A learning mindset, starting with COBOL

Hello and welcome to Ship It, the podcast all about what happens after you git push. I’m your host, Justin Garrison, and with me, as always, is Autumn Nash. Autumn will be on the interview, because we’re doing these shorter intros… Don’t worry about it, we’re going to get rid of them. We’re just doing it all together in the future. But again, we’re trying a little bit of different formats to make sure that we get you right to the interview and the interesting stuff that you’re here to listen to.

But this one, I did want to intro David… He made a LinkedIn post about how he learned COBOL to join a toy factory. And I was so interested, I said “Can you come talk about it a little bit? I just want to hear about your journey, I want to hear about what you did, how you got into it, what you were doing at the time…” And I feel like in a lot of ways he and I have had very different paths, but a lot of the same passions of skateboarding and just learning technology to solve problems. So here’s the interview with David Beale and Autumn, and we’ll talk to you again afterwards.

Alright, today we have David Beale on the show to talk about some things he’s done in the past, but also we’re interested to hear what he’s doing in the future. So David, thank you for coming on the show.

Thanks, Justin. Happy to be here.

So you had posted on LinkedIn that you learned COBOL, having not been a developer, to go work at a toy factory, a toy distribution center. Can you explain some of that a little bit more to me?

Yeah, so I had definitely played with some code before. I came up in the late ‘90s. I’m about to be 39, and I got the internet in the summer of ’98. So I came up in the late ‘90s, kind of getting into IRC and sort of the hackery side of the internet… It was all a little hackery back then. And so I played around with PHP, and Python, and Perl, the trifecta of script kitty languages at the time… But I’d never had like a real tech job.

So when I had the opportunity to get this temp job at a toy distribution warehouse - and it was like AS400, sometimes you’re going to have to like troubleshoot, write a little COBOL to fix bugs, stuff like that… I just dug into the internet, and figured out how to do it enough to get through the interview, and get the job, and then just continue to figure it out as I went along.

And this was a temp job. You were learning how to code this stuff for a temp position at the company.

That is correct. At the time, I was living at my grandma’s house, delivering pizza, playing in a couple bands, and my gear was just all wrecked, I didn’t have any money… I wanted to get an apartment, move to a slightly bigger city… So this was the opportunity to like stack some cash for a couple months, and that’s what I did.

What did they use COBOL for in the mainframe floor at the factory?

It was a bunch of hand scanners. And to call it a mainframe was kind of – I mean, it was running AS400, but it was not like a room, or anything. It was two small server racks. And yeah, these hand scanners for like order distribution, logistics, all that sort of stuff. And the entire warehouse pretty much ran on them. Like, people would pick orders, and package them, and all that sort of stuff. So we had a big IT team that kind of charged them, and maintained them… And you had to reinstall the operating system on them like every other day. They were super-buggy.

And so me and a couple other people were basically doing all the desktop support, networking, and then I was kind of the COBOL guy when it all sort of leveled out, because I had put the most time into it… So I was pretty much hacking on an AS400 like most of the time.

What kind of stuff did you learn through that? What was the experience like as far as going through and “Hey, I have this expectation of what I’m going into”, and then afterwards everything changes, obviously, once people demand things?

[00:07:59.06] You know, it demystified what life was like as a programmer a little bit. Obviously, I didn’t want to be doing mainframe AS400 stuff. I was really interested in sort of modern, at the time, PHP, Java, stuff like that, and JavaScript. But it was really daunting to me… I had never really built anything. I’d made some little IRC bots and stuff like that, but I’d never really sat down and been like “I’m going to build a thing.”

I bet your bands had some pretty kick-ass MySpace pages.

Right…?

You know, they did, but not thanks to me. I’ve got to give a shout-out to my good friend, Kyle Foundry, who is an incredible designer. He’s gone on to have just an amazing career. And he made dope MySpace pages.

I love that you were into something and then you found a job because you could do the amount of like prep before the interview, and get it… And then that your friend became this amazing designer. Because it’s like, that’s how you used to get in tech. You used to be like “Oh, this was my favorite thing” or “This is something I’m really into”, and then you get to go do it and then you gain all this experience… And now it’s like the interviews, and like the gatekeeping are so hard just to get your first job. So I think that’s like such a cool way to tell the story of like now you’ve had this awesome career, and it started because you wanted to get a job at a toy company. And COBOL… That’s wild.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what’s wild is how much COBOL is out there. It’s still everywhere. Anything you do, with a Visa or MasterCard, anything you do on the stock market, a lot of healthcare… Everything flight-related is still on AS400 at its core.

And military, and weapons and stuff… It’s crazy. That’s why when people say that they’re going to get rid of Java, I’m like “Yeah, sure…” Because - I mean, there’s so much COBOL out there… And can you imagine trying to migrate those systems that can’t go down, and that are so intricate?

When if someone comes up and says “You need 25 years of COBOL experience”, you just raise your hand and you’re like “Yes, I have done that.”

There are very few people your age in this market that have that. That’s fire.

It’s true. It’s true. I have never used it since, to be completely honest; almost 20 years.

The people who wrote the COBOL haven’t either.

That’s probably true. But yeah, if we go back too, the reason I ever wrote any code was skateboarding. So I’ve been skateboarding since 1996, and I don’t remember learning to like ride a board. I’d always had one. But I got a pair of Etnies and like a nice board in ‘96, and a couple of videos. And I’ve taken long hiatuses since, but I still skate… And at the time I was just poor, couldn’t afford skate videos, wasn’t in the scene… And I got into it through the internet, through, first off, Usenet, alt.skate-boarding. And I have friends that I’m still in contact with, that I met 25 years ago on Usenet. And then on IRC, there was a couple of skate channels that were really good. And a few that you could download videos from on [unintelligible 00:10:59.21] So I wrote a bot so that I could download them incrementally over my 56K dial-up connection.

Because you had to disconnect, or someone would call and you would lose the download.

So what I would do is I would kick it off before I went to bed, and it would download for as long as my connection wouldn’t time out. In the sticks of Virginia, late ’90, [unintelligible 00:11:21.26] was the internet service provider, through the electric co-op. And it would time out usually every like two to three hours. So it would take like three or four nights to download a skate video, or a couple albums, or whatever I was trying to pirate pre all the apps. You had to like write bots to do that yourself.

And this is why kids don’t know patience today.

Yes. I was like trying to explain that to my kids, and I was like “Do you know we had to wait for like cartoons to come on on Saturdays, and do you know how hard it was to download stuff on LimeWire and pirate music?”

Well, even just the fact that there was an offline. Like, you had to choose to go on the internet…

I was trying to explain dial-up to my children who die of WiFi. When our electricity goes out, I don’t even think they care about the electricity. They care about the fact that WiFi doesn’t work. Don’t you miss the ‘90s internet? I had so many friends that I’ve met from random ways, and just… It was like the peak of the internet.

[00:12:20.01] I was not on ’90s internet. I did not get the internet till 2000s. It was like [unintelligible 00:12:23.28] It was like my first internet.

Yeah, my father was super-supportive of my interest in technology. And it’s really weird, because I try to think about what’s the actual genesis… Like, when did I like first use a computer? And it’s kind of like skateboarding, I have no idea. But I don’t remember a time where I couldn’t like run some DOS commands, or do something.

