 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a special On the Ground here at the VTUG Summer Slam 2019, the 16th and final year of the event. We've got people coming in from all over the environment and so many changes. Really, really change is one of the central themes and joining me on the program is Matt Broberg who, when I first met, had a very different job, had a different name, but was one of the keynote speakers this morning. Matt, thank you so much for joining us and I love you. Representing the Cube shirt. Yeah, thank you. I had to wear my limited edition Cube shirt. I've got to represent for everybody. Yeah, I've moved on in a slightly different direction from the V community, but what I love about the virtualization community is it's really about the relationships that we have. So being here is just reconnecting with people I really care about and making sure that they have paths forward with their career as well. Not that virtualization is disappearing overnight, but there's a lot of interesting ways to grow these days and I like to advocate for that. Well, yeah, one of the things that I loved when this changed from being the V-Mug, the New England V-Mug to the V-Tug, it actually was helping along that transition of it's more than just virtualization. What's going on in cloud computing obviously is having a huge impact and what's happening in careers and developers and that was some of the conversation that you had this morning and if people can't read on the lower third, you're currently with Red Hat. You're a technical advocate as well as an editor with opensource.com. That's correct. Of course, Red Hat, we now call that IBM, is that right? Yes, well, I mean IBM is the overall. Red Hat is the independent part of the organization and I work for opensource.com. It's a special small group that we get to focus just on telling open source stories inside the ecosystem of open source. So everything from lawyers talking about licenses to people learning Python to system administrators telling about their Linux expertise. And it's all very interesting and very exciting because so many of the people here are fantastic sysadmins that yes they know virtualization, yes they know the proprietary side of it, but the open source side is just as much part of their day and I want to give them a way of sharing that. Yeah, so careers of course is something that you know well. I was not only a long time listener but happened the pleasure to be on the Geekwisters podcast once and you yourself have gone through a number of career changes. When I first met you, very technical, working in some of the products there, you did some very community focused events but kept your technical bent and you're back working a lot with this technical community. You know these Geekwisters at the show there and they're your people. 100% my people. Yeah, I found it early on I was given the advice that if you ever go anywhere outside of an engineering organization you're going to lose your edge. And what I found in practice is that there's actually a wide breadth of technology and wide breadth of jobs necessary to support the technology out there these days. So when you pick your head up, when you look into organizations you might not normally think you could work in like marketing or in sales, you can find some of the most technical people in a company. They're attracted to jobs where they can communicate in the way they like to communicate and they have the day-to-day life that matters to them. I found that I love telling stories. I love supporting people trying to tell stories. That makes me gravitate to a very different part of the organization than engineering where I started. And I still get to learn quite a bit. I'm actually coding more than I did when I was an engineer, technically. And I look forward to doing that more. Yeah, well it really is being able to connect between communities. How do we get, you know, share those stories and make sure we can speak the language of our audience? You know, so often it's, you know, if I'm in the IT organization I don't necessarily understand the business. We were just talking to Josh Outwell is if you don't understand the key objectives of the business how do you know that you're supporting it? How do you make sure you are valuable to the organization? Right. And I think some similar themes were in your keynote. 100% true. Yeah, and there's a lot of nuance to it because the waves of cloud and DevOps and coding, infrastructure as code have all kind of shaken the foundation of CIS administration in a way that it's just, it seems to be telling a story of you're not good enough in what you're doing. And I really don't like that narrative. I think we can reframe it in a very positive way that we decided to all work in technology because it is inclusive of change and because we need to continue to evolve. If we wanted to be certain about what we're doing every day you need to study something like geology so that rocks kind of keep the same or be a chiropractor and you crack the back the same way every time. In technology you're constantly evolving, you're constantly looking at the next step and I love Josh's work in new ops. I love seeing people adopt DevOps ideas and open source is such a gateway into all of that work. So open source as the core of it once you realize you don't have to file a ticket when something breaks and you can go fix it or you can talk to a developer that's fixing it you feel a brand new form of community that you just don't feel in this part of the industry and I've just become obsessed with it. I want other people to know that there's an option there that it's really exciting. Yeah, it's interesting. I remember the first time I went to a Red Hat show. I've worked with Linux for many years. I've worked with Red Hat for a long time but it was definitely a different feel at a Red Hat summit than it was going to a virtualization user group or VM world. Yes, that inclusiveness and they want to help but in open source a lot of times it's like right how are you contributing? It doesn't mean you necessarily have to be fixing bugs and filing code, maybe you're helping in the documentation but it is that that contribution is so central to what happens open source. I know you've got some thoughts on that. 100%, yeah the contribution is such a huge element and the shirt that you made the shirt is for GopherCon effectively. It's with Gophers from the Go programming language community and what's cool about Go and I've recently went to PyCon for the Python developer community and at each of those events what I love is that every one of the booths, every one of the people speaking they have a project that you can participate in and what's great about that is I think the fear of it being like oh I have to learn to code to participate here quickly goes away when you look and they're looking for users. They're looking for subject matter experts on IT infrastructure to use the software, test it at scale, make sure it's supported, make sure it's secure in all the ways that CIS admins are the subject matter experts on so it's not that CIS administration is going away it's that it's evolving in a way that is more inclusive of other technologies and honestly more freeing once you get into it. All right so Matt you currently live in Minnesota. I do. But you lived here in the Northeast for a while, you've been to many environments. Give us a little bit of what the VTUG community and the people at this event have meant to you personally. I can't quite sum up how important it's been. I started volunteering as part of the VTUG community from a social media angle which showed me that actually marketing can be interesting because it helps other people connect and then I spoke here on multiple times early on in my career. It gave me the confidence, it gave me the community that helped support me and I think we all can do a good job of remembering why we're here and remembering how to bring that forward in our local communities. Well Matt, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you for the keynote this morning and I look forward to seeing your continued work at other events. Yeah, thanks Sue. All right, I'm Stu Miniman and I'll be back with more coverage here. As always, thanks for watching theCUBE.