 Toot-toot-toot-toot-toot My day was going great Just pushed a code update But then the pager started humming Toot-toot-toot Oops, did I just delete? Half the production fleet That's sinking feelings coming From deep within my plumbing Now my life is flashing Hope my boss will show compassion And I really, really need someone to say Hey, it's gonna be okay You didn't just set fire to your resume This happens to the best Try not to get too stressed It'll be an awesome story someday I tweaked a small config Toot-toot-toot-toot My day was going great Just pushed a code update But then the pager started humming Toot-toot-toot-toot Oops, did I just delete? Half the production fleet That's sinking feelings coming From deep within my plumbing Now my life is flashing Hope my boss will show compassion And I really, really need someone to say Hey, it's gonna be okay You didn't just set fire to your resume This happens to the best Try not to get too stressed It'll be an awesome story someday I tweaked a small config Turns out that it was big And now my app has been beheaded Whoa, when I do something wrong I fear I don't belong How can the world forget it? We're trending now on Reddit Oh, mistakes will find you But you've got a team behind you Oh, so fix the process Yes, but don't dismay Oh, hey, hey It's gonna be okay We'll do a full postboard Jump some other day It was a swing and miss But we will learn from this And we'll all be better engineers Like, look, here's what you need to know When something gets destroyed If there's negligence or mousetrain You shouldn't be employed But if a human is assuming Then the problem is the system It's got wrenching butt clenching butt You work with them again Happen to a junior Or to a senior Just because you cause a little pause Doesn't mean you're incompetent It means you do and work with real effectiveness A scara battle, baby That'll earn you some respect We all have been there To miss the boys To attend their show We try to do a blameless RCA So, white, we've all screwed something up So welcome to the club We would love to hear your You will still be here with this flow So, white, we've all screwed something up So welcome to the club We would love to hear your story Well, good evening Got something brand new to start us off with tonight So, I'll aboard the hype train Hype train's a-coming I hear it around the bend Hype train's a-coming It's carrying some new tech trend For me, can't wait to see what it will be Hype train's a-coming It might be cloud or gen AI It might be better, worse or metaverse But it won't pass me by It might not stay for very long But I'll enhance my resume Before it's gone Hype train's a-coming I hear it's mighty wheels Saying Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes Can't help but love the way it feels To let it roll right over me Hype train's a-coming And the party's humming On that train The good times roll For the startup selling shovels In a frantic rush for gold At hackathons The hustlers grind By their courses, books and sub-stacks Or you're sure to fall behind Hype train's a-coming Hype train's a-coming Hype train's a-coming Hype train's a-coming Hype train's a-coming Hype train's a-coming Hype train's a-coming Hype train's a-leavin' There go the last VCs They leave behind a tangled wreck Of burnout and abandoned MVPs And another JavaScript framework somehow Hype train's departing Now the hard work's starting We'll clean up that software core And eventually build systems That are better than before But as the work becomes mundane We'll cast our eyes to the horizon For that inbound train Oh, there's a part of us However tiny That loves the new and shiny That longs to hear that whistle blow There's a part that wants to Our peers to sit up front And wave and steer To be real live Gosh darn engineer And that's how they get us Hype train's a-coming It's back again, my friends The track's a giant circle So the excitement never ends You see? Now just hang on everybody Whoa! Hype train's a-coming Hype train's a-coming My name is Forrest Brazil It's great to be here with you tonight at Upscale I'm kind of a long time cloud in DevOps guy Most recently I was at Google Cloud And I left there just a month or two ago Partly on a quest to become less cynical About the technology industry And as you can see so far that's going very well But listen, you know Tonight what we're going to try to do Is go on a quest for the joy Of what we do The joy of software engineering And some of the things that steal that joy from us And some practical ways we can get it back And of course hype can be kind of a double-edged sword It brings joy, it takes joy, whatever But I think one of the primary things that steals our joy As engineers, as operators Is just organizational dysfunction, right? I've been in companies that have gone on these Multi-year DevOps transformations And sometimes at the end of that time All we had done is kind of refactored ourselves Into slightly different silos But, you know, I like silos, right? They're safe, they're warm, they're comfortable Sometimes they're full of corn There's really, you know There's nothing better than a silo Until it's time to change the status quo, right? Time to change the way we do things And then they become missile silos And I had seen this so much in my career That I decided to write a song about it And the song is called The Reorg Rag Would you like to hear it? All right, all right, I'll see how this goes Well, our company used to have these big silos We had Devin Ops in two different rows And they'd rarely communicate except to fight So we said we're gonna make ourselves a dedicated DevOps team Because everybody loves a go-between We're gonna break these silos down We're gonna do it, right? We're gonna do a little reorg Yes, siri, this time We're gonna fix this company We're gonna have this DevOps thing in the bag After one more round of the Reorg Rag Well, the DevOps team started hot as heck But they soon became kind of a bottleneck And instead of two silos, now we had three So we said we're gonna make Dev do their own ops Now it's all in the cloud They can figure out how And we believe the term for this is SRE We're gonna do another Reorg Yes, siri, this time We're gonna fix this company We're gonna storm the silos And capture the flag After one more round of the Reorg Rag Well, it turns out Ops is incredibly tough And our dev soon said they'd had enough So we brought back Ops But now they needed more They said you're gonna need a platform team To guard and guide And the DBAs wouldn't come along for the ride Oh, we had silos everywhere And they were all at war So here's where we're at I'm on the tooling team Which is owned by Dev But functionally, it rolls up under this new cloud COE Which was recently spun out of Corp IT With a dotted line to security And some of those folks still report to me I think technically I'm my own VP We're gonna need a big Reorg Yes, siri, somebody put a sound of a misery Because my optimism may start to say If we play another round Of the play another round Of the play another Replay another Replay another Replay another