2018 Year-End Wrap-Up

Matty, Trevor, Bridget and Joe record the 2018 wrap-up, with Joe hosting for the one time a year Joe does, and with questions Joe wrote. They cover favorite episodes, the one million listens milestone, what each did in 2018, predictions, travel, a round of conference rants and what they're looking forward to in 2019. Matty calls 2018 "a race condition" and Bridget says it never had a starting or an ending point. The cold open is Trevor: "I am the 25th best shuffleboarder in Chicago."

Favorite Episodes

Matty picked three and then noticed that all of them were recorded solo. Let's Be Careful Out There with J. Paul Reed and Mary Thengvall is about resilience of organizations, people and teams, recorded before their Redeploy conference. Punk Rock DevOps with Jay Gordon was mostly about punk and metal, and comes with a playlist for DevOpsing. Shouting at the DevOps, a crossover with Corey Quinn's podcast, is about getting started with conference talks, and Matty heard from listeners who went on to submit abstracts.

Bridget's pick is the GOTO Chicago episode, a panel of the speakers from the distributed systems track Bridget curated, which was "like fanfic": getting speakers to discuss each other's talks. Trevor, who did five episodes, liked the theater episode, the DevOpsDays Chicago episode, and the Ignite interviews with Microsoft people about the history of Git and TFS and why Azure DevOps exists in its form. Joe picks the theater episode and again favors live episodes for being easier to edit. This year's live episodes came from Amsterdam, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Chicago and Salt Lake City, with Jessica DeVita and Nicole as guest hosts.

Trevor pitches revisiting old episodes the way Alton Brown revisits Good Eats, with commentary on what was wrong, like Trevor having Googled the definition of DevOps for the first episode. Matty suggests a riff-track crossover with Software Defined Talk. Matty also mentions a two-hour crossover episode with hosts from the Ship Show, Food Fight and Software Defined Talk that proved "mostly unlistenable," and jokes about putting it behind Patreon.

Numbers

The only figure Matty wants to share is that the show passed one million listens, "a big number that has two commas in it." The most listened-to episode of 2018 was Punk Rock DevOps, and second was Theatre Geeks Unite and Tech Over the World, which Matty says keeps coming up in Twitter threads from people who came to tech from acting.

What Each of Them Did

Bridget joked that airline status is "the gamification of poor life choices," and after cutting back in 2017, said yes to too much and is Diamond on Delta again. The year included fewer talks but more Kubernetes workshops with Jerome Petazzoni and more involvement with the product side. Matty traveled about 135 days out of roughly 200, visited more countries for the first time than in all previous years combined, went to Australia and to Amsterdam twice, finished the first full year at PagerDuty, where the advocacy team grew from one to three with a developer advocate being hired, and moved from Chicago to San Francisco. Trevor spent the year as a Chef partner architect with Microsoft, launched the Chef Automate managed service for Azure preview on stage at Ignite, started learning guitar properly, and played the Chicago House of Blues with the Chef band. Joe followed Bridget around the world, with Norway the new country, noting that "the secret pipeline is me" for getting Bridget to say yes to a conference.

Predictions for Conferences

Joe asks what the talks will be after Docker and Kubernetes. Bridget expects service mesh, noting that Kubernetes, Prometheus and now Envoy are CNCF graduated projects, and hopes for unvarnished experience reports on gluing Envoy to Kubernetes. Matty says DevSecOps will be a consistent theme and that business response matters as well as technology. Trevor predicts "the minimum viable application modernization project," where an old application shoved into the cloud gets optimized without a rewrite. Bridget says it's a familiar pattern: "You put your data center in the cloud and you wonder why the cloud is expensive." Bridget expects customers to tell these stories on stage at vendors' first-party events first.

Podcasts and Places

Bridget listens to Pod Save America, Matty to Hidden Brain, Trevor watches Techmoan on YouTube, and Joe's only podcast is Extra Hot Great. Matty's favorite trip is a tie between Sydney and Helsinki, where the organizers took speakers to a cabin two hours away for a sauna and dinner, and speakers warned Matty that Finns don't ask questions. Bridget recommends taking the Eurostar between Paris and London, with terrible Wi-Fi all the way. Trevor went to Tokyo for fun and to Las Vegas for Inspire, which went as badly as expected. Joe's highlight is DevOpsDays Amsterdam and HashiDays, including a dinner that grew from 10 people to about 45 and a restaurant that seemed glad to see them leave.

Trends That Need to End

• Bridget: events that serve only beer and pizza, which leaves out vegetarians, vegans and anyone who avoids gluten or alcohol, and food with no labels. Also lineups of all men, including vendors who send the same person to give the pitch: "remember, not everyone is you."
• Matty: speakers who pay for their own tickets, which falls hardest on underrepresented speakers, and the resume slide: "we need to kill the resume slide," or at least move it a few slides in. Bridget disagrees, since a new speaker facing an unwelcoming room may benefit from bona fides on screen, and Matty adds that boring slides are the real problem and to "use it with intent." Matty also wants better speaker intros, walk-on music like at DevOpsDays Chicago, and more Diet Coke. Bridget cautions that paying international speakers can have tax implications.
• Trevor: Bluetooth beacons on badges at Microsoft's Ignite and Inspire that tracked people through the expo hall, with the opt-out buried in fine print. Trevor also wants more citing of sources in talks and posts, and mentions using gender-neutral names in product personas, which a colleague noticed and appreciated. Bridget tries to quote people other than the authors of the same three talks everyone cites.
• Joe: slide design that can't be read from the back of a 500-seat room, and complaining about the stage lights.

Looking Forward to 2019

Trevor wants to get deeper into product ownership, do more speaking, and play in a shuffleboard tournament in St. Petersburg, Florida, having placed 25th of 64 in Chicago. Bridget plans more product work, including helping PM the Helm 3 release, and significantly less travel, which Joe doubts. Matty plans more targeted travel and more writing, including on burnout and psychological safety. Joe wants to be prepared for a fat bike race in March and for guitar lessons, and sums up the job: "I look at PowerPoint professionally, and then I get on a plane and I go look at PowerPoint recreationally."

Favorite Episodes

Matty

• Let’s Be Careful out There with J. Paul Reed and Mary Thengvall
• Punk Rock DevOps with Jay Gordon
• Shouting at the DevOps with Corey Quinn

Bridget

• GOTO Chicago 2018

Trevor

• Ignite 2018 Catch Up With Jessica Deen
• Ignite 2018 Catch Up With Ed Thomson
• Ignite 2018 Catch Up With Steven Murawski
• Ignite 2018 Catch Up With Donovan Brown

Numbers

• We passed 1,000,000 listens this year
• Most listened to episode of 2018 - Punk Rock DevOps with Jay Gordon
• Second most listened to episode of 2018 - Theatre Geeks Unite and Tech Over the World

What happened in 2018?

Bridget

• Travel. And plenty of it.

Matty

• Moved to SF and a bunch of personal stuff
• Visited 8 countries for work
• Spoke at like 20 events or something
• 5 new tattoos

Trevor

• Lot’s of time with Microsoft
• Launched a product (preview)
• Learning guitar! Formally, finally!

Podcast Recommendations

Bridget

• Pod Save America

Matty

• Hidden Brain

Trevor

• Tech Moan

Joe

• extra hot great