 for Arrested DevOps, the podcast that helps you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and optimize your team or organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. We are coming to you live from DevOps Day Chicago. I'm your co-host, Matt Stratton, and with me is Trevor Hess. Before we get started talking to our great panel, we have a word from our sponsors. You'll have to listen to the show later to find out what the sponsors are. Sponsors go here. Sponsors go here. So again, we are here at DevOps Day Chicago 2019. Live! Live. The sixth time we've had this event. And we've got a great panel of different speakers who have spoken at the event and had different experiences at DevOps Day. So first, starting to my left, just maybe introduce yourself for our audience. I'm Jesse Frizzle, currently self-employed. Veronica Hannes, I'm a contractor in Brooklyn, New York. Jeff Smith, director of production operations at Central, official black guy for DevOps Days. It's true! It's official, right? Everyone pauses and they're like, oh, he said that. Fair. What I'd like to do is maybe start, since you all spoke here at DevOps Days today, maybe for people who are listening to the show before the talks are online, maybe give a kind of a little overview of what you talked about in your presentation. And then we'll kind of get some feedback and talk about it. So I talked about open source firmware and roots of trust and why those are important. So I talked about, I gave an ignite talk and I talked about, very briefly, about developer use of comments and how attitudes for those comments affect growing developers and may affect their documentation styles later. And I talked about ethics and technology and computing and why it's difficult and hard. That's fantastic. If I'm not mistaken, when we were on the stage at the Holiday Inn last year for DevOps Days Chicago, you had an open space on ethics and computing. Yeah, I can't remember if I actually, this is the situation, I can't remember if I actually did that or not, like if I kicked it off, but I was definitely present and it was definitely something that informed this talk because a bunch of us had conversations afterwards and said like this is a conversation that needs to continue. And we had similar results today in that open space, a conversation that needs to continue to happen and grow. So one thing, I'd like to kind of have a little bit of a chat about because we have different experiences with DevOps Days and with DevOps Days Chicago in general. So kind of looking down this, so Jeff, this is the fifth time you've been at, speaking at and been part of DevOps Days Chicago. Jesse, I know this is your first time at DevOps Days Chicago but you've been to several DevOps Days. Veronica, this is your first DevOps Days ever. So maybe kind of starting with Veronica, what are some of your impressions you've had, some of your thoughts about the DevOps Days experience so far? Sure thing. So coming, I'm coming from New York City and this is my first DevOps Days so I'm very much like what do you expect? How does it work? And how does public transit work when you're not in New York City anyway? And all those little things that you worry about when you're traveling and one thing that's been really phenomenal is how much support the team has given. I tweeted earlier, shortly after I was accepted, they literally asked the speakers, would they like a special song when they go on to the stage? And I was like, I love this group more than anything else in the world because not only are they like, we're going to help you figure out transportation, we're going to make this party easy and that party easy and you have all the support and you're going to eat the best food you've ever eaten at a conference. But in addition to all of that, we're going to make you feel really amazing when you walk onto the stage. Like, how about that? So that is kind of the first impression I have in like being here so far. Nothing has surprised me, like nothing has gone against that first impression. So like, hurrah, hurrah organizers. I see all the moving parts moving like extremely smoothly. Jeff, what have you seen over the years that you've been here? How does the event feel different? Does it feel the same? Like, what do you see? In a lot of ways it feels the same, in a lot of ways it's different. You definitely see the event grow, right? And you see the process get smoother, audio video, funny I'm saying that now, but audio video has gotten a lot smoother. But the community just continues to grow. It's absolutely one of my favorite times of the year. And even if I'm not speaking, I would definitely be attending DevOps Day Chicago. It really is sort of, for me, it's like the bar in which I judge all of the other conferences because it's always such a tremendous experience. You know, the participants are great. The open spaces are fantastic. And there's just an energy here that for me is unmatched in a lot of conferences. And Jesse, you've been to some other DevOps days and I noticed your first time here in Chicago. Like, what did you, from what you participated in so far in giving your talk, what are some of your initial feels? Yeah, I would say that it's organized really well, not to suck up. But yeah, also just like the varied audience background. So people who come from different fields, because I was talking to someone who does like data science and then one that's like a technical writer. And it's nice when conferences can draw different groups of people versus just like having like group thought or whatever. Fantastic. So I want to... I was going to say, so now that we're only about halfway through the event at this point, what have been some of your favorite conversations that we've had so far here this couple of days? So I think one thing that's been really exciting to me, a lot of the talks that I've heard have been really neat. So my background is not DevOps. I'm coming giving a talk that is interesting to a lot of folks, but it's like one of those varied conversations. And so kind of hearing talks where people are describing like situations that occur within DevOps, but like within the context of something a human would experience. We had talks that involved like, things going viral online and people getting tickets because like signs are difficult and what's that even anyway. And so one of my favorite conversations has been like when we were in open spaces and talking about what makes an interesting, what's like one hook you could have if you're working on your own talk submission is talking about ways you can bring in that the technical with like the lived experience portions. I think there was a really interesting parallel between Jeff's talk and Jesse's talk in different ways though. So