The Mechanic: Interview with a Site Reliability Engineer and SDET

what's going on everybody uh i have the honor and pleasure of welcoming uh brian to uh an interview slash chat uh i've known brian for i don't know how many years but i often tell the story of our uh when you first interviewed me and we just like started talking about hashicorp stuff uh it was like 20 am i want to say 15 to early 2016. and uh we're both just obsessed with happy stuff and uh that's it like you know the relationship grew from there we worked together he hired me incidentally and um and uh we've done all kinds of fun things together i consider and i'll say this at the very beginning just to put more pressure on you to just perform here uh i consider someone who's been a mentor to me you know while we were working together at several different jobs and uh just between two um in addition to just being a friend so uh yeah thanks for doing this thank you for being a friend dave can we do we pat each other on the shoulder now or is that well i was making a friend's call back but but yeah again did leslie teach you nothing i don't know anything about pop culture american pop culture why are you doing this to me on my own [Laughter] this interview is over um yeah anyway yeah do you want to just like kind of tell a little bit about you know how you got into tech and kind of like what what your jam has kind of been from a super high level we'll dive in to more specifics yeah sure um so i guess i kind of got into tech um a long long time ago i remember my dad my dad worked for ibm for nearly 30 years before those bastards laid him off um and uh and then he spent another 15 years there um so like way way back when i was in like second grade he brought home like an apple 2e and i remember playing around with that stuff and and even taking it to like my classroom in elementary school to like you know kind of show it off and you know this was back in the 80s i guess second grade it would have been eight so yeah like 82 something like that back there do you really yeah [Laughter] um so really it was my dad that got me kind of started and my dad worked for ibm he then was well for ibm he worked at cornell and we lived outside of ithaca and upstate new york where i'm headed this weekend and so he would uh little podunk town and he found a way to get me on a bus like the the bus that ran between you know the middle of nowhere and ithaca which is also the middle of nowhere and um uh he he set me up at a terminal in his in the theory center building in cornell um and uh you know basically i got online and in 90 i graduated in 94 92 ish 91 92. um and so i've really kind of been on the internet before a lot of people knew what the internet was about um and and you know like i remember i was sitting down at um you know rs6000 x windows terminal um and you know like poking around news groups and finding the cd underbelly of the internet um and uh you know you know building downloading and building software you know like i remember running you know like period slash configure 30 years ago um yeah and uh and so just you know really just kind of poking around and and um so that was that was sort of like my my introduction to tech um was being really kind of allowed to run free um on the internet at a pretty young age uh before it was a before it was you know so common i guess i've never really thought about it like that yeah no i think it it makes for a slightly different like tech brain when it wasn't shoved in your like when you had to seek this stuff out all the time basically to get exposed to it did you like kind of after that kind of introduction in your childhood did you did you immediately know like oh this is something i want to keep doing did you study something tech related did you are you just doing it to support your motorcycle and car habit is very much that in a typical white male fashion that continued to fall upwards um so yeah you know i just i i've i come from a pretty privileged background um and uh you know we just had all kinds of advantages from you know just like my dad you know being an only child being spoiled to death practically and no uh when i went off to college i was i wanted to be an engineer of some milk and um i went to suny binghamton and floundered for five years uh before finally giving up uh and so i i didn't exactly fail out but i definitely gave up um and really like math i struggled with hardcore um and still do to this day um you don't strike me as someone who fears the math that's interesting i i don't fear it i just don't interact with it this is a math free zone dave but it's interesting because i've always figured you had a strong math background because of your kind of like rigorous approach to problems and solving things and moving forward kind of like breaking things down into solvable bits it's just it's interesting yeah no the the math is my achilles heel and and always has been um and i remember so i guess i like i remember the sort of pivotal moment for me in college was um it was supposed to be like a 3-2 program of engineering or physics and physics um maybe maybe it was like three years of physics two years of engineering or something like that and you know i got to my third semester and we started talking about you know the the bending of space and time and i'm like uh why stop [Laughter] i need something how can i interact with a welding torch and this concept um yeah so so it really was you know i really kind of got by on on my advantages sort of at an early age i've been exposed to computers and tools and mechanical things um and for in like in terms of my career your question is if i was starting over from zero we'll maybe come back to that but um in terms of tech um i got by on experience um you know so when i went to college i was you know a pod op we called them a pod operator in the in the computer lab the lab was a pod and i remember like my first you know that was that was a job i don't remember how much actual income if any i got from it but it was definitely like you know hanging out with the computers um you know in the suny binghamton lab um you know actually in the printer room is where i started out so i had a vt-100 terminal and massive um you know not matrix printer sitting behind me and i would give people their pronouns from behind the glass window um it was really perfect for