Matty: [00:00:00] It’s called, it’s called Let’s Just All Go on Twitter and Then Call It a Podcast. Welcome to Arrested DevOps, episode 45, Creating DevOps Events and Communities. I’m your co-host, Matt Stratton, @MattStratton on Twitter.
Trevor: And I’m your co-host, Trevor Hess, @TrevorGHess on Twitter. Arrested DevOps is brought to you by 10th Magnitude, a cloud services company that figures if you’re listening to this podcast, then you must be pretty cool. You can find out about joining our cloud services team at arresteddevops.com/10thmagnitude.
Matty: This episode is also sponsored by VictorOps. From initial alarm to final retrospective, the mission at VictorOps is to make on-calls suck less. Easily integrate with your existing monitoring systems and manage on-call schedules with rules for intelligent routing. In the live infrastructure timeline, get real-time context and see annotated alarms with resolution documentation. And when you’re in the firefight, collaboratively troubleshoot using native chat or bidirectional integrations with your— visit arresteddevops.com/victorops and sign up for a 14-day free trial to see how they’re making on-calls suck less.
Trevor: [00:01:14] This episode is also brought to you by Datadog, a monitoring tool that helps bridge the gap between operations and dev teams. Datadog brings together system metrics, changes, alerts, and events from over 70 common infrastructure tools such as Chef, Docker, and AWS, so that dev and ops teams share the key data and alerts in a single place and collaborate on issues in real time. Datadog is available for a 14-day trial at arresteddevops.com/datadog.
Matty: Tonight’s topic was suggested to us by Andy Bergen, who runs the DevOps meetup group in Leeds, UK. After reading Dustin Collins’ blog post about lessons learned from running a DevOps meetup, Andy and Dustin came up with the idea of joining us to chat about this great topic. So Andy, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself?
Andy: Yeah, I’m one of these people that’s got a long career, which basically means I’m old. I’m currently Senior DevOps Engineer at SkyBet Gaming in Leeds, where I basically keep things running and keep the lights on. I’m on a little bit of a stint in the data tribe at the minute, running the Hadoop cluster. But before that, I worked for 15 years at a digital agency. I wore many hats, basically sysadmin to dev to timesheet police, which is a rubbish job. Don’t ever do that. Production management, and board member, which is also a job. I got into DevOps because I was using Chef and Nagios and I thought I was doing the DevOps, as you do. And I started LeedsDevOps about 2 years ago and it’s, uh, it’s been growing ever since.
Trevor: [00:02:46] Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us, Andy. Dustin, how about you?
Dustin: Yep. So my name is Dustin Collins. I’ve been a developer for about 10 years, mostly in small early-stage startups. I’ve been running the Boston DevOps meetup for about 2 years now, and I am the developer advocate for Conjure, which is in the DevOps and security space.
Matty: Thanks, Dustin. It’s, uh, you and I talk a lot online and everything, so it’s great to have you on the show.
Dustin: Good to be here.
Matty: A couple times where I’ve read your stuff, you know, something will happen, there’ll be a comment on— I’m gonna put you in the same category as Steve Pereira in a certain way, which is the— Steve and I will read comments on Reddit or something and go, wow, Wow, that was really interesting. Oh, that was Steve. Oh, I thought it was someone new smart that I didn’t know about before. That’s gotten to the point now with me when I’ll read Reddit, so I’m like, oh, this person’s really— oh, it’s Dustin again being insightful. Damn, where’s the new insightful people? Rounding out our panel is Nathan Harvey, who you may all remember, of course, from Arrested DevOps fame of being on episode 11, How to F Up DevOps, as well as the podcast, The Food Fight Show, and probably every single chef event you’ve ever been at. All those other things, but mostly I think people know him because of episode 11. What else could you tell us about you, Nathan?
Nathen: [00:04:06] I mean, I was a nobody until we, we hit 11 and then it was awesome because I got to come on.
Matty: And that was just because Cheslock was on the show, right? You really got notoriety from being in his shadow, the Peter Cook.
Nathen: That’s right, I just, I just find some coattails and I hop right on and it was awesome. Yeah, so I’m Nathan Harvey. Uh, as Matt said, I work at Chef. Uh, I guess, uh, one thing that you should know about me is that I spell my name incorrectly and actually That’s a lie. The other thing you should know about me is I lie. I don’t spell my name incorrectly. Everyone else does. So the way it worked in the Harvey household was this. The rule was mom gets to pick the names, dad gets to misspell them. And he misspelled them because in the early ’70s, he was a brilliant, forward-thinking man who said, one day my children are going to need some way to globally uniquely identify themselves. And so he misspelled every single one of our names. So I’m N-A-T-H-E-N. For the entirety of my life, I’ve had to fight the way people spell my name. My favorite story— and by favorite, I mean my least favorite story about this— is that when I was in 10th grade in high school, my English teacher returned an assignment to me where she had corrected the spelling of my name for me. If you’ve ever wondered why my English is gooder than yours, now you know.
Matty: [00:05:26] Tonight, we’re going to mostly be talking about 3 things. One, why you should start a DevOps community or event. 2, who should be involved? And 3, how do you do it? First, why? Why should you start a DevOps community or event?
Nathen: I would say that one of the reasons you might want to build an internal event or an internal community is for the exact same reason that the people that work with you won’t maybe participate in external communities. Number one, and there may be multiple reasons, so one might be that there’s this fear of sharing trade secrets or things about the way your company works or the way that you do business that you’re just deathly afraid to share outside of your 4 walls. But then there’s also this other really practical concern. A lot of times the way that people, and myself included, get introduced to sort of external communities and interacting with external communities is through meetups. And if you’ve ever been to a meetup, one of the things that you probably recognize as pretty true across most meetups is that they happen in the evening after work. And so there’s this really practical thing where if, if what you think you want to do is go to a meetup or someone invites you to a meetup, it’s easy to hear them say, when you’re done with work, what I want you to do is go to work. But what you really want to do when you’re done with work is go to family or go to pub because that’s a better place to be than more work. So I think that that’s, that’s one thing that can be a big difference in why you might want to start one internally. You can start a community event, have a lunch and learn, do something during regular office hours that isn’t going to impact people’s personal lives. That’s the thing I’ll start with.
Matty: [00:07:07] As Dustin had brought up when we were talking, he said, what does an event or community— like, what does, you know, a meatspace event provide that you can’t get out of reading blog posts, on-the-job learning, or online communities? We talked about this a little bit in episode 21, which you can listen to at arresteddevops.com/21, called Conference Love. Because again, it was, why should I go to a conference? In that case, why should I go to a conference instead of watching a livestream? In this case, What do I get out of going to an event versus reading things on Reddit or Twitter or just learning stuff as part of my job?
Dustin: I think, especially when we’re talking about DevOps, that one-way conversations aren’t as helpful. You can put out a blog post, you can give a talk at a presentation, but really, these things we’re trying to do are really hard. I write a blog, but it’s really hard to write a blog and say, this is the one way that this goes. This is your one path to success, because often that’s not really the case. If you can get some more participation at a meetup or DevOps Days or something like this, you start to ferret out issues, things that you have never thought about. So, I think it’s really the participation piece that really gives you what you wouldn’t get otherwise.