I don’t remember the first time I had a computer, but I remember the first computer that was really mine, and I got one of those cool-colored iMacs… It was like a Teal iMac, and I swear that’s like changed my entire life.

So jealous. I wanted one so bad. And my first computer was an HP Pavilion, 400 megahertz Celeron processor.

HP’s used to be fire back in the day, though. Those were like –

I believe it had 64 megabytes of RAM, and a 25-gigabyte hard drive.

Well, that’s big. You’d never need more space than that.

But it’s so crazy… iPhones have –

The new iPhone’s coming out, they’re like “Oh, the pro comes with 256 gigs.” I’m like “That’s not enough.”

I’m like, “That’s not even enough for the kid pictures I have on my phone.”

I remember – because I got my first skateboard in ‘89, and I remember, because I found it like walking out in a field, and it was like in a bush. I’m like “This is amazing. Someone left a skateboard here.” And it was like a Ninja Turtle skateboard…

Oh, nice.

And I was like “This is great.” So that was my first skateboard. I had been skateboarding all through the ‘90s, I wasn’t on the internet. We built a quarter pipe in my front yard, and a fun box, and some rails and stuff like that… And I used to have so much fun doing that. And then the internet came and ruined my life.

People always say that kids need to go outside, but I feel like we are – this just shows [unintelligible 00:14:08.00] the internet because of skateboarding and a band… So what now? Like, boomers…

Yeah. And skateboarding got me into music, too. All of it. It’s all because of skateboarding, actually, which is crazy. But yeah, that was the very beginning of like ever writing any code, or doing anything like that. And then I didn’t go to college… I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional home, didn’t really have access to a good education or resources or any of that… So when I got out and could make some money doing whatever, I really just pursued music, and hanging out and having a good time for probably a little bit longer than I should have. But I finally reigned in my career and I got my first like real full-time job around 2012.

Well, so explain the progression here from you got this temp job, you’re doing some COBOL, you’re learning a bunch of stuff, you’re doing networking, which especially early-ish 2000s was kind of the Wild West… Like, yes, finally, everyone’s on Ethernet. This is a pretty stable [unintelligible 00:15:08.00] It’s not the best networking. But it’s a temp job. So you were there for - what, six months, or something like that?

Also, networking is hard. That is hard to learn.

Yeah. So I learned networking through my high school. I had crappy Windows 3.1 computers, and we had a couple of computer classes, two typing classes, and then programming class that was computer math science, and it was just working through Visual Basic 101. QBasic for the first class, and then Visual Basic the second. But we didn’t have internet. And I knew that the teachers had Internet on their computers, so I was like “I’ve got to figure out how this works.”

[00:15:52.17] So I just learned enough about networking, and learned how to use – I forget what I used, but the Windows equivalent to like traceroute and ping and stuff like that, to figure out what the internet gateway was, and how to access it from one of the terminals… Or they weren’t terminals, but one of the typing computers. So that’s how I learned networking, is because I wanted to use Internet in my computer classes during high school.

This was, again late ‘90s… How were you finding this information? The Internet was difficult. You didn’t have a smartphone, you didn’t have a way to – there was books, right? There’s like books and magazines, and then friends.

Well, I had Internet at home. So I graduated high school in 2004. So this was like early 2000s, and I had Internet at home. So what I would do is I would literally write down commands in my notebook of things to try… Because I could get a DOS prompt, and then I’d just try stuff. And so I’d write down commands… And I’d found a chat app. I remember we were all chatting with each other like a long time… Because Windows had its own built-in messaging app. So I’d write down commands and then go try them, and then figure out what worked. Sometimes I’d write down what the output was, and go home and troubleshoot it when I had Internet… It took about two weeks.

Again, the patience… The determination and patience was just –

I mean, we were all playing Pac-Man on our TI-83s and stuff like that, too. It was it was a lot of fun using technology back then, because you actually had to make it yourself a little bit more.

But that’s so dope though, because people look down on people – like, I have a similar like childhood background; very dysfunctional… I’m the first girl to go to college or finish high school in my family, and people look down on people that didn’t go to college… But everything you just said is like peak engineer. You wrote things down, you tested things out, you built things in patience… So I wish people would see how cool people that just love technology, and go out and find the information… Like, you should get just as much credit, if not more than somebody who just sat in the classroom. You went out there, you found the information, and then you tried it and made it work. That is – I don’t know, I think that’s cool.

Thank you, Autumn. That means a lot to me. And I’m really sorry to hear that you had a dysfunctional childhood as well. It’s hard, but…

It’s hard, but it prepares you. I feel like I can take on anything after my childhood. People are like “Oh, this thing happened” and I’m like “I’ve been through worse. It’s cool.”

I’m pretty resilient because of it.

It makes you grateful for things. I look at the way that my kids grow up, and I’m like “Dude, they don’t even know some of the stuff.” I just remember not being able to pay bills, or… My kids will eat so much fruit, and I’m like “Dude, I didn’t even know what fresh fruit was.” I’m just like “You get to go to the dentist, which is wild.” That should not be –

people are like “Why do you care about remote work?” and I’m like “I know what it’s like to never have your parents home, and to just be on your own, and the things that happen.” I think it gives you a really grateful place to come from. It’s crappy, but… Plus also, I love finding people with different backgrounds, like us, where you’ve been through a lot maybe, or you have different ways that you [unintelligible 00:18:51.27] tech, because they make like the best friends and people to relate with, because they’ve been through so much, and they’ve got such a cool – like, look at how cool your personality is. You’ve been through like skating, music and… You know what I mean? There’s always the people with the coolest glasses, and like T-shirts, and like everything… Like, we are one of a kind.

Well, I try. Shout-out to Rare Birds Music here in Chicago. Great used and vintage music store.

I love those little spots.

Yeah, yeah. No, it’s true… I’m a big kind of self-help junkie for the past couple of years, and I’m listening to this book right now called “The Courage to be Disliked.” And it’s a Japanese book, based on like Adler psychology… He was like a contemporary of Freud. And it kind of denounces trauma. Or at least trauma as like a thing that you could ever use to like make an excuse for anything. It’s just like your origin. Everyone has an origin of something, and mine just has some trauma in it. And I think that that lines up a lot with this dude, David Goggins, who I’m a huge fan of. He wrote a book called Can’t Hurt Me. And he’s a Navy SEAL, and he’s insane. Like, ultra marathon runner runner… He has just destroyed his body. But he did it all with a really, really rough origin story. And I don’t know, I just think it makes for some superheroes.

[00:20:10.09] Yeah. I think you’ve got to acknowledge it and deal with it, but it’s really good when you get past it and you can use it for good. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Also, I love friends that you can share books with, because Justin’s always like “I read this book” and I’m just like “How do I keep up with you?”

I’m sorry, I know I send you homework, and I don’t mean to.

I’m just like “Justin…!” I’ve got like three different kids, and like a whole engineer job, and on-call, and five different boards… I’m like “How do you read all these books…?”

Yeah. I wake up pretty early, and try to have some like – I try to do morning pages, which is incredible when I do it, but difficult to keep up with. And then try to listen to at least like 30 to 60 minutes of like pure audiobook uninterrupted… And then I’m one of those weirdos that can listen to and enjoy podcasts while writing code. I don’t know how I do it… And in fact, I concentrate better. I think my brain – my neurodivergence kind of needs like two or three threads at a time. And I can really get into a flow state. So I’m listening to podcasts all day, every day.