Replay another Replay another Play another round of the Reorg Rag Thank you very much So actually, let me tell you a little secret That song actually got me in a lot of trouble at Google I'm not even kidding So I put this out on the internet Started getting some attention The next thing I knew I had a direct message from Google Cloud's chief marketing officer A lovely person And the message just said I just want you to know that I liked it Which is never what you want to hear From someone that you rarely hear from And it turned out what had happened was People I didn't know at Google Were putting in complaints to HR And they were saying He's spilling company secrets Which is kind of a classic case of telling on yourself I think But just sort of underscores the point Organizational dysfunction is a thief of joy And you know what's another thief of joy? Enterprise architects No, they're great people I think their mothers probably love them But at one company I worked at We had enterprise architects that designed this amazing CICD pipeline for us It was state-of-the-art And this is what it looked like when all was said and done So we had kind of an automated testing step And then we would build our code And we would deploy it to a development environment And when we had done that We would probably make a few manual tweaks And then we would promptly forget about the tweaks And deploy everything to our staging environment Of course when we got there nothing would work right So we would make some more tweaks And then we would wait for change approval And we would wait for that Probably until the sun burned out Whereupon we would escalate to our director And everything would be approved site unseen And then all we had to do was just Wait for our 3AM maintenance window And deploy to production And as you might expect with a well-designed process like that Everything worked perfectly No, just kidding, right? Why would any of this work? Errors followed Downtime Panic A 50-person conference call With just all your favorite people on it And then after many, many more manual tweaks Production would finally be returned No, it's not really to a working state But let's say to an acceptably broken state And then the final step of this state-of-the-art CICD pipeline Was we would all run to LinkedIn to update our skills With DevOps, automation, and troubleshooting I wish I could say that was an exaggeration If anything, that's understating the problem But notice what's going on here, right? We're calling this CICD But we've got some ITIL mixed in There's automation but not really You know, we're calling it continuous delivery But then we have these maintenance windows In the middle of everything Right, so if you let this sort of thing go on Before long, nobody knows what words mean anymore And then what happens then Is you develop these warring factions Where everybody's got their own fiefdoms Their own definitions and their own pet projects That they're defending from each other And you know who likes to jump in the gap Between those factions? Vendors Now, again, I like vendors, I've worked for some But there are some of them that they promise joy They promise solutions, right? That's just joy by another name But oftentimes what they deliver is just sprawl The song that I'm going to play for you now Is probably the song of mine That the most people have heard around the world But because I recorded it during the pandemic And then I was working for Google It has never been performed live until right now I genuinely don't know how this is going to go So hang in there with me This is 168 AWS services in two minutes There's MQ, EC2, and Redshift and Gamelifting Glue There's Lumberyard Light, Salem, WorkDocs and WorkMail With WorkLink and PrivateLink too Detective Inspector, Interested Advisor, Cognito, Coretto, S3 Data, Pipeline and DataSync, AppMesh and AppSinker You could use simple DB, but don't AppStream, TimeStream, Augmented AI Autoscaling, Lambda, Amplify Oh, Direct Connector, Just Connect, Configure RDS These are the major services of AWS, CLI, CDK, TextTrack, Lexa, Visex and X-Ray SNS, SCS, SQS, SCS, EFS, DeerBest, it's okay Athena and Polly and Kendra and Macy Alexa for Business, Cloud9, CodeArtifact CodeBuilding, CodeDeploy, CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeGuru CodeStar and Chatbot and Chime Translate, Transcribe, TransferFamily All the many things of IoT Oh, there's CloudFormation, LakeFormation, FreeRTOS These are the major services of AWS, Proton, Elemental, VMware and AWS This key change is brought to you by KMS Comprehend, Infrancia, Deep Learning, Deep Bracer, Deep Lens Deep Composer, Aurora and then CostExplorer to track your expanding expense Service Catalog, Artifact, QuickSight, Device, Farm and Workspace As Glacier as Cold RoboMaker, Sumerian, Kafka, Kinesis, Control Tower, Pinpoint and Fargate I'm told, Recognition, Fraud Detector's Cool Wavelength, Blockchain, Well-Architected Tool Oh, half of them start with Amazon for reasons we can't guess These are the major services of AWS Now it's time to deploy Global Accelerator V-P-C-E-L-B and the database for AlphaD3 There's Compute Optimizer and Personalizer, Event for G-Q-L-D-B There's CloudChurch and CloudWatch and CloudBabba, CloudFront, CloudTrail and CloudHSM SageMaker, Step Functions, Web, A-C-M-E-C-R-E-M-R-S-A-R-A-M And there's Outposts and Outforks and Organizations Now it's a zone at Flow and Ground Station and DynamoDB and DocumentDB And Neptune and KeySpace is shielding our duty and the Elastics and the Managers and the Dashboards and the Hubs I'm cheating now, we gotta wrap this up Greengrass Forecasts, Tools and SDKs Storage, Transit and API Gateways Oh, there's Bracket and Budgets and Backup and Batchy C-S-E-K-S-E-B-S These are the major services for all intents and purposes Till ReInvent writes a new verse, that is of AWS My wife is in the audience tonight She's never heard that live before either So, if that doesn't give her the ick, I don't know what could Anyway, if all that happened as a result of these warring factions and these organizational dysfunctions and these sprawling code bases is that we lost our joy I think a lot of us could probably pick up our paycheck and move on with our lives, but of course that's not the worst that happens Production goes down and it doesn't come back up You might have what I call a false flag attack which is where a disgruntled dev sets all of the feature flags in your code base to false Or you might have to be on that horrible call where the CISO tells the CEO, yeah, somebody's in our network It's not us, we don't know who they are and we don't know what they've touched So we're going to have to shut the entire company down Right? Those are not the calls you want to be on And if you go through enough of that kind of thing you may end up with the ultimate thief of joy which is cynicism What do they say in doing? What's the mind killer? Fear is the mind killer I actually don't agree with that fully At least fear can motivate you to do something even if it's the wrong thing, you know But cynicism is the ultimate anti-motivator, right? Cynicism