Jonathan, Jillian, and Will join this week's panelist episode as they talk about conferences. Will starts off as he talks about his inputs from the last conference that he recently attended. Additionally, the panel talks about each of their own experiences and key learning from the different conferences.

Key Takeaways From Conferences - DevOps 146

 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of Adventures in DevOps. I'm your host for the day, Jonathan Hall, and joining us live from lovely Las Vegas is Will Button.

 

Hello everyone. I was going to say something witty but then my brain was like, no, no you're not.

 

Hahaha!

 

And we also have Jillian. I think she's just from her regular studio though, is that correct?

 

I'm here in Doha, Qatar, which is hosting the World Cup. And it's, there's a lot of people here, you guys. There's a lot of people. There's like floating hotels and sports games. And I don't, I don't know. I don't do sports. So it's all just kind of madness to me.

 

Yeah, I don't either. So today, since we have two people who are in cities with major events happening, we thought we'd talk about some events, specifically tech conferences, good, bad, ugly, maybe some tips for people who might want to attend or maybe want to put on a conference. Will, do you want to kick us off since you're at a conference right now? Tell us what you've experienced so far.

 

Yeah, for sure. One number I heard thrown out was there are a million attendees at AWS reInvent this year.

 

A million?

 

That's the number I heard. Totally unconfirmed. But when I'm walking through the event, it certainly feels fairly accurate. There are a bunch of people. This is the first time I've been to reInvent in five or six years, I think. And it's now spread out over six different casino resort conference centers here in Las Vegas. So it's challenging, yeah. And that's what sparked the conversation today. If you look at the total expense here, it's $1,800 for the ticket to reinvent. Plus you're gonna have another $1,000 fairly easily in travel and lodging and meal expenses. Plus there's the cost on your team because everyone on my team is having to cover the things that I can't get to for here. So one of the big... problems weighing on my mind is how am I going to generate $3,000 of value from this conference and bring it back to my team. And so that's what we're focusing on today.

 

So quick fact check here. I know Google isn't always authoritative, but a website published by Amazon claims 50,000 attendees.

 

50,000?

 

So

 

That's close

 

yeah,

 

to a million.

 

it's close.

 

If you're an

 

I mean,

 

introvert,

 

there's a similar number of zeros in those numbers.

 

right, if you're an introvert, that's good enough to be a

 

Good

 

million.

 

enough.

 

Yeah, a crowded grocery store is good enough to be a million for me. Like, I hear that.

 

Yeah,

 

So

 

so.

 

you were saying before we started recording that you were at Rehabilitation a few years ago and it's changed drastically since then, right?

 

Yeah, the last time I was here it was just in the Venetian Casino, which is a really large facility. But that one was pretty doable. Now it's across six different casinos. Each one has different talks going on and different like... There's like the live action things where you can test your AWS skills or get your AWS certification or do the hands on labs. And so all of those things are going on in all of these different casinos or I guess not really the casino part. I guess I should say conference centers that happen to be attached to casinos. And that's one of the big challenges is like figuring out where you're supposed to be and how's how do you get there. They've got shuttles running between. all of them and when I say shuttles they're like those big huge cross-country buses and they're leaving like every 10 minutes to go to the different ones so that part seems to be running pretty efficiently but it's still limited by the physical distances between these events or these venues and so you've got a half hour 45 minutes minimum to make it from one venue to the other. assuming that you've figured out which one you're supposed to be in.

 

Interesting.

 

Do they have like an AI kind of thing? Like these are the sorts of talks I'm interested in. Now optimize my casino jumping. I don't know what to call it.

 

They have reviews. You can like rank your talks with stars and then you can get, you know. Other people who attended this talk also attended this talk.

 

You know, given that it's put on by AWS and they seem to advocate a lot of AI stuff, no, they did not have any of that. Whenever I

 

Hehehehe

 

was signing up for the different talks, it was a straight list of like a thousand or more talks saying, which one do you want? And so by the time you make it a hundred or so down into there, you're like, wait, which ones have I signed up for? Have I seen this one before? Does this one conflict with one I've already signed up with? What's the travel distance between these two? So that part was pretty frustrating. It was really difficult to put together a list of the things I wanted to do here. Um, also compounded by the fact that all the ones I was really interested in were already at capacity and no way to sign up for those, which, you know, for 1800 box, I'm kind of thinking if there's a talk I want to attend. I wanna attend it.

 

Yeah, that's very odd. Is it like, do they have pre-signups for like the industries that, you know, like the big industry partners that just buy like a block of tickets and have all their staff go or something like that? Like, why would they already be filled?

 

I don't know. I guess, you know, I signed up, what was it, three, three, maybe four weeks ago. So maybe I was too late in signing up, but that was still frustrating. But, you know, one of the good things, so here's, I want to share some of the positive experiences with this too, because going through the expo hall, talking to different vendors has been really good. meeting some people that can help us solve some problems that we're facing. But I think the biggest tip I have is having a really good AWS account manager. Whenever I signed up and told my account manager, he's like, okay, these people are here, I set you up with a meeting with them. These people are here, set you up with them. I know you're struggling with this in AWS, so I set you up a meeting with this AWS team. And here's like a couple of after hours events that are like aligned with what you're doing there, so you might be interested in these. So actually the biggest benefit to re-invent so far has been having a great account manager who's steered me in the right direction before I even got here.

 

How does one get an account manager? Like, is that something for re-invent or is that just AWS in general?

 

Now, if you have an AWS account, period, you have an AWS account manager. My experience in, you know, I've been using AWS for a really long time now. Most of my conversations with my account manager have been, hey, I'm your account manager, let me know if you need anything, and then I'll email them, and they're like, oh, hey, I'm not an account manager anymore, here's your new account manager. And that's been like 99% of my... conversations with AWS account managers over the last decade or so. But the one I have right now is just phenomenal.

