Remaining Authentic in Retirement with Kelsey Hightower

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I have seen nothing level up my career faster than that level of

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transparency and that feedback loop you get from people that don’t

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really have much bias towards your solution other than trying

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to get you set up in the right direction with their experience.

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Welcome to Fork Around and Find Out, the podcast about

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building, running, and maintaining software and systems.

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Managing role-based access control for Kubernetes isn't the

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easiest thing in the world, especially as you have more clusters

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and more users and more services that want to use Kubernetes.

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OpenUnison helps solve those problems by bringing

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single sign on to your Kubernetes clusters.

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This extends Active Directory, Okta, Azure AD, and other sources as

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your centralized user management for your Kubernetes access control.

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You can forget managing all those YAML files to give someone access

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to the cluster and centrally manage all of their access in one place.

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This extends to services inside the cluster

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like Grafana, Argo CD, and Argo Workflows.

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Open Unison is a great open source project, but relying

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on open source without any support for something as

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critical as access management may not be the best option.

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Tremelo Security offers support for Open Unison

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and other features around identity and security.

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Tremelo provides open source and commercial support for Open Unison

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in all of your Kubernetes clusters, whether in the cloud or on prem.

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So check out Tremolo Security for your single sign on needs in Kubernetes.

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You can find them at fafo.fm/tremolo.

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That's T-R E-M-O-L-O.

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Welcome to this episode, episode one.

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And so, today on the show, I am so happy that Kelsey Hightower is here with us.

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Kelsey, thank you for coming on the show.

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Yo.

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Happy to be here.

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And for anyone that doesn’t know you, which would be weird in the

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podcast worlds, especially with our audience that we’re trying to

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reach, you were Distinguished Engineer when you retired at Google,

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long time contributor to Kubernetes, CoreOS, and Puppet before that.

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You’ve been around for a little while.

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I’ve been around.

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I had an almost 25-year career.

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I retired last year, but it doesn’t feel like retirement

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because I’m still at some of the same places I was at when I was

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working, but I get to do it on my terms now, so that feels good.

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That’s baller.

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Also, Kelsey Hightower is a man that made Twitter leave—like, Tech

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Twitter, leave Twitter, and follow him, like the exodus to, like, Bluesky.

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Like, be real [laugh] it’s so much more than just the code that you

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wrote, and a storyteller and amazing speaker, and all of the things.

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Oh, thanks for all the kind words.

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I got to let y’all update my Wikipedia.

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Like—

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[laugh]

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.
—this sounds so much better.

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I’m trying not to, like, let my body—like, my soul leave my body right now.

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Like, I’m just, like, “Just hold it in.” Like—

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I’m just excited you came on.

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And for this episode, we can talk about the boring

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infrastructure stuff and the code you’ve written, but like

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Autumn was saying that’s not, like, the legacy you’re leaving.

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And in many regards, I love your retirement—how did

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you phrase it?—you’re buying your time back, right?

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Like at that point, you’re paying yourself for whatever it is you want to do.

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And it’s been fun just following along with the last couple years of what you’ve

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decided to do because there’s been some of this tech investing, and there’s

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been some—instead of building the future, you’re kind of investing in the

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future and helping people guide to the future, but there’s also been a lot of

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other projects which have been fun just following along on Bluesky and places,

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seeing you rewire parts of your house, and kind of dive into different things.

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Like, you’re diving into some C, and some SQLite, and some other things.

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So, what’s been interesting the last six months for you?

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When you’re starting out, there’s so much content for beginners,

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how to get started with linux, how to get started in tech.

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Should you get an IT certification, or should you go to college?

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There isn’t a lot of content for what do you do towards the end of your career.

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And looking back, I think a lot of decisions I made in the early parts

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of my career, the mid parts of my career, the relationships I built

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contributed a lot to what I’m doing now towards the end of my career.

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And someone really said something really dope to me.

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He was like, “Hey, if you get good at something long enough, you

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will eventually become a philosopher.” It’s one thing to master a

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particular technology, but it’s another to have an opinion about

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something, but to have a philosophy about something requires time,

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and learning from people, and then sharing that stuff over the years.

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And that’s where I’ve arrived.

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So look, I started my career like a lot of

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people listening to this: IT certifications.

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Nothing is wrong with college.

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I just didn’t go, so I can’t tell you about college.

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My daughter is in college now, and I think it’s the best thing

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ever—the things she’s being exposed to, the structure, all the

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things—but one thing that I learned is, don’t matter what path

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you chose, you’re going to be learning for the rest of your life.

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I often meet people and say, “I didn’t learn Kubernetes

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until I was 32,” because that’s when it came out.

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You don’t pick when it’s time to learn.

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You just got to be willing to do it when the time comes.

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And I had a bunch of the jobs that people listening to this, I managed

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storage, backups, [Tivoli] , VMware, OpenStack, and then I helped build some

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of the tools that we’re using today, things like Puppet and open source.

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Towards the end of my career, I built a bunch of relationships along the way.

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All those people you work with, all those people you manage, all those

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problems you solve together, every job interview, every conference talk, every

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meetup, each of those kind of contribute to, like, the people around me today.

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I have friends that I’ve known for 20 years.

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And you get that by paying attention to those relationships.

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And I meet a lot of people out here that put more effort into

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building good relationships with infrastructure and machines,

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and less emphasis on actual people, right, the people you’re

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going to call on later on your career to give you opportunities.

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Justin, reaching out now and saying, “Hey, Kelsey, you want to

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be on the podcast?” And I met Justin, what, almost, what, eight—

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Ten years ago.

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Years ago.

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It was ten.

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That was—ten.

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It was the first HashiConf.

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Yeah, I was thinking about it.

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It was Portland 2014.

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That was—I think it was, or 2015, so nine years.

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And that relationship has paid in dividends over the years,

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during your time at Disney, the things I learned from you

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when you’re at Amazon, hell, just even being on this podcast.

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So, for me, that’s the combination.

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Again, everything you’re going to hear today occurs over 25 years.

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Do not think that this is something you should just

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start doing tomorrow, or you’re behind in some way.

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Everybody’s on their own timeline.

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I just want to give that context before we dive into it.

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Because when people say, “What are you doing now?”

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It’s built off of that previous quarter century.

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You mean you don’t have, like, a three

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month get into to tech workshop for [laugh]

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—
I’m so tired of those

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tech talk videos.

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And I get it—

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Get your six figures right now [laugh]

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.
And I get it because a lot of this stuff is attractive.

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We see all these success stories, and it’s

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hard to tell people what the true grind is.

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The true grind is literally flipping through the

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book and not understanding it the first pass.

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Going to work, and sometimes getting paired with a hostile

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coworker that isn’t interested in training you, and now you got

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to try to sink or swim before performance review rolls around.

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Or a manager.

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Oh, my—that is so—that is—

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Or a manager.

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There’s so much nuance to this game.

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But the thing I think now, though, is that, hey, the reason why

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I can advise startups now is because I’ve been through it, as

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a customer, as a practitioner, as someone also trying to build

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things, sometimes that worked and a lot of times that didn’t.

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And that contributes to this ability to be a startup advisor.

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So, what is a startup advisor?

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You could get your name and picture on the website.

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Hey, this person that you all know is an advisor at our company.

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You should do business with us because we have their

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endorsement, but the advisory that I do is literally, like,

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the work I used to do when I was at CoreOS or at Google.

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What products should we build?

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How should we build them?

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What intuition do you want to use if you have to live with the consequences?

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Should Flux try to take on Homebrew and build a

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better package management system for Mac or not?

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I think we should, and we did, and we shipped.

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And then you communicate the things that you shipped.

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And I learned a lot of this stuff by working at

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places like Google, where I was no one’s manager.

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I was there almost seven-and-a-half years, and I was no one’s manager.

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And there’s this concept of trying to lead without authority.

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I can’t tell anyone to do anything, so I chose to learn

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how to inspire people to building the next great thing.

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And trust me, when you get a taste of that, and the team

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actually ships and customers start giving that feedback, like,

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“This is amazing, I want to use this,” then your trust builds.

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You know what?

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Kelsey isn’t just blowing smoke.

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These are real things that have real consequences,

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real outcomes, that we can measure the impact.

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And so, now I do that across, like, ten companies.

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Some, you know, companies like Docker, there’s Flux out there,

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Redpanda, these are companies I’ve been working with for years now.

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And then there’s some new ones you don’t know about that are,

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like, the ML and networking space, doing low-level things.

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But this has been the thing that has satisfied that urge.

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Like, I can’t just walk away from tech.

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There is so much to give, still so much to learn.

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So, that’s kind of the core of what I’m doing.

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And of course, speaking, authoring, and

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do it yourself projects around the house.

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Question about your time at Google—which maybe you can’t answer this question,

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but I’ve actually wanted to ask you this for a long time—Google has a reputation

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for killing off projects that people love, the Killed by Google website

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exists with more dead projects than Amazon has alive projects, which is a lot.

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How did that wear on you as an engineer, trying to inspire

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people and build something at a place that you had no control

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over what was going to be deprecated or going to be turned down.

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And people are going to say, we don’t trust Google anymore

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because they’ve already turned off all the stuff that I loved.

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Google Reader still lives for a lot [laugh]

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of people as, like, the thing they all loved.

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But how did that affect you, as someone that’s internal, like, powerless

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about what you could do about that, but still on the outside, have

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to say, “Trust us, we’re going to build something cool for you.”

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I hold no Google stock.

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I don’t want no one thinking that I’m biased.

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I made all of my money, and I’m out of here.

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I’m graduated.

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If you’ve ever built anything—I remember building an open-source project

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called [Kafti] . I maintained that thing for three or four years.

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I watched people give talks on it.

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It inspired HashiCorp to do Console Template.

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And I got to a point where I was done with it.

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I’m done.

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If you don’t want to trust Kelsey anymore for

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the rest of your life, that’s your problem.

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I am not signing up for a lifetime commitment

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because I gave you something that I am now done with.

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And I think there’s this illusion in tech that… and surprisingly,

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even stuff that’s free, we’ve gotten accustomed to that it

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should be free forever, and you better maintain it forever.

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And the day you stop is the day I’m mad at you because

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you taken away a thing that you gave me for free.

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And I think in many ways, we kind of lost a plot on the consumer side.

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If you’re not paying for something, like, so let’s say you’re an engineer.

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Let’s talk about the [power at this] point.

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You’re an engineer at Google.

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You do have a lot of power.

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You have the power to make a product viable.

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Giving away software, like, for example, Google Translate, and

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that thing starts making bad translations, you can destroy the

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reputation of your employer because you wanted to give away a

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translation service for free and support every language under the sun.

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So, at some point you got to say, yeah, is this really scalable?

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It is not.

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Or there are situations where there’s four people

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working on something—literally, four—200,000

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people company, four people working on a thing.

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Those four people on year six want to do something different, and no one in

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the whole company wants to work on the thing that they’re leaving behind.

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Why does someone not want to work on it?

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Because you ain’t getting no promotion making

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Google Reader better or maintaining bugs.

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You’re just not.

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A lot of people have chosen—and I don’t know, that predates my time,

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Google Reader going away—but this idea that things have to be around

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forever, let me be honest with y’all, Google don’t owe you that.

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But plan accordingly.

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If you use any of these services like Gmail, I

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will not be surprised one day if Gmail went away.

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I used it for free for, like, a decade.

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I am not going to go on Bluesky and complain that the

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thing I got for free for a decade is now being deprecated.

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Thank you, Google for all the fish.

254
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You know what I do instead, I actually pay my little $12 a month for the

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pay-for version of GSuite so I can contribute to the thing that I want to exist.

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So, when I think about the deprecation thing, I think all businesses that

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are relying on these SaaS or hosted, managed products, if on your game plan,

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you don’t have some contingency for going away, you’re lying to yourself.

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There are many reasons why things could go away.

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Regulation, right?

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In the news right now, they’re talking about TikTok has to

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leave the United States, not because they want to go; it’s

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because the government is telling them they may have to go.

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Did you think TikTok was going to be around forever?

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A lot of people did.

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They never thought TikTok would ever be at risk of not being usable by them.

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So, I think honestly, we got to just remind ourselves that nothing is forever.

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And so me, as an engineer at Google, thinking about the

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whole complex, and the whole business around it, it never

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shocked me when things that don’t make money go away.

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Like, if you went to your job tomorrow and you just stopped doing

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anything, they will make you go away because it doesn’t make sense.

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So, as you know—this is why I’m a big proponent

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of open source—so contrast that with Kubernetes.

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If Google gave up on Kubernetes, it doesn’t mean the rest of the industry will.

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And so, that was kind of the sweet spot for me at Google, being involved

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in things that were backed by open source, backed by industry standards.

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I kind of felt that the proper hedge was, if

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Google walked away, does this thing still exist?

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And so, I would just balance things out.

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And every project that Google isn’t that way.

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I think they’re trying to get better.

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And to be fair, I remember when one of the big selling

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points of Amazon was they never deprecate anything.

285
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And I remember, like, this year they’re starting to deprecate stuff.

286
00:13:52,460 --> 00:13:52,680
Yeah.

287
00:13:52,840 --> 00:13:53,970
Dude, not just this year.

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00:13:53,970 --> 00:13:56,050
The last six months has been wild [laugh]

289
00:13:56,050 --> 00:13:56,645
.
[laugh]

290
00:13:57,240 --> 00:13:57,839
.
So, there you go.

291
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Because that’s reality.

292
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Some stuff needs to be deprecated.

293
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It’s past its shelf life.

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But I do think—to your point, probably—is they could

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have done a better job of setting that expectation.

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Nothing is forever, and here’s the plan around that.

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00:14:14,120 --> 00:14:15,969
Like, when they got rid of Google Domains, and sold

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00:14:15,969 --> 00:14:18,829
it to Squarespace, I felt that one a little bit.

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I was a customer.

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I paid for that one.

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00:14:20,750 --> 00:14:24,069
Yeah, I paid for that one, but I wasn’t surprised, all right, because

302
00:14:24,170 --> 00:14:26,850
I started thinking through the liabilities of managing domains.

303
00:14:26,850 --> 00:14:31,040
Like, a dot IO domain is not as easy as people think, right?

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00:14:31,040 --> 00:14:32,920
That particular government has a lot of

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00:14:32,929 --> 00:14:35,160
restrictions on what you can do with an IO domain.

306
00:14:35,389 --> 00:14:38,900
So, imagine you being a small team at Google, managing Google domains,

307
00:14:39,349 --> 00:14:42,930
dealing with almost the same complexity as probably the Cloud team is doing.

308
00:14:43,400 --> 00:14:44,610
So, it just makes sense.

309
00:14:44,630 --> 00:14:46,250
But I’m more of a pragmatist on this stuff.

310
00:14:46,770 --> 00:14:46,990
Sure.

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00:14:47,070 --> 00:14:50,990
How did that affect your trust within the community of you’re looking

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00:14:50,990 --> 00:14:54,689
at the open-source stuff that will last longer than any one company’s

313
00:14:54,690 --> 00:14:58,470
interest in it, but I know at some point you were the person that

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00:14:58,470 --> 00:15:00,910
a lot of people pointed to and said, “Kelsey is at Google,” right?

315
00:15:00,910 --> 00:15:02,670
Like, Kelsey is the Google representative in a

316
00:15:02,670 --> 00:15:04,640
lot of ways, and they put all that weight on you.

317
00:15:04,940 --> 00:15:05,210
Yeah.

318
00:15:05,210 --> 00:15:07,760
Kelsey talked about things that Kelsey believed in.

319
00:15:08,380 --> 00:15:10,719
Did y’all hear Kelsey talking about crypto when he was at Google?

320
00:15:10,980 --> 00:15:11,430
No.

321
00:15:11,780 --> 00:15:11,810
[laugh]

322
00:15:11,990 --> 00:15:15,480
.
So, my thing was, if I wouldn’t use it, I tried not to talk about it.

323
00:15:15,660 --> 00:15:18,680
If I didn’t believe in it, I’d try not to talk about it.

324
00:15:18,800 --> 00:15:20,180
So, what’d you see me associated with?

325
00:15:20,859 --> 00:15:24,840
Istio, Kubernetes, even Cloud Run was backed by Knative.

326
00:15:25,460 --> 00:15:27,560
And so, I tried to lead with, like, the principles and

327
00:15:27,560 --> 00:15:30,159
fundamentals, things that I knew would last beyond it.

328
00:15:30,179 --> 00:15:34,639
Also, look, if you have a job, I learned probably 12 years

329
00:15:34,639 --> 00:15:37,740
ago that there are parts you take with you, and that’s

330
00:15:37,740 --> 00:15:39,860
really when I started to double down on open source.

331
00:15:40,300 --> 00:15:45,060
I don’t want to leave a job and my entire resume is all I have to show for it.

332
00:15:45,069 --> 00:15:46,980
I want to be able to take my relationships.

333
00:15:47,370 --> 00:15:48,540
I want to be able to take my work.

334
00:15:48,540 --> 00:15:50,140
This is why I love GitHub so much.

335
00:15:50,140 --> 00:15:52,550
You can put your work on there, and the network

336
00:15:52,550 --> 00:15:54,819
lives beyond the current employer you’re at.

337
00:15:54,880 --> 00:15:57,930
And so, at Google, man, so much of my work still lives

338
00:15:57,980 --> 00:16:00,920
on that I have access to because I chose to do it.

339
00:16:01,030 --> 00:16:03,870
Not everyone’s going to have that as an output, but I was

340
00:16:03,900 --> 00:16:06,700
very curious about—like, for example, I would never talk

341
00:16:06,710 --> 00:16:09,369
about Spanner until they added the Postgres interface.

342
00:16:09,750 --> 00:16:12,450
It felt like, if I was going to tell you to use this fancy database

343
00:16:12,450 --> 00:16:16,700
in the cloud with a proprietary protocol, would I even do that?

344
00:16:16,950 --> 00:16:17,770
Probably not.

345
00:16:18,260 --> 00:16:19,640
And so, that’s the way I did the balance.

346
00:16:19,640 --> 00:16:21,560
But look, I knew I was working for a business.

347
00:16:21,760 --> 00:16:24,100
It wasn’t my own company, and so I had to

348
00:16:24,100 --> 00:16:26,000
understand to balance those two things well.

349
00:16:26,530 --> 00:16:28,579
I think tying that into what you were saying at the beginning,

350
00:16:28,590 --> 00:16:32,550
where this is over a 25-year career, one of the things that

351
00:16:32,570 --> 00:16:36,219
I’ve learned is knowing when I need to walk away from something,

352
00:16:36,470 --> 00:16:39,569
and knowing when all of the investment that I have in learning

353
00:16:39,570 --> 00:16:43,000
something and mastering something isn’t something I want to do next.

354
00:16:43,389 --> 00:16:47,689
And so, I remember moving over to Disney, and I was a Linux and Windows admin.

355
00:16:48,049 --> 00:16:50,100
I did Active Directory, I did all this stuff at the

356
00:16:50,100 --> 00:16:53,040
university I was at before, and when I came over to Disney,

357
00:16:53,040 --> 00:16:54,940
I was like, I don’t do any of that Windows stuff anymore.

358
00:16:54,950 --> 00:16:57,819
I don’t want to do Active Directory anymore.

359
00:16:57,820 --> 00:16:59,260
And so, when they were looking for people

360
00:16:59,260 --> 00:17:01,439
to take on that work, I kept my mouth shut.

361
00:17:01,540 --> 00:17:03,910
Like, actually, no, that’s not why you hired me.

362
00:17:03,910 --> 00:17:05,210
That’s not what I want to do.

363
00:17:05,699 --> 00:17:08,480
I’m going to almost deprecate my own knowledge about

364
00:17:08,480 --> 00:17:10,460
that and not volunteer for those sorts of things.

365
00:17:10,710 --> 00:17:13,639
I know how much gravity there is in some of those things, and they

366
00:17:13,640 --> 00:17:15,540
just pull you in, and you’re like, you’re going to do that thing again.

367
00:17:15,540 --> 00:17:18,569
Now, you’re the expert on the thing that you can’t escape from.

368
00:17:18,869 --> 00:17:21,670
That’s also, like, where privilege is involved, right?

369
00:17:21,679 --> 00:17:22,229
Because—

370
00:17:22,430 --> 00:17:22,810
Absolutely.

371
00:17:22,810 --> 00:17:24,899
—you can’t always say no to things.

372
00:17:24,900 --> 00:17:29,000
But also to, like, your point of talking about, like, you being the Google

373
00:17:29,000 --> 00:17:32,480
representative, or talking about things you don’t believe in, I wonder how you

374
00:17:32,480 --> 00:17:35,890
feel that contrast to, like, this field—like, the world of AI right now, like.

375
00:17:35,900 --> 00:17:38,879
A lot of people that used to work in infrastructure databases or

376
00:17:38,880 --> 00:17:42,650
these different areas, are now kind of forced to work with an AI.

377
00:17:43,120 --> 00:17:46,370
And I think one of the things that is, like, really interesting

378
00:17:46,380 --> 00:17:48,700
about your career is, I remember that you went on stage and told

379
00:17:48,700 --> 00:17:51,230
people, like, not [laugh] to use Kubernetes at a certain point.

380
00:17:51,260 --> 00:17:54,699
And I think that honesty, right, really contributes to, like, why

381
00:17:54,700 --> 00:17:57,830
people trust you, even when you worked for these big corporations.

382
00:17:58,139 --> 00:17:59,619
It didn’t seem like they owned you.

383
00:17:59,619 --> 00:18:01,170
Or like, you know, like, it kind of gave you, like, this

384
00:18:01,180 --> 00:18:05,139
credibility, where, if Kelsey says this is good, it’s probably good.