Andy: [00:08:24] I think as well, a lot of people don’t actually get the opportunity to go to those conferences. Or they, you know, they don’t have that option. Putting something local, you know, gives them that opportunity to go to, you know, obviously a smaller scale event, but certainly something that means they can actually engage with people and engage in, you know, the community rather than just being isolated.
Matty: Well, and especially if you think about that, one of the things that came up on our conference episode was, well, the reason you should go instead of watching the livestream is we’re like, well, Conferences aren’t about the talks anyway. It’s all about the hallway track. So then why does it matter if you’re going to the conference that, you know, the great John Alspar, the great Nathan Harvey is speaking at, if you’re going to really actually mostly get value out of talking to other practitioners who just happen to be there? Those practitioners can be local to your city, and in fact, that even might be great things. And I think, I think that’s a huge point. It’s a good place to start, um, not necessarily finish. I mean, if you love going to conferences, you should still go to local meetups, but it widens that, makes that tent bigger for sure.
Dustin: [00:09:32] Well, I think it’s also really helpful for people new to the space. People are just getting into it because they don’t even know where to start, right? They’re looking at AWS, and have you ever looked at the AWS docs about how to string together applications? No way. You’re not going to do that on your own. People are intimidated as well, so having a local place where that can be welcomed welcoming to them and help them get where they want to go is good.
Nathen: I also think that raises a really good point in that oftentimes I definitely go to a lot of meetups, host a lot of meetups. There is always a good significant portion of the room that it is their first time at that particular meetup. Sometimes it’s their first time in a meetup period. And I think as meetup organizers and frankly as meetup participants, it’s our responsibility to make sure that the meetings that we are having, the events that we are putting on and that we are participating in are truly welcoming events where the newcomer feels welcome and can get something out of it because the most important thing that we, I think, as a community want is for that newcomer to come back because you’re only a newcomer the first time you go. By the time you’re done with that first event, we no longer want you to feel like a newcomer.
Matty: [00:10:47] There was a meetup that wasn’t already there. There hasn’t been a DevOpsDays in your area before, or you come up with some type of in-person event that hasn’t existed before comes to your mind. You say, you know what? I live in Des Moines, Iowa. For our listeners in Des Moines, Iowa, I swear I’m not picking on you. I lived in Des Moines for like 3 months once, so it’s okay. But there hasn’t been a DevOps Days Iowa yet, so I think there should be one. Or there hasn’t been a DevOps meetup in Des Moines yet, so I’m going to start that. So the question though is, why should I do that? I mean, I think we’ve all been involved in starting something that was new. What did you get out of it? You know, why should someone consider that?
Andy: Yeah, for me, I, I really resonate with the point about not being a, you know, a technological backwater, which maybe you live in, but particularly in the city I live in, in Leeds, we’re the 5th largest sort of city in the UK in terms of tech employment. So we’re not the largest, we’re not a capital city. And for me, it was— I’ve been to loads and loads of meetup groups, and none of them really spoke to me. None of them really covered the kind of thing I was doing day to day. There wasn’t really anything ops-y out there. It was a bit of the, um, a bit of the do-gooder attitude in me that wanted to put stuff back. I’d used open source stuff for years. I’d never really contributed anything back to that. And maybe it was guilt. Maybe that’s actually what it was in the end that forced me to actually do this. But yeah, I started the group because it was just obvious that the city needed it and the community needed it. And there was a gap. I thought I could do all right at it, even though I was making it up as I went along. But that was really my motivations around it.
Nathen: [00:12:30] So Andy, I have to ask, um, you said that you went to loads of meetup groups before you started your own and they, they weren’t speaking to you. Did you find others in the room that, that wanted to hear sort of the same topics that you were interested in? Were you able to find, uh, you know, smaller pockets of people?
Andy: Yeah, I think what the, the situation in the city was at the time was they were very language-specific. They were very niche in the sense that they were They’re all great, don’t get me wrong. The PHP group’s great, the JavaScript group’s great, the Python group’s great, the .NET guys, they’re great. They’ve all got their own little group. And where I really felt that I was getting something out of it was when they had a talk on something which was perhaps more of a, I’ll say, DevOps tool. Obviously, I don’t mean that, but certainly some of the toolset which is used by more operations stuff than maybe dev stuff. So I wasn’t really interested in talks about B-Hat, but when somebody brought along, you know, Vagrant or some infrastructure as code stuff, though, it was kind of like, yeah, you know, this is my kind of stuff and there should be more of this.
Matty: [00:13:36] So really, yeah, like you said, it’s that filling the gap. And it’s— I just want to paraphrase or sort of repeat back and see, because I think that’s— all of those I think are really good. And I think common— I shouldn’t say good, like, no, your reasons are invalid. Get off my show. But, ’cause what most people, or a lot of people would do is sit there and say, ah man, you know what, there’s no, there’s no meetups. I go look at the meetups and there’s no meetups that are for me. And so you can read from that, there’s a couple different ways you can react to that. One way is you can just complain about it a lot. The other way is you could, now this is a detrimental one, is you could say, well, this must mean there aren’t other people like me around here, right? There’s nobody else in Leeds who’s actually doing this kind of work or anything like that. ’Cause otherwise obviously there would be a meetup, you know, and then that can be, can be somewhat false. Or you can do is you can say, well, I’m not going to wait to invent it. I will go create it because if I want it, someone else probably wants it too. So it’s, it’s again, it’s, it’s sort of the filling the gap. I think I, I, I like that, um, way to think about it for, for listeners. When you’re thinking about that, if in your locale, look to, but I also, you know, would say, look, that the gap is there. I know Nathan gives a lot of really good advice to us within chef organization, you know, folks that are saying, you know, to say like, don’t go reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to, you know. I mean, if it truly is a gap, but don’t go start a thing just to start a thing, right? There may actually be already something that you’re unaware of. And it sounds— and in your particular experience, you were very much aware of what was going on, what was out there. You tried it, you said there’s something that’s not quite there, and we can— there’s a community to solve for. So I don’t know, Dustin, what do you think? Why? Why do we do this?
Dustin: [00:15:23] So I actually grew up, went to high school and college in Iowa.
Matty: There are no complaints that nobody in Des Moines listens to this show. Therefore, you’re right. Gauntlet thrown down, Des Moines, your move.
Dustin: Yeah, so I think all of Andy’s points are valid. I think there’s also a case to be made for the selfish considerations. I actually didn’t start the Boston DevOps Meetup. I took it over after about 2 years. The old organizer just said, I don’t want to do it anymore, and left it blank. So, I hopped in there. I wanted to do it because I wanted to get better at public speaking. I wanted to get better at organizing. I knew that I had been in the space for a few years, but I still had a lot to learn. The amount of— when you’re talking about your career and building your brand and all of that business, the amount of people that you meet that you wouldn’t even expect. Like, I’ve spoken on Internet of Things panels. I’ve worked with organizational consultants. It’s just a little ridiculous the amount of people you meet and the people that are willing to help you. And I learn something new every time we have a meetup too. So it’s just very good for staying sharp and letting people know you’re out there.