 

That reminds me of some relationships with ex-girlfriends.

 

Right?

 

Now you see me, now you don't.

 

It's a very Vegas-style relationship.

 

Hahaha

 

So

 

That was the

 

you've

 

main

 

convinced

 

joke before.

 

me, you know, you convinced me I don't want to go to re-invent. I wasn't really tempted anyway. I don't like huge conferences. I guess in that regard I'm like Gillian. I think a supermarket's enough people. I do like conferences sometimes, but I don't like them to be that big. You know, I don't want to get lost in a sea of people.

 

Yeah, I think, um... Like, I'm not opposed to the size of the conference. I'm not a huge fan of big crowds, but if the value is there, I'm willing to surf my way through the crowd. So I think that's the big disappointment thing is having certain talks I was really interested in and not being able to get to those,

 

Mm-hmm.

 

especially for the amount of money that it costs to get here.

 

Right.

 

And then the other part of that is it's very AWS centric. You know,

 

course.

 

a lot of the talks are specific to AWS products. So if you're looking for guidance or, you know, strategies on how to do things in AWS without using AWS tooling like let's say Terraform or Pulumi, those talks are less, there are a fewer number of those. which you know you can't really be shocked about that it is an AWS conference.

 

How many tracks are there?

 

Um, I have no idea.

 

With six conference

 

Bunch.

 

centers, it's got to be at least double that many tracks, maybe triple that many.

 

Yeah, they're looking through the different list of talks and stuff. It numbered in the thousands.

 

To me that's just, that's the bigger problem probably than the size of the number of people.

 

Yeah.

 

There's no way, unless everything is recorded, in which case why would I go to the conference and watch the talk?

 

Exactly, yeah, they're

 

Yes.

 

doing they're doing that for some of them like oh, hey, this one's full But we're gonna live stream it over on this tv in the hallway or on twitch and it's like well I didn't really come this far to you know, watch twitch tv in somebody's

 

Right,

 

hallway

 

right. So I think this touches on kind of my core thesis about conferences is that they're valuable if the hallway track is valuable. If you can meet people, whether it's business partners or just people to hang out with and have a beer and talk about, nerd out about code, whatever your thing is, or if you're a CEO looking for funding, if you can find some VCs or whatever, that's what really makes a conference or breaks it, in my opinion. The talks, ideally, I mean, generally a conference talk is superficial enough that if you miss it, you're not missing that much anyway. Like if I go to a conference talk about Pulumi, I'm not expecting to walk away and be able to use Pulumi for the first time. I'm expecting to learn whether I care about Pulumi. And I can probably get that information somewhere else. Maybe it's a recorded talk, but maybe it's somewhere else.

 

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I think that's where I'm going to get value from this conference is from the expo hall talking to different people, whether those are our vendors or partners or peers who are trying to solve the same problem. That's been where the biggest value from the conference has come.

 

Yeah, I was going to say, I know somebody else who's at re-invent now. And, um, I mean, he's definitely going to some of the talks, but it seems to be more that so many people are going that he was able to, you know, arrange a bunch of in-person meetings with people that he doesn't normally get to talk to in person, right. And our kind of remote distributed way of working that we all have, especially after COVID. So he seems pretty happy with that experience for that reason. And I mean, maybe, you know, that's kind of worth it. If it's like a big conference and you know, a bunch of other people in your field are going to be there and you just want to go and like, you know, talk shop with them and you're all going to be in the same place at the same time. That could be okay.

 

Yeah, for sure. I think that's a huge benefit to meet with the people that you don't get to interact with on a daily basis. Because one of the things that happens over remote work or, you know, working in different offices is those casual conversations never happen. If you're talking with someone, it's because you have a specific agenda. You know, no one just hangs out in a video conference to shoot the shit. But. I'm able to do that here and talk with some people that I work with and just have those casual conversations, which ultimately leads to talking about something work-related and working through some problems that we're facing or discovering that there's something else going on that I didn't know about because we just don't have those casual conversations.

 

I've always liked finding the people behind conferences too. Like that's some of the more useful conferences I've been to, uh, were so that I could meet the people behind like an open source software project. And then I could kind of figure out like, how can we, how can we barter for features here? You guys, you

 

Mm-hmm.

 

have something I want.

 

Yeah

 

I must have something you want. Like Let's talk this out here because that is a shocking amount of my sort of day-to-day work as being like, ah, who already has this feature? Who can I convince to build it for something that I already have? I do that a lot. And that's been one of the more useful kind of reasons when I've ever gone to a conference. Haven't been to one in a while.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

Oh, you guys, my kids were finally big enough for me to feel like I could travel and then COVID hit. And... That's been how that's been going for me.

 

And my last conference was in September.

 

Right, because you were in... was it Vienna?

 

Yeah, Agile

 

Ooh.

 

Tour Vienna, yeah.

 

So how was the turnout for that?

 

You know, I'm not sure. I wonder if those stats are published. I would say a few hundred, but let me see. It doesn't look like those stats are published publicly. I would guess five or 600 probably.

 

Yeah,

 

It wasn't

 

so that's

 

that

 

a good

 

big.

 

size conference.

 

It was a three track conference. And when I spoke, I think there were probably 40 or 50 people listening to me and half the chairs were empty on the technical track. So yeah, I don't know exactly, but I'm guessing 5 or 600 total.

 

And that was a go conference, right?

 

It was just more agile, agile scrum,

 

Okay.

 

all things agile. And the thing is like agile tour, they have it in different cities. So which of course you're gonna get small or more specialized conferences that way.

 

right.

 

I think it was all over the world. So if you have, as well as like, if Amazon did one in every capital city or even five capital cities or something, I'm sure each one would be much smaller than what you have when it's all in Las Vegas like that.