385
00:18:05,150 --> 00:18:06,560
Yeah, because you were honest, right?

386
00:18:06,680 --> 00:18:09,495
How do you think people navigate that in the times where, like,

387
00:18:09,530 --> 00:18:11,659
we have all these tech recessions, and people are kind of, like,

388
00:18:11,670 --> 00:18:15,440
struggling to get jobs, and they might have to take that job where

389
00:18:15,469 --> 00:18:20,820
they have to do work for a Web3 company, or AI, or something.

390
00:18:21,090 --> 00:18:22,669
Like, how would you navigate that?

391
00:18:22,780 --> 00:18:25,196
Because it does take a special level of privilege to be, like, “You

392
00:18:25,196 --> 00:18:28,130
know, I’m out.” Or to say, like, I don’t want to work for this company.

393
00:18:28,170 --> 00:18:31,260
But right now, like, people that could say that two years ago

394
00:18:31,260 --> 00:18:34,620
can’t even say that, you know people with amazing 20-year careers.

395
00:18:35,070 --> 00:18:37,260
I don’t think people and their leadership think

396
00:18:37,260 --> 00:18:39,229
every day about the psyche of the average person.

397
00:18:39,440 --> 00:18:41,600
You have to be able to afford to be honest.

398
00:18:41,920 --> 00:18:44,070
Being honest is expensive.

399
00:18:44,290 --> 00:18:46,350
People will pay you a lot of money to lie.

400
00:18:46,660 --> 00:18:49,440
People will pay you a lot of money to be what they want you to be.

401
00:18:49,590 --> 00:18:51,540
In many ways, there’s an expectation.

402
00:18:51,920 --> 00:18:52,990
“No, I’m paying you.

403
00:18:54,180 --> 00:18:55,929
You’ve got to do what I’m telling you to do.

404
00:18:56,310 --> 00:18:57,670
I don’t really care about your morals.

405
00:18:57,670 --> 00:18:58,590
I’m not paying for that.

406
00:18:58,900 --> 00:19:00,540
I’m not paying for your ethics.

407
00:19:00,700 --> 00:19:04,370
I’m literally paying you to be at my disposal, right?

408
00:19:04,370 --> 00:19:06,619
If you get burnt out, then we’ll hire the next person.”

409
00:19:07,139 --> 00:19:10,909
There’s a little bit too much of that in general, not just tech, but in general.

410
00:19:11,190 --> 00:19:14,760
And so, for me, when I got to Google, I could afford to be honest.

411
00:19:15,050 --> 00:19:17,570
Meaning I could quit and be fine.

412
00:19:17,790 --> 00:19:20,949
I could not get a promotion and be fine.

413
00:19:20,950 --> 00:19:23,340
When I say fine, not just mentally, but financially.

414
00:19:23,670 --> 00:19:25,440
My family was going to be fine.

415
00:19:25,860 --> 00:19:29,310
And so, that gives you a bit of courage to say, no, I don’t believe in that.

416
00:19:29,310 --> 00:19:31,060
I don’t want to be involved in that.

417
00:19:31,450 --> 00:19:34,370
Oh, that sounds like a great opportunity, but I’ll pass.

418
00:19:34,680 --> 00:19:38,150
I want to stay in my lane based on my current set of beliefs.

419
00:19:38,360 --> 00:19:39,629
And I always did that respectively.

420
00:19:39,630 --> 00:19:41,249
Like everyone talks about, F-You Money.

421
00:19:41,599 --> 00:19:43,649
I kind of approach it more like, Love-You Money.

422
00:19:43,670 --> 00:19:45,940
I love myself, and I can afford to.

423
00:19:45,960 --> 00:19:50,030
So, that means, if I told you I don’t want to be involved in a thing—like,

424
00:19:50,040 --> 00:19:53,020
even when I was at Google, there was a situation where there was, like, a

425
00:19:53,030 --> 00:19:56,940
big keynote, the big Cloud Next keynotes, kind of like Amazon’s re:Invent.

426
00:19:57,190 --> 00:19:59,080
And we’re doing rehearsals, right?

427
00:19:59,219 --> 00:20:00,379
I got my keynote slot.

428
00:20:00,389 --> 00:20:03,110
And if anyone’s ever worked at a large tech company, this

429
00:20:03,110 --> 00:20:06,499
stuff sucks up, like, two or three months leading up, of

430
00:20:06,559 --> 00:20:09,360
all of your time is getting ready for this kind of thing.

431
00:20:09,969 --> 00:20:12,030
And I remember going to one of the rehearsals,

432
00:20:12,320 --> 00:20:14,379
and I didn’t like the format at all.

433
00:20:14,379 --> 00:20:17,140
It was a little too comical, there was stuff that just didn’t

434
00:20:17,150 --> 00:20:20,030
match my personality or anything I wanted to be associated with.

435
00:20:20,620 --> 00:20:23,579
So, during the table read, I said, “Hey, I don’t want to be

436
00:20:23,580 --> 00:20:26,110
involved in this.” [unintelligible] be like, “Oh, what’s wrong?

437
00:20:26,120 --> 00:20:26,610
This is fun.

438
00:20:26,610 --> 00:20:27,280
It’s going to be cool.

439
00:20:27,280 --> 00:20:30,470
It’s going to be great.” I was like, “Hey, I’m not here to judge.

440
00:20:30,870 --> 00:20:32,409
Y’all might actually be right.

441
00:20:32,950 --> 00:20:36,310
I don’t even want to get into an argument about what y’all should change.

442
00:20:36,780 --> 00:20:38,800
This project belongs to the team.

443
00:20:39,190 --> 00:20:43,750
I just personally will not like to be involved.” Do you know what that does?

444
00:20:44,680 --> 00:20:46,629
Imagine what people say when you’re not around.

445
00:20:46,710 --> 00:20:49,980
Oh, not a team player, only looking out for himself.

446
00:20:49,980 --> 00:20:51,640
You’re goddamn right [laugh]

447
00:20:51,710 --> 00:20:55,380
.
You better be the first person to look out for

448
00:20:55,380 --> 00:20:57,660
yourself, but you also kind of give the team feedback.

449
00:20:57,660 --> 00:21:00,630
But the thing is, I’m not always trying to change everybody’s opinion.

450
00:21:00,800 --> 00:21:02,820
Because I could just be wrong.

451
00:21:02,920 --> 00:21:04,370
I just didn’t want to be involved in that.

452
00:21:04,390 --> 00:21:07,720
And that takes a lot of personal capital, that takes a lot of political

453
00:21:07,720 --> 00:21:11,580
capital, and you better have a capital in the bank in case someone decides

454
00:21:11,580 --> 00:21:15,120
that you shouldn’t be at the company anymore for making a move like that.

455
00:21:15,889 --> 00:21:18,450
And so, that’s where I would say it’s a little tough.

456
00:21:18,480 --> 00:21:21,900
I was a VP of engineering once—maybe this is to Justin’s point—you do have

457
00:21:21,900 --> 00:21:24,350
to take the job sometimes because that’s all you have in front of you,

458
00:21:24,360 --> 00:21:28,740
you don’t have that ability, and you do what you got to do, no problem.

459
00:21:28,750 --> 00:21:31,100
But I was a VP of engineering once, and I had two people.

460
00:21:31,120 --> 00:21:34,509
One worked on the Linux side of the house writing code

461
00:21:34,510 --> 00:21:37,460
that ran on Linux servers, and one worked on the Windows

462
00:21:37,460 --> 00:21:39,850
side of the house, writing .NET for desktop apps.

463
00:21:40,110 --> 00:21:43,070
And both of these people did not really like the spot they were on.

464
00:21:43,560 --> 00:21:44,750
So, I met with them individually.

465
00:21:44,750 --> 00:21:47,530
I say, “Hey, what’s going on?” It’s like, “Hey look, I love working

466
00:21:47,530 --> 00:21:52,179
here at this company, but I hate Linux.” I was like, “What would

467
00:21:52,180 --> 00:21:55,680
you prefer to work on instead?” He’s like, I just want to go back

468
00:21:55,680 --> 00:21:59,450
to working on .NET I said, “Okay.” I met with the other person.

469
00:21:59,560 --> 00:22:02,600
“I hate windows with all my heart.” And I was like, “I understand.

470
00:22:03,170 --> 00:22:07,919
Me, too.” I was like, “What would you rather do instead?” “Linux.” And

471
00:22:07,920 --> 00:22:10,859
they report to two different managers under two different directors.

472
00:22:10,910 --> 00:22:14,890
I said, “Oh, I have a solution, starting tomorrow, Y’all just

473
00:22:14,900 --> 00:22:18,020
swap.” And everyone’s like, “Y’all can just do this?” Like,

474
00:22:18,360 --> 00:22:21,360
yeah, you’re not getting them at a hundred percent capacity

475
00:22:21,360 --> 00:22:24,899
right now with this feeling of being trapped and stuck.

476
00:22:25,270 --> 00:22:29,649
You might as well let them swap and get the full potential

477
00:22:29,650 --> 00:22:32,750
of these two individuals by just making this simple fix.

478
00:22:32,770 --> 00:22:35,580
They didn’t ask for a raise, they didn’t ask for a promotion,

479
00:22:35,890 --> 00:22:38,500
they just asked to be in the best situation possible.

480
00:22:38,750 --> 00:22:41,999
And me, as a leader at the time, I’m just listening saying, “Hey,

481
00:22:42,320 --> 00:22:45,250
let me just put you in position to succeed.” And I think that’s

482
00:22:45,250 --> 00:22:48,899
what a lot of teams, team leads, managers, and directors could do.

483
00:22:49,260 --> 00:22:52,540
Just listen a little bit and just see what you can do to put people in

484
00:22:52,590 --> 00:22:56,700
a better situation, even if they’re uncomfortable asking for themselves.

485
00:22:57,160 --> 00:22:59,940
I think that’s so true because just, as you were saying

486
00:22:59,940 --> 00:23:03,429
before, a lot of people don’t have the capital whether it

487
00:23:03,440 --> 00:23:07,080
be money or personal capital, to kind of say no to things.

488
00:23:07,310 --> 00:23:10,290
And people will pay you all the money to lie.

489
00:23:10,350 --> 00:23:13,400
But it’s also interesting that that almost devalues

490
00:23:13,410 --> 00:23:16,369
these people that they seek out, by having them lie.

491
00:23:16,400 --> 00:23:19,889
So, you’re paying for an asset that you then devalue.

492
00:23:19,929 --> 00:23:22,920
And then, like how you were saying, where people will use you up,

493
00:23:22,940 --> 00:23:25,870
burn you out and get rid of you, but it’s wild because if they

494
00:23:25,870 --> 00:23:28,290
treat people like humans and let people work on things they’re

495
00:23:28,290 --> 00:23:31,290
passionate, and treat them the way that you said you treated the

496
00:23:31,300 --> 00:23:34,209
two people that worked for you, you get so much more out of people.

497
00:23:34,590 --> 00:23:37,120
And it’s just interesting, like, where we are in tech, like, is it

498
00:23:37,120 --> 00:23:39,869
going to affect the way that we’re innovating because of the way

499
00:23:39,870 --> 00:23:43,060
that the market is currently, and the way people are being treated?

500
00:23:43,170 --> 00:23:45,400
One thing I had to learn was how to listen.

501
00:23:45,710 --> 00:23:46,250
So, think about it.

502
00:23:46,250 --> 00:23:48,540
If someone comes to you with a big initiative they just got over

503
00:23:48,630 --> 00:23:52,519
the big exec meeting, every exec agrees on a certain path forward.

504
00:23:53,059 --> 00:23:55,450
Then they come to you and say, “Hey, I need you to be

505
00:23:55,450 --> 00:23:57,910
involved with this thing.” And you hear about it for the first

506
00:23:57,910 --> 00:24:00,630
time, you’re like, that sounds like the dumbest idea ever.

507
00:24:01,130 --> 00:24:02,250
Why would we do that?

508
00:24:02,250 --> 00:24:03,760
And they’re like, “Hey, hold on.

509
00:24:04,200 --> 00:24:07,240
I’ve been working on this for months, and I got exec approval.

510
00:24:07,250 --> 00:24:11,140
Green light, so I’m not in position to pivot all

511
00:24:11,140 --> 00:24:14,004
of a sudden, just because you don’t like it.”

512
00:24:14,340 --> 00:24:17,529
So, I have to understand, it’s like, okay, I don’t know how deep

513
00:24:17,539 --> 00:24:21,290
they are into this direction, so what can I do in some scenarios?

514
00:24:21,620 --> 00:24:24,240
I’ll say, “Look, you could do that, but I don’t

515
00:24:24,240 --> 00:24:25,650
know if it’s going to get you to the goal.

516
00:24:26,139 --> 00:24:27,600
You promised them what?

517
00:24:28,000 --> 00:24:28,730
Here’s what we could do.

518
00:24:28,740 --> 00:24:31,660
We can do that, but before we do that, you want to try something?”

519
00:24:31,660 --> 00:24:34,649
And it was like, “What do you got?” I said, “How about we just

520
00:24:34,660 --> 00:24:37,910
try this, and if that don’t work, we just do what you had anyway.”

521
00:24:38,210 --> 00:24:42,260
And then, to me, it’s on me to make that viable, right?

522
00:24:42,280 --> 00:24:45,060
I’m almost competing with the set of ideas that they have.

523
00:24:45,060 --> 00:24:47,580
And again, I think that just comes from experience

524
00:24:47,580 --> 00:24:49,789
being able to really advocate for yourself.

525
00:24:49,860 --> 00:24:51,830
And sometimes you got to advocate for the other person.

526
00:24:52,090 --> 00:24:54,649
I do not want to see you driving to this brick wall.

527
00:24:54,890 --> 00:24:55,980
You’re going to get fired.

528
00:24:56,320 --> 00:24:59,043
I probably won’t feel sad for you because I told you ahead of time [laugh]

529
00:24:59,043 --> 00:25:02,359
that this was probably not the best thing to do, but if I can be of any

530
00:25:02,360 --> 00:25:05,856
service right now, before that happens, please allow me to help you.

531
00:25:05,856 --> 00:25:09,460
But you got to do it in a way that makes them feel like you

532
00:25:09,469 --> 00:25:12,080
have their best interest in ming, versus being a contrarian.

533
00:25:12,080 --> 00:25:14,679
I have a direct example of, like, everything you just said.

534
00:25:15,130 --> 00:25:16,110
I was at Amazon.

535
00:25:16,110 --> 00:25:18,820
We were launching App Runner, and I loved Cloud Run.

536
00:25:18,870 --> 00:25:20,580
Like, I thought Cloud Run was just the best thing.

537
00:25:20,580 --> 00:25:22,493
Like, the interface for it, the speed, everything about it.

538
00:25:22,493 --> 00:25:23,109
I’m like, “Oh, cool.

539
00:25:23,110 --> 00:25:26,959
We’re finally building a Cloud Run.” And so, the team

540
00:25:26,960 --> 00:25:29,229
that was selected to build it was coming from Beanstalk.

541
00:25:29,679 --> 00:25:33,370
And so, it was the Beanstalk team that was chosen to implement App Runner.

542
00:25:33,720 --> 00:25:36,950
And all the Beanstalk team wanted was a Beanstalk version two.

543
00:25:37,530 --> 00:25:38,989
And they’re like, “We don’t want Cloud Run.

544
00:25:39,010 --> 00:25:42,149
We just want a better Beanstalk.” And I’m like, “Nobody wants Beanstalk.

545
00:25:42,150 --> 00:25:44,209
Everybody wants this new interface.”

546
00:25:44,380 --> 00:25:47,350
And so—I remember when we launched it, too, because you DM’ed me

547
00:25:47,359 --> 00:25:51,020
asking why do we didn’t pick Knative, and I was like, “I tried.

548
00:25:51,110 --> 00:25:54,050
Like, I tried to explain, like, the open-source mindset behind it.

549
00:25:54,050 --> 00:25:55,530
I tried”—and, like, they were coming, you know,

550
00:25:55,560 --> 00:25:58,060
completely far away from Kubernetes anything.

551
00:25:58,060 --> 00:25:58,980
And I’m like, “Okay, I get it.

552
00:25:59,179 --> 00:26:01,930
But let’s at least meet on the interface, even if it is proprietary.”

553
00:26:02,250 --> 00:26:05,419
And so, I was like, “I think this is a bad direction where you’re going.

554
00:26:05,420 --> 00:26:07,740
Let’s cut out some of these features and go with just the better

555
00:26:07,740 --> 00:26:11,730
user experience.” And I ended up building an internal CLI tool.

556
00:26:11,740 --> 00:26:12,660
It was the interface I wanted.

557
00:26:12,660 --> 00:26:15,249
Was basically, like, a docker run, but I built it on top of LightSail.

558
00:26:15,379 --> 00:26:18,669
LightSail had containers, and it gave the interface

559
00:26:18,669 --> 00:26:20,429
that I wanted for this new App Runner thing.

560
00:26:20,429 --> 00:26:22,850
I’m like, cool, I could do—I called it Sailboat.

561
00:26:23,109 --> 00:26:27,080
It was sailboat run container, and it gave me the certificate, it gave

562
00:26:27,080 --> 00:26:29,640
me the domain, it gave me a database, it gave me all the stuff I wanted.

563
00:26:29,640 --> 00:26:30,616
Like, that’s the interface I want.

564
00:26:30,616 --> 00:26:31,670
And like, “This is amazing.

565
00:26:31,680 --> 00:26:32,760
Go talk to the LightSail team.

566
00:26:32,760 --> 00:26:33,835
That’s not what we’re building.” [laugh]

567
00:26:33,835 --> 00:26:35,480
.
And I’m like, “Okay, that’s fine.

568
00:26:35,480 --> 00:26:38,060
I’ll go talk to them, see if they are interested.” How do we get

569
00:26:38,060 --> 00:26:42,430
you to some level of success with the thing that you are building?

570
00:26:42,440 --> 00:26:45,230
And I, you know, helped them launch it, and we did some demos and

571
00:26:45,230 --> 00:26:47,610
stuff like that, but the whole time was like, this interface is not

572
00:26:47,610 --> 00:26:50,709
what I wanted as a developer, but I’m going to try to support you.

573
00:26:51,160 --> 00:26:53,220
Soon after that, most of the team left, [laugh] and they were

574
00:26:53,250 --> 00:26:56,059
like, actually, this was a failure, and people weren’t adopting it.

575
00:26:56,059 --> 00:26:59,240
And a lot of that team was like, okay, well, now it wasn’t something that was

576
00:26:59,240 --> 00:27:03,080
like this big success that they expected out of a tier one sort of launch.

577
00:27:03,150 --> 00:27:05,960
And even in that case, I think a person like you that did

578
00:27:05,960 --> 00:27:08,750
it that way gains a lot of credibility with that team.

579
00:27:08,760 --> 00:27:11,740
Even though your idea didn’t necessarily convince anyone in

580
00:27:11,740 --> 00:27:14,560
that moment, I guarantee you there’s a group of people who

581
00:27:14,560 --> 00:27:18,600
remember that you try to kind of show them a different way.

582
00:27:18,660 --> 00:27:21,200
The really interesting thing was how that played out long-term

583
00:27:21,200 --> 00:27:23,310
when I was going for a promo inside of Amazon, right?

584
00:27:23,310 --> 00:27:26,270
Because it’s like all of the people that I felt I had good impact

585
00:27:26,270 --> 00:27:29,100
on, and I could have said I was right about, they all left.

586
00:27:29,240 --> 00:27:32,460
They weren’t there at the company anymore to back up, oh, he did good work.

587
00:27:32,469 --> 00:27:35,689
All they saw was I worked on this failure of a service, and said, “Oh,

588
00:27:35,690 --> 00:27:38,410
that wasn’t a success, so you don’t get the promo.” And I’m like, “Oh,

589
00:27:38,550 --> 00:27:42,210
I see how this works, now.” Let’s go find the winners and only invest

590
00:27:42,210 --> 00:27:45,093
my time, just to your point of, like, what gets deprecated [laugh] is

591
00:27:45,260 --> 00:27:48,020
the things that are, you know, like, no one’s getting a bonus on this.

592
00:27:48,150 --> 00:27:49,080
I was just going to say that.

593
00:27:49,080 --> 00:27:52,000
Like, it’s interesting that they forced you to make duplicate products,

594
00:27:52,010 --> 00:27:54,750
even when you’re telling them, hey, like, this is not a good idea.

595
00:27:54,850 --> 00:27:57,400
And that’s the same stuff that, like, they have to pay all the extra

596
00:27:57,410 --> 00:28:01,720
infrastructure cost on, and maintenance, but it’s the same crappy

597
00:28:01,810 --> 00:28:05,270
version of the other thing that’s not being successful right now.

598
00:28:05,309 --> 00:28:07,530
And no one listens to you when you’re in those meetings.

599
00:28:07,900 --> 00:28:11,759
But they’re still going to burn out a bunch of engineers, be mad

600
00:28:11,760 --> 00:28:14,449
at everybody, and then it’s like that empire building that they

601
00:28:14,450 --> 00:28:18,160
talk about, where you build something just because you can say you

602
00:28:18,160 --> 00:28:21,820
built it to get the promotion, but everybody knew it was a bad idea.

603
00:28:22,150 --> 00:28:25,340
But, you know, one thing I do like about this kind of bake off scenario,

604
00:28:26,700 --> 00:28:30,659
the thing about the bake off scenario is it weeds out a lot of people who

605
00:28:30,660 --> 00:28:34,320
don’t want to do anything other than just use their political capital to

606
00:28:34,320 --> 00:28:38,060
say yes or no, and decide what direction to go without any skin in the game.