says hope is dead and trying is useless and there's no point in trying to make things better because they're only going to get worse I am not going to leave you in a place of cynicism today We're going to pull ourselves out of this pit together one step at a time And so the first practical tactical thing we're going to talk about to bring back some of that joy as developers is simply challenging buzzwords You say what's a buzzword? Here's my definition A buzzword is any term of art, jargon phrase, whatever that turns critical thinking into magical thinking Let me give you an example This is a real guy based on a real guy I met him a few years ago He was working for a hardware vendor that shall remain nameless And he had this real It was Dell And he had this real Be in his monad about cloud which he apparently felt was a buzzword And he says, who needs the cloud? You know, our customers they're seeing like 80% server utilization across their data center environments, right? And he was really exercised about this about defeating that buzzword of cloud But if you notice He's actually using another buzzword there, isn't he? What is it? Shout it out Say it loud Utilization That is a really boring buzzword But it is a buzzword Because when you hear it your brain just starts to shut down, doesn't it? And that little bit of imposter syndrome inside you says I don't totally know what he's talking about But he really sounds like he knows what he's talking about So I'm gonna shut up and pretend I get it And maybe everything will all just make sense later on It won't make sense later on So it didn't make less sense as time goes on So what you have to do is challenge the buzzword and ask the question Utilized How? Right? Now I don't know how his customers were running their data centers But I can tell you some of the servers I've seen So let's break it down, shall we? Now 20% we know is free space right off the bat So that's great out But what else do we have here? 25% of that server space might just be monitoring agents and management tools Right? No workloads at all Another 20% might just be RDP sessions with open browser tabs Right? A bunch of engineers firing up Chrome and googling Why is this server so slow? 8% is definitely not cryptojacking It's just a non-identified process It's fine, don't worry about it 7% is productive work Yay, really good And then the last 20% of course is just one majestically inefficient database query Right? There's a lot of ways to get to 80% utilization When I drew this cartoon and shared it out I thought, I don't know This may not resonate with anybody Maybe nobody's seen this What I found was that I was not being intense enough in what people were doing I had one person tell me They had engineers at their company They had this mandate across the team that you had to get to 80% utilization or whatever it was So they had engineers writing for loops with time.sleeps in them That is a real story from a real company to bring up to 80% utilization Challenge those buzzwords or that will happen to you Right? And you'll find that as you bring back some of your control over your language you bring back some joy into your job Okay? The second Whoa, there we go The second really tactical thing that I want to talk to you about And we're running a little short on time so we'll have to move quickly here The second thing I want to talk to you about is just psychological safety We modeled that in the first video recorded song that we played And a lot of us are familiar with that concept at a team level This idea that you want to have blameless postmortems and you want to focus on fixing the process But I think a lot of us don't think enough about what psychological safety means for us as an individual You have to make a personal choice to say my self-worth is separate from the projects I'm given and the code that I work on and the bugs that they may have Right? And I'm not going to let my ego I'm not going to get myself loathing get in the way of that That's actually really hard I've struggled with that a lot And so I want to do a little exercise with you all tonight We're going to model psychological safety as a room here Okay? This is very scary for me I don't know how this is going to go I haven't actually done this with an audience before But we're going to improvise a tech song together right now Are you up for that? Okay, let's do it All right So we may go down crashing in musical flames But we're going to give it a try So I need a programming language A configuration language Something that you're using hopefully in production right now Just shout it out Yeah, I'm all I heard What else? Give me a couple more Python is good What else? Give me a couple more Yes Nix I heard Nix Oh, I love Nix Someone sitting in the front row today Who shall remain nameless, Chase Said to me What is Nix? Can you explain Nix to me? I cannot explain Nix But I can write a song about Nix You want to do it? Should we do Nix? All right Now I need a musical style to play this in Something I'm playing the piano Somebody shout it out Bebop Okay, I heard jazz I heard swing, bebop I heard a lot of that kind of thing That all works great Okay, so it'll be something like that Theoretically All right, so this is a kind of old school Showtune, swing kind of song And it is called Nix So let's say Look Up in the sky It's a configuration language No, it's a package manager Well, maybe it's a build system But it's also an operating system kind of You know what it is? It's Nix Nix There's no problem Pure functions can't fix with Nix Nix I outgrew ducker when I was like six Now let's see We don't know if it's a package manager Or an OS It's basically too beautiful for words I guess But when you see the light You'll be shining at your desk With the power The power The power Hopefully that's now clear as mud No, but okay, so that was scary, right? But we got through that together That was really fun Maybe we'll do another one of those later If we get a chance after the lightning talks And if you all don't have a bunch of other things to get to We'll see But anyway, for right now I want to move on to the third and final Tactical practical thing we can do to increase our joy Quite simply is just mentorship So look At some point in your career You're going to reach a point where you can't derive From being the person who pushes the big red button And deploys the thing to broad and sees that it works Right? You've got to start living vicariously Through people on your team that you've mentored And you've got to start getting excited And deriving joy from them advancing in their careers And them building cool things Putting multiple groups of people together That hate each other And seeing them actually work together And build something on their own That takes some practice and work to get there But there's a really deep and fulfilling joy that comes Once you sublimate your own desires And learn to live in that world And I want to sing a little song for you tonight That just kind of models that way of thinking It's called You Belong You won't always feel like a rock star Sometimes