 

Yeah.

 

I was considering going to FASDEM this year. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It's really well known here in Europe.

 

I haven't heard

 

It's

 

of that one.

 

the free open source developer Europe meetup or something like that is what it stands for. And it's all about open source stuff, but the unique thing about FASDEM is it's free. It's completely free to attend. You don't get a ticket, you just show up. The...

 

Oh, right.

 

So that's the nice thing about it. If you want to go to a conference and you have no budget, here's one you can go to,

 

Hahaha

 

especially if the travel's affordable. The bad thing is that because that's the way it's organized, everything is on a first-come, first-serve basis.

 

Yeah.

 

So they have, rather than say tracks, they have dev rooms and each one's on a topic. So there's a Go dev room and a MySQL dev room and whatever different. category they have and it's a college university so kind of like their whole computer science department each room each lecture hall is its own dev room for the day and so you can look at the schedule and and see the talks that will be happening and you basically if you want to hear the talk at three o'clock in the afternoon you have to make sure you're in that room and there's space which usually means you have to attend one or two or three talks before and you might be waiting outside the door waiting in line and then basically once the seats are full they close the door and you can't come in And then when people leave, then they let the line trickle in. I hate that.

 

Hahaha

 

I understand the reasoning and it's kind of cool. You know, if you're on a budget and you can't afford a real conference, fine. But I hate that. I don't want to, I don't want to stand in line or wait through six talks. I don't care about just you hear one. I do care about if you know what I

 

Right.

 

mean. So

 

Yeah.

 

I'm not a big fan. I've been once and I've considered going again, but I probably won't go for that reason.

 

Yeah, just because it's such a commitment, even if the conference itself, like you mentioned, is free, you still got travel expenses plus the lost opportunity cost of what are you not able to get done that's on your list because you're at this conference and then you're not even sure if you're going to be able to get what you want out of the conference because it's first come first serve.

 

Yeah, that would very much annoy me if I went to a conference and I couldn't even get into the talks that I wanted to get into. The ones I've been to have been very small. And I'm either giving a talk or doing a poster or something like that, because that used to be the only way I could get my work to pay for stuff. Now I have to pay for my own stuff, because I'm self-employed, and I'm just kind of too cheap for that. But that was the way that it used to work.

 

Right? I used to think my old boss was cheap until I started working for myself.

 

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

 

I know, it's all different when I'm the budget holder.

 

Right?

 

I'm like, ah, I'm not paying for this.

 

My favorite conference of the last several years before COVID has been.go. And I think it's a European thing only, but there's a lot of.conferences, it's the word DOT and then the theme, go and they have different ones. But I like it because it's a single track conference. So you don't have to decide which talk am I gonna watch? You never have a conflict of two good talks at the same time. And it really makes the hallway track more interesting in my opinion, because everybody... has heard the same talks. So you don't have to have the awkward conversation. Oh, did you see Bob talk about that thing? Bob? Who's that? Let me check the schedule. Oh, no. Oh, no. I was I was at this other one about this other thing. You know, you never had those weird conversations over over your your cocktails or your hot chocolate or whatever you're drinking between talks. So I really like that. And I get a similar vibe. It's not really a tech conference, but microcon I've been to a couple of times.

 

Right. Yeah.

 

The Rob Walling conference for for primarily SaaS startups. It's a single track. The one I've been to, I went to the European one a couple times. That's single track too. And it's the same thing. And so it's small enough, a hundred, couple hundred attendees. Everybody's in one room. Everybody hears the same presentations. And then you have time to talk about it afterwards. So I really liked that. Those are the conferences I find most valuable where I get to talk to people between the talks and in the evenings for drinks or whatever.

 

microconf. I've thought about going to that a few times and again cheap so I've just never quite you know pressed buy on the ticket but

 

Yeah, I mean, I enjoyed it. I went twice in Dubrovnik, and I would probably go again. Dubrovnik's a great city. I don't know which one you would go to if you go to Europe or one in the US.

 

I think the one in Croatia was the one I was looking at,

 

Yeah,

 

but

 

I don't

 

I

 

know.

 

don't know, depends

 

I

 

where

 

think

 

I

 

their

 

am.

 

next one's going to be somewhere else. I don't know where. I think, but yeah, I don't know. Somewhere in Europe. But anyway, I like the people there. The only reason I didn't go the last time was after COVID, they had another, finally had another one in Providence, and I didn't go. I just feel like my business is in a different place than they're doing. I'm focusing more on building an authority business, consultations, stuff like that, rather than SaaS. So although there is some overlap, it's really not enough of an overlap anymore for me to feel like it's a worthwhile investment. But that doesn't mean I'll never go again. You know, maybe I'll be doing SaaS related stuff at some point and then I would definitely go again.

 

Yeah, I've been to MicroConf here in Las Vegas twice and same, same takeaway as you. It was a great, very well done, well organized event. I've been to quite a few DevOps days events too, here in the U S and in Europe. And those seem to always be really well run, I think in part because to be an official DevOps days, event you have to go through their framework which has a lot of guidelines and how to execute and run the conference that they've refined over a number of years. So if you aren't really sure what to do for a conference that's a good way to get started because they kind of guide you. And then hands down on the DevOps Days conferences, DevOps Days Austin in Austin Texas, those guys just do a phenomenal job every single year.

 

I attended DevOps Days Amsterdam four years ago probably, and it was a good conference.

 

I spoke at that one in 2016 or 17, I think. They

 

Okay.

 

did a great job too.

 

Yeah.

 

and they sent you home with some, they had somebody make their own special batch of beer. So it was

 

Yes,

 

DevOps Days Amsterdam beer.

 

I had, we weren't in the same one, were we?

 

Maybe, I don't know.

 

Or do they do the beer every year? They might do the beer every year.

