Top Dev Ops global influencer, award-winning tech writer, and developer advocate Pavan Belagatti joins the show today to share the importance of personal branding as a developer, plus tactical strategies you can implement today.

What's going on everybody? I'm today's host of another exciting episode of Adventures in DevOps. I almost said another exciting adventure of Adventures in DevOps and I was like, well, that's going to sound stupid. So

 

When has that

 

I know

 

stopped you before, Will? Ha ha ha

 

it's almost like,

 

ha!

 

it's almost like the monkey brain is like, no, dude, no, stop. You've got to quit doing that to us. So joining me in the studio today, Jonathan Hall. And

 

Hi

 

we

 

everyone.

 

have a guest today talking to us about personal branding as a developer, which I'm pretty excited about because I have spent way too much time on this subject and done an absolutely horrible job of it. So I'm excited. I've got my notebook ready to take some notes. Pavan, welcome to the show.

 

Thanks guys, thanks for having me today in this show. Yeah,

 

Yeah,

 

very excited.

 

our pleasure. So do you want to give us a little bit about your background?

 

Yeah, sure. My name is Pavan, and I have 10 years of experience in DevOps. And basically, I do tech marketing roles. And my first company, DevOps company, was Shippable. And then I moved to JFrog. And then now I'm working at Harness, modern continuous delivery platform. I started writing articles. you know reading about DevOps from last five years and then you know, I really liked it and then one one social media platform Serious platform. I would say is LinkedIn that helped me to grow so much more and Yeah from last three years Every day I share one tech story And usually I get around 100 likes on an average.

 

Oh, wow.

 

And I have built a huge following of 35k developers. Yeah, so

 

Oh wow, nice.

 

yes. So.

 

That's all.

 

And so LinkedIn is your primary medium for doing that.

 

Yes, LinkedIn is the primary medium. When I think three years back, one day, previously, I used to call myself a growth hacker, a fancy name for marketing,

 

Uh-huh.

 

using unconventional ways of doing

 

Mm-hmm.

 

marketing. But yeah, it was pretty famous. It started as a movement in the early 2000s. in US actually but then it came to India where everybody started saying hey I'm a growth hacker, I'm a growth

 

Hahaha

 

hacker so it's fancy and all the startups started looking at hiring growth hackers so yeah so from there I had this thing of because I have done engineering and then MBA in marketing so that mix usually helps me to get the tech part and also the marketing. aspect of it, how to present the tech articles and very complex tech things to people in a very in a very illimiant words. That's what I started doing three years back and first thing I used Twitter but Twitter was kind of it didn't help me. So LinkedIn one day I went to LinkedIn and I shared my personal story saying hey you know in 2013. I used to spend my whole day in just $3 or $4 in Bangalore. I wrote a huge story and it got like 1000 likes and more than 1000 likes and it went viral. That

 

right on.

 

made me think that, okay, this is the platform for me. So let me shift slowly talking about marketing. So that's how I started. online learning.

 

Right on. So for someone who's listening to the show that hasn't really spent any time doing personal branding, why would they want to? What are the benefits for building your personal brand as a developer?

 

Usually, I tell developers not to get offended. Developers are kind of shy. They usually sit in a corner with their laptop and they don't like people coming them and asking them a lot of things and they just want to solve problems. They are the creative people on earth. Right, they are. Now every company is a software company. But, you know. When you come out there, start speaking in conferences and podcasts like this, and if you start writing, you'll get noticed and people start asking you a lot of questions. That's how you become a kind of, I don't want to use this word, an influencer. So,

 

Yeah

 

you'll become, people start looking at you as a thought leader in this space, and that gives you a lot of benefits and advantages. like you get picked easily in publications. And if you approach someone, they'll be knowing your name in your industry. Hey, I know you've been writing articles there. And it's easy to pitch any of your ideas to other people. And that's why I encourage people to go out there, make a lot of connections, and approach these websites where you can. ask them, hey, I have a cool idea, I have a cool article, can I share it on your website because I can leverage that audience and then get a lot of reach. And this Twitter and LinkedIn, these two I prefer for developers and there are many other tech forums where developers should be there and then get interacted with others and then yeah, that's how you'll get noticed.

 

Do you think everybody should, every developer should care about their personal brand or is it only a matter

 

Thanks

 

if

 

for

 

you

 

watching!

 

have certain career aspirations?

 

I think every developer should have a personal brand as such because end of the day we are all doing our efforts, hard work to get notified, to get noticed and then get paid. So it's better to get noticed early and then even the company leaders, right? If you can. Tell them, hey, I have done this. I have these many followers. And that gives you an extra edge on your side. Yeah. So I believe everybody, at least to certain, I won't say I'm active very much on LinkedIn, not like me maybe because I don't expect everybody to be all day active on LinkedIn. So at least for some time they just come

 

Yeah.