607
00:28:38,750 --> 00:28:41,759
And so, this concept of where I can put a prototype and pit it against

608
00:28:41,759 --> 00:28:46,380
yours, that level of, like, here’s my thing, here’s your thing—also, it

609
00:28:46,380 --> 00:28:49,750
helps me be honest with myself because I’m like, we should just do, and

610
00:28:49,750 --> 00:28:51,240
then you start working on a prototype, and you’ve like, “ [yelling] ahhhhh.

611
00:28:52,390 --> 00:28:52,670
That’s not”—

612
00:28:52,670 --> 00:28:53,288
[laugh] . Yeah, yeah.

613
00:28:53,288 --> 00:28:55,570
—“That’s not as good of an idea as I thought.

614
00:28:55,590 --> 00:28:56,439
Y’all are right.

615
00:28:56,630 --> 00:28:58,800
Y’all should keep running with that because I found out

616
00:28:58,800 --> 00:29:02,159
that this path isn’t viable.” I think the part where you

617
00:29:02,160 --> 00:29:05,830
could just communicate, though, hey, we got different ideas.

618
00:29:05,850 --> 00:29:06,489
How about this?

619
00:29:06,520 --> 00:29:08,070
Let’s prototype both of them out.

620
00:29:08,480 --> 00:29:11,600
And I actually seen a lot of Google engineering team to do this where they

621
00:29:11,600 --> 00:29:16,339
would try two different approaches, present them, and see if people would figure

622
00:29:16,340 --> 00:29:19,519
out, like, is one more viable than the other, and then move in that direction.

623
00:29:19,900 --> 00:29:21,320
I want to switch gears here to another story.

624
00:29:21,370 --> 00:29:23,559
Going back to, like, the investment, the stuff you’re doing now,

625
00:29:23,590 --> 00:29:26,220
right, you have all these companies, I want to hear—I heard at KubeCon,

626
00:29:27,380 --> 00:29:30,510
you’re walking around with a couple football players at KubeCon.

627
00:29:31,030 --> 00:29:31,770
What happened?

628
00:29:31,780 --> 00:29:33,710
How did you get involved with this?

629
00:29:33,900 --> 00:29:35,170
Was it like, Larry Fitzgerald?

630
00:29:35,200 --> 00:29:37,290
Or who were the—Larry Fitzgerald, and I don’t remember

631
00:29:37,290 --> 00:29:38,649
who the second person was, but you’re just, like,

632
00:29:38,660 --> 00:29:41,159
walking around and saying, like, “This is technology.”

633
00:29:41,469 --> 00:29:45,360
Yeah, like, so look, maybe last year, there’s a guy named Larry Fitzgerald.

634
00:29:45,390 --> 00:29:48,450
He’s, like, going to the Hall of Fame, probably first ballot, right?

635
00:29:48,810 --> 00:29:51,129
NFL player, and he has this interesting stat.

636
00:29:51,130 --> 00:29:52,789
Like, as a receiver, for those that don’t know

637
00:29:52,790 --> 00:29:55,620
football, your goal is to catch passes, right?

638
00:29:55,620 --> 00:29:56,510
You’re the receiver.

639
00:29:57,120 --> 00:30:00,530
And if you play defense, your job is to make sure that they

640
00:30:00,530 --> 00:30:03,110
don’t catch passes, and if they do, you want to tackle them.

641
00:30:03,130 --> 00:30:04,960
That’s literally your job: playing defense.

642
00:30:05,230 --> 00:30:10,330
One thing that sucks for the whole team is when receivers drop passes, right?

643
00:30:10,340 --> 00:30:12,310
Like if it touches your hand—there’s a rule—if

644
00:30:12,310 --> 00:30:13,960
it touches your hand, you got to catch it.

645
00:30:13,969 --> 00:30:14,940
I don’t care what’s happened.

646
00:30:14,940 --> 00:30:16,100
I don’t care if you’re going to run to a brick

647
00:30:16,100 --> 00:30:18,620
wall, catch the ball and just take the hit.

648
00:30:18,760 --> 00:30:21,230
And apparently there’s a stat where he has—as a

649
00:30:21,230 --> 00:30:24,970
receiver—he has more tackles than drop passes.

650
00:30:25,200 --> 00:30:29,860
And for someone with a Hall of Fame career, it doesn’t even make sense to be

651
00:30:29,860 --> 00:30:34,139
able to say that I’ve only dropped a few passes in my whole career, and I’ve

652
00:30:34,150 --> 00:30:38,680
had to tackle, like, loose fumbles or interceptions more than I drop passes.

653
00:30:38,680 --> 00:30:41,760
And so, Larry Fitzgerald pings me on Twitter, like, “Hey, Kelsey.

654
00:30:42,310 --> 00:30:44,920
I want to talk to you about open-source software.” I’m like,

655
00:30:44,920 --> 00:30:47,900
“I was just watching you play last year on the football field.

656
00:30:47,900 --> 00:30:51,529
What does open source got do with being a professional

657
00:30:51,599 --> 00:30:54,209
NFL all-star player?” This doesn’t make sense.

658
00:30:54,690 --> 00:30:56,580
And so, the other person is Kelvin Beachum, who

659
00:30:56,620 --> 00:30:59,260
actively plays for the Arizona Cardinals right now.

660
00:30:59,550 --> 00:31:01,226
And so, I’m like, “Okay, let’s just meet.” And

661
00:31:01,320 --> 00:31:03,309
I’m like, I don’t know how this is going to go.

662
00:31:03,440 --> 00:31:04,579
How technical can we go?

663
00:31:04,620 --> 00:31:06,860
And so, I’m meeting both of them on, like, a Google

664
00:31:06,870 --> 00:31:11,070
Meet, and they’re talking about CockroachDB, Spencer,

665
00:31:11,070 --> 00:31:14,980
who started it, they did work at places like Sequoia.

666
00:31:15,280 --> 00:31:17,530
They’d been investing in tech space forever.

667
00:31:17,810 --> 00:31:20,699
They explained their thesis around enterprise software

668
00:31:20,700 --> 00:31:24,010
versus infrastructure versus AI versus things that

669
00:31:24,010 --> 00:31:26,550
are capital intensive versus developer productivity.

670
00:31:26,750 --> 00:31:28,639
And I’m sitting here, like, oh my goodness.

671
00:31:28,949 --> 00:31:32,270
Why was I so biased towards professional athletes, like

672
00:31:32,270 --> 00:31:34,590
they wouldn’t have this, like, depth around technology?

673
00:31:35,060 --> 00:31:37,210
And so, they were starting a venture capital fund.

674
00:31:37,210 --> 00:31:40,800
So, as an athlete, you’re typically investing through the big

675
00:31:40,800 --> 00:31:44,000
investment firms, and they decided that they want to start their own

676
00:31:44,000 --> 00:31:47,770
portfolio so they could have a better relationship with founders, and

677
00:31:47,779 --> 00:31:51,290
be a meaningful part of the growth and success of those companies.

678
00:31:51,490 --> 00:31:55,620
So, I came on as a technical advisor, and a part of that work is evaluating

679
00:31:55,670 --> 00:31:59,190
what companies to invest in, forming the thesis of what the portfolio

680
00:31:59,190 --> 00:32:03,530
construction should be, and just really meeting founders, understanding where

681
00:32:03,530 --> 00:32:06,390
these companies can go, there’s a lot of things that happen behind the scenes.

682
00:32:06,910 --> 00:32:10,770
And it was the bye week for the Arizona Cardinals in November.

683
00:32:11,050 --> 00:32:13,250
And like, “Hey, Kelsey, we’re going to do something during the bye week.

684
00:32:13,250 --> 00:32:16,389
You should come.” I was like, “No, because I’m going to be at KubeCon.”

685
00:32:17,280 --> 00:32:19,210
And they’re like, “What’s that?” I was like, “Oh, you got to be there.

686
00:32:19,219 --> 00:32:21,460
That’s just where it all happens.

687
00:32:21,460 --> 00:32:25,050
That’s where it takes place.” And so, both of them came to KubeCon.

688
00:32:25,340 --> 00:32:26,850
And look, they’re walking around KubeCon,

689
00:32:26,850 --> 00:32:30,290
they’re like, six foot three, six foot four.

690
00:32:30,310 --> 00:32:32,470
Like, these are tall—they stand out in the audience.

691
00:32:32,960 --> 00:32:35,705
And so, I would probably say at least 5% of

692
00:32:35,770 --> 00:32:37,520
KubeCon realized that they were NFL players.

693
00:32:38,070 --> 00:32:41,080
And so, we’re walking around, and there was two weird interactions.

694
00:32:41,080 --> 00:32:44,660
Number one, some people that didn’t know who they were, they were asking

695
00:32:44,670 --> 00:32:49,256
people like Larry Fitzgerald to take photos of me and the attendee.

696
00:32:49,256 --> 00:32:53,194
Like, “Hey you, can you take a photo?” And look, I’m pret—they’re

697
00:32:53,389 --> 00:32:55,780
very humble people, but I’m pretty sure that is, like, an

698
00:32:55,940 --> 00:32:59,090
odd thing for people not to know who they are and asking

699
00:32:59,090 --> 00:33:01,310
them to take pictures of other people and vice versa, right?

700
00:33:01,310 --> 00:33:03,870
There are other people, like, “Yo, are you Larry Fitzgerald?

701
00:33:04,360 --> 00:33:04,990
Oh, my God.

702
00:33:05,000 --> 00:33:06,035
Why are you at KubeCon?”

703
00:33:06,380 --> 00:33:07,140
So, that was dope.

704
00:33:07,140 --> 00:33:11,340
And we just went around to the booth area, talked to technologists about

705
00:33:11,340 --> 00:33:14,650
what products they’re building and why, spent some times with founders,

706
00:33:14,900 --> 00:33:17,580
and honestly, just looking for good companies to probably invest in.

707
00:33:17,580 --> 00:33:19,720
So yes, these football players were at

708
00:33:19,720 --> 00:33:22,470
KubeCon, walking around and taking it all in.

709
00:33:22,830 --> 00:33:23,520
Sliding into your DMs.

710
00:33:24,139 --> 00:33:24,560
That’s amazing.

711
00:33:24,560 --> 00:33:27,879
I think that’s so funny because I’d be the person that would be, like, “Tall

712
00:33:27,880 --> 00:33:30,380
dude, move over so I can take a picture with Kelsey Hightower.” [laugh]

713
00:33:30,380 --> 00:33:34,495
. Like, “I don’t care who you are, just can you take a picture of me and you?”

714
00:33:34,495 --> 00:33:37,330
You got to get the good angle, too, from the six three—

715
00:33:37,330 --> 00:33:37,335
Right?

716
00:33:37,370 --> 00:33:40,365
Like, it would be, like, a legit selfie [laugh] . Like—well not selfie—

717
00:33:40,365 --> 00:33:41,240
I learned a lot.

718
00:33:41,240 --> 00:33:42,650
I worked at lots of startups.

719
00:33:42,670 --> 00:33:43,620
You know, CoreOS.

720
00:33:43,620 --> 00:33:47,209
I think Alex Polvi and Brandon Philips, the founders of CoreOS, they

721
00:33:47,210 --> 00:33:52,129
were so transparent about fundraising, how much money we had in the bank.

722
00:33:52,250 --> 00:33:54,879
Eventually, they trusted me to be the product manager, and we made the

723
00:33:54,880 --> 00:33:59,270
pivot from kind of CoreOS technologies to just being all-in on Kubernetes.

724
00:33:59,770 --> 00:34:01,780
And I learned so much from that interaction of

725
00:34:01,790 --> 00:34:04,000
them just building—that was their second company.

726
00:34:04,130 --> 00:34:07,529
But now that I’m working with Larry and Kelvin Beachum, I’m learning

727
00:34:07,660 --> 00:34:11,259
so much about deal construction, where the money comes from.

728
00:34:11,340 --> 00:34:13,020
It’s weird because there’s this dynamic.

729
00:34:13,020 --> 00:34:16,330
When you talk to some founders, they believe they’re the king of the castle.

730
00:34:16,540 --> 00:34:19,860
When you talk to some VCs, they’re like, we’re the king of the castles.

731
00:34:19,889 --> 00:34:23,769
You kind of—it’s your company, but you’re kind of in our portfolio.

732
00:34:23,800 --> 00:34:25,770
And then you got the banks, and the banks,

733
00:34:25,770 --> 00:34:27,770
like, all y’all sit underneath the money tree.

734
00:34:28,109 --> 00:34:31,140
And there’s so many layers to this game that are not just about

735
00:34:31,140 --> 00:34:34,389
building a core product; you’re literally building companies.

736
00:34:34,639 --> 00:34:37,410
And that portfolio construction and relationship building, and

737
00:34:37,410 --> 00:34:40,060
the time it takes to do all of that, that’s been a game changer.

738
00:34:40,120 --> 00:34:47,210
I’ve never seen the depths of portfolio construction and money allocation.

739
00:34:47,299 --> 00:34:49,580
It’s very different than writing an angel check, right?

740
00:34:49,580 --> 00:34:51,360
This is a whole different league.

741
00:34:51,360 --> 00:34:55,250
So, that’s definitely evolved the way I look at tech through that lens, now.

742
00:34:55,510 --> 00:34:57,869
Do you think that’s because—they’re not in tech, right?

743
00:34:57,869 --> 00:34:59,880
They’re investing in technology.

744
00:35:00,080 --> 00:35:02,529
Is that doing due diligence because it’s a lot of money that

745
00:35:02,530 --> 00:35:05,600
they’re putting in something that they, maybe—I don’t—not say they

746
00:35:05,600 --> 00:35:08,600
don’t understand, but they’re not first, like, experiencing that.

747
00:35:08,660 --> 00:35:13,339
And, like, their jobs are to be experts in a sport

748
00:35:13,340 --> 00:35:15,759
that is very physical, and then at nights and weekends,

749
00:35:15,759 --> 00:35:18,109
like, you know, it’s like, I used to do tech at night.

750
00:35:18,130 --> 00:35:20,420
It was just, like, a fun hobby to, like, try to figure out how

751
00:35:20,420 --> 00:35:23,069
it all worked, but then at some point I had to, like, invest in

752
00:35:23,080 --> 00:35:26,350
something in my own time, to say, I’m going to go this direction.

753
00:35:26,590 --> 00:35:29,500
And for them having that much capital in the game and trying to figure

754
00:35:29,500 --> 00:35:31,640
out where to, obviously, they’re trying to maximize their investment.

755
00:35:31,660 --> 00:35:33,790
This isn’t a, we want to throw away some money.

756
00:35:33,830 --> 00:35:37,190
We want to actually, like, influence some aspect of this

757
00:35:37,190 --> 00:35:40,219
to make other people successful, to make us have a return.

758
00:35:40,629 --> 00:35:43,870
So, the thing is, what I’ve at least through life, everybody technical.

759
00:35:44,180 --> 00:35:45,430
Everybody technical.

760
00:35:45,490 --> 00:35:48,100
People who cook are extremely technical.

761
00:35:48,110 --> 00:35:50,240
They understand food science and chemistry,

762
00:35:50,270 --> 00:35:51,840
even if they don’t explain it that way.

763
00:35:52,050 --> 00:35:55,280
To play in the NFL, millions of people play football.

764
00:35:55,650 --> 00:35:57,629
Like, hundreds of them go pro.

765
00:35:58,080 --> 00:36:02,970
And you’re working, like, the gloves you use, the size of your cleats, the

766
00:36:02,970 --> 00:36:08,110
way turf works, the way the wind blows and the effect on—it’s ridiculous.

767
00:36:08,110 --> 00:36:13,299
So, operating at that level in any discipline, makes

768
00:36:13,299 --> 00:36:15,800
you highly in tune to understand how systems work,

769
00:36:15,830 --> 00:36:18,020
whatever system you’re dealing with and working with.

770
00:36:18,350 --> 00:36:21,900
And I think for them, it’s like, for us, we get so attached to things.

771
00:36:22,260 --> 00:36:24,200
Like, there are people walking around with Linux

772
00:36:24,210 --> 00:36:27,810
tattoos and Docker whale logos on their skin.

773
00:36:27,810 --> 00:36:29,170
It’s like, they get so attached.

774
00:36:29,210 --> 00:36:31,140
I am a Linux system administrator.

775
00:36:31,450 --> 00:36:34,050
I am a platform engineer.

776
00:36:34,059 --> 00:36:35,999
And then we put the blinders on, and we

777
00:36:36,000 --> 00:36:38,570
see the whole world through our keyboard.

778
00:36:39,240 --> 00:36:41,379
And so, when we start to have to talk to business

779
00:36:41,420 --> 00:36:43,899
about business with those people, they can’t see it.

780
00:36:44,020 --> 00:36:46,150
They can’t see the big macro trends.

781
00:36:46,190 --> 00:36:48,540
They can’t see the relationship between what

782
00:36:48,540 --> 00:36:50,480
you’re building and what the market demands.

783
00:36:50,940 --> 00:36:53,729
And I think one benefit a lot of people have that get further

784
00:36:53,730 --> 00:36:55,980
away from the keyboard, they can actually see the big picture.

785
00:36:56,270 --> 00:36:59,290
They can see, like, what the customer expectation will be,

786
00:36:59,650 --> 00:37:02,710
they can see whether this even needs venture capital or not.

787
00:37:02,720 --> 00:37:04,120
Because a lot of people that have good ideas,

788
00:37:04,270 --> 00:37:06,160
you should invest in it because it’s a good idea.

789
00:37:06,160 --> 00:37:08,819
It’s like, ah, it’s a good idea, but a bad business.

790
00:37:09,179 --> 00:37:13,090
And they have that ability to see the world objectively

791
00:37:13,580 --> 00:37:18,590
because VC is about making businesses, not just technology.

792
00:37:18,610 --> 00:37:22,439
So, that’s the one advantage they have when they are evaluating these companies.

793
00:37:22,440 --> 00:37:24,720
And that’s something I think I’ve learned, too, over time, which

794
00:37:24,720 --> 00:37:28,000
is, everything in business doesn’t happen behind the keyboard.

795
00:37:28,240 --> 00:37:30,529
And I think that’s the advantage that they have.

796
00:37:30,530 --> 00:37:33,070
So, that’s why I think they do such a good job with that.

797
00:37:33,100 --> 00:37:36,030
And also it just helps me also zoom out because now I got to think about,

798
00:37:36,290 --> 00:37:38,980
when I was working for one company, I just have to make one bet at a time.

799
00:37:39,330 --> 00:37:41,479
I’m going to go to this company, and I hope it pays off.

800
00:37:41,740 --> 00:37:45,930
But when you’re an investor, you’re zooming out and say, look, we might make

801
00:37:46,330 --> 00:37:51,509
ten to fifteen investments a year, and I got to construct this portfolio in a

802
00:37:51,510 --> 00:37:56,000
way that complements each other, can be explained why we made the investment,

803
00:37:56,490 --> 00:38:00,380
how it plans out in the next ten years, and the risk appetite is high.

804
00:38:00,670 --> 00:38:02,430
You ain’t trying to invest in safe stuff.

805
00:38:02,670 --> 00:38:07,000
You’re trying to invest in stuff that is going to be amazing or terrible.

806
00:38:07,510 --> 00:38:09,379
Not a lot of in between with that.

807
00:38:09,380 --> 00:38:12,535
So, I think that’s kind of the big difference between what we do as,

808
00:38:12,590 --> 00:38:15,350
like, on the engineering side, versus what an investor thinks about.

809
00:38:16,090 --> 00:38:16,350
Yeah.

810
00:38:16,370 --> 00:38:18,490
That’s a good point because you can—there’s plenty

811
00:38:18,490 --> 00:38:20,679
of safe places to make a decent amount of money.

812
00:38:21,070 --> 00:38:23,409
You put in ten million and you’re fine, right?

813
00:38:23,410 --> 00:38:26,450
But they don’t want to get a 3-4% back or anything.

814
00:38:26,450 --> 00:38:28,419
They’re like, we want to take a bigger risk here.

815
00:38:28,930 --> 00:38:33,999
I think, also to your point, I think pattern recognition on what you need

816
00:38:34,000 --> 00:38:38,850
to do to be successful is one of the things that sets most people apart.

817
00:38:38,960 --> 00:38:42,119
No matter what you do, there’s some sort of pattern that you need

818
00:38:42,119 --> 00:38:47,010
to recognize and goals to set to be successful in any career.

819
00:38:47,010 --> 00:38:48,520
So, I think that’s really true.

820
00:38:48,570 --> 00:38:50,860
And if you are good at figuring that out,

821
00:38:50,870 --> 00:38:53,000
you can be successful in multiple places.

822
00:38:53,010 --> 00:38:54,470
A hundred percent.

823
00:38:54,820 --> 00:38:56,189
How do we make it all more maintainable?

824
00:38:56,709 --> 00:38:59,959
Being in it for 20 years or so, or 25, like, you just see it happen

825
00:38:59,959 --> 00:39:02,419
over and over again, and it just kind of fizzles out, and then

826
00:39:02,470 --> 00:39:05,150
till the next thing comes, is that just always the cycle, now?

827
00:39:05,790 --> 00:39:08,440
In one regard, that’s why it’s sustainable.

828
00:39:08,820 --> 00:39:10,720
Like one thing in the US that we have that a lot of

829
00:39:10,720 --> 00:39:13,780
countries don’t have, we have a lot of risk takers.

830
00:39:14,160 --> 00:39:16,790
We have a lot of people with money that are taking risks.

831
00:39:17,459 --> 00:39:20,070
And that creates a situation where there seems to be

832
00:39:20,070 --> 00:39:23,440
this pipeline of cash to try stuff, even dumb stuff.