 

Yeah, that was the only year I went to Amsterdam.

 

I don't think I was doing that in 2016. I think it was after that. So I don't think it was the same year, but whatever.

 

I

 

Would've

 

went

 

been

 

to

 

funny

 

a conference.

 

if

 

Yeah.

 

I was sat in on your talk and that was the one I hated and it was

 

Great!

 

just, you know, live tweeting all the hate comments about it.

 

What is this thing?

 

Who is this?

 

I went to a conference in Germany once and like the amount of drinking was just like, was unreal to me. Yeah, I don't know. I think I didn't try to keep up, but like the first

 

Yes.

 

two nights I had a couple drinks and the third night I was like, listen, no, I'm done. Like, I don't wanna have any more you guys. And they were just knocking them back. Yeah, it was quite the culture shock for me. I also had to wear real shoes. That was strange.

 

Yeah

 

It was cold.

 

Oh. That's

 

It was

 

the

 

very

 

problem

 

cold.

 

with conferences. You have to wear real shoes and real pants.

 

Mmm!

 

Now that

 

Ready?

 

COVID's over.

 

I know, like I only look nice from the waist on up and even that's kinda sketchy most days, like

 

Hahaha

 

I

 

I don't

 

happen

 

know.

 

to get dressed?

 

I think I might look better from the waist down, honestly.

 

Ha ha!

 

Yeah

 

I don't think that works on a video though.

 

Well, you don't know where I put my camera sometimes.

 

Ha ha ha

 

That's true.

 

Alright, this is

 

And

 

dangerously

 

we're no longer

 

close

 

a family

 

to not being family

 

friendly

 

friendly

 

podcast.

 

anymore.

 

Hahaha.

 

very surprised to find out like we're allowed to have actual sponsors on the show. I kind of, I really kind of thought Chuck was like, those bozos, no way.

 

Right?

 

Do the sponsors ever listen to the show?

 

Yeah, it's like tell me your sponsors have never listened to this show without telling

 

Hahahaha

 

me your sponsors have never listened to this show. Anyone who's ever responded to this twice we know has never listened to an episode.

 

Uh, ha,

 

Hahahaha

 

ha.

 

This is not what we're going for, you guys.

 

But hey, if you are a sponsor, thanks for sponsoring us.

 

I know right? Thank you.

 

Yes. And

 

We love you.

 

if you host a conference, I would like to sponsor the show.

 

Yeah, right.

 

So

 

Yeah,

 

I.

 

Russ, in particular, like you want to fly me out there, put

 

Oh, there

 

me in

 

we go.

 

a hotel, like that's great.

 

If we could do a panelist episode live at your conference.

 

Yeah, that would be fun. Let's do that.

 

Awesome.

 

I'm still cheap though, so somebody still has to pay for me, you guys.

 

Yeah.

 

Like, this is...

 

I'm sorry.

 

There's some shameless self-promotion still happening here. The show

 

So

 

should get a kickback,

 

I

 

too.

 

think we should turn this into some advice if we can for our listeners. Anyone

 

Oh, for

 

who

 

sure.

 

still hasn't turned this off and listened to the next episode

 

Like, oh,

 

of their pod

 

jeez.

 

player.

 

Bad enough, these ones.

 

What can you do? Suppose you're considering conferences. What

 

Thank

 

should

 

you.

 

you look for? How do you decide if a conference is a good one and if you're gonna get value from it?

 

I prefer smaller, like very focused conferences and even conferences that have like a hackathon component to them because those tend to be, again, just very small, very focused. It's easy to meet people and to get to know them. Bigger conferences. I don't know, I feel like it would be too reminiscent of a middle school dance for me, where I'm up against the wall and there's just a whole lot of people out there somewhere. But smaller conferences, I'm okay, I can deal with that. But that's just me, if you have, I don't know, if you're a more social kind of person, you might like getting out in a big conference and meeting a bunch of people that you don't know. Me, not so much. I like to already know some people that are going. So that's another thing too, is if you have people that you know who are going to the same conference, if that is a plus for you, then look for that. If it's not a plus for you, you know, then don't.

 

Yeah,

 

I'll

 

I

 

echo

 

would

 

that.

 

agree.

 

I like small conferences. I also like conferences that aren't sponsored by a company. I mean, I've been to sound like I went to GitLab. I don't know what they call it. They had a conference here in Amsterdam a few years ago that I went to. And I learned some good things. It was enjoyable. But I prefer ones that aren't vendor specific, just because I feel like you get more honest talks. You know, it's not all about promoting the vendors stuff. So you get more honest talks and a better variety of talks. So that's my personal bias. That's not to say there's no value in whether it's GitHub or GitLab or Amazon or Google or whatever. I'm not saying there's no value there. I just, I kind of prefer the thematic rather than vendor-based conferences.

 

Yeah, I would agree with that. Pick a conference that has meaning to you. You're interested in that particular topic or that tool or whatever, and the conference is more or less aligned around that. I think you'll have more success there. And then also, when looking at different conferences, just Google. that particular conference and find out what people have said in years past. Odds are you'll end up on Twitter and you'll get pretty much a whole range of of feedback from that and it'll help you shape your decisions to whether that's the right conference for you or not. And then for like here at AWS reInvent, having an insider who can help you, you know, going back again to my account manager for AWS, like most of the value I've gotten from this based on the input from my account manager, go here, talk to these people, I set you up a meeting with these people, go to this thing that's happening at this time, and each one of the suggestions that he's given me has led to just great results that make the conference worthwhile. And I wouldn't have ended up in those places without his guidance on getting there.

 

Yeah, you always kind of want somebody who has the inside scoop. I think on pretty much anything. So it's good advice.

 

Once you're at the conference, how do you make the most of it? I mean, what do you look for? And I think we can answer this in different ways. Like if you're looking for a job, can you do that at a conference? And if so, how, if you're just looking to meet people, I don't know, what are your motivations and how do you get the most out of it?