the burgeoning introvert [Laughter] this glass is a metaphor for the separation from the world outside um and so i uh so i kind of you know i grew a little bit in that in that role and then i did an internship with lockheed martin um middle ego new york from 97 ish 95 97 something like that so i did that for a couple of years um and and enjoyed that that was that was pretty cool um also i had a summer job which then a couple years later turned into like sort of my first job outside of college um with a startup technology startup in like a called glyph technologies and they were like um [Music] they were they were basically tuning uh zip drives for digital audio and digital video recording some of those you know 100 megabytes oh yeah lazy fast and unbelievable amounts of storage i remember um so i started out kind of doing tech support for that and then i was doing like website stuff and you know kind of your typical you know geek computer guy um and and so then you know from there i like i literally i literally fell upward like i moved to arizona to try something new ended up working for insight and then after a couple of years there i moved to indianapolis and and worked for delta faucet and then moved to new hampshire um and you know worked for my next next stream of companies now i'm in virginia so it's um you know so i've kind of not not done anything with any particular focus ever in my entire life um i'm capable of high high intensity short-term focus that's about it yeah exactly yeah interesting um and like so what's your situation now like how would you kind of describe your kind of interests and and how they've matched up to different jobs you've had over the last like in in in the recent you know five year kind of time span so the the way that i've kind of always described myself is as is as a mechanic um i would have i think if my if my if i had done anything with any direction at all in my college years it would have been to get into like automotive technology or really become like an actual engineer if um so anyway i love i love working with my hands although i'm very poor at it i like working on cars and motorcycles and building them and crashing them and maintaining them and all that stuff so that's that's ultimately what i like to do and my my career supports my my hobby um and uh yeah so so i but i do i do just i think of myself as as a mechanic um i was terrible at all the theoretical stuff um but i found that i'm good at sort of problem solving at integrating systems um and uh you know kind of kind of putting things together that people have already built to an extent um so that's that's how i think of my um you know my skill set and sort of my approach to things um and i think that has uh it's just worked for me you know like um you know i think the people who are uh maybe this kind of really feeds into my um uh what's the word for you think you're not good enough imposter syndrome yes thank you um i think i've got i've got that pretty bad uh you know even though i currently i currently work for for amazon and our previous boss uh chris has you know has said you know amazon will beat the imposter syndrome out of you yeah i don't really think that's happening uh it's interesting but it's topical like what you just said is um it's a great way to learn a lot of disparate things and it just it's topical in our industry because our industry has heaped so many layers of abstraction on top of what existed just a few years or decades ago that that is functionally your job more and more people's job regardless of which side they're on whether on a pure you know dev role or more infrastructure role is like you are gluing together components and trying to shape like a workflow that works for whatever you're trying to do and it's so much it's so much less engineering a brand new thing and more you know welding together a frankenstein's monster of technology and it's like it's great i mean i'm the same way and it's it's great that for us that like our industry currently speaks massively to like our strengths right which is this oh yeah broad thinking be creative like cobble something together quickly test a couple of kind of theories or hypotheses and then and i just like roll it out and and kind of move on to the next like large project it's just like the nature of the work in many ways so yeah it's like it's slinging bash in yaml and json and honestly one of the things that i enjoyed most about my i'm no longer doing you know sre or op stuff but on a given day i could work with um you know half a dozen different languages you know go python ruby bash you know kind of kind of whatever whatever previous people had done before me and you know whatever i was trying to teach myself versus what i'm fluent with um and and you know whatever you know wherever the problem solving leads me and that was i always very much enjoyed that so i don't have a whole lot of depth necessarily um in in really kind of any one thing um although it's kind of accumulated over over however many decades i've been doing this but the um you know the ability to kind of explore different different things and kind of always be picking up new tools is really fascinating to me for what it's worth and i totally hear what you're saying but for what it's worth the imposter syndrome is strong with you because i know for a fact when i hear you say i don't have a lot of depth in any one thing like i have seen you troubleshoot down to like the packet level on certain things like you have more depth than you think you do is what i'm saying but i think especially in in our kind of like world and industry and and the stuff that we're into it's very easy to get in posture syndrome because the you are always hyper aware you have to be the more you know the more you realize you're just resting on the very top layer of this onion of complexity uh where at any point something could go wrong where you suddenly need three lower layers than you have of knowledge to figure out what exactly broke and how and why um and so it just like lends itself to this like well i really don't know what i'm doing it's like well how deep do you want to go it's like you know yeah i can't troubleshoot like a wired together computer logic machine uh and look at logic gates to tell you what went wrong and like this accumulator or the in your alu you know but like i work