833
00:39:23,680 --> 00:39:27,770
And so, that just creates this situation where there’s always something to try.

834
00:39:28,599 --> 00:39:33,040
Now, what’s not sustainable is working on a free, open-source

835
00:39:33,049 --> 00:39:36,200
project used by millions of people who all want different things.

836
00:39:37,199 --> 00:39:39,250
That’s not sustainable for one person.

837
00:39:39,250 --> 00:39:40,290
It’s just not.

838
00:39:40,640 --> 00:39:44,610
Like, having a job, and then working on a side project

839
00:39:44,610 --> 00:39:48,010
that becomes popular becomes a second job with no pay.

840
00:39:48,320 --> 00:39:50,639
And you try to do your best because now your identity

841
00:39:50,639 --> 00:39:54,039
is tied to, like, when you go to GitHub, it’s github.com

842
00:39:54,039 --> 00:39:57,130
forward-slash your name, and the product everyone’s using.

843
00:39:57,130 --> 00:39:59,020
So, now it’s literally linked to your identity.

844
00:39:59,270 --> 00:40:00,850
And now you’re asking yourself, it’s like,

845
00:40:00,850 --> 00:40:02,280
well, how much effort should I put in it?

846
00:40:02,570 --> 00:40:05,679
And given that it’s you on the line, your identity on the line, you feel

847
00:40:05,679 --> 00:40:09,030
like you don’t want to let anyone down, even when they are asking for things

848
00:40:09,030 --> 00:40:12,600
that you have no interest in using, and it would be crazy to implement.

849
00:40:12,610 --> 00:40:15,070
So, you do it anyway, and then you get burnt out.

850
00:40:15,310 --> 00:40:17,640
And the hard part is, like, man, how do you

851
00:40:17,640 --> 00:40:19,690
walk away from something that bears your name?

852
00:40:19,980 --> 00:40:22,430
So, from a sustainability point, I think the best thing I ever

853
00:40:22,430 --> 00:40:24,979
did when Kubernetes started getting real hot, I was there in the

854
00:40:25,030 --> 00:40:28,659
early days, but maybe year six or seven, I was like, I’m done.

855
00:40:29,219 --> 00:40:30,080
Everybody is like, “Oh no, no.

856
00:40:30,110 --> 00:40:31,710
It’s finally blowing up.

857
00:40:31,910 --> 00:40:32,760
Everyone’s coming.

858
00:40:32,790 --> 00:40:33,374
Kube kind of big.”

859
00:40:33,374 --> 00:40:34,920
It’s like, yeah, I’m done.

860
00:40:35,130 --> 00:40:36,510
It’s time for me to move on.

861
00:40:37,250 --> 00:40:39,220
Let me go check out service mesh.

862
00:40:39,580 --> 00:40:41,350
Let me go check out serverless.

863
00:40:41,900 --> 00:40:43,590
Let me go check out databases.

864
00:40:43,620 --> 00:40:45,499
Let me go check out something different.

865
00:40:46,119 --> 00:40:48,290
And it’s not because I think Kubernetes is a failure.

866
00:40:48,820 --> 00:40:51,960
I just know that there’s so many more people involved in the project now

867
00:40:52,570 --> 00:40:56,819
that it feels like it’s in good hands, it’s going to go where it needs to go.

868
00:40:57,340 --> 00:40:59,410
But sustainability, I think, is also realizing

869
00:40:59,420 --> 00:41:01,430
that you ain’t got to be there forever.

870
00:41:01,860 --> 00:41:04,990
And so, we always talk about, it’s a marathon, not a race.

871
00:41:04,990 --> 00:41:05,849
No, it’s a relay.

872
00:41:06,049 --> 00:41:08,360
You got to be willing to pass the baton.

873
00:41:09,100 --> 00:41:10,480
And the problem is, if you think you’re going to

874
00:41:10,480 --> 00:41:13,060
run a 2-trillion mile marathon, you’re mistaken.

875
00:41:13,850 --> 00:41:15,870
I think now, I think is a healthy way to think about

876
00:41:17,030 --> 00:41:20,130
maintainership: leave your mark, make an impact, and start

877
00:41:20,139 --> 00:41:23,489
lining up that next person that you need to hand the baton to.

878
00:41:23,520 --> 00:41:26,589
Like, identify who that person is ahead of time, and that way

879
00:41:26,590 --> 00:41:31,310
you can hand it off, and you get to stop, you can look at it, but

880
00:41:31,310 --> 00:41:34,819
nothing’s stopping you from preparing yourself down the road to

881
00:41:34,849 --> 00:41:37,909
maybe receive the baton again, if that’s where things line up.

882
00:41:38,110 --> 00:41:40,350
So, I think that’s going to be the other part of sustainability here.

883
00:41:40,350 --> 00:41:43,109
We got to know when to stop and pass the baton.

884
00:41:43,980 --> 00:41:46,540
That goes back to your point where you said that you switched

885
00:41:46,540 --> 00:41:49,130
the guy that worked in Linux and the guy that worked in Windows.

886
00:41:49,210 --> 00:41:52,430
I think when you come into a project or a role, and it’s new and you’re

887
00:41:52,430 --> 00:41:55,179
excited, it’s a different kind of energy than when you’re burnt out.

888
00:41:55,179 --> 00:41:57,770
And sometimes you have to be like, “I came, I saw,

889
00:41:57,820 --> 00:42:00,249
now there’s a new dream, and it’s time to leave.”

890
00:42:00,520 --> 00:42:04,569
And look, Kuberetes is probably one of the best examples I’ve seen forever.

891
00:42:04,950 --> 00:42:09,950
Every KubeCon, I try to pop by the Contributor Summit is always a new set

892
00:42:09,950 --> 00:42:14,680
of fresh faces, people on the release team, the SIGs, the security teams.

893
00:42:15,020 --> 00:42:18,059
These people come in with a ton of passion, the proper amount

894
00:42:18,059 --> 00:42:21,220
of being naive because if you just knew how complex all this

895
00:42:21,270 --> 00:42:23,709
is [laugh] , you probably wouldn’t want to get involved.

896
00:42:24,090 --> 00:42:26,459
That was my favorite quote from one of our first Ship it!

897
00:42:26,460 --> 00:42:29,340
episodes, when someone says, “If we knew how hard it

898
00:42:29,340 --> 00:42:31,930
would be to build, we’d never build anything.” [laugh]

899
00:42:32,860 --> 00:42:33,749
.
You got to have the naivety.

900
00:42:33,909 --> 00:42:36,740
It was just, like, “I don’t know what this is, but we’re going to try.” Yeah.

901
00:42:36,780 --> 00:42:41,890
I think one thing that is very starkly different about Kubernetes, working

902
00:42:41,890 --> 00:42:46,779
in the Java space and just seeing Linux from the outside, Kubernetes has a

903
00:42:46,780 --> 00:42:51,920
lot of, you’ve been really good at giving the baton away, and bringing more

904
00:42:51,920 --> 00:42:56,530
younger maintainers and, like, contributors in, and people that don’t have the

905
00:42:56,530 --> 00:43:00,759
stereotypical background, and kind of being a more, like, accepting community.

906
00:43:00,760 --> 00:43:05,229
Like, it is so much easier to get involved in Kubernetes than some of the big,

907
00:43:05,340 --> 00:43:09,400
longer-maintained open-source projects, and that’s going to keep it alive.

908
00:43:09,400 --> 00:43:13,210
I think that in the fact that they figured out a sustainable, like, funding.

909
00:43:13,410 --> 00:43:16,089
I contribute that completely to the documentation

910
00:43:16,090 --> 00:43:18,580
and process that Kubernetes wrote in the beginning.

911
00:43:18,580 --> 00:43:20,129
Everyone that comes to me and says, “How do I get to be,

912
00:43:20,130 --> 00:43:22,947
like, a senior engineer,” I say, how many docs do you write?

913
00:43:23,120 --> 00:43:25,770
Because every company I’ve been at, the documentation

914
00:43:25,770 --> 00:43:28,009
I’ve written has long outlasted the code I wrote.

915
00:43:28,350 --> 00:43:29,539
That, but the people though.

916
00:43:29,779 --> 00:43:31,609
There’s something special about Kubernetes.

917
00:43:31,800 --> 00:43:34,715
Kubernetes community, and people are so welcoming, and they—

918
00:43:34,715 --> 00:43:39,049
You walk in, everybody’s got cool hair, like, everybody is so much nicer.

919
00:43:39,389 --> 00:43:41,800
But, like, think about it, like, I came from, like, Java and

920
00:43:41,800 --> 00:43:45,049
databases, and then I got on the release team, and I only use Docker.

921
00:43:45,299 --> 00:43:48,339
I literally only want to contribute to Kubernetes for the people.

922
00:43:48,350 --> 00:43:49,510
I’m like, I’ll release something.

923
00:43:49,510 --> 00:43:52,180
Tell me where to go because I just want to hang

924
00:43:52,180 --> 00:43:53,870
out with you guys, and you make cool stuff.

925
00:43:53,870 --> 00:43:58,430
Like, we’re asking for people to volunteer their time to build stuff and to

926
00:43:58,430 --> 00:44:01,810
maintain it, and the people are going to matter because just like you said,

927
00:44:01,810 --> 00:44:05,200
Kelsey, you go somewhere and people forget that people actually matter.

928
00:44:05,510 --> 00:44:07,950
And people are so into being tech, and you get these people

929
00:44:07,950 --> 00:44:11,049
who are not always the best to work with, and how long is

930
00:44:11,050 --> 00:44:13,200
that sustainable, especially when you’re doing it for free?

931
00:44:16,830 --> 00:44:17,440
Hey you.

932
00:44:17,790 --> 00:44:18,510
Yeah, you.

933
00:44:18,590 --> 00:44:18,855
I know.

934
00:44:18,990 --> 00:44:21,480
This is Justin still, and this is an ad spot, but

935
00:44:21,480 --> 00:44:23,610
we actually don't have a sponsor for this spot.

936
00:44:24,020 --> 00:44:26,930
So it's just me telling you about our sponsor spots.

937
00:44:27,410 --> 00:44:31,350
If you're an advertiser and you want to reach this audience, we

938
00:44:31,350 --> 00:44:35,969
need you to go to fafo.fm/sponsor and check out our packages.

939
00:44:36,450 --> 00:44:40,160
If you're not an advertiser, we need you to share this podcast

940
00:44:40,330 --> 00:44:43,980
with your friends or your family or your enemies or your cat.

941
00:44:44,730 --> 00:44:47,670
I don't know, send it to someone that can download the episode

942
00:44:47,670 --> 00:44:50,920
and listen to it, and then maybe they know a better sponsor.

943
00:44:51,210 --> 00:44:55,410
We want to keep the sound quality high and the sponsor quality even higher.

944
00:44:55,469 --> 00:44:57,730
And to do that, we need people just to come

945
00:44:57,730 --> 00:45:00,009
check out the package and get in contact with us.

946
00:45:00,360 --> 00:45:03,010
That's going to help us keep these episodes going so that

947
00:45:03,010 --> 00:45:06,080
we can bring you better guests and better topics over time.

948
00:45:06,300 --> 00:45:12,800
So again, if you want to sponsor the show, please reach out at fafo.fm/sponsor.

949
00:45:17,430 --> 00:45:18,730
Autumn, you know there’s something that made

950
00:45:18,730 --> 00:45:22,020
me think about, why is this the case, right?

951
00:45:22,070 --> 00:45:24,540
I’ve never talked about why I think the community is

952
00:45:24,540 --> 00:45:27,869
the way it is, but one thing that I think plays a big

953
00:45:27,870 --> 00:45:31,670
role, number one, Google was not first place in cloud.

954
00:45:31,750 --> 00:45:33,600
There’s a humbleness that comes from not

955
00:45:33,600 --> 00:45:36,520
being number one, striving to be number one.

956
00:45:37,060 --> 00:45:42,250
Second, Docker was on a tear, redefining everything, right?

957
00:45:42,260 --> 00:45:44,510
Docker was like, we are the container runtime.

958
00:45:44,710 --> 00:45:46,730
We are setting the direction for everybody.

959
00:45:46,790 --> 00:45:48,680
Even the cloud providers must follow.

960
00:45:48,880 --> 00:45:51,869
And so, when Kubernetes comes out, it was competing with

961
00:45:51,880 --> 00:45:56,620
OpenStack, it’s competing with Mesosphere, it’s competing

962
00:45:56,620 --> 00:45:59,410
with all of these things that are kind of settled in.

963
00:45:59,950 --> 00:46:03,560
And so, now Kubernetes has to enter the market humble.

964
00:46:03,870 --> 00:46:06,709
You are not number one, there is no clear reason

965
00:46:06,710 --> 00:46:08,319
why anyone would use this over the incumbents.

966
00:46:09,339 --> 00:46:12,050
But you know what you’re doing, and so what do you do?

967
00:46:12,440 --> 00:46:14,500
You start by using things that already exist.

968
00:46:14,730 --> 00:46:16,390
Let’s take Docker as the container runtime.

969
00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:18,760
Let’s take etcd as the store.

970
00:46:19,070 --> 00:46:21,420
Let’s take CNI as the networking component.

971
00:46:21,820 --> 00:46:24,689
And you push these things in, and you’re actually giving kind of clear

972
00:46:24,690 --> 00:46:27,800
credit to these groups because you’re not burying these things; they’re

973
00:46:27,800 --> 00:46:31,460
just right there in the documentation that these are hard dependencies.

974
00:46:32,100 --> 00:46:35,110
And I think there were just so much, we hope people accept this.

975
00:46:35,560 --> 00:46:38,809
Those first couple of years, “I hope people like this.”

976
00:46:39,139 --> 00:46:42,010
Oh man, Docker, we got to be as user-friendly as Docker.

977
00:46:42,370 --> 00:46:45,919
And I remember when I got involved in the community, I remember someone

978
00:46:45,920 --> 00:46:49,960
on Twitter saying, “We’re killing Mesos.” I was like, “No, no, no.

979
00:46:50,020 --> 00:46:53,800
Ain’t no killing.” There’s so much that we’ve learned from those communities

980
00:46:53,810 --> 00:46:57,550
that we carried over to Kubernetes, we shouldn’t even try to move that way.

981
00:46:57,550 --> 00:47:01,209
What we should try to do is say, “Hey, all the ideas we’ve all ever

982
00:47:01,210 --> 00:47:05,039
had in this space are finally coming together into something we can

983
00:47:05,039 --> 00:47:10,190
touch.” That’s enough to motivate us to do what we do, and I think

984
00:47:10,190 --> 00:47:13,510
that carried itself over to the foundation, it carried itself over

985
00:47:13,510 --> 00:47:16,839
to way they give out awards, the way to chop wood and carry water.

986
00:47:16,990 --> 00:47:20,380
Like, the things that they’re recognizing, all of that, to me, has

987
00:47:20,380 --> 00:47:23,630
turned into this kind of permanence around what our community is.

988
00:47:24,360 --> 00:47:26,150
I think that’s what’s going to sustain it.

989
00:47:26,270 --> 00:47:29,330
How do you think the relationship between corporations

990
00:47:29,330 --> 00:47:32,230
and open source kind of goes on from here?

991
00:47:32,230 --> 00:47:34,730
Because it’s been a wild ride the last year.

992
00:47:34,770 --> 00:47:38,690
But I mean, 70% of infrastructure is open source, you know?

993
00:47:38,710 --> 00:47:40,839
We’ve got, we’re going to have to figure out how to do

994
00:47:40,840 --> 00:47:43,910
this responsibility and this relationship the right way.

995
00:47:43,910 --> 00:47:47,109
So, like, how do you think we move on to a better future?

996
00:47:47,110 --> 00:47:50,500
Because I agree that open source is where I want to be.

997
00:47:50,570 --> 00:47:52,970
I don’t know where in open source I’ll go for, like, the rest

998
00:47:52,970 --> 00:47:55,730
of my career, but open source, and just the community, and kind

999
00:47:55,730 --> 00:47:59,149
of contributing to something bigger than a company is definitely

1000
00:47:59,320 --> 00:48:02,090
something I feel like I need to motivate me in a career.

1001
00:48:02,140 --> 00:48:03,750
But how do we make that sustainable?

1002
00:48:03,770 --> 00:48:07,440
Because it does take money and it does take corporate influence at this point.

1003
00:48:08,120 --> 00:48:11,109
Man, the thing about open source, my whole life—I’m 43 years

1004
00:48:11,110 --> 00:48:14,830
old, and if I watch the news, I can get depressed really quickly.

1005
00:48:15,049 --> 00:48:17,159
When I look at the way people talk to each other,

1006
00:48:17,160 --> 00:48:19,270
sometimes I can get depressed really quickly.

1007
00:48:19,760 --> 00:48:21,300
It kind of feels like everybody’s trying to

1008
00:48:21,300 --> 00:48:23,980
do Game of Thrones and one-up each other.

1009
00:48:24,240 --> 00:48:25,609
And then when I go into the open-source

1010
00:48:25,610 --> 00:48:28,450
community space, it just feels like utopia.

1011
00:48:29,020 --> 00:48:30,670
I’m not saying that it’s perfect.

1012
00:48:31,280 --> 00:48:34,160
I’m saying that you found a way to get complete strangers

1013
00:48:34,750 --> 00:48:38,150
to come together and work on something with no guarantee

1014
00:48:38,200 --> 00:48:41,160
of financial gain, and they’ve been doing this for decades.

1015
00:48:41,720 --> 00:48:44,910
And they’ve gotten so good at it that they’re building things that

1016
00:48:44,910 --> 00:48:48,189
are better than the things that you can actually pay money for.

1017
00:48:48,389 --> 00:48:51,399
This is, like, Star Trek-level wishful thinking

1018
00:48:51,710 --> 00:48:53,270
that we actually get to touch every day.

1019
00:48:53,480 --> 00:48:56,560
But then there’s a flip side of this is when people do try to

1020
00:48:56,570 --> 00:48:58,920
work on this full-time—because a lot of people are volunteering

1021
00:48:58,920 --> 00:49:02,350
their time on the side, and maybe that part isn’t sustainable.

1022
00:49:02,770 --> 00:49:06,520
Things that do work, I give credit to all the big companies,

1023
00:49:06,530 --> 00:49:10,629
from Netflix, to Amazon, to Google, to even Oracle, that

1024
00:49:10,629 --> 00:49:13,130
they do have people that are working on open source.

1025
00:49:13,390 --> 00:49:15,840
A lot of them are doing it full time, but they’re

1026
00:49:15,970 --> 00:49:18,169
at the direction of that particular company.

1027
00:49:18,410 --> 00:49:21,750
But the part that I think needs to be sustainable is, these

1028
00:49:21,750 --> 00:49:25,210
companies that are built on top of open source, they are

1029
00:49:25,240 --> 00:49:28,230
literally trying to do the right thing, making this software

1030
00:49:28,230 --> 00:49:31,300
free and accessible, but also giving you something to pay for.

1031
00:49:32,070 --> 00:49:34,170
And what I think we’ve seen for the last 15 years

1032
00:49:34,170 --> 00:49:37,100
is, people only pay for things that they have to.

1033
00:49:37,390 --> 00:49:39,760
So, if you’re not having an Oracle-like licensing

1034
00:49:39,770 --> 00:49:42,360
model, you’re going to have a hard time getting money.

1035
00:49:42,559 --> 00:49:45,080
Because I think a lot of big corporations who make a lot of money, by

1036
00:49:45,080 --> 00:49:48,890
the way, look at paying for open-source software as a form of charity.

1037
00:49:49,260 --> 00:49:51,980
And that’s not sustainable, so I think what we’ve seen as

1038
00:49:51,980 --> 00:49:54,780
a result is a lot of companies saying, hey, you know what?

1039
00:49:55,110 --> 00:49:56,830
No more giving the full product away.

1040
00:49:57,270 --> 00:50:00,680
Some companies are saying now the builds are now proprietary.

1041
00:50:00,690 --> 00:50:03,309
The software is available, but good luck making the builds.

1042
00:50:03,980 --> 00:50:06,680
Or, maybe we start doing a feature split, right?

1043
00:50:06,680 --> 00:50:11,029
Like, CockroachDB is getting more towards, hey, Open Core, maybe a lot of it

1044
00:50:11,110 --> 00:50:14,460
has to go more down the closed route and slightly different licensing model.

1045
00:50:14,710 --> 00:50:16,780
I think at some point, enterprise is going to have to figure

1046
00:50:16,780 --> 00:50:19,400
out that they were getting an extremely good deal here.

1047
00:50:19,719 --> 00:50:22,120
If I was a company and they say, hey, how would you contribute

1048
00:50:22,129 --> 00:50:24,859
back—and I’m just trying to be very hyper-specific, but there’s

1049
00:50:24,869 --> 00:50:28,490
millions of other ways of doing this—if you use Postgres full time

1050
00:50:28,730 --> 00:50:31,790
at a company and you’re not paying a licensing fee or anything

1051
00:50:31,790 --> 00:50:35,240
like that, go and hire two people from the Postgres community.

1052
00:50:35,550 --> 00:50:36,959
Do not add them to Jira.

1053
00:50:37,200 --> 00:50:39,290
Do not make them come to your stand ups.

1054
00:50:39,820 --> 00:50:42,720
Literally, let them just be tier one engineering support

1055
00:50:42,720 --> 00:50:45,880
when the time comes, but other than that, let them focus

1056
00:50:45,880 --> 00:50:50,350
on making Postgres a continued, sustainable project.