 

For me, I think it depends on the type of conference. Going back to DevOps days, every one I've been to, they've always had either a whiteboard or a piece of paper taped to the wall with people who were looking to hire, saying, hey, I'm hiring for this position, here's my email address. And so it was just a live running job board, which I thought was great for people looking for your. You've got to hire people or people who are there looking for a job. Um, and then for larger conferences like AWS, I think one of the things that can be helpful there is there's a lot of people who work with AWS here. So find some particular challenges that you're looking to get help with. And then go talk with those people. Like we've got a couple of things that we're trying to do here and lo and behold there are four or five vendors in the expo hall that offer solutions claiming to solve that problem so it's a chance to go and talk with those people face-to-face and you won't be able to determine if that's the right tool or not but you can get a a feeling and out of those four or five you know that may lead to two or three follow-up meetings and maybe a demo or proof of concept in the coming weeks faster and more productive, I think, than just going to their website and trying to scroll through their marketing material to figure out what the difference between what marketing says they do and what their product actually does.

 

I think some conferences also just have job booths and things. I don't know how many, probably not all of them, but I know some do. I would also recommend having a really easy way for people to contact you. If they have to put any work into contacting you, it's probably not a good idea. Like when I was out looking for jobs, I used to have a business card with a QR code. So I'd have a regular business card, and then on the back, it would have a QR code. I don't know, it would have like my LinkedIn or something like that on it. And so that was kind of an easy thing that I could just pass out to get to know people.

 

Did it work? Did people contact you?

 

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've only been to a few conferences, so I'm not

 

Mm-hmm.

 

like necessarily the best person to ask about this, but

 

Mm-hmm

 

the few I've been to, like I still have relationships with the people that I met at those conferences and it's still been, you know, kind of all good things for me. So I think so. Although I suppose there is a bit of confirmation bias because I already knew people at the conferences too. I don't typically go to conferences if I don't know anybody. So that would be a cool experiment. If somebody wants to A-B test that, go to conferences where you know people, go to conferences where you don't know people, hand out cards and see how much feedback you get.

 

That would mean I have to know people first.

 

That's true, and you have to talk to them.

 

What?

 

That's

 

I

 

All

 

a

 

know.

 

deal

 

right, I'm

 

breaker.

 

out.

 

It's wild.

 

Which is funny because all three of us are like, oh, talking to real people? Nope, I'm out. Here we are recording a podcast to be consumed by thousands of people and.

 

But you think people listen to this?

 

Right? And we have our YouTube channels and our Twitter presences and things like that. But all of that is you're still like behind the wall of having to directly interact with other humans.

 

And it's very focused too. I was actually, I was thinking about this the other day cause my older daughter is like super social and she was asking me like how I can go and do meetings and peopling. And then like, I won't go to a crowded grocery store for example. And I was like, but it's different because it's very focused. I know like, you know, on Wednesdays from whatever time to whatever time, depending on stupid daylight savings time, I'm going to be going and like, you know, doing the podcast with you guys or meetings with other people or. I had another podcast going for a little bit. They're doing the YouTube channel or whatever the thing is, but it's focused and it's planned in advance. I don't like it when people just spring the peopling on me. My husband does that to me a lot. He's gotten a little bit better about it over the years, but sometimes he's very social. So sometimes he just like shows up with a bunch of people

 

Yeah.

 

and they're all just in my house and I'm like in my pajamas and it's bad scenes all around you guys.

 

I think that's another really cool thing to point out though, is actually giving a talk at a conference. Because when it comes to just talking to people, I'm not the greatest at it. But I've given a lot of talks at conferences and one of the cool things about doing that is You don't have to figure out what to say when you meet new people because after you give your talk, anyone you talk to is going to have feedback about the talk that you gave. And so you know what the scope of the conversation is going to be ahead of time. So if you're someone who doesn't really like to talk to people or doesn't like unstructured conversations, you know, giving a talk really is not. the anxiety producing event that you think it is, because everyone that you end up talking to is gonna probably talk to you about the talk that you gave. And so the conversation has a direction and it has a scope from the outset. So you don't have to feel that pressure of wondering what people are gonna ask you or what you're gonna talk about.

 

That's true.

 

And it's much easier to get accepted for talks at smaller conferences, I found. Although, hey, so real quick, you know, public service announcement here, if you ever get anybody messaging you to pay to give a talk at a conference, like you have to pay them to give a talk, that is probably a scam. And I just wanna throw that out there.

 

Definitely a scam.

 

Every once in a while

 

Don't

 

that

 

do

 

happens

 

that.

 

to me.

 

Yep.

 

And I'm like, guys, what are we doing here? No, I'm not gonna pay you to come talk. Like, what is wrong with you? No.

 

Thank you. Bye.

 

I mean, first of all, it's a scam, but second of all, just the principle of the thing, absolutely not.

 

Yeah, good point. I haven't encountered that, but you should never pay to speak at a conference. And you're, you know, don't feel like if it's a conference that's not near you, don't hesitate to ask them to cover travel expenses either.

 

I would say there is an exception to that rule about don't pay to speak at a conference. And that is if you are a founder and you are trying to get publicity, it may well be worth it to pay to sponsor a conference and get on the stage at the same time. Now, I've never done that. I don't know what the economics look like there, but I could see that happening. You know, if you want to speak at your local DevOps days or I don't know if they would do that, but your whatever. buy a booth or whatever, sponsor the conference and ask that in return you get a speaking spot. That might be legitimate, I don't know. But that's not, nobody's gonna approach you and say, would you pay me to speak at my conference? If they do that, just tell them to stick it with a Sun Note Show.

