A Year of ADO

How It Started

For the year-end episode there are no guests, and Bridget Kromhout, the newest host, asks Matty and Trevor to start from the top. Matty says he wanted to blog about DevOps 101, a friend came up with the name Arrested DevOps, and he saw a gap in podcasts for people just starting to learn about DevOps. His mission statement was to be the show for people whose boss "read about DevOps in the in-flight magazine and now I'm supposed to do it." He learned from DevOps Cafe, then Food Fight and The Ship Show, and admits he still doesn't always follow what John Willis is talking about. Bridget points out that he's now name-dropping Willis and Damon Edwards after swearing off name-dropping in episode 1, and asks if he's met John Allspaw at Velocity. He hasn't been to Velocity yet.

Trevor tells how they met at the new Azure meetup in Chicago, where he ran into a "really loud, knowledgeable guy" who turned out to be Matty. Matty says he knows he doesn't finish what he starts, so he wanted a partner to keep him accountable, and that editing the first episode made him think "are you ever gonna let Trevor talk?"

By the Numbers

Matty cautions that podcast stats are guesswork, since they only count audio downloads, and that he halves them for his own purposes. The most downloaded and most viewed episode is 14, How to Eff Up DevOps, which he calls the Pete Cheslock effect (Bridget: "like the Colbert bump"). Older episodes keep growing, which he takes to mean new listeners are working through the back catalog. He says an episode gets about 2,500 to 3,000 audio downloads and 200 to 300 YouTube views, and that when the Minneapolis episode wasn't posted to YouTube, some people wrote asking what happened, since YouTube is how they follow the show. Every episode except the two live ones was recorded on a Google Hangout, "which is ironic, I guess, that our truly live episodes were not live streamed."

Topic First or Guest First

Matty admits part of the reason the podcast exists was to get Jez Humble on. After the tenth episode he tweeted, and Jez replied that the hard part isn't getting him on the show, it's getting him to shut up once he's on. He was episode 15. Trevor says he's topic first, then who can talk about it, and jokes that Matty likes famous names. Matty says he's prone to the echo chamber, and that Trevor finds people he's never heard of, which is good since some listeners aren't in the DevOps community at all.

Listener feedback shaped some episodes. People said the show was heavy on culture and light on tools, which led to the Git episode. Matty says he's having an identity crisis about the audience, since it's meant to be the 101 show but people he knows listen. What matters more to him are the messages from people who say "I didn't even know where to start," or one who wrote that they'd drunk the Kool-Aid, their organization hadn't, and the show made them feel it could be done. That's "way more awesome" than knowing an expert listens.

Favorite Moments

The episode plays an audio supercut of the year's lines, including "tools are easy, people are what's tough." Bridget says she loved that in episode 1 Matty wouldn't read the John Vincent quote because he didn't want to say the word shit on air, and that by the Etsy episode "everybody is swearing like Chef employees." Matty says he used to drop in a spring sound effect over swearing and stopped. Trevor says they originally avoided the explicit tag so as not to turn listeners away, and that Matty eventually decided that was a fruitless effort. Bridget also likes Trevor's line in episode 2 about never stopping learning, and her own MST3K-style response: "so you're like a shark?"

Her favorites are the Minneapolis episode with Patrick Debois, the conferences episode with Jason Dixon and Pete Cheslock, and hosting the enterprise one. Matty says that one was a comedy of errors, with hotel Wi-Fi, a guest in Budapest, and an Azure network incident that day. Trevor's favorites are episode 17 on asking for help and the Etsy story about telling a senior VP he was being a jerk. Matty's is episode 14, partly for a running backchannel in a Google chat, and partly because he thinks a guest is different from a host, and it was fun to watch Nathen Harvey simply contribute. He regrets the awful audio on his cheap headset.

Behind the Mic

For anyone thinking of starting a podcast, Matty says the cost ranges from nothing to thousands a month. They record on Google Hangouts on Air, which pushes to YouTube, then he pulls the audio and MP4, converts to AIFF, and either edits it himself or sends it to Mandy Moore (@therubyrep), who edits it and returns it via Dropbox, usually within 48 hours. The MP3s live on Amazon S3 and the site, which serves the RSS feed, runs on Azure. Sponsors pay for the post-production and microphones, and for the first few months it was funded out of Matty's pocket. He notes that when he edits, everyone seems to say "um" more toward the end because he gets bored, which is his argument for outside editing.

The only thing stopping them from publishing more often than twice a month is time. A third co-host helps, since until Bridget neither could skip an episode, and Julian Dunn had to stand in at Minneapolis.

The Retro Goes Missing

Trevor says the original structure was a mock agile framework, which is why the closing segment is called checkouts and there was a retrospective at the start. They dropped the retro because they didn't have anything to say, and Matty says he's doing work now that he can't discuss, like customers he visits. He now misses it, since shows like The Ship Show and Food Fight let you know what the hosts are up to, and asks listeners whether they care.

Where the Show Fits

Trevor says he rarely listens to other podcasts, and Matty says the show fits in the same place as before, alongside The Ship Show, whose hosts seem to hack his Google Docs and do his show ideas first. He says the show is not what he envisioned, "and that's cool." Trevor says he's heard from people glad to have an intro point, and from a sysadmin friend who prefers The Ship Show for the technical detail, and that for him it's "nice to provide what I needed then."

Bridget asks Matty whether the show has changed his cynicism. He says he was forced into optimism when he told his team "let's just pretend it will work," and selling new ways of thinking has kept it up. The new Facebook search let him find his 2011 posts, where he was "a cynical asshole" about DevOps, including a coworker's comment that it was "great for tiny companies with no customers and no future." Bridget: "Yes, tiny companies with no customers and no future, like Etsy and Facebook."

Both hosts changed jobs during the year, Matty to Chef and Trevor to 10th Magnitude, with about a week of overlap. Matty says the show made his networking better, and at least once a month a prospective customer says "you do Arrested DevOps, right?" Trevor says he picked 10th Magnitude partly to learn from Matty, and that being on the show is now seen as an asset there.

What's Coming in 2015

Ducy is the field correspondent, and might pop into a Hangout from wherever he is. Planned topics, with the promise that they won't promise when, include a promise theory episode with someone who lives in Minneapolis, blameless postmortems, DevOps jobs, a Microsoft and PowerShell episode, Docker, eventually consistent distributed systems, and building teams. Matty says the previous longest episode was episode 2, at one hour and seven minutes, and that this one will beat it.

Check-Outs

Bridget saw the giant interactive Google Android billboard in Times Square that features DramaFever, and recommends Lara Hogan's Designing for Performance. Trevor recommends the Apollo guidance computer rewritten in JavaScript, the Human app now on Android, and the Netflix series Black Mirror. Matty recommends the Guardians of the Galaxy Honest Trailer, the expanded Facebook graph search, the @PeteChessBot Twitter bot, and the Accompli mail app.