 Hello, how are you doing? Very good. How's everything going? Where are you right now? I'm actually in Westford in the office. So Okay, and is that usually like your location you're like Like your home base No, not not so much. I'm actually If you want to talk about home base my home base is actually in IMEA in Europe. I live in the Netherlands But for this year, I brought my family over to the States. I was originally born in Oregon So giving my kids a little bit of an experience in the States and we're living out at the beach on an island in North Carolina That sounds really nice. So well that was going to be kind of like my first question Like why don't you introduce yourself until it's a little bit about your work with with redhead? Yeah So, you know, you heard a little bit about background about me, but I've been with red hat about seven going well, I think this month is seven years actually I Started out for three years in Europe as a solutions architect doing like the technical sales role moved over to the middleware BU have a pretty strong background in BPM rules processes things like that did this in the financial world before I joined red hat Continue to work on that in the middleware BU Most people know me from from a lot of stuff. I've done around the the JBoss BRMS product and later the JBoss BPM suite so big app development background and I've just recently transitioned into something called the integrated solutions business unit That's kind of a business unit on top of all the other ones We now look across the entire red hat portfolio for solutions that make sense for our customers Thank you for that really really cool. And I wanted to ask you like how is it to work with within red head? Like do you think it makes the difference that we're so close involved like with open source? Like because it's it's almost like you think about red hat and immediately you think about open source So, how is it? I that's something that I usually ask people that come to the show to the open ship profiles Because I think it's so important that people understand that side of red hat and open shift It's I think that's probably one of the the main reasons that I'm here I'm a big fan always have been since early days of my you know, IT career development career Like having access to everything and and not being stopped by proprietary stuff that doesn't let me dig deeper I find out why it's not working or why I can't do what I want to do I think having that kind of openness is has now been proven in the market with the company like red hat there's a lot of companies to see a lot of value in that and I think having that back on a being able to dig into what's going on and to assist and to help and to Provide feedback or or you know, whether that's documentation feedback or code feedback. That's up to you At the higher level. It's really fascinating to watch how customer feature requests Actually happen right and even in between major releases Special special patches are sent out with their fixes for that specific customer. This does happen I think that makes all the difference in the world and I really can't imagine, you know, not working a red hat It's it's kind of a one of the first companies. They're been out where you get that feeling, right? You really want to be part of what's going on. It's pretty magical Okay, well, that's that's great and So I saw that one of your blog posts you were talking about like a CDK So like I'm trying to bring the conversation a little bit towards like the open-shift side I know that you are not part of the opening open-shift team But I I've seen that you do like a lot of like blog posts and things like that and you were talking about the CDK So how does like the CDK help you in your day by day? How like if you are a developer using open-shift, how does that help you? Before I get too far into that, maybe I can add a little bit of background on How I got over into the open-shift stuff. So when when the open-shift got acquired way back when I was one of the first, you know, I saw value right right away You know, you go tinker with some of our new acquisitions and see what it is And I was completely fascinated with the with the whole platform as a service kind of idea that was very quickly Integrated into our own tooling and our own own stuff You pretty much find everything that I blogged and put out there and whether it had anything to do with Open-shift or not Presentations workshops I host everything on open-shift right absolutely everything I've done you can you can find online And it's it's running on an open-shift instance I Came off of close to becoming an evangelist the way back in those days for them that didn't work out I went into the role in the middle where be you instead But I've always kept close ties with what's going on and watching it very closely and doing pretty much everything I do in it or on it and and Watching the transformation between what was cartridges at the time now is going to be darker images or images containerized stuff It's it's really fascinating to see where it's going and to watch the adoption curve, you know going up so steeply And and that brings us around to things like you know the images that you have the all-in-one image on open-shift I also wrote about it was playing with and tinkering with In my current role one of the product solutions we have is it's called the red hat cloud suite Which will be coming soon? This is taking the product portfolio from the operating system virtualization and open-stack layers up through containerized atomic enterprise layers Including open-shift enterprise on top of that and and cloud forms for the management orchestration and monitoring right So what what is the interface for an application developer from my world to this stack or to a cloud suite like that and That's pretty much the the open-shift is going to be the the face of what we're working with and what we're looking at and So I started digging a little bit into that because part of my job and part of what I do is you know speak at conferences or large groups or Putting videos together or doing webinars, right? It's pretty hard to put a data center on your laptop That's basically what we're talking about. You know, this is some really heavy-duty stuff, right and That doesn't scale out on a laptop. It's just not the way it works So the interface is what you can talk to a stack like that and explain all that Maybe show a video of someone that's done something at data center with it But that's not really how you want to do it you want to do some live stuff and show what this means for your pre application delivery your application development and So my plan was to dig a little bit into what would be the best interface to do something like that So I played a little bit with the open-shift All in one image and then I stumbled upon a relatively new project. This is the CDK Container development kit that's been going on here at Red Hat and and they're doing a big push right now of and some of the beta releases of what you're seeing me write about are tying this into the to the IDE so the jboss developer studio and Giving us some kind of integrated experience where you can install it quickly get spun up quickly and have some some pre-canned Stuff ready to go one of them happens to be the open-shift the enterprise sort of all in one image then inside the JDK or that JDK the CDK So that's what I tied together. They're a little rough. Of course, they're not finished and not, you know, publicized the stuff as GA yet So the install process wasn't exactly Easy so I went around and you know, I put that into my demo template Which I've done for all my demos and I got a lot of attention and and you know It'll probably be a little bit different when they release it I don't expect it to continue to be you know my my little demo