Nathen: [00:16:37] Yeah. I think you raise a really good point also that, you know, there was someone else that was running it and they, they wanted to stop. So my advice always is, uh, if you want to start a meetup group, my advice is always to not start a meetup group. It is a lot of hard work. And you, if, if you’re, if you’re the right person, when I tell you not to do that thing, what you’re going to do is do it anyhow, because you have to do it because you’re so passionate and invested in making this thing happen. But the other practical side The flip side of that is I say, go to some of the other events and make sure that there are, or try to find those kindred spirits in your local community. Go to the PHP group and give a DevOps-flavored talk at that group and see, like, am I lighting— is there a spark behind a couple of people’s eyes here? Because if I could do that at a couple of different meetups and have a couple of those different topics, maybe then getting it off the ground becomes much easier because people have started to hear these topics at other groups. Hell, I think one of the best things would be… Dustin, you’re not allowed to come back because all you want to do is talk about DevOps topics, so stay away from our meetup. That right there is permission to go and create your own and do that thing. I think that’s awesome.
Dustin: [00:17:48] Yeah, and I think you have a good point there where you set a spark in a couple of people’s eyes. I went around to different meetups and talked about DevOps topics, and some people just hate it. They hate it. This does not belong here. Get out of my meetup. But if there are a few people in the crowd that seem to resonate with it, I think that’s good enough.
Matty: About, about why would be is if you think there’s an audience that there is a group that’s not served. So this is something that has come up quite a bit, and I think it’s probably a general major metro kind of thing like this, where in Chicago, I mean, so there’s downtown Chicago and then there’s the sprawl of the suburbs. And so someone I’ve talked to several times, you know, we’ll run into each other at conferences and things, and we’re local, and he’s in the north, you know, kind of the northwest suburbs. And for people There’s a lot of people that live in the suburbs and work in the city. So people who live in the suburbs and work in the city will possibly stay after work to go to a meetup that’s downtown and catch that later train. People who live— there are some people that live in the city and work in the suburbs. I’m like raising my eyebrows, like what kind of fool would do that? Even though I’ve done it for, you know, on and off, but a lot of people live in the suburbs and work in the suburbs. So Nathan, to take your point of the last thing I want to do after going to work is get in my car and drive through an hour and a half of traffic on the Eisenhower. To go downtown. But if it’s, hey, there’s something that’s more in my locale. But what I suggested in that case was saying, like, actually, instead of starting your whole own thing— and this is gonna go into a little bit about the who in a minute— is I said, why don’t we, why don’t we do this under the, the, you know, aegis of the Chicago DevOps Group, and we will just have some events that are in that area, and you can run those events. But rather than, you know, so there’s a lot of being able to not be a splinter group but expand. Because as we talked about, and we’re gonna continue to talk about, this is a lot of work. And especially if you’re starting from ground up by yourself, if you can leverage being part of another group and then eventually maybe get so large that you go off and are completely independent or not. I think also I I would say too is that, you know, we talked about, you know, when you’re talking about, again, we didn’t go back. I think a lot of this to me applies to internal events as well as to why should you decide to do it. You know, Nathan talked about this a little bit about that, you know, why an internal event, or I’m sorry, or just even an internal community, internal DevOps community at your company could be because folks won’t, you know, again, would rather go off and do stuff with their families. For some reason after work instead of go talk about DevOps stuff. I think when you think about being able to evangelize within your company, it gives a lot of possibility for that. I’d like to kind of move on to our next, which is the who. So when we talk about who should just be and who should be involved, we’ve talked about— so you’ve decided, yes, it is time for me to start the DevOps meetup in Kings Landing. So I’m going to use made-up cities now so I don’t offend anybody. Can you just decide to start this yourself and just decide to go and, and go and run? What’s that like?
Dustin: [00:21:03] I mean, so when I took over the Boston meetup, I did it for myself, for, or by myself for about 8 months. And it’s tough. Like I was spending probably 6 to 8 hours a week just getting everything coordinated, making sure the speakers were happy, getting the venue sorted, all of it. And about, but about 8 months in, Dave Fredericks, the guy who had been been coming pretty regularly, offered to help. And he’s like, he’s one of those guys that was doing sort of the fix your kitchen before they had TV shows about it. So he’s very logistically minded. And so he’s been handling a lot of the logistics around sponsorships and venues now, so I can focus more on creating content that will actually be helpful to the members. I would say it is possible to do it on your own. It’s, it’s just tough.
Nathen: Yeah.
Andy: I’d echo the sentiment on that. I mean, I’ve run the Leeds group on my own the last 2 years, but I’ve, I’ve kind of worked out a way to do it which is kind of minimal effort now. I’ve kind of like been tuning and tuning it. I think the thing is I am actually essentially lazy, you know. I will choose the path of least resistance, and certainly in the earlier days it was the first 2 speakers I could get my hands on, the most convenient venue, the person who was just willing to sponsor that was easy. I think it was kind of more, um, maybe not quantity over quality, but it was certainly that path of least resistance where now the reputation of the group’s built up. I can be a lot more fussy and pick and choose sponsors. And, you know, I’ve got a bit of a backlog of speakers now, so it’s kind of got easier through reputation and just sticking with it as well.
Matty: [00:22:40] But what were those, those early days when you’re kind of starting? So when you, when you started this, you did start it by yourself. I mean, that’s, that’s got to be in some ways quite a bit— I imagine some of the big challenge of that is if you haven’t done it before too, you’re dealing with, how do I promote this? How do I, what are the things I have to think about? What goes into that? Can you tell us a little bit what that was like?
Andy: Sure, so I’d kind of spoken with a lot of the other user group managers in Leeds, so I kind of knew what I was letting myself in for. I’d also worked in a digital marketing agency for like 15 years, whatever it was, and I’d picked up through osmosis a few bits of marketing and a few bits of social media stuff. So when I got going, I kind of put together a product, and I think this was kind of what a couple of things I did right. I mean, I’ve learned through mistakes, but I think I was quite savvy for listening to other people’s advice. So I got a web presence together, I got a Twitter account and used Twitter as like the way to funnel everybody to the place. That was really the sum of my marketing technique, if you like. And I worked out that if I I followed all the people who followed all the other user groups in the city. Being quite British and polite, people would follow me back. So it took 5 days to get like 100 followers of exactly the kind of people I wanted to speak to. Then getting an event together— I mean, yes, I used a lot of help from sponsors originally and got them to try and organize and pay for venues, so I wasn’t dealing with money. Speaker-wise, it was just basically finding friends and acquaintances who I knew. I didn’t have this— and I hate the word network, but that’s kind of what I’ve ended up with, even though I didn’t deliberately set out to network. But I’ve ended up with loads of contacts now that, you know, you speak to them and you find somebody else. It’s kind of like layers of the onion now are unwrapping, and I find speakers all over the place. Quite typical, quite an obsession, really. But anyway, so yeah, the early days were, were kind of tough, but it was basically not quite subcontracting stuff out to people, but certainly getting the help of the sponsors and the venues to do a lot of the heavy lifting. And I still regard it really as kind of just creating the thing and letting the thing happen. It’s very DIY. I don’t, you know, I don’t necessarily want to hear what the speaker’s got to say. I just want to hear the synopsis. I don’t necessarily, you know, I don’t check tickets on the door, you know, even though I used to run kind of stuff. It’s all about kind of DIY and that kind of putting it together and letting it happen, really, rather than trying to orchestrate a show or something like that.
