 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to another episode of RHEL Presents. I am Chris Short, host of Red Hat Live Streaming. I am joined by the one and only Eric Hendricks, AKA Eric, the IT guy, Eric, how are you? Chris, I'm doing fantastic, especially after our last episode. I think folks will be happy to know that I ripped out my server and I'm currently rebuilding it. That is wonderful news. We had some networking issues. And then funny enough, I was contacted after the episode was over and come to find out that part of our problem was actually not my internet connection, but they were working on the certificates for the repository in the middle of our stream. That's right. I remember seeing the emails, like after the fact, now the dots are connecting and that makes total sense. So we actually planned it that way because we wanted to demonstrate what it was like to be a systems administrator in real life. In real life, yes. It never fails that you go to do something easy, some easy maintenance and inevitably, you have 30 days in a month, but that's when the software vendor decides to work on their stuff, is at the exact same time as your outage window. So just a little bit of real life on the show. That's my story, I'm sticking to it. There you go. So, you know, after last week's debacle, you've decided to take a different route this week. No demo, no terminal, but... No terminal, but plenty of nerdyness. Yes, in fact, probably more nerdyness. In fact, this is the long awaited day in the life episode. We've prompted this a couple of times on previous episodes. So I'm really, really excited to introduce a couple of amazing folks. In fact, I will let each of you introduce yourselves and ladies first. Okay. I'm Alexandra Fedora. I work in Redhead for three years now, and before that I was like Fedora Ambassador, Fedora Contributor, and now I'm also a member of Fedora Console. And my primary area of interest is building the infrastructure for rail development, building the workflows and the processes for continuous integration inside rail. Awesome. Glad to have you on the show. In fact, I first got to know you a little bit through the Fedora podcast. There was an episode where you and the host chatted a little bit. I think it was about a new release of Fedora Server, in fact. Yeah. We probably discussed that and also the Fedora Server, which we planned. So we do some stuff in Fedora. Awesome. We're glad to have you on the show. And Simo, why don't you introduce yourself as well? All right. I've been with Redhead. I forgot. 14 years, something like that. And I started my career working around open source stuff. Samba was the project I was working on before joining Redhead for many years since. And then my focus has always been more around security, identity, that kind of stuff. And currently, I ended up leading the, well, a crypto team where we worked on cryptography and all the libraries around there, including certificates and certificate management. And so your server. That's amazing. Well, I may or may not trash talk to you during the show today. But I think I wasn't intending to go this direction, but I think I will ask that question. What is the culture like here at Red Hat? Because it seems to be that that's kind of the big thing people think about is not RHEL or security or a hybrid cloud platform, but we're known very much for our culture. So how does Red Hat shape up? And how does that compare to other environments you've been in? And then we'll kind of backtrack into that and how you got started and things that, and one other quick thing. If you are watching us live, we've got the chat open. Please, by all means, throw your questions in there. Would love to get your all's questions, get your feedback. And I mean, they are here for you. This is your all's hour. So definitely preference goes to live questions that come in. Yeah, you got real questions to bring them in or open shift for that matter. Simo, do you want to start with the culture thing? Well, you want to hear the dinosaur first, okay. So, well, culture at Red Hat, it's not easy to define, I would say, like everything, but it has changed over time, of course. I mean, we've been here quite a while, but not in the ways one might think. I mean, when I joined, we were already quite big according to some of our colleagues and in-holder around, I think, just a little bit about 100,000 people and now a lot more, right, like 10-fold or more. And even though that happened, there is an extremely interesting culture of communication and also initiative within Red Hat in general, I would say, although there are many differences because at this point, Red Hat has so many components in it as well, which is what I'm used to. There are other parts. But in general, there's this real great thing about communication and technical knowledge to the highest level everywhere. Yeah, it's a really inclusive culture, I would say. At least that's my experience of a little bit privileged there, I guess. But I really feel like there's a lot of understanding and a lot of sharing within our walls, even though it makes me laugh to say walls because so one of the defining things I would say is that most people on Red Hat works probably more with people outside of Red Hat than with people within Red Hat, at least in the development department. I've spent so much time upstream, which is what we call in the projects, whatever they are, mainly the other stuff like that. I can see for the old people, that was lack or anything, today like most of my life was there, and then there was the internal part where you could do the