It depends on if it’s like mind – not mindless, but… You know the muscle memory things that you do all day? When I’m like going through tickets, or like doing something that’s a muscle memory activity… But have you ever turned down the radio when you really need to concentrate?

Yeah. You’re like “Hold on, I need to find this place. Let me turn down the radio.” Like, bro’, that’s –

And I’m like “I don’t know what that has to do with it”, but sometimes I’m like… I feel like through college I read so many technical books, because I went to college a lot later in life, and then I had like kids, and I didn’t get to enjoy to reads… So I’m constantly trying to get technical reading done, and then enjoy to read. And sometimes I have to – if I’m reading, absorbing information that I don’t need to go back and really like “No, I can do that bypass.” I don’t know, not bypass, but like in the background… Because I always need background noise, of music or something. But I think sometimes I’m definitely the weird person who’s like, I have to turn down the radio to find something [unintelligible 00:22:04.15]

It’s a thing. You have to. It’s a requirement.

I don’t even know what that is, but…

Yeah, I do that sometimes. I listen to mostly instrumental music, if I listen to music while I’m working. And I do typically like writing, or editing, anything that’s a little bit more creative, I’ll listen to electronic music or some type of instrumental music. And so I’ve actually been sharing on LinkedIn every Friday a Focus Friday’s playlist.

Oh, that’s awesome.

Yeah. And so they’re all like an hour and a half long of just like what I consider to be really good instrumental focus music, that puts me in a really good state.

Isn’t that crazy to find all the different things that work for your different flow states, depending on what you’re doing? Because they can be so different, but it’s really effective when you learn how to – I’m definitely neuro-spicy, and I feel like when you find out how to hack your brain, or how to work best with your brain, it’s crazy how you can get things to all work together when you figure out those things.

Yeah, no, it’s insane. Things that work for me would send other people into like a full-on panic attack, probably.

Yeah, for sure. The amount of caffeine I drink… It’s so funny, because when you go on the engineer floor, you’re like “We’re so neuro–” Like, there’s so many caffeine support beverages…

Do you remember Bawls? Did you ever drink that back in the day?

I remember the drink, yeah. I never had it.

It was disgusting…

Have you seen the candy that we – and like the sodas, and just… My kids will bring home like – what’s that one with like the basic sugar that you dip in, those dips packs?

Fun Dip.

Fun Dip, yeah.

I was like “They just let us eat anything.”

I mean, Pixy Stix, right? Like, you’re just like “Oh, let me just pour a bunch of sugar in my mouth”, and just…

I’m just like, how did we not glow in the dark? I get my kids – I feel like I make them eat healthy cereal, but like for Halloween I’m always like “Let’s go get fun cereal”, and my kids ate cereal this morning and they’re like bouncing off the walls. And I’m like “How did we survive eating crap all the time?”

[00:24:04.09] Yeah… If we let my son have like syrup on his pancakes - three, four hours of just complete insanity.

I swear to God, I was just like “What?”

You do that on school days.

My kids are just like buzzing, and I’m like “What is wrong with you? Oh, you ate cereal…”

So getting a little back, David, I want to talk a little more about what – what did you do after getting your career in order? What were the kind of the jobs you gravitated towards, and the technologies that you were like “Oh, this is interesting”? Because it seemed like you kept scratching your own itch.

Yeah.

You were like “I want to find this thing, I want to do that thing”, and now you’re like “I have to go sell this to someone. Someone has to pay me to do something for them.”

So yeah, I can kind of sum it up pretty quickly… So after that temp job, I moved to a slightly bigger city, Roanoke, Virginia, which is kind of in the mountains a little bit, but it has an airport… And I got a job at a computer store; just like two dudes, Randy and Richard, the Computer Exchange, they owned it… They paid me – I started at $9 an hour, which is probably I think what I was making at that temp job; maybe 9,50. And yeah, I did wipe and reloads, fixed computers, replaced hard drives, built custom machines, did networking at like small offices, people’s houses, set up routers, access points, all that sort of stuff. And then every once in a while, there’d be a little bit of coding work, or I’d pick up like some side work doing something… I taught myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails, in like, let’s say 2008-2009, and started getting a little side work here and there. But the thing about the computer store job is I could come and go. So it was never like a real full-time job. I could go work as much as I wanted or as little as I wanted. And I was touring in bands a lot still. So I’d go on tour, and where I’d used to have to like quit my line cook, or pizza delivery job and then come back and get a new one, I could just leave and come back and still have a job.

So I stuck with that for like five years, and like toured, and really kind of lived an artist’s life. And then I moved to New York in 2014. And so when I got there, I had kind of disparate skillsets. I’d done some networking, some desktop support, a little bit of server stuff here and there, and I could write some code. And this was 2014, the cloud was really starting to take over… It was a lot of Ruby on Rails based startups in New York that had built out on Heroku, and a lot of them hired me to migrate to AWS. And that’s how I became a DevOps engineer.

At the time, Ruby was kind of like the DSL of DevOps. You had Chef, and Capistrano, and Puppet, and a lot of – there was a lot of Ruby stuff happening. So I had those jobs… If I remember correctly, the first couple of weeks I was there, I went to a recruiter, and they were like “Yeah, just learn AWS and learn Chef.” So I just got my free AWS credits, and figured out how to spin up some EC2s and S3 buckets, and all that sort of stuff… And the rest was history.

That recruiter was on top of it, right? Because in like 2014, telling someone to learn AWS and Chef was still early for a lot of companies.

Well, there was no DevOps engineers.

Right. It wasn’t a thing.

So you had like developers, you had sysadmins… And I was straight in the middle. I could speak both languages well enough, and… Yeah, I had to get up to speed on some things. I had messed around with Subversion before, but I didn’t really know Git. I’d never really played around with Jenkins, or CI/CD, or any of that sort of stuff. So there was a big learning curve. And honestly, for the first two, three years of my career, or of my DevOps career, I was not very good at it. It took me a long time to get up to speed… But no one else could do it either. There was nothing to compare to, it was so new. It wasn’t until Terraform, Kubernetes, that sort of stuff came around, to where it all like really clicked for me. And like now I feel like I’m a pretty solid DevOps engineer.

In your defense, they don’t teach any of that stuff in school, and there’s nowhere that you really learn that type of thing… So I think it just takes context anyways, for everybody.

Agreed. Yeah.

After that you were in New York, you started doing DevOps over and over again for startups, migrating Heroku to AWS over and over again. What came after that? Are you still helping people migrate Heroku to AWS? It’s still a thing. Like, there’s still a lot of people doing it.

[00:28:16.27] Yeah. It depends on how much they’re paying. No, so I worked at a bunch of startups, for fairly decent stints; a year, two years, whatever. And so I worked at some notable ones in New York… Etsy - not really a startup, but… And at the time that was actually Google Cloud. I worked at a company called Glossier; they did like skincare and makeup. They blew up pretty big. And then a company called Kustomer, which was like a CMS. And they were acquired by Facebook. And then actually –

Not Kubernetes.