 

Yeah, and that's actually common, the part that you were mentioning, Jonathan. Like if you sponsor, there's different tiers of sponsorship, you know, like the lowest level you get a booth and then the next tier above that you get like a larger booth and then like the tier above that you get the larger booth and you get your name, company name on the website and then you get a speaking slot. But

 

Mm-hmm.

 

all of that... All of that is clearly defined on the conference's website under the

 

Exactly.

 

sponsors section there. So again to Jillian's point, no one's going to DM you on Twitter out of the blue and ask you for money for it. It will be spelled out on the official conference website.

 

Yeah, exactly. Plenty of companies do sponsor booths and whatnot. I don't know. I know PyData does that quite a bit. They have a lot of booths and a lot of sponsors and things like that. If you're looking for a job, that might be a good place to look, because you know they have at least enough money to sponsor a booth, right? So they might be looking for people. But they might be looking for people to hire, and they might be looking for customers, which are kind of two different areas to spend money in, but might still be worth it to go talk to them at least.

 

A lot of sponsors at conferences are specifically there to hire people too. I've been in many conferences where their entire booth is dedicated to come work for us. Here's an online assessment. You can do it while you're here in the booth or you can talk to a recruiter or whatever. Some companies are all about that. It depends on the conference, like developer conferences are like that a lot. Other times they're trying to sell you something, you know, come buy our new IDE plugin or buy this book about... the new React widget or whatever thing they might be selling.

 

Yeah, that's probably another point worth pointing out is everyone at a conference with a booth is trying to sell something, whether that's their company or their product. The free t-shirt that you get from them is not really free. It comes at the cost

 

Ha ha ha.

 

of your email address. and the unwritten promise that their unsubscribe link actually works.

 

Right.

 

I guess that's another tip we can share here. A lot of times the sponsors will get the list of email addresses from the venue, from everyone who attended the conference. So in many cases it's worth your time and effort to set up an alias or an alternate email address and use that for the conference so that if things get out of hand you haven't completely trashed your primary email address to the point where it's unusual.

 

Ah, I didn't know that. I didn't know they could just like give your data to their sponsors. I guess I should have, but I didn't.

 

Here in Europe, they would have to disclose that ahead of time with GDPR rules. In the US, I don't know how restrictive that is.

 

Yeah, I'm sure it's spelled out somewhere on their website if you go look for it and find it. But it's also like here at AWS you have the badge and the barter agreement is, hey, if you let me scan your badge, I'll give you the lightsaber or the t-shirt or whatever it is that we're giving away. And so they'll get your email address from scanning your badge.

 

the lightsaber. I can't believe, I mean like I can and I can't believe that that's the swag at tech conferences.

 

Yeah, I saw a few hundred people yesterday walking around with lightsabers hanging out of their goody bags.

 

I believe it. I absolutely believe it.

 

I thought it was normal to see lightsabers hanging out of things in Vegas.

 

Hahaha

 

That's the other conference.

 

Hahaha!

 

It's the other side of Vegas.

 

The

 

Right?

 

Star Wars Conference, right?

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah, exactly.

 

All right,

 

Although had

 

is

 

they

 

there anything

 

had,

 

else? Oh, sorry,

 

yeah,

 

go ahead.

 

had they had re-invent next week instead of this week, I could have seen ZZ Top in concert. So I'm a little bummed about

 

Why

 

that.

 

don't you just stay an extra week, man? You're already there.

 

Yeah, no. That's a hard pass for me.

 

All right.

 

So that's what my husband does. So I guess that could be like, you know, another tip is he plans for conferences. I mean, like somewhat based on what they are, but mostly he just goes places that he wants to go. And then he'll like have a couple of extra days after the conference. And usually he gets his work or the conference. He's very good at getting people to pay for stuff. So then like, he'll just have like a couple days before or after the conference where he'll just hang out at the place, which could be pretty cool, depending on the place that you're going.

 

Yeah, I've actually done that at a bunch of the conferences I've spoken at, like Amsterdam, we hung out for a few days after that. My wife went with me to that one. I spoke in Lithuania at their DevOps Europe conference and then we spent a few days there in Lithuania and then went to Prague since we were close. But yeah, that's a cool idea. It's a great way to see places that you may not otherwise go to.

 

Exactly. When we went to Dubrovnik, when I went to Dubrovnik, we turned it into a holiday both times from Microconf. Spent a few extra days there. That was our plan with Vienna also in September, but then my wife got pregnant and she was seven months pregnant

 

You think it's all her fault.

 

at the time. It wasn't practical, but we had planned to turn it into

 

That

 

a week.

 

ruins all the vacations, huh? I know,

 

Should have thought

 

I know.

 

that one through earlier.

 

Really?

 

Oh well.

 

I found out I was pregnant in Spain. I

 

Thank you.

 

was very unhappy with the timing of that. Very unhappy.

 

What the hell is this? A baby? Where did that come from?

 

Ha ha.

 

Maybe you've come a little bit after the vacation, like geez, you know?

 

I'm sorry.

 

Ah, life.

 

Well, on that note.

 

Yeah, are we done? Do we have anything else to talk about, or are we conferenced at all?

 

I think so.

 

I would s-

 

Um... Go ahead, Jillian.

 

I was just going to say for kind of, you know, the paranoid among us, like definitely look into conferences. I've had a few that just sort of at first glance look pretty legit, especially if there's some place close to you, you live some place close by and you're like, ah, that could be cool, get out for a day and go do something different. Not all conferences that advertise are legit, right? And personally, I don't like being the only woman at a conference that's happened to me a couple times. I prefer that that doesn't happen,

 

Never

 

so

 

happened

 

I will.

 

to me for some reason.

 

Okay.

 

I know, I know, it's crazy, it's wild, isn't it? But yeah, so I just prefer that that doesn't happen.