you'll struggle just to carry the tune In the mirror you'll see an imposter And you'll wonder if the whole world's smarter than you And stronger and faster And you're a disaster But baby you're wrong Cause you belong Even when you don't believe it You belong I've got help here when you need it Just hold on Yeah the road ahead looks steep So take my hand we'll make the leap together Oh whoa Sometimes you'll feel folks who seem diffuse and unfair We'll have a dream and it turns out That no one else around you seems to care And when you see what you're up against It's fine to fight to feel incensed Or just to move on Cause you belong In a place where you're supported You belong Where you're challenged and rewarded Just hold on As you feel your power growing You can choose the way you're going And it's Oh whoa Days you're gonna reach the mountaintop Yeah it's not if but when And you do I hope you'll take a beat to stop And celebrate how far you've come Remember where you've been And then reach back to those behind you Shine a light so they can find you Help the ones you can Then sing to them again Tell them You belong When you're new and nervous Then you still belong I know it cause I've been You just hold a head look steep So take my hand we'll make the leap together Oh whoa Let's sing it together now Oh whoa I can't hear you let's try it again All right I have one last song to play for you But I want to leave you with this We started by singing about hype Right and about how it you know Kind of fuels excitement and brings joy Even as we know it creates some problems We'll have to solve down the road But we don't always get to work On the latest new and shiny thing do we Some of us are you know Supporting things that have been around a while That may not be the most exciting flashy thing in the world But they pay the bills and they do important work While you're thinking about that Let me remind you real quick My name is Forrest Brazil My website is goodtechthings.com I have a lot of songs A lot of cartoons and things there Please check that out You can subscribe to my mailing list there Get all the new cartoons and videos and things first So please do check that out I'm at Forrest Brazil on all the many social platforms That exist now So whichever of those is your flavor of choice You can probably find me there Anyway but listen we build these legacy systems You know and and there's value in that There's joy in that And so I want to finish tonight by saying that You know even if you're working on these systems That are 30 40 years old Maybe in some cases There's that work is worth doing right There's joy to be found there And I want to encourage you that you can find that joy And you can add value even in legacy land Last night I dreamed about the green field again Where I could build it too No constraints or workarounds in that moment of zen But then my pager woke me And I knew we're living in legacy land Modernizing whatever I can while the past is always chasing me We missed the payment on our technical debt But we haven't defaulted yet But we're gonna see if we can outrun entropy Here in legacy land Build server fellow It's weakened memory But hey aren't we all someone tell me when We get there I still see the waterfall I found some code that caused me the physical pain An ancient collage of sheer incompetency I called the whole team in and well Turns out the guy who made the mess was me We're living in legacy land Duck tape stuck to our sweaty hands And nothing seems ideal With weird acquisitions coming into the fold And temporary fixes that are 10 years old But still we're shipping something here in legacy land Remember the people who made those long ago technical decisions Were doing their best with the resources they had And what they built is still here because it works That's what legacy means And we celebrate that even as we work to make it better We're always working on performance and scale Refactoring and optimizing things that got stale Adding fail Living in legacy land It's messy and weird but on the other hand Yeah so is the most of reality And slowly surely whenever I do Well if I'm lucky the best reward will be A whole new Thank you very much y'all are wonderful Who's ready for some lightning talks All right Hannah and upscale team back to you Thank you all Let's hear it one more time for forest Hi welcome to upscale I'm Hannah I'm your host today If you haven't been to an upscale before Here's generally how it works We've got some great speakers set up for you For the rest of the evening We have a set number of slides and they auto advance on them So they have no control over their their decks After they've sent them to me So it creates a little bit more fun If they're a little off timing So that being said we like to be very supportive When things go wrong because that's half the fun So let's practice our clapping For when slides go wrong Excellent That's what we like to hear Okay so without further ado Let's bring up our first speaker Naja Practice the clapping Yeah yeah yeah we got it Best How important is AI in our lives? On average we interact with 30 to 50 different AI systems Every single day This invisible influence shapes our choices Quietly but significantly From what we watch to what we buy And how we think So how do we ensure AI understands and adheres to our moral values And who decides what these values are These systems encapsulate our collective knowledge Values and culture Even our creative expression Is being synthesized And perhaps outsourced to AI While this is very exciting for the evolution of our cognitive abilities It poses also some ethical considerations Do we really want our future to be shaped By few companies in Silicon Valley? It's important to think about What that means for diversity and fairness around the world So in this debate between open versus closed I'm here to make the case for open source AI With minimal government intervention Keeping the technology safe yet accessible to all We shouldn't let the few codify morality Open source principles Ensure democratic approach to ethical considerations Questions like what kind of AI do we prefer? One that sugarcoats reality Or one that confronts us with brutal honesty Just as we have free media I believe we should have diversity in AI Ensuring plurality of voices and perspectives And because thought control is a threat And we should confront it with all what we can And open source has a track record of elevating technology Making it more accessible universal and safer In fact the world infrastructure from cryptography to servers run on open source Open source is also safer Transparency in developing these models Ensure that allows for community vetting bug fixing and ethical scrutiny So it all boils down to the question of what kind of world we want to live in A world of diversity and openness Or a homogeneous and secretive one Success in AI could be our greatest achievement Or our last one Remember Okay Sorry about that So yeah success in AI could be our great achievement or our last one And we must advocate for open source principles And innovate and build