 

then, yeah.

 

I mean, if everybody was, then there would be no advantage anymore,

 

Yeah,

 

right? Because

 

too noisy.

 

it would

 

Yes.

 

be too noisy and

 

Yes.

 

we wouldn't stand

 

Yes.

 

out. So, yeah.

 

That'll be too noisy. That's what happened to Facebook.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Hahaha

 

One of the things that happened to Facebook.

 

So, yes.

 

So if somebody, maybe they're, let's talk to somebody who's brand new, maybe they just finished university or they've done a bootcamp or something. Is that too early to start building a brand? I mean, do you need to build an expertise first or can you start building your brand from the very beginning?

 

When I say brand, it might look very big initially, but for a person who just finished his university, they can just start with something very simple, like creating a Hello World application and then sharing it with people. So that's how we will as simple as that. Hey, today I wrote Hello World application on Node.js.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

That will help other. other students and then that's how he can get notified and then get noticed in his own little group of people. So yeah, that's how we can do that, you or she.

 

Alright. And, um... What are the different ways that you like to build your brand? You've talked about LinkedIn a lot. Is that all you do? Or do you do YouTube or podcasting or blogging or anything else? Or is it

 

LinkedIn.

 

for you, it's just LinkedIn?

 

I picked LinkedIn because LinkedIn got me a momentum. It gave initially that momentum

 

Mm-hmm.

 

that I want to... Every day I used to get like 50 followers at some point and through that I used to get a lot of good connections. That's what I did and I picked LinkedIn. That's how it helped me. Like I said, Twitter I tried but... I

 

Mm-hmm.

 

have 3k followers on Twitter but I have not cracked that part because on Twitter you have to be there very personally taking lot of selfies pics and all posting them

 

Okay.

 

here I am here at this conference

 

Hehehehehehe

 

I am here with this guy so we are going out for lunch and all that but I want to keep it little more professional and more serious oriented so I picked LinkedIn. And I do videos too sometimes. I'm not very good at videos. I'm still learning, but

 

Hmm.

 

I prefer, I think when people see your face in a video, I think that gives more trust to the people. That credibility, that trust is very important along with writing articles and being on social media.

 

I think that's a good point there. That's one of the things that people struggle with is focusing on one platform. You know, I think if I'm gonna build a personal brand, that means I've gotta be on LinkedIn and on Twitter and on Snapchat and TikTok and Facebook, and that's not true. You can just pick one and stick with that.

 

Yeah, true.

 

To add to that, you don't need to stick to it necessarily, but you should focus on one at a time,

 

once.

 

I think. I mean, if later you want to expand to others, you don't need to feel limited. But you definitely shouldn't feel required to take on the whole world at once. Don't worry about Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and

 

Yeah,

 

whatever, whatever, whatever.

 

I believe all these social media platforms are targeted towards different categories like Facebook is for family fans, Twitter is for nerds mostly and LinkedIn is for people like me who want to

 

Hmm.

 

build a lot of followers, very serious folks and there are things like Reddit.

 

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

 

You can get a lot of karma by answering other people's questions like Quora. There is Quora. There is Reddit. There is Hacker News and all this. But you can't be at all

 

Yeah, yeah, there's

 

platform.

 

a lot of a

 

So

 

lot of those out there.

 

take one, be good at one and then leverage that so that you can move on to other platforms if you want.

 

What benefits have you seen personally from building a brand? I mean, you talked about number of followers and you've already made me jealous because you have a lot more than I do. But what benefit does that bring? Has it given you better job offers? Have you gotten consulting gigs? What benefit has it brought

 

The first

 

to you?

 

thing I have since I write tech articles, I'm very crazy about writing on big publications, right? So when I started out in 2013, I believe, I reached out to a bunch of editors, right? They said, who are you? I'm like, have you written any articles before? What

 

Okay.

 

credibility do you have? Right? And I had nothing to show.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So by building this and started writing on, slowly on medium. medium is free. So I started getting a lot of claps at that time. I think now also medium has claps thing right. You can give claps on medium.

 

Mm-hmm.

 

So that's how

 

I think

 

I

 

so,

 

started

 

yeah.

 

you know giving these proofs to these editors saying hey see I have written this article there and it went really well and even how LinkedIn helped me. I diverted all this traffic there. I used to share these links on LinkedIn. After I got like 5k connections, followers at that time. So slowly, I started getting some more reach and a lot of followers. And then I started personally started messaging them, hey, can you please go read this? They started liking it. And That is one thing and also companies and leaders approaching me for, hey, can you give a talk here about this? Hey, can you collaborate and write this article together? Because that helped me a lot. And like I said, even the hiring process, right? It gets easy because the leaders already kind of know you in this industry that you are there doing stuff already. and you don't have to do that extra effort to convince them that, hey, I know this stuff, I can really do this. So that gives an extra edge when you build a personal brand.