stuff to bring wealth to people. But yeah, so there is this thing where you're not confined just within any wall for the most part. You really interact with a lot of the community, even the development world, maybe other worlds are a little slightly different. That's my thing. I would support your point on not having walls, and this is what I think you recognize very fast in Red Hat, that no one shoots you from the outside world and there's no such delegation like I'm doing this thing and someone else will do the talking for me. It's like no, you're doing the coding, but you also have to do the talking and you also have to do the explanation and you have to do the interaction because all of that is still on you and you need to own it and you need to own the topic in full. So you cannot hide from the community interaction, it's part of you as a role developer to interact with the community. But maybe I can also add some different aspects on this. Because I joined Red Hat, I'm kind of new being Red Hat, you can consider this like only three years. So when I joined Red Hat, the thing I really, really realized very, it was quite different from the companies I worked before is this independence of a role developer and this level of role developer being designed in things around. And sometimes it's really cool and you really enjoy that. Sometimes it can be also hard because for example, when I work in continuous integration and try to like unify some of the processes, there's literally like no way I can come and be like, you know, people, you now do all these things this way because like management said so, it doesn't work and it never works and it is just, you really need to work with people, convince each and every person to try this out and to get on board with this change and so on. So sometimes I'm really like, it can be hard, you know, to make such changes and also like a very precious thing in Red Hat, this level of interaction and this level of feedback and we will develop it. Well, I think to prove your point, you just have to answer one question. I mean, how many communication tools do we have here at Red Hat? And I think the answer is never enough because I mean, I have an entire screen on my Mac just dedicated to just communication tools just so I can keep touch with all the different teams. I'm not the only I did that. Yeah. I don't know. You're not alone. Yeah. Before we move on to the next question, I did want to get, I did want to kind of pick at one other thing because you came to Red Hat through your contributions with Fedora. So I'm kind of curious what it was like working elsewhere, contributing to Fedora and then coming to Red Hat to continue your work with Fedora. What was that experience like? I enjoyed it very much because I mean, you have a work for the salary and for the money and you had Fedora for fun and for hanging out with people which are like-minded and for doing things you really enjoy. And this helped me a lot during my career. Actually, I think I had a whole 20 minutes of talking at some of the previous Fedora Nest conferences just about how Fedora helped me to get each of my jobs which I had before Red Hat and like it was six of them and each of them was because I had this experience in Fedora and the final one also because of that. The bad thing is of course that once I joined Red Hat, my hobby and my work really converged that much that I'm actually struggling to find some other hobby to get this switching of context when I actually want to get some rest from myself, I do. So it introduces some problems on that part but yeah, it feels really amazing to be able to work on your hobby in this environment. So I can definitely relate to that because before coming to Red Hat I had started working on podcasts which I'm not shy about plugging on the show so this is like the required one plug for the pseudo show. One thing on my... Yeah, I have one thing on my... But I kind of stumbled into content creation and podcasting before I came to Red Hat. So like you, I had a number of different jobs before I went from Systems Administrator to sales at Red Hat to now I'm in marketing and so now all of those worlds have kind of collided and so I'm working in the Royal BU, I'm doing content creation, I'm hosting with Chris every other week and so all of those things have kind of come together and it's great because I'm getting paid to do something I love to do but at the same time it's like, okay now my hobby... I've just spent nine hours on my hobby, what do I do? So if it helps, I recently fell in love with Dungeons and Dragons about two years ago I mean if you're looking for a hobby, that's a great one especially if you're creative and you're looking for a different outlet to kind of stretch those creative muscles. I mean... I'm actually doing the crochet now, you know, just something to completely get outside of your computer screen and just like do something with your hands. This is very different experience. You might be onto something there. All my hobbies involve screens, all my work involves screens. It took me only 12 years to find something I was maybe 15, I don't know, but that was a lot. I started playing bass recently, I love that. Oh, nice. Yeah, that's definitely an analog experience. Yeah, yeah. And I quickly moved away from using a computer because when I started I plugged it into the computer and I was terrible. Oh, no. So shifting gears a little bit, how did you both kind of get into the developer space or the engineering space, however you want to look at it? Did you just kind of stumble into it or was it something that you'd wanted to do