with open source models And collaborate with one another For a more inclusive and ethical future And the best way to raise wonderful children is being a wonderful parent And we have agency collectively we can Guide this technology to a greater future for all So be a voice and not an echo Your voice is not just for election day Your voice is in every social media post In every blog and in every git push you commit Join the conversation Sign up for our email newsletter at singularitysyndicate.org And we also have a podcast and we'd love to hear from you So thank you so much Thank you so much Naja While we're waiting for Krista to come up I want to give a quick thank you to CIQ for sponsoring our drinks and cupcakes Who likes free drinks So thank you so much to CIQ for sponsoring upscale And with that I'll welcome Krista to the stage We're clapping remember Good job Open source communities often rely on volunteers to do the work This means we can't just hire when we need more people to do the work We have to be creative First and foremost it has to be easy to become a volunteer How can we expect someone to visit our house If they have a hard time getting in the front door One way to make it easy is to make shared knowledge accessible That way anyone who wanders in has a place to get caught up On what the project is up to without needing a personal tour As a first stop a code of conduct Outlines from the very beginning what a newcomer can expect from a community This code includes examples of positive behaviors That are community values like kindness open-mindedness And includes examples of behaviors that are considered offensive And it also outlines the consequences of offensive behavior When newcomers read this code and realize that there are rules of engagement that protect them They are they're reassured to continue further into getting involved in the project Past that point you would want newcomers to be able to discover how your project is organized This happens with clear documentation both of the project and of how the community works One way to make documentation stand out is by paying attention to accessibility features Like having a standard pre-reading layout for all documents in a category Or reviewing all documentation for removing outdated or inappropriate language What's more documentation needs to be up to date needs to be supported On a variety of browsers needs to work across a range of devices Like on mobile or tablet or desktop all of these are important to making something accessible It should be easy to contribute to documentation it should be easy to find this starting point It should be easy for people to easy to comprehend for people who might not have English as their first language And for the more complex parts there should be easy places to ask a live human for help Easy is also the word of the day for storing other shared knowledge A newcomer will want to find be able to easily find Notes from previous meetings links to recordings blog posts or standard presentations that explain the project And if that content doesn't exist Because the project isn't actually holding meetings or publishing blogs yet Creating content like that is a great place to start with making a project more accessible Don't know where to start with blog content. Sometimes that's hard There should at the very least be an initial post that describes Why the project exists and what the project commits to the community? That's a lot of information and it may be stored in various places within your project So above all a project needs a single point of entry that collates where to find all of this shared knowledge And that's the read me file. This is an introductory statement about the project And includes a bullet point list of all of these pieces of information that I've been talking about And again the point of documenting all of this shared knowledge Is to make the knowledge and the entire project accessible to newcomers There are a lot more steps to helping people be comfortable in a project But this shared knowledge is good after the read me is complete You'll want to start looking at how collaboration works within your project And spend time building your external credibility so that people will have A desire and interest to come visit your project And most of all you'll want to engage with users and contributors And that is actually my very favorite part of building a community But since I only had five minutes, I'll have to save that for another time My name is crista bergain And I am in my second year of serving as a community architect for the resf and for rocky linux, which is our flagship project If you have any interest in talking more about building community, I'll be here all weekend at booth 218 Thank you all for your intention Thank you so much crista and now I'd love to welcome alias to the stage We've got to give our big rounds of applause in between My name is alias and today I want to talk about How we took an open source company across the pond specifically from germany to the united states Really quick about me My name is alias. I am from germany. I'm not an engineer despite what many things When people think about germans or as most of the people here I've been with check mk for more than five years and I came to the us for check mk To build it up here for those of you who don't know check mk. I don't know if anybody knows check mk We're an open source monitoring platform. We are one of the grown-up grandchildren of nagias And if you want to learn more stop by our booth, we're over there in the exhibition hall all weekend Now there's a company behind check mk. We're 170 something people four and a half town customers We've been doing it monitoring for more than 15 years and we're really big on open source That's what we do. That's what we are And um, this is where we're from those of you. I don't know if some of you recognize this picture This is munich. It's a really nice city if you have been great If you haven't been you should go. It's really nice um munich is in bavaria And what bavaria is known for is this beer pretzels the october fest Which fun fact is not in october. It's in september What we're much less known for is actually Something else it's This it's software If people know software from germany, it's from berlin. Um, there's some great software companies in berlin, but They're weird. Um, there's also great soft. There's also great software companies in munich We're one of them Um, and you might want to ask yourself. Well, why does this open source company from germany want to go to the us? Well, i'll tell you why We did that You know as one of my favorite basketball bloggers says, why would you do that? Well, we look at where our downloads come from. Um, obviously germany for our head And then there's the us roughly one third Of our downloads that we get from germany and there's france and italy and all the other big countries in the world um Now if we look at our revenues that looks different, you know, we have germany and then There's the us much much much much smaller than germany And then there's france and italy