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Arrested DevOps
Arrested DevOps

2016 Year-End Extravaganza

31 december 2016
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Om avsnittet

Matty, Trevor and Bridget record a hosts-only year-end episode in December 2016, and most of it is a long tangent about podcasting itself. The agenda, such as it is, covers favorite episodes, site and listen stats, what each of them did in 2016, and what they think the year meant for DevOps. The show notes are thin and Matty knows it. The cold open is Bridget: "Oh my God, we're not going to start talking about the process of podcasting again. Moving on."

The Cold Open Supercut

The episode starts with a supercut of the year's cold opens, which Matty describes as the lazy route: in the first year-end show Matty tried to make a highlight reel and had to listen to every episode, but now "you only have to listen to the first 5 seconds of our show." Matty also says the cold opens only started this year, and that Joe, the new audio editor, picks them and keeps surprising Matty.

Why the Audio Isn't Better

Listeners keep asking for better audio quality, and the hosts agree Hangouts is a poor choice but the "lowest common denominator": nobody has ever said they couldn't use it. They've tried other tools at least half a dozen times, including TriCast and Zencastr, and Trevor says that "every time we actually go to do it, something goes catastrophically wrong," usually with three hosts and a panel of guests. Matty says the show is unusual, since most podcasts have one host or a host pair in a room, and a panel show with few repeat panelists is "0.00001% of podcasts out there," so the software isn't built for it. Bridget's takeaway for anyone thinking of starting a podcast: "software is terrible." Matty also notes that two-person episodes are the easiest to edit, and that pre-recorded sponsor pre-rolls replaced the hosts reading them live.

This was also the year of cross-podcast episodes released on other shows' feeds, with the Goat Farm and Software Defined Talk, and a DevOpsDays Dallas super-episode with Software Defined Talk and Food Fight. Matty floated a roundtable of podcast hosts talking about how they make their shows, and every host who replied said nobody would care.

Favorite Episodes

Bridget's favorite is the first episode of 2016, on platforms, which set a bar the year managed to live up to. Trevor picks the DevOpsDays Dallas episode and one recorded in Singapore, where people "are getting all the concepts that we're talking about now, but they didn't have to go through all the pain." Bridget compares it to skipping landlines and going straight to cellular.

Matty's picks:

  • Personal brand: the episode that reached friends and family outside the usual audience.
  • Who Owns Your Availability: recorded within hours of the left-pad incident after Bridget said it had to happen that day, with a guest who was about to board a plane to Japan and was told to do it now.
  • CareerOps: an episode that came entirely from a listener's idea about disaster recovery for your career, which Matty uses to repeat that guests should arrive with a topic. "we have a long list of people and a short list of topics."
  • Operationalizing open source: an experiment where Michael Hedgepeth hosted and the hosts were panelists, after a proposal that ran ten paragraphs.

Matty adds that the show gets "one episode a year to be self-indulgent," and this is it.

The Numbers

On the numbers, Matty notes that the website had about 16,000 unique visitors, almost half of traffic comes from search, and Twitter accounts for 6 percent. The number one search term is Arrested DevOps. 1 percent of traffic came from being listed in the Hugo gallery, and another podcast turned out to be using the show's Hugo theme, which Bridget discovered through a Google alert on a name. Matty then wrote a Hugo theme for podcasters. Listens were 232,200 against 204,001 in 2015 with about the same number of episodes, so Matty reads audio popularity as roughly flat. The most listened-to episode was Application Configuration with Adam Jacob and Tim Gross. The most watched video was Bridget's fireside chat with Bryan Cantrill, at almost 2,000 views, then the containers and security episode with Jess and Ben Hughes at about 1,200, then the Jeffrey Snover episode recorded in 2014. Matty credits big personalities and topics people are hungry for, and that if every episode were a chat with a personality the show wouldn't have lasted, and without any it would have burned out.

Matty also tells the story of a blog post that put a personal site on the front page of Reddit, and after Bridget asks, agrees to take down a post a commenter had asked to have removed.