several layers of abstraction up and i'm just aware that there's this mountain of stuff that i don't know yeah it makes it very easy and i think uh i think we do this to some degree too much of like worrying that that we don't know much because when you see i mean i don't know if you feel bad about your skills do a few phone interviews because people are just googling like what does list in do in linux you know like live on the phone like that's that's part of who is getting into this industry so and i think that goes and i call that out not for you but specifically for anyone listening because i think a lot of people who are listening a lot of people who watch my channel they are in this mode of that is trying to counteract that imposter syndrome where they're they're like oh i have to accumulate more skills and knowledge before i ever go apply to the job or before i ever uh you know like put myself out there because what if i don't know something in the interview and that like i get that and that's tempting and it's kind of what we're talking about here but it's pointless like just start applying just get out there just do it just start doing the work like you'll figure it out you know talk to people yeah i think um two things immediately come to mind one is my time uh as a uh a websphere portal engineer uh doing you know as a software developer doing websphere portals this is back in the mid-2000s and my sort of my first indoctrination into the world of the ide which was eclipse um with plug-ins for uh you know ibm's massive complexity and and i had a day where the system broke and it took me weeks a couple of weeks to kind of like get back on top of what i was doing because the the ide had had a misfire somewhere and it was just like everything was just broken um and and that was you know everything was just so abstracted that you know you you're you know your your day-to-day work was you know like wiring together portlets uh you know writing some java code i was just going to say everyone check your java like thing on your bingo card right now and then everything was broken and we thought yeah why do we have machines managing the plate do we need all of this so so really kind of ever since then i um uh have issued the the ide and you know my my coworker rich used to be like dude you you know you you would edit text with uh you know a magnetized needle in a steady hand [Laughter] um so so yeah so i you know i kind of learned at an early age that you got to know how stuff works sorry my dog is being an um i learned at an early age that i needed i need to understand how stuff works sooner or later the abstractions are going to bite you and i think there's something called like a leaky abstraction like you know where a poorly defined abstraction allows you know allows the back stuff the the stuff behind to come through um and yeah so you need to understand the abstractions and i think at some point you will end up having to to understand how all those pieces work together all that abstraction has been has broken down at some point you need to understand how to wire it back together or maybe that's just where i've found my niche in being able to dive in and sort of you know understand some of that stuff yeah totally um the other thing i was thinking of real real quickly is uh is someone that we worked with uh the hashicorp is uh sorry opsec that is refill your regular your employer no no i i'm i'm open about where i work it's all good i actually talked to mitchell about it on my like second week and i was like is it cool why are you asking me yes of course it's cool uh so there's a woman who's young quite junior but incredibly curious and was really putting herself out there she's like man she has got so much enthusiasm um that i think we should find a home for her because you know she will go far yeah um and and so yeah i think it's you know that sort of like genuine genuine personality and and desire to to learn um that i mean she has more enthusiasm than i do uh but i think that's you know i think that's a powerful skill yeah i i think but yeah i think that's amazing that you call that out being able to display curiosity and enthusiasm in things like your cover letter your screening interviews like that it'll get you far at companies that are the right companies because people are looking for that you know it's like yeah it might not give you an advantage at like big corp they might look at your cover letter and be like it's not formal enough you don't want to work there anyway it's going to be a nightmare it's all going to be like that so if you obviously like the world that we live in changes uh it feels like every six months and that's being generous if you were starting over again today you know where um where would you kind of go in the industry how would you go about you know where would you look like what kind of work would you try to do and and what would your kind of very basic strategy be for for just how to quickly get started get a paying job you got motorcycles to rebuild man um you're assuming much more intentionality than i've ever exhibited in my entire life um you know obviously if i answer this question by closing our eyes getting up and just bouncing around here i i yeah i mean that's kind of it that's my career plan that's and it seems they're working fine for you so far if i was if i was literally starting over from scratch and it's sort of like you know hindsight is 2020 then i think i would have buckled down on some of the engineering and math stuff and and uh man if i could have gone to a school that had like uh formula sae which something that tufts and uh many other schools do but we're basically it's students that get into building a race car like that kind of that is the thing for me application of stuff application of knowledge and hands-on is what engages me and so if if i had had that sort of opportunity that maybe would have focused my my interests and gotten me excited that would have i think probably really kind of changed my my trajectory um that being said thinking about it i think that those are the things that have um kind of guided my path to where it is such as it is uh is i've been interested in something and i've pursued it and kind of kind of listened i guess to to my own my own interests um you know i remember um you know back when i was in arizona like you know