Matty: [00:25:18] The role is more of facilitator.
Nathen: Yeah, I’d like to echo some of what Andy said. When I first started, you know, I’ve— I have started essentially 2 different meetups in my local area, and both times I was fortunate enough that my employer was willing to host and sponsor the food and beverage. So that was a thing that was out of the way. But I do, I’ll never forget, you know, those first couple of meetups for each one of the groups that I ran the first couple of months. You’d spend a couple of hours putting up the signs and making sure that the pizza’s ready and the beer’s going to be there and all of these things. And the clock like ticks across to 6:30 or whatever time it’s supposed to start. And you feel like you’re throwing a party for all of your friends, but you forgot to send out the invites because where is everyone?
Trevor: Right.
Nathen: You have just, I just remember being a bundle of nerves, like, I’ve thrown this amazing party and no one shows up. What does that say about me? It was hard, but then this amazing thing happened. People came in the door and it was cool. I remember when I first got started, for the first meetup, we didn’t even have a topic. The first DevOps meetup that I ran, we knew it was going to be about DevOps, but the meetup was basically, come together and let’s talk about what we want this meetup to be. How frequently should we meet? Is this location good for everyone. And of course, like, I wanted to sort of target it to the people that showed up because I knew that the people that showed up were the people that were most likely to come back the next time. And I found that as you’re getting started, it’s super important to be consistent, have that meeting every single month or every single, you know, whatever your schedule happens to be. And then the other thing I think that really helped sort of find that core group of people that were going to come back all the time and bring people back with them, much like you do your checkouts here on Arrested DevOps, I used to close my meetups with checkouts or pro tips or tips from everyone in the room and tell us anything about it. But the point that I did that, or the reason I did that, was I wanted to remind people that I’m here as the facilitator. This is not my meetup. This is our meetup. You have something of value to share with the group. I wanted to force everyone to share something of value with the group before they left that night so that next time they came back, maybe they would give a lightning talk or maybe they’d give a full presentation. But it’s truly, as Andy mentioned, like, we’re here as the facilitators. We are not here because this is my group and we’re going to do things the way that I say.
Matty: [00:27:50] Yeah, you definitely won’t, won’t get very far with that. And that goes into, I was going to ask as well, when you’re getting, you know, you definitely can start a thing by yourself. You can start a thing with a group. And I think a lot of this is how do you get help? And, and by help, I’m not necessarily speaking about how do I get, you know, we’ve talked about that, about like getting help with specific things as you’re going, but when you’re saying, okay, so let’s say I started this DevOps group, or I’m going to start a DevOps Day. I’m going to do a thing. Maybe some thoughts around— because the first thing I can tell you is, at least in my experience, you’re going to do this and you’re going to have this flurry of people who are going to say, I am so excited to be involved with this thing you’re doing. Half of them, you will never— at least half you will never hear from again or something. So it’s a matter of— I know when we started DevOps Days Chicago, we said you have that organized. This is what I tell people when they’re getting ready to start a new DevOps Day. You’re going to have an organizer meeting. Say, anyone who’s interested, show up. There were probably 24 people that came to the 10th Magnitude office that day for that meeting. By the time it was— if you look at that organizer photo from Chicago 7 months later, there was, I think, 10 people standing there. That’s fine, but it’s— anyway, back to the thing. When you’ve brought more people into your system through DevOps Day Sponsor or their DevOps or What are some things for people to think about with reaching out to more people to be part of the organization that you’re creating, and, and some, or some tips for soliciting them in case you don’t have people, you know, tripping over themselves to help you? And maybe the people tripping over themselves to help you aren’t even necessarily the ones that are best served to do so.
Trevor: [00:29:33] I think it’s important to remember not everyone might be as excited as you are. And so you have to, you have to manage your own expectations about participate— participation of the people who are offering to help. And so you have to make sure, at least while things are getting started and while you narrow down that group of 20 people down to 10, you need to cover your bases and make sure that— check up and make sure that we’re getting the things that we’re expecting so that the group is a success.
Dustin: Well, I think this is sort of a double-edged sword here, right? Because the people that you probably want to go to to help you out are your friends or the people that you work with. And that might work fine if you had a different kind of meetup, right? Like if you had an ops meetup or if you had an AngularJS meetup or something, because it’s very, very focused. But if you end up trying to start a DevOps meetup and all of your organizers are ops people and you don’t know any dev or QA or business people, it gets pretty hard to get more of a homogeneous group. So I think reaching really helped. Like, if you’re, if you’re a dev person, maybe you should look into getting an ops person to be your co-organizer just to get a better perspective, because I think it’s really easy to turn a DevOps meetup into an ops meetup.
Trevor: [00:30:49] Yeah, that sounds almost exactly like what Matt said to me when he asked me to do the podcast with him.
Matty: You guys who are folks who’ve been listening only recently don’t realize that Trevor used to write code before becoming a reluctant type of ops person, I guess.
Trevor: I don’t know.
Matty: But that was exactly— but the point is completely valid. This is like the only episode we’ve ever done where we go around and tell each other that their opinion is okay.
Dustin: Stopping everyone.
Matty: Yeah. And I don’t understand where that came from. I think it was my fault because I said something was valid. But I think it’s actually— I don’t want to say that it’s valid. I think it’s an exceptionally good piece of advice, besides the fact that sometimes organizing and working with your friends causes its own different kind of challenge, but to force that perspective down that road, and even to the perspective of, you know, to say, okay, I don’t actually even know— and that’s a risky thing, because I’m like, I may hate working with you. I don’t know you. All I know is that you run the, you know, local Ruby meetup, you know, or Rails meetup, but you are gonna come— but if you’re interested, in the DevOps topic enough that you’ve come to this, then— so I think that’s a great piece of advice to think about. I think we may have made that— I’m trying to think now of the makeup of the DevOpsDays Chicago organizing crew, and I think we lean more ops-heavy, but I do think we have some fair amount of diversity from that representation. We had at least 2 developers, we had somebody who knew how to or at least update the website, so that’s a start.
Dustin: [00:32:23] That was the position I found myself in when I took over the Boston DevOps meetup. We were about 24 ops guys, and I mean guys, sitting around talking about ops stuff. We’d have a panel discussion trying to get some DevOps topics going, and then there’d be a 20-minute sidebar on whether ZFS or ButterFS is the better file system. That might be a completely valid conversation, but not in this context.
