February 18, 2025 • 46 mins
Technology is evolving at a rapid pace along with the tools, methods, and education practices. Today, Derek Morgan joins the show to discuss the intersection of automation, DevOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Derek is the Founder of More Than Certified, an e-learning platform hosting courses on DevOps, Terraform, Docker, and more. We discuss the importance of foundational knowledge in modern tech, the role of tools like Terraform in enterprise environments, and the future of DevOps education. Derek also provides valuable insights into content creation and the philosophy behind effective technical teaching methodologies.
Where to Find Derek
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/derekm1215
- Twitter: https://x.com/mtcderek
- Company: https://morethancertified.com
Show Links
- Linux Academy (Now part of Pluralsight): https://www.pluralsight.com/
- Terraform: https://www.terraform.io/
- OpenTOFU: https://opentofu.org/
- Jenkins: https://www.jenkins.io/
- GitHub Actions: https://github.com/features/actions
- Ansible: https://www.ansible.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Derek (00:00):
A lot of the stuff that we did was in the GUI a lot of
(00:03):
times, and so once I startedlearning Linux, I'm kind of like
, how do I catch up with thesepeople?
Pretty quickly I startedlearning AWS and then I'm like,
all right, now I've got to getto the command line.
And I picked up Terraform oneday and I was like whoa, that
was easy.
William (00:29):
It is 2025.
There is a blizzard just ragingoutside.
You know, the governor ofKentucky, andy Brashear, has
declared a state of emergency,and Yvonne Sharp couldn't be
happier.
You were right at home in thistype of weather.
It's your preferred weatherprofile, isn't it, yvonne?
Eyvonne (00:47):
That't be happier.
You were right at home in thistype of weather.
It's your preferred weatherprofile, isn't it, yvonne?
That would be an overstatement.
I am not a fan of the cold, butwhat I will say is we woke up
this morning and the power wason.
So I'm a happy camper.
I've got power, internet andsome chicken and rice soup on
the stove.
So no, complaints.
William (01:03):
Yeah, I, I mean for those in kentucky or anywhere
around.
We haven't.
I mean, I haven't seen snowlike this.
My kids have never seen snowlike this and ice.
It's been a winter wonderland.
Eyvonne (01:14):
So you have a lot of fun stuff in six to eight inches
of snow and then covered byhalf an inch of ice, which means
nobody's going anywhere.
William (01:23):
Yeah, shelter in place, get the hot chocolate and
listen to your favorite podcast.
And joining us today, hailingfrom Chicago, illinois, which is
equally cold and maybe not asdismal and crazy with the snow
and ice, is Derek Morgan.
How are you doing today, derek?
Derek (01:42):
Doing pretty well.
Thank you, happy to be here.
Awesome, how long have youtoday, derek, doing?
William (01:45):
pretty well.
Thank you Happy to be here.
Awesome, how long have you beenin Chicago?
Derek (01:49):
This was.
I moved right before the fundstarted, January 2020.
So I guess that makes, oh wow,half a decade now.
William (01:59):
How are you liking it so far?
Derek (02:01):
I mean, half a decade is not bad for me.
To be perfectly honest, it'snot too bad overall.
I'd say it's kind of got thatsmaller town feel with a big
city atmosphere.
So it's a really good mix,depending on which neighborhood
you're in.
So I can't really complain.
The tech industry's pretty goodhere and the beer scene is
(02:22):
fantastic.
William (02:23):
so do you like chicago style pizza?
Derek (02:27):
uh, tavern style there's.
I'm not sure if you're familiarwith it.
Tavern style is a very thincrackery crust that you get at a
lot of the bars and pubs around.
Uh, the chicago style issomething you do with your
family about once or twice ayear when they visit, check it
off the list, take a long napafter and then get back to the
(02:48):
normal pizza.
William (02:49):
A long nap is right.
Eyvonne (02:51):
The tavern style, I imagine, has the added benefit
of being ready quickly.
Derek (02:56):
It's not 45 minutes in Luma, that's right.
Eyvonne (03:00):
Like those deep dish.
Yeah, full of carbs verygluten-y.
Yeah.
Chicago style pizza, but oh sosatisfying.
Oh yeah, full of carbs, verygluten-y, yeah, chicago style
pizza, but oh so satisfying.
William (03:08):
Oh yeah, pretty good stuff.
Yeah, I like Giordano's everyonce in a while and they've kind
of branched out of Chicago sowe have one in like Indianapolis
, which isn't too far from whereI'm at.
So every once in a while,mainly for kids' travel sports,
we'll hit up Giordano's whilewe're up there.
Got to get those calories backright, Exactly so do you want to
(03:30):
give us a brief, just kind of arundown, a background of your
career, Like how did you findyourself working in tech in the
first place and how did you getto where you are today?
You're kind of like a trustedexpert in DevOps infrastructure
as code and teaching.
So how did that happen?
Derek (03:50):
It was kind of a long, erratic story overall, so I'll
try to keep it straight to thepoint.
Kind of started out working, Ithink I got into retail is kind
of where it all started.
Started getting into tech thereand then I started seeing that,
you know, retail is not quitewhat it used to be, and this was
years ago.
Circuit City was still open.
(04:11):
But it started getting to thepoint where Circuit City was
closing down and all of a suddenI realized like that wasn't
really the direction I wanted togo.
So I hopped into the MCSA booksFor those that may not know,
talking Microsoft way way backwhen Azure wasn't even a thought
and so MCSA, ccna, cisco, gotinto the networking, got into
(04:34):
kind of everything and finally,after a lot of digging and
opportunity, opened in Atlantaat a hosting company.
So it threw me right to thewolves.
I got to experience some nicetrue DDoS attacks that took down
entire regions.
I got to kind of play with thereal infrastructure and see what
(04:55):
the grownups do other thanrunning.
I used to run like a smallcomputer store and stuff like
that, but once I got into thebig boy stuff, that's where it
kind of took off.
I started working in hosting ormanaged consulting after that
dealing with very rich peoplewho had very small problems.
Then I kind of realized thatthrough all of this I always
(05:19):
ended up in one place and thatwas helping my colleagues.
No matter where I was, nomatter how big the problem or
whatever, I always ended upbeing the one that my colleagues
would come to.
I was always the one writingthe documentation and I realized
that teaching was what I wantedto do.
So a lot of you may rememberLinux Academy way back when kind
of ended up with A Cloud Guruand then ended up with
(05:40):
Pluralsight a whole lot ofpaperwork and mess there, but
anyway started working there.
That's where I really found mypassion.
I had to branch off a littlebit.
After that dealt withmanufacturing that was my first
big production Kubernetesdeployment.
That was fun.
Did a bunch of manufacturingstuff all of that and then
(06:01):
eventually teaching called meback.
Eyvonne (06:03):
So here I am, off all of that and then eventually,
teaching called me back.
So here I am.
I really love how you um, youlooked at commonalities in your
all of your roles and and reallystarted to examine.
You know, where is it that Ifind myself?
What is it that I see is theunique thing that I bring into
this situation, and how do Itake that and then capitalize on
(06:25):
that in the future?
I think sometimes folks aren'taren't self-reflective enough to
to connect those dots and theymiss opportunities to to really
shine in their own unique way.
So I think that's a cool partof your story.
Derek (06:40):
Yeah, absolutely, and I think you know a little bit of
neuro atypicalness kind of leadsinto that.
You know you, sometimes it'snot always a choice, it's just
kind of flow with whatever makesyou happy.
And overall teaching made mehappy more than grinding till
two in the morning on somethingwhere a lot of people honestly
really enjoy grinding on.
(07:01):
That problem Me, that problemis helping someone and where you
know, sometimes you like whenthe lights flicker properly,
sometimes you like when the codedeploys.
I like when somebody sends me amessage and says, hey, man,
thanks, I really appreciate it.
That's helped me get a job,whatever.
So you know, overall it's nottotally unselfish, but I will
(07:22):
say that I'm really happy withmy journey so far.
William (07:27):
That's awesome.
You said a few things there Ithought that were really good
and to kind of take and expandon them.
So like, as we march into 2025,I can't believe I'm saying that
2025.
I can't imagine a better timeto like, if you're entering into
tech, it's a great time to comeinto tech, but it is a double
(07:47):
edged sword.
Oh yeah, there's so many newtechnologies and there's just
there's way too many ways to dothings and historically, like
going back, things were muchmore clear, much more defined.
But with that clarity also camethis rigidity.
(08:07):
Is rigidity a word I don't know?
Eyvonne (08:09):
doesn't matter yeah, awesome.
William (08:11):
But you, you typically had to follow like a, a
predetermined path with like aparticular type of technology
with much less room for uh,crossing disciplines, like if
you were, if you were going tobe a network engineer, you got a
net plus and a CCNA and you dugright in.
If you wanted to write code, itwas usually Java or C++, maybe
(08:34):
a comp sci degree, I guess,depending on how far you go back
.
But I can't help but think andhave empathy for folks coming
into tech because of theconfusion.
There's just got to be so muchconfusion on where to start,
like DevOps is cool, cloud is ahuge thing and it's always good
(08:55):
to maybe learn a programminglanguage and you need to
sprinkle Linux throughout allthe things.
So I guess the question is howis technology and the path to
learning technology evolved fromthis like earlier days of doing
things?
Derek (09:11):
You know the foundations are still so, so, so important,
and this is something I'velearned.
It's definitely bit me multipletimes where you know you learn
this shiny new technology andthen all of a sudden you're like
, uh-oh, what exactly is this?
And it takes you twice as longto learn this technology because
(09:31):
you don't understand where it'scoming from.
You've got words that arederived from old technologies
from the 80s that show up, and Iknow there's actually been a
lot of discourse in theeducation community like should
we be using these words thatdon't have a real world analog
anymore?
And uh, to use one which and Idon't want to start any
(09:54):
arguments or anything but youknow like, uh, the master,
master branch.