i was ostensibly a php developer um yeah yeah i know and that that came back to us uh you know a few years ten years later um but uh but you know i got into like you know packaging um you know i was like literally building rpms of oracle to ease you know the the development environments and setup of production systems so basically every every time i've had a job i've always ended up leaning towards the the operations aspects of it so the assist had been end sorts of things uh and communications like you know back at that job i actually like i i set up jabber so that was sort of like you know in the pre-slack era you know like my teammates spread across you know this one room that we all worked in you know we could chat back and forth and uh you know that was that was kind of cool so i've just kind of always i've always trended and tended towards those things um and i think i'm extremely fortunate that i've been able to somehow get actual you know business value out of my work what all i really want to do is around with computers i mean that's my story too yeah i was just like what how can i get it wasn't even getting paid for me it was just like how can i around with more expensive computers than i can afford the you kind of alluded to the fact that like theory is important and um you know one thing i i think my brain is kind of tuned the same way as yours where like i want to see the practical application quickly like so much of my youtube channel is about that um but my big sort of insight is yeah knowing more theory makes you much more powerful in terms of like how much leverage you can exert on the world how big or complex the things you can build are how how good you actually are and the practical you know if you are somebody like that then doing practical projects to learn skills are great but use them as a and this is what i try to do on the youtube channel is use that to try to sneak in the enthusiasm that you're going to need to get through the theory for each thing um you know we're like pick projects that require you knowing more theory than you do now you know like if you know nothing about networking setting up a jabber server is not bad you know because you need to deal with like you could do like a dns like an srv record with like the little xmpp thing and then setting up the i mean it's a network service setting up the network service itself dealing with firewalls um you know stuff like that where it's like you you're just required to dig deeper to do the practical thing that's motivating you to actually get up and and try playing with tech so yeah that's something i recommend one of the things that i really appreciate about hashicorp uh and and um terraform as an example terraform is is basically applied graph theory um and i say that like i know what those words mean but uh you know it's something where where uh mitchell and armand really you know they they built a tool out of a very complex um set of theories and data structures um and and and built that into something that is you know incredibly powerful and understands the relationships between resources and and all of this stuff um console is is an application of uh you know distributed systems that is just distributed computing models um and consensus that is something that you know my people brain can can grasp so you know they there is so much that goes into those uh into those things um those those those tools and being able to up use them be able to use them as an applied tool um i think is incredibly powerful and that's that's something that i don't think there's a ton of in in the industry um and uh yeah so um that's a really interesting thought yeah so everyone listening go find a really crazy piece of theory and build a cool implementation and build a billion dollar company from it [Laughter] it's cool um in the work that you've done like more recently what are the things that you find the most interesting about what you are doing day to day i think um again this is i wish i had been i wish i had had this clarity you know way back when um but automation you know like um you know i'm anything that can be automated do it and that's that's sort of where uh yeah i guess is probably like one of the cornerstones of my of my skill set i guess is is is automating things uh humans are dumb um and the the more we can take humans out of the equation you know one the humans can be used for more useful things and we remove human error from the equation at the expense of complexity sure but uh you know there is no point in having a person repeatedly hit a button you know when you can when you can have a computer do that um and so so my role today is basically you know doing automation for embedded systems uh for um you know alexa devices like how do we how do we test those things how do we um you know reproduce bugs that that customers have um how do we trace down you know memory leaks um you know how do we do this without having to put a person in front of a of a small screen and speak to it you know for for days on end um you know hire a bunch of small children as your qa [Laughter] yeah so i think you know i think that the the application of what i've learned has has changed um but that is you know you're basically you're constantly building on on stuff you're constantly standing on the shoulders of giants you're constantly standing on you know the shoulders of you from six months or six years ago um and uh yeah and that's also i think why i'm pretty good at what i do i can i can visualize and and you know execute you know some pretty complex stuff i also can't explain to my mom the difference between single and double clicking hey everyone i just want to give a big 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along with hundreds of tech guides and tutorials to help you get started they've been around for a long time and their reputation is amazing for a reason if you sign up today at lenode.com tutorial linux you'll get a 100 60-day credit to use on your new lenod account so just click the link in the description below and you can be signed up in about 60 seconds you've covered this to some degree but what are some things is there anything specific about tech that uh and i'll actually narrow this down because you've seen so many different things in the devops world as it is now are there any things that really surprised you when