from very early on? Just kind of tell us about that journey a little bit. Simo, you first again. Okay. I wanted to be a pilot. Then I started wearing glasses and I decided for a few dozen of them I think. I was maybe 12 or 13. So it kind of was early on, but back in my time internet was not a thing. And so progress was, whatever book you could find, whatever you could buy. Then the university learned this thing, called the internet. From there on it was just impossible to do anything else. I started working on this project. Then I started creating mine. Actually, it really had to do a lot more than that either. When I started, I would continue to do the summer project, which is still is an absolutely good project to work on. But really had a lot to do. You know, forth by my hobby. So I started giving more projects there. I always been pretty passionate about computers. Cool. Kind of aligns with my experience, but yeah. Glasses, heights, that's the only difference there. I'm too tall to be a pilot. In my case, I was actually learning mathematics and I was doing my PhD in geometry and topology. When I realized that mathematics is probably like, it's a very lonely job to do. And I realized like I need some point correction. And so I tried to find something less nerdy. So I switched to IT from mathematics. And for me, it was like very important when I decided that I go outside of academia that I still have this feeling of people doing something for fun and interest and not just for salary. And so open source community, Fedora community was a place where I felt like, okay, it's not mathematics, but it at least has this academic feeling about like being interested in doing something nice for the higher purpose and not just being corporate business oriented person. So yeah, I enjoyed it so much. And then I was really happy to find some career path which led me to this place where I can do it actually as a job. So that's interesting. You said you left mathematics because it's kind of a lonely career path. But development IT can be pretty lonely as well. Was your experience different? Did you have the kind of interaction and collaboration that you were looking for? Or was that something you got here in Fedora and eventually Red Hat? Yeah, I think this is where the feeling might be different for people who are doing like deep development in one specific area. But I believe that in IT you still have the possibility to talk more with people around. It's not any person on the street who will understand what you're doing, but at least not a single person. So in mathematics you really do have your scientific advisor and maybe two colleagues who understand what you're talking about in the whole country or the whole world. And also in mathematics it's a bit too strict on how do you interact with people. In IT I can go to a conference and present a thing which I really don't know about. I mean I want to state a question and I want to engage in the conversation and so on. In mathematics you kind of show your results only when they are done and you don't have this nicer environment where you collaborate, where you share more openly. It may sound strange, but yeah, mathematics is kind of felt kind of closed for me. And open source is where you can really ask people for help and you do things together in this changes things. There's a definite culture difference there because I could see how mathematics would be closed whereas open source kind of celebrates especially with the onslaught of DevOps and agile methodologies and all this kind of thing that, hey, here's my thing. It's not a 1.0 version. So it's half broken, but what do you think? It's kind of celebrated versus kind of shun. Well, we are never done. Unlike mathematics. Well, I'll have to take your word on that because after about pre-algebra, my understanding of math just kind of plummeted through the floor. Yeah, I'm in that same boat where like the algebra class, the one class I needed to take to get a degree, like it took me 10 years to finally go ahead and do that. In fact, it was great for higher mathematics. I graduated with a bachelor's from DeVry University and what was great is that they had a higher level math class that was statistics for like statistics for technology or something like that. And when I asked what the four technology meant, they said, yeah, we kind of dumbed it down from the general statistics class for all you nerdy people. I was like, oh, great. I think I got to be in that class. So I got to be in the nerdy math class. Good job. Gold star for you, Eric. All right. So I'll pick on SEMO since the questions have been getting deferred to you first. So other than kind of your day job, what projects are you working on or you mentioned upstream? So what projects, what communities are you heavily involved with? I have to say that I'm less involved heavily in upstream communities these days than I was until a little while ago. I did get a visa and I met with a somewhere higher level of work. I think I have one package still that I own, but it's, I own it because there is no work to be done in there. And so that's easy. I still have a couple of projects of mine, very small things around nerdy stuff like GSAPI or some post-secret stuff. Very small things. Very small things that don't take a lot of my time. I had to stop working on the big ones because I couldn't follow them well enough to be really useful anymore. So I kind of, on the sidelines, I cheer up, I follow the menu list, you know, maybe once a week I go through a few of them and sometimes a surprise someone will come and say, hey, you said nothing for six