Nathen: ZFS, obviously.
Andy: Go on.
Dustin: I’ve been trying really, really hard to bring to specifically— like, we’re pretty good with the ops folks now, so why don’t we talk to developers? Why don’t we talk to security? Why don’t we talk to business and really try to get them in too?
Andy: Yeah, I would say that that is, along with finding speakers in the first place, finding that mix of speakers that’s not just Docker talks, which is a particularly easy win at the minute, but to actually get some form of, you know, business-related stuff or people-related stuff in there is a challenge. And, you know, I’ve found it hard to get Microsoft stuff in there. You know, I can get loads of LAMP talks or talks about tools which primarily exist in Linux, but actually getting engagement with the Windows people, I’ve actually had to make a big effort to get speakers in and to make sure that that mix of content is there.
Dustin: [00:33:42] And I think it’s not always easy to know what people are going to be interested in, right? This was a good piece of advice I got from the Python meetup organizer. In Boston. I went to a meetup one night and there was a guy there that was using Python to do some science and he didn’t really talk about Python at all. Basically what he ended up with was this little machine that could sit on your counter at CVS. It would prick your finger and tell you if you had the flu or not. That was the topic, right? And people loved it. They loved it. There was no Python on the screen. Bringing people in, taking sort of a chance, like, I don’t know if this is going to be good for the audience or not, but let’s find out because they seem really smart and engaging. That can always also pay off to help you get a little more diversity in your crowd.
Matty: That’s great. I think that this goes— this leads us really naturally into our 3rd piece of tonight, which is the how do you do this? The first thing that we’re talking about is how do you get content? We talked about reaching out to folks. I know one of the challenges has been a matter of thinking too much inside the DevOps box or inside the echo chamber. I know I’ve been guilty of that a lot. We are— this applies to like now, some of this applies a little bit to like this show. We sit down here and we say, okay, well, who should we have on the show? Well, let’s bring on John Allspaw and Nathan Harvey and Mark Imbriaco and Kyle Kingsbury, bring on all the usual suspects. And somehow John Willis has managed to evade the show up till now. But the reality is, yes, people want to listen to that, but people really care about the ideas And then I think the same thing is gonna be true for your local meetups, which is you don’t necessarily have to bring Gene Kim to your meetup to get people to come. The thing is, it can be— I think you can kind of alternate this a little bit, because if you don’t have this thing, like Andy said, there’s certainly a fact of now your meetup has got a reputation, so people submit to themselves. People come to your meetup because it’s the Leeds Meetup. But when you’re kind of building a thing, just saying, I’m gonna do this thing, someone might say, well, I’ve never been to it before, I don’t know what I’m gonna get. Oh, well, I see Jez Humble is coming to speak. Well, I’ve heard of him, I’d like to hear him talk, so I’ll come to your thing so I can hear Jez. Then I come to your thing and find out that it’s super rad. But it does give us— we do have this, this thing where we feel like we have to, you know, sometimes like we have to get in these big names. And Nathan, I think you’ve got some thoughts on that.
Nathen: [00:36:14] Yeah, I was just saying in the chat window there that nobody else can read that it’s good to talk to yourself. But honestly, what I was actually saying was that it’s— there is this desire to bring in celebrities, and what you think is that the celebrities are going to give you a big draw, and that might very well be true. I would argue that if you do bring in someone from the outside, the other thing that you should always do is make sure that you have a local presenter or local speaker that night. Because frankly, when we’re talking about meetups and building local communities, we should also be building local celebrities. The people in your area should know the people that are doing the amazing things also in your area. And you don’t, you don’t need to bring in a big-name celebrity. They’re not going to be there next month, or it’s unlikely that they will be, right? So let’s build— it’s a true community when what we can do is get together on a regular basis and have those conversations.
Dustin: Yeah, I think the last thing I would I would say about how do you do it is the same advice you would give to a Scrum Master. Mix it up. Do long talks, do short talks, do open spaces, do panels. Don’t do the same thing month in, month out. Most of our— like next week we’re doing a lightning talk, a panel, and an open space. We usually have open spaces, but just keeping it, varying it up, keeping the audience engaged really helps out because otherwise you’re just, oh, it’s that time of the month again. I guess I’ll go sit through 3 more talks.
Matty: [00:37:39] Okay. I’m interested, you know, your mix it up thing. And I think especially when you think it’s going well is probably your best time to throw a wrench— you know, I’m sorry, I’ll do this one— to throw a spanner in the works, right? Because that’s the thing, you can’t— it’s too late to mix it up once your people’s interest has declined, you know. But when you, when you’re up there is to say, okay, maybe we still have this scenario like I know we have in Chicago where if you don’t sign And when one gets announced, within 40 hours, 48 hours, it’s completely full. That’s kind of actually a bit of a problem because it means it’s always the same people, you know, but also at this point we know that everyone’s going to come. We know it’s always going to be a packed house. That doesn’t mean that we should keep doing it the same way. But if we wait until that’s not the case to say, oh, well let’s try doing open spaces instead, it may be too late to see what’s happening. The other thing I want to think about, and this might be, Also, again, thinking about beyond just meetups, but when we think about things like DevOps Days or conferences, and why DevOps, in general, events and communities than normal ones. How is it? Maybe someone’s had experience running a marketing— again, this is not— my girlfriend works in marketing. She’ll kill me if she knows I was making fun of it. So I’m not, didn’t happen. Good thing I’m not on the show. Or I’ve run conferences that are more large-scale, and now I want to be a part of DevOps Days. What are some things that, in your experience, are maybe a little bit different about a DevOps event or meetup than maybe some other one?
Dustin: [00:39:18] Well, this is one of the things I brought up in my post about it, is that if you’re going to have a very varied audience, you need to create material that respects that. You don’t know who’s going to be coming into your meetup, so maybe something like an intro to Docker isn’t that great of a talk, because maybe half the people already are using Docker a lot. When I’m talking to speakers, I try to get them to structure their talks in a way where it starts off really basic and then goes really deep. The people who are running Docker in production for 2 years might already know, yeah, yeah, yeah, but toward the latter half of the talk, then you see them perk up a little bit, oh, I didn’t know that. You get more of a cross-section of the crowd.
Nathen: I think another challenge, or a thing that makes something like DevOps unique, is that just tonight, Tonight, we’ve talked a little bit about dev, we’ve talked a little bit about ops, we’ve talked about things from PHP to ButterFS. There are varied topics, so varied topics when it comes to DevOps that I think if you go to something like a Ruby meetup, you know you’re going to talk about Rails because what else do Rubyists talk about? You can be a little bit more focused maybe in some of those other groups, whereas in DevOps, I think you’re going to have just a wider array of interests and topics that you can discuss. Honestly, that’s a big reason why we do open source.
Dustin: [00:40:41] Spaces, because then you can break out, you know, 6 groups that can talk about what they want.