 

Yeah, I think it's very helpful whenever you're looking for a new job because one of the big challenges with interviewing for a new job is getting past that technical interview, you know, where they try to figure out do you actually have the technical skills and if you have a public, if you have public resources that show what you're doing in that space. And a lot of times it makes the tech interview process easier or gives you the ability to skip it altogether.

 

Yeah, true.

 

So how do you come up with, you said you were putting out one article on LinkedIn per day, right?

 

It's not exactly an article, I would say it's a post.

 

a post every day.

 

Yeah.

 

So how do you come up with something new to say every single day?

 

Yeah, that's a good question. Most of

 

It's

 

people

 

one I struggle

 

ask me

 

with. Ha ha ha.

 

every day. Yeah, see after spending three years at LinkedIn, I know what these people like. There are things like, if you know the DevOps world, if I talk about the platform like Kubernetes, there's Kubernetes, there is now Service Mesh. If I talk about CI, CD, I know these things. Particularly about communities, if I talk about communities, I know that this thing is going to go a little viral. So before even posting, I can guess, yes, I have made a good post. I think it's going to give me good likes or reach, I would say. So I have understood, like I said, after spending three years, I have understood those topics that I should search for. The case studies that how... How Snapchat is using Kubernetes. How Instagram is doing DevOps. So these kind of interesting stories, if I share, usually that's what people, the developers prefer. And something

 

right

 

knowledgeable.

 

on.

 

If I share something very knowledgeable, something of value, they share it.

 

Catch ya.

 

like it.

 

Jonathan, I know you put out things on a daily basis. What's your approach for finding something to say every day?

 

Yeah, I write our daily email list. I usually, so most days it's pretty easy. Let me back up. The hardest part is when you're first starting, in my experience. Especially if you've maybe been writing it weekly or monthly or ad hoc and you start doing it daily, it can be really hard to think, what am I gonna say every day? So my approach was to make a list of 30 topics. And my criteria was something that I could just talk about off the top of my head. if a stranger asked me about it in an elevator or on the subway or something like that. So, you know, just something that I didn't have to think about, I could just like, yeah, how do I feel about Kubernetes? Oh yeah, here's what I think, you know, whatever, I could just answer or what's your favorite CI CD tool or whatever, something I could just, boom, talk about quickly. And I made a list, once I had a list of 30 of those, I was like, okay, I have a month of material here, this is gonna be easy. So I have that in a document. And then every day I would write something, I would take it off the list. And then as I think of new ideas, maybe I'm reading a blog post or a book or getting a fight with somebody on Twitter about

 

Hahaha

 

something and like, Oh, that would be a great topic. I add it to my list. Uh, so, you know, some days I add 10 things to my list. Some days, nothing. Um, but overall I keep adding to it. And that's how I got started. Nowadays, I usually ignore the list completely. Sometimes when I'm reading a book or something, I'm like, oh, this would be great. I don't want to forget this. I'll add to the list. But usually that list just sits there kind of rotting unless, except, you know, maybe if I go on a holiday and I'm not talking about computers to people, then my brain isn't thinking about it. And then I refer to my list again. But like this morning, I wrote about a conversation I had with a former colleague yesterday, which was on the topic that I'd written about the day before. So, you know, it just got like these things kind of just build on each other. So, you know, the last I kind of have this thing going. I see the thread in my head. I'm sure most people reading it don't. But like I wrote this topic and that led to a conversation that led to my next topic, which led to a conversation about the next topic and so on and so forth. So it's pretty it's pretty easy to keep it going. Once you get going, your brain just starts to see opportunities for topics everywhere.

 

Well, there you go.

 

Yeah.

 

And then once a week, I can be lazy and I just announced the latest adventures in DevOps

 

Hahaha

 

podcasts and say, here, go listen to that. Ha ha ha

 

Hehehe

 

ha.

 

That's called content repurposing, right?

 

I was about to say that.

 

There

 

So

 

you go.

 

Yeah

 

what I usually do,

 

Hehehehe

 

I see that in a week, in a month, like I go back to my three months of list of the posts and articles that I share, I see which one went a little good and then I reshare it again. The one I shared three months back, I go back to my own list and that is the best use of repurposing the content. So

 

Right on.

 

sometimes I am kind of lazy sometimes I feel like okay let's not do this today so

 

Hahaha

 

Usually on Fridays.

 

Right? How much time would you say that you spend on personal branding each day?

 

Each day now I started off with maybe like two to three hours every day. Now I like like 30 minutes every

 

Oh

 

day.

 

wow, right on.

 

Because my role here as a developer Advocated Harness, I do kind of experiments with CI, CD, serverless, GCP, Azure. So I keep writing what I learned. So I make them articles. what I learn, I convert them into articles. So that way I push them to different websites. I publish them to different websites. And those are usually the kind of stuff that developers like. Like how to build and push your artifacts to artifactory. How to do CI CD with Go, like for Go applications and Python.