you got into that kind of knowing devops theory and seeing it develop and then seeing the kind of execution of that where the the rubber kind of hits the road you know yeah um it's all it's all tied together with duct tape and bailing twine um there is you know for as um for as much as every company tries to pitch themselves you know with with think pieces on you know how well they've solved this problem um and you know how how well this has worked to reduce whatever metric you're trying to you're trying to find when you go and work there it's all crap so uh so i would love to be able to have have gone into the um the etsy that i had read about you know back 10 years ago where they they monitored everything and they had you know everything was data-driven and and they were just they were on a pedestal of at least in my mind of a of a place that did everything right um but now that i've talked to people who have worked there and i've worked for a couple of pretty notable companies um it is that's kind of window dressing when it comes down to it like everybody's got their you know their skeletons um and uh you know so kind of be prepared for that i guess you know like you will learn no matter what but you're probably not gonna learn what you thought you were gonna learn yeah um i i think that's a fantastic thing to tell people i agree i think the branding and a lot of these tech companies are so good um that the best you can hope for is that you have a team that's really smart and dedicated and kind and that is really genuinely trying to work towards a good positive vision of like devops and all this and sre and all this stuff yeah um but it's yeah i think again this is talks to the imposter syndrome people feel like oh i'm not ready because i'm not a real sra it's like well neither is anyone else so yeah you know we're all just gluing things together trying to come up with abstractions that aren't crazy trying to keep complexity from leaking out trying to build systems that are reliable that are resilient that are uh kind of intuitive to use secure etc um yeah ever you know if you and it comes down to what you said before it's like curiosity and enthusiasm and just honesty and and the ability and willingness to work hard at trying to make something better like if you have those things just the basics of tech will be enough like for someone to give you a chance and give you a place to continue growing um yeah yeah yeah for sure i think um i don't know i haven't figured out how you kind of determine this ahead of time unless you kind of know people on the inside of a place that you're you know that you're looking to get hired at um but the the things that the things that i remember most are not the god this is going to be so cheesy the the real the real things you learn are the friends along the way um let's just put a high school yearbook image here well yeah yeah totally please um you know i think we have our thumbnail just that sweet innocent face uh-huh yeah um i i've made uh it has been the the personal connections that i've made with people that have really kind of brought me place to place i've i've you know i have not really had direction and i've kind of gone where things have been interesting and sometimes that has been because a friend has reached out and been like hey i hear you're looking for work or um you know i'm at this place and we could really use some more people with your skills um so that networking is is is by far the most effective um and i'm very scornful of recruiters in general uh so there's this fake idea of networking that kind of like pervades different industries right where it's just like cold call a lot of people shake a lot of hands be like fake nice go to meetups or whatever and that's fine these things can work sure but the real networking that gets stuff done is you just have people that know you're a good person that know you're not bsing that you are actually skilled and that you're gonna try to work hard and that already have some trust with you like that's your network and the more trustworthy and good you are the better your network will be and yeah the more opportunity you know random opportunities will happen it's like yeah and i i don't know how much you know sort of like social justice stuff you get into on your you know in in the topics that you present but um you know i'm saying this as as middle-aged white guy to a slightly less middle-aged white guy like this is it's pretty easy for us to kind of people look like us it's it's sort of easy to get jobs because you know i have a name like brian you have a name like dave yeah um assumed rapport like oh yeah a lot of advantages there right and and so i honestly i honestly don't know so i'm not going to speak authoritatively but i suspect that i know that it is harder for people um you know who don't look like me to to get into the industry and and to um sort of maintain their uh to continue to be valued for the type of work that they do um and be given opportunities regardless of what they look like or where they came from and um so i i gotta i i have to think that that networking is even more important uh to you know kind of build those those personal relationships and and keep in touch with them and i say this is someone that does a really terrible job at it um that you know that is that is very valuable um you know so i think back on on you know how i've kind of landed where i've landed and and almost all of it has come down to just the connections um and um you know and i recognize that it is that it is harder to get interviewed um you know for for for many people for people who are not middle aged white guys yeah i agree and i think that's that's the flip side of networking is uh it gives me much more pleasure to uh help refer somebody to somewhere that where they may not have gotten in the front door maybe not even because of racism or whatever but just because they don't have the traditional background for whatever reason it is a lot of people face a lot more barriers than you and i do um and that's like the most gratifying part of networking is being able to link together other people you know and be able to being able to open doors for other people is like um yeah i mean it's almost like it's not selfish but it's almost selfishly pleasurable you know where you're just like yes like i helped make this person's