2016 Year-End Extravaganza
Posted on Saturday, Dec 31, 2016
Show Notes
Matt, Trevor, and Bridget chat (at length) about podcasts, podcast recording, and podcast recording software. Oh, and the highlights of 2016 if they get around to it. (Don’t miss the supercut of all 2016’s cold opens, which was edited by Joe, even though Matt takes credit for it!)
What were some of your favorite episodes?
- Bridget: So many great ones! Kicked off the year with Andrew Clay Shafer and Kelsey Hightower, and we kept going at that pace!
- Trevor: Soon-to-be-finished Singapore PowerShell Summit Episode
- Matt: Personal Brand episode, Who Owns Your Availability (Bridget says “omg, left pad, we need to have this episode NOW”), CareerOps
Let’s talk numbers
Website
- 16K visitors to the website
- 46% of traffic comes from search
- 16% comes from referrals, mostly Twitter (Twitter is 6% of all traffic)
- 1% of our traffic comes from the hugo site itself (our site generator)
Episodes
- 232,200 listens in 2016 (204,001 listens in 2015)
- Most listened-to episode in 2016 was Application Configuration with Adam Jacob and Tim Gross
- Most watched YouTube video in 2016 was Bridget’s Fireside Chat with Bryan Cantrill
Website updates
- Didn’t change much, but we list episode numbers now (maybe we’ll add dates sometime)
Other improvements
- Matt did a session with Daniel J. Lewis of the Audacity to Podcast (we were a featured podcast eval in Podcasters Society) and we got a whole bunch of ideas on how to improve the show - some of which we have already started to implement). You can check out our outstanding issues on GitHub
- Welcome to Joe as our main audio editor!
What happened with you in 2016?
Matt
- Didn’t travel much - only spoke once twice - once at Pink16, and once at a Cloudbees conference in Chicago
- Only went to one devopsdays - Chicago. I’m failing!
- Hey, I got married
Bridget
- 28 talks. Give or take. A few of those were at devopsdays - I made it to London, Toronto, New York, Detroit, Havana, Philadelphia, Madison, Sydney - and of course ran Minneapolis.
- Counting North America Joe and I hit 5 continents this year. And I was going to travel less. Instead, all the airline status. Rethinking next year. Maybe get into webinars?
- Devopsdays: growing! New core team! New cities!
Trevor
- I spoke 3 times this year, but got to attend so many more conferences than before
- I was literally on the other side of the planet to my usual place of existence for the first time.
- I moved to LA
- I work for Chef now!
Check Outs
Bridget
- Systems We Love - videos at https://twitter.com/SystemsWeLove/status/809117528374972416
Trevor:
- [Westworld](http://www.startrek.com/article/klingon-mug-and-collector-lapel-pins-ready-to-beam-up Klingon Blood Wine Mug)
Matt:
- There’s this thing called Minecraft I “discovered” via my kids.
- Also reminder about code.org and everyone is talking about Hour of Code
- It’s been super retro time for Matt as he re-read a bunch of the Dragonlance books, and discovered a bunch he hadn’t read, including The Soulforge.
Community & Event Stuff
If you have an upcoming conference you would like to see promoted on ADO, you can fill out the handy form at arresteddevops.com/conf
Open CFPs
- lots of DevOpsDays
- Velocity San Jose until Jan 10th
- ChefConf 2017 - closing on January 18, 2017
- Monitorama - May 22-24 - until Feb 1
Guests
Matty Stratton
Matty Stratton is a customer architect at Chef, where he demonstrates how Chef’s automation platform provides speed and flexibility to clients’ infrastructure. He is devoted to concepts like Continuous Delivery and Infrastructure as Code, and his license plate actually says “DevOps”. He lives in the Chicagoland area with his wife Andrea, and his three kids, Henry, Joey, and Sophia. He also has an unhealthy obsession with Doctor Who, Firefly, and Game of Thrones. And whiskey.
Trevor Hess
Adding his bio late enough for it to be a cutout stuffed in the playbill, Trevor Hess is a Software Consultant at 10th Magnitude. Usually writing .NET applications on Azure, he always appreciates new challenges. Between exceedingly nerdy anecdotes and useless facts lay some opinions and thoughts about how we build software and teams. Trevor has been seen previously in such shows as “The Fantasticks” and “Joseph And the Amazing Technicolor Computer Screen”.
Bridget Kromhout
Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Technologist for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if ‘cloud’ can be considered tangible). After 15 years as an operations engineer, she traded being on call for being on a plane. A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, she leads the devopsdays organization globally and the devops community at home in Minneapolis. She podcasts with Arrested DevOps, blogs at bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.
Hosts
Matt Stratton (he/him)
Matty Stratton is the Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, a well-known member of the DevOps community, and a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.
Matty has over 20 years of experience in IT operations and is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering focused events worldwide. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL.
He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke.
Trevor Hess
Trevor Hess is a Senior Product Manager at Progress Software working on Chef Software. He currently works on the Chef Application Delivery, Compliance and Infrastructure offerings.
Coming from a background in .NET Software Development and consulting, he has worked with several large multinational organizations to help kick start their journey to the cloud and the world of DevOps practices and principals. He is excited to engage in new experiences, and learning opportunities.
Trevor enjoys having hearty discussions about DevOps as well organizational change and transformation.
Bridget Kromhout
Bridget Kromhout is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Azure, focusing on the open source cloud native ecosystem. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if ‘cloud’ can be considered tangible). After years on call for production (from enterprise to research to startups) and a couple of customer-facing adventures, she now herds cats and wrangles docs on the product side of engineering. In the wider tech community, she has done much conference speaking and organizing, and advises the global devopsdays organization after leading it for over five years. Living in Minneapolis, she enjoys snowshoeing in the winter and bicycling in the summer (with winter cycling as a stretch goal).