my first question is did anybody but me, because Jesse's talk was in the afternoon during, obviously so I just want to get some context. Yeah, either of the three of you see Jesse's talk. Yes. Okay, fair. Okay, so Jesse like said talked about why open source firmware was important and I always like to think of this talk as the one that will scare the shit out of you when you realize how terrible it all is. And I think we're like kind of the thought around those ethics also comes in, right, is that it's like just because it seemed like a good idea to put a web server in there, right, because what could go wrong is how can the, you know, always think about how can these things be misused, right. And I'm interested to kind of see like where you see those parallels. Yeah, it's definitely something that happens, right. And when you see technology sort of misapplied and we sort of do it ourselves in the operation space and the engineering space where we might choose a technology for the wrong purposes because we want to play around with it or we think it's interesting, not thinking about all of the downstream implications of it, right. Like I think of the Zoom breach recently where they thought it was a great idea like oh we're going to install a local web server and automatically reinstall the software. And somewhere, I'm sure someone wasn't thinking of that as being malicious, they were thinking this is going to make it so much easier for me to be able to accomplish X. So it becomes difficult to think about all of the different paths that technology can take us down and the sort of consequences that come from it. So I think the only thing that we can really do around that is to have more conversations around it, to bring in more viewpoints, more discussions, you know. I remember when Google, you know, had that snafu when they were classifying apes as black people and I was like there wasn't a black guy in that room, right, because that would have got caught. So it's about, you know, sort of opening up the conversation, broadening the perspectives and, you know, trying to think one step beyond what am I trying to get done right now and think about the long term implications. Well, Matt even started with the question of what could go wrong with putting a web server in the sub layers of the system but why don't we ask the question what could go right? Or actually do ask the question what could go wrong, because that was the sort of thing I was thinking rhetorically, but yeah, actually say what could go wrong. Seriously ask what could go wrong not just facetiously ask what could go wrong. It's funny, I was looking at some permissions for someone in AWS and I look at their their policy and the SID for the IAM profile is what could go wrong? Allow, star, star. Well, at least that's like being self aware. I think like a lot of it is also a lot of employees are very process oriented, so if it's not a part of your process to like think or even ask that question what could go wrong. You just do A, B, C, D and then you finish your task. And sometimes I'm just like at what point were you like thinking or, you know, like wondering what could actually go wrong. What do you think what do you think kind of drives that you know, taking the box is going through the motions kind of thing because I think again we're not really that most people are wanting to do good work, you know, but there's something within the organization there's something that's caused this to be the I'm just sort of taking you know, going through the motions. I think sometimes that's a matter of like psychological safety with an organization because I've certainly been in positions where it would be extremely difficult to push process and to say why don't we X and there also been situations where people have been very open to that and the the amount of like we talk about innovation a lot in tech and like the amount of innovation you can do in an environment where it's like okay to say why is it like this and to take more time and to do research is, you know, that their night and day and also I think like what people feel comfortable asking for and doing is really like guides how much you know puts us in a position where it might it might feel best to check those boxes and to be like well there's might be well I mean if we tie it back to what Jeff was saying this morning about potentially the idea of some sort of ethical body around technology I think one of the reasons why we make those split-second decisions to do something potentially unsafe is because we have some pressure saying we need to get something accomplished or something finished but we don't often have the moral pressure to challenge just getting something done right you may do something that you know like setting all stars on an access policy right you may need to do that just to get your task done but you don't have the authority maybe or the moral authority to say this is wrong and is going to cause us a big problem and sometimes it's also like organizational standards and culture because you think of a world where those things aren't allowed I remember 10 years ago I was at a job and the idea of putting a password in a config file wasn't that crazy but then you go to a job and someone's like what's wrong with you why would you do that suddenly you're like oh that's not acceptable here and eventually that just keeps moving up and up and the pipeline gets more and more sophisticated but you know I'm curious I would just imagine like does anyone at Google submit a new function without unit testing right they probably get laughed out the door I hope definitely culture like if your culture is like make money even if it comes from the expense of exploiting your own customers and no one ever gets ramifications for doing that then that's like the culture that you said back when I was in a research setting you know in a research center where we weren't putting anything on the cloud yet because like we don't trust the cloud and especially like as a as a large government research center we definitely don't and so things would be stored and hopefully duplicated but if not if something crashed we lost data and that was you know there was definitely you know you lose data you grieve a little you get your head down and create it again and it's like you know that was part of almost an expected process like oh that happened it happens sometimes and now when I think about that it just sounds bizarre to me that we put ourselves in that situation I want to go back to Veronica when you're talking about a lot of this coming from people whether or not being in a place of psychological safety and so we like to speak in practicalities on the show every now and again so this might be a good time especially given kind of the balance of