Nobody had a clue where thatactually came from.
You know in like when it firstcame out, you know talking about
whether it was tape masters orwhether it was this or that, and
there's so many different waysto interpret it that you know,
honestly, main just kind of mademore sense to everybody, and
(10:15):
that's perfectly fine, and Ithink that happens with a lot of
words nowadays.
People are like why do you, whyare you using this term?
And then somebody's like oh, Iguess debug is actually a lot
more famous one and a moreexciting one.
You know it's from what I'veread.
Eyvonne (10:30):
It's actually getting bugs out of the computer,
physical, actual, like roachespulling them out of mainframes,
my favorite example of that andthis is not exactly tech, but
there are words that stay withus, right and back in the
typesetting days when you had,when letters you know physical
(10:52):
letters were placed in a pressto make newspapers, the capital
letters were in a A case thatwas up high and the small
letters were in a case that wasdown low, and so your capital
letters were uppercase and yoursmall letters were lowercase.
And that comes from the newsprinting, typesetting industry.
(11:15):
And those words are still withus, even though their original
meaning is almost lost toantiquity, except when somebody
you know picks up a cool storylike that tells it right and
there's, there's there's allkinds of history in in tech that
way as well.
(11:35):
Right that we keep the names,the, the.
You know the kid who saw afloppy disk and asked why you,
why somebody 3d printed a savebutton.
Right Like those.
Those things happen all thetime.
Derek (11:51):
Yeah, no, I that's.
That's a huge thing and youknow, some of this stuff does
build a barrier to entry on thenewer technologies and things
like that.
And it's funny.
You know, you bring the newgreat thing.
You know AI it's just a bunchof if statements, right?
Or somebody's like oh, I wasdoing AI what they call machine
(12:13):
learning in Excel in the 80s, orI guess not the 80s for Excel,
but you know, like a lot ofthese concepts have been around,
oh yeah, there you go.
Lotus Notes everybody's favoriteyeah, so a lot of this stuff
has been around.
Oh yeah, there you go.
Lotus notes everybody'sfavorite yeah, so a lot of this
stuff has been around forever.
So getting that foundationmakes it easier for people to
understand the why behind a lotof new technologies, and I'll
(12:37):
get a lot of people to kind ofhead up the stack a little bit.
I've got a lot of people wholearn Terraform from me, who
come in and they're in my courseand they're like, hey, I keep
having this problem and I lookand it's because they have no
idea how to read the output froma bash script that was there.
You know, the Terraform stuffkind of makes sense.
They learned cloud, they gottheir cloud practitioner and
(12:58):
their AWS associates, theylearned all this other stuff.
But the second I threw a bashscript in there they fell apart.
So I'm trying to make sure thatI know to step back and consider
those people and if you'retrying to get into the industry,
make sure you do learn thosefoundations.
You're going to need them andeven if you don't use these
(13:19):
specific things, the knowledgeyou gain just from the why of
these things and learning whatyou're solving helps you
understand new products a lotfaster.
So if you want to navigate thiscrazy landscape of a thousand
things, just go and learn whatthey're based on, and any new
thing that comes out isbasically going to be the same
(13:40):
thing, with differentterminology, different UI or a
different CLI.
Eyvonne (13:44):
That's great and that begs an interesting question,
because this this is something Ithink about often is is how do
you know where, where to startwith folks?
Because you know you.
You could go all the way backto number theory and ones and
zeros and vacuum tubes and andthings like that that aren't
(14:05):
100% applicable today, or youcould go so far the other
direction, that there'sabsolutely no foundation.
Do you have any thoughts on howto draw the line and where to
really start along the technicalevolution curve?
Derek (14:21):
Lots of thoughts but no real solutions.
That's a very difficultquestion and I've definitely had
polls on LinkedIn.
I've had conversations.
I've seen big arguments oninterview questions.
They're expecting someone whois coming in as a cloud engineer
to know some.
We'll just say Fortran, justfor kicks.
(14:44):
I know that's probably notrealistic, but just to really
hammer the point home.
You know they're asking forthings because it scratches that
manager's itch, it makes themfeel good about what they've
done and they must be gettingthe best engineers.
But at the end of the day, isyour product really that
important that somebody needs todo this type of stuff?
Is it really that importantthat somebody needs to do this
(15:05):
type of stuff?
Is it really that complicated?
And I think a lot of thesehiring managers think that their
stuff is that much morecomplicated that they need these
10X engineers who can do stufffrom the 80s when in reality
somebody who just came out ofschool or somebody who just got
a couple associatecertifications and really
practiced could do just as well.
(15:26):
So it's a little bit ofgatekeeping and I don't like
that in a lot of ways.
So deciding where to start isprobably the hardest part, I
think.
With AI, especially now, willyou always have a calculator in
your pocket?
No, that's the way they alwayssaid it.
Now, of course.
Well, now we have ai right infront of us that will answer so
(15:48):
many of these problems.
So should somebody be able todo a one-liner bash script with
regex and you know awk and saidfrom from memory maybe not, but
debugging it is still veryimportant because ai is not
there yet.
William (16:04):
That's such a good, yeah, linux.
We've been on a tear with Linuxlately, yvonne and I, with a
lot of our guests, because it'sjust such a core skill, like you
were just saying earlier, likeinterpreting that output, but
it's everywhere, like when everytime I, every time I build a
pipeline, I'm doing somethingwith Bash.
It seems like it's the gluebetween all these different
things bootstrapping this, doingthat, and it's not like it's
(16:26):
some huge thousands of lines,elegant piece of code, but it's
maybe 30 lines here, 40 linesthere, 10 lines there.
And understanding the filesystem, how to mount things, how
to use SCP, how to transferfiles.
Those things are never.
(16:47):
I don't know if they're evergoing to go away, I use them all
the time still and it's just.
That's one of those skills thatI see is like really just the
hierarchical file structure oflinux, like file systems aren't
understood anymore.
It's like oh, I just search athing and that's how I get to
this thing.
Well, they're like okay, wemissed the file, the file system
(17:09):
hierarchy, completely.
Eyvonne (17:13):
You know I, I think about you know when you're
talking about where to start,especially when it comes to
education, and I think onehelpful thing to think through
is how do I get somebody to apoint where they can do a
practical thing?
You know, like I, you know howdo I help them solve a problem
and teach them a thing that isdirectly applicable.
(17:35):
I think you know you need topresent some theory and you need
to explain things, but I thinkif you can help people
practically solve a problem andthen grow out from there like
concentric circles, I thinkthat's a really good approach.
Years ago my oldest, who's nowa software developer there was a
bring your kid to work day.
I worked from home at the timeand so I brought him to work
(17:59):
with me.
But what I did is I bought araspberry pie, sat him up in the
room with me, sent him a linkto a document, gave him all the
pieces and basically told him tospend the day to build himself
his own video game system.
So he took his Raspberry Pi, heloaded the RetroPi OS on it, he
(18:21):
downloaded his mods, hedeployed them on his Raspberry
Pi and at the end of the day hehad a working video game system
and, and he's a softwaredeveloper today, you know and,
interestingly enough, william,he and I were talking the other
day and he was ranting about thefact that people don't know how
to use hierarchical filesystems anymore.
So, um, I've been a success,just so you know, I love that.
(18:47):
And then I took the contrarianposition.
I was like well, do they reallyneed them, though?
Does your average user reallyneed to know how to use a
hierarchical file system?
Tell me?
So we had that conversation.
I do agree with you if you'retechnical, but anyway, I think
finding something that folks canpractically use and wrap their
arms around today and make themproductive and then growing from
(19:10):
there is an incrediblyimportant strategy, because you
can always go back further andthere's always more to learn,
but if you can solve a problemtoday, then you can build on
that and be productive and thencontinue to grow then you can
build on that and be productiveand then continue to grow.
Derek (19:27):
Yeah, I'd say in, file systems are an interesting one.
I haven't had to really mount afile system in forever.
Most everything I do is inephemeral boxes.
I run GitHub code spaces foralmost everything that I have to
do.
Otherwise I piece it out andthrow it somewhere, whether it,
whether it's S3 or whether it's,you know it's on serverless
(19:49):
thing or a container containersor something that I think still
are going to be around foreverand you can't just you cannot
skip to Kubernetes.
You've got to understand howthe Docker file system works and
how all of that works.
Well, you know Docker or anytype of container system and
that's something you know.
It's a black box for a lot ofpeople and when you actually
(20:11):
break it apart and see that likea Docker container is just
these files and directoriesspread apart on your computer,
it really kind of becomes veryinteresting and brings the whole
Kubernetes ecosystem a lotcloser.
It makes it make a lot moresense for you.
That's something I noticed.
There's that the next one, Ithink SSH keys Please learn to
(20:33):
understand those and filepermissions, because that is a
nightmare for everybody, I'd say.
I would honestly say 90% of thetickets I get on my courses are
related to the SSH keys that weuse.
I would say that actually mightbe a little low.
That's probably.
Most of the problems I get isSSH keys and then manipulating
(20:58):
the path, like, honestly, can wenot fix this somehow?
It is just, you know,installing a new binary in Linux
is still way too hard for a lotof people, Even for me.
I get tripped up sometimes,especially dealing with, like
Python, environments and stufflike that.
But manipulating the path andpermissions on that, permissions
(21:21):
on executables, making sure youcan run something that,
honestly, is where I would Iwould start is understanding the
file system, like you said, andhow to get these, these
binaries, where they need to goit's funny.
William (21:34):
You said ssh key.
So I have a linkedin coursewith terraform and part of the
course is, like you know, weneed to get to this ec2 instance
and so, like I have thecommands and the readme and
everything like ssh dash I.
Okay, here's the path to whereyou generated the thing.
Okay, now you gotta log into itand that is like again, I got
(21:56):
tons of emails and you know, hey, it's not working.
Like okay, you're not puttingin the path.