No.

Everything Kubernetes is a K, so…

Honestly, though - it’s funny… Kustomer with a K, but they used Amazon ECS. So like –

There you go.

So there was a little bit of Kubernetes, but not primarily. And then I met my wife in 2020. She’s from Chicago. We had our son, and we moved here shortly before he was born. And it’s just a similar vibe. We live in cool neighborhood, and my life isn’t really that different from New York, but… A startup seems a little bit different. I haven’t quite broken in, like found my footing professionally here, but… Everything’s so distributed anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

Hopefully it stays that way. The remote jobs in general are falling into cities.

Yeah, it’s weird. I see it both ways. I will say this, and something that I’m going to emphasize - for someone early in their career, go move to a city. Go work in-person. Like, once you’re older and established, and you know what you’re doing, remote’s amazing. But early on in your career, I think that in-person time is huge. And I think that, especially for people from different backgrounds - maybe you don’t have a CS degree, or you’re not quite sure what you want to do in tech… Move to a city, work at a startup. Be around some people. Learn go to market, learn product, learn engineering; learn it all. And you’re not going to do that on Zoom. It’s just not going to happen.

Yeah. A lot of the transactional interactions we have with people, you don’t have the time to learn. You’re just like “I need to get something done, and then we’re off.” And you miss a lot of that extra bonus stuff of in-person.

Yeah. And you don’t get to watch other people work; you overhear so much – so much of the value of valuable information I’ve heard in my career is just from me eavesdropping.

Break: [00:30:26.05]

I feel like you must’ve learned a lot switching startups every year and having to kind of adjust to the new team, and what everyone’s using there… What do you think you took away the most? …because I feel like now you can walk into any room, if you could go to that many different startups and start in that many different stacks, and kind of get in there and migrate things… Also, I just want to know, what’s the biggest reason for migrating from Heroku to AWS at that time? Because I think that’s interesting, that you did so many migrations for that.

Yeah, I would say the biggest reason is cost. Heroku is very batteries included. The barrier to entry is negligible, but you’re going to pay for it once you’re there. And you’re just paying for – at the time, before they were acquired by Salesforce, and even still, I think it’s all just AWS. If you think about it, AWS is just an API layer on top of a bunch of networking and computer equipment. And this is just another API layer on top of that. So you’re just paying them for that.

You’re basically paying for a level of abstraction, I guess…

Yeah. But you get CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring, and all that sort of stuff for free. So it does make a lot of sense. But yeah, and it sucks, because I wish that I had like an awesome three, four-year stint on my resume. It would really make interviewing a lot less awkward. But I am glad that I had to learn as quickly as I did. It was very trial by fire, and I’ve touched everything. I’ve worked at companies that use Rails, Python, JavaScript, Elixir, Clojure… I’ve touched it all. And I think what I’ve learned is it’s all the same stuff. There’s different ways to think about it, and you can dress it up in whatever clothing you want, but it is all the same stuff. And that’s been the greatest thing I’ve ever taken away, is just learning how to think about problem solving, not getting hung up on the semantics of like operating system, orchestration platform, programming language, whatever. We’re just telling computers what to do, and then telling computers how to tell themselves what to do a little bit better, and that’s pretty much it.

Super-true. Is there anything you miss about COBOL?

No.

That was the quickest no ever.

The one thing in that sequence that wasn’t the same, is COBOL…

My favorite programming language syntax ever is Ruby, just because I’ve written so much of it. But I think Go is probably the perfect language. So that’s kind of what I reach for these days. And it has some procedural kind of elements to it. It’s not object-oriented, it’s not functional. It’s kind of its own thing. And COBOL kind of is, too. So maybe there’s some similarities there, but…

All the &‘s in Ruby drive me nuts. I’m just like “This is what brackets are for.”

[00:36:11.27] But you don’t have to use any parentheses. You can just declare a function, and it’s just there, you know?

Yeah, I think I like the structure. I think that’s what happens when you learn Java first. It’s just like, what you got used to - not necessarily what’s better. You know how you said COBOL you learn first, and then you liked Go, because they’re their own thing? I think sometimes it’s just what you’re used to, I guess.

And some of us just stick with Bash. So it’s fine.

Oh, gosh… Every time you say that, the PTSD just like hits me.

I like Bash.

What other patterns have you seen over time, of 20-year careers, a bunch of startups, a bunch of different infrastructure? Obviously, the languages are almost all the same, in like the management and maintenance of them. It’s like “Oh, what’s the gem in Go?” “Okay, it’s this other thing.” Like, you just change all the commands into something else, and they all kind of function the same. And then management is kind of the same. “Oh, well, here’s a deployment. Here’s a – we’ve got to upgrade it. We’ve got to do database migration”, whatever. What sort of patterns have you seen over time in the different environments and infrastructure that you’ve worked in?

You know, I think that runtime has always just been the Achilles heel of delivering software. Different programming languages or different operating systems handle that differently. Containerization, obviously, has been the biggest development in my career… I think I really got into dev ops around the time cloud was taking off. And Docker came into existence around that time. Kubernetes came into existence shortly thereafter. I discovered Kubernetes in 2016, so pretty early, but not at the advent.

I feel like we’re getting further away from the metal, and we still kind of are, but maybe getting a little closer back to it as well. DHH, the founder of Rails - all of his company is back on bare metal. I’m seeing companies go back to bare metal. It’s happening. It’s just cheap. And depending on what you’re doing, you might not need all those cloud-native services. But I don’t know, you probably do… It’s weird. I think we’re in a weird place right now, where I’m seeing more anti-patterns than patterns. Tech is – I think there’s a sort of fundamental existential discord happening within technology right now. Like, no one really knows what’s happening. AI - we’re all bullish on AI, but weren’t we just that bullish on blockchain like two years ago?

No.

But now are running blockchains on AI? Are we building blockchains with AI? Yes, we are. And I think the convergence of those two technologies is pretty brilliant, and I’m excited to see what happens with it. But there’s nothing that I’m just like “Yes, this is what’s driving technology right now.” We’re building AI that we literally don’t have the electricity to power.

That’s what I’m – and just like, we were just talking about how hot it’s been, and the fires, and I’m like “Yeah, let’s make heat even worse.” You know what I mean? I love the inventions of new technologies, and I am excited… I definitely use AI to be more efficient, and I think blockchain has its place, but I just think it’s like wild to do this kind of damage to the environment and spend this type of money and not know how we’re going to get the return. Everybody is scrambling and cutting costs… And just even the discussion between cloud and on-prem - like, DHH is always recommending something, and sometimes I’m wondering “Do you do it for like the views and the likes, or do you actually think these things?” Because there’s nothing in technology that you can say “This is what works for everything.” You know what I mean? Like, that’s a red flag in itself. So I don’t know, it just feels like everybody’s like lost right now. Everybody.

I think so.

But let’s be honest, in the early two thousands, did we know what we were doing? We were lost in a different way.

It’s true.

I don’t know, this feels weird though.

It feels more greedy to me.

Yes.

The lostness is like “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing, but also, we have to make a lot of money.” And back then it was like “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m happy learning it.”

