(car screeching)
- [Brad] It's lunchtime,
and this is Brad Anderson's Lunch Break.
(bright music)
I get invited to attend tech events
all the time in Las Vegas.
And whenever I can,
I like to make the quick trip from Redmond,
and meet with other tech leaders,
and learn about what they're doing.
On this episode of Brad Anderson's Lunch Break,
I'm joined by the author of over 40 tech books,
and the curriculum director of Pluralsight Don Jones.
(horn honking)
(light jazz music)
So if we were having this conversation 20 years ago,
you would actually be telling me about your career
as a fighter plane mechanic?
- I was an aircraft mechanic.
I was a civilian employee for the Navy,
and I did depot level maintenance on F-14s and A-6s.
- Now what's the hardest part of building a fighter jet?
Are the instructions like
the instructions you get from IKEA?
- Nearly.
You would be surprised.
There is an entire room of three-ring binders
for every possible system and there is an index
and whatever you are working on that day
it is step-by-step.
You are huge champion of the DevOps approach to IT.
- I am.
- Make the case here you know quickly
about IT and Devs moving that direction.
- It's A about moving faster
which I think everybody understands
and they struggle to tie business value to.
But what it really is is moving faster
and being able to accommodate failure.
The reason we don't move fast now
is because we're terrified of exploding the world.
And if you're doing DevOps correctly,
you might fail but you have the ability
to quickly un-fail as well.
And whether you choose to move quickly or not,
wouldn't it be nice to know that you can
recover very quickly?
- [Brad] That's right, that's right.
- Regardless. - Fail fast.
- Yeah.
Fail fast or don't fail at all,
but recover quickly.
- You know, I think one of the biggest,
I'll tell you this even the culture in my team,
is a culture of: a failure is bad.
And a failure is not bad.
- It's not bad.
- If you're experimenting and you're you know,
If you're rapidly experimenting,
and these experiments are hours or days in duration,
- Yeah.
- You want as many of those to fail honestly as possible.
Because you get smarter you get a little more wisdom,
and you move forward but you get better.
- You didn't learn to not touch that pot on the stove
until you touched it the first time.
- Good point.
- Failure is a good thing,
you just have to make it non-destructive.
- Yeah.
We're going to play a quick game of This or That.
- [Don] Okay.
- So I'm going to give you two objects.
- Alright. - Alright.
Okay, so the two objects are Public Cloud and Diet Coke.
- [Don] Okay.
- [Brad] A staple of most Fortune 500 offices:
- Diet Coke
(bell dings)
- Explodes when you put Mentos in it.
- Oh, definitely Diet Coke.
(bell dings)
- [Brad] There's basically a bottomless amount of it.
- [Don] Public Cloud.
(bell dings)
- Although I'm sure if you're in Atlanta,
there's a bottomless amount of Diet Coke as well.
- The inner workings of it are generally unknown
to the general public.
- It's both.
(bell dings)
- First unveiled in 1982.
- That would have to be Diet Coke.
(bell dings) - That's right.
- Okay.
You start to question yourself.
Wait, the Cloud?
- The two biggest producers of it are in Seattle.
- Oh, the Public Cloud.
(bell dings) - Yep.
You've also got a really interesting mentoring program
that you've set up.
- Yes, I'm very proud of it.
So, it's the Devopscollective.org.
And like I said I don't have a degree in anything,
but I feel I've been able to do well in the industry,
and IT especially operations is one of those fields where
you can get an entry-level job without a degree.
And a young person can make $40-$50,000
as a help desk technician.
And I don't see why more people don't do it.
And I think it's because there's this feeling that
you have to go to the expensive career colleges
or whatever else.
So we've put together an entire education program
that somebody could run through on their own,
for under 600 bucks in probably about 36 weeks.
And they come out of it with recognized certifications.
You know entry level stuff.
CompTIAs and Microsoft.
And then we have a scholarship
where we tack mentoring and some cloud time
for hands-on experience and a build your own PC kit.
- Super cool.
- And it gives someone about a $10,000 experience
free of charge.
They get an expert mentor who's been
in the industry a long time.
They get a jump on a nice career.
- So, what's that name again?
- Devopscollective.org
- Alright.
This is one of those things that I think,
anybody who listens to this,
as their blogging as their talking send people to this site.
Thank you.
- [Don] Cool. Absolutely good seeing you.
- And if that was you with that Frito Lay job
in Memphis let me know.
- I will.
- [Brad] Next time on Brad Anderson's Lunch Break
- So people used to be nervous about
going to the cloud at all.
Show me it's safe.
But now what I see is I have all of these companies
that have questionnaires from their customers saying,
How do I trust you in the cloud?
And you have to prove that you have DR,
and that you have backup,
and that you have good procedures that are secure.
But we no longer have to answer the question of,
How do I trust the cloud?
So now it's more about how do I migrate safely?
- So, when you speak at a conference like this,
you do this a lot,
can you remember what it was like at your first one?
What was it like your first time?
What was going through your mind?
- I can tell you that.
There's 300 people in the room.
The lights are shining on this guy,
and I'm sitting there,
and I literally think I started having a panic attack.
- Sure.