Okay, where's the Well, wheredid you generate the key?
And it's just this reverseengineering of like okay, this
lives in a directory somewhere.
You're just pointing thatcommand to that directory, to
where this file is, and then oh,it works.
Now, you know it's one of thosemisunderstood things.
(22:18):
And you're so being a teacher,I mean you're, I guess you're a
teacher pretty much by trade now.
And I teacher, I mean you're, Iguess you're a teacher pretty
much by trade now and I wouldsay, like a good teacher goes a
long way, especially with, Imean, I looking back like I had
some really good teachers overthe years that kind of inspired
me to just be better and, um,you know whether it was in
person or in an online class,you know.
(22:40):
But what about the teachers,though?
You know what inspires theteachers.
Um, so you started more thanCertified, which I actually went
through.
You have some free courses onthere and it's really good
content.
No paywall, you don't have toregister, you don't have to do
anything, you just go in andclick Go.
But how were you inspired tosort of go off on your own and
(23:01):
start this content creation andcourse journey?
Derek (23:06):
Well, I mean, linux Academy was great.
I honestly, when I started mynew thing after that, I really
just I was burnt out.
It does burn you out a prettygood bit, especially doing AWS
courses, because one reinventand everything you've created is
useless.
Now you know it will brickentire courses.
And if you're using the UI thenit's even worse because then
(23:30):
you have to rerecord becausepeople will complain and
absolutely wreck your coursesbecause a button moved.
So I think once I had controlover this and I was inspired to
start again, I hopped on afriend's podcast actually years
ago he doesn't have it anymoreHopped on that and a bunch of
people said, oh yeah, I rememberyou from Linux Academy, will
(23:52):
you ever do another Terraformcourse?
And I said I guess it soundslike a pretty fun idea.
And honestly it caught fire.
I did very, very, very well andI created another couple.
I ended up getting a job as adev rel at another company
because, especially after theheart surgery, you know this,
this stuff, if there's anythingthat puts pressure on your heart
(24:12):
, it's it's teaching.
It's very stressful, especiallyrunning it yourself.
But you know, once, once I kindof got control over the content
, you start to enjoy it a littlebit more than having someone
over your shoulder yelling atyou hey, you have to do this
because this one corporationneeds it.
And you may never get thatreturn, at least the squishy
(24:36):
return, the one for where thepeople message you and say, hey
thanks, you're not going to getlike that corporation reaching
out and be like, hey thanks, yougot me a new job, or you're
going to get in a lot of trouble, like that corporation reaching
out and be like, hey thanks,you got me a new job, or you're
going to get in a lot of trouble.
So the idea of like being ableto control things and all of
that, it also motivated me tocome out with my own platform,
which I migrated to a newplatform which I'm liking a
(24:57):
whole lot.
It's giving me control to dokind of my own thing.
I'm working on a greater now.
I'm working on, you know,different lab environments,
stuff like that, so trying toexpand and some scratching two
inches at once.
I get to do the teaching but Ialso get to do the engineering
and that's that's really fun.
Still doing some hosts, likeyou know, devrel type stuff for
(25:20):
companies on the side, becauserent does need to get paid and
unfortunately when you'rebetween courses sometimes that
money does dip a little bitwhile you're still trying to
figure it out.
But overall it's just been sosatisfying kind of moving and
building this new platform andmaking a big move to some really
cool new stuff.
William (25:43):
That's great.
I know that content, you knoweverybody.
You know looking, you knowlooking back, I had a teacher
one time at a vocational schoolwhen I was learning.
That was in high school still,I think it was net plus.
We had a vocational school wecould go to and, or no, it was
CCNA, I think I can't remember.
But anyway, we, we had ourbooks.
We came into class there waslike I think there was less than
(26:05):
15 of us and teacher comes inand said, hey, stack all your
books over there.
We never opened them once.
He had this gigantic pile ofhubs, switches, just junk PCs
that had to be put together thatwe could test with.
We just started building fromlike day one.
That was like the whole entireyear and that was, I mean, I'll
(26:27):
always remember this teacher.
It was one of the best.
I mean that's a really good wayfor me to learn.
But I mean, of course you can'tdo that virtually and most of
the stuff we touch now doesn'thave a physical component to it.
But what I mean to say is, likemost teachers or creators have
their own philosophy.
You know, when I was learning,doing the linkedin learning
stuff, my philosophy, like whatI would really try and do, was,
(26:51):
you know, revolve, you know makeit uh, revolve around, like
fundamentals, but also kind oflike what yvonne was saying,
like solving a real problem,like taking a problem, baking in
the fundamentals and thenbuilding out the code and doing
a thing you know, a real worldtype scenario.
But do you have any sort ofguiding principles or
(27:12):
philosophies that you try tostand behind?
You know that adhere to, youknow, when you build, like new
learning content yeah, I meanit's called more than certified
for a reason.
Derek (27:22):
The idea is, this is not supposed to be like an exam
course.
In fact, I don't even take theexam before I do it anymore.
I used to, but now I actuallyjust I'll read the exam guide
and make sure I hit everything,but I don't want to limit myself
to, oh, this isn't covered onthe exam, so who cares?
(27:43):
It's more of a I'm going tomake sure I hit everything, no
matter what.
But that pretty much just, youknow really just terraformed
that I've done any exam levelcontent for, and part of that is
because I do want to just buildand, to be perfectly honest,
sometimes I do need to dive in alittle bit more on some slides
(28:04):
and things like that.
There are people who do wantthat intro content and I am
sometimes bad because I get soexcited about building.
My entire course is built aroundbuilding something and I
managed to squeeze in everytopic into an actual project.
I try to do minimal like okay,now we've done that, so now
delete it, type stuff, becausethat's certainly something that
(28:27):
a lot of people will do.
But the idea is that you'regoing to learn everything that's
on that test through an actualproject that will deploy and
will work, and sometimes that'seasier.
It's very easy to plan and Ihate slides.
I would rather jump out of mywindow than do another slide.
So it's actually easier for meto go over code than it is to
(28:49):
sit here and try to pile a bunchof information into a slide,
but I think sometimes thatprobably isn't the best route.
I do need to do a few moreslides and build a few more
foundations on this stuff, butoverall it's been very
successful and a lot of peopledo my entire course and then go
do a practice exam or somethingsomewhere and make sure they're
(29:09):
in the right spot, but overallnothing is better than building.
William (29:15):
I love that.
I mean a lot of the.
I've studied, I've gone throughso many cert training material
like over the years and nevertook a lot of the certs like I
did it honestly, just for thelike hey, my employer provides,
like one of my employers likeconvinced them to actually do
purchase seats for linux academy, for the cloud sandboxes and
(29:37):
such.
And so I had a few teams and we, we didn't stop at our expert,
our subject matter expertisearea.
We were, you know, learningadjacent things.
And then once some I mean,there were some folks on on the
team that really embraced it,some that were just like I don't
, I got to do this, you know.
But the ones that reallyembraced it, they took off like
(29:59):
I couldn't almost get them tostop, like, hey, you got a day
job, you need to set time to dothis, you know.
And they were just, you know,sucking in all that information.
And then it, then it showed intheir day-to-day work they were
performing better, they had newand better and creative ideas
and such.
And that's why it's soimportant.
I encourage any big enterpriseout there for your training
(30:20):
dollars, empower your folks tolearn.
It's not about just getting apaper cert you want them to
provide value and you want themto feel fulfilled in the role
that they're doing.
It's huge.
Derek (30:31):
I built a lot of those labs, actually A ton of those
labs.
I did a lot of the backend type, behind the scenes stuff to get
a lot of those Linux Academylabs out.
So it's the guiding principlefor a lot of the stuff that I'm
building now.
Only I'm doing things slightlydifferent and I haven't released
this totally to the public yet.
(30:52):
I've hinted it, but I foundthat in those labs you're
missing probably the mostimportant concept involved with
learning actually learning realtech stuff, and that is breaking
stuff.
A pristine sandbox is nevergoing to teach you what you need
(31:13):
all the way through.
Because I know God, I'mlearning Python, I'll spend more
time setting up the Pythonenvironment than I will actually
on the Python code.
Python's easy Environments arehard, and so what I'm actually
working on now is a grader, aCLI that you will run on your
own system and you'll grade codethat you code on your own
(31:35):
system.
So you keep everything that youwrite.
Everything is all yours.
You can expand on it.
You can do anything you want.
Once you get done with thetasks that you do, you still own
the code.
So if you want to continuebuilding after the course,
you've got it.
So the grader will report backto my system.
It will say hey look, good job,You've passed.
(31:57):
You can now take your code.
You don't have to move it offof a lab, you don't have to move
it out of a sandbox.
You get to keep it exactlywhere it is.
Eyvonne (32:05):
So so for me, one of the one of the best
certification experiences I everhad was, if you remember, the
Red Hat Linux certification fromyears ago and and it's it's
been over a decade I'm not goingto do the math, but the
certification there was awritten part of the exam which
was around, you know it wassimple and you only had to have
(32:29):
a 50% pass rate.
But then there was also a buildand a troubleshoot and they
gave you a broken system and youhad to go through and resolve
it.
And I mean I remember eventaking the exam.
For somebody who had worked inenterprise IT and in troubleshot
systems for years.
I feel like that part wasreally pretty straightforward.
There were some master bootrecord things and, and, yeah,
(32:49):
some like files in the wrongplace and then some permissions
issues and stuff like that thatyou had to troubleshoot.
But certainly engaging and thenworking to fix broken things is
a is a very different learningexperience.
Derek (33:04):
Absolutely.
The RHCSA was the one that Idid by them and the first
question was eh, whatever, it'salready expired, they can come
get it.
But it was as long as you kindof had heard that somewhere, it
(33:32):
was pretty great.
But of course expecting someoneto memorize that is sometimes
that's a little brutal.