[00:40:11.03] Yeah. Well, and here’s the thing… And I’m trying to be a less judgmental person and a less cynical person in general, so this is probably not in the right direction, but… The people that are attracted to technology today as a career path are very different than those who were attracted to it 20 years ago. There’s a lot of money in it. You can make a lot more money as your first year as a front-end developer than you can working 80 hours as a junior analyst at whatever bank, o you can spend five minutes a night in your Murray Hill apartment.

That’s so real though.

Yeah. I met a lot of those people in my time in New York. And no shade on finance. There’s a lot of people whose personality works really well for that, their intensity, their drive towards excellence and communication, and really just showing people that “I can work for a really long time doing things.” I just wish they had stayed out of technology. I get it. Like, I understand, it’s a valuable skillset, but I think a lot of people write code for money, and they don’t love doing it, and that changes the whole landscape, it changes the ideas, it changes the people that are willing to execute ideas… There was a lot more values and a lot more morality in technology 20 years ago than there is now.

Tell me something, since you guys have been in tech longer than me… Was the interview process always this bad? Because I feel like the interview process right now is very gatekeeping, and it stops the creative kids, the kids that just love tech. A lot of jobs that we’ve seen on this podcast, people’s first jobs [unintelligible 00:41:47.17] a bunch of people that have come on that are really good at their jobs, they started because they liked something, just like you, and then they went and got a job, and they got to learn, and… We’re kind of getting rid of that. You can’t just get a job and learn on the job. That’s why I’m always a really big advocate for apprenticeships, because a lot of these skills - how else are you going to teach them, unless you’re learning on the job? Do you feel like the interview process changed, or do you feel like it’s the same from when you both got into tech?

For me, I think it has gotten both better and worse. I don’t remember the last time that anyone asked me to use like Big O notation in an interview… And that’s a positive.

See, that’s everywhere though.

Really?

I think that’s a big tech thing. I don’t think that’s a –

Even for startups that I’ve applied to, they’re like “Do this LeetCode.” And I’m like…

Well, and many of those startups are founded from big tech people. This is still like big tech spreading bad practices some places.

Yeah. I feel like people are like “Now we have to use it, because they use it, so now we’re all going to adopt it.”

Yeah. I was interviewing for a job a couple of years ago, and they asked me to do Fizzbuzz, just like live, in a Zoom. Open up a terminal or whatever, and write Fizzbuzz. And so I wrote it as a Python one-liner, with a Lambda, and they got really angry… And so I posted that on Twitter. This was like pre-X, and it was like “If anybody wants to make someone angry, here’s a Python one-liner for Fizzbuzz.”

I feel like it’s almost like being the NeuroSpicy kid in math class, and everybody follows the teacher’s way of getting the same equation and answer, and then you do it in this more efficient, better way, and it’s still wrong… That’s how I feel like interviewing for tech is now. It got to the point where you can’t google your answer. You have to just pretend like you know it all on LeetCode, which is memorization. It’s not being good at building things. But now we’re going to let AI be part of the interview… It’s so confusing. Like, what do you want from us? Do you want the memorization? Do we want AI to do it all? Can I just tell you how I would build it?

[00:43:56.19] And, at least in my experience - I’ve never got a job that I didn’t have a network connection at a place.

Did you have to LeetCode for all your engineer jobs?

I’ve never got a job offer from somewhere I had to LeetCode. I’ve had a few, but I was always terrible at it. And most of the time – and I made some interviewers mad at Google long time ago when I interviewed there, and I did it all in Bash. It was like “Sort this, pull out the uniques, do this other thing…” I’m like “Oh, that’s like four commands. I can do this.” And they’re like “No. We want you–” And I was like “No. The Bash gets us –” It’s not a hundred percent, but it’s most there. Like, “How would you write tests for this?” I’m like “You don’t write tests for Bash. You ship it. Get out.”

You try it and then you’re like YOLO.

Yeah. It works. This is an interview. And it wasn’t even like – yeah. So anyway. Every LeetCode position or interview I’ve had, I did poorly, and I never got a job offer from them.

Same.

And now, ever since – I did, I think, I don’t know, a handful of them in the 2010s… I just turn down people. I asked them up front, I’m like “Hey, are you going to have me LeetCode?” And they’re like “Yes, it’s part of our process.” I’m like “Never mind.” That’s not the place for me. It’s okay. And I have a lot of privilege to be able to say “Never mind. I don’t want the interview.” But I just turn it down now. I don’t even care. Because I’m not gonna waste my time, and I’m not gonna waste your time. But I do think that the interview process for me, over time, it’s about the same. I think my interviews early two thousands were probably harder than my interviews in late 2010s, 2020s, because I had so much more experience, I didn’t have to prove myself, in a lot of cases.

You also have like a bigger –

That network is big, and the experience on my resume looks good, that people aren’t asking me to prove myself.

But you also build in public a lot, and you go to a lot of events, so I think that they probably just assume you know a lot. You know what I mean? Because you have like this body of work.

Yeah. But everything that they looked at before, jobs I got, was not because I had that on my resume, of like “I can do this job.” It was because I did the thing they were asking for outside of work. In my first sys admin job I had zero Linux experience on my resume, but I was building a blog, I had a home server, I ran a NAS at home… And literally, I was writing how to tutorials for Linux that the people that were there were using to learn how to use Linux. I’m like “Oh yeah, you used my tutorial. Great. I don’t have professional experience doing that, but here’s the thing I did at home”, and like “Yeah, we’ll take a chance on you.” And a lot of that stuff for me over time just came from I had to do it outside of work, which sucks. And I don’t think that everyone has to do it. I don’t think people have to love to code to be efficient and be good. I don’t like writing code. I really like having AI help me in a lot of things now. I can chat with things and I’m like “Hey, I don’t want to struggle with this for now”, because I’m going to get outside of the code as fast as I can and go back to systems work, or process, or something else.

See, I love writing code, but I feel like I don’t really do that at work as much as I’d like. I feel like I code more in my meantime, because I’m maintaining infrastructure. You know when you’re diagnosing a problem in a big tech stack, it’s like a line, or like fixing something in CI/CD… It’s not so much of like –

I love debugging. Debugging is one of my favorite things. It’s struggling, but I love diving deep into that stuff, and like “Well, let’s pull out S-trace, and TCP dump, and see what we can find.”

Teach me how to love it. I love it in a certain way, but then I’m just very frustrated and have to go take a walk and come back. Like, I wanna go build cool things, but…

Yeah. I love writing code. So I actually pivoted into my career a couple of years ago, and I’ve been working as a sales engineer. But I’m only interviewing for SRE DevOps jobs now. I think I’m done with the sales for a while.

But having SREs that know how sales function is so important, in my opinion. Being able to understand the uptime related to a customer call of like “Will you buy us?” is like super-critical to “Oh, that actually thing? We don’t need an alert for that. No one cares.”

Yeah. But it’s interesting, for a while there in the 2010s in New York, job interviews were awesome. VCs were just throwing around money, so it was all these dudes my age - and I hate to say it, but it was all dudes, pretty much until I went to Glossier. And I’d show up at their WeWork or wherever their office was, and we’d just drink Lagunitas IPAs and talk… And then they’d just like send me an offer later the next day. I had several job interviews that were pretty much that.