1057
00:50:50,920 --> 00:50:54,680
Maybe they can work on things you care about more in order of prioritization,

1058
00:50:55,450 --> 00:50:59,959
but I can’t think of a better way of giving back than putting a

1059
00:50:59,959 --> 00:51:02,520
little bit of your budget towards keeping these things sustainable.

1060
00:51:02,520 --> 00:51:03,833
So, shout out to places like Facebook.

1061
00:51:04,060 --> 00:51:05,870
I know they have a lot of Postgres engineers there.

1062
00:51:06,310 --> 00:51:07,860
Shout out to people like VMware.

1063
00:51:07,900 --> 00:51:11,389
I know they employed the guy from Redis for a number of years so that he can

1064
00:51:11,389 --> 00:51:14,509
just focus on building Redis all those years that we all got it for free.

1065
00:51:14,929 --> 00:51:17,060
So, there are good use cases out there.

1066
00:51:17,289 --> 00:51:19,210
And then the last one I would probably mention is Let’s Encrypt.

1067
00:51:20,330 --> 00:51:22,600
That whole project is phenomenal.

1068
00:51:22,610 --> 00:51:25,810
So, if you’re listening to this, go research their funding model.

1069
00:51:25,900 --> 00:51:29,590
Go research how they found a way to build something so critical to the

1070
00:51:29,590 --> 00:51:33,760
entire internet that they seem to have found a way to do it sustainably.

1071
00:51:33,760 --> 00:51:37,100
Switching to a different vein of maintenance.

1072
00:51:37,840 --> 00:51:41,380
You were doing some maintenance on circuit breaking [laugh]

1073
00:51:41,620 --> 00:51:41,630
.
Oh…

1074
00:51:42,810 --> 00:51:45,960
So, some circuitry at your house, and you

1075
00:51:45,960 --> 00:51:47,310
had to go through a process for that, right?

1076
00:51:47,320 --> 00:51:49,740
Like you were talking about in the States, we have a

1077
00:51:49,740 --> 00:51:52,470
lot of risk-takers, and doing electrical work on your

1078
00:51:52,470 --> 00:51:55,150
own house is probably the biggest risk you can take.

1079
00:51:55,400 --> 00:51:57,600
That’s just, like, straight up [laugh]

1080
00:51:58,770 --> 00:51:58,799
—
[laugh]

1081
00:51:59,010 --> 00:52:00,550
.
I used to do construction in college.

1082
00:52:00,550 --> 00:52:03,130
I had a summer job doing construction, and they had me—we

1083
00:52:03,130 --> 00:52:05,670
would install wells out in the boonies, out in Southern

1084
00:52:05,670 --> 00:52:09,690
California, and I was mainly doing electrical work.

1085
00:52:10,260 --> 00:52:15,481
And I’d never told them that I’m color blind, and so I always had to, [laugh]

1086
00:52:15,481 --> 00:52:17,740
—
[unintelligible] is like, “What?” [laugh]

1087
00:52:17,740 --> 00:52:18,191
.
Justin!

1088
00:52:18,191 --> 00:52:23,395
I always had to have them check my work because I knew, at some point,

1089
00:52:23,570 --> 00:52:26,620
like, hey, I’m going to mess this up because I physically cannot— [laugh]

1090
00:52:26,620 --> 00:52:28,079
.
You see that shocked face that Kelsey made?

1091
00:52:28,100 --> 00:52:30,630
He makes me make that face, like, once a week.

1092
00:52:30,630 --> 00:52:31,980
Like, so—like, I’m just—

1093
00:52:32,530 --> 00:52:35,700
And now, and like, I mean, my work was distant from the house.

1094
00:52:35,700 --> 00:52:37,790
It wasn’t something that was like part

1095
00:52:37,820 --> 00:52:38,923
of—well, yeah—well it was usually part of—

1096
00:52:38,923 --> 00:52:38,935
Well, fire in your garage.

1097
00:52:38,935 --> 00:52:39,201
No big deal.

1098
00:52:39,201 --> 00:52:39,940
But, you know, it was validated by,

1099
00:52:42,730 --> 00:52:44,579
you know, my supervisor and everything.

1100
00:52:44,580 --> 00:52:46,499
But that was something that—and so now you’re doing that,

1101
00:52:46,500 --> 00:52:49,010
you’re pulling wires in your house and doing some stuff.

1102
00:52:49,029 --> 00:52:53,490
How does that—like, that’s a new project, that’s a new thing to learn, and a

1103
00:52:53,490 --> 00:52:57,050
new place that maybe you don’t need mastery, but you do need competence [laugh]

1104
00:52:57,630 --> 00:52:57,810
.
Yeah.

1105
00:52:57,810 --> 00:53:00,220
I mean, honestly, I just been very respectful of the

1106
00:53:00,220 --> 00:53:03,709
little things, like, the people who maintain the sidewalks.

1107
00:53:04,299 --> 00:53:07,340
When I look at my house, I look at life-sustaining systems that

1108
00:53:07,380 --> 00:53:10,210
are put together that sustain life for you and your family.

1109
00:53:10,380 --> 00:53:12,550
And so, when I look at tradespeople, these are people

1110
00:53:12,550 --> 00:53:16,150
that are literally keeping the lights on for society.

1111
00:53:16,380 --> 00:53:18,970
And so, one of my very first jobs, I was pulling

1112
00:53:19,000 --> 00:53:22,259
ethernet cables through buildings so I can set up their

1113
00:53:22,260 --> 00:53:25,549
networks, and that is a very small form of construction.

1114
00:53:26,140 --> 00:53:30,360
And the tools that go into that, there are codes, you need permits,

1115
00:53:30,370 --> 00:53:32,720
sometimes you need special licenses to do this kind of work.

1116
00:53:33,210 --> 00:53:35,370
And so, very simple project.

1117
00:53:36,000 --> 00:53:39,050
It should have been simple, but I can’t let it be simple.

1118
00:53:39,270 --> 00:53:42,020
My wife is like, “Hey, I want a bidet.” I was

1119
00:53:42,020 --> 00:53:45,250
like, “Hmmm.” And there’s an easy route to this.

1120
00:53:45,570 --> 00:53:48,150
You literally can just go get the ones and, you

1121
00:53:48,150 --> 00:53:50,480
know, put it on top of what you already have.

1122
00:53:50,480 --> 00:53:54,420
And it may not have any hot water, but you can literally just unscrew two

1123
00:53:54,420 --> 00:53:57,599
screws, put something on top— [makes dusting-off sounds] —you are done.

1124
00:53:57,599 --> 00:53:58,466
That’s all she ask for.

1125
00:53:58,639 --> 00:54:00,436
That’s bolting on a sidecar to your logging system.

1126
00:54:00,436 --> 00:54:00,494
Yeah.

1127
00:54:00,494 --> 00:54:01,303
That’s all she asked for.

1128
00:54:01,303 --> 00:54:04,009
Can we have, like, Kelsey, like, sound effects?

1129
00:54:04,010 --> 00:54:06,220
Because, like, you have your own set of

1130
00:54:06,220 --> 00:54:08,800
sound effects, and they make my entire life.

1131
00:54:09,099 --> 00:54:14,540
Like, you on Twitter and Bluesky is great, but you, in real life is fire.

1132
00:54:16,440 --> 00:54:18,489
Like, [laugh] you have, like, a whole set of sound effects.

1133
00:54:18,520 --> 00:54:19,730
Y’all have been missing out.

1134
00:54:19,730 --> 00:54:24,799
You got to get this man, like, record it, like, a lot because it’s great.

1135
00:54:24,930 --> 00:54:26,953
So look, that’s all she asked all she asked for, and I was like,

1136
00:54:27,070 --> 00:54:30,760
I could do this, and for $200 a toilet, I would have been done.

1137
00:54:30,760 --> 00:54:32,270
But I was like, you know what?

1138
00:54:32,450 --> 00:54:34,800
What is the best bidet you could buy?

1139
00:54:35,250 --> 00:54:38,120
And so, then you eventually land on this place called Toto, and you’re

1140
00:54:38,120 --> 00:54:42,980
like, hmm, I can’t get the Toto bidet with the existing toilets.

1141
00:54:42,990 --> 00:54:45,279
Now, my house is, like, one year old, and

1142
00:54:45,279 --> 00:54:46,640
I was like, I got to replace these toilets.

1143
00:54:46,640 --> 00:54:47,350
There’s no way.

1144
00:54:47,800 --> 00:54:49,020
And I’ve never done that before.

1145
00:54:49,020 --> 00:54:49,623
So, now I’m buying—

1146
00:54:49,623 --> 00:54:51,739
Was your wife very stressed out during this process?

1147
00:54:51,739 --> 00:54:52,159
Because, like—

1148
00:54:53,039 --> 00:54:53,414
Yeah, imagine—

1149
00:54:53,414 --> 00:54:54,289
—you’re stressing me out a little bit.

1150
00:54:54,289 --> 00:54:54,539
Okay [laugh]

1151
00:54:54,539 --> 00:54:56,945
.
You walk in the bathroom, you’d be like, “Where’s the toilet?” I say,

1152
00:54:57,020 --> 00:54:59,740
“I got to replace the toilet, too.” So, there’s a hole in the ground.

1153
00:55:00,640 --> 00:55:01,899
Like, don’t use this bathroom.

1154
00:55:02,010 --> 00:55:03,560
Has she asked you to go back to work yet?

1155
00:55:03,580 --> 00:55:04,980
Like— [laugh]

1156
00:55:06,490 --> 00:55:06,862
.
No, no, no, no, no.

1157
00:55:06,910 --> 00:55:07,520
So, here’s the thing.

1158
00:55:07,920 --> 00:55:11,520
So, I go down this path, but it turns out for these

1159
00:55:11,520 --> 00:55:14,790
bidets, you need electricity behind the toilet.

1160
00:55:15,060 --> 00:55:19,150
And I call the electricians, like, hey, these bidets use a lot of power.

1161
00:55:19,740 --> 00:55:22,410
The first thing I try to do is, like, tap into, like, where

1162
00:55:22,410 --> 00:55:25,759
my lights are connected, but the bidets are so powerful

1163
00:55:25,920 --> 00:55:28,079
that they make the lights flicker when you’re using it.

1164
00:55:28,559 --> 00:55:30,229
So, I’m like, this is fail mission.

1165
00:55:30,990 --> 00:55:33,490
And it turns out, if you read the instructions, you need 20 amp

1166
00:55:33,490 --> 00:55:38,240
circuits, and so that’s way more power than that I had nearby.

1167
00:55:38,260 --> 00:55:39,030
So, I was like, you know what?

1168
00:55:39,230 --> 00:55:41,539
I’ll call an electrician, get a quote.

1169
00:55:42,160 --> 00:55:43,380
This should be easy.

1170
00:55:44,090 --> 00:55:48,239
It’s thousands of dollars to run new lines from first floor

1171
00:55:48,289 --> 00:55:51,149
up through wall, through the attic, to these two bathrooms.

1172
00:55:51,660 --> 00:55:53,009
I was like, “Thousands of dollars?

1173
00:55:53,010 --> 00:55:53,950
I ain’t paying that.”

1174
00:55:54,510 --> 00:55:57,940
And you just start buying tools, you’re pulling permits, you’re

1175
00:55:57,940 --> 00:56:00,790
watching YouTube videos, you’re reading electrical codes,

1176
00:56:01,349 --> 00:56:04,699
and then you have a tool bag of stuff, and you run the lines.

1177
00:56:05,199 --> 00:56:07,049
And the thing is, when you’re doing it yourself,

1178
00:56:07,180 --> 00:56:08,799
you’re cautious because I don’t want to die.

1179
00:56:09,290 --> 00:56:13,310
I can’t have Kelsey die trying to install power lines.

1180
00:56:13,430 --> 00:56:14,840
That’s not how I wanted to go out.

1181
00:56:15,010 --> 00:56:18,209
And so, the thing about doing that work, though, is, I felt

1182
00:56:18,230 --> 00:56:22,379
like, man, I learned a new set of skills that provides value.

1183
00:56:22,719 --> 00:56:24,930
And the dope part about finishing that project—you know, a

1184
00:56:24,930 --> 00:56:28,839
couple days ago, I got my green sticker from the inspector

1185
00:56:28,880 --> 00:56:31,120
that showed up to make sure I did everything correct.

1186
00:56:31,810 --> 00:56:35,850
And I remember, like, couple months ago, my mom got new floors put

1187
00:56:35,850 --> 00:56:39,770
in her bathroom, but they didn’t bolt the toilet down correctly,

1188
00:56:39,770 --> 00:56:43,270
and they cracked the flange that the toilet bolts down on.

1189
00:56:43,750 --> 00:56:45,660
And I’m thinking, like, oh, I can fix this.

1190
00:56:45,770 --> 00:56:46,956
She’s like, “No, no, no, we just going to

1191
00:56:47,040 --> 00:56:48,430
call the plumbers.” Like, “No, I got you.”

1192
00:56:48,890 --> 00:56:50,000
And we went to Home Depot.

1193
00:56:50,020 --> 00:56:52,880
In a couple of hours, I replaced the toilet and

1194
00:56:52,880 --> 00:56:54,970
the flange because I had this new set of skills.

1195
00:56:55,400 --> 00:56:57,829
So, for me, I think, Justin, it’s like, the ability to

1196
00:56:57,830 --> 00:57:01,259
learn new skills, to manage life-sustaining systems,

1197
00:57:01,790 --> 00:57:04,700
feels like the highest order of learning for me right now.

1198
00:57:04,860 --> 00:57:07,810
Learning how to cook, learning how to maintain your

1199
00:57:07,810 --> 00:57:11,270
house, all of these skills are extremely valuable to me.

1200
00:57:11,270 --> 00:57:12,980
So, when I think about wealth, I don’t think about

1201
00:57:12,980 --> 00:57:15,590
just how many digits you have in your bank account.

1202
00:57:16,150 --> 00:57:18,470
What can you actually do, right?

1203
00:57:18,480 --> 00:57:21,390
And so, that served me well in my tech career, and I

1204
00:57:21,400 --> 00:57:23,740
just want it to serve me well in my real life as well.

1205
00:57:23,740 --> 00:57:26,020
So, whether that’s maintaining my house—but yeah,

1206
00:57:26,020 --> 00:57:28,459
this is something I take, actually, super seriously.

1207
00:57:28,460 --> 00:57:31,400
I want to just show you my tool bag, but I’m not quite ready yet, but—

1208
00:57:31,400 --> 00:57:31,752
You see my—

1209
00:57:31,870 --> 00:57:32,900
It’s ridiculous.

1210
00:57:32,900 --> 00:57:33,130
Yeah.

1211
00:57:33,130 --> 00:57:33,619
Yeah, yeah.

1212
00:57:33,660 --> 00:57:34,739
—my toolbox over there.

1213
00:57:34,760 --> 00:57:35,020
Yeah.

1214
00:57:35,029 --> 00:57:38,080
I feel like you, for one, totally have to show us your tool bag too.

1215
00:57:38,090 --> 00:57:40,779
Why do you and Justin—have you ever heard of two-time fun?

1216
00:57:40,780 --> 00:57:43,580
Like, when people have—like, their fun is, like, climbing mountains,

1217
00:57:43,580 --> 00:57:46,360
or doing just—like, I was nervous the whole time you were telling

1218
00:57:46,360 --> 00:57:50,099
the story about electrical, [laugh] and, like, water, like.

1219
00:57:50,099 --> 00:57:52,749
And Justin also makes me nervous when he

1220
00:57:52,750 --> 00:57:54,970
talks about his extracurricular activities.

1221
00:57:54,970 --> 00:57:57,710
Like, do you just have, like, a certain type of

1222
00:57:57,710 --> 00:58:00,180
fun [laugh] that’s different from the rest of us?

1223
00:58:00,410 --> 00:58:04,350
I started learning skills in college because I would fix people’s cars.

1224
00:58:04,380 --> 00:58:06,100
Because I always had, like, trash cars.

1225
00:58:06,110 --> 00:58:08,939
My first, like, five cars all cost a thousand dollars each, and I

1226
00:58:08,939 --> 00:58:11,519
was just, like, I have to fix this because I have to get to work.

1227
00:58:11,980 --> 00:58:15,290
And so, I had some skills going into college, and then people

1228
00:58:15,290 --> 00:58:17,760
would need oil changes, and they’d have things break or whatever.

1229
00:58:17,760 --> 00:58:20,610
I’d say, hey, every car I was fixing in college, I’d say,

1230
00:58:20,610 --> 00:58:23,170
“You buy the parts and the tools and I’ll do it this weekend.”

1231
00:58:23,800 --> 00:58:27,579
And I would buy the book, the Chilton’s Manuals, like, I would get the book.

1232
00:58:27,770 --> 00:58:30,580
I say, “You pay for the stuff I need to learn the skill, and I’m

1233
00:58:30,580 --> 00:58:34,170
in.” And I took that mindset through my tech career, when all those

1234
00:58:34,170 --> 00:58:36,920
certifications were coming through, when I was getting A+ and Network+

1235
00:58:36,920 --> 00:58:39,700
to say, “You pay for my training, I’m going to put in the effort to

1236
00:58:39,700 --> 00:58:42,850
go do this thing because I want the skill on the other side.” And

1237
00:58:42,850 --> 00:58:47,280
that thing has paid me dividends throughout my life, where I don’t—I

1238
00:58:47,280 --> 00:58:50,540
actually, just for the first time, my last oil change, I didn’t do myself.

1239
00:58:50,580 --> 00:58:53,630
First oil change in my life, I didn’t do because I stripped the bolt.

1240
00:58:53,980 --> 00:58:55,740
And I was like, I don’t want to drill this out right now.

1241
00:58:55,780 --> 00:58:57,550
I’m not going to—like, I just don’t want to.

1242
00:58:57,559 --> 00:58:58,750
Like, I know I can do it.

1243
00:58:59,010 --> 00:59:00,250
I’m not here to do the skill.

1244
00:59:00,250 --> 00:59:01,259
This is a Saturday.

1245
00:59:01,559 --> 00:59:01,999
It’s okay.

1246
00:59:02,000 --> 00:59:04,189
I’m not laying down under this car and getting all oily.

1247
00:59:04,199 --> 00:59:05,380
I’m just going to go take it to someone.

1248
00:59:05,380 --> 00:59:07,140
They’re going to get it out for me, and we’re fine.

1249
00:59:07,530 --> 00:59:08,920
But you know what’s funny about this?

1250
00:59:08,970 --> 00:59:12,970
This goes to show that, like, right now we’re in this weird time where

1251
00:59:12,970 --> 00:59:15,890
before people were like, anybody in tech, if you can code, if you can

1252
00:59:15,890 --> 00:59:19,370
pass an interview, you can get this awesome six-figure job, right?

1253
00:59:19,370 --> 00:59:21,930
And now we’re getting back to that real elitist part where they’re

1254
00:59:21,930 --> 00:59:24,900
like, they want all these fancy college degrees, they only want

1255
00:59:24,900 --> 00:59:27,500
to hire kids from MIT who are going to work a million hours.

1256
00:59:27,940 --> 00:59:31,470
And you lose the curious people, the people

1257
00:59:31,470 --> 00:59:33,690
that are constantly trying to solve problems.

1258
00:59:33,700 --> 00:59:37,739
Some of the best people in tech are not the fact that they have a fancy

1259
00:59:37,740 --> 00:59:40,669
degree; it’s because their brains are constantly looking for pattern

1260
00:59:40,670 --> 00:59:44,250
recognition, and they’re constantly trying to solve interesting problems.

1261
00:59:44,700 --> 00:59:48,190
And like, you two are like, how many people do we all know that are

1262
00:59:48,500 --> 00:59:51,669
they’re amazing problem solvers, and they don’t have college degrees?

1263
00:59:51,700 --> 00:59:54,589
Which is why I think that this podcast is fitting because I

1264
00:59:54,590 --> 00:59:57,790
say this is the ‘F Around and Find Out,’ like, time of tech.

1265
00:59:58,279 --> 01:00:01,060
And we’re going to lose so many amazing problem-solvers.

1266
01:00:01,100 --> 01:00:03,770
Everything you guys just said, you’re talking about different skills,

1267
01:00:03,770 --> 01:00:06,529
but you’re doing the same exact thing as you did in your tech career.

1268
01:00:06,540 --> 01:00:09,220
You’re solving problems, you’re finding

1269
01:00:09,220 --> 01:00:11,490
patterns, and you’re learning continuously.

1270
01:00:11,980 --> 01:00:15,029
You know, one thing is, when I’m doing this work, it’s amazing—and

1271
01:00:15,029 --> 01:00:17,299
Justin, you’ve probably seen this a lot—people have been doing

1272
01:00:17,299 --> 01:00:21,050
this kind of work for so long, there are so many specialized tools.

1273
01:00:21,780 --> 01:00:24,560
Like, there’s a tool to do a very specific thing that can

1274
01:00:24,560 --> 01:00:26,909
turn something that could take two hours to two minutes.

1275
01:00:27,599 --> 01:00:29,900
And I think tech is also getting to that place.

1276
01:00:30,290 --> 01:00:34,549
Some of these libraries and frameworks, like Node.js, and Docker, and

1277
01:00:35,350 --> 01:00:41,529
serverless, they have become so hyper-specialized that the number of people

1278
01:00:41,530 --> 01:00:45,310
who can do this stuff easily and cheaply—so I think I’m seeing two dynamics.

1279
01:00:45,310 --> 01:00:49,180
One is, you got to be at such an expert level that you can work on those

1280
01:00:49,180 --> 01:00:53,730
type of systems, or you can be junior, willing to work for a little—way

1281
01:00:53,730 --> 01:00:58,090
less than what the average was before, and just use those tools instead.