and all the other big countries Well, where did that go and this is basically what we saw as our opportunity So we moved to atlanta. Why atlanta? Longer story. If you want to learn that stop by our booth I'll tell you everything about it if you want to hear it. Um, but that's where we are. We're in atlanta We love it. Um, anybody from atlanta um So when we got there we literally started building stuff, you know um A company Furniture every piece in our off of Of the furniture in office was hand assembled by me using these highly professional german engineering tools Um, and then we did recruiting but as you all know, it's kind of hard to find people One does not simply go recruiting. Um, but if we're already sticking with the lord of the rings theme Um, you know, we're kind of like aragorn in some ways less good-looking But, you know, we also had like a convenient army of invisible helpers that came at the right moment to Yeah, help turn the tide against the googles and the medas and though who what new relics and whatnot um, and that was um Our open source community The check mk community. I don't know if anybody's here who is a part of the check mk Community, um, we're thousands of users actually one of the most active monitoring communities in the world There's a ton of things. There's hundreds of contributors on github Um, there's a ton of other things that people can do in the community. We have a translation project We have user group meetings. There's a feature portal But um in our specific case when we moved over from germany to to the u.s The community was incredibly helpful, you know, they introduced us to people We went on podcast interviews like Chuck from the cdc introduced us to the atlanta linux enthusiasts. Yes, the ale We're doing events We got applications like for roles and the result of that is that 18 months in we've recruited 12 people two new people started this week We have a few more starting Very soon we more than doubled our us business um We've established a meet-up series. We're doing the first check mk conference in the us this june So if that's interesting to you check that out and this is thanks to you know, all of these people and You know some that don't have a nice avatar that you can put on the slide But this is our open source community. This is people from our Um our forum and this is my way of saying thank you. Thank you for being such a great community Thanks for the power of these communities and we couldn't have done it without them Thank you so much alias and uh, hopefully you're able to bring more of your community And maybe you can teach us how to to munich if we're tired of being here. I think maybe that'll be next year's presentation um All right, and without further ado, I'd like to welcome sash to the stage Hi, i'm sash. Thanks for having me fair warning My talk is non-technical And it's about some of my learnings over the last decade of working as a tech marketer My career spans a couple of decades, but the last 10 years have exclusively been in the open source software infrastructure space It's been a while since I've spoken in front of an audience and I think I only have 30 seconds per slide So this is going to test my speed reading speed talking and your speed comprehension So first a little bit about me my day job is head of growth and partnerships at open metal Open metal is an infrastructure as a service provider and has built a platform that fuses the best of public cloud Private cloud and bare metal all powered by open source tech I also organize the open infra los angeles to use a group So if you are interested do hit me up A few more fun facts about me a qr code for my linkedin This talk stemmed from both a personal challenge to push myself to speak on a public podium As well as a curiosity on how I could present in a fun relatable way The importance of collaboration between marketing and technical teams in this talk I will attempt to share some of my learnings and experiences as a tech marketer Against the backdrop of classic sci-fi all the background images are abstract concepts of the sci-fi counterparts and were generated using dolly 3 Okay, I'm going to take a deep breath And then once it goes i'm going to start speed talking. So let's do this Open source like the force from star wars is a pervasive and unifying energy and technology It's everywhere from the operating systems and web servers that power our digital world to the devices we use every day It fosters innovation and democratizes technology Driving rapid technological advancements But remember just as the force is a light and dark side open source faces ethical challenges That require thoughtful navigation to ensure that it remains a force for positive change The united federation of planets from star trek and the open stack community Showcase the power of diverse groups collaborating towards shared goals Muring principles of liberty Equality and open innovation their structured governance through councils of foundations Councils and foundations facilitate democratic participation And decision-making the uniting their diversity to innovate one in space exploration the other open source infrastructure Like neil's journey in the matrix marketers and tech undergo a transformative journey to evolve their skills and perceptions to master the complex landscape It's not just about learning new tools But understanding the interconnectedness of technology consumer behavior and trends for me. This goes beyond mere tactics It's about embracing a broader purpose embodied by the open source community Ethical marketing and making a real impact. This is like neo's quest for mastery and understanding in a constantly shifting world oops Drawing in the inspiration of the babel fish in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy The need for clear communication between technical teams and marketers is crucial in my role Like the babel fish makes disparate beings Understand each other a shared communication model and collaborative discussions are vital for our success making complex ideas accessible and fostering a unified company culture and building trust with our customers The time lord's library and doctor who this is not it because there was copyright stuff With its comprehensive collections spanning the universe and time Exemplifies the essence of documentation and knowledge management. This vast repo allows them to grasp the universe's complexities Forsee futures and make you know informed decisions I believe in our case all teams in a technical organization must view documentation as a crucial Groupality just like one of the other speakers spoke about last John Crichton's odyssey in far escape any any fans Navigating through a universe of unfamiliar cultures and technologies Mirrors the journey of tech marketing teams Crichton's experiences and alliances underscore the importance of embracing diversity of opinion background and skill sets Learning and adapting to new technologies and the necessity of effective communication This metaphor and all of the others Eliminates the importance for me for marketers and technical teams to work