[00:48:18.01] But yeah, I don’t know. It’s weird. Interviewing now – I think the thing that makes interviewing the worst these days is calendars. I feel like I’ll get in a flow with a company, and have like a first interview, and then they’ll be like “Alright, well, the hiring manager is on PTO until next month, and then they’re blocked until the month after that. So you’re cool to wait for two months between now and the next interview, right?” And I’m like “Uhm…”

“Do you remember who I am?”

Yeah, seriously.

Do they still make you LeeetCode when you go for a job interview, or not really?

I’ve never LeetCoded.

Really? Never?

I’ve had take-home assignments, I’ve done –

I love a take-home assignment. I would do that all day, because I can do it in the manner that I actually work. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I used to be a troll and I would write them in like Haskell or something like that, but I don’t do that anymore.

I love that you did it in Haskell, and Justin was like “I’m going to write this in Bash, just to be petty.” I love it so much. Like, it does make me mad that I’m working for free, but at least I can show my skill in that way. I feel like it’s an accurate show of how I work, so I feel like at least it’s comparable.

Did I tell you about my take-home for Oculus before [unintelligible 00:49:24.18]

No, but I’m scared. Look at his face. Y’all can’t see his face, but he’s making the Justin excited face, so it’s going to be good.

I remember, it was one of the worst things. They gave me a take-home. I passed the first couple of interviews, like “Here’s a take-home. Set up a three-tier infrastructure. Here’s your AWS credentials.” I didn’t get AWS console access, but they set up three VMs for me. Like “We want a database, a frontend and a backend. We want you to build it.” I’m like “All from scratch?” They’re like “Yeah. You get a weekend.” I’m like “Really? This is a lot.” I’m like “Okay, I’m gonna figure out some of this stuff. I just need a database, a little Python app, a little frontend, three different things, connected together…” Like, they all network together. So I literally finished it late on a Sunday. I’m like “Okay, we’re good. I’m just gonna do one last run through, and I’m going to secure them, just to show I go the extra mile on how this stuff works.” And I literally [unintelligible 00:50:07.28] that like I have no access to reboot, or console access to anything else. I’m just like, I just locked myself out, and everyone out from the entire thing. I didn’t save it. They could reboot it and get back to where it was, but I was like “I just locked everyone out of this box.” I was like “I can’t do anything.” I just sent them an email. I’m like “I’m sorry I can’t finish your take-home assignment. Thank you for the time.”

Wow.

And [unintelligible 00:50:30.15]

Don’t you love when you do a take-home assignment three interviews in and they don’t even call you back, and you’re just like… “Thanks…”

Yeah.

The junior engineer’s like “I have this ticket. Could you solve this for me? Thank you.”

Sometimes, I swear to God, they use your work to actually solve something. They’ll be like “Can you make an architecture?” And I was just like “You’re going to use this after, aren’t you?”

So David, you’re interviewing right now. You’re looking for SRE positions. What else – you said you were building some stuff, kind of just in your free time, or learning to give back… What are you working on?

Yeah, so I’m working on a YouTube channel called The Uneducated Technologist. And I was inspired by this guy, The Uneducated Economist. And he’s just this awesome dude that works at a lumber yard, and talks about really intense economic concepts, in like pretty relatable terms, just sitting this truck. So I’ll probably put a little bit more production into it, and I’ll probably be sitting at my desk… But essentially, I just want to tell my story about how I got into tech, how I’ve built a career, and give some tips on how I would maybe go about it a little bit better, knowing what I know now. How to align yourself with the job that matches your values, which I think is super-important. People talk about being unhappy at work… Well, you’re probably not doing what you like. Maybe you think you’re doing what you like, or you’re doing what you know how to do, but you probably don’t like it.

How do you navigate that when you’re starting out though? Or like when you don’t have 20 years of experience?

Well, I think you just have to think about what you like to do. Do you like talking to people? Are you extroverted? You’re probably not a developer. Maybe, but like probably not.

[00:52:05.24] I’m extroverted and a developer.

I am too, I am too. But we’re on a podcast right now. Not –

You’re not wrong. Which makes it really hard to find people to come on your podcast.

Yeah. We’re the exception and not the rule. And a lot of times, if you’re extroverted and a developer and you find out how much SEs make, you switch to go to market. That’s what I did. But I think – are you a creative type? Are you always doodling and drawing? You’re a product designer. Are you really good at organization? Are you the person who plans your friend’s vacations, and your family vacations? And is your room really tidy? You’d probably make a pretty good project manager.

And I think those are all three tracks, and it’s pretty easy to get into, with a degree, without a degree… I’ve met product managers that were PhDs in philosophy. I’ve met incredible product designers that dropped out of high school. It doesn’t matter where you come from. If you’re doing what you like to do, you’ll try to do a good job at it. And so I think that’s where aligning your values is super-important.

Do you feel like we’re still going to be able to achieve that for people in this market the way that tech is like changing? Because I’m really worried that it won’t be that easy for people that didn’t go to college, or people that are philosophy majors; this new market, people with 20 years of experience are having a hard time to get in. And when I go to talk to like college students or military spouses, I don’t even know what to tell them right now.

Look, there’s always going to be jobs. I mean, if you’re worried about AI, be a DevOps engineer. Like, the lights have got to stay on. The compute’s got to be there. Those GPUs have to be scaled one way or another. I think tech is pretty self-healing, and has been for a long time.

As long as you’re willing to adjust. Because that’s the thing… I won’t say it’s not a stable job; it’s not a consistent job. And the thing I was doing 20 years ago - I was at a terminal on Linux, but I was being paid for a different skillset than what I’m being paid for now. And those things adjust over time throughout the career. And being able to pick up new things and learn how you like to learn… We were talking about finding the groove for yourself, finding the right focus music, and the things that work for you to learn and pick up new things, and then following the threads that excite you is super-important in a long career.

I think that’s one of the things that it hits my neuro ADHD. I love learning new things. It also freaks my anxiety out, but I love the fact that you constantly get to learn new things, and that you get to be like a forever learner in tech, you know?

Yeah. I think my sort of neuro ADHD anxiety stuff is like two sides of the same coin. And if I’m excited about something enough, I’m going to get so anxious about it that I actually start to feel awesome. And that’s kind of where I’m always trying to get. I don’t know, there’s always going to be cool people in tech. There just is. So if you can ask for help, get out there, build a network, talk to the people you know… Sure, it’s hard right now. It’s a hard market. Salaries got really, really high, I think. And that’s a big thing, that a lot of companies are just dumping people and trying to hire people cheaper. That’s what’s happening. And that’s why it’s hard for people with 20-year careers to get a job; they want those big salaries. Whereas that 24-year-old kid straight out of bootcamp, or CS degree, or whatever - they’ll take half that. And I think that that’s why we’re seeing a big shift, and so many riffs, and all this sort of stuff. But you know, it’s just always reinventing itself, and taking shape… And VCs are starting to really invest again. I’m seeing that. I think the market’s picking up.

What’s your favorite startup job? Because you worked at so many. Did you have one that you maybe learned the most at, and one that was the most fun? Or are those the same job?