 

One last topic actually we should talk about. I'm curious. This is more a curiosity thing. What kind of swag do you like? When you go to a conference Because

 

coffee

 

I'm tired

 

mugs.

 

of t-shirts, I mean I don't wear t-shirts with logos in the first place just as a sort of principled statement I don't need more

 

We

 

water

 

like.

 

bottles. I don't need more mouse pads. I've thankfully those are kind of out of style now You know, I don't need more post-it notes or pens What kind of swag is good?

 

Coffee mugs. Like we destroy, we are like the destroyer of dishes in this house. I don't know what it is, but

 

Ha ha!

 

no dishes can withstand us. And so we always need new coffee mugs. And my husband just got like a bunch from a conference that he went to and he was like, oh, I got us a bunch because we keep breaking them.

 

the

 

But they're really nice ones. They have like this little like cover on them. They're great. So

 

which are cool.

 

coffee mugs, that's all I want.

 

Yeah, for me, I think I'm in the same boat as you, Jonathan, where I'm kind of t-shirted out. Although I picked up some t-shirts here, but if I'm perfectly honest, I'm just going to use them as workout t-shirts, you know, for going to the gym. And there's some really cool stuff, like there's some things here, you know, that they've got like Lego sets and the lightsabers that I already mentioned. and cool stuff like that. And those are actually pretty cool, I think. I haven't really picked up on those just because I struggle to keep my desk clean to begin with, and so adding more stuff to my desk is really something I'm going out of my way to avoid.

 

I do like Legos. I didn't know that was an option.

 

Yeah, there's a whole range of Legos here, from like really small ones to like the great big Lego kits that they're doing the drawings for.

 

Those are so fun. We get one of those every Christmas. And we, well, Santa brings us one every Christmas and we bake a bunch of cookies on Christmas day and hang out and do Legos.

 

Right on, that's a cool idea.

 

There's one piece of swag I would love to see at a conference. I've never seen it. That would be a necktie, or better yet, a bowtie.

 

Wow.

 

I would totally wear somebody's branded bow tie. I would wear it on my YouTube channel. If you make a bow tie and you want to send it to me, I will wear it on my YouTube channel. With a small caveat, I won't do it for certain types of businesses I consider unethical. If you make bombs, I'm probably not gonna wear your bow tie. But you know, this is a very short list.

 

That's fair.

 

But yeah, I would love to see a bow tie. Or boxer shorts would be great too, but I'm not sure I would wear that on my YouTube channel. Even with my below the waist.

 

What?

 

cam angle.

 

Because the validation is gonna get you demonetized on YouTube.

 

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

 

Getting too personal there.

 

But that's true, I've never seen anyone doing either bow ties or neck ties, but that's a pretty cool idea.

 

I could kind of understand why because not a lot of people wear those these days, bow ties especially, and it's also very gender specific. So you'd have to, I don't know, do hair barrettes or something to go along with it, I guess. I don't know.

 

Scrunchies!

 

Scrunchies,

 

One can never have

 

there

 

too

 

you go.

 

many scrunchies.

 

I can string them.

 

I have never had too many scrunchies, that's

 

Yeah, that's never been a problem for me.

 

true.

 

But Jonathan and I, we go to the same barbers.

 

It's an ever constant struggle for me.

 

Ha ha ha.

 

Ha ha ha.

 

Me, I have two daughters, I have sisters. There's like a lot of women in my family. I don't know, the men are very outnumbered, so we just have like scrunchies. They just explode from everywhere.

 

Cool, so I think just to wrap this up and summarize it, choose your conference based on what it is you're trying to do, whether you're looking for technical content to learn new skills or support resources on how to use a product. And I think that will help you be more successful in finding the right conference and feeling like you got your value out of it at the end. Oh, and then I just thought of this. One of the greatest swag things I ever got was a one-year subscription to JetBrains. I think it was actually from JetBrains, they were at the conference and they were giving away like a one year trial to all their products for everyone who dropped by their booth and

 

I would never use that.

 

Never, right?

 

That's neat. I would. I use JetBrains every day.

 

I tried

 

I

 

their

 

never

 

products.

 

switched on over

 

I haven't

 

to BS

 

found one

 

code.

 

that I like yet, but

 

Really?

 

yeah.

 

Oh man, that is the one invoice I get every year that I happily pay. I don't even wait for it to be due.

 

I could not remove Go Land fast enough from my computer

 

No kidding.

 

when I tried it.

 

I like live in PyCharm. Like it's just one of those things that's always open. It's like PyCharm and Docker.

 

I felt I when I was using I hope I hope JetBrains isn't a sponsor of this

 

Well, not anymore.

 

episode

 

I bet they are.

 

I felt like I was wading through a pool of Java-flavored molasses when I was trying to use Go Land. Everything in the UI, it felt like Java. I'm not writing Java, I'm writing Go. I'm sure that JetBrains has written, or what do they call their ID? I'm sure it's written in Java. But still, the options in the menu are like... Java class names and crap like that. I don't want to have to learn a new programming language to use my IDE for goodness sake, go away.

 

So what do you use?

 

I use VS code these days.

 

Oh, oh.

 

I'm not really a big fan.

 

Sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Give me a second.

 

I did like Atom

 

Real developers

 

quite a

 

use

 

bit.

 

Vim.

 

I liked Atom pretty well, but it fell behind and it's been discontinued now. So,

 

Right, yeah.

 

Oh

 

yeah.

 

really? I used that for a bit and I

 

Yeah,

 

liked

 

I mean,

 

it but...

 

basically, I guess when Microsoft bought GitHub, they're like, we don't need to be supporting VS Code and Atom. Let's just do the one that we already do. And so they're like, goodbye. So

 

Great.

 

yeah, I can't say that I love VS Code, but... I certainly hate it less than I hated my experience with Go Land.

