2021 Year-End Wrap-Up

Joe Lahey, Matty, Trevor, Bridget and Jessica record the 2021 year-end wrap-up in one room, which Joe admits has an agenda line reading "stuff and junk." The conversation covers YouTube and Spotify numbers, favorite and most popular episodes, high points of the year, a long stretch on pets, and what everyone is looking forward to in 2022. The cold open is Jessica: "It really is about getting your system to teach you what you need, not about dumping fucking metrics out your butt."

The Numbers

Matty opens with the YouTube year-in-review email: almost 6,000 views and 37,000 watch minutes, which is less than what one episode of the podcast gets listened to. That's why the show doesn't optimize for video. Matty adds that doing the show on Twitch would be less work than the podcast since there's no editing, and Bridget does not want a comment stream. Hangouts on Air history gets a mention: when Jeffrey Snover tweeted the join link instead of the watch link, a few extra people showed up on the call, and the show's highest live viewership was around 12.

The podcast had 11 episodes in 2021, which Matty notes is close to one a month and not unusual for the show, with four more ready to go. As of December 15th the most listened-to episode was All Things Docker. Bridget's theory is that recording it live on Zoom at US lunchtime, early in 2021, started a cascade of people linking to it. Second was Foundational Practices with Johan Abildskov, where Matty kept mishearing the pronunciation of the guest's name, which turned into a conversation about communication breakdown from context. Third was Doing Releases Right, the first episode of the year. Cumulative downloads are 1.6 million.

Spotify stats get their own stretch: follower count up 62 percent and listeners up 16 percent, top listening countries of Slovenia, Kenya, Serbia, Lesotho and Nigeria, and 137 people for whom the show is the most-listened podcast on Spotify. Over time the show has been listened to more than 14,000 times in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and San Francisco is the highest city. Bridget calls it "our podcast on podcasting."

Favorite Episodes

Jessica picks Words Are Hard with Emily Freeman, with one complaint: Matty and Emily kept referring to a class with a "secret formula for presenting to power" and never said what it was. Matty's pick is Drawing DevOps, with the sketch-recording side of Ashton's work and what drawing taught about DevOps over the years. Joe says it would have been a good episode for Joe to be on, since Joe came to DevOpsDays as an outsider who was voluntold into running audiovisual. Bridget's picks are the Open Service Mesh multicluster episode and Brigade with Kent Rancourt, for talking to maintainers about things that aren't in the repo. Joe's favorite was the Tech Twitter episode, purely as an editing challenge with around 15 guests.

Transcripts, Descript and the Back Catalog

Matty recommends Descript for editing, since the transcript is built into the editor and cuts are made against the text, though it can be overzealous about filler words and "verbal tics." Separate tracks per speaker (Zencastr or Squadcast) make the transcription much better, and the Deserted Island DevOps episode was hard because the tool can't tell ten voices apart. Jessica says text-based editing is the future for audio but not for video. Matty apologizes for missing accessibility and says transcribing the whole back catalog would cost over $45,000, so the show is doing it going forward.

High Points of 2021

• Bridget: IPv6 dual stack went GA in Kubernetes at the beginning of December, after behind-the-scenes work. "Something actually got done."
• Jessica: switched jobs to Honeycomb, and a partner moved from Tennessee to St. Louis, about three miles away.
• Trevor: finding a community and how much of it cares, plus riding a century on a bicycle. "I trained for it, and I didn't die."
• Matty: breakfast with Bridget three days in a row at KubeCon, "what it's like to spend time with friends again," and starting a new job at Pulumi a year after announcing Red Hat, plus a new dog, Moxie.
• Joe: a new cat, Ripley, who joined in June and became fast friends with Nimoy within hours. The rule of thumb for dogs, Joe says, is n plus 1.

The pets run long: "free as in puppy" and "free as in mattress" for open source, the dog and cat gods comic, and Joe and Bridget's house name, Gazebo 7, from a Simpsons episode, which is also the trivia team name. There's also a section on media: Trevor concedes that Babylon 5 is better than DS9, Matty and Bridget discuss the Cowboy Bebop reboot, Jessica watched Schmigadoon, and Joe reports on a water glass eggs video that ended with "We have the technology. They're called grocery stores or refrigerators."

Looking Ahead to 2022

Bridget is looking forward to being in charge of less: Andy Fehner takes over DevOpsDays Minneapolis, with Bridget in an advisory role, which leaves room for different decisions and other voices. Jessica is returning to a family beach trip at Tybee Island, Georgia. Trevor plans another century, a Seattle to Portland ride, and a triathlon in Chicago. Matty, who took over as global DevOpsDays chair from Bridget, hopes for DevOpsDays Chicago back in person in May, with the CFP open until the end of January, and for KubeCon in Valencia. Matty also ties the ADO streak of episodes to Seinfeld's method, and to normalization of deviance once a streak is broken. Joe is looking forward to a rescheduled Canadian fishing trip.

Favorite Episodes

• Drawing DevOps with Ashton Rodenhiser
• Multicluster Service Mesh With Phillip Gibson and Annie Wang
• Brigade With Kent Rancourt

Most Popular Episodes

• Most listened-to episode in 2021 was All Things Docker
• Second most listened-to episode in 2021 was Foundational Practices With Johan Abildskov
• Number three was Doing Releases Right With Scott Hain

Pet photos!