You know, I’d probably say Lua… And I wasn’t there for a super-long time, but I was there long enough to really catch the bug with like Kubernetes, and distributed computing. I never got to open-source it, but I wrote, I think, the first distributed Erlang virtual machine on Kubernetes. So I actually wrote like an operator in Go, that could listen to the Erlang API and scale itself up and down based on events. And so we were migrating from Ruby on Rails to Elixir microservices, which ran on Erlang… It was a lot of fun. I love Erlang, I love Elixir, I love Kubernetes. Too bad there’s no Erlang Elixir jobs… But I did learn Kubernetes.

[00:56:18.18] That Venn diagram is pretty small for that overlap, right? You can pick one or the other, but yeah.

Yeah, unfortunately. But I think that was probably my favorite one. I hope to eventually be a founder, or co-founder of a startup, so I’m going to say that will be my favorite one… It just hasn’t happened yet.

That’s awesome. I’d love that for you. I’m also really excited about your channel and all that stuff, because I feel like it’s the coolest when people just kind of pass down knowledge, and do it in a way that’s accessible… Because it’s like, you’re helping the next person. That’s like one of my favorite parts about tech, is that you can just pick up a YouTube video and go try something and learn a skill. That’s awesome.

Definitely. Yeah. I hope I don’t disappoint.

David, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find you online?

Absolutely. The pleasure was mine. You can find me on LinkedIn, David Beale. I think it’s just dbealejr is the username. You can find me on Instagram, d.beale_, if you want to see a lot of pictures of drums and my wife and kid… And yeah, that should be a good starting point.

Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes, and thanks so much for your time.

Awesome. See you guys.

Break: [00:57:27.18]

Thank you so much, David, for coming on the episode and talking to us all about a lot of things… Like, your career in technology, how you got into it, things you’re still interested in… I love that the thread of skateboarding and music and just figuring things out was just kind of constant through the whole thing… So that was very fun to hear about.

That was a fun interview.

Yeah. Today on the show for the outro we have some links. And Autumn, I think you you came up with both of these. Why don’t you tell us about them, and we’ll discuss?

I think it’s interesting seeing the amount of money that big cloud companies and big tech are investing in the new ways to build data centers. I think Microsoft and AWS are built are investing hundreds of thousands dollars into new data centers… And with the uptick in AI and data and compute power, data centers - they’re either going to have to find better ways of building them, or we’re going to have to get creative… So these two links are new proposals on how to, and ways new companies are building data centers.

So one was a data center would be powered by the three nuclear reactors. So Oracle is proposing a design of data centers that are powered by three nuclear reactors. And I don’t know if people have heard it, but Bill Gates has been really big on like nuclear power is cleaner, and all that good stuff. It also, for me, feels a little bit scary, because when nuclear reactors go wrong, you see – or not yet… Like, the whole Chernobyl thing and all that, which - Justin, do you want to say what you said about Japan earlier? Because I do think that’s a valid point, too.

Well, I mean, I think the fear of nuclear - it has been very generational. And Bill has been one of those advocates for – I feel like Bill and I are just on a first name basis…

You are, totally.

Mr. Gates. He’s been talking about like the new ways of doing it is not like the old ways. And a lot of the things that we had problems with in the past… Because these power plants exist for literally decades and decades, and they’re around for 50 or more years. And the things we knew about this power, and how to cool it, and make it safe from 80 years ago or whenever we were building those earlier power plants is very different than how we understand them and use them today. And I know he’s a proponent of doing it.

I don’t know enough of the details about that as a clean energy source to be like “Yeah, we should totally do it.” But I have solar powers on my house now, and I’m trying to contribute in those sorts of ways. But beyond doing that for like these large “We just need more power in an area”, I think we’ve been trying to find a lot of creative ways of doing it, and… Yeah, we’re just consuming so much more power, to do more compute, for questionable more value. That is that is a big concern in general.

I think one of the fascinating things is the disconnect people have with all of these large cloud providers creating these gigantic data centers, and the disconnect of that - like, the cloud runs on prem. That is a thing that exists. And when people say “Oh, Oracle is going to make three new regions”, those are physical locations, with computers in them, and it’s just a data center.

And then everyone’s like “I’m allergic to running a computer. I don’t want to touch a computer.” And it’s like, actually, data centers exist all over. And you don’t have to build it from scratch, and come up with fancy power. You could just go buy a box and ship it to someone, and they’ll rack and stack, and network, and storage, and power, and redundancy, and all that other stuff for you. You’re just like “I just want a computer” actually isn’t that expensive anymore, especially with the newer ARM chips. I was pricing out some Ampere servers a week or two ago, and I’m like “Actually, these are pretty affordable.” I have a colo that’s driving distance to my house. I could go throw that in there and run a lot of stuff from it. They’re very – they’re one hundred ninety six cores, a bunch of memory, and I’m like “That’s that’s a big box to run a lot of stuff for not that much money.”

But I also think it’s not just cost, though. We were just talking about last week - how hot was it where you were? Wasn’t it like a hundred and fifteen?

Yeah.

And Seattle does not do well with heat, because we’re not used to it. And you have fires, you said your car was covered in ash…

Covered in ash, yeah, yesterday.

…and it was super-smoky up here, and we’re not getting enough rain… And it’s like, we are contributing to this heat. We had a link the other day that said people were running a lot of AI workloads at night because of the heat and how much faster it would run.

The Meta paper. Yeah, the LLaMA paper was all about – like, it was like a two percent performance improvement if you just ran it at night.

Yeah. So if you just think about it… So that kind of moves into the next one, where - there’s a proposal for building data centers underwater. And I guess this advisory board or government regulators didn’t know about this new design. And a lot of people are pushing towards creative ways to build data centers because of the – you know, we’re using so much water and electricity and heat. And supposedly, this is going to be some component that is supposed to make it better by putting basically the cloud into the ocean.

[01:06:14.21] Is it still called the cloud?

Yeah, is it then like a coral? I don’t know. But then you start to think about it, like “Are we going to heat up the ocean?”

Yeah. That’s like another metric of like the Earth heating up, is like actually the ocean ambient temperature is heated up. And granted, there are – like, it’s more efficient at dissipating heat, and the air is actually really terrible at it. And it’s another thing that I keep thinking of, even in my home lab, here in my garage… The more I run my own servers, the more I’m cognizant of the thing I’m doing having impact.

Yeah, because you’re heating up your own office.

Exactly. I’m like “I’m sweating in here”, because I have eight computers on right now. You know what? I can turn off a couple of these computers. I don’t need them running right now. I don’t need to run that workload. And touching metal to me has been really great over the past couple of years to just be able to like – I remember what it was like in a data center, in the hot and cold aisle… And I’m like “Actually, the thing I’m doing has a big impact.” And I do think that, again, that disconnects a lot of stuff when we just say “Oh, someone else runs it. I don’t care.” I assume they’re efficient, or good for the environment, or they have renewable energy. It’s like, no; it’s like buybacks. It’s like energy buybacks, and all this other stuff. They’re not actually running – like, Virginia is very much not a green data center for anyone. And that sort of stuff has a huge impact, in – like, running this metal here in my garage… I have to crank down the AC. And I’m like “Actually, I should just think about, do I need this stuff running? What am I actually doing with it, and how often do I need it running?” And I shut the machines down at night now.

Back in the day, my computer room – people had computer rooms, and you’d go turn off the computer at night, because you’re like “Well, it doesn’t need to be on. It’s going to heat up the room. We’ll turn it off.”