months, how come you come here and say something? But yeah, the extent to which I can scale is limited at this point. But I'm still having a ton of fun following up on the sidelines if you want. They still keep tabs on all the projects that have been projected in the past, even though I might not say anything. I'd just like to see now what's going on, what happens. So that's it. Small things at this point. But I'm happy with that. I mean, there's more things are, you know, I think I can do meaningful contributions because they're small. So whenever I do a patch, it's like, hey, it's a lot of, it's a lot. My project gets three patches at once, right? So it feels more meaningful, even though it's a small thing. How about you, Alexandra? I guess right now I'm not doing as much as I wish I would. And I do have one package to maintain in Fedora. It's a game, actually. It's a mind test game. Several years ago I was like into this, you know, blog building game and so on. But I stopped playing it because I realized that playing it is the same as participating in open source. You just build wrong thing. I mean, you build from blogs and not from the code, but everything else is the same. So I kind of switched back to the real thing. I also played with Raspberry Pi and I have even library to switch a led light on Raspberry Pi from Fedora, and then I turned on and off the GPIO pin, and it was some fun experience with even rebuilding the kernel to get some device tree stuff in it there. So, yeah, not very many contributions, I guess, but some interest in some side projects, yeah. I mean, you go from building blocks to building bits, but they can both blow up your computer. So, you know, there's that. Yeah. So what I wanted, one of the things that I'm very passionate about is helping folks that are getting into the industry or are trying to pivot, because I've been in IT for probably close to 15 years now. And I think maybe 15 years ago you could have been a full stack engineer. You could kind of maybe have gotten your hands in a little bit of everything. But I think today technology is just so vast. There's so many different things, and it's so complex that there's no way. I mean, I've spent a decade on RHEL, and now I work on the marketing team, and I look at our operating system and it's like, yeah, can we break this down a little bit? So thankfully we have pods within the marketing BU, so I have certain areas of interest that I focus on. But it's just, it's so vast. Anyway, not to jump on my soapbox. So what would you recommend new developers, a new open source enthusiasts learn? What are kind of the things that you deal with or that you want to get involved with or that you think are coming up that will be important to the industry? Alexander, you have to first answer. My turn now. Okay, so what's important for the industry or important for RHEL? So if we're talking about work in distribution of kind of like RHEL distribution then, obviously like Fedora is the way. And once you get how, the understanding how Fedora works, you get the RHEL experience, not full RHEL experience, you still will get a bit of surprise how huge RHEL is, but you get the idea. But if we talk about industry, I think I would still suggest to learn the distribution side of things, because we have this controversy about like will containers eat the world or like will distribution still survive through the future? But what I see is like containers, the management of containers actually reinvents many concepts which distributions have in finding those familiar concepts in the container world. At least for me, it's like an interesting direction and it's bringing a bit of an order in the chaotic world of the modern development. We have no one understands where this piece of code comes from. So bringing this connecting those pieces. But I guess on a more very generic term, I'd say the future is to learn how to use your strengths in that ever changing IT world. So don't feel like because you have the skill in this thing and you have no skill in that thing, then IT is like close for you or you're not a real IT person or something. This key is like to find strengths in your special skills and to find the application. And it is so huge right now. So there's always an application. You just really need to think how to apply what you can do in the current IT landscape. IT is everything now. So you will find a way. That's awesome. And I love how you didn't just lift off a bunch of languages or tools. I like how you took that at a higher level. Great. Because I'm living where you should learn Rust. No, I'm kidding. But that's something I'm actually studying recently because I find it very fascinating. I'm not the kind of guy that goes behind every single new thing. I would say that from my point of view, you should really... I go through kind of a logical process maybe, but I think you should start early on whether you are more of a high level kind of guy or low level kind of guy because they're completely different thing. I tend to like the low level stuff and I kind of don't understand high level very much. It's just beyond me because whenever I think of something, I need to go and imagine how it goes all the way down to the bits in the CPU and high level that's just so removed that my mind blows. So I think that's the very first thing for someone that is looking to start. Like what you like to do from that point of view, high level or low level, then you pick up completely different directions from there. I experience in low level stuff all the way down to the core now, looking at the code, exactly how it works. In that