Overall, but I think that'sreally the way to go and a lot
of people are moving to that.
The new Terraform exam is allhands-on.
So I did a poll the other dayjust talking about how you know
we're talking about these oldertechnologies and stuff like that
(33:52):
, and it was asking like what ismy next content?
I can't put food on the tablewith Terraform for the rest of
my life and we can go all daytalking about Terraform and
OpenTOFU.
But I think you've had plentyof guests go down that track on
here already.
But I think you've had plentyof guests go down that track on
here already.
So I'm like you know, I've gota Terraform Ansible and Jenkins
(34:14):
course which has crushed it justfor years, and I'm like you
know, maybe I should replacethat with GitHub Actions.
And then in that I was like,hey, should I replace this or
refresh it?
And then in that poll, I wasalso like or should I do DevOps
with AI, just to see who's outthere DevOps with AI?
(34:35):
It just crushed it.
It doubled everything else,which kind of blew me away, to
be really honest.
But I think I can do it in agood way.
Second place was Terraform,ansible and Jenkins these
enterprises.
Sometimes you just need asledgehammer to do something,
(34:56):
and Jenkins is a sledgehammer.
And when you're talking aboutthese enterprises like, oh no,
switch to GitHub Actions becauseit's cool and nice, these guys
don't care.
They're not going to change upsomething that's been working
for a decade just becausesomething is neater or has, like
you know, one extra feature.
Jenkins is still very muchalive and well.
(35:17):
Ansible is very much alive andwell, and so I think you know if
you you're probably hurtingyourself by I'm not saying you
need to learn it, but you won'thurt yourself to learn it.
If you learn the principles ofJenkins, you're going to be able
to use anything.
William (35:34):
Yeah, jenkins is a, I have some.
Yeah, it's a mountain.
Yeah, there's a lot easier waysto do things, but you're right,
they, you know, if you thinkabout every use case and these
are kind of like divisive topicsactually.
So building, I think aboutevery use case and these are
(35:55):
kind of like divisive topicsactually.
So building, I'll just go andlike say, like building
infrastructure atop, like an sdkwith a general purpose language
like python or go or type typescript, versus using, like these
kind of some of the things yousaid, these infrastructure
platforms like ansible,terraform, open tofu, all these,
um, my, my case against theformer is especially like you
were saying enterprise as acompany scales.
You have more hands in thatcookie jar.
(36:17):
You have more, uh, you know yougot these hot shot developers
coming in with their creativeminds at work.
Their wheels are spinning.
You know they.
They want to do lots of customthings and if you give them the
power to, they will, and I cantell from experience this gets
out of control very quicklybecause at the end of the day,
you want consistency and theability to enforce consistency
(36:38):
across a large number of teamsfor the betterment of the
business.
So kind of what you're sayingresonates because Ansible.
You know it may not be the besttool on the entire planet for
configuring a, an image at buildtime, installing some packages
or doing some things, but youknow what most of the folks I've
worked with in the past havethe ability to pick it up and
(37:01):
start using it rather quickly.
Same with terraform.
It's not going to solve everyproblem out there, but it is a
platform and it helps with thatscale and with that maintaining
consistency.
Derek (37:15):
I'd say I get a lot of pushback from these hotshot
developers.
And not to throw you guys underthe bus, but some of these guys
come up and like, well, whatabout this one super niche
problem that I encountered atFortune X hundred company?
And it's like there arethousands and thousands and
(37:35):
thousands of startups out therethat just need to get some stuff
out the door.
You know, like not everybodyneeds to go and build something
with code and, honestly, thewhat you said about consistency
is the number one thing I chimein on.
I say, look, have you ever hadto debug somebody's inventive
(37:55):
solution?
Like no, guess who's going tohave more documented solutions
out there Probably Terraform forexactly what you're doing.
Or OpenTOFU or whatever it'scalled HCL Probably HCL in tofu,
or whatever h.
What's called hcl?
Probably hcl.
Uh, you know, like your weirdlittle hacky java triple nested
loop thing probably is not goingto be easy to debug five years
(38:18):
down the road yeah, andespecially if they leave at some
point and they were the sort ofthe keeper of the keys to the
logic to that thing.
William (38:26):
oh, oh boy.
I mean I guess it's easiernowadays because you can maybe
plug it into some AI and figureout what the heck it's doing,
but yeah, historically it's beenlike a no-go.
Derek (38:37):
Maybe why there's so much pushback.
Eyvonne (38:40):
Well, and we're often more impressed with our own
cleverness than other people areright.
You know, folks want solutionsto problems and, especially if
you're a leader in an enterprise, you have to be able to find
people to support yourenvironment and it has to be
(39:00):
supportable and there are allkinds of requirements and
constraints that that,especially in heavily regulated
industries um, regulatedindustries that matter and that
the business has to account for.
And even if a tool requires aperson or even a team, a little
(39:22):
bit more effort, it can saveeffort across the organization
in inconsistencies, inportability of code, in training
costs, in the ability for folksto move around inside the
organization if they'reconsistent is supportable.
(39:44):
That you can find other peopleto work on, that has support,
because so many organizationspay for support to keep their
executives out of hot water.
Frankly, you know, and and Ihave a um, a bat phone, you know
to pick up and call to, tobring in the cavalry when they
(40:06):
need to, and all of those thingsare objective realities inside
of enterprises and it's not justabout who can write the most
clever recursive function, forexample.
Derek (40:20):
Absolutely, I agree.
The whole I guess a little lessfriendly term, throat to choke,
is just absolutely huge andthat's something when I worked
at one of the major tacos.
You know, terraformcollaboration softwares, that
was something we heard a lot of.
Uh is, you know, like peopleare like, oh, I can build this
(40:42):
in github actions and somebody'slike, well, we pay you two $200
an hour and we can pay themnowhere near that for a year to
help, basically, be there ifsomething goes wrong.
To fix all these things youmight have to do two hacky
things instead of a thousandhacky things, but overall we
(41:04):
need you somewhere else, notbuilding GitHub Actions
pipelines.
But you know, overall we needyou somewhere else, not building
GitHub Actions pipelines.
We need you building theinfrastructure, doing actual
architecture and making you know, making sure this stuff stays
up.
The deployment's just a pieceof the puzzle.
So I think you know the wholebuild versus buy and I don't
even know how we got here.
But the build versus buyargument is certainly, you know,
(41:25):
an interesting one.
William (41:31):
But I'm seeing a lot of people really opting to buy
most of the time.
Likewise, yeah, I, I know we'regoing.
I don't know how long we'vebeen on because it reset the
timer, but I think we're runningup on time.
Okay, yeah, I think we are.
But I wanted to ask something.
I'm just kind of curious.
So I had an aha moment.
Like many years ago I was one ofthese folks.
It was like you know, terraform, this new hipster garbage, get
(41:51):
this out of here.
So, like I was in like a hotseat basically with what would
become like a devops team and Iremember like what made it stick
for me.
So I had written this stuff.
I can't remember if it waspython, yeah, I think it was
python, I can't remember, butI'd written this stuff to deploy
this infrastructure and I waslike showing them all the you
(42:14):
know, all the things we've beentalking about.
Look at how clever this is.
Like, oh, look at me, I wrotethis, it's so good.
And then there was one devopsengineer that like put me on
blast.
He was like okay, how do you,how do you destroy all that?
Then and I was like uh, I'mstill trying to work that out.
And I had all these.
Okay, like because you createda, the vpc, you have all these
(42:36):
defaults that get created, butthen you have to delete them
individually and like all thisstuff and everything has
dependencies.
And he's like you know how wedo it in terraform destroy.
And then it was all gone and Iwas like, oh snap, this is
really cool, this is awesome.
And, honestly, ever since thenI've been like a huge fan, like
terraform is probably one of thelike.
(42:56):
I used to tend towards generalpurpose languages, like most of
the time, but terraform opentofu either.
They are fantastic tools butlike what made you like these
tools so much?
Like what made it stick for you?
Derek (43:12):
um, well, uh, for one thing it was.
It was just interesting.
I I picked up terraform prettyearly in my real devops journey.
Now I'd been in you knowinfrastructure forever, but you
know I'm like literally workingwith Windows machines.
A lot of the stuff that we did,powershell was still in its
(43:33):
infancy, so a lot of the stuffthat we did was in the GUI a lot
of times.
And so once I started learningLinux, I'm kind of like how do I
catch up with these people?
Pretty quickly I startedlearning AWS and then I'm like
all right, now I've got to getto the command line.
And I picked up Terraform oneday and I was like whoa, that
(43:56):
was easy, you know.
And I played with Bodo a lotand I really tried to be that
cool kid who was like I don'tneed Terraform, check this out.
And I'm like what am I doing?
You know, terraform is just somuch easier.
William (44:06):
Yeah, much easier.
Derek (44:08):
Yeah, it just worked and it was cool and it was early, so
I got, you know, scratched thatitch.
I was one of the earlieradopters of it because I needed
to teach it and I taught it andI'll admit I probably didn't use
as many best practices as Icould for that first course, but
you know it worked and I'velearned a lot since then.
(44:29):
And you know, I definitely seethe cracks, I know there are
definitely cracks in thelanguage and all of that.
But people ask me all the timejust use Pulumi, just use SDK,
just use this.
And I'm not or CDK rather, andI'm just like you know, if it
doesn't work for you, that'sfine, do it.
But for me it makes absolutelyno sense to switch to a whole
(44:54):
new paradigm for a couple weirdedge cases that I can't quite
nail down.
William (45:00):
Yeah, and in those cases I'll figure it out.
Derek (45:03):
I'll create a shim if I have to a very readable shim,
create a shim if I have to avery readable shim, but I'll
create a shim for the littlestuff and otherwise Terraform is
going to work just fine versus,as we've said, going way off
the rails and completelyreinventing the wheel, so I love
it.
William (45:19):
Do you have anything else, yvonne, before we part
ways?