What Each of Them Did in 2016

Matty traveled little, lost status on everything, spoke twice (Pink16 and a CloudBees Jenkins conference in Chicago), attended one DevOpsDays, Chicago, which Matty ran, and got married. Trevor spent months leading a data center transformation in Asia-Pacific, saw Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo, and says staying on Singapore hours "broke me in some way," which is when Trevor understood burnout. Trevor spoke at the PowerShell Summit in Singapore and at ChefConf, moved to Los Angeles and joined Chef in the same role Matty holds. Trevor also recounts applying for an evangelist job at the lowest point of the burnout, and Matty adds that it was mature of a hiring manager not to hire for the wrong role at the wrong time. Bridget's advice is not to compromise on what you'll be happy doing and where you want to live.

Bridget gave about 25 talks, visited DevOpsDays in London, Toronto, New York, Detroit, Havana, Philadelphia, Madison and Sydney while running Minneapolis, and with Joe covered five continents. The plan had been to travel less, which became "the gamification of poor life choices" once the airline status arrived. Matty says the remote-work life has made travel something to dread, and that roles built on being in the room with customers make it hard to avoid. Trevor calls elite status "the worst wonderful thing in the world."

DevOps in 2016 and DevOpsDays

Matty's read of the year: "this was a year when we stopped talking about doing shit and we just started doing shit." After the empathy talks of 2014 and the thinking of 2015, people in the open spaces at DevOpsDays Chicago were talking as peers who were all doing it, instead of sitting at the feet of thought leaders.

Bridget says DevOpsDays grew from about 22 cities in 2015 to 42 cities on 6 continents in 2016, with first-time events in places like Istanbul, Porto Alegre, Raleigh, Kansas City, Philadelphia and Cape Town, and Moscow, Beijing and Zurich planned for 2017. Matty joined the core team as web team lead, doing the work behind the scenes of the site so that updating it is easier, while deliberately keeping the Git requirement: "we want to make it delightful but not easy." Bridget has notes on the mockup colors, asking only for better contrast.

Matt, Trevor, and Bridget chat (at length) about podcasts, podcast recording, and podcast recording software. Oh, and the highlights of 2016 if they get around to it. (Don't miss the supercut of all 2016's cold opens, which was edited by Joe, even though Matt takes credit for it!)

What were some of your favorite episodes?

Let’s talk numbers

Website

  • 16K visitors to the website
  • 46% of traffic comes from search
  • 16% comes from referrals, mostly Twitter (Twitter is 6% of all traffic)
  • 1% of our traffic comes from the hugo site itself (our site generator)

Episodes

Website updates

  • Didn’t change much, but we list episode numbers now (maybe we’ll add dates sometime)

Other improvements

  • Matt did a session with Daniel J. Lewis of the Audacity to Podcast (we were a featured podcast eval in Podcasters Society) and we got a whole bunch of ideas on how to improve the show - some of which we have already started to implement). You can check out our outstanding issues on GitHub
  • Welcome to Joe as our main audio editor!

What happened with you in 2016?

Matt

  • Didn’t travel much - only spoke once twice - once at Pink16, and once at a Cloudbees conference in Chicago
  • Only went to one devopsdays - Chicago. I’m failing!
  • Hey, I got married

Bridget

  • 28 talks. Give or take. A few of those were at devopsdays - I made it to London, Toronto, New York, Detroit, Havana, Philadelphia, Madison, Sydney - and of course ran Minneapolis.
  • Counting North America Joe and I hit 5 continents this year. And I was going to travel less. Instead, all the airline status. Rethinking next year. Maybe get into webinars?
  • Devopsdays: growing! New core team! New cities!

Trevor

  • I spoke 3 times this year, but got to attend so many more conferences than before
  • I was literally on the other side of the planet to my usual place of existence for the first time.
  • I moved to LA
  • I work for Chef now!

Check Outs

Bridget

Trevor:

Matt:

  • There’s this thing called Minecraft I “discovered” via my kids.
  • Also reminder about code.org and everyone is talking about Hour of Code
  • It’s been super retro time for Matt as he re-read a bunch of the Dragonlance books, and discovered a bunch he hadn’t read, including The Soulforge.

Community & Event Stuff

If you have an upcoming conference you would like to see promoted on ADO, you can fill out the handy form at arresteddevops.com/conf

Open CFPs

photo credit 1, photo credit 2

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