case, I would just say find a project that has appeal to you, of course, because I'm never going to learn anything if you don't like it. Just try to understand how it works. I think that's how I started. I tried to understand how a piece of code worked for real. Partially was because I was trying to do something and it didn't work and it was like okay, I need to figure out how this thing works and then I kind of got lost in the right way. I don't remember if I ever did the thing that I started. I was looking for, I think every day people put different directions by the end of it, but that's the thing. Do something that you like and at least when you start to understand how things work. From there on, you'll find the right path. There will be either a project that you get really passionate about or just a technology without being attached to any specific project and become very experienced with that or in the end each one has a different path but I strongly believe that you need to do something that you like doing otherwise. It's harder. At least for me, it's harder if I don't do something. There's nothing wrong with just doing a job for money and I also think that's perfectly fine, but in that case your focus will probably be slightly different. In the technology itself there will be something else. So that was probably something you should decide whether you like coding for coding sake or if for you it's just that it's still for something else. Some people are very excellent dealing with the management of the project or the product. I know people that are really amazing in that area and clearly they exist and they help there. Just figure it out but I think if you look at some specific tech and you start looking deeply to them, you'll figure out what you like very enough. That's really amazing. So one thing that you both mentioned was the ability to pivot and I cannot stress how important that is because being here live streaming with Chris, talking about Red Hat, talking about REL is kind of the epitome of a career shift because I spent years as a systems administrator and I spent years trying to be the deep low level not career wise but technology wise being deep in the code understanding every piece of the operating system and network and that's not me where the high level stuff makes your eyes glaze over, that's where I live is I like to see the high level picture it took me probably about eight years of my career so I was close to 30. If you think about college and eight years in the career field I realized I'm a generalist and you know what, that's okay it's not a problem it's actually a strength and so it took me a few years to pivot to from systems administration systems engineering to sales and now to marketing and I feel like I've finally come home so take it from me and my years of experience in the field you have to pivot and you have to follow because otherwise you're dealing with stress you're dealing with burnout and if you don't like what you do I'm sorry, I'm not financially driven so if I hate what I'm doing there is no amount of money that's going to make that better sometimes meet people who come and say what do I need to do to become a CIS admin and I'm like CIS admin is a profession we term what we use maybe for next three years or five years do you really want to bet right now that this profession will survive for next 50-60 years and you want to plan just one direction you probably want to try it and get some experience but it's not who you are you're yourself you can work as a system administrator you're not limited to this work you can explore new areas, different approaches you can invent your own role and you will find a place to focus the career field is definitely not limited in fact I think it might have been one of my college math teachers that told me that I'm not going to do well in technology because my math skills just weren't big enough I mean I'll let the results speak for themselves but well at least you had a math teacher that told you that I did not now they were probably right about becoming a developer because I took a VB basic class and then a C-sharp class and it was just like nope and then literally looked across the hall and there was a networking lab I was like what classes do I have to sign up for to go play over there and they're like oh yeah we've got this degree field about I see sorry I distracted me oh yeah we've got this degree path called network communications management and you deal with servers and you deal with switches and you get to plug in cables and you get to build stuff I was like sign me up for that so Christian why don't you expand on that a little bit you say you don't see a lot of love for systems administrators oh you well that's good because I I think I know where Christian's coming from and I'd love for all of us to address that I mean I am a solutions architect now but deep inside I still think like a sys heaven yeah I think we all do to an extent right like I flipped that switch on and off now where you know before it was all I did right like was just sys admin now it's like all right I got a sys admin this thing I forgot to marketing that thing I've got to open source this thing that document that you know like all these skills have built up over time to where it's like I can think like different people and sometimes that sys admin thinking is great sometimes it doesn't work too so you got with my wife right like my spouse has no idea what the hell I do like technically but she knows that there's lights and there's a camera involved in that kind of thing right like but what she doesn't realize