1282
01:00:58,640 --> 01:01:00,960
And I think what we’re going to be missing is that middle of

1283
01:01:01,170 --> 01:01:06,660
people who are curious, they’ll build it themselves, but a lot

1284
01:01:06,660 --> 01:01:08,850
of people are like, no, no, there’s too many tools that are

1285
01:01:08,850 --> 01:01:12,189
mature for you to be coming in and building anything yourself.

1286
01:01:12,230 --> 01:01:14,580
I don’t know how this is going to play out, but I would

1287
01:01:14,580 --> 01:01:17,759
imagine as our industry gets way more mature, it’s going

1288
01:01:17,760 --> 01:01:20,669
to be a hard time for people that are tool builders.

1289
01:01:21,010 --> 01:01:24,140
I think there’s going to be a lot more people optimizing for people who

1290
01:01:24,140 --> 01:01:27,889
can just use the tools, not necessarily build them from the ground up.

1291
01:01:28,139 --> 01:01:31,279
Do you think that’s what AI also starts to contribute to?

1292
01:01:31,660 --> 01:01:35,150
Actually, I think AI is a distraction for this in many ways

1293
01:01:35,170 --> 01:01:38,320
because if you really are serious about what AI can do right now,

1294
01:01:38,360 --> 01:01:41,160
you wouldn’t say that kind of thing because it’s just not true.

1295
01:01:41,540 --> 01:01:42,689
Does it assist people?

1296
01:01:42,759 --> 01:01:43,329
Sure.

1297
01:01:43,830 --> 01:01:47,240
Lots of things—compilers assist developers every day, and

1298
01:01:47,240 --> 01:01:49,820
we don’t have whole conferences about compilers anymore.

1299
01:01:50,710 --> 01:01:55,680
But I do think the underlying situation is, think about private equity.

1300
01:01:55,690 --> 01:01:57,340
When a company gets bought by a private equity

1301
01:01:57,340 --> 01:02:02,380
first, like, why would VMware get bought by Broadcom?

1302
01:02:02,679 --> 01:02:05,939
Well, how much more is there to work on virtualization stacks?

1303
01:02:06,600 --> 01:02:07,930
It’s pretty mature.

1304
01:02:07,940 --> 01:02:11,240
VMware knocked virtualization out of the park, 15 years ago.

1305
01:02:11,500 --> 01:02:14,250
Where we’re at now, it’s so stable and mature, you

1306
01:02:14,620 --> 01:02:17,290
probably need to optimize for a different business model.

1307
01:02:17,500 --> 01:02:20,430
Maybe not a hundred percent innovation, but maybe

1308
01:02:20,430 --> 01:02:23,699
more like stability and keeping the lights on.

1309
01:02:23,980 --> 01:02:25,360
And so, I think that’s the transition.

1310
01:02:25,360 --> 01:02:28,860
We’re going from build something net-new to, hey, stop.

1311
01:02:29,140 --> 01:02:30,660
Use the thing that’s mature.

1312
01:02:31,010 --> 01:02:32,380
And maybe that’s the way it should go, and

1313
01:02:32,380 --> 01:02:34,190
this is the life cycle for lots of things.

1314
01:02:34,270 --> 01:02:36,819
AI, on the other hand, is not that mature.

1315
01:02:37,020 --> 01:02:40,370
I can understand why all the excitement is there because they have a lot of

1316
01:02:40,370 --> 01:02:45,335
work to do, but you’re talking, like, platform engineering [hissing sound] hooo.

1317
01:02:46,190 --> 01:02:48,090
Please Lord, let people listen to Kelsey.

1318
01:02:48,420 --> 01:02:52,370
Can we just—can we make that a sound bite, and just kind of like—can

1319
01:02:52,370 --> 01:02:54,899
they take that, your opinion, since they won’t listen to all the

1320
01:02:54,900 --> 01:02:57,640
rest of us, but because you said it, can they just listen now?

1321
01:02:57,670 --> 01:02:57,885
Because I—

1322
01:02:57,885 --> 01:03:00,930
I’m seeing it alre—I have colleagues that I would hire in a

1323
01:03:00,940 --> 01:03:04,620
minute that are having a hard time looking the job right now.

1324
01:03:05,150 --> 01:03:06,060
That’s the wild part.

1325
01:03:06,060 --> 01:03:09,960
People with, like, really important experience in infrastructure and

1326
01:03:09,960 --> 01:03:13,470
building important things that are not easily maintainable, with 20

1327
01:03:13,480 --> 01:03:16,820
years of experience, are struggling, and it just does not compute.

1328
01:03:17,119 --> 01:03:19,070
Like, it kind of goes back to what you’re saying where, like, you know, like,

1329
01:03:19,070 --> 01:03:22,070
the struggle, and sometimes when we’re struggling and kind of going through

1330
01:03:22,070 --> 01:03:25,370
adversity, it’s a good time in tech because it humbles people, and it brings,

1331
01:03:25,370 --> 01:03:29,270
like, new companies and new things, how do we earn back the trust of the

1332
01:03:29,270 --> 01:03:33,099
people that are investing all this time to build, and to be good engineers,

1333
01:03:33,099 --> 01:03:36,609
and to be good practitioners, and you’ve basically thrown them all out, and

1334
01:03:36,610 --> 01:03:39,500
said, “We don’t care about your 20 years of experience.” You know what I mean?

1335
01:03:39,500 --> 01:03:41,089
Like, it’s wild.

1336
01:03:41,130 --> 01:03:42,420
Two days ago, I got stuck.

1337
01:03:42,420 --> 01:03:43,330
It was all my fault.

1338
01:03:43,620 --> 01:03:46,719
I had this design for how I wanted to redo my network.

1339
01:03:47,179 --> 01:03:50,370
And I bought this, you know, 12-port patch panel, the kind you

1340
01:03:50,390 --> 01:03:54,650
mount horizontally, and I made my whole design revolve around that.

1341
01:03:54,950 --> 01:03:59,040
I’m removing extra drywall, I’m doing so much work just

1342
01:03:59,040 --> 01:04:01,819
for this item to be the centerpiece of the whole thing.

1343
01:04:02,200 --> 01:04:03,290
And then I thought about it.

1344
01:04:03,510 --> 01:04:04,730
I only have six things.

1345
01:04:04,730 --> 01:04:08,470
And I came up with a much simpler design that didn’t require

1346
01:04:08,470 --> 01:04:10,739
the three weeks that I wasted trying to make this work.

1347
01:04:10,740 --> 01:04:13,440
I even bought a 3D printer trying to print stuff, too.

1348
01:04:14,320 --> 01:04:14,350
[laugh]

1349
01:04:14,350 --> 01:04:16,223
.
Like, seriously, it got—I’ll save—

1350
01:04:16,223 --> 01:04:16,426
I love this story so much.

1351
01:04:16,460 --> 01:04:17,480
—the story for another time.

1352
01:04:18,310 --> 01:04:21,299
I went down the rabbit hole so deep, and I stopped myself and said,

1353
01:04:21,400 --> 01:04:26,449
“Why… are you doing this?” And I said, “What if I didn’t use this?” I

1354
01:04:26,450 --> 01:04:30,089
just asked that one question: “What if I didn’t use this specifically?

1355
01:04:30,330 --> 01:04:36,940
What would I do instead?” And I landed on this much simpler, cleaner design.

1356
01:04:36,940 --> 01:04:40,930
I’m sitting here, like, I actually got my daughter and said, let me show you

1357
01:04:41,509 --> 01:04:46,190
how your dad wasted a bunch of time—because she’s in school for informatics

1358
01:04:46,190 --> 01:04:49,390
slash computer science—I was like, here’s what happens when the engineer

1359
01:04:49,410 --> 01:04:53,710
gets fixated on something being the solution and working towards it.

1360
01:04:53,710 --> 01:04:55,990
Like, a lot of people say, “Hey, we have a project where

1361
01:04:55,990 --> 01:04:59,169
we’re going to use Kubernetes.” It’s the same mistake.

1362
01:04:59,480 --> 01:05:03,499
They do way too much just to start using Kubernetes, versus saying,

1363
01:05:03,839 --> 01:05:06,169
“What are we actually trying to do?” I know it’s cliche where we say

1364
01:05:06,170 --> 01:05:09,750
you should understand the problem first, but believe me, I am guilty

1365
01:05:09,790 --> 01:05:12,720
of it to this day, of saying, “I don’t care what the problem is.

1366
01:05:13,030 --> 01:05:15,909
I got this solution in my hand and I am

1367
01:05:15,910 --> 01:05:18,490
going to use it, come hell or high water.”

1368
01:05:18,610 --> 01:05:21,229
When I look back, I think a lot of people are doing that.

1369
01:05:21,230 --> 01:05:23,959
So, I think on one part of that question is, engineers

1370
01:05:23,959 --> 01:05:25,650
are going to have to be a little more responsible.

1371
01:05:25,920 --> 01:05:28,170
This stuff where we start walking around, like, “Oh, we’re

1372
01:05:28,170 --> 01:05:31,830
going to use service mesh because I saw it at the keynote

1373
01:05:32,110 --> 01:05:35,710
at a conference I went to,” that’s highly irresponsible.

1374
01:05:35,910 --> 01:05:38,210
And if I did that to you, let me apologize

1375
01:05:38,210 --> 01:05:41,749
[laugh] for pushing you in the wrong direction.

1376
01:05:41,779 --> 01:05:42,980
I promise to make it up.

1377
01:05:43,160 --> 01:05:46,700
It’s funny because I think it’s like, how many times have you automated

1378
01:05:46,710 --> 01:05:51,560
something or used this cool new library and it took double the time, double

1379
01:05:51,560 --> 01:05:54,469
the effort, and it would have been so much better to do it the simple way.

1380
01:05:54,469 --> 01:05:56,289
And like that happens so often.

1381
01:05:56,290 --> 01:05:59,730
Like, working for managed databases, you’re like, “Bro, you don’t need all this.

1382
01:05:59,730 --> 01:06:01,430
Go back to, like, SQL.

1383
01:06:01,840 --> 01:06:02,920
Calm down.” [laugh] . Like,

1384
01:06:05,110 --> 01:06:08,250
and people would get mad, and I’d be like, but you don’t need a NoSQL database.

1385
01:06:08,250 --> 01:06:10,250
Yes, that’s my job, but like, this is a mess.

1386
01:06:10,260 --> 01:06:11,080
Stop it [laugh]

1387
01:06:11,830 --> 01:06:15,209
.
I love reading white papers about technologies, how they started because

1388
01:06:15,210 --> 01:06:18,580
I love seeing what they were intended for, and then going through,

1389
01:06:18,580 --> 01:06:21,030
and saying, like, oh, the original designers were trying to solve a

1390
01:06:21,030 --> 01:06:24,040
completely different problem than what you’re looking at right now.

1391
01:06:24,040 --> 01:06:27,150
I know the tools look the same when I’m squinting from a distance.

1392
01:06:27,150 --> 01:06:28,780
I’m like, yeah, but these look about right.

1393
01:06:29,080 --> 01:06:31,100
I’m going to use the one that has all the money

1394
01:06:31,100 --> 01:06:33,370
or hype behind it, so let’s go with that one.

1395
01:06:33,370 --> 01:06:36,379
I’m like, actually, have you read why it was built?

1396
01:06:36,400 --> 01:06:39,940
You know, if you’ve read the Hadoop paper and then figured out, like, why

1397
01:06:39,940 --> 01:06:43,600
Hadoop started, and then, like, Yahoo built it, and then Google had to build

1398
01:06:43,600 --> 01:06:47,190
a thing for, like, all of that cycle of, like, what problem were they solving?

1399
01:06:47,360 --> 01:06:49,740
And all of these companies throughout the

1400
01:06:49,740 --> 01:06:51,030
early two—like, they all went with Hortonworks.

1401
01:06:51,030 --> 01:06:53,779
It was like, this huge—like, everyone needed Hadoop for a while.

1402
01:06:53,779 --> 01:06:55,050
Like, that was the thing.

1403
01:06:55,190 --> 01:06:58,280
It was the AI of the early-2000s, right?

1404
01:06:58,420 --> 01:07:00,170
Like, everyone wanted that, right?

1405
01:07:00,170 --> 01:07:02,630
And then it’s like, actually, what problem are you solving?

1406
01:07:02,630 --> 01:07:03,789
You’re like, yeah, you know what?

1407
01:07:03,789 --> 01:07:05,914
Like, I would have been fine with GREP, and sed, and—

1408
01:07:05,914 --> 01:07:09,299
You know, one thing I hope we continue to do in our industry is—and

1409
01:07:09,299 --> 01:07:12,020
I know a lot of people don’t get access to it—just continue to

1410
01:07:12,020 --> 01:07:14,520
talk to each other, especially outside of your own four walls.

1411
01:07:14,930 --> 01:07:16,860
A lot of engineers don’t understand why people

1412
01:07:16,860 --> 01:07:18,500
spend a lot of time at tech conferences.

1413
01:07:18,550 --> 01:07:21,639
It’s not literally to sit there and watch people give talks all day.

1414
01:07:21,670 --> 01:07:23,629
A lot of people don’t really even do that.

1415
01:07:24,290 --> 01:07:27,150
It’s literally, if you’re willing to be transparent and say, “Hey, here’s what

1416
01:07:27,150 --> 01:07:31,390
I’m working on,” and getting real time feedback about an approach you’re taking.

1417
01:07:31,620 --> 01:07:35,480
I have seen nothing level up my career faster than that level of

1418
01:07:35,480 --> 01:07:40,120
transparency and that feedback loop you get from people that don’t

1419
01:07:40,120 --> 01:07:43,310
really have much bias towards your solution other than trying

1420
01:07:43,310 --> 01:07:45,519
to get you set up in the right direction with their experience.

1421
01:07:46,250 --> 01:07:48,810
It’s like going to summer camp with a bunch of nerds to talk

1422
01:07:48,820 --> 01:07:51,870
about, like, your favorite things, and just, it’s my favorite.

1423
01:07:51,870 --> 01:07:53,610
Like, it’s the community and the people.

1424
01:07:54,350 --> 01:07:57,120
One of my favorite books is Where Good Ideas Come From, and

1425
01:07:57,120 --> 01:08:00,690
it’s all about, like, ideas come from the edges of things.

1426
01:08:00,870 --> 01:08:03,960
It’s not because you’re so deep in the thing that you understand

1427
01:08:03,960 --> 01:08:06,069
exactly what the problem is and exactly what you’re going to do.

1428
01:08:06,069 --> 01:08:08,609
It’s like, no, I switched fields.

1429
01:08:08,730 --> 01:08:12,210
I started looking at a completely new thing, and then I was like, “Oh, I

1430
01:08:12,210 --> 01:08:16,720
could apply what I learned over here to that new thing in a different way

1431
01:08:16,720 --> 01:08:19,870
that someone never even thought of.” Like, how do these things merge together?

1432
01:08:19,880 --> 01:08:23,220
And it’s just fascinating to see how that has happened over and

1433
01:08:23,220 --> 01:08:26,350
over again in our industry, but just in other industries, too.

1434
01:08:26,350 --> 01:08:29,300
Like, innovations and batteries and all these, like, new technologies that

1435
01:08:29,300 --> 01:08:33,490
we see aren’t because necessarily someone did, like, ten years of research;

1436
01:08:33,510 --> 01:08:37,399
it’s because there was a new person in the field that came from biology or

1437
01:08:37,399 --> 01:08:41,269
something else, that they’re like, “Oh, I don’t have the typical background

1438
01:08:41,529 --> 01:08:45,439
you want me to have in this field, but I understand what problems you’re trying

1439
01:08:45,439 --> 01:08:49,060
to solve, and we can apply new technologies or new information in this field.”

1440
01:08:49,819 --> 01:08:50,529
Let’s cover Bluesky.

1441
01:08:51,090 --> 01:08:52,150
You’re the migration.

1442
01:08:52,150 --> 01:08:53,929
You should—we should—what do you want to talk about, Bluesky?

1443
01:08:54,130 --> 01:08:54,889
You this is you.

1444
01:08:55,120 --> 01:08:57,919
Like, I mean, we were there, and nobody came because

1445
01:08:57,929 --> 01:09:02,489
we were cool [laugh] . Everybody came because of you.

1446
01:09:02,489 --> 01:09:04,650
[laugh] . I moved off of Bluesky the day—I

1447
01:09:04,650 --> 01:09:07,269
remember the day Elon walked in with his sink.

1448
01:09:07,760 --> 01:09:09,630
I’m deleted all my tweets.

1449
01:09:09,630 --> 01:09:12,510
Anything from here, I’m going to—like, if I’m investing here,

1450
01:09:12,510 --> 01:09:15,370
this is, like, a very specific reason that I’m on this thing.

1451
01:09:15,370 --> 01:09:16,769
I did not delete my account, yet.

1452
01:09:17,119 --> 01:09:18,060
I think it’s timeline—

1453
01:09:18,060 --> 01:09:19,380
No, I kept mine so they can’t take my username.

1454
01:09:19,380 --> 01:09:20,930
I think it’s time I can delete it now.

1455
01:09:20,939 --> 01:09:23,950
Like, I don’t have any interest in going back.

1456
01:09:24,020 --> 01:09:25,950
But I tried Mastodon.

1457
01:09:25,950 --> 01:09:27,920
I invested a bunch of time in Mastodon.

1458
01:09:27,920 --> 01:09:29,790
I was—I had to understand it.

1459
01:09:29,880 --> 01:09:31,219
I feel like Kelsey, in a lot of ways.

1460
01:09:31,219 --> 01:09:33,109
I was trying to embody you in some ways, where I was like,

1461
01:09:33,130 --> 01:09:36,169
what’s the simplest version of Mastodon that I could build?

1462
01:09:36,169 --> 01:09:39,220
And so, I re-implemented Mastodon in static files.

1463
01:09:39,399 --> 01:09:43,259
I’m like, could I build this with a lambda function and an S3 bucket?

1464
01:09:43,529 --> 01:09:47,200
And that was my goal of, how do I understand the protocol at that level?

1465
01:09:47,219 --> 01:09:48,640
And I got there, mostly.

1466
01:09:48,700 --> 01:09:50,350
I was like, oh, I can read stuff out of here.

1467
01:09:50,439 --> 01:09:53,389
I could put some JSON in a bucket, and I

1468
01:09:53,389 --> 01:09:55,410
was fine for people to read the content.

1469
01:09:55,410 --> 01:09:58,639
But I’m like, this isn’t the ownership that I want, and all of these

1470
01:09:58,640 --> 01:10:03,280
little pockets felt too disjointed for me to really understand.

1471
01:10:03,280 --> 01:10:06,859
And then I really talked to people at, like, Hachyderm and other places

1472
01:10:06,860 --> 01:10:10,110
that, like, this is way too expensive, and the biggest problem is the

1473
01:10:10,110 --> 01:10:14,940
legal responsibility of the architecture of Macedon required us to set up

1474
01:10:14,950 --> 01:10:20,380
legal entities to protect the admins because of all of the other network,

1475
01:10:20,389 --> 01:10:23,460
all of the other things that just that architecture of your caching

1476
01:10:23,460 --> 01:10:27,420
information on your server; now you are responsible, and that is a huge risk.

1477
01:10:27,420 --> 01:10:28,360
And I was like, okay, I’m out.

1478
01:10:28,400 --> 01:10:29,559
I’m not doing this anymore.

1479
01:10:29,949 --> 01:10:30,950
Let’s see the model Bluesky.

1480
01:10:30,950 --> 01:10:32,140
And then I just started from there.

1481
01:10:32,190 --> 01:10:35,920
Like, okay, how would I, as simply as possible, re-implement some of the stuff?

1482
01:10:35,920 --> 01:10:37,480
And I haven’t re-implemented [unintelligible] , but I’ve

1483
01:10:37,480 --> 01:10:39,880
been running it, and I’ve been understanding pieces of that.

1484
01:10:40,170 --> 01:10:41,850
You were on Bluesky for a minute, and then you kind

1485
01:10:41,850 --> 01:10:43,379
of left you back to Twitter for a little while.

1486
01:10:43,429 --> 01:10:43,963
And then you came back.

1487
01:10:43,963 --> 01:10:45,849
But before we move on, can we just talk about how

1488
01:10:45,849 --> 01:10:48,750
the last couple of years have been so ridiculous?

1489
01:10:48,750 --> 01:10:51,580
Like, how does The Onion still write, like, articles?

1490
01:10:51,580 --> 01:10:54,363
Like, you just said when Elon walked out with a sink,

1491
01:10:54,480 --> 01:10:56,480
like, that’s the world we live in right now [laugh]

1492
01:10:56,480 --> 01:10:57,695
.
[laugh]

1493
01:10:58,910 --> 01:11:01,130
.
How are we going to explain this in history books?

1494
01:11:01,130 --> 01:11:03,269
Like, this one time when this very orange

1495
01:11:03,270 --> 01:11:06,769
man took over the world—like, it’s wild.

1496
01:11:07,510 --> 01:11:10,259
It feels like this is the prequel to Idiocracy, the movie.

1497
01:11:10,810 --> 01:11:11,000
Like—

1498
01:11:11,000 --> 01:11:11,620
I—right?

1499
01:11:11,780 --> 01:11:13,980
You asked yourself, how do you even get to that point?

1500
01:11:14,010 --> 01:11:16,469
Maybe… the way we are living, this is how?

1501
01:11:17,030 --> 01:11:18,699
And everybody just acts like as normal.

1502
01:11:18,700 --> 01:11:20,419
And I’m like, “Do y’all see this?” [laugh]

1503
01:11:20,419 --> 01:11:20,449
.
Look,

1504
01:11:22,590 --> 01:11:24,210
one thing that I do is go outside.