 

So if someone wanted to get started with this, what would? What would your guidelines be to help them start doing this in a sustainable way where they don't feel like they're taking on another full-time job?

 

Yeah, so the thing is, I think there is something called Google Alerts. You can go to Google Alerts and set your keywords. For example, I have set cloud native, Kubernetes, Docker, Service Mesh, all the popular topics, popular keywords that come under in this industry. So once you set your Google, what is that? Google Alerts with keywords. you start getting emails everyday you can set that you start getting emails everyday whenever someone writes a topic on your keyword that if you have chosen keyword like communities if somebody has written something on that you get that article on your inbox everyday so you see what the other people are writing and

 

Mm-hmm.

 

where they are writing so and there are tools like social animal. A social animal is one tool that I use. If I search for DevOps, it will show me what is the top article on DevOps. It gives a list, how many shares it got

 

you

 

on Facebook, how many shares it got on Twitter and LinkedIn and Reddit. So on that, you can get a lot of... ideas like what people are talking about, what is trending and again LinkedIn and Twitter will give a lot of... if you follow the thought leaders, you will know

 

Mm-hmm.

 

of course what they are talking and what you should be talking, something related to that. And one easy trick is also you can go to YouTube, search about Kubernetes and see which one is coming up and then actually convert that into an article and talk about it, write about it. give the credits to them. That also is one trick that I used initially. They can use these simple ones to write articles and share as post everyday, create a 5 minute video, all these things they can do.

 

Right on. Jonathan, what about you? What's your advice for someone just starting to do this?

 

Get started. Just get started.

 

Just do

 

That's

 

it.

 

really my advice.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah. Don't wait. You're never gonna know what you're doing until you start messing up. So the sooner you mess up, the sooner you can start improving. Just pick a platform, whatever you like. So I never used LinkedIn until I started doing this. And I tried, I started on LinkedIn and Twitter at the same time. And Twitter just didn't like me, I guess. I don't know. I mean, I'm still there. I automatically post my dailies to both LinkedIn and Twitter. And I probably, I got a like today from

 

Hahaha

 

somebody on Twitter. It's kind of like, it's notable when I get a like on Twitter. I get one every two weeks or something. On LinkedIn, I get lots of likes. So for whatever reason, my content seems to resonate better or my style resonates better on LinkedIn. So that's where I put my attention. But even so LinkedIn isn't my primary focus. My primary focus is my mailing list because I want to own that relationship with those people. I don't want, like if LinkedIn decides to ban my account, I don't want to be without my user base, if that makes sense. So I mean, I still use LinkedIn, but I use LinkedIn to hopefully drive people to my mailing list and to my other content, my podcast, this podcast, my YouTube channels, things like that. But definitely just get started. Whether you're, if you want to set up a WordPress site or use a static site generator like Hugo, like I use, or LinkedIn, it doesn't matter, just start, or Twitter. And just start writing about your experience. Today I learned how to build a home chart. Today I learned how to write Hello World in Python. Whatever, it doesn't matter how detailed or how simple it is, just start writing your experience. Some, no matter what you say, Somebody won't

 

right.

 

know that yet.

 

That's all.

 

So, you know, you don't have to worry about being the expert first. You're always the expert to somebody. And sometimes you're wrong and people will be happy to tell you about that. Don't worry. Ha ha ha ha.

 

There was a post on Twitter the other day this person posted that whenever they post a question on Reddit, they have another account. So they'll log in to that account and then post an answer that's just completely and horribly wrong. said because nobody cares about having the right answer, but everyone loves to tell someone who's wrong that they're wrong.

 

Thank

 

So

 

you.

 

they use that to get answers on Reddit. And I was like, wow.

 

I have seen that. I thought

 

Yeah,

 

it would work on

 

it's

 

Stack

 

like,

 

Overflow

 

that's

 

too.

 

just brilliant.

 

Okay.

 

Another great idea for getting started is, you know, Jonathan, you mentioned having your own blog or WordPress site or whatever. So build that and then that can be your first series of articles of how you built it.

 

Sure,

 

And that'll

 

definitely.

 

give you, if you're just getting started with that or choosing a new platform, that'll give you multiple things to write about right after that.

 

Well, even if you don't want to, you know, yeah, even if you don't want to host it yourself, just blog about the experience of choosing whether you're going to use WordPress or something else. You know, if you're into DevOps, then definitely hosting it yourself is a great idea. It'll give you practical experience. But even if you're not, just

 

Yeah.

 

write about something. It doesn't matter. Here's why I chose WordPress instead of Django or whatever.

 

Yeah.

 

Just write.

 

Yeah, regarding this one example, I can say my wife is also in DevOps. She recently just started with, okay, let me make a do a video on how to become a DevOps engineer without any prior experience. She did that video for 10 minutes and today it hit 10k, 10k views.