this panel so Jeff you're a management type person I mean that you know in a nice way so mature leader you lead teams and so first I want to think from the perspective of if you're someone saying I want to build more psychological safety on the team that I lead what are some things you do or some things that you do you know I believe you are vulnerability I think that's probably the biggest thing you can do is show vulnerability not being afraid to say I don't know one of the big things that we have on my team is you know I don't know is an okay answer it's just not the end of the conversation right you have to you have to figure things out but giving people that sort of room in that space to be able to learn to be able to explore another thing I like to do is push education as part of your job there's no reason I mean you're already on call why should you have to learn this new technology for my company's benefit on your own time spend time at work learning this thing because it is part of your job I don't expect you to just know it so if you've got to take you know an hour or two hours a week to just go sit in the kitchen and read that's fine I want to make sure that you feel comfortable doing that so you know between those things I think people begin to get comfortable I think when people also want to dissent on an opinion creating that safe space so that we can have a dialogue and talk about it because that's probably one of the biggest areas where people bottle up where they don't feel comfortable disagreeing so they kind of go along with something that they know is wrong or that they feel strongly against creating an atmosphere where people can disagree in a constructive manner and know that at the end of the day you know we're still a team and we're going to be able to figure this thing out I think that's strong and I think it's a testament when the teams disagree but at the end we come to a resolution and everyone is still all in. One more to say about the education piece one thing that I've noticed is you know I've been in work environments that were very helpful in this regard and you know could be very unhelpful as well and the and the major difference was you know having that time to be able to learn and like when things did go wrong you know in my research life one time we had like a piece of machinery that had a problem that no one realized for a month and there was a lot of like backtracking that needed to happen but we went through it in like what I think we would call a like blameless way and it was it was an educational experience for everybody like we said okay and we all knew how that machine worked inside and out at the end why because we had something go very wrong cost us time and we had to like trace back and like those those two pieces being able to like sit in the kitchen and get better at your job while at your job instead of having it have some be something that's burning you out in the evenings and having a situation where when something goes wrong it's less about you know the person who made the commit and more about like learning about the process better because that's obviously something the team needs to do have like been immeasurable been both feels that that I've worked in actually so I think what are maybe some again like thinking you know we kind of talked about like things that leadership can do maybe what are sometimes we're in a position where we're not able to we're not leading the team we're an individual contributor and we might be in a position where we don't feel that level of psychological safety what might be some things that we could to help influence leadership to help influence the team based on your experiences hopefully positive ones somewhere or not I would say in most cases where I was in situations like that I tend to have a lot of candor with leadership and that can go one of two ways depending on who the person is so I myself like if someone came to me and did what I do to other people I would be like super happy to know exactly what they felt but some people do not like knowing exactly how people feel so yeah it really depends I just want to work with you I think it's also important to think about leadership as a role not necessary as a position because I've been on teams where I wasn't the manager but I was definitely the leader of the team you know I don't remember what author said but if you walk into a group of people you can instantly pick out who the leader is regardless of their position so I think it's important to recognize that if you are the leader the emotional leader of the team that there is a bit of psychological safety cover you can provide for the rest of the team and you can be that person to engage with your manager and say like hey listen you know XYZ isn't working out for us maybe we can try something different maybe it's you that solicits the extra everything has sort of fallen flat you kind of know that like alright I know Max is stewing about this thing because he hates no JS so why don't I give Max an opportunity to sort of talk about it so just sort of creating those environments where one it's clear that you've got that person's back but then also set them up to be able to respectfully disagree I think as well like when you think of one of the things there's a lot of definitions around teams that have high level of psychological safety as an example is there's an equal amount of conversation everybody speaks the equal amount and that's easier said than done and if you're not in that again if you're not the manager I think about to like back here a couple years ago we had Otto and Simmons gave a great talk about lending privilege so if you are in that team and you have privilege you have a responsibility to help drive the you know what it's really easy for me to talk a lot surprise surprise everybody who's been at the event all day right but think about ways that I can use that ability that I feel safe doing that all day long to help people who are not necessarily in that position right now I think that's a huge point because you know when I first started in technology I was really taking any job that anyone would give me and as I became more experienced and became more confident now I feel confident you know putting stuff on the line and saying like you know what no this is a really bad idea and I don't mind calling you out on that so you're right lending that privilege to be able to you know perhaps shield someone and say like hey you know max has got a really good point and we need to talk more about this that can be huge for someone because if I get laid off or fired tomorrow I feel confident that I'll be able to get another job someone else may not be that confident in their position and being able to lend that privilege is huge for