
goals set and have that like,focus on what you want to do.
But there is no like you said,there's no, there's no class for
(52:02):
being like, I mean, there's nolike DevOps class. Really.
There's no degree in DevOps,there's no not yet not in some
places. But also, you may changeyour mind, because as you come
in, you now know more aboutdifferent things. So you you
want to have you want to beginwith the end in mind, but
(52:23):
understand that it can be fluid,right? Like, we sort of, you
know, not to get the thing, butthere's always like, remember,
what was the big thing thateverybody you know, got all you
know, about John Kerry? Oh, he'sa flip flopper. And you're like,
Wait, you mean, they changed, hechanged his mind his mind with
new, new information. So thatcan happen, like be dedicated
and committed to your goal. Butas you learn more things, Mm
(52:45):
hmm. You know, cuz the map isnot the territory, right? You
know, so like, we have anunderstanding, I'll put it this
way. It's not just about peoplethat are new. This happens all
the time. So I used to do my jobat Red Hat, it was around, sort
of like, you know, culturaltransformation, and especially
with government agencies, butthat was neither here nor there
(53:07):
on that last part. But one ofthe things that would be funny
is, you know, you would asksomeone to like how they would
rate themselves, like you'relike, okay, in these areas, and
people will be like, Oh, we're afive out of five. And you're
like, but because you only knowthat it can go so far. But wait,
yeah, there's this whole morethat can be right. And Dr.
Nicole Forsgren had a greatshe's she's talked about this
(53:31):
multiple times about why whyNicole and I agree with her wide
maturity models are not greatbecause they have a maturity
model implies an end state. Andshe she gave this MC did a
couple of her talks where shesort of talks about the map,
like if you play World ofWarcraft, right? Like, how big
as Roth is continually changing,right? Like three, expansion,
(53:53):
that map gets bigger, andthere's more things, right. But
if you're at the beginning, youdon't know. Right? So like, you
know, again, think about me,like, you know, right in that
bio in 1993, where I was like, Iwas gonna be a you know, what do
you call it a computerprogrammer, cuz it was the only
thing I knew you could pewtersthat was it. Yeah, I mean, to be
(54:16):
fair, that might have been allthere was so I mean, well, when
you're young, also, the onlyjobs you know, are like baseball
player, astronaut, marinebiologist. Fine. Like that was
it?
Brandon Minnick (54:30):
I wanted to be a ninja turtle when I grew up.
Yep, sadly, still hasn'thappened.
Pj Metz (54:34):
Yeah, I was gonna say there's still times where this
is this branch is gonna leadyou.
Brandon Minnick (54:40):
Yeah. Well, so one of the thing I like about
that idea is just, you know, getstarted on your journey, because
you you don't really know whatwe're where you'll end up. My
first internship in it taught methat I didn't want to work in
it. And that's okay. And So, Igot I got a little lucky because
(55:02):
it was just a summer internship.
So I knew in three months thiswas going to be over. But I
respect people who work in it somuch because it is a thankless
job. Nobody contacts it, becausethey want to say thank you. They
contact it because they're madat you for maybe something they
did, and maybe something Iconfigured wrong on their
(55:25):
computer. Sure. But yeah,nobody's happy when they call
it. It's a very thankless job.
So make sure to thank your ITworker every now and again,
Matty Stratton (55:36):
I was just gonna say so just like we talked
about, like the content creator.
So it reminded me when I was atapartments, calm, my colleague
who like I, you know, I wasdirector of, you know, tech ops,
and then my colleague who ranlike data ops stuff for us, he
was like, you know, so Hal wasalways like, Matt, like, how
come you always have a newlaptop, or you get the new phone
(55:57):
or you get whatever. And I'mlike, because at Christmas, I go
down to the help desk, and Ibring them cookies. And in the
summer, I bring them homemadejam, and I treat them like
people. I mean, it wasn't justdriving, but it was like, I know
them, and I know who they are.
And I'm friends with them. Andso it means that I'm like, But
you, they only know you when youhave a problem. So you're just
(56:18):
another person, it doesn't meanthat they don't do good work,
but doesn't mean you have tobribe your help desk to get work
done by again, just like the barfor being a non terrible dude.
And tech is so low, the bar fortreating your helpdesk your HR,
the gate agent at the airport,all these people just don't be a
(56:40):
jerk. Like, and you will be likea breath of fresh air. That's
the thing. People are like, Oh,you're bribing. I was like, No,
I'm just being nice. And Ibrought my co workers to Yeah.
Like, you got to explain some ofthe spaces. It really is just,
(57:01):
it's it's building goodrelationships. And that's what
I've started to learn all DevRelis building honest, real,
authentic relationships withpeople, be yourself connect with
people. And on thoseconnections, you can talk about
work stuff, but the connectionsand the people come first. And
that's true of DevOps, you saidearlier, culture isn't the most
(57:23):
important, but it's the one wegot to teach you all the most
about because you're resistantto it for some reason. It's
culture. It's it's the people,right? Yes, be people be nice.
You can't hear it on thepodcast. But my shirt says Be
kind to
Brandon Minnick (57:42):
love it. So Maddie, we only have a couple
minutes left. In You are a very,very busy man. So I want to make
sure we share all the amazingthings you're doing. We've we've
talked about the podcast thatyou do. We've talked about
DevOps days, what else areyou're working on that we can
share with the world.
Matty Stratton (58:01):
So another thing so I just and maybe this is
breaking news, I'll put thishere. So for the last couple
years, I've hosted an onlinegame show called DevOps party
games, we actually decidedrecently that we're not doing it
regularly anymore. So we'regoing to keep doing it. Kind of
here. And there. We do it aspart of events. But still check
out DevOps party games.com It'sbeen super fun. I threatened I
(58:24):
am sorry, I told PJ he could beon and that was right before we
decided not to do it anymore. Sowe just do it can be on it's
yes, we just do them morespecial events now rather than,
you know, every month orwhatever. Yeah, totally fine.
Um, the other thing is, so I dofrom a work perspective. But
still, it's fun. I do a streamat Twitch tv slash pulumi. I do
(58:47):
that every Thursday. If you'relistening to this, it's already
happened in the past. But if youare watching the stream right
now, I decided I just decidedthat this Thursday, I'm going to
take my personal Hugo websiteand deploy it all with pulumi.
And you know, just sort of do astatic site build. I don't know
how it's gonna go. I just gonnajust sort of figure it out and
(59:08):
have some fun. But yeah, gotwitch.tv/pulumi Twitter is your
best place to find out whatevernonsense I'm up to. I'm at. At
Matt Stratton on Twitter. Andyeah, DevOpsDays Chicago is
hopefully coming up soon. Imean, it's hard to make any kind
of plans, but go todevopsdays.org to see any
(59:29):
upcoming DevOpsDays there's alot that are going on. I'm
excited to be back and I hope tosee you all on the internet's Mm
hmm. That's fantastic. Well,listen, you can follow us at a
pit stop TV. Make sure to checkout everything that Matt just
told you about DevOps days,DevOps party, all the all the
(59:50):
great stuff. And make sure tolike and subscribe to us on
YouTube so you can always seewhen we're on and live and we
will see you all next time.
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