is that we know there's things happening right you know we're working on things on a server downstairs or we're you know on a lab and you know there's technical pieces to all of our jobs but there's also non-technical pieces to all of our jobs as well and that requires that human knowledge where you know humans don't act like computers and you have to think you know with a different hat on essentially yeah like I tell people I wear many hats at Red Hat yeah it's I don't think it's a lack of love for systems administrators it's I used to be one I spent a lot of years as sys admin and there's a lot of parts of that type of role that I enjoyed but in the end it just it wasn't what I was what I was driven to do this is more my thing in fact the systems administration work that I do nowadays is amazing I get to basically write a lab this is how you would do a thing if you're like we did convert to rail we did in place upgrades I I wrote pretty much all the commands based on documentation on other people's experiences on this is the easiest way to do this thing we want to convert from rail 7 to rail 8 this is the easiest way to do it does this fix all of your problems does this take care of every use case no but this covers 80% and that's where I shine and what was great was we did the demo it sort of worked it worked on my machine when we were off air minor detail but then I got to move on and I got to start prepping for the next show so it's not the sysadmin is a bad title and I do agree that in the industry sysadmins have gotten a bad rap and I don't think that's I don't think that's deserved at all it's a market dynamic I don't understand and I think sysadmins have become I also go ahead sorry I actually worked as sysadmin too so don't feel like I'm attacking the profession I meant more of the term itself it has some weight some burden of the stereotype attached to it at this moment so I feel like it's not the work itself but it's some impression it created and it pulls it down sometimes and this is why it's evolving so it's not disappearing definitely it's just it gets renamed it gets introduced in some different way and so on I wouldn't say that we should get rid of sysadmins no it's definitely no it's a valid work but it gets some evolution to get away from that stereotypical sysadmin who is not interested in anything and just doesn't actually do anything and just waits for his system to work it's not the good kind of sysadmin and we're getting evolving over it into some areas where you actually have interest in some development of your systems and some evolution of your products and so on so the evolution happens so you don't my point was like don't attach yourself to one specific title if title evolves you can evolve to you can choose different areas and you can find more interesting things that are maybe around you yeah don't close your eyes on that in fact I also started a sysadmin profession I was doing stuff in 364 for people that still know what that is but today I'm calling myself a cyber ability engineer and I'm not a subreddit right well and I think that's a perfect example because if you trace the history of sysadmin's back far enough you end up with electrical engineers true and so I mean none of I I couldn't wire a circuit I couldn't work on a circuit board I don't know how any of that I don't want to do that anymore that's just that's not part of my job and I just I know that if I plug this thing into this box and push this button that if everything's working correctly then lights come on and discs spin up and that kind of thing so I don't have to do the electrical engineering part but that's not something we think about as a sysadmin and and to Simo's point in a decade from now there may not the term may fall out of regular use and it could be site reliability engineer it could be DevOps engineer it could be cloud architect in fact so it's I don't think I mean all four of us were sysadmin's at one point the term is someone has to care for those computers right doesn't matter what you call it so Christian says that the term is considered the low level entry job my suggestions is that it should be changed to something else because today sysadmin are more like sysops and not just admins that's a great point sysops right yeah so and I've seen different I've seen different cultures different companies address this different ways there's sysadmin systems engineer systems architect kind of in a tiered position I've seen companies break it out to where you're sysadmin 3 then you get promoted to sysadmin 2 sysadmin 1 I mean it means something different to different folks sorry to pick on you Christian but no we're not I think you've raised a very valid point I do too because the last quote sysadmin I hired was actually a junior role we needed a junior sysadmin right that we could teach and kind of mold take your deep Linux knowledge apply that but also now we're going to add on to that and we were a quote devops team so we had a need for a junior we had a need for a lot of research but there's plenty of gray in between here and there you know that has to get filled in as well and I think you know whether it's a low level term or not they're still the same thing right like to an extent an sre is a sysadmin to an extent a devops engineer is a sysadmin they just might know a little bit more about networking or something of that effect let's see Chris did you I feel like I've kind of dominated the conversation do you have any any questions for for our guests like what is the thing that drives you to get up and work on rail every morning right like you roll out of bed you