life better um you just like it's a good feeling to have to see someone's life improve measurably and be like i had some some influence on this i was able to do something for once you know yeah yeah so anyone watching you know you use your use your privilege and your power if you've got it to help other people i mean that's like i don't think anyone has to say that but uh but well yes we live in this world i do it so that's cool i appreciate you saying that um so the the last question was sort of not about skills specifically this one is specifically about skills what are some skills that you notice uh the the newest batch of kind of new tech folks are neglecting or uh just like don't come equipped with that they have to learn quickly when they when they kind of hit the real world thinking more like new grads or or just more inexperienced folks i don't really have a lot of experience to draw from that um i haven't sort of to my detriment i have not worked with a ton of people coming into the industry um i think i think things that are maybe overlooked are um communication um you know being able to to describe problems being able to write clear concise code um and maybe i'm a bit of an maybe a bit ocd but spelling matters um you know and um you know and and complete sentences there was a guy that i worked with who was just like every commit was fix this thing like god damn it like i mean yeah that's not you being an because if any anyone that does that in six months will know that they are an for doing it because they won't be able to find where they made that change or like you know your git log an entire massive feature of git becomes useless to you when every get blame shows fixed thing or whatever you know it's like okay yeah oh yeah i'll just go through the entire history of this project to figure out what's going on um yeah yeah so uh yeah and i think you know i don't i don't know i don't know what what the kids are using these days they're on the javascript still i think but it seemed like there was a time where people were coming in uh you know where i'm interviewing people which i hate doing by the way that are coming in and they don't have um you know sort of basic linux skills um and and you know maybe like in in you know sort of a devops type of role that's necessary yeah um and you know you probably just need to build up to that but i do think that's part of you know understanding command line stuff how how to move around in a linux shell and and to be effective there um you will be more effective and you will learn more um than if you expected everything to be in a gui yeah you're kidding yourself if you think if you think oh if i don't regularly have to log in and troubleshoot stuff on linux machines i don't need to know or understand linux or have command line skills it's indispensable like i don't care if you just build docker files all day and and have lambdas everywhere like your circle ci thing that's a shallow environment and if you don't know how to use it you're going to spend a lot of wasted time on doing very simple tasks um yeah likewise you know there's just a million examples of things not only that still use the shell in some like legacy sense but where shell scripting and like built-in things in linux are the fastest by far way of doing something one of my favorite tech bloggers who never blogs anymore um steve yeggy he uh i'm pronouncing that right he has this interesting like interview questions uh post where he basically goes through like 10 interview questions he asks and why specifically and what they show about people and one thing he asks is basically like oh if i have you know like an input file that is a phone book and i ask you to find like something that's like testing like do you know regex and will you use the command line to string together with pipes a little bash command to find something he's like i've had people write 5 000 lines c programs to do this and it's disqualifying i don't care how good your c code is it's like if you don't if you don't understand that this is like a tool in your toolbox and you're familiar with it just the basics of it and you realize that's the fastest way to do it um you know that's because we are glue people and clearly we always have been like your job is to usually just do things clean fast like reliably and cracking open an editor if you're not having real second thoughts about starting a new software project then you might not have the proper respect yet or complexity the size of the task of maintaining a code base et cetera all this stuff so yeah i mean you're quickly going to um you know cut yourself on sharp edges but you know if you're if you're you know writing a program and you need to you know find a line and and uh you know whatever open a file and prep for something sometimes it's okay to just shell out to it you know like you don't have to you don't have to import libraries and write the code like prove your point first um you know and also be mindful that proving your point um will probably end up in production someday and you'll wish that it hadn't yet but ultimately exactly yeah there's a balance to be struck there that's why you have to just get really good at prototyping see it still matters because even if you plan everything out it's like the the design prototype then makes it into production which is arguably worse than the practical prototype making it there yeah um it's like oh yeah sorry we can never change this again because we thought about it wrong two years ago and now everything's built on that horrible like wrong abstraction of the problem future predictions this is just it's not even in the form of a question which i like i just added a question mark at the end uh future predictions for tech devops kind of like tech processes and how the tech world will develop so this i literally wrote this and everyone i'm asking this question it's based on a conversation we had probably six years ago during our interview you were interviewing me and we just we kind of got off on this shared love for the hashi stack and but more specifically about what that represented to us in terms of it was like finally a modern like cloud tool thing that uh kind of expressed or or implemented a lot of these principles that we both respect like simplicity you know small sharp tools the kind of unix way they took that off the