No good, awesome.
Well, it has been a pleasuretalking to you, derek.
No good, Awesome.
Well, it has been a pleasuretalking to you, Derek.
Derek (45:33):
Where can the nice folks out there find you?
I'd say, you know, obviously mysite, morethancertifiedcom, and
LinkedIn, probably the bestplace to get me.
Otherwise, you know, I'm on X,I'm on Blue Sky, but we're still
trying to figure all that out.
So I think LinkedIn and my siteare probably the two best
places.
A lot of the stuff that we did was in the GUI a lot of
(00:03):
times, and so once I startedlearning Linux, I'm kind of like
, how do I catch up with thesepeople?
Pretty quickly I startedlearning AWS and then I'm like,
all right, now I've got to getto the command line.
And I picked up Terraform oneday and I was like whoa, that
was easy.
William (00:29):
It is 2025.
There is a blizzard just ragingoutside.
You know, the governor ofKentucky, andy Brashear, has
declared a state of emergency,and Yvonne Sharp couldn't be
happier.
You were right at home in thistype of weather.
It's your preferred weatherprofile, isn't it, yvonne?
Eyvonne (00:47):
That't be happier.
You were right at home in thistype of weather.
It's your preferred weatherprofile, isn't it, yvonne?
That would be an overstatement.
I am not a fan of the cold, butwhat I will say is we woke up
this morning and the power wason.
So I'm a happy camper.
I've got power, internet andsome chicken and rice soup on
the stove.
So no, complaints.
William (01:03):
Yeah, I, I mean for those in kentucky or anywhere
around.
We haven't.
I mean, I haven't seen snowlike this.
My kids have never seen snowlike this and ice.
It's been a winter wonderland.
Eyvonne (01:14):
So you have a lot of fun stuff in six to eight inches
of snow and then covered byhalf an inch of ice, which means
nobody's going anywhere.
William (01:23):
Yeah, shelter in place, get the hot chocolate and
listen to your favorite podcast.
And joining us today, hailingfrom Chicago, illinois, which is
equally cold and maybe not asdismal and crazy with the snow
and ice, is Derek Morgan.
How are you doing today, derek?
Derek (01:42):
Doing pretty well.
Thank you, happy to be here.
Awesome, how long have youtoday, derek, doing?
William (01:45):
pretty well.
Thank you Happy to be here.
Awesome, how long have you beenin Chicago?
Derek (01:49):
This was.
I moved right before the fundstarted, January 2020.
So I guess that makes, oh wow,half a decade now.
William (01:59):
How are you liking it so far?
Derek (02:01):
I mean, half a decade is not bad for me.
To be perfectly honest, it'snot too bad overall.
I'd say it's kind of got thatsmaller town feel with a big
city atmosphere.
So it's a really good mix,depending on which neighborhood
you're in.
So I can't really complain.
The tech industry's pretty goodhere and the beer scene is
(02:22):
fantastic.
William (02:23):
so do you like chicago style pizza?
Derek (02:27):
uh, tavern style there's.
I'm not sure if you're familiarwith it.
Tavern style is a very thincrackery crust that you get at a
lot of the bars and pubs around.
Uh, the chicago style issomething you do with your
family about once or twice ayear when they visit, check it
off the list, take a long napafter and then get back to the
(02:48):
normal pizza.
William (02:49):
A long nap is right.
Eyvonne (02:51):
The tavern style, I imagine, has the added benefit
of being ready quickly.
Derek (02:56):
It's not 45 minutes in Luma, that's right.
Eyvonne (03:00):
Like those deep dish.
Yeah, full of carbs verygluten-y.
Yeah.
Chicago style pizza, but oh sosatisfying.
Oh yeah, full of carbs, verygluten-y, yeah, chicago style
pizza, but oh so satisfying.
William (03:08):
Oh yeah, pretty good stuff.
Yeah, I like Giordano's everyonce in a while and they've kind
of branched out of Chicago sowe have one in like Indianapolis
, which isn't too far from whereI'm at.
So every once in a while,mainly for kids' travel sports,
we'll hit up Giordano's whilewe're up there.
Got to get those calories backright, Exactly so do you want to
(03:30):
give us a brief, just kind of arundown, a background of your
career, Like how did you findyourself working in tech in the
first place and how did you getto where you are today?
You're kind of like a trustedexpert in DevOps infrastructure
as code and teaching.
So how did that happen?
Derek (03:50):
It was kind of a long, erratic story overall, so I'll
try to keep it straight to thepoint.
Kind of started out working, Ithink I got into retail is kind
of where it all started.
Started getting into tech thereand then I started seeing that,
you know, retail is not quitewhat it used to be, and this was
years ago.
Circuit City was still open.
(04:11):
But it started getting to thepoint where Circuit City was
closing down and all of a suddenI realized like that wasn't
really the direction I wanted togo.
So I hopped into the MCSA booksFor those that may not know,
talking Microsoft way way backwhen Azure wasn't even a thought
and so MCSA, ccna, cisco, gotinto the networking, got into
(04:34):
kind of everything and finally,after a lot of digging and
opportunity, opened in Atlantaat a hosting company.
So it threw me right to thewolves.
I got to experience some nicetrue DDoS attacks that took down
entire regions.
I got to kind of play with thereal infrastructure and see what
(04:55):
the grownups do other thanrunning.
I used to run like a smallcomputer store and stuff like
that, but once I got into thebig boy stuff, that's where it
kind of took off.
I started working in hosting ormanaged consulting after that
dealing with very rich peoplewho had very small problems.
Then I kind of realized thatthrough all of this I always
(05:19):
ended up in one place and thatwas helping my colleagues.
No matter where I was, nomatter how big the problem or
whatever, I always ended upbeing the one that my colleagues
would come to.
I was always the one writingthe documentation and I realized
that teaching was what I wantedto do.
So a lot of you may rememberLinux Academy way back when kind
of ended up with A Cloud Guruand then ended up with
(05:40):
Pluralsight a whole lot ofpaperwork and mess there, but
anyway started working there.
That's where I really found mypassion.
I had to branch off a littlebit.
After that dealt withmanufacturing that was my first
big production Kubernetesdeployment.
That was fun.
Did a bunch of manufacturingstuff all of that and then
(06:01):
eventually teaching called meback.
Eyvonne (06:03):
So here I am, off all of that and then eventually,
teaching called me back.
So here I am.
I really love how you um, youlooked at commonalities in your
all of your roles and and reallystarted to examine.
You know, where is it that Ifind myself?
What is it that I see is theunique thing that I bring into
this situation, and how do Itake that and then capitalize on
(06:25):
that in the future?
I think sometimes folks aren'taren't self-reflective enough to
to connect those dots and theymiss opportunities to to really
shine in their own unique way.
So I think that's a cool partof your story.
Derek (06:40):
Yeah, absolutely, and I think you know a little bit of
neuro atypicalness kind of leadsinto that.
You know you, sometimes it'snot always a choice, it's just
kind of flow with whatever makesyou happy.
And overall teaching made mehappy more than grinding till
two in the morning on somethingwhere a lot of people honestly
really enjoy grinding on.
(07:01):
That problem Me, that problemis helping someone and where you
know, sometimes you like whenthe lights flicker properly,
sometimes you like when the codedeploys.
I like when somebody sends me amessage and says, hey, man,
thanks, I really appreciate it.
That's helped me get a job,whatever.
So you know, overall it's nottotally unselfish, but I will
(07:22):
say that I'm really happy withmy journey so far.
William (07:27):
That's awesome.
You said a few things there Ithought that were really good
and to kind of take and expandon them.
So like, as we march into 2025,I can't believe I'm saying that
2025.
I can't imagine a better timeto like, if you're entering into
tech, it's a great time to comeinto tech, but it is a double
(07:47):
edged sword.
Oh yeah, there's so many newtechnologies and there's just
there's way too many ways to dothings and historically, like
going back, things were muchmore clear, much more defined.
But with that clarity also camethis rigidity.
(08:07):
Is rigidity a word I don't know?
Eyvonne (08:09):
doesn't matter yeah, awesome.
William (08:11):
But you, you typically had to follow like a, a
predetermined path with like aparticular type of technology
with much less room for uh,crossing disciplines, like if
you were, if you were going tobe a network engineer, you got a
net plus and a CCNA and you dugright in.
If you wanted to write code, itwas usually Java or C++, maybe
(08:34):
a comp sci degree, I guess,depending on how far you go back
.
But I can't help but think andhave empathy for folks coming
into tech because of theconfusion.
There's just got to be so muchconfusion on where to start,
like DevOps is cool, cloud is ahuge thing and it's always good
(08:55):
to maybe learn a programminglanguage and you need to
sprinkle Linux throughout allthe things.
So I guess the question is howis technology and the path to
learning technology evolved fromthis like earlier days of doing
things?
Derek (09:11):
You know the foundations are still so, so, so important,
and this is something I'velearned.
It's definitely bit me multipletimes where you know you learn
this shiny new technology andthen all of a sudden you're like
, uh-oh, what exactly is this?
And it takes you twice as longto learn this technology because
(09:31):
you don't understand where it'scoming from.
You've got words that arederived from old technologies
from the 80s that show up, and Iknow there's actually been a
lot of discourse in theeducation community like should
we be using these words thatdon't have a real world analog
anymore?
And uh, to use one which and Idon't want to start any
(09:54):
arguments or anything but youknow like, uh, the master,
master branch.
Nobody had a clue where thatactually came from.
You know in like when it firstcame out, you know talking about
whether it was tape masters orwhether it was this or that, and
there's so many different waysto interpret it that you know,
honestly, main just kind of mademore sense to everybody, and
(10:15):
that's perfectly fine, and Ithink that happens with a lot of
words nowadays.
People are like why do you, whyare you using this term?
And then somebody's like oh, Iguess debug is actually a lot
more famous one and a moreexciting one.