Well, just in my office, when I have both laptops and the screens running, it’ll be like not very warm outside, and all of a sudden you’re just like “Dude, it’s very hot in here.” It also makes me cringe a little bit when startups come and tell me about their startups, or like people ask for advice… You just talk to people at conferences and they’re like “I’m running a bunch of racks in my grandma’s basement.” And I’m like “Please don’t burn your grandma’s house down. What are you doing to your grandma’s electricity bill?” I don’t know.

I had an old desktop behind my dad’s dresser for like three years while I was at college, running… What was it? It was an Unreal Tournament server.

Behind his dresser –

He didn’t know about it. I plugged it in – like, that’s where the outlet was. And there happened to be a network cable. I’m like “Oh, my gosh.” I literally just like put a desktop back there. He never knew about it.

Justin…!

He moved out of the house and he’s like “What’s this computer?” “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.” I ran it for three years in his house.

Oh, the mom in me just… Why are you like this? This is also why my kids love you so much.

This was before Raspberry Pi’s. We had big computers that we just had to –

You’re like – you know that one uncle that your kids love to get in trouble with? But you’re like –

Let’s them get in trouble?

…their tech trouble uncle. Yeah. You won’t necessarily teach them to do bad things, but like, I’m going to have Raspberry Pi’s all over my house, running some [unintelligible 01:09:14.15] somewhere.

Like, “What is this Python script doing?” “Don’t worry about it, mom.”

Exactly.

Where’d the bandwidth go? “I don’t know…”

I was submitting my talk for Scale, and they’re like “Do we get to meet Uncle Justin?”

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, we can finish up this conversation, but I – I wanna outro on some of that stuff, too. But I do think that data centers are going through a big phase right now, but they’re having not only a resurgence for some people just thinking about them, but also like their impact… Because we’ve been building them for decades, and we have been trying to make them better. And in some cases they’re renewable. I remember Facebook had the ones that they were building up up North more, because like guess what? We don’t need active cooling. We open the windows. I’m like “Yeah, the snow’s melting.” Like, please, there’s still heat. We’re still doing this stuff over and over again.

[01:10:04.27] I love innovation, but I just hope that we can really look at where the innovation is going to take us and try to be responsible… Because I love tech, but I also love outside, and not dying of heat. You know what I mean? Can we, like, in the middle? There’s a website you can look at what your heat and climate in your area is going to be in so many years, and you’re like “Dude, Arizona is going to like just burn itself off the map.” There’s parts of Washington – I think my area of Washington is supposed to be equivalent to Fremont, California in 10 years, which is like wild. All of a sudden, everyone’s getting ACs, and all these houses were built because they didn’t need AC.

And it’s not even – like, they don’t have insulation. The AC is not helping if it’s all just going to go outside.

My house is built in a way that has in floor heating, so it isn’t even – like, there’s no ducts in my house. Like, it’s not even possible to get – there’s one AC unit to cool the whole… Because it wasn’t a thought. Nobody thought we were going to need AC.

You’re never going to get that hot. Why do you need it? You open the window.

Yeah. It was like “Oh, you’ll get two 90-degree days and it’s fine.”

Yeah, it’s fine. Put on a fan.

And we’ve been dying the last couple of summers. Like, it is so hot… It’s wild. We’re going to have to come up with these crazy, very creative ways to put AC in my house, and it’s going to cost so much money, because it was not built to have AC.

My house has really good insulation. When we moved in, I was just like “Oh, actually, I’ve never had a house that had this good of insulation places.” And the fact that we don’t have to run the AC all that often, even when it’s 100 degrees outside in Southern California, I’m like “Oh, actually, this is amazing. Everyone should do insulation.” Like, that’s what we need first. And then we decide on how –

That’s something that people don’t think about. And you can get your insulation reblown. They can come and blow insulation into your walls.

Yeah. [unintelligible 01:12:04.29] I was like “Actually, you just want to keep the temperature difference from outside not coming in.”

Downstairs in my house, because it’s built into like a mountain, so one floor of my house is –

Half underground?

Yes. So my bedroom is downstairs, and my guestroom, and my office and stuff… It is a completely different temperature downstairs than upstairs.

A different ecosystem a foot underground.

Yes, it is wild. And it’s like, my room is so cool, and my kids’ room will be so hot that they’ll end up sleeping downstairs for like half the summer.

So data centers underground…

Well, it’s interesting, but I just hope we also don’t – like, let’s not go overboard and heat up the ground and ocean…

Yeah, we’re creating a lot of heat, and we’re consuming a lot of energy. And the closer we can get people to the heat and the energy that they’re having a cause for, I think is important for a lot of people just to understand. [unintelligible 01:12:56.28] carbon footprint calculators, right? We’re like “Oh, how many flights did you have? How far do you drive? [unintelligible 01:13:02.19] How much do you use your phone? How many videos did you scroll on TikTok, and now you’re heating up the Earth because you want to be entertained? Actually, that does have an impact, and it’s crazy when you really think about it that way.

I do really love technology and using it, so there’s no shade, and I am definitely a part of the problem… You know what I mean? So it’s not like – I’m not looking down on any of it. But I hope that we can find a balance, because I do want to leave a decent Earth to my children, and be able to go outside when I go outside, rarely.

I set a personal screen time on my phone, to like “Do not be on social media more than this much every day.” And actually, sometimes I skip it. But you know what? It does help me to like “Hey, you’ve actually already been on for two hours. You can just sign off now, and you can go do something else”, and it’s great.

It’s also just bad for your brain [unintelligible 01:13:51.25]

Yeah… You know, there’s a lot of things.

We should shout out Scale, because…

Yeah, before we go - the Scale CFP is coming up. Scale is Southern California Linux Expo. You can find it at SoCalLinuxExpo.org. I help organize that, as well as the Kubernetes cloud-native track for it. But the CFP is open. If you want to come to Pasadena in March next year, feel free to fill out a CFP, or just start opening tickets, or get a ticket… Because it’s a community-run events, the tickets are, I think, a hundred-ish dollars, which is very cheap for a conference…

They’re very reasonable. And you can bring your kids. They have a whole kids track… It’s very family-friendly.

They have a game night, and Autumn, your kids are going to love the family game night, which is Saturday night.

They’re just going to love chasing you around the convention center.

It’s a lot of fun for everyone, so I’m excited. They have a kids track if your kids want to speak. My son gave his first conference talk…

I’m tired already, but I’m so excited. It’s like nerd summer camp. It is the coolest conference I’ve ever been to. They’re such kind, nice people… The Kubernetes crowd is – they’re fire. I don’t know if I want to run Kubernetes [unintelligible 01:14:57.10] but fire, though.

And there are a couple of other conferences. I’m going to All Things Open, which is in Raleigh, in October, which is going to be awesome. I have a talk there.

You’re also going to London, and I’m super-jealous.

I am going to London; actually, I’ll be back from London when this episode airs. And then also, KubeCon North America has like a bajillion conferences next to it. It’s in Salt Lake City in November, and I also have a talk there, so I’m going to Salt Lake City.

So if anyone’s going to either of those, feel free to shout out, let me know if you’re going to be there. I’d love to meet in person. And yeah, we’ll talk to everyone soon.

Bye, everyone.

Bye.