 

Oh wow.

 

So 10k views and I was like, oh my God, seriously, then we need to get you a good camera or something to record. So she's really enjoying it. Every week she's telling that, okay, let me do every week one video. Okay, so she read about Docker, she read about Kubernetes. They are all slowly picking up because this one video is going consistently really well. So I think in three weeks it got 10K views. For a starter, it's a really big thing is what I say.

 

Yeah, for sure.

 

So she just started that, like how to become a DevOps engineer without any prior experience. So she comes from an electronics background. She did not have any prior experience of software engineering, but she did some reading and she went through some course and she got into a DevOps role in one of the big companies. So she told her story in this video. everybody started liking it that's how it got in three weeks 10k views

 

So with your wife working

 

Nice.

 

in DevOps too, are there some family arguments that come out of

 

I'm

 

that?

 

sorry.

 

Like Jenkins versus GitHub Actions, it's like, damn it, you'll use Jenkins or sleep

 

Hehehe

 

on the couch.

 

As of now, nothing like that because we always discuss what they are using at their company, what we are using at our company but anyhow I convince her to at least use what we are doing and what I use for her personal projects, for learning

 

Right on.

 

projects. What she knows she will teach me and what I know simpler I teach her. That's how it usually works.

 

That's pretty cool. I mean, just having things, like you want to have things in common with your spouse, but like both working in the same career, that's actually pretty cool.

 

But sometimes I felt it's kind of boring too. You always keep talking the same things.

 

Yeah,

 

Hehehehe

 

yeah, I suppose that's true, yeah.

 

Yeah, but I knew that DevOps is gonna be really big in the coming years so that's how I told her before marriage that hey quit everything just learn DevOps. She asked me like what is DevOps? Like I told her see this is how it is. I did not know properly so I told her just Google it. It's

 

care.

 

like some years back.

 

Yeah, that's the beauty. Nobody knows what DevOps is, and somehow we're getting paid for it. So fingers crossed

 

Yeah.

 

that that holds true. Right?

 

That's

 

Yeah.

 

the best kind of job, right? Just keep paying me to do stuff you don't understand, and I'll just

 

Yeah.

 

keep doing stuff you

 

We

 

don't understand.

 

really want to fire him, but we just don't know what the impact of that's going to be.

 

So what are your plans? I mean, do you intend to just keep focusing on LinkedIn? Do you have plans to expand? Are you gonna start a podcast, go on YouTube, conference speaking, what are your plans for

 

So

 

your brand?

 

I'm slowly, actually I have a show called Talk Tech with Pawan on LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn live show that I usually get some thought leaders in the software industry, DevOps industry to talk about what they are familiar with. I give them like questions and they answer. It's a Q and A type of something similar to this. So it's a Talk Tech with Pawan is what I call, but I'm not. I am not consistent with that. I did maybe probably in a year like 5-6 that's it.

 

Yeah.

 

Somehow it's getting out of because managing because there is a dependency right when you ask someone hey they will tell let me think about it ok let me get back but then it never happens sometimes they never get back to me or it's kind of dependency. So what I am thinking is to. who do my own shows and then me only, only me talking, like how to create a Helm chart, how to create a Docker file and all this simple stuff, start with simple stuff. But that's how I share, I'm not good at videos as of now. I have to, this is one thing where I'm lacking, I want to become good at it. So that I can go to conference and speak confidently.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah, nice.

 

I can relate to that. As soon as I turn the camera on to record a video, it's like a completely different personality comes out.

 

Yeah, I don't know if that's true for me. I mean, I'm sure that somebody watching me do a conference talk or a recorded video probably sees me as different than when we're sitting around having a beer. But I don't feel like there's a switch. I'm like, there's public Jonathan and there's private Jonathan. I don't feel like that. But I mean, I'm sure there's certain personality traits that are more emphasized in one area than another. But I feel like I'm pretty genuine me everywhere I go. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'm not, but I feel like it.

 

Hahaha

 

I might be fooling myself. I do that from time to time.

 

There's a quote from someone like that, something along the lines of, you're the easiest person you know to fool or something like that.

 

Yeah, it's probably true.

 

Some years back I gave a talk in one of the universities in India. It's the topmost university. They called me to talk about growth hacking. That's the fancy stuff. So they told me there will be only 50 people. I said, okay, there will be 50 people. But when I went inside, there were like 300 people sitting inside.

 

Yeah

 

Ha ha ha

So that was my first encounter with the... the fear coming right in front of me saying, Paun, can you do this? Just let's go home. So I was the third speaker, first two speakers, they spoke and after I was the third one and that's the time I'm like, somehow I got that thing in me, just went on stage and started speaking. I think that's how it's gonna be. But after that, I have not spoken in a conference thing because... Two years COVID came and then

 

Right?