website which i'm still sad about but i get it we're an enterprise company now but um the yeah so and we we kind of felt like all this complexity that's happening like we these tools are going to be big because they represent like all the wisdom of those simpler more concise very powerful and composable solutions uh and like they're gonna catch on and lo and behold a bunch of them did um sitting here now obviously many things have changed how i don't know what do you what are you like is there anything that's interesting to you in tech any any place that you think things are drifting or going uh anything you can kind of see in the future or imagine um i feel like i've kind of taken a a year off in in terms of like observing the industry um you know i'm sort of using a new set of tools and in some ways using stuff that i learned you know 20 plus years ago i do a lot of python almost exclusively python now um but i think that um you know honestly honestly i think so much is going towards kubernetes and that scares the out of me um you know because it is because it is the antithesis of that it is everything in one in what feels like a huge monolithic complex system um and and i know i'm not alone in thinking this but it's sort of like the the tension between the people who want to consume the latest and greatest and really cool tools and don't get me wrong kubernetes has some really cool stuff going on um but there are people who have to operate at some point especially when you get into the the newest most exciting stuff you don't have amazon and google and i guess microsoft uh who are who are providing these you know kubernetes as a service for example um you know and all the all the guys that has um and so understand again understanding how the stuff works under being able to peek behind the abstractions um work your way you know through the problem that you will inevitably have even if you're using a hosted solution i think it's very important to to understand how those things fit together um and i am very wary of anything that that makes it magical because there is no there is no magic um so i think it's i think it's amazing what people are doing with you know the tools that are being built around kubernetes and i wish that nomad um had really kind of no matters hashtag products which has kind of always been in the shadows i think that it is it is objectively a better tool um but did not capture the industry's attention and and if i had to build a system i would absolutely prefer to operate nomad than kubernetes and all that i would have to know about kubernetes in order to uh no one even has an answer to that criticism which is a completely valid criticism that i also have which is like but what about the insane complexity it's like well you just like push that onto your cloud provider which like is not really an answer it's like yes they can do better running some of the components but it's not it's not a perfect abstraction and like you said there is no magic anywhere like once when that system breaks down in any way you're still dealing with go bash like docker um you know like local like little virtual like art tables and like a networking stack that's running on a linux kernel you know it's like whenever i yeah i just think that that abstraction feels um it can be incredibly powerful i think but also it's skin deep because it relies on everything that you already know underneath um and maybe that's maybe that's some usable like advice for people is like you know if you use one of these systems make sure to dig down below the layer that you need because i think like i i keep seeing like blog posts of you know companies where it's like oh we switched to kubernetes and everything's like super great oh and then we had our first outage and everyone realized they didn't understand ip tables it's like well i'm sorry everything's going through that's a problem if no one understands what you're doing you know yeah so i um i i agree i think that it's it's one of these industry things that i think is a pattern i've seen it long enough now for it to be a pattern i remember there's this article i forget who wrote it is it one of those cat b articles i don't know uh worse is better or something it's about like the things that win in like the collective like tech the industry and often like the worse abstractions win for all kinds of interesting reasons and i again like i've i've used not in production but i've played around with kubernetes to some degree i've used snowmen in production and to me the real difference between them is you know one of them is a kind of almost almost one size fits all kind of like idea like you have to buy into all of these abstractions um you're using containers like too bad like if you have some old vms like they're not running on kubernetes um the uh it's like it requires you gotta you gotta drink all the kool-aid to use it and then kind of build your systems around it right it becomes that becomes the shape of your your organization essentially i mean your your tech stack whereas more flexible and configurable tools are and i think this is why they end up losing is you know things like nomad things that you can reshuffle or put together in different ways that can really adapt to the shape that your business already has they're just harder to adopt because there's decision making involved like when you adopt kubernetes there are few decisions about the shape of the that the thing is going to take right um and i think i i really wonder if that's just like people don't want to deal with they're just like give us the thing we'll work with it and you know no one wants to have like an internal i don't i don't know that this is it but you need a lot of internal expertise to in both cases but in the kubernetes case you can lie to yourself and tell yourself you don't actually need a lot of to retain a lot of internal expertise to troubleshoot it if anything goes wrong yeah you can't lie to yourself that way when you're like well we're gonna architect like an internal like uh nomad thing that's to run everything it's like that's very clearly a job first for a an expert at least at first yeah and i feel like the the phrase that comes to mind is undifferentiated heavy lifting which is you know people say well just use use amazon use eks use you know whatever um to a large extent using the cloud