fall on the floor and what's that experience tell me it's got to be all it's got to be all the video conferences all the meetings I bet that's what drives them I think we can all share the hatred of meetings yes for me it's actually really really interesting to see a very huge infrastructure a very huge company and to find you know the logic inside this this whole mess in which which if you look from from a bit far you're like this is complete chaos see the words you cannot understand it and then you start to dig in and you start to find you know connections and logic and this is why it happened this is what brings it and then you start to untangle things and this untangling things is really my passion I like to understand it and to explain to others what I understood this is the the thing which I really enjoyed explaining to people what I understood people sometimes hate me for that but I do that all the time and I really like that part of the job feels like Alexandre is into debugging the organization I'm more on the programming part I mean I guess it's as a as a team leader I have to interact with a lot of people on the team I like helping out you know for junior people maybe figuring out what's the next thing I have to do the things but also there's a lot of part of my job is connection with other people the organization within rail or maybe I sometimes also outside of rail so there's a lot of I'm always basically enabling other people to do their job I would say at this point that's my probably major contribution and that's what I kind of like doing in my career sometimes frustrating sometimes it's satisfying because you can see the fruits of you know of the organizational work you try to do just like everything so it's one of the programming of the work so well you're well you're making connections and kind of engaging different resources and while Alexandra's kind of untangling the mess of code for this project or that project it's I get the pleasure of going out learning what you all are doing looking at the upcoming features then to Christian's point I get to put on my sysadmin hat and go oh this would be great because I remember this time where I had this problem so now this feature could have fixed this problem it could have been a system role or something and then it's now my job it's now my pleasure to then go out and tell our sales folks tell the community, tell the audience of the show hey this feature is coming it'll help you fix problems like this so that's where I really activate that's where I get excited so let's kind of bring that process to the forefront is there something cool coming out with rel is there something cool you guys are working on that you'd love to share with folks I'll pick on you yeah I was waiting for that so I guess it depends what you think it's cool don't violate any state secret no no no all I'm going to say is it's not a little bit so my phone will be ringing in 10 minutes yeah so I think in my side it's really kind of niche like cryptography that kind of stuff it's also very obscure from time to time if you look at the stable rel I relate we did work on a few system roles that you mentioned very recently that coming out something came out in 804 already at some level in 805 that was a interesting stuff I kind of like Ansible because it allows you to do so many things with a somewhat easier way and more organic approach so I think that's a nice stuff the stuff I'm looking for is in round 9 we are bringing open cell 3 there and it might not sound exciting but it was a crap ton of work that's the thing it required extraordinary forcing coordination and fun fact it's one of the rare cases where we had to work on rel before fedora and the only reason is that rel is smaller than fedora less packages in that sense it has less packages and less dependencies so there are thousands thousands of packages somewhere pulling open cell but thousands is better than 10,000 so it was easier to do it that way also because we knew the process was going to take it took us basically a year and a half since we started and maybe 2 years since the first time we started thinking about it and in fedora time that's like 4 releases 3 releases and it would have been really really disruptive and although yes you can throw bad stuff you will hire from time to time you don't want to break the stable releases so it was a very interesting experience I didn't do most of it of course other people in my team did it but it is organizationally the sheer amount of work to bring that thing into the composes and the fields roots and you know fixing all the dependencies and you know explaining or helping people out that was a great experience and I think it will be very interesting when rel 9 comes out so I think that's exciting for me I don't know how exciting for other people because well I mean to give you an idea of the scale at which you were working with I just pulled from the blog posting SSL 3 release post 3 years of development work 17 alpha releases 2 beta releases 7500 commits from over 350 different authors that's a lot of work and doing any amount of that was not trivial it was really a huge event especially because it's not a normal release in the sense that it's not just incremental there was a change in the architecture the internal architecture that has repercussions not so much luckily to more modern applications but there were changes to be made approachable not like something that you have to rewrite it's not a different library but when you talk integration at the level of the distribution if you change a single function you're going to break a