You know it's from what I'veread.
Eyvonne (10:30):
It's actually getting bugs out of the computer,
physical, actual, like roachespulling them out of mainframes,
my favorite example of that andthis is not exactly tech, but
there are words that stay withus, right and back in the
typesetting days when you had,when letters you know physical
(10:52):
letters were placed in a pressto make newspapers, the capital
letters were in a A case thatwas up high and the small
letters were in a case that wasdown low, and so your capital
letters were uppercase and yoursmall letters were lowercase.
And that comes from the newsprinting, typesetting industry.
(11:15):
And those words are still withus, even though their original
meaning is almost lost toantiquity, except when somebody
you know picks up a cool storylike that tells it right and
there's, there's there's allkinds of history in in tech that
way as well.
(11:35):
Right that we keep the names,the, the.
You know the kid who saw afloppy disk and asked why you,
why somebody 3d printed a savebutton.
Right Like those.
Those things happen all thetime.
Derek (11:51):
Yeah, no, I that's.
That's a huge thing and youknow, some of this stuff does
build a barrier to entry on thenewer technologies and things
like that.
And it's funny.
You know, you bring the newgreat thing.
You know AI it's just a bunchof if statements, right?
Or somebody's like oh, I wasdoing AI what they call machine
(12:13):
learning in Excel in the 80s, orI guess not the 80s for Excel,
but you know, like a lot ofthese concepts have been around,
oh yeah, there you go.
Lotus Notes everybody's favoriteyeah, so a lot of this stuff
has been around.
Oh yeah, there you go.
Lotus notes everybody'sfavorite yeah, so a lot of this
stuff has been around forever.
So getting that foundationmakes it easier for people to
understand the why behind a lotof new technologies, and I'll
(12:37):
get a lot of people to kind ofhead up the stack a little bit.
I've got a lot of people wholearn Terraform from me, who
come in and they're in my courseand they're like, hey, I keep
having this problem and I lookand it's because they have no
idea how to read the output froma bash script that was there.
You know, the Terraform stuffkind of makes sense.
They learned cloud, they gottheir cloud practitioner and
(12:58):
their AWS associates, theylearned all this other stuff.
But the second I threw a bashscript in there they fell apart.
So I'm trying to make sure thatI know to step back and consider
those people and if you'retrying to get into the industry,
make sure you do learn thosefoundations.
You're going to need them andeven if you don't use these
(13:19):
specific things, the knowledgeyou gain just from the why of
these things and learning whatyou're solving helps you
understand new products a lotfaster.
So if you want to navigate thiscrazy landscape of a thousand
things, just go and learn whatthey're based on, and any new
thing that comes out isbasically going to be the same
(13:40):
thing, with differentterminology, different UI or a
different CLI.
Eyvonne (13:44):
That's great and that begs an interesting question,
because this this is something Ithink about often is is how do
you know where, where to startwith folks?
Because you know you.
You could go all the way backto number theory and ones and
zeros and vacuum tubes and andthings like that that aren't
(14:05):
100% applicable today, or youcould go so far the other
direction, that there'sabsolutely no foundation.
Do you have any thoughts on howto draw the line and where to
really start along the technicalevolution curve?
Derek (14:21):
Lots of thoughts but no real solutions.
That's a very difficultquestion and I've definitely had
polls on LinkedIn.
I've had conversations.
I've seen big arguments oninterview questions.
They're expecting someone whois coming in as a cloud engineer
to know some.
We'll just say Fortran, justfor kicks.
(14:44):
I know that's probably notrealistic, but just to really
hammer the point home.
You know they're asking forthings because it scratches that
manager's itch, it makes themfeel good about what they've
done and they must be gettingthe best engineers.
But at the end of the day, isyour product really that
important that somebody needs todo this type of stuff?
Is it really that importantthat somebody needs to do this
(15:05):
type of stuff?
Is it really that complicated?
And I think a lot of thesehiring managers think that their
stuff is that much morecomplicated that they need these
10X engineers who can do stufffrom the 80s when in reality
somebody who just came out ofschool or somebody who just got
a couple associatecertifications and really
practiced could do just as well.
(15:26):
So it's a little bit ofgatekeeping and I don't like
that in a lot of ways.
So deciding where to start isprobably the hardest part, I
think.
With AI, especially now, willyou always have a calculator in
your pocket?
No, that's the way they alwayssaid it.
Now, of course.
Well, now we have ai right infront of us that will answer so
(15:48):
many of these problems.
So should somebody be able todo a one-liner bash script with
regex and you know awk and saidfrom from memory maybe not, but
debugging it is still veryimportant because ai is not
there yet.
William (16:04):
That's such a good, yeah, linux.
We've been on a tear with Linuxlately, yvonne and I, with a
lot of our guests, because it'sjust such a core skill, like you
were just saying earlier, likeinterpreting that output, but
it's everywhere, like when everytime I, every time I build a
pipeline, I'm doing somethingwith Bash.
It seems like it's the gluebetween all these different
things bootstrapping this, doingthat, and it's not like it's
(16:26):
some huge thousands of lines,elegant piece of code, but it's
maybe 30 lines here, 40 linesthere, 10 lines there.
And understanding the filesystem, how to mount things, how
to use SCP, how to transferfiles.
Those things are never.
(16:47):
I don't know if they're evergoing to go away, I use them all
the time still and it's just.
That's one of those skills thatI see is like really just the
hierarchical file structure oflinux, like file systems aren't
understood anymore.
It's like oh, I just search athing and that's how I get to
this thing.
Well, they're like okay, wemissed the file, the file system
(17:09):
hierarchy, completely.
Eyvonne (17:13):
You know I, I think about you know when you're
talking about where to start,especially when it comes to
education, and I think onehelpful thing to think through
is how do I get somebody to apoint where they can do a
practical thing?
You know, like I, you know howdo I help them solve a problem
and teach them a thing that isdirectly applicable.
(17:35):
I think you know you need topresent some theory and you need
to explain things, but I thinkif you can help people
practically solve a problem andthen grow out from there like
concentric circles, I thinkthat's a really good approach.
Years ago my oldest, who's nowa software developer there was a
bring your kid to work day.
I worked from home at the timeand so I brought him to work
(17:59):
with me.
But what I did is I bought araspberry pie, sat him up in the
room with me, sent him a linkto a document, gave him all the
pieces and basically told him tospend the day to build himself
his own video game system.
So he took his Raspberry Pi, heloaded the RetroPi OS on it, he
(18:21):
downloaded his mods, hedeployed them on his Raspberry
Pi and at the end of the day hehad a working video game system
and, and he's a softwaredeveloper today, you know and,
interestingly enough, william,he and I were talking the other
day and he was ranting about thefact that people don't know how
to use hierarchical filesystems anymore.
So, um, I've been a success,just so you know, I love that.
(18:47):
And then I took the contrarianposition.
I was like well, do they reallyneed them, though?
Does your average user reallyneed to know how to use a
hierarchical file system?
Tell me?
So we had that conversation.
I do agree with you if you'retechnical, but anyway, I think
finding something that folks canpractically use and wrap their
arms around today and make themproductive and then growing from
(19:10):
there is an incrediblyimportant strategy, because you
can always go back further andthere's always more to learn,
but if you can solve a problemtoday, then you can build on
that and be productive and thencontinue to grow then you can
build on that and be productiveand then continue to grow.
Derek (19:27):
Yeah, I'd say in, file systems are an interesting one.
I haven't had to really mount afile system in forever.
Most everything I do is inephemeral boxes.
I run GitHub code spaces foralmost everything that I have to
do.
Otherwise I piece it out andthrow it somewhere, whether it,
whether it's S3 or whether it's,you know it's on serverless
(19:49):
thing or a container containersor something that I think still
are going to be around foreverand you can't just you cannot
skip to Kubernetes.
You've got to understand howthe Docker file system works and
how all of that works.
Well, you know Docker or anytype of container system and
that's something you know.
It's a black box for a lot ofpeople and when you actually
(20:11):
break it apart and see that likea Docker container is just
these files and directoriesspread apart on your computer,
it really kind of becomes veryinteresting and brings the whole
Kubernetes ecosystem a lotcloser.
It makes it make a lot moresense for you.
That's something I noticed.
There's that the next one, Ithink SSH keys Please learn to
(20:33):
understand those and filepermissions, because that is a
nightmare for everybody, I'd say.
I would honestly say 90% of thetickets I get on my courses are
related to the SSH keys that weuse.
I would say that actually mightbe a little low.
That's probably.
Most of the problems I get isSSH keys and then manipulating
(20:58):
the path, like, honestly, can wenot fix this somehow?
It is just, you know,installing a new binary in Linux
is still way too hard for a lotof people, Even for me.
I get tripped up sometimes,especially dealing with, like
Python, environments and stufflike that.
But manipulating the path andpermissions on that, permissions
(21:21):
on executables, making sure youcan run something that,
honestly, is where I would Iwould start is understanding the
file system, like you said, andhow to get these, these
binaries, where they need to goit's funny.
William (21:34):
You said ssh key.
So I have a linkedin coursewith terraform and part of the
course is, like you know, weneed to get to this ec2 instance
and so, like I have thecommands and the readme and
everything like ssh dash I.
Okay, here's the path to whereyou generated the thing.
Okay, now you gotta log into itand that is like again, I got
(21:56):
tons of emails and you know, hey, it's not working.
Like okay, you're not puttingin the path.
Okay, where's the Well, wheredid you generate the key?
And it's just this reverseengineering of like okay, this
lives in a directory somewhere.
You're just pointing thatcommand to that directory, to
where this file is, and then oh,it works.
Now, you know it's one of thosemisunderstood things.
(22:18):
And you're so being a teacher,I mean you're, I guess you're a
teacher pretty much by trade now.