the cloud is is is paying someone else to do the undifferentiated heavy lifting so the idea being that you want to you want to pay somebody to build your application not to run your infrastructure because everybody has infrastructure and i kind of feel like that gulf is getting wider because people will come in and say well i just you know i'm going to write this thing and deploy it on kubernetes and bam it's in production um and and you know probably there is value in not racking and stacking your own your own servers i certainly don't have any desire to do that um but not you know just just delegating all of that or even abdicating all of that responsibility to someone else means that you're not prepared when something does inevitably go bump um and you know frankly i sort of enjoy doing the undifferentiated heavy lifting um you know that's that's sort of the the layer that i enjoy the most and you know i guess i've really never wanted to write business level software um but yeah so i think you know that i i struggle with that because i often hear like well you know that's that's what that's where the cool stuff happens um yeah i agree i but i think it's exactly what you just said actually is why i disagree with that undifferentiated heavy lifting building a truly great platform gives your application an advantage and i think it's just the perspective that a lot of these decisions get made from it's like whatever's in like ceo weekly or whatever is like you know whatever makes it up there or even cio weekly or whatever um you know that is just sort of like oh that's that's just the accepted wisdom now but and and a lot of that is the application is where all the differentiation and value creation in the organization happens and that's been that stupid wrong insight has been i mean how many years have like ops and dead folk be been sort of quasi at war and we had a whole devops thing to try to make it better and it's like it's because companies see value and new features and don't see a platform as something capable of delivering new features like is it not a feature if your platform can suddenly go on in a new region to be legally compliant with serving traffic to a brand new section of the world that's not an application feature but does that not you know double the amount of value you can suddenly provide it's like i just i don't and yeah like to some degree that's still something you can outsource but you can also outsource your app development lots of people do that so right i just don't see them being all that different like either you're an engineering company that can generate value in all the engineering it does or you just kind of accept that you're an old-school company with a dev department that gets run like with this magic special agile sauce that's different from everything else and they're like the golden children again nothing against pure dev work i just that perspective just misses so much of the value i think that that infrastructure can provide i know i know i'm biased because i come from kind of an infrastructure background but i do product work now you know and it's it's like i still i still believe that what's that three whole days yeah that's basically what you caught a product veteran i like that i didn't have that thought when i said i still believe that i was like dave it was it was this week it's been so long i've managed to hold on to that infrastructure-centric belief yeah anyway this is the stuff that gets cut out of youtube brian you wanted to know what it was these wild and wacky unsubstantiated claims [Laughter] yeah that's what the people want um brian thank you so much for taking the time to do this uh i mean i'd be lying if i said we didn't do this every two weeks anyway and just shoot the but thank you for sitting here through like such focused questioning which is unusual for me um and for just like sharing i actually learned a ton of interesting stuff about your sordid tech pass that i didn't know before which is super interesting um and i think i think so much of what you said is really going to help people especially people that watch the youtube channel or are listening to this as a podcast um who are just on the on that kind of imposter syndrome uh doorstep that you described you know like they haven't even jumped in yet for their early career and they're just like ah i don't know where to go next i don't know what i can do and they feel kind of limited but just by their current job or their current situation um and i think it's just like your story and like your path kind of proves that there's there's a there's a limited amount of planning you can do because of how quickly things move in our industry and like you know you may have the best intentions but like there was literally no way for you to make a plan to get into devops when you started because devops was not a glimmer in a hipster's eye yet it was um so you just gotta kind of having that mindset of just like being open-minded about opportunities just resolving to be competent at the work that you do and being good to the people around you is is a career plan like that is a career plan that's how it works so yeah thanks man right on thank you very much this was this was very enjoyable and uh please let me know when the director's cut comes out yeah exactly as always leave all your comments uh and stuff below if you have any more questions that you would like to ask brian i will take the best comments and ask brian and then either write you an answer or we'll do another one of these all right very good uh smash that like button or something oh whoa whoa out of nowhere like the pro do you just want to take over the channel honestly you did good bro i did not ask you to do that all right ring that bell yeah who are you someone who spent too much time watching you have some like youtube ascii like streaming thing in the shelf you can't see these videos [Laughter] links baby links browser is the way that you yeah okay it works anywhere links to apt-get install links to the best warehouse or ever um cool thanks again dude you're welcome

Channel: tutoriaLinux

Views: 5,727

Keywords: computer, how-to, Linux, tutorial, system administration, sysadmin, command-line, tutorial linux, linux tutorial, tutoriallinux

Id: Tghu8REybSY

Length: 57min 59sec (3479 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021