hand in hand to innovate together As we travel through time and space by building a better future for all Thank you How about now? Okay, great. Welcome back to the microphone Um, let's give an extra special round of applause for sosh for getting on stage after a few years It's incredible All right, and I'd like to welcome our next speaker up michael I hope I didn't just lose myself like 20 seconds Last year I left a particularly PTSD inducing job And like many people in that situation, I decided I lost my 20 seconds I decided to go and spend my time working in a wood job And after making cutting boards like the previous one for quite a while I kind of got bored and decided to try to try something new I was going to make an end grain Cutting board which is what one of my colleagues in the slide off on the right was doing That's where you take the wood and Slice it a second time and turn the pieces on the edge So the end of the wood is what's sticking up So I went online and found a designer program And I came up with this bricks and mortar design That has 11 or 12 layers Didn't look like something I couldn't do with my skills Set up everything when I went for the final glue up something was wrong All the pieces of wood all the layers were splayed out at the ends Could not figure out what it was. I started getting really frustrated Fortunately the woodshop manager is somewhat calmer than me Also next tech guy came over Made me realize really quickly. I have to either finish this or throw it away So we finished it and it came out weird. It was bulged in the middle And We did a little bit of what any good tech people would do and we did a Post mortem correction of errors And realized that every single one of those pieces of wood had a cross section that looked approximately like this Where it bulged by about 200ths of an inch in the middle Which in the normal scale of woodworking would not be a big deal But I had 22 layers And some of you know about stacking tolerances And that led to about half an inch of bulge across this board And that is not a photoshop. The wood actually curves. I have the actual object here I tried to figure out for a while what could I do with this thing and eventually decided I just had to lean into it and decided well I'll make the short edges round as well and just have this completely bizarre object that I never could have imagined or tried making Had it not been for this accident And then I did what I should have done in the first place, which is I started over And I did the simple things. I made a basic one with maple with which is a cheap wood And then I made yeah easier to experiment when you're not wasting a lot of money Then I made a more complex one with cherry and walnut, which I really love and even put a juice groove on it And eventually I made the thing that I had started wanting to make And I learned a bunch of things or I relearned a lot of things that I should have known in the first place Use the right tool. The whole source of this problem we found out was I had used the wrong tool to flatten the wood. That's what gave me that one one hundredth of an inch And if you have to switch a tool Consider the impact Know the tolerances know how this tolerances stack in tech often they multiply or go exponential It gets really nasty really fast Ask for help I am awful at this But fortunately I had someone there who noticed me Remember, this is the universal dev op signal Use it Do something when an event is going on. Don't just sit there Because you can figure it out later. Just solve the immediate problem But then again start simple Be willing to try again And consider was this really wrong? It came out pretty cool But the big tech the big takeaway is that our knowledge applies everywhere We tend to compartmentalize things this stuff that I know in my tech job Just sort of never really Translated into the wood shop and there are probably other things all over my life and all over your lives that You're compartmentalizing into this is a piece of my technology. It doesn't apply over here or whatever Don't do that. Our lives are rich or when you don't All right. Thank you so much Michael And I'd like to welcome our final speaker on stage for the night Long time up scale speaker, but we haven't had him in a few years. So welcome back Cori Thank you. I appreciate that as much as I love the sound of my own voice So little over a year ago chat jippity. Yes, that's how it's pronounced burst onto the scene and changed a whole bunch of everything Forever nothing will ever be the same How do I know this because a lot of companies will not shut up for love or money? And if there's one thing they love it's money Github said they are refounding the company around AI It's transformative hurry hurry hurry and they are yolo slamming things into production faster than anyone would possibly believe Developers have been super excited about this right up until the reason that wait a minute They hit a point where suddenly they realized they're at threat too. I saw this coming earlier on Why because the industrial revolution process happens to everyone and as a mediocre white guy The writing was on the wall. In fact, I am such a mediocre white guy You probably don't even notice that this isn't actually me. We are interchangeable. We look alike That's how it works And I assure you I am lily white I have not one but two podcasts that catch up there looks dangerously spicy from my point of view And of course most of what comes out of my mouth is utter unfettered bullshit But because I'm that white guy it looks a lot more credible than it would otherwise And this benefits AI because if you ask it questions, it gives a great surface level answer When you dig into it, you realize it makes no sense It's spitting out bullshit and then you start to see how much of the world is actually bullshit All of the things that I do all the time. It's getting better at faster and faster and faster And what are we going to do about this societally? There's no time to think about that We've to raise seven trillion dollars to make new chips. I mean, I told it to make a better white guy and look at that I try to be the best dressed person in tech. Thank you for keeping the bar on the floor jens It's appreciated and look at those suits. They fit so much better. Look at the confidence Look at the poise. Look at how vacuous they are But for me, it's not so much about being threatened. It's about being threatened because I'm jealous I want what AI has I want what it has been able to grant something I have always wanted and never gotten That's right at aws where yes, their corporate comms people do speak like that They unfortunately don't let me speak on their behalf This is a problem with all kinds of companies right now where you have to go through all kinds of trading to speak publicly But that doesn't happen. This is a screenshot of the scale code of conduct I have to use that because of what I actually got the amazon chatbot to say on a product page for an adult Device that is used to pay people to pleasure themselves. That's right. They sell a kubernetes And instead it