 

everything shut down. So I think now I have to start again, to go in person and start speaking in the conferences.

 

Yeah, I think

 

Thank

 

conference

 

you.

 

speaking is a great skill to work on for technical people like us. I found myself in a situation quite a few years ago. We were in this early stage startup, and we would have investors, potential investors show up. And I was having to explain the infrastructure to them. And really struggled with it and then I joined an organization called Toastmasters which helps you work on your public speaking and improved there and then ended up doing quite a few conference talks around the world. But I think one of the things that was most helpful about that was the process of thinking about what you're going to say and refining it. and organizing it for delivery, it really helped me organize my thoughts and become a better communicator, which translated directly to my day job whenever you're talking to the product manager or the software teams that you support or different people outside of your technical organization, then it helps you to follow the right or find the right train of thought and find the right words to be a better communicator whenever you're talking with those people. So that was kind of a hidden benefit of public speaking.

 

Nice. So that was a course or you went there, got trained under someone.

 

It's a worldwide organization

 

Yeah,

 

just

 

it's

 

for

 

here also.

 

practicing.

 

Yeah.

 

Yeah, yeah. And you pay a membership fee. It's like an annual membership fee.

 

Oh.

 

The one I went to was pretty inexpensive. And so you have these different track books that you follow. And your first track book will give you five different speeches that you have to give. And each one's supposed to be five minutes long. So then you get that ready. and then you give it to just these people in your local group there. So you kind of know the people so you don't have to worry about the fear

 

chronic.

 

of speaking to strangers as much. And everyone gives you feedback on it. So as soon as you're done giving your speech, you go around the room and everyone gives you feedback on what they thought you could improve on. And same thing, like you sit down and the next person gets up and gives their speech and then you give them feedback. And so it's really good at. practicing your listening skills and teaching you how to offer constructive feedback and teaching you how to receive constructive feedback. Yeah,

 

I think I

 

highly

 

should.

 

recommended.

 

Yeah, I was about to say that.

 

Awesome. Well, if our thousands of listeners want to join

 

Mm-hmm.

 

you on LinkedIn to follow you, where do they find

 

My

 

you?

 

name Pawan Belagati. Yeah.

 

That's awesome. Well,

 

Yeah.

 

Okay.

 

we'll put a link in the show notes too. Um Great.

 

And I have a-

 

Anything else we should add here? Yeah, go ahead.

 

I have a newsletter on LinkedIn. I'll tell that also.

 

Okay.

 

I thought I should create

 

Ah,

 

a

 

yeah.

 

newsletter. So I created a newsletter and in a day I got 6000 subscribers.

 

Oh wow! Holy

 

Ha

 

cow!

 

ha ha ha.

 

So I since I named it as every week I take a topic and then I try to describe it and give a simple tutorial for people to try out. So now after I think after two months I have 11.5k subscribers.

 

Dang!

 

So today, just now, before coming to the show, I talked about creating Helm chart and deploying it through harness. So that is out, that newsletter is out.

 

right on.

 

Very cool.

 

There you go, people can find you on LinkedIn and join your quickly

 

News Yeah.

 

growing newsletter. Like very quickly growing, I don't think I know anyone who's grown a newsletter that fast. Excellent. Anything else to cover?

 

from me I'm like yeah it's it's I think it's that's it you if you want to ask anything else

 

This is where we need a call-in show,

 

Hahaha

 

a Call 1-800

 

Ha

 

Adventures

 

ha. Ha

 

to

 

ha.

 

ask your question.

 

So you guys on Twitter, LinkedIn, what's your strong areas, social media, websites, social profiles?

 

Yeah, for social media, I'm on LinkedIn. It's my name also, Jonathan Hall. Although the easier place to find me is at jhall.io. You can from there go to my LinkedIn or my daily email. Right at the top, you can sign up for my daily email if you're interested. You can find my YouTube channel, my podcast, links to this podcast, and some other crazy ideas that I like to write every day about just whatever comes up in yesterday's conversations is what I... what I write about. So yeah, that's the best place to

 

You

 

find me

 

talk

 

is

 

about

 

jhall.io.

 

tech stuff or gender?

 

I talk about DevOps, I talk about software delivery. It's less from a technical angle usually. I mean, I do talk about technical stuff, but I don't

 

Ah,

 

talk

 

okay.

 

about tools very much. So like you're not gonna see a tutorial about writing a Helm chart or how to do GitHub actions or whatever, it's more conceptual. And it's really aimed at like leaders,

 

Right.

 

team leads, tech leads, managers, CTOs,

 

order

 

those sorts of people.

 

and you will.

 

Yeah, most of my effort goes to my YouTube channel, DevOps for Developers,

 

Okay,

 

and then

 

bye.

 

I post some stuff on Twitter too, but Twitter is mainly just posting memes and shit posting. Don't expect anything serious from me on Twitter. Ha ha.