1505
01:11:24,270 --> 01:11:24,730
Seriously.

1506
01:11:24,730 --> 01:11:27,410
Like when I go outside, it reminds me that

1507
01:11:27,920 --> 01:11:30,309
the internet over-indexes on foolishness.

1508
01:11:31,150 --> 01:11:35,610
It just over-in—like, when you go to a grocery store, people do normal stuff.

1509
01:11:36,599 --> 01:11:40,469
They don’t jump into your conversation, they don’t tell you why you buying

1510
01:11:40,469 --> 01:11:44,400
those apples instead of this one, like, they just kind of keep to themselves.

1511
01:11:44,400 --> 01:11:45,309
Most people are polite.

1512
01:11:45,360 --> 01:11:47,490
“Excuse me,” they’ll stand out your way.

1513
01:11:48,080 --> 01:11:50,889
That’s just, like, been my normal outside interaction.

1514
01:11:50,889 --> 01:11:55,720
So, I just try to log off a bit more, and get connected to reality.

1515
01:11:56,349 --> 01:11:59,790
And look, when Elon bought Twitter, I don’t think I liked

1516
01:11:59,790 --> 01:12:01,759
it, but remember, this is the Elon before MAGA Elon.

1517
01:12:02,960 --> 01:12:06,790
So, a lot of people were like, oh, “Tony Stark, SpaceX, Tesla

1518
01:12:06,790 --> 01:12:10,959
guy is buying Twitter.” Now, I think a lot of people on tech

1519
01:12:10,959 --> 01:12:14,349
were like, he’s over-indexing this whole get rid of everybody.

1520
01:12:14,639 --> 01:12:16,980
But if you think about it, we just had this conversation.

1521
01:12:17,379 --> 01:12:19,570
How much more do you need to improve Twitter?

1522
01:12:19,980 --> 01:12:22,380
And look, I’m going to have to give him a little credit.

1523
01:12:22,400 --> 01:12:26,240
He cut 80% of the staff, and it’s still running, years later?

1524
01:12:26,380 --> 01:12:28,679
That kind of defied all—is it best shape?

1525
01:12:28,679 --> 01:12:31,679
It can be absolutely not, but it’s still running.

1526
01:12:32,049 --> 01:12:34,108
Is that him, or is that the engineers that made it [crosstalk]

1527
01:12:34,108 --> 01:12:34,440
—
It doesn’t matter.

1528
01:12:34,440 --> 01:12:36,129
He cut 80% of the people.

1529
01:12:36,129 --> 01:12:36,204
Sure.

1530
01:12:36,279 --> 01:12:37,810
Like, he’s going to take that credit.

1531
01:12:37,810 --> 01:12:40,060
Like a lot of people said, he’s a fool for doing it.

1532
01:12:40,210 --> 01:12:43,710
He did it, and it’s still running to this day, right?

1533
01:12:43,840 --> 01:12:44,960
So, I’ll give him that.

1534
01:12:44,970 --> 01:12:48,799
But where I don’t give him credit is—or the thing that made me leave

1535
01:12:48,799 --> 01:12:52,019
the platform, it wasn’t actually all the Nazis—and I should have left

1536
01:12:52,020 --> 01:12:56,490
then—it wasn’t all the bots because they were there before he got there.

1537
01:12:56,700 --> 01:13:01,110
The thing that made me really leave is when the platform started to

1538
01:13:01,110 --> 01:13:05,950
not just over-index on entertainment, but paying people to do it.

1539
01:13:06,280 --> 01:13:10,689
Like, when he started monetizing, people started optimizing for anger.

1540
01:13:10,889 --> 01:13:12,059
And it wasn’t even just that.

1541
01:13:12,059 --> 01:13:13,190
There are trolls always.

1542
01:13:13,740 --> 01:13:15,740
There’s always people who do that for a living.

1543
01:13:15,740 --> 01:13:17,610
Like, it still blows my mind.

1544
01:13:17,620 --> 01:13:22,110
There’s some people wake up in the day, get on the internet to troll people.

1545
01:13:22,360 --> 01:13:23,509
Like, is that your life?

1546
01:13:23,509 --> 01:13:27,059
If you’re listening to this and this is your life, please explain.

1547
01:13:27,250 --> 01:13:31,040
Why does every day you feel like that’s a thing society needs you to do?

1548
01:13:31,150 --> 01:13:31,750
It’s not.

1549
01:13:32,120 --> 01:13:35,330
Okay, not to quote Taylor Swift, but like, she has a line in her song

1550
01:13:35,330 --> 01:13:38,240
that says that people would never say this stuff to her face, you know?

1551
01:13:38,240 --> 01:13:42,469
And it’s like, so real, though because, like, I love the internet, and I’ve

1552
01:13:42,469 --> 01:13:47,490
got to meet awesome people, like Justin and, like, follow you, but it is wild.

1553
01:13:47,490 --> 01:13:50,600
Like, it’s almost like human brains haven’t caught up to

1554
01:13:50,600 --> 01:13:53,200
the fact that we have both real life and the internet.

1555
01:13:53,200 --> 01:13:55,700
Because, like, the stuff people will say to you on the internet,

1556
01:13:55,700 --> 01:13:58,820
like, tech bros will come for you, and we’re like, dude, like [laugh]

1557
01:13:59,020 --> 01:14:01,659
—
And some of that to me, like, even before the internet, right?

1558
01:14:01,660 --> 01:14:02,499
Like driving, right?

1559
01:14:02,499 --> 01:14:06,990
Like, you are protected in your bubble of a car and people can’t see your face.

1560
01:14:07,000 --> 01:14:09,089
They might see your hand out the window, but

1561
01:14:09,090 --> 01:14:10,750
they don’t know who you are, necessarily.

1562
01:14:10,750 --> 01:14:13,120
And the internet has, like, changed that dynamic, right?

1563
01:14:13,120 --> 01:14:13,125
Oh…

1564
01:14:13,125 --> 01:14:16,600
Because now people are, like, taking video, and they can find who you are.

1565
01:14:16,610 --> 01:14:17,650
Like, [crosstalk] your license plate.

1566
01:14:17,650 --> 01:14:18,280
But I’ve never thought of that.

1567
01:14:18,280 --> 01:14:19,570
People—think about road rage.

1568
01:14:19,570 --> 01:14:23,549
People do some crazy stuff, and that same person, like, we all

1569
01:14:23,549 --> 01:14:25,849
know that one person that you never want to get in a car with.

1570
01:14:27,870 --> 01:14:30,349
They made a whole documentary on Netflix called Beef.

1571
01:14:30,710 --> 01:14:32,243
It starts with road rage.

1572
01:14:32,243 --> 01:14:33,620
So, it’s like, I’ve really never thought about that.

1573
01:14:33,630 --> 01:14:34,350
That’s interesting.

1574
01:14:34,350 --> 01:14:36,989
Maybe it’s just a certain level of removedness and protection?

1575
01:14:36,989 --> 01:14:40,250
At some point, it’s a weird phenomenon with people.

1576
01:14:40,250 --> 01:14:42,489
Like, tools become part of us, right?

1577
01:14:42,490 --> 01:14:43,950
Like our clothes, like, you don’t think

1578
01:14:43,960 --> 01:14:46,129
about your clothes as a tool, but they are.

1579
01:14:46,130 --> 01:14:48,240
And you don’t think about, like, when you have a hammer, or screwdriver, or

1580
01:14:48,360 --> 01:14:52,809
your keyboard, like, if you get in the zone of that, like, it’s part of you.

1581
01:14:52,990 --> 01:14:56,370
You know how to operate it so well, but then you still distance your

1582
01:14:56,370 --> 01:15:00,694
identity from that thing, that I feel like in a lot of ways, the cars, and

1583
01:15:00,800 --> 01:15:03,930
the internet, and all these things are so, like, that’s I’m a different

1584
01:15:03,930 --> 01:15:09,180
person in those situations, that I can be more angry, or I have more of a

1585
01:15:09,180 --> 01:15:12,780
priority for—more selfishness, for my—like, I need to get somewhere, or this

1586
01:15:12,780 --> 01:15:16,179
is my lane, or all of a sudden, I’m privileged on, like, who’s around me.

1587
01:15:16,180 --> 01:15:18,730
Like, all that stuff just gets so bizarre, and people

1588
01:15:18,730 --> 01:15:20,910
do the same thing on social media and the internet.

1589
01:15:20,910 --> 01:15:22,820
And they’re just like, “Oh, you’re tailgating me.

1590
01:15:22,950 --> 01:15:24,740
I’m going to slow down to five miles an hour

1591
01:15:25,060 --> 01:15:26,426
to get you somewhere else.” Or something.

1592
01:15:26,426 --> 01:15:28,550
Like, this behavior is not the same thing

1593
01:15:28,550 --> 01:15:31,050
as if we’re having a conversation in person.

1594
01:15:31,690 --> 01:15:34,500
Is this a manifestation of humans because humans are

1595
01:15:34,500 --> 01:15:37,036
just always see negativity more or like, what’s going on.

1596
01:15:37,036 --> 01:15:40,740
No, you’re a human and you behave this way in real life, you

1597
01:15:40,740 --> 01:15:42,806
can get a fist to the face, and change your whole perspective.

1598
01:15:42,806 --> 01:15:45,920
You’re not wrong because I think that so often.

1599
01:15:45,920 --> 01:15:49,049
Like, you know what—like, I just—like, just the stuff

1600
01:15:49,049 --> 01:15:51,149
that people say, nobody would say that in real life.

1601
01:15:51,150 --> 01:15:52,389
Like, you can’t just—

1602
01:15:52,549 --> 01:15:53,530
It’s just consequences.

1603
01:15:53,949 --> 01:15:57,170
People know there’s limits to the game, but when you’re online,

1604
01:15:57,770 --> 01:16:01,630
I think people, like—for example, towards my last couple days on

1605
01:16:01,660 --> 01:16:06,120
Twitter, before the election, there were good people behaving badly.

1606
01:16:06,380 --> 01:16:09,660
And I remember [unintelligible] somebody’s, like, why are you talking like this?

1607
01:16:10,359 --> 01:16:11,839
You can disagree with me all day.

1608
01:16:11,840 --> 01:16:13,080
You know I’m going to go back and forth.

1609
01:16:13,440 --> 01:16:15,330
Then why you talking like this?

1610
01:16:15,370 --> 01:16:16,550
This sounds crazy.

1611
01:16:17,070 --> 01:16:20,110
Like, literally, do you have to sound—I’m not tone policing.

1612
01:16:20,349 --> 01:16:22,680
I’m just saying this is unnecessary.

1613
01:16:22,990 --> 01:16:23,990
And I said, you know what?

1614
01:16:24,210 --> 01:16:25,880
Why am I on this platform?

1615
01:16:26,420 --> 01:16:30,540
And I remember tweeting, “This is my last tweet.” And I logged off.

1616
01:16:30,990 --> 01:16:32,530
And I remember waking up the next day.

1617
01:16:32,530 --> 01:16:33,360
I was like, what should I do?

1618
01:16:33,360 --> 01:16:34,410
Should I just delete my account?

1619
01:16:34,600 --> 01:16:35,460
Do I delete all my tweets?

1620
01:16:35,460 --> 01:16:39,870
And I remember reading a reply that says, “You ain’t going nowhere.

1621
01:16:40,760 --> 01:16:42,069
You are stuck here.

1622
01:16:43,370 --> 01:16:44,439
We own you.

1623
01:16:44,520 --> 01:16:47,409
We are your identity.” That’s the way that they were thinking.

1624
01:16:47,549 --> 01:16:50,260
Think about it, they’re like, you can’t leave here, right?

1625
01:16:50,260 --> 01:16:52,280
We own you, in their mind.

1626
01:16:52,570 --> 01:16:53,780
And I was like, you know what?

1627
01:16:53,940 --> 01:16:54,790
Delete.

1628
01:16:55,030 --> 01:16:56,730
I went to Bluesky and I said, you’re right.

1629
01:16:57,410 --> 01:16:59,370
I don’t need this place.

1630
01:16:59,740 --> 01:17:01,509
I signed up for Twitter, not X.

1631
01:17:01,910 --> 01:17:03,880
Did you feel better, like, afterwards?

1632
01:17:03,880 --> 01:17:05,549
Like, did it feel like a weight, since you weren’t

1633
01:17:05,549 --> 01:17:08,469
constantly—because I felt better after deleting Twitter.

1634
01:17:08,480 --> 01:17:09,026
Like, I felt like—

1635
01:17:09,026 --> 01:17:11,640
I didn’t feel better immediately because I still have this unhealthy

1636
01:17:11,640 --> 01:17:15,470
connection to, like—my career benefit is so much from this community.

1637
01:17:15,679 --> 01:17:16,160
Mine too.

1638
01:17:16,160 --> 01:17:17,980
And I met some of my best friends, like,

1639
01:17:17,980 --> 01:17:20,280
some of the people that impacted my career.

1640
01:17:20,280 --> 01:17:22,939
But it got to the point where it was almost giving me,

1641
01:17:22,940 --> 01:17:25,540
like, you know, the anxiety you get when you watch the news?

1642
01:17:25,710 --> 01:17:26,890
It was giving me that.

1643
01:17:27,000 --> 01:17:30,020
I felt like it made me, like, feel more anxious because it was

1644
01:17:30,080 --> 01:17:32,227
just, like, constant bombardments of, like, scary [crosstalk]

1645
01:17:32,270 --> 01:17:34,719
.
Yeah, it probably contributed a little bit to that.

1646
01:17:34,719 --> 01:17:38,639
But honestly, when I left, it was more like, I had a pretty good size following.

1647
01:17:38,809 --> 01:17:40,470
That’s the only social media platform I use.

1648
01:17:40,470 --> 01:17:42,790
I don’t have Instagram or TikTok or Facebook.

1649
01:17:42,790 --> 01:17:46,610
I have nothing else, and so leaving that was like, I got to go start over.

1650
01:17:47,100 --> 01:17:48,910
And I thought about it, it was like, so what?

1651
01:17:48,910 --> 01:17:50,639
And it was an ego check.

1652
01:17:50,730 --> 01:17:54,810
It was really more about checking my ego because everyone, no, I got ego.

1653
01:17:55,230 --> 01:17:57,219
And when you see a large following, and all these

1654
01:17:57,219 --> 01:18:00,049
people recognize you, there’s an ego that develops.

1655
01:18:00,580 --> 01:18:02,700
And so, it was less about just leaving Twitter;

1656
01:18:02,820 --> 01:18:04,990
it’s like you got to go and let the ego part go.

1657
01:18:05,220 --> 01:18:06,000
Start over.

1658
01:18:06,470 --> 01:18:10,040
And so, going to Bluesky, I remember saying, “I’m done.” And I

1659
01:18:10,040 --> 01:18:13,800
actually had to contemplate the role social media plays in my life.

1660
01:18:14,090 --> 01:18:17,590
It’s not just about going from Twitter to Bluesky; it’s about the role it plays.

1661
01:18:18,080 --> 01:18:20,350
And I got an interview from a reporter not too

1662
01:18:20,350 --> 01:18:22,344
long ago, and I told him, it’s like, you know what?

1663
01:18:22,380 --> 01:18:25,930
I’m all about free speech, but I’m not looking to go to a Klan rally.

1664
01:18:26,220 --> 01:18:28,360
And that’s what it felt like being stuck there is like.

1665
01:18:28,360 --> 01:18:31,610
You’re going to be subjected to a bunch of things that are just ridiculous.

1666
01:18:31,900 --> 01:18:35,450
In the name of free speech, it didn’t make sense to me, so I moved on.

1667
01:18:35,450 --> 01:18:39,059
But the thing that made it attractive was the whole AT protocol.

1668
01:18:39,060 --> 01:18:41,920
And I know Justin does a good job explaining how the protocol

1669
01:18:41,920 --> 01:18:45,760
works, but it reminded me of, like, the analogy of what Kubernetes

1670
01:18:45,790 --> 01:18:49,870
was to the cloud, the AT protocol seems to be to social media.

1671
01:18:50,250 --> 01:18:53,420
You have this modular thing that can become

1672
01:18:53,420 --> 01:18:55,170
whatever the community wants it to become.

1673
01:18:55,330 --> 01:18:59,470
Today, it feels like a Twitter clone, but tomorrow it can be more,

1674
01:18:59,500 --> 01:19:03,380
custom feeds, you know, you got these things where you can follow people.

1675
01:19:03,420 --> 01:19:05,190
There’s so much you can do, whether it’s host

1676
01:19:05,190 --> 01:19:07,059
your own data or point your own domain at it.

1677
01:19:07,160 --> 01:19:08,940
It gave me that Kubernetes feeling again.

1678
01:19:09,259 --> 01:19:11,210
So, it was less about running away from Twitter

1679
01:19:11,590 --> 01:19:14,280
and running towards Bluesky and the AT protocol.

1680
01:19:14,280 --> 01:19:15,849
So, that’s where I am in the journey right now.

1681
01:19:16,310 --> 01:19:20,680
And then, within a couple of weeks, thousands of people, my community seems to

1682
01:19:20,690 --> 01:19:24,510
be over there again, including the companies and brands that we interacted with.

1683
01:19:25,290 --> 01:19:28,230
And I think for the first time, like, two weeks ago,

1684
01:19:28,270 --> 01:19:30,129
three weeks ago, I don’t even think about Twitter.

1685
01:19:30,129 --> 01:19:34,480
Matter of fact, I went to my settings on my Mac and blocked it as a site.

1686
01:19:34,540 --> 01:19:36,540
I can’t even go to x.com anymore.

1687
01:19:37,450 --> 01:19:37,767
I don’t want to see it.

1688
01:19:37,767 --> 01:19:38,540
I don’t want to click on the link.

1689
01:19:38,800 --> 01:19:39,940
So, that’s just where I am now.

1690
01:19:40,370 --> 01:19:44,609
Why go to another social media site when you could have a website?

1691
01:19:44,719 --> 01:19:48,460
Why put it in AT protocol like it is today, right?

1692
01:19:48,460 --> 01:19:49,880
Because it’s still a social thing.

1693
01:19:49,880 --> 01:19:53,540
This is still a micro blogging, we interact with people, we have

1694
01:19:53,540 --> 01:19:59,050
followers, we do all that stuff, versus I have a static site generator.

1695
01:19:59,080 --> 01:20:03,010
I’ve had a website in a blog for 20 years.

1696
01:20:03,020 --> 01:20:04,420
It started in 2005.

1697
01:20:04,720 --> 01:20:07,620
And it’s gone through some iterations, I’ve done some WordPress

1698
01:20:07,620 --> 01:20:09,700
and a bunch of stuff, but I’ve been consistently writing.

1699
01:20:09,710 --> 01:20:16,140
Since 2005 I’ve had one blog post—on average—one blog post a month for 20 years.

1700
01:20:16,380 --> 01:20:20,210
And I am so more proud of that than any of

1701
01:20:20,210 --> 01:20:22,150
my social media sort of engagement stuff.

1702
01:20:22,150 --> 01:20:26,049
And like that side of it, and being able to just… a lot of it garbage.

1703
01:20:26,090 --> 01:20:26,960
Like, I don’t want to look back.

1704
01:20:27,290 --> 01:20:28,940
But a lot of my early tweets were garbage too, right?

1705
01:20:29,430 --> 01:20:30,950
This isn’t a thing that, like, I’m necessarily proud of, but

1706
01:20:30,960 --> 01:20:34,240
like that consistency and being able to share in an actual

1707
01:20:34,250 --> 01:20:37,209
more open—like, the internet is the most open platform we have.

1708
01:20:37,570 --> 01:20:39,790
I’m not just trying to share content is the thing.

1709
01:20:40,000 --> 01:20:41,579
I’m going to tell you, like, it was probably about eight

1710
01:20:41,580 --> 01:20:45,210
years ago… I mean, even more recent examples, I’m walking

1711
01:20:45,210 --> 01:20:48,300
through San Francisco and a kid runs out of a restaurant.

1712
01:20:48,300 --> 01:20:49,470
I was like, “Hey, don’t rob me.

1713
01:20:49,470 --> 01:20:52,680
I got nothing.” He’s like, “I’m not trying to rob you, Mr.

1714
01:20:52,680 --> 01:20:53,179
Hightower.

1715
01:20:53,679 --> 01:20:57,335
You don’t remember me, but I pinged you on Twitter, and we jumped on the

1716
01:20:57,360 --> 01:21:00,320
Google Meet, and you gave me some career advice on how to break into tech.

1717
01:21:00,820 --> 01:21:02,080
I’m in tech now.

1718
01:21:02,210 --> 01:21:03,490
I live in the Bay Area.

1719
01:21:03,570 --> 01:21:07,190
I’m making good money, and when I saw you walk by, I just

1720
01:21:07,190 --> 01:21:11,019
wanted to run out and tell you the impact you made on my life.

1721
01:21:11,349 --> 01:21:13,489
Not some cool blog post you put together.

1722
01:21:13,790 --> 01:21:16,860
My life is different, and you helped.”

1723
01:21:17,799 --> 01:21:20,400
And I have numbers of stories of this connection.

1724
01:21:20,580 --> 01:21:25,140
And I’m telling you, when you meet people and they tear up because you changed

1725
01:21:25,140 --> 01:21:28,580
their life in some way, it reminds me when I first started to get into tech.

1726
01:21:28,599 --> 01:21:31,850
I was like, man, if I could just get a job that’s not fast food.

1727
01:21:31,850 --> 01:21:33,339
Ain’t nothing wrong with fast food.

1728
01:21:34,010 --> 01:21:37,640
I’ll never look down on anyone doing that, but it’s okay to look up, too.