them because it gives them an opportunity to you know speak up I completely agree like starting out my career I wasn't necessarily the person who could like be kind of aggressive and get away with it but now I have like so found myself in such a position that yeah like I will do that whenever needs be because especially like having known the other side of it when you can't speak up I always try to at least say something one thing that I wanted to say kind of jumping back a little bit is when you're you know approaching you know when you're when you're taking a position where you're like hey I'm going to approach my manager and say hey this isn't quite working one thing that I found really helpful is the whole like you know praise in private praise in public reprimand in private not the other way I see you've worked for some of the people I've worked for so you've got to get that right but you know going to that person and recognizing that like they may be feeling their own vulnerabilities as well we all have different paths into leadership and comforts in that role and that person may be you know with their face on trying to figure things out and like feeling just as vulnerable as you all are so like you know taking the time when that time is you know being vulnerable and trying to make that a smooth conversation can help a lot some of the worst workplaces I'd been in would involve you know like people just coming up you know kind of ambushing you in the hallway kind of situations and that you know it's it can be really stressful and kind of ruin your whole prospect on what your day is and like make you want to hide in the bathroom and we don't need that when it comes to lending privilege too it's not doesn't need to be in the moment like in front of that person either like bringing people up in conversation reminding people that the idea that came that you're all moving forward with was somebody's idea and talking about them in that light that lets them shine in the best way possible is another way and a very important way to lend that privilege so as we're starting to to get towards towards wrapping up I want to go back to your talks into the things that you talked about today and if you had one key message from the presentation you gave what would be that thing you want people to take away that we need to take a bit of responsibility for the things that we're creating and we need to own some of that some of those consequences so that these aren't things that are just happening in a vacuum so when there are bad actions happening we can't just pass the buck on that it's up to us to step up and say like hey something's wrong and maybe we're not currently as an industry in a position where people feel safe doing that but you know it's on us to figure out how to make that safe for people to do it because as technology gets more advanced the stakes are going to get higher and higher comments are a form of documentation and documentation is good and we should make sure that we're supporting people and doing the best documentation for them I would say the people who work on various layers of software should talk to each other more and in talking to each other also actively listen and then kind of try to come to a solution on the problems between the interfaces fantastic and one last thing I'd like to do and then before we kind of wrap up because I know we've got a panel who's doing all sorts of interesting and different things and we want to give you an opportunity to plug a thing you're doing whether it's your podcast whether it's I'm not going to tell you so we'll let you start Jeff I'm in the process of writing a book and maybe one day I'll finish it I don't know it's a tough slog but right now I'm working on a book tentatively called Real World DevOps and the idea is to give it from the perspective of an individual contributor to what they can do and sort of imperfect organizations I think there's a lot of great work out there for leaders that want to do sort of a top down approach but there's a lot of people out there that are struggling in environments where there's a lot of stuff that they can do and they just really need sort of a field guide on how to go about accomplishing that so that's sort of the target audience for my book do out 2020 sometimes plus or minus Hey Matt, how's that book you're writing? Which one? So hold on to your hats. This is my first time announcing this publicly um I met two fabulous other first time speakers when I went to and spoke for the first time this February and the three of us are starting the quick developer guides um YouTube channel and we're going to have 10 you know a series of 10 minute videos on like everything from like how do you get started using version control to like so you're thinking of quitting your job and doing this like I'm going to be a dev thing how are you going to budget for that so like a whole bunch of different skills that people will want to consider if they're getting started in this whole this whole world so yet again some new project is announced for the first time on Arrested DevOps the Michael Ducey and Ross Clanton's podcast was announced first here I believe Jesse you and Andrew started your podcast or talked about it on ADO so like you know breaking news but yeah what new rad thing do you want to plug and promote? well I'm currently unemployed so I guess I'll plug some books Soul of a New Machine and Ben Horwitz is the hard thing about hard things very good and if you're job searching you should tell us what role you're looking for I am not actively looking for a job obviously I have a hard time believing she's blue right I will say it's like every time like wherever I'm working and something happens and Jesse you know like yeah I know I mean not that I don't want to work out do you know who you're talking about she's not looking she's choosing right exactly we would know I'm glad to have another wrap up another Arrested DevOps podcast here at DevOps Day Chicago I want to thank our awesome panel for joining us really appreciate it and also as an organizer really appreciate all of you being part of our program I'm really excited so thank you let's give it up for our panel it's a live studio audience applause when we recorded this in Minneapolis I actually had like applause signs so at least I didn't do that to you so yeah you can check us out on the internet at ArrestedDevOps.com you can find us on iTunes at ArrestedDevOps.com slash iTunes leave us a review in the iTunes store that's the thing you can do we are now on iHeartRadio apparently so that's a thing if you like iHeartRadio and we're on Spotify so we're all the places you can find us and listen and your heart's content and with that being said as always thanks for watching we'll see you next time bye