 

So you win? Yes.

 

I've seen some of your thumbnails on your YouTube channel, should I

 

Yeah,

 

expect something

 

probably

 

serious

 

not.

 

there? Ha ha ha ha ha

 

Yeah, I think just look for something that's partially entertaining and there might accidentally be something actionable in there.

 

I think you have fun on your channel. It's not, I mean, it's educational, but

 

Oh for

 

you

 

sure,

 

like to have

 

yeah.

 

fun too.

 

Yeah it's not very serious. I try to find the humor and entertainment in everything, which I think pretty much

 

Yeah,

 

holds

 

nice.

 

true for me all the time. Even during major incidents and server outages, I'm pretty laid back.

 

Are you the guy making jokes all the time when everyone's

 

I am,

 

like, the

 

yeah.

 

server's down? And you're

 

Hehehe

 

like, well, did you unplug the cable? Did you reboot it?

 

Right. Yeah. And that comes from part of my background, because way, way back, I was a nuclear engineer in the Navy. And we did a lot of disaster recovery training there. But then one of the jobs I held was for a medical imaging company, where we routed medical images from emergency rooms and trauma centers across the US to radiologists. And so. every time we got involved, there was someone laying in an emergency room who couldn't receive medical care until we got our systems back up and running. So I just, I have a pretty calm demeanor and high threshold for stress just because of that background. So yeah, I'm usually cracking jokes.

 

the people waiting for you to get the machines working so they can save their lives appreciate the humor. Laughter is the

 

You

 

best medicine

 

know, there

 

after

 

have

 

all!

 

been instances where I've been talking to the doctor or the nurse in the emergency room, and they just put me on speakerphone. Like, yeah, put me on speakerphone, go take care of your patient, and I'll just shout, and if I need anything from you. So yeah, there have been opportunities where the patient probably looked at the doctor and was like, can you just hang up on that dude? He's clearly not helping.

 

So your YouTube videos they talk about what they or usually you post on YouTube.

 

So I talk about DevOps from a career perspective of what to expect if you're starting a DevOps career, why you would want to choose it, how it compares to software engineering. And then there's some how-to content of how to do different tasks, and then some videos on how to build your portfolio, how to get experience. Because that's one of the challenges for someone getting started in DevOps is everyone hiring for DevOps wants someone with DevOps experience, but it's hard to get DevOps experience till somebody hires you. And so I have some videos out there that help address that in the form of here are some different projects you can tackle that use DevOps principles, give you real world experience, and can serve as your portfolio to help get your first job.

 

Okay.

 

then

 

I just.

 

there's just some stupid skits.

 

I just checked your twitter you look completely different there

 

HAHAHAHAHA

 

Ha ha ha ha ha.

 

I'm sorry.

 

Right, that's the cleaned up version. So since this is a podcast, I'll clarify. My Twitter profile is I'm wearing like a shirt and a tie and

 

Yeah.

 

look very well groomed. But here on the podcast, I just got home from the gym. So I'm wearing a ball cap and a cut up t shirt. So Pavan is not and headphones.

 

and headphones.

 

So Pavan is legitimately confused. Is this even the same dude?

 

It usually happens when you see people on social media and when you meet them personally, there is usually kind of either it's their height or the way they look, it's kind of different sometimes.

 

Hahaha, yeah. for sure. Cool, should we do some picks? Let's do it. Do you have one ready

 

Let's

 

for

 

do

 

us,

 

it.

 

Jonathan?

 

Yeah, I've got a couple. So my task at my day job right now has been setting up logging and alerting for some microservices that never had that properly set up. Today I was trying to find a bug in a service that turns out the only logs it was doing were it was sending. It was written to send. Panics, it's a go service, so a panic is like a cordon for crash or whatever. It was written to send those to Sentry, but there were no other logs whatsoever.

 

So just get this out of context error.

 

Well, it was worse than that. The error we were getting, well, we weren't getting at all logged anywhere

 

Ha ha.

 

because it wasn't a crash, it was actual application error. So I spent the entire day fixing that and getting it to log all requests and send errors to Sentry. Aside from that, the Sentry DSN was not configured for the instance on ECS. So even though the software thought it was sending stuff to Sentry, It wasn't going anywhere. So it was literally logging nothing anywhere at all whatsoever. Anyway, I fixed that and I fixed the bug shortly before this recording. But that leads to my recommendation, which is Sentry, Sentry.io. They're not paying me for this. I know they have competitors, they have alternatives and they're good, too. But I like Sentry.io just because I'm familiar with it. I've been using it at several different companies. I've actually I actually have my name in there, go SDK, because I submitted some patches

 

Nice.

 

against it. So if you use Sentry with Go, you're going to use my code,

 

Nice.