template But it's just something I don't want to have to repeat that install process So everything I do I put out there, you know, it's about teaching sharing and you know share we grow and Yeah, I think this is gonna be something that's gonna gonna get people spun up a lot quicker That that's the whole idea behind it Get you go and have some examples ready to go out of the box instead of having to put your whole container Processing your container installation layers and stuff like that together. Oh Whoa, thank you I appreciate that you gave us like all that background So quite likely a lot of people are going to be interested in dad Like that's the kind of thing that you don't really see like on the blog or like On the commutation that's kind of like the experience that you are living Working with with thin right hat I wanted to ask a little bit more about what you do like day by day like We have talked with a couple of evangelists We have talked with a couple of like people that are moving all around Does your like position your current position like take you different places? Do you just like do presentations in one area different countries? How does that work? Yeah? So basically the last Four years, I've been doing a role that's Internally recognized as a technical marketing manager But externally we we call these a JBOS technology evangelist or red hat technology evangelist So there's a deviation from just the pure community evangelist that you see Like I think your previous one of your previous interviews with mark Marcus easel. He is one of the developer evangelists, right? So that there's a very large focus more so on community projects open-source community stuff Kind of kind of generating interest and digging into those pieces What I tend to focus on or what I do focus on is Everything to do around the products. So once the over-source project has been turned into a product You're missing the kind of noise that you're seeing in the community with evangelism out there. So we use technical marketing managers for that So what does my day look like? Where do I go? That's a pretty tough question There's several things that we're focusing on is things that I've found that work Kind of can give a sketch around that I wrote some blog posts about that too some articles I Believe a huge part of it is teaching and sharing So I listen very acutely to what our field is doing with the products and what the customers are Asking of them and you try to support that so both internally and and you know out in the wild You you see responses to stuff and I talk to people and if somebody has a need to be able to demonstrate Something in a product, which is an awful lot of what the demo projects were that I did in JBOS BRMS and the BPM space Whether that is containerized in the cloud or locally on your machine. Those are the ways we try to offer it They're basically demonstrating features or something that's a little bit difficult for them to understand to do normally and So we'll put something like that together Put it in easily repeatable form so you can spin it up spin it down It's it's strongly assisting the solution architects who you know are told today tomorrow You're going to be talking to the customer about a certain product or a certain technology And they may not have a lot of time to get prepared for it. So it's really nice if you have some stuff in a can Have a little video explanation around it or a couple of steps and they can get spun up really quick No, yeah, that's how that works. You know, I've had the training a long time ago But I just haven't talked about it for six months. So it's it's kind of nice to support that That's one aspect number two is being vocal about it So you have to get out there and you have to own stuff in social media. You have to own like tags Categories topics or at least get your voice in the mix I Believe consistency and writing is really important. I usually write something two three times a week At the at the peak of my you know, BRMS BPM time. I've now transitioned to a new role So I'm building up a base on that and foundation where I'm comfortable with to talk about You move into a space where you're not an expert You're not you know, you're not gonna be an expert overnight and there's there's aspects that I'm an expert of that I bring into that area. That's what I want to focus on Another part of it is is Also being able to go out and talk about this stuff. So finding the right places It's a whole lot different than the developer evangelism and that I'm not looking just to talk at any developer conferences You tend to target a little bit more specifically based on the crowd You're trying to reach which often includes customers analysts that kind of thing That doesn't preclude me from showing up at like a job user group or something like that I tend to back load my visits that way So if I show up somewhere for example Something I'm working on right now is Code of Motion in Amsterdam Submitted a bunch of stuff If that works out, I'll probably do a couple of user groups around it And I'll also stop into the office and do some sales enablement such as talking to our colleagues and explaining some of the new stuff That's coming and what it looks like that. That's my life, right? That's really how it goes around Another large chunk of it is the enablement when new products come out For example, what I just described with that cloud suite We'll visit the regions and bring some training and get some hands-on stuff together So they can they can learn that same thing happened with the with the JBoss products It's getting to the point now where we're growing so large that we have enablement Parts of our organization that do that So then my role is then more assisting to make sure the content either is mine that they're using or what we're developing Right stuff, and they'll take that over Yeah, that's Yeah, well, yeah, it's a really good idea what you would you do and thank you for that So I don't take tons of your time I'm just going to ask you like one last question and obviously it has to do with open shift Like what do you think about the latest version? Have you been able to try it any features that you would like to see like in future updates and things like that? I'm not a big feature hounds. I of course have been playing with the stuff that's coming along shifting more and more to open shift on Enterprise I should say The one request that I've had internally and I think you hearing externally too is it would be often nice if they'd make open shift online the same Right now. It's it's still the version two. It's coming It's not going to be very much longer But it used to be the other way around where we released that first and then the rest and in this case the containerized stuff They did it first enterprise and then they're going to do it online. So maybe next time. Please don't I miss being able to just spin stuff up and share it with the world, you know Yeah Yeah, right now I know that the entire team is working hard on that and they just want to do it like the right way So everyone tries to be happy or as happy as we can make everyone which is almost impossible But like let's say that we try our best Any parting thoughts anything that you would like to share with it with the block community that we have at open shift Parting thoughts. Um, no, no, really. I'm just uh continue to coat on I guess, right? Yeah, so well, uh, here you're going to see on the screen all the links. I think you have been seeing them during the video To contact Eric his blog his twitter. Uh, like you mentioned, he's quite active So and I think in the following weeks, we're going to have at least one of or two of his articles In our blog. So, uh, well, thanks for that and apart from that. Well, thank you for your time and have a great day Well, thank you