And I teacher, I mean you're, Iguess you're a teacher pretty
much by trade now and I wouldsay, like a good teacher goes a
long way, especially with, Imean, I looking back like I had
some really good teachers overthe years that kind of inspired
me to just be better and, um,you know whether it was in
person or in an online class,you know.
(22:40):
But what about the teachers,though?
You know what inspires theteachers.
Um, so you started more thanCertified, which I actually went
through.
You have some free courses onthere and it's really good
content.
No paywall, you don't have toregister, you don't have to do
anything, you just go in andclick Go.
But how were you inspired tosort of go off on your own and
(23:01):
start this content creation andcourse journey?
Derek (23:06):
Well, I mean, linux Academy was great.
I honestly, when I started mynew thing after that, I really
just I was burnt out.
It does burn you out a prettygood bit, especially doing AWS
courses, because one reinventand everything you've created is
useless.
Now you know it will brickentire courses.
And if you're using the UI thenit's even worse because then
(23:30):
you have to rerecord becausepeople will complain and
absolutely wreck your coursesbecause a button moved.
So I think once I had controlover this and I was inspired to
start again, I hopped on afriend's podcast actually years
ago he doesn't have it anymoreHopped on that and a bunch of
people said, oh yeah, I rememberyou from Linux Academy, will
(23:52):
you ever do another Terraformcourse?
And I said I guess it soundslike a pretty fun idea.
And honestly it caught fire.
I did very, very, very well andI created another couple.
I ended up getting a job as adev rel at another company
because, especially after theheart surgery, you know this,
this stuff, if there's anythingthat puts pressure on your heart
(24:12):
, it's it's teaching.
It's very stressful, especiallyrunning it yourself.
But you know, once, once I kindof got control over the content
, you start to enjoy it a littlebit more than having someone
over your shoulder yelling atyou hey, you have to do this
because this one corporationneeds it.
And you may never get thatreturn, at least the squishy
(24:36):
return, the one for where thepeople message you and say, hey
thanks, you're not going to getlike that corporation reaching
out and be like, hey thanks, yougot me a new job, or you're
going to get in a lot of trouble, like that corporation reaching
out and be like, hey thanks,you got me a new job, or you're
going to get in a lot of trouble.
So the idea of like being ableto control things and all of
that, it also motivated me tocome out with my own platform,
which I migrated to a newplatform which I'm liking a
(24:57):
whole lot.
It's giving me control to dokind of my own thing.
I'm working on a greater now.
I'm working on, you know,different lab environments,
stuff like that, so trying toexpand and some scratching two
inches at once.
I get to do the teaching but Ialso get to do the engineering
and that's that's really fun.
Still doing some hosts, likeyou know, devrel type stuff for
(25:20):
companies on the side, becauserent does need to get paid and
unfortunately when you'rebetween courses sometimes that
money does dip a little bitwhile you're still trying to
figure it out.
But overall it's just been sosatisfying kind of moving and
building this new platform andmaking a big move to some really
cool new stuff.
William (25:43):
That's great.
I know that content, you knoweverybody.
You know looking, you knowlooking back, I had a teacher
one time at a vocational schoolwhen I was learning.
That was in high school still,I think it was net plus.
We had a vocational school wecould go to and, or no, it was
CCNA, I think I can't remember.
But anyway, we, we had ourbooks.
We came into class there waslike I think there was less than
(26:05):
15 of us and teacher comes inand said, hey, stack all your
books over there.
We never opened them once.
He had this gigantic pile ofhubs, switches, just junk PCs
that had to be put together thatwe could test with.
We just started building fromlike day one.
That was like the whole entireyear and that was, I mean, I'll
(26:27):
always remember this teacher.
It was one of the best.
I mean that's a really good wayfor me to learn.
But I mean, of course you can'tdo that virtually and most of
the stuff we touch now doesn'thave a physical component to it.
But what I mean to say is, likemost teachers or creators have
their own philosophy.
You know, when I was learning,doing the linkedin learning
stuff, my philosophy, like whatI would really try and do, was,
(26:51):
you know, revolve, you know makeit uh, revolve around, like
fundamentals, but also kind oflike what yvonne was saying,
like solving a real problem,like taking a problem, baking in
the fundamentals and thenbuilding out the code and doing
a thing you know, a real worldtype scenario.
But do you have any sort ofguiding principles or
(27:12):
philosophies that you try tostand behind?
You know that adhere to, youknow, when you build, like new
learning content yeah, I meanit's called more than certified
for a reason.
Derek (27:22):
The idea is, this is not supposed to be like an exam
course.
In fact, I don't even take theexam before I do it anymore.
I used to, but now I actuallyjust I'll read the exam guide
and make sure I hit everything,but I don't want to limit myself
to, oh, this isn't covered onthe exam, so who cares?
(27:43):
It's more of a I'm going tomake sure I hit everything, no
matter what.
But that pretty much just, youknow really just terraformed
that I've done any exam levelcontent for, and part of that is
because I do want to just buildand, to be perfectly honest,
sometimes I do need to dive in alittle bit more on some slides
(28:04):
and things like that.
There are people who do wantthat intro content and I am
sometimes bad because I get soexcited about building.
My entire course is built aroundbuilding something and I
managed to squeeze in everytopic into an actual project.
I try to do minimal like okay,now we've done that, so now
delete it, type stuff, becausethat's certainly something that
(28:27):
a lot of people will do.
But the idea is that you'regoing to learn everything that's
on that test through an actualproject that will deploy and
will work, and sometimes that'seasier.
It's very easy to plan and Ihate slides.
I would rather jump out of mywindow than do another slide.
So it's actually easier for meto go over code than it is to
(28:49):
sit here and try to pile a bunchof information into a slide,
but I think sometimes thatprobably isn't the best route.
I do need to do a few moreslides and build a few more
foundations on this stuff, butoverall it's been very
successful and a lot of peopledo my entire course and then go
do a practice exam or somethingsomewhere and make sure they're
(29:09):
in the right spot, but overallnothing is better than building.
William (29:15):
I love that.
I mean a lot of the.
I've studied, I've gone throughso many cert training material
like over the years and nevertook a lot of the certs like I
did it honestly, just for thelike hey, my employer provides,
like one of my employers likeconvinced them to actually do
purchase seats for linux academy, for the cloud sandboxes and
(29:37):
such.
And so I had a few teams and we, we didn't stop at our expert,
our subject matter expertisearea.
We were, you know, learningadjacent things.
And then once some I mean,there were some folks on on the
team that really embraced it,some that were just like I don't
, I got to do this, you know.
But the ones that reallyembraced it, they took off like
(29:59):
I couldn't almost get them tostop, like, hey, you got a day
job, you need to set time to dothis, you know.
And they were just, you know,sucking in all that information.
And then it, then it showed intheir day-to-day work they were
performing better, they had newand better and creative ideas
and such.
And that's why it's soimportant.
I encourage any big enterpriseout there for your training
(30:20):
dollars, empower your folks tolearn.
It's not about just getting apaper cert you want them to
provide value and you want themto feel fulfilled in the role
that they're doing.
It's huge.
Derek (30:31):
I built a lot of those labs, actually A ton of those
labs.
I did a lot of the backend type, behind the scenes stuff to get
a lot of those Linux Academylabs out.
So it's the guiding principlefor a lot of the stuff that I'm
building now.
Only I'm doing things slightlydifferent and I haven't released
this totally to the public yet.
(30:52):
I've hinted it, but I foundthat in those labs you're
missing probably the mostimportant concept involved with
learning actually learning realtech stuff, and that is breaking
stuff.
A pristine sandbox is nevergoing to teach you what you need
(31:13):
all the way through.
Because I know God, I'mlearning Python, I'll spend more
time setting up the Pythonenvironment than I will actually
on the Python code.
Python's easy Environments arehard, and so what I'm actually
working on now is a grader, aCLI that you will run on your
own system and you'll grade codethat you code on your own
(31:35):
system.
So you keep everything that youwrite.
Everything is all yours.
You can expand on it.
You can do anything you want.
Once you get done with thetasks that you do, you still own
the code.
So if you want to continuebuilding after the course,
you've got it.
So the grader will report backto my system.
It will say hey look, good job,You've passed.
(31:57):
You can now take your code.
You don't have to move it offof a lab, you don't have to move
it out of a sandbox.
You get to keep it exactlywhere it is.
Eyvonne (32:05):
So so for me, one of the one of the best
certification experiences I everhad was, if you remember, the
Red Hat Linux certification fromyears ago and and it's it's
been over a decade I'm not goingto do the math, but the
certification there was awritten part of the exam which
was around, you know it wassimple and you only had to have
(32:29):
a 50% pass rate.
But then there was also a buildand a troubleshoot and they
gave you a broken system and youhad to go through and resolve
it.
And I mean I remember eventaking the exam.
For somebody who had worked inenterprise IT and in troubleshot
systems for years.
I feel like that part wasreally pretty straightforward.
There were some master bootrecord things and, and, yeah,
(32:49):
some like files in the wrongplace and then some permissions
issues and stuff like that thatyou had to troubleshoot.
But certainly engaging and thenworking to fix broken things is
a is a very different learningexperience.
Derek (33:04):
Absolutely.
The RHCSA was the one that Idid by them and the first
question was eh, whatever, it'salready expired, they can come
get it.
But it was as long as you kindof had heard that somewhere, it
(33:32):
was pretty great.
But of course expecting someoneto memorize that is sometimes
that's a little brutal.
Overall, but I think that'sreally the way to go and a lot
of people are moving to that.
The new Terraform exam is allhands-on.
So I did a poll the other dayjust talking about how you know
we're talking about these oldertechnologies and stuff like that
(33:52):
, and it was asking like what ismy next content?
I can't put food on the tablewith Terraform for the rest of
my life and we can go all daytalking about Terraform and
OpenTOFU.
But I think you've had plentyof guests go down that track on
here already.
But I think you've had plentyof guests go down that track on
here already.