 

Yeah, and I think the early versions of VS Code, they felt really like a, somebody took the Atom IDE and did the old right-click save as and called it VS Code.

 

Yeah. Yeah, they looked almost the same for quite a while. It's, you know, I really miss the days when it was not only possible, but actually easy and enjoyable to write code without an IDE. And Go was like that for a long time, but now, now that, um, you know, with modules and, uh, just a lot of the import stuff, it's not really practical. I mean, you can, um, but whether you, even if you're using Vim, you're basically, you've turned it into an IDE for the most part. So.

 

right?

 

said. That's

 

I

 

a

 

like

 

different

 

all

 

topic.

 

the auto completes and refactoring from the IDE, so I'm not with you on that. Spell check. I need my spell check.

 

I turn off auto-complete for the most part. I can't stand that.

 

No, no! All right, Jonathan, we're gonna have to fight about that when I think on another episode.

 

All right,

 

Next week the battle of the IDEs.

 

come back next week. We have pics?

 

Um...

 

Thanks for watching!

 

Well, awkward silence.

 

Nah, I do. So I've been digging into the package manager called SPAC, which is like a, it's kind of like Conda, except It compiles directly on your system. So if you have any kind of hardware components, MPI, CUDA, or GPU type stuff, or if you need to compile with specific versions of MPI, like you often do if say you're on an HPC scheduler, which is where I spend most of my days is, you know, often HPC land, it has really, really good support for all of that. And I've just been using it a lot. And I've actually started porting some of the recipes that I previously had easy build, which I still love easy build. That's actually one of the conferences I went to. That's like one of my favorite conferences. And I have like a lot of barter economy built up in easy build because I have like people that I trade tasks with, like I need this in easy build. Do you need this other thing? Let's talk. But I don't know, I'm tired of having like 50 package managers that I have to use. So I'm thinking about condensing them down a little bit. And I am pretty happy with SPAC. It's also very well supported on Amazon Linux too, which EasyBuild. isn't as much, but it's directly, like they test it, they have mirrors for it. The AWS dev team like is kind of pushing us back. And since y'all know, I'm kind of inherently lazy. I tend to use the thing that I can just get my work done the fastest with the least amount of friction. So that's my tech pick. And then I guess I have a book pick too. I'm reading a book called Sinister Magic by Lindsay Broker. I'm about three quarters of the way finished and it's very good. It's like an urban fantasy book. It's fun. It's a pretty light read. I tend to switch between light reads that don't take a lot of brain power and things that do take a lot of brain power, depending on how much I'm working or how much is going on with my kids and that kind of thing. So this is my light read. And if you like urban fantasy, people, I don't know, assassin for hire kind of stuff, you might like it. That's it. Those are my picks.

 

That sounds like my night job, not a fantasy.

 

Hahaha!

 

Hehehe

 

So my pick for the week, I'm going to pick the YubiKey for 2FA.

 

What are we doing here?

 

And I think I'm in a small minority, if not completely alone in this thing of like if you have the Authenticator app on your phone for 2FA and you have your password manager on your phone for passwords, you don't have 2FA. because anyone who compromises your phone now has your passwords and your 2FA device. And I get the fact that, you know, like your 2FA device may have some kind of biometric thing in there, but it's still one device and that's not two devices required for two factor authentication. So, YubiKey, I like it. They're pretty reliable. It fits on your keychain. You don't have to drag this extra thing around anywhere and it's true. 2FA from a separate physical device. So if you're going to compromise something you have to get the device that has the passwords and the 2FA device itself. So yeah, Ubiquice. That's my pick.

 

I'm gonna have to look into that soon. I've been thinking about getting one too. I have two picks that are related to each other. My first pick is a book. Just came out recently. It's called Delivery Management, Enabling Teams to Deliver Value by Johnny Williams. I know about this book because I follow Johnny Williams on LinkedIn. And when he announced he had this book out, that's cool. I'd heard about delivery management, but I didn't really understand it. So I bought the book and I've been reading it and I've been learning about delivery management. It's pretty cool. It's, you could... sort of the TLDR version, you could kind of think of it as a, if you imagine a Venn diagram that includes like an Agile Coach and a Product Manager and a Scrum Master and some of these different Product-y, Develop-y titles. It's like a cross-section of certain parts of these and it's cool. So I first heard about the term delivery management from Marty Kagan's book, I think. I read it a year ago. And I talked to some friends about it. Like, oh yeah, delivery management, that's terrible, you should never do delivery management. You should do the real like agile coach sort of thing. And I was like, I don't know if that's true, but this book is how to open my eyes to what delivery management is. So that's my first pick, Delivery Management by Johnny Williams. And related is my second pick, which is episode number 50 of the Tiny DevOps Podcast, which will be coming out about the same time as this episode. So maybe a day or two before or after this episode comes out where I interview Johnny Williams about his book. So if you're not ready to buy the book, but you like podcasts, check out episode number 50 of the Tiny DevOps Podcast where I interview the author and you can sort of get a longer TLDR version of the book. And then maybe you'll go buy the book after that. So those are my two picks.

 

Wow, that was like a... a bundle of pics.

 

Yeah.

 

Like a holiday bundled pic.

 

Two for one.

 

Right? That was well done.

 

And all for the low, low price of your attention. Ha ha

 

Joke's on you, I don't have it.

 

ha ha ha! Ha ha!

 

People are just trapped in their cars while they're listening to us anyways, probably.

 

Later. Alright, cool.

 

Cool. I think that's an episode, guys.

 

Yeah.

 

I

 

I think

 

look

 

so

 

forward

 

too.

 

to our IDE battles next week,

 

Yeah, bring it on.

 

or something else.

 

All right, see you guys.

 

That's right,

 

Until next time guys.

 

I'll manufacture drama for the internet. Okay, bye bye.