Trevor: That’s really interesting, because at 10th we’ve got our Azure meetup, and I find so often that most of the people who show up to that Azure meetup are people who are interested in dev on Azure. And we’ve tried having some of the folks who represent more of the ops and the infrastructure give talks, and really I think it’s just made the group scale down. It has— there hasn’t been a good intersection between the two. And maybe, maybe based on some of the conversation we’ve had tonight, maybe we should do 2-part where we do talk about some dev and we talk about some infra, or maybe we just split them in 2, although I like that less.
Matty: I think the thing is that you— what you do, again, you know, you can’t control your audience. So it’s, it’s a bummer about something like that where you’re saying, I really have a bunch of Azure devs, I really wish they would, you know, give a shit about the infrastructure side of that. And if you’ve tried and you’ve tried and you’ve tried and they don’t show up and they don’t care and they don’t want to be there, then you know what, that you gotta give up because what’s gonna happen is you’re just gonna send them away. Now then, now if there’s ways you can help influence that, so maybe the 2-parter meetup might help. The only thing that like kind of the, the cynic in me says, well, make sure that the dev part is in the second half and they don’t know that, because I’ve actually been at meetups where I’ve seen people leave after the first speaker, which actually really bothered me because I just think that’s, that’s like leaving after coming from theater.
Trevor: [00:42:06] That’s like leaving after your friend’s band plays, you know, or leaving after the first act. Yeah.
Dustin: So I’ve got one more that might be a little controversial, but has worked really well for us. If you can find a business person with a thick skin to tell it like it is from their perspective, then you’re both— you, you help level up the more technical people in the crowd because they can understand, they can form a little empathy, but also there’s that shared enemy sort of thing still going on. So if you’re having trouble getting your DevOps people or your security people to really work with each other. Just giving them something they can rally around helps, too. I think a couple of months ago, we had a meetup where it was almost like a stand-up. People were heckling, but the person that was giving the talk was— they’re used to this sort of thing, and it turned out really well.
Matty: Awesome. This is great. I would just say, we’re going to have to wrap it up and get into our checkouts and everything, but there are 2 things. We had a question come in from Twitter from Brian Bohannon who said, so the question is, top 3 things to host a meetup at corp. So I’m not quite sure exactly what that question means. I’ll leave it open to if anyone wants to translate. I think it means like maybe top 3 things to keep in mind if you’re hosting a meetup within your corporation. Or unless he all thinks we work for the corporate office of Arrested DevOps, and when we do our meetups at corp, what do we do? I don’t know, Nathan. You’ve helped with a lot of these.
Nathen: [00:43:47] I think he could be asking it from one of two perspectives. Maybe we’ll give him 6 things.
Matty: There we go.
Nathen: He asked for 3.
Matty: At least 2 of them should be right.
Nathen: One perspective could be, I want to host a meetup at the corp where I work, so how do I convince my boss or the facilities team that what we should do is host a meetup here? Then the other way that you could look at that topic or that question is, what are the top 3 ways that I can host a meetup for within my corporation? Those are kind of the 2 different ways that I think we could interpret that. Yeah. So I would say that for the, for the first one, like I work at a place, I want my place to host the meetup. All you have to do is convince the people that are in charge, the people that make those decisions about why it would be a good thing. And my past experience tells me that if you’re in a technical industry, you’re probably looking to hire people. People, and you probably have a hard time finding those people. One of the best ways to do that is to bring people into your offices to show them that you’re a great community participant. Let them participate with the community. Then, while they’re there, I had the great pleasure of working at Custom Ink. It’s a t-shirt company, so it was a fun office. One of the things that I used to do, and it was kind of an agreement with my employer, at the end of the meetup, anyone that was interested and wanted to stick around, I would give you a tour of the office and talk about, like, how this business— here’s how this business works. I want to get you excited about coming to work at Custom Ink without telling you what I’m trying to do is get you to come and work at Custom Ink. I just want to show you what a cool place it is. So that’s— there’s one of the top ways to get it hosted by your office. Dustin or Andy, do you have another? Or of course Matt or Trevor.
Trevor: [00:45:36] I was just gonna say another way to get internal sponsorship is to point out that it provides learning opportunities for your own team as well as speaking opportunities. So if you’re looking to get your team ready to talk at some of the bigger conferences or DevOps Days or bigger than that, you get them going with those speaking engagements at a local, local gig, and they’ll be your— I don’t want to say rock star because that’s a no-no word, but they’ll be your, your mainstage actor before you know it.
Andy: Yeah, I would just add extensive guest out and speaking at groups, which probably isn’t answering this question, but that’s something I do to get promotion out about the group. I’ve spoken at, like, the local Agile groups and many of the dev language groups in Leeds, just really to get the message out there about the group. But it’s also a really good way to actually learn about this stuff. I mean, I thought originally that DevOps was about Nagios and Chef, and it wasn’t until I went out and actually spoke about this stuff that I learned what it really was. And boy, was I wrong.
Matty: [00:46:38] So it’s about Nagios and Chef and the ELK Stack.
Andy: Yes, of course it is. Exactly. And Vagrant and Docker.
Matty: Oh yeah, Docker.
Andy: But yeah, certainly getting out and talking about this stuff gets you to learn. And if your team is like Trevor says, if they’re going talking internally at these events, that’s a great way for them to learn. And you never know the stuff better until you’ve got to stand up in front of a bunch of people and explain it, because they’ll ask questions back.
Matty: All right, and that is actually probably a really good way to wrap us up and send us out. It’s like as if you said it on purpose in that way. So we’re going to go into really quickly our community stuff, some upcoming conferences. So the Chef Community Summit is next week in Seattle. We guess we have a discount code, although my understanding is that it’s pretty close to full at this point.
Nathen: No, no, no, no, it’s all another Sell another ticket, Matt. Sell another ticket.
Matty: Go. Oh, okay. Well, I don’t know, because it’s not written in here, but I think our discount code is ArrestedDevOps.
Nathen: [00:47:40] If that doesn’t work, try ChefFriend. If that doesn’t work, put an S on the end of that, ChefFriends. One of those things is bound to work.
Matty: But I can tell you for sure that Nathan, Trevor, and I will all be there. I don’t know Andy or Dustin.
Trevor: We’re going to have 5 podcasters.
Nathen: Yeah.
Matty: So, All Things Open will be in Raleigh at some point. I don’t know, because somebody put hyperlinks in this document. Instead of writing things.
Nathen: It’s October 19th through the 21st-ish, and it was me that put them in because I totally trolled your doc and just put all the conferences I’m going to.
Matty: Right, okay, then I’m gonna let you read the rest of them because you know when they are.
Nathen: So after all things open, Chef will be on the road. We’ll be visiting Boston. I think that’s October 27th or so. We will put a link in the show notes. The Chef Community Summit is happening again, but this time not in Seattle. It’s happening in London on November 3rd and 4th. If you want to come across the pond, or Andy, if you want to drive south a little bit to London, we’d love to have you at the Chef Community Summit. If you ask nicely, I bet I can get you a discount code that’s better than what Matt can give you. Yeah. Then, finally, on my list of conferences that I’m sure I’ll be attending before the year is out is LISA, the Large Implementation System Administration Conference, which is happening in D.C., November 8th through the 13th.