dozen or more packages just by the change in semantics the signature of the function so it is a challenging it was a really satisfying to go through it and see that we made it through at this point there's nothing secret if you look at Sentos string you'll find it there and you'll find old packages that have their build against it so it works at least we hope I think it works but I was amazing I think it will be a nice thing technically that's what I'm excited about that's really cool don't discount the work you're doing just this morning I think I had two or three articles hit my RSS reader about more crypto attacks and ransomware it's out there and the work that's getting done with open SSL supply chain network bound disk encryption I could list off six different things that are top of mind right now for not just Red Hat but our upstream projects for the government for people worldwide it's no small task three years and 7500 commits that's a lot Alexandra what are you excited about it's involved in online bootstrap activities so I'm kind of very excited that online is heading to release and I'm kind of not shy to put my label on this for online release this is what I've done of course it's like work of entire real engineering but it's nice to see like the release coming and prepared and being released and while we were trying to package this initial amount of Fedora content into REL9 and of course during this time we created the Centro Stream 9 and I'm absolutely excited that REL development is now happening in public and that public can see, can participate and one of the future common features is that public can actually that changes in Centro Stream via third party testing so for example even downstream rebuilds like ALMA or like anyone can basically implement certain test suites and test Centro Stream changes and this will be included in the consideration so extending this community contribution collaboration with the community this is what I'm totally excited about that's really great yeah and I'm really excited by what you're saying because I've been neck deep in REL 8.5 and 9.0 beta activities the last few weeks so getting ready for the big announcements coming up in November so that's I'm really excited and it'll be great to see the new development lifecycle from Fedora to Centro Stream to REL9 in place because like you said more people can get involved and bring kind of the resources of Fedora CentOS and REL together to just make an even more secure and perform an operating system so there's so many cool things going we'll have to have you both on to talk about that kind of post release because REL9 is going to be great there's some great stuff coming in fact if you would like putting my host hat back on if you'd like you can go to redhat.com REL try R-H-E-L and you can download copies of REL and I believe that also includes beta entitlements now so if you go and try out REL you can try out not only the current release but also the releases to come before we wrap up is there any any place either of you would like to send folks? I would say go and try Centro Stream Cool Centro Stream and Fedora of course we welcome everyone in Fedora I got a couple of Fedora servers here and my workstation runs Fedora 34 so although a couple of my more crazy friends are already running the release candidate for 35 it's like I'm glad that you can do that but I do live streaming and podcasting and I need some degree of reliability and this next time I've told myself I want to wait 48 hours before I upgrade just to be safe I'm usually the day of 11am I'll do a day of still I'm also Fedora 34 thinking that SBES was so good their paid experience is just endless I remember the time where I had to do stuff and I'd like to do stuff whatever an upgrade happened like going or when she doesn't go that's car pianda she eats and packages it breaks everything my workstation in fact I think started on 30 maybe 31 but I've done in place upgrades all the way up to 34 so I had to uninstall the audio stack and reinstall it something about the switch some of the changes around pipe wire having been around for my individual instance being around for a while I think I ran into some kind of an issue but did a yum reinstall on a few of the packages and no problems works like a champ and that's in place upgrades so that's great news for Fedora and all that stuff just way down into into rel in fact are in place upgrade show a few weeks ago notwithstanding I'm pretty sure my Fedora goes back to at least 18 not this machine my personal machine of course the work machine gets refreshed every three years I know somebody who had a long time system that they'd had going since like the early Fedora 20s and they were so proud that they've kept it going that long that they ended up virtualizing it throwing it on their home lab server just so they can continue to do in place upgrades on it even though the hardware is long since retired my hardware changes at least three times already same here just image to the new SSD or whatever it is it keeps living people so very much I know it's crazy time of the year to have you guys on but I really appreciate you giving an hour of your time to come and chat with us all and share your experiences this has been a great conversation I agree pleasure definitely head on out to red.htslashfree underscore rel to give rel a try and to see what our folks have been working on and other than that Chris we'll see you in a couple of weeks another Thursday episode and then we'll be back on our Wednesday schedule sounds good next up get ops guide to the galaxy folks join us in a few seconds