 

probably. So I like Sentry.io. They're also open source, so if you don't want to pay them, you can always host it yourself. If you don't know what they do, they basically you send, they have other services too, but what I use them for is you send errors there and they... They integrate with your email and your Slack and your whatever you want. They send alerts and they help track failures in your application and crashes and things like that. So it's a really good thing to do on services, whether you sentry or something else. So that's my first pick. My second pick is a repick. I don't know when this episode is coming out. Probably August sometime. Middle of September, on my birthday actually, on September 15. I'm going to be in Vienna, Austria speaking at the Agile Tour Vienna conference. So I would like to invite the listeners to come watch me make a fool of myself building my brand

 

ha ha ha

 

on stage. I'm going to be talking about how to implement continuous delivery

 

I don't know.

 

backwards. In other words, before you have all your tests in place. Maybe even if you're still using manual QA and things like that. So if that's an interesting topic, come meet me, wish me a happy birthday. Maybe meet me afterwards. We'll share a drink together. It would be a lot of fun. So those

 

Right

 

are my

 

on.

 

picks.

 

That'll be a cool talk. We've touched on your thoughts on that briefly, and it's definitely interesting to hear. So that's going to be a really cool talk. So I will second that recommendation, first of all, for a chance to go to Vienna. Second of all, to check out what's going to be a really cool talk. All right, so Pavan, do you have anything you'd like to pick?

 

Yeah I would pick my own product like the harness that I am working for. So pick you mean I can pick this product right? Product and talk about it? Or

 

Yeah.

 

is it kind of a okay. So yeah I was not that deep technical guy before joining harness but when I joined harness I... I started doing a lot of deep technical stuff. So I started learning Node.js a little bit deeper and then CI-CD, these both topics have been my favorite topics. And Harness is, I would say, is the best CI-CD platform out there. So

 

Wow.

 

because I use it every day and I'm very familiar with it and...

 

Wait, wait, it's better than Jenkins?

 

and also we have open source like we

 

Ha

 

have

 

ha.

 

acquired this drone CI it is drone CI and drone drone

 

Which one?

 

so

 

Drone, okay.

 

yeah we usually compare drone with Jenkins and drones GitHub stars are far better than I'm like more compared to Jenkins and And drone is completely cloud native because at every step uses Docker containers and Jenkins, I don't know. So yeah.

 

Yeah,

 

Good

 

for

 

answer.

 

real.

 

Good answer. Jen can tell, I don't know.

 

Thanks for coming to

 

Lots,

 

my Ted talk.

 

If

 

lots,

 

you can't tell.

 

lots of...

 

If you can't tell, I'm not

 

Yeah,

 

a big fan of Jenkins.

 

lot of lot of plugins. So I'm actually writing an article like slow builds and complex plugins 10 reasons to move from Jenkins to drone. So

 

Hahaha!

 

no, literally drone is very easy. I'm like, a guy like me, it took like five, 10 minutes to set up drone CI on my local laptop and then day and then Harness CD is the modern continuous delivery platform that I use and this is where I actually I learned what exactly is CI CD apart from the

 

wer.

 

theoretical stuff that I used to write. So I would of course pick these

 

Awesome.

 

things Harness and Harness platform and Droom.

 

Right on.

 

I'm sorry.

 

Awesome. All right, so my pick for this week is gonna be a non-technical pick. About a month ago, I think, I recommended a book called The Sovereign Individual, which talks about how society is gonna change with the information age, using things that we've learned from how society changed when we went to the Bronze Age and the Agricultural Age. and in the industrial age. But the thing that that book didn't cover is it didn't really give you a lot of actionable advice to it. But then last week, Balaji Srinivasan, I think I said his last name right, wrote and released a book called The Network State. And so that's my pick for this week is The Network State. And he kind of picks up where the sovereign individual leaves off. and talks about how to adjust your own personal life to kind of like get ready for the changes that are coming with the increasing use of blockchain and cryptocurrencies, which is gonna change government regulations and how we interact with people, with the remote workforce, how there's... not really we're getting less and less of people that work in the same office and you work with people across different time zones. So it's a very actionable book on how to think about and adopt those changes. So that is the Network State by Balaji Srinivasan and that's my pick for the week.

 

And join us next time for Adventures in

 

Thank

 

Philosophy!

 

Right?

 

you.

 

Hahaha! Although, there's like,

 

That would be a good podcast

 

hashtag

 

though, wouldn't it?

 

disclaimer asterisks probably shouldn't be getting your philosophy advice from the 80s stoner. Ha ha ha ha. Or maybe you should, I don't know. I don't think I'm qualified to make that call. Well, on that note,

 

Awesome.

 

I think we've pretty much covered everything. Yeah.

 

Yeah.

 

Alright,

 

I think

 

Yes.

 

so.

 

well thanks for tuning in everyone and hopefully after that ending we'll see you next week too!

 

Thanks everyone, until next time.