made a dirty limerick about it. Now, this may not be sympathetic to everyone It turns out that the problems of mediocre white men are not in fact The largest burning problem that people have to deal with and I get that Truly I do but the problem is is it comes for all of us because AI is really built on Examining and hoovering up vast amounts of data that companies are busily rewriting privacy policies to help themselves to And you see that microsoft's doing well with this. They have social networks and stuff google Yes, they've been searching our data forever But what does amazon have other than microphones living in everyone's house and also they recently bought my doctor's office I'm sure that's not going to be creepily ominous. Honestly if I wanted to talk about my schmechel with amazon employees I would just go ahead and get a job there as an engineering manager But that's neither here nor there now people are getting upset about these things But you can't say we should outlaw it but you can't turn back the clock You can't put that genie back in the bottle because the genie will in fact throw hands So lean into it have fun. My daughter asked me to make her a screamy happy unicorn with one of these things So I did and progressively make it screamier and happier and eventually it becomes actively grotesque in some sort of quantum realm Other companies are like this and you can start explaining things note the ibm logo and the cart full of clowns because they haven't quite built a A truck full of clowns yet or a clown car. It's a clown cart I'm looking forward to seeing what that happens The point though is that this is fine It will be fine because whenever you wind up seeing these things evolve Remember this has happened before it will happen again We have fallen for hype cycles and things tend to work out The important part is don't lose your sense of whimsy because in this case these companies have no sense of humor ability to laugh at themselves So we can laugh at them for them as long as we keep our sense of humor talking like a corporate comms person at aws Thank you all for listening to me now back to a forest to our musical stuff There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin and the other people in the bar are horrified Thank you for us Thank you Thank you Cori for always reminding everyone that scale has a very great code of conduct and a safety all right Did you guys have a lot of fun listening to forest earlier? Should we ask him if he'll sing more songs for us? Maybe just one. Do you think he'd do that for us? Maybe if we clap a lot he'll come and do it Oh Thank you so much. Let's have for a sing one last song to close us out Thank you so much to all the upscale speakers and thank you again to ciq for sponsoring upscale this year So without further ado, I'll hand it back over to forest Okay, no folks need to leave so i'm going to give you a choice Would you like to hear another regular song? Do you want to do another improv? Or do you want to do a serverless versus containers rap battle? Sounds like the rap battles have it. Okay, so we're gonna get away from the piano for this one All right No, as you've noticed I am one person so I cannot do this by myself. I'm going to need your help Okay, so this half of the room here. I'm going to need you all to be Yeah, let's start over here this half of the room I'm going to need you to be my serverless fans for tonight Okay, and when I all right and when I have my server on Okay, I need you to make some noise. I need you to show some love All right Now for this half of the room when I have my containers hat on Okay, I need you to make some noise show some love for containers. All right. Are we ready? Okay, oh, I'll hang on. Let's practice. Let's practice Serverless side. Let me hear you Okay, all right Yeah container side. Let me hear you Okay, you gotta watch. Okay. So I don't know it sounds like the containers are a little more vigorous tonight, but we'll see We'll see what happens. All right. So we are ready For a serverless versus containers wrap battle. So let's let's drop the beat You can call me crazy, but it's how my mama raised me servers make me nervous But serverless never faze me maybe I'm lazy But why deploy a box when abstraction brings the action for a fraction of the cost My code isn't a zip file requirements in a pip file Function the family I do is ship while standing proud in the cloud on the shoulders of the giants Which you need to serve before the values in the clients But I wish there was something more portable to wrap my app in. Oh wait, there is it's called containers They make crap happen. Check it out. I can build the way I'm used Stope of course run it where I choose Automate and orchestrate with kubernetes at the helm hand on my tiller I'm a killer in the service realm plus all these hella world tutorials are slick So someone put the docker because the stack is looking sick. This is what you do It's insane you over complicate the name kubernetes. So arcane you spell it with an eight I'm no cloud economist, but I'm sure you don't want to miss the savings You could find if you put your mind to simplifying this aren't you building pixar is your name john lasseter Then why you need a service mesh? Why you need ambassador is to miss me? Oh, this kingdom isn't magic you throw it in production and the outage gonna be tragic Hey, take a breath man. You ran kind of long there functions have a time out You got to save your song there. You got limitations. I run applications Every enterprise has their eyes on containerizations. Why long jobs real time doesn't matter I eat hard problems for meal time. So pass the platter so many industries left to disrupt I know your gold start makes it hard, but try to keep up check it one two three He's getting warmer wait and see the latency is no worse than your complacency Faces so you're basically chasing a place. You don't want to be my services approval by themselves. They get better Meanwhile, you're out of luck stuck chucking out the cheddar. Hey, remember specter and meltdown You were up all night. I mean I slept that's right the cloud provider kept it tight You can patch your run times. I love happy fun times delivering value while pal you fight the same old fight That's great. But wait, let's use our brains here. Yo, I got constraints here I'm running java eight here digging in the brownfield moving the ball downfield can't rearchitected all until we look respect the ball I just want to build more. That's what I get build more functions are a blast. Our past cells would have killed more I know i'm just saying we're in a different state of being you have a functions are amazing and wait are we agreeing? Obviously both of us have the same destination get rid of heavy lifting without differentiation So whether your abstraction is a function or a node you can get a lot of traction on the old cloud road If your app goes down at 3 a.m. And it will you gotta own that it's your problem still There's no silver bullet hocus pocus magic guarantee, but when business is your focus, you'll be where you want to be Y'all have a great night