Trevor: [00:49:01] There you go.
Nathen: There are your upcoming conferences. Great.
Matty: Also, the very first DevOps Days Detroit will be November 11th through the 12th. If you listen to ADO, or if you don’t but someone told you, you can get 10% off with the discount code ADO10. The week after that will be the very first DevOps Days Ohio in Columbus, November 18th and 19th, and you can get 10% off with the discount code ARRESTED. So you understand why I didn’t know our code off the top of my head, Nathan. And then also, Raleigh or Durham or South Carolina— Charlotte, right, is the one that’s in the beginning. I think the first week of November, DevOps Days, that I unfortunately can’t go to. Also, so a thing that we’re gonna start doing in every episode, and maybe we’ll have a cool name for it— if you have an idea for a name for this segment, please tweet it at us. This is our podcast recommendation of the episode, when we tell you about another podcast podcasts that we think you should listen to. Today, tonight, our podcast recommendation of the episode is The Food Fight Show, hosted by Brian Berry and Nathan Harvey and a bunch of other people. You may have heard of Nathan Harvey of Arrested DevOps Episode 11 fame. The Food Fight Show is the podcast where DevOps chefs do battle, right? That’s what you call it these days, Nathan?
Nathen: [00:50:19] That’s what we do, although it’s a lie. We’re pretty congenial.
Matty: It’s pretty congenial, but don’t think it’s— so if you don’t use chef, don’t I don’t think that you won’t find it to be useful and entertaining. It’s not always completely about chef topics. I will say that when I was just a wee young lad of 4 years ago, maybe, learning about DevOps, that Food Fight Show was one, especially when I was learning about the chef, but learning about DevOps, I probably listened to every single episode of the Food Fight Show. I don’t necessarily recommend— I’m not telling you that everyone should go back and listen to every single one, because I know that’s a huge undertaking. Well, you should. It’d be— it would be fun. But I learned— I’ve learned so much from listening to that show, and it’s highly entertaining. Nathan is one of the greater of the DevOps podcast hosts. So everybody check them out at foodfightshow.org. Foodfightshow.org.
Trevor: [00:51:20] You got it.
Matty: See, that’s why Nathan is a good host and I’m not. So speaking of Nathan, Nathan, what do you have for us to check out? By the way, we completely stole this from you, but I feel okay because you stole it from the Ruby Rogues.
Nathen: I did, I did steal this idea of checkouts or tips from the Ruby Rogues earlier. Yeah, I used it in my meetups. I used, used to use it at my meetups. So I’m gonna cheat. One of my tips is a thing I didn’t get to say but came to mind while we were talking about how do you get your own local meetup started. If you find yourself at a large national or regional conference, maybe something like a Velocity, put out a tweet and find the people that are at that conference from your local area. On-site, say, look, we’re going to meet in the lobby for 10 minutes, and I want to talk about the local DevOps meetup. It’s going to be our first meetup of our chapter. It’s going to take place 10 minutes in the lobby at this big conference. You will find the people that want to help you get that thing started. That’s my first checkout. My second checkout is I love reading about incidents and postmortems. When failure happens because, in DevOps, of course, failure is an opportunity to learn. At Chef, I push us very hard to host all of our postmortems in a public fashion. I recently held a postmortem that was hosted essentially identical to this show. It was a Google Hangout that was livestreamed to YouTube. We’ll put a link in the show notes there that’s a blog post where you can read the full incident write-up, but then you can also watch the video of the postmortem. One of the coolest things about making it public, we learned more about about the incident by making our postmortem public. There were parts, people, users that were impacted that we didn’t fully understand what those impacts were. We have comments on the YouTube video that tell us, no, no, no, you said this, but this is actually how that thing impacted me, which I think is super awesome. And then my third and final pick out, I didn’t realize that there was a podcast recommendations of this episode section, so I’m also going to recommend another podcast.
Matty: [00:53:23] That’s the thing that we’re recommending, so it’s ours, but you can recommend one.
Nathen: Yeah, I mean, I could have trolled your notes there also, but I didn’t. My third and final checkout is DevOps Days, the DevOps Days podcast. It’s a brand-new podcast that we’ve started as DevOps Days organizers. If you go to that in your favorite podcast streaming thing, you will find just the audio of all of the talks from Washington, D.C. that happened in June. You’ll find all the talks from Pittsburgh that happened this summer also. As of this morning, you’ll find day 1 talks from Chicago. Maybe by tomorrow, I’ll have all the day 2 talks from Chicago posted up there. If you’re hosting—
Matty: The amazing thing is, I volunteered to help transfer all those into there and help him with Chicago and everything, and clearly, I have done none of that so far.
Nathen: Yeah, it’s all me.
Matty: Back to that picking who you have help you.
Nathen: Yeah, but if you are hosting or organizing a DevOps Days event and you want to get the audio recording of your talks into that podcast, just reach out in either the DevOps Slack channel or reach out to me directly, and I’ll help you make that happen. Those are my checkouts.
Matty: [00:54:33] Great, Andy.
Andy: Okay, just a plug, I’m going to Velocity Amsterdam, so if anybody wants to say hello, I’ll be annoying Bridget, hopefully.
Matty: You should also most likely annoy Ivo. I’m sure Ivo van Doorn from Chef will be there, so my former manager until he moved to Amsterdam a few months ago, he’s over there. So if you see him, if you see a dude walking around ranting with a goatee ranting about IP and that looks like he was born in the States even though he’s born over there. Say, are you Ivo?
Andy: Okay, I will make a list of people to nag.
Matty: Yes, excellent.
Andy: Okay, in terms of picks, what do I have? Charles Proxy. I just want to give a shout out to that because it’s been a mainstay of my job for so many years and it’s just brilliant. It’s a proxy that sits between your browser and your connection, and it shows you the stuff going through it. It does all sorts of other stuff like substituting remote files for files on your desktop and port forwarding and stuff. It’s really brilliant. And the guy who writes it is constantly updating it. It’s amazing. I wouldn’t be half the guy I was without Charles Proxy. The other 2 things I want to give a bit of a plug to, first of all, is a piece of advice, which is if you’re running a DevOps group, don’t bite off more than you can chew. So I’ve decided to curate a day’s worth of talks at a technology event on DevOps, just to make sure I contribute myself. That’s happening in Leeds on the 22nd of October. It’s called TechnologyUG. We’ve got some really good speakers. We’ve got someone who’s speaking at Velocity, someone who’s just spoken at Operability.io, and another couple of speakers we’ve had at the group who are amazing. It’s kind of a bit of a greatest hits, but, you know, they’re really top-notch speakers. So please follow the link, and if you’re in the UK or in the north of the UK, please come along. And then finally, I’ll finish with a song, not that I’m going to perform it, but we had a speaker come to our group called John Leach, who works for a local ISP, and he said, can I bring my guitar? And I said, okay. So he did a talk on the inner workings of Docker and then played his Nagios song, which nearly had hilarious consequences when the autocorrect on my Twitter client changed the word Nagios to something else. But fortunately I spotted it before I tweeted it out. But it’s brilliant. Obviously the link will be there. It’s just a great song and really funny. So please watch that.