So I'm like you know, I've gota Terraform Ansible and Jenkins
(34:14):
course which has crushed it justfor years, and I'm like you
know, maybe I should replacethat with GitHub Actions.
And then in that I was like,hey, should I replace this or
refresh it?
And then in that poll, I wasalso like or should I do DevOps
with AI, just to see who's outthere DevOps with AI?
(34:35):
It just crushed it.
It doubled everything else,which kind of blew me away, to
be really honest.
But I think I can do it in agood way.
Second place was Terraform,ansible and Jenkins these
enterprises.
Sometimes you just need asledgehammer to do something,
(34:56):
and Jenkins is a sledgehammer.
And when you're talking aboutthese enterprises like, oh no,
switch to GitHub Actions becauseit's cool and nice, these guys
don't care.
They're not going to change upsomething that's been working
for a decade just becausesomething is neater or has, like
you know, one extra feature.
Jenkins is still very muchalive and well.
(35:17):
Ansible is very much alive andwell, and so I think you know if
you you're probably hurtingyourself by I'm not saying you
need to learn it, but you won'thurt yourself to learn it.
If you learn the principles ofJenkins, you're going to be able
to use anything.
William (35:34):
Yeah, jenkins is a, I have some.
Yeah, it's a mountain.
Yeah, there's a lot easier waysto do things, but you're right,
they, you know, if you thinkabout every use case and these
are kind of like divisive topicsactually.
So building, I think aboutevery use case and these are
(35:55):
kind of like divisive topicsactually.
So building, I'll just go andlike say, like building
infrastructure atop, like an sdkwith a general purpose language
like python or go or type typescript, versus using, like these
kind of some of the things yousaid, these infrastructure
platforms like ansible,terraform, open tofu, all these,
um, my, my case against theformer is especially like you
were saying enterprise as acompany scales.
You have more hands in thatcookie jar.
(36:17):
You have more, uh, you know yougot these hot shot developers
coming in with their creativeminds at work.
Their wheels are spinning.
You know they.
They want to do lots of customthings and if you give them the
power to, they will, and I cantell from experience this gets
out of control very quicklybecause at the end of the day,
you want consistency and theability to enforce consistency
(36:38):
across a large number of teamsfor the betterment of the
business.
So kind of what you're sayingresonates because Ansible.
You know it may not be the besttool on the entire planet for
configuring a, an image at buildtime, installing some packages
or doing some things, but youknow what most of the folks I've
worked with in the past havethe ability to pick it up and
(37:01):
start using it rather quickly.
Same with terraform.
It's not going to solve everyproblem out there, but it is a
platform and it helps with thatscale and with that maintaining
consistency.
Derek (37:15):
I'd say I get a lot of pushback from these hotshot
developers.
And not to throw you guys underthe bus, but some of these guys
come up and like, well, whatabout this one super niche
problem that I encountered atFortune X hundred company?
And it's like there arethousands and thousands and
(37:35):
thousands of startups out therethat just need to get some stuff
out the door.
You know, like not everybodyneeds to go and build something
with code and, honestly, thewhat you said about consistency
is the number one thing I chimein on.
I say, look, have you ever hadto debug somebody's inventive
(37:55):
solution?
Like no, guess who's going tohave more documented solutions
out there Probably Terraform forexactly what you're doing.
Or OpenTOFU or whatever it'scalled HCL Probably HCL in tofu,
or whatever h.
What's called hcl?
Probably hcl.
Uh, you know, like your weirdlittle hacky java triple nested
loop thing probably is not goingto be easy to debug five years
(38:18):
down the road yeah, andespecially if they leave at some
point and they were the sort ofthe keeper of the keys to the
logic to that thing.
William (38:26):
oh, oh boy.
I mean I guess it's easiernowadays because you can maybe
plug it into some AI and figureout what the heck it's doing,
but yeah, historically it's beenlike a no-go.
Derek (38:37):
Maybe why there's so much pushback.
Eyvonne (38:40):
Well, and we're often more impressed with our own
cleverness than other people areright.
You know, folks want solutionsto problems and, especially if
you're a leader in an enterprise, you have to be able to find
people to support yourenvironment and it has to be
(39:00):
supportable and there are allkinds of requirements and
constraints that that,especially in heavily regulated
industries um, regulatedindustries that matter and that
the business has to account for.
And even if a tool requires aperson or even a team, a little
(39:22):
bit more effort, it can saveeffort across the organization
in inconsistencies, inportability of code, in training
costs, in the ability for folksto move around inside the
organization if they'reconsistent is supportable.
(39:44):
That you can find other peopleto work on, that has support,
because so many organizationspay for support to keep their
executives out of hot water.
Frankly, you know, and and Ihave a um, a bat phone, you know
to pick up and call to, tobring in the cavalry when they
(40:06):
need to, and all of those thingsare objective realities inside
of enterprises and it's not justabout who can write the most
clever recursive function, forexample.
Derek (40:20):
Absolutely, I agree.
The whole I guess a little lessfriendly term, throat to choke,
is just absolutely huge andthat's something when I worked
at one of the major tacos.
You know, terraformcollaboration softwares, that
was something we heard a lot of.
Uh is, you know, like peopleare like, oh, I can build this
(40:42):
in github actions and somebody'slike, well, we pay you two $200
an hour and we can pay themnowhere near that for a year to
help, basically, be there ifsomething goes wrong.
To fix all these things youmight have to do two hacky
things instead of a thousandhacky things, but overall we
(41:04):
need you somewhere else, notbuilding GitHub Actions
pipelines.
But you know, overall we needyou somewhere else, not building
GitHub Actions pipelines.
We need you building theinfrastructure, doing actual
architecture and making you know, making sure this stuff stays
up.
The deployment's just a pieceof the puzzle.
So I think you know the wholebuild versus buy and I don't
even know how we got here.
But the build versus buyargument is certainly, you know,
(41:25):
an interesting one.
William (41:31):
But I'm seeing a lot of people really opting to buy
most of the time.
Likewise, yeah, I, I know we'regoing.
I don't know how long we'vebeen on because it reset the
timer, but I think we're runningup on time.
Okay, yeah, I think we are.
But I wanted to ask something.
I'm just kind of curious.
So I had an aha moment.
Like many years ago I was one ofthese folks.
It was like you know, terraform, this new hipster garbage, get
(41:51):
this out of here.
So, like I was in like a hotseat basically with what would
become like a devops team and Iremember like what made it stick
for me.
So I had written this stuff.
I can't remember if it waspython, yeah, I think it was
python, I can't remember, butI'd written this stuff to deploy
this infrastructure and I waslike showing them all the you
(42:14):
know, all the things we've beentalking about.
Look at how clever this is.
Like, oh, look at me, I wrotethis, it's so good.
And then there was one devopsengineer that like put me on
blast.
He was like okay, how do you,how do you destroy all that?
Then and I was like uh, I'mstill trying to work that out.
And I had all these.
Okay, like because you createda, the vpc, you have all these
(42:36):
defaults that get created, butthen you have to delete them
individually and like all thisstuff and everything has
dependencies.
And he's like you know how wedo it in terraform destroy.
And then it was all gone and Iwas like, oh snap, this is
really cool, this is awesome.
And, honestly, ever since thenI've been like a huge fan, like
terraform is probably one of thelike.
(42:56):
I used to tend towards generalpurpose languages, like most of
the time, but terraform opentofu either.
They are fantastic tools butlike what made you like these
tools so much?
Like what made it stick for you?
Derek (43:12):
um, well, uh, for one thing it was.
It was just interesting.
I I picked up terraform prettyearly in my real devops journey.
Now I'd been in you knowinfrastructure forever, but you
know I'm like literally workingwith Windows machines.
A lot of the stuff that we did,powershell was still in its
(43:33):
infancy, so a lot of the stuffthat we did was in the GUI a lot
of times.
And so once I started learningLinux, I'm kind of like how do I
catch up with these people?
Pretty quickly I startedlearning AWS and then I'm like
all right, now I've got to getto the command line.
And I picked up Terraform oneday and I was like whoa, that
(43:56):
was easy, you know.
And I played with Bodo a lotand I really tried to be that
cool kid who was like I don'tneed Terraform, check this out.
And I'm like what am I doing?
You know, terraform is just somuch easier.
William (44:06):
Yeah, much easier.
Derek (44:08):
Yeah, it just worked and it was cool and it was early, so
I got, you know, scratched thatitch.
I was one of the earlieradopters of it because I needed
to teach it and I taught it andI'll admit I probably didn't use
as many best practices as Icould for that first course, but
you know it worked and I'velearned a lot since then.
(44:29):
And you know, I definitely seethe cracks, I know there are
definitely cracks in thelanguage and all of that.
But people ask me all the timejust use Pulumi, just use SDK,
just use this.
And I'm not or CDK rather, andI'm just like you know, if it
doesn't work for you, that'sfine, do it.
But for me it makes absolutelyno sense to switch to a whole
(44:54):
new paradigm for a couple weirdedge cases that I can't quite
nail down.
William (45:00):
Yeah, and in those cases I'll figure it out.
Derek (45:03):
I'll create a shim if I have to a very readable shim,
create a shim if I have to avery readable shim, but I'll
create a shim for the littlestuff and otherwise Terraform is
going to work just fine versus,as we've said, going way off
the rails and completelyreinventing the wheel, so I love
it.
William (45:19):
Do you have anything else, yvonne, before we part
ways?
No good, awesome.
Well, it has been a pleasuretalking to you, derek.
No good, Awesome.
Well, it has been a pleasuretalking to you, Derek.
Derek (45:33):
Where can the nice folks out there find you?
I'd say, you know, obviously mysite, morethancertifiedcom, and
LinkedIn, probably the bestplace to get me.
Otherwise, you know, I'm on X,I'm on Blue Sky, but we're still
trying to figure all that out.
So I think LinkedIn and my siteare probably the two best
places.
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