1729
01:21:37,840 --> 01:21:39,889
Yeah, and so when I got into tech, I was just like,

1730
01:21:39,890 --> 01:21:42,310
man, I remember going to Barnes & Noble and spending $35

1731
01:21:43,020 --> 01:21:45,459
on probably the same A+ certification book you bought.

1732
01:21:45,459 --> 01:21:45,684
[laugh]

1733
01:21:45,910 --> 01:21:48,290
.
The red one with the gold cover, right?

1734
01:21:48,290 --> 01:21:48,780
That one.

1735
01:21:48,780 --> 01:21:48,916
Yep.

1736
01:21:48,916 --> 01:21:50,014
So, I bought that book and I—

1737
01:21:50,014 --> 01:21:51,290
I didn’t buy—we had a shared one.

1738
01:21:51,309 --> 01:21:51,749
We had one—

1739
01:21:51,819 --> 01:21:51,939
Yeah.

1740
01:21:51,939 --> 01:21:52,670
There you go.

1741
01:21:52,670 --> 01:21:53,480
I couldn’t pay for it.

1742
01:21:53,480 --> 01:21:54,140
I borrowed it.

1743
01:21:54,140 --> 01:21:54,415
Yeah.

1744
01:21:54,690 --> 01:21:56,130
And so, I’m flipping through that book.

1745
01:21:56,140 --> 01:21:58,600
I was like, I can’t believe this person is giving

1746
01:21:58,600 --> 01:22:02,420
me all of this knowledge to break into this field.

1747
01:22:02,740 --> 01:22:03,874
I just couldn’t believe it.

1748
01:22:03,889 --> 01:22:06,179
I read that book probably 12 times, and there’s a

1749
01:22:06,179 --> 01:22:08,559
little CD in the back so you can take a practice exam.

1750
01:22:09,290 --> 01:22:13,430
And I felt like this dude was my professor, my mentor, and I never met them.

1751
01:22:13,840 --> 01:22:18,260
And so, the idea that I could do something similar at scale—and when I

1752
01:22:18,260 --> 01:22:21,280
say scale, one person at a time is the only thing that matters to me.

1753
01:22:21,469 --> 01:22:22,968
This whole, oh, we got to reach a million.

1754
01:22:23,090 --> 01:22:24,240
I can’t reach a million people.

1755
01:22:24,240 --> 01:22:24,809
I don’t need to.

1756
01:22:25,580 --> 01:22:28,200
But this idea where I can just make myself available, people

1757
01:22:28,200 --> 01:22:31,420
hit me in the DM, “Hey, I’m running to a career issue.”

1758
01:22:31,450 --> 01:22:34,240
And the thing is, when you’re really, really patient with someone, and

1759
01:22:34,240 --> 01:22:36,940
what I learned from mentoring—first, I thought mentoring was about telling

1760
01:22:36,940 --> 01:22:40,600
everything you know, and giving people clues on what they can use from that.

1761
01:22:40,870 --> 01:22:45,209
Nah, mentoring became a hold up the mirror and try

1762
01:22:45,210 --> 01:22:47,130
to convince the other person to like what they see.

1763
01:22:47,420 --> 01:22:50,580
And so, what social media gave me an opportunity to do is that, all the time.

1764
01:22:51,210 --> 01:22:54,660
And so, I’m on these calls, and you start—I just listened first.

1765
01:22:54,660 --> 01:22:56,240
And I remember there’s one guy I was just

1766
01:22:56,240 --> 01:22:58,090
listening to, he just needed to vent a little bit.

1767
01:22:58,270 --> 01:23:00,059
There’s only so many characters, and you can’t do

1768
01:23:00,059 --> 01:23:01,420
it all on there, so I’ll just say, here’s a link.

1769
01:23:01,580 --> 01:23:02,440
Let’s jump on the meet.

1770
01:23:02,809 --> 01:23:03,550
He’s just venting.

1771
01:23:03,830 --> 01:23:04,789
And I said, “Dude, I get it.

1772
01:23:04,789 --> 01:23:05,869
I think I understand.

1773
01:23:06,400 --> 01:23:09,370
If I were you, I would probably do things in this

1774
01:23:09,390 --> 01:23:12,870
order and this pace, but just realize you are enough.

1775
01:23:13,030 --> 01:23:14,469
Don’t compare yourself to me.

1776
01:23:14,469 --> 01:23:16,480
You ain’t got to compare yourself to nobody else.

1777
01:23:16,920 --> 01:23:18,099
Here’s what’s unique about you.

1778
01:23:18,099 --> 01:23:19,840
And I started explaining their uniqueness.”

1779
01:23:20,330 --> 01:23:21,950
This person was like a soccer coach.

1780
01:23:22,139 --> 01:23:24,489
I said, what do you like about coaching soccer?

1781
01:23:24,780 --> 01:23:26,370
“Oh, player development, all these things.”

1782
01:23:26,370 --> 01:23:28,140
I was like, “And you’re the team lead.

1783
01:23:28,220 --> 01:23:31,140
Why don’t you take that same coach characteristic to the job?

1784
01:23:31,750 --> 01:23:35,260
Train the newcomers, write the docs, watch how people play, make them

1785
01:23:35,270 --> 01:23:38,820
better.” And he just thought about it for a moment, and his eyes just lit up.

1786
01:23:38,980 --> 01:23:43,230
And I did something similar with another person, and we’re on a follow up call,

1787
01:23:43,250 --> 01:23:47,540
and his wife jumped in and said, “Hey, whatever you told him, I want to say

1788
01:23:47,560 --> 01:23:51,899
thank you.” Because the demeanor of a person can then impact the whole family.

1789
01:23:52,020 --> 01:23:55,879
You know how that is, where your kids feel it, your spouse feel it.

1790
01:23:56,639 --> 01:23:59,379
So, when I’m doing that social media work, that’s what that means to me.

1791
01:23:59,400 --> 01:24:02,320
I don’t care if it’s only ten people that I touch between now

1792
01:24:02,320 --> 01:24:05,530
and the end of time, those ten go on to do something magnificent.

1793
01:24:05,530 --> 01:24:08,430
So, I’m a big believer in the power of community.

1794
01:24:08,820 --> 01:24:12,199
And given that most people, when I started out, they were not accessible,

1795
01:24:13,070 --> 01:24:17,529
I read about them, I saw them on Wikipedia, but I never got to get close.

1796
01:24:18,150 --> 01:24:22,860
So, now that people see me somewhat in that regard, and I get to be close.

1797
01:24:23,150 --> 01:24:25,880
That’s what this social media thing, this is why I didn’t

1798
01:24:25,880 --> 01:24:29,170
walk away from it because I don’t want to miss the opportunity

1799
01:24:29,170 --> 01:24:32,460
to just make that little tweak in society, if I can do that.

1800
01:24:32,630 --> 01:24:33,639
That’s why I’m still there.

1801
01:24:33,990 --> 01:24:35,689
Well, and I’m sure even just through that,

1802
01:24:35,699 --> 01:24:37,830
like, you’re reaching a million people, right?

1803
01:24:37,830 --> 01:24:41,190
Like, second-order effects of the family you affect, and the other

1804
01:24:41,190 --> 01:24:44,190
person that went to another team and took some of the same mindset.

1805
01:24:44,610 --> 01:24:49,880
And not even—like, discounting all of your speaking, and

1806
01:24:49,880 --> 01:24:52,710
podcasts, and other people you’ve reached, like, not in person,

1807
01:24:52,710 --> 01:24:55,200
but, I mean, I remember all the calls we’ve had over time.

1808
01:24:55,470 --> 01:24:57,990
And the first time that, like, you were in LA—I don’t

1809
01:24:57,990 --> 01:25:00,206
remember why—you were, like, waiting for a flight to LAX.

1810
01:25:00,206 --> 01:25:01,790
I’m like, why don’t you come up to Burbank?

1811
01:25:01,810 --> 01:25:03,869
And that was, like, the magic of Twitter,

1812
01:25:03,920 --> 01:25:05,644
early days, because people were accessible.

1813
01:25:05,644 --> 01:25:07,364
And you just tweeted out, like, “I’m in LA

1814
01:25:07,509 --> 01:25:09,439
for a few hours.” I’m like, “You got a car?

1815
01:25:09,440 --> 01:25:09,970
Come up to Burbank.

1816
01:25:09,990 --> 01:25:11,779
We’ll walk around Disney.” And we did.

1817
01:25:11,779 --> 01:25:14,559
And that’s when you—I was dead set on Mezos.

1818
01:25:14,750 --> 01:25:17,290
I was like, we are doing this scheduling thing, we were HPC

1819
01:25:17,550 --> 01:25:19,549
environment, like, Mesos has the schedule and all that stuff.

1820
01:25:19,660 --> 01:25:21,599
And you told me, you’re like, “You know, Kubernetes has

1821
01:25:21,599 --> 01:25:24,170
custom schedulers, too.” I was like, no, it’s not in the docs.

1822
01:25:24,170 --> 01:25:24,545
You’re like, it’s not in the docs.

1823
01:25:24,545 --> 01:25:26,070
You’re like, “It’s not in the docs yet.

1824
01:25:26,340 --> 01:25:29,809
It’s in the API.” And that’s when I spent a couple weeks digging into the API.

1825
01:25:29,809 --> 01:25:32,830
I built a scheduler in bash, and I’m like, okay, I understand

1826
01:25:32,830 --> 01:25:35,270
the fundamentals of how this layer of it works, now.

1827
01:25:35,500 --> 01:25:36,510
How would I apply that?

1828
01:25:36,510 --> 01:25:39,040
And that was the exact same, like, mindset of just, like, you

1829
01:25:39,040 --> 01:25:42,889
showed up, we walked around for an hour, and then you had to go.

1830
01:25:42,920 --> 01:25:44,519
And it was cool because you’re just like, okay.

1831
01:25:44,589 --> 01:25:48,041
That was my introduction to, like, actually, I’m going to

1832
01:25:48,041 --> 01:25:50,560
try this Kubernetes thing in a little more seriousness.

1833
01:25:50,820 --> 01:25:53,510
See when I use social media, I’m literally treating

1834
01:25:53,510 --> 01:25:55,599
people like real people standing in front of me.

1835
01:25:56,230 --> 01:25:57,019
Seriously.

1836
01:25:57,230 --> 01:25:58,980
Like, people, like, why are you so patient

1837
01:25:58,980 --> 01:26:01,580
with people that jump into your conversations?

1838
01:26:01,620 --> 01:26:03,839
Like, because I’m treating them like they were standing in front of me.

1839
01:26:04,029 --> 01:26:05,740
A lot of times, people are giving me a better

1840
01:26:05,740 --> 01:26:07,720
way to think about things and explain myself.

1841
01:26:08,190 --> 01:26:10,740
So, I don’t know, I just really see every

1842
01:26:10,740 --> 01:26:13,780
single person [thoroughly] on social media.

1843
01:26:13,780 --> 01:26:17,739
So, I just see the platform is a little different than just social media.

1844
01:26:18,090 --> 01:26:20,639
This goes back to what you were saying earlier about not just being

1845
01:26:20,639 --> 01:26:24,400
technology, but 25 years in the making of building relationships.

1846
01:26:24,400 --> 01:26:26,360
Like, you made that full circle.

1847
01:26:26,800 --> 01:26:28,210
You when you messaged me and you said,

1848
01:26:28,210 --> 01:26:31,130
congratulations about my new job, I about died.

1849
01:26:31,140 --> 01:26:32,560
I cried, I texted Justin.

1850
01:26:32,620 --> 01:26:36,210
Like I was like, oh my God, Kelsey Hightower knows who I am.

1851
01:26:36,219 --> 01:26:39,559
Like, I—like the way that you have the ability to

1852
01:26:39,559 --> 01:26:44,309
be inspiring, but a real person is just, like, wild.

1853
01:26:44,310 --> 01:26:44,470
Like, I love—

1854
01:26:44,470 --> 01:26:44,870
You know why?

1855
01:26:44,880 --> 01:26:46,110
Because y’all inspire me.

1856
01:26:46,110 --> 01:26:47,040
Seriously, I got a daughter.

1857
01:26:47,040 --> 01:26:50,303
She’s 17, and when I see people like you out here

1858
01:26:50,380 --> 01:26:52,969
doing your thing, I know she’s going to be straight.

1859
01:26:53,300 --> 01:26:54,004
And so I get excited—

1860
01:26:54,004 --> 01:26:56,619
That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.

1861
01:26:56,619 --> 01:26:56,674
Like [laugh]

1862
01:26:56,700 --> 01:27:00,139
.
Well, the thing is, like, that’s inspiring to me, right?

1863
01:27:00,139 --> 01:27:03,040
So, when I see y’all out here, grinding, still putting in the work, building

1864
01:27:03,050 --> 01:27:08,839
y’all careers, people like you, Angie Jones, all of y’all, I see my daughter.

1865
01:27:09,309 --> 01:27:11,790
And I’m always asking what is going to be like for her out here?

1866
01:27:11,790 --> 01:27:13,044
And I just look at y’all and say, oh.

1867
01:27:13,044 --> 01:27:14,416
She going to be straight.

1868
01:27:14,416 --> 01:27:16,160
That’s literally why I don’t give up.

1869
01:27:16,160 --> 01:27:17,919
People are like, “Why are you just keep trying to be

1870
01:27:17,920 --> 01:27:19,830
an engineer and keep staying in this field, and stuff?”

1871
01:27:19,830 --> 01:27:22,620
And I’m just like because, like, representation matters.

1872
01:27:22,730 --> 01:27:26,080
At one point, like, I couldn’t find any black female engineers.

1873
01:27:26,090 --> 01:27:27,360
It was only Angie Jones.

1874
01:27:27,580 --> 01:27:31,270
She’s still the first and only black female, like, Java champion.

1875
01:27:31,420 --> 01:27:32,509
That is wild.

1876
01:27:32,759 --> 01:27:34,680
And people still try to come for her on Twitter.

1877
01:27:34,680 --> 01:27:35,230
It’s crazy.

1878
01:27:35,350 --> 01:27:37,080
She is phenomenal.

1879
01:27:37,080 --> 01:27:39,100
She is my, like, hero.

1880
01:27:39,210 --> 01:27:40,220
And it’s so sad though.

1881
01:27:40,300 --> 01:27:44,879
I think if I was looking for a statistic for a talk, and they don’t

1882
01:27:44,880 --> 01:27:47,710
even have a [unintelligible] statistic for black female engineers.

1883
01:27:47,710 --> 01:27:48,700
Like, we don’t exist.

1884
01:27:48,759 --> 01:27:50,390
Like, there is no statistic for it.

1885
01:27:50,520 --> 01:27:51,330
It’s wild.

1886
01:27:51,730 --> 01:27:55,210
This work is so important because thinking back to, like, when I

1887
01:27:55,210 --> 01:27:59,760
was a teenager—and I grew up in some rough places, but not all—but

1888
01:27:59,760 --> 01:28:02,630
there was some times where I’m walking around, and I realized looking

1889
01:28:02,630 --> 01:28:06,980
back, some people don’t think past five minutes in the future.

1890
01:28:07,299 --> 01:28:07,859
That’s it.

1891
01:28:08,290 --> 01:28:10,339
They’re going to work, and they only deal

1892
01:28:10,340 --> 01:28:12,840
with problems within a five minute time span.

1893
01:28:13,640 --> 01:28:16,260
And the crazy thing is, poverty and where you the

1894
01:28:16,260 --> 01:28:18,820
situation, it doesn’t allow you to think over that.

1895
01:28:18,820 --> 01:28:18,950
Like—

1896
01:28:18,950 --> 01:28:19,080
Exactly.

1897
01:28:19,080 --> 01:28:22,400
The way that poverty and being in a struggle changes

1898
01:28:22,400 --> 01:28:24,750
your brain, it scientifically changes your brain.

1899
01:28:24,750 --> 01:28:25,490
It’s wild.

1900
01:28:25,660 --> 01:28:26,300
A hundred percent.

1901
01:28:26,300 --> 01:28:28,909
And when we get into this work, we get to

1902
01:28:28,910 --> 01:28:31,130
see big pictures, and we connect things.

1903
01:28:31,130 --> 01:28:33,970
We turn things, we make ideas come to life.

1904
01:28:34,880 --> 01:28:37,660
There’s very few industries where you can make something that it starts in

1905
01:28:37,660 --> 01:28:41,530
someone’s mind and come to life that then millions of people can go use.

1906
01:28:41,540 --> 01:28:45,259
So, people from all walks of life deserve this opportunity.

1907
01:28:45,259 --> 01:28:48,979
So, this is why I think the tech field, our communities,

1908
01:28:49,150 --> 01:28:51,950
they have been a Godsend for my career, my life,

1909
01:28:51,950 --> 01:28:53,840
and I just hope more people get to experience it.

1910
01:28:53,840 --> 01:28:56,060
So, I’m not the Kubernetes guy.

1911
01:28:56,420 --> 01:29:01,109
I’m like this hopefully will have seen as a humanitarian that gave

1912
01:29:01,130 --> 01:29:04,479
people opportunities and allowed them to see themselves and believe in

1913
01:29:04,480 --> 01:29:08,970
themselves, and then they go on to use technology to create great things.

1914
01:29:09,330 --> 01:29:12,500
Being a single mom, and at one point, a military spouse at one point, a

1915
01:29:12,500 --> 01:29:15,490
person that was in school, going back for their second degree with babies, the

1916
01:29:15,490 --> 01:29:20,030
only accessibility I had to tech and learning was social media and Twitter.

1917
01:29:20,030 --> 01:29:21,790
And without Twitter, I’d have no career.

1918
01:29:21,900 --> 01:29:25,080
It’s amazing the kind people that were just willing to talk to me.

1919
01:29:25,290 --> 01:29:28,020
I think that’s the highest form of paying it forward.

1920
01:29:28,020 --> 01:29:30,710
Like, I’ll always have time to mentor people or to volunteer

1921
01:29:30,710 --> 01:29:33,880
because I am so grateful for what it’s done to my life.

1922
01:29:33,900 --> 01:29:37,890
The fact that a mom can be in her house, or somebody who’s disabled, or somebody

1923
01:29:37,890 --> 01:29:41,850
who is working that fast food job on their ten-minute lunch break, you can give

1924
01:29:41,850 --> 01:29:45,880
them—I’ve given people advice in their car while they’re working another job.

1925
01:29:46,010 --> 01:29:46,740
You know what I mean?

1926
01:29:47,090 --> 01:29:50,259
And it makes it where everybody is reachable, and we can help

1927
01:29:50,270 --> 01:29:53,439
other people because we’re all super blessed and lucky to be here.

1928
01:29:53,440 --> 01:29:56,319
I think that’s why I still believe that we can demand democratized

1929
01:29:56,340 --> 01:29:59,689
tech and get rid of the gatekeeping and elitism, at least for us

1930
01:29:59,690 --> 01:30:03,940
because, for one, you can Google so many free sources, and because

1931
01:30:03,940 --> 01:30:06,759
you can talk to people, and because it’s a skill that you can learn.

1932
01:30:06,920 --> 01:30:09,580
Hey, I want to end with a big shout out to the tech community.

1933
01:30:09,820 --> 01:30:12,700
So, many of y’all come up to me and tell me thank you for all the things.

1934
01:30:12,910 --> 01:30:14,110
I just want to return the favor.

1935
01:30:14,110 --> 01:30:18,290
Like, in general, the tech community has been extremely welcoming,

1936
01:30:18,670 --> 01:30:22,610
and patient, and consistent, and so I just want to end with a

1937
01:30:22,730 --> 01:30:25,630
big thank you to everybody in the tech community, no matter if

1938
01:30:25,630 --> 01:30:27,990
you’re just starting out or you’ve been here for a long time.

1939
01:30:28,740 --> 01:30:29,120
Thank you.

1940
01:30:29,580 --> 01:30:32,490
Well, and thank you, Kelsey, for coming on the very first episode.

1941
01:30:32,700 --> 01:30:35,750
Where should people find you if they want to reach out and connect with you?

1942
01:30:35,959 --> 01:30:36,344
Bluesky at kelseyhightower.com.

1943
01:30:36,344 --> 01:30:36,489
So, I’m

1944
01:30:39,820 --> 01:30:39,901
on Bluesky.

1945
01:30:39,901 --> 01:30:41,270
And if you DM me, there’s a chance I will respond.

1946
01:30:41,770 --> 01:30:43,990
That is so cool that you actually respond to people.

1947
01:30:43,990 --> 01:30:45,849
Thank you so much for coming and just—

1948
01:30:45,849 --> 01:30:46,089
Awesome.

1949
01:30:46,330 --> 01:30:50,730
—being amazing and community-driven because I think that’s so important.

1950
01:30:51,780 --> 01:30:52,120
Awesome.

1951
01:31:07,360 --> 01:31:10,370
Thank you for listening to this episode of Fork Around and Find Out.

1952
01:31:10,670 --> 01:31:12,809
If you like this show, please consider sharing it with

1953
01:31:12,810 --> 01:31:15,990
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1954
01:31:16,100 --> 01:31:18,190
However we get the word out about this show

1955
01:31:18,410 --> 01:31:20,629
helps it to become sustainable for the long-term.

1956
01:31:20,900 --> 01:31:27,160
If you want to sponsor this show, please go to fafo.fm/sponsor, and reach out

1957
01:31:27,160 --> 01:31:30,389
to us there about what you’re interested in sponsoring, and how we can help.

1958
01:31:31,620 --> 01:31:34,780
We hope your systems stay available and your pagers stay quiet.

1959
01:31:35,320 --> 01:31:36,510
We’ll see you again next time.