Matty: [00:57:05] Yeah, the— when you talk about the autocorrect, something I’ve realized lately. So my autocorrect— so if you’re familiar with the DevOps gadfly known as Michael Ducy, who also works for Chef and is actually now my manager. So I’ve had— so I’ve been typing his name a lot more recently, and my iPhone likes to autocorrect Ducy to sexy, which could have very unfortunate results when trying to talk. And all kinds of problems. It’s a problem because he’s my boss. It’s a problem because he’s Ducy. And so yeah, that was, that was almost unfortunate. So Dustin, what do you have for us?
Dustin: Yeah, sure. So later this month, Container Days will be in New York City. I went to the one in Boston a couple of months ago, and it was really good. It’s not all Docker. There’s quite a bit of Docker, but if you want to talk with folks, learn from folks that are running Docker containers in production, that’s a good event to go to. Boyd Hemphill, he did Container Days Austin. Good guy. He’s actually talking about Docker in production at a meetup the night before. Both those links are in the notes. There’s been a website that’s been helpful for me, both as an event organizer and developer advocate, which is CMX Hub. And so these are articles and videos all about building communities, and there’s just a lot of good insights on there. It’s all free. And then the last thing, I am a developer, so I’ve been managing our build infrastructure at Conjure while making it better, and the Jenkins Job DSL. So if you’re gonna write your code in code, your servers in code, your security in code, just write your Jenkins jobs in code. It’s a lot easier. I have open-sourced the Conjure repo, so there’s a ton of examples in there, and that’ll be in the links too. Oh, and I will be giving a talk at DevOps Days Ohio, so say hi if you see me there.
Matty: [00:59:05] Yay, awesome! All right, Trevor.
Trevor: All right, so Marvel’s Agents Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has started back up and it’s already really exciting. I have the new Hulu no commercials thing, which is awesome. Even though Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to be excluded from that, it apparently isn’t, which is awesome because that means even less commercials, which is even better.
Matty: This is like Hulu++ or something, right?
Trevor: Yeah. I think it’s like $12 a month or something and there’s no commercials. It’s amazing because that’s what I’ve been waiting for them to do since it happened. So besides that, this week and last week there have been some fun new device announcements, which I’m sure everybody’s already aware of. But Microsoft announced the Surface Book, which looks really awesome and really cool and is really powerful, and I can finally get rid of my 17-inch monolith and replace it with something small and touchscreen compatible. And I’m really excited about that.
Matty: [01:00:07] Trevor’s laptop is an Azure data center.
Trevor: Yes. Then the other device that came out is the Nexus 6P. Well, it’s not out yet. Neither of these are in anybody’s hands yet besides tech writers, but the Nexus 6P is available for preorder. I love gadgets. Those are fun. Matt, what do you got?
Matty: The first one is— I actually do. I just realized it is another podcast recommendation, but it’s not a tech podcast. This is a podcast called Classy Little Podcast, and they basically, the 2 hosts sit around and drink wine and eat cheese and talk about stuff. And they’re, I think they’re really funny. I’ve really enjoyed the show. I came across it, one of their co-hosts, Emily, is part of a podcasting community I’m in, and we were talking about a technical thing and then it was like, what’s your show? And I started listening and then pretty much listened to every one of their shows. They’re relatively short, about half an hour long, very well produced. Very funny. They’re classylittlepodcast.com. The other thing is Lego is producing a Doctor Who set, and the worst part is Trevor and I both found out about it from Bridget. So we don’t know how she knew about it and we didn’t, but that is, I believe, December 11th. It’s a little playset. Many Whovians are up in arms about why is the Doctor wearing this particular outfit when he didn’t do that in that episode. I’m just like, OMG. I can build the TARDIS out of Lego. And finally, speaking of OMG, I know not everybody’s into sportsball, but as of last night, the Chicago Cubs are in the playoffs. They will be playing St. Louis on Friday. They are hot, hot, hot. So I would tell— and also, there were— oddsmakers were saying whoever won last night’s one-game playoff was favored to win the World Series. And this is, yes, my friends, 2015, the year that in Back to the Future or 2, the Cubs did win the World Series. So with that, when the Cubs do win the World Series, you can hear about it in the Arrested DevOps mailing list, which you can get on at arresteddevops.com/bandstand. It’s also a good way to know about upcoming podcast episodes and cool news with DevOps. And we have an iPhone app if you’d like to directly have ADO on your iPhone. You can download it for free at arresteddevops.com/appstore.
Dustin: [01:02:23] IPhone.
Trevor: You’re gonna really regret putting your foot in your mouth when you renew the curse there, Matt.
Matty: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was— no, I won’t, because can you imagine the sick traffic that we will get when people think that when we’re— that when the curse is renewed because of Arrested DevOps?
Trevor: Come on, all the hate, all the hate comments that’ll be flooding all the pages.
Matty: Yes, it’s never— you just never read the comments.
Trevor: So thanks again to our sponsors. Please be sure to visit them at arresteddevops.com/10thmagnitude/victorops/data-dog. Thanks again to Andy, Dustin, and Nathan for joining us tonight.
Dustin: Thanks for having me.
Andy: Yeah, this is, this is one of those things that you kind of always want to happen when you start a DevOps group, ending up on this podcast. It’s just gonna be really surreal on my drive to work when it starts coming in, my own voice starts coming out of my speakers. Anyway, there you go.
Matty: Tell me about it.
Trevor: [01:03:26] And thank you also to our loyal listeners. If you enjoy listening to Arrested DevOps, we’d appreciate it if you would visit arresteddevops.com/itunes and leave us a review in the iTunes Store. We would also love to know what you thought of tonight’s episode. Please leave us a comment at arresteddevops.com/45, although we now know Matt won’t read them.
Matty: That’s right, actually. So, and yeah, so check us out at arresteddevops.com. The other thing is, by the time you’re listening to this, it’s entirely possible that we will have launched the all-new arresteddevops.com that you will quickly see why I’m an ops person, not a front-end web designer. But it does have some new features, some new things we’re doing. We’ll be playing around with that and, uh, take it, take a look. And when you see the new site, if it’s new to you, please give us your feedback. Uh, and you can do that either by— no, 80/20 2.0. You can either hit us up at Arrested DevOps on Twitter or send us an email at shows@arresteddevops.com. That’s what Andy did, and now he’s on the show. Next thing you know, he’s gonna be the CTO. That was like the worst rapping thing ever. I’m not—
Trevor: [01:04:35] you really, you really need to work on your flow.
Matty: I know.
Dustin: Or your editing.
Matty: Both. Thankfully, I am the editor. So, uh, anyway, I’m Matt at Matt Stratton.
Trevor: And I’m Trevor at Trevor G Hess.
Matty: We’re Arrested DevOps, and remember, there’s always DevOps in the banana stand.
