Brian Ketelsen is probably most widely known for his role in the Go community: co-organizing Gophercon, co-hosting the GoTime.FM podcast, and co-authoring Go in Action for Manning Press. He's been programming since he was 10, starting on a TI-99 4A. His broad background includes roles as a DBA, Developer, CIO, and nearly everything in-between. In this episode Brian and i go deep into his history, guitars, the programming language Go, the conference he co-organizes as well as the community in general. Brian and i also spend time on talking music as well as a 2 person review on the greatest movie ever created by mankind... ROADHOUSE with Patrick Swayze. All and all, Brian is one of my favorite people!
Timeline/Topic
00:00 - Opener (Thank you Sponsors!)
00:12 - Introduction to Brian Ketelsen
00:44 - Brian's Journey
02:48 - The love of guitars, music, and how it ties to the logic and the math of computers
04:34 - Getting paid for programming for the first time.
09:20 - The first time Brian saw GO.
12:35 - Ketelsen's process for using/finding technology.
15:33 - The First Gophercon
20:10 - Cool Technologies Brian is excited for.
24:28 - What is in the DNA of a good Developer Advocate.
26:27 - WSL and NUNO
30:52 - Guitars in depth and Dream Theater
34:35 - Tool
39:02 - The greatest movie ever created by human beings on the planet Earth.... ROADHOUSE.
43:52 - Twitter questions.
50:38 - What work is Brian most proud of
Please leave a comment if you enjoyed the episode! it helps the show!
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Episode Links
Brian's Blog - https://www.brian.dev/
Erik and Brian's Martian Demo (thank you Erik and Ralph!) - https://youtu.be/DWCrP41SjbM
Go - https://golang.org/
Gophercon - https://www.gophercon.com/
Krustlet - https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2020/04/07/announcing-krustlet-kubernetes-rust-kubelet-webassembly-wasm/
WSL2 - https://www.brian.dev/blog/byobu-wsl
WSL.dev blog - https://www.brian.dev/
Nuno's Falco on WSL blog - https://falco.org/blog/falco-wsl2-custom-kernel/
Roadhouse - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098206/
Nuno's Twitter - https://twitter.com/nunixtech
BBQ Github Repo - https://github.com/bbqgophers/qpid
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- This episode of the POPCAST is brought to you by these sponsors.
- Hello everyone, and welcome to the POPCAST. He's somewhat of an alumni for Brian Ketelsen because when Kelsey was on the show, he mentioned Brian and so right here, you'll probably end up seeing like the thing where it's Kelsey's interview here and stuff like that. But he's the principal cloud developer advocate at Microsoft. Cool dude, welcome to the podcast, Brian Ketelsen.
- Hey, I'm really excited to be here. This is fun.
- Excited to have you. I think we've kind of bonded on Twitter and it's good to finally talk through stuff. So, hey, so I'm gonna talk about your journey in general. I'm gonna talk about how you got started all the way to the fine gentlemen you are today.
- Wow. So I think it's probably important to go all the way back. When I was in seventh grade, my mom was working two jobs, one of them at a grocery store and so that we could afford groceries 'cause the grocery store let us charge the groceries before the paycheck. And the second-
- Can I you a question.
- Yeah.
- Where'd you grow up? What city and state did you grow up?
- So this was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
- Okay, got it.
- Where there's only two classes of people in Jackson Hole. There's the people that own everything and the people that work for them. So you can guess which side we were on . It was really fun town to grow up in, but my mom took the second job and she surprised me by buying me a TI-99 computer. And I had really no idea about the personal computing world and having a computer at home just changed my life. I pedaled my little butt down to the library every week and got the latest Byte Magazines and whatever other magazines I could get my hands on and typed in basic programs into my TI and just I loved it so much. And that was my introduction to computing and it changed everything for me. It literally just, it changed everything. So that's was-
- That's definitely like a topic. Again, a lot of folks, again started, it was Byte Magazine, make simple programs, make games. And to me, gaming is like is always the route like, hey, I wanna make something better, I wanna learn how they did this. It's like that discovery thing. I think it's such a thing that people especially in distributed computing and all the things we are like all had got some their start in gaming to some great degree, like yeah-
- Yeah. For me, it was more writing games that I could play than it was playing them. I wanted to make the computer bend to my will and I loved it so much. I really did.
- And so post like, again, the beginnings of that and I see a lot of musical instruments, I'm assuming again that you be play, right?
- I do, yeah. I play guitar and I've been playing bass a little bit lately and I enjoy that quite a bit. I didn't realize it was as much fun as it is. So I might be collecting a few more basses and doing some work there. That was
- Let me ask you this, in terms of the like, and again, I think also from a technology perspective, I think, I'm a musician as well, I went to school for it as well, and it's like, I think that you learn discipline and you learn repetition and you learn that and that to me, I think also super, super useful. Would you say like music played a part in making you kind of structuring your upbringing to a certain degree in this-
- I would, and I think there's a tie somewhere, whether it's something that you can put your finger on and describe well or not. I think there's a tie between the logic and the math of computers and the rhythm and the beat and of math of music. I feel like there's an easy parallel there and it works well together, right? I know a lot of musicians who are programmers and a lot of programmers who are musicians. Even if they're not amazing programmers or musicians there's an overlap there that's hard to ignore.
- And so, did you play in bands as well?
- I've played in bands, nothing really big, just playing around fun bands the most exciting of which is the band that we do every year at GopherCon and in our after party and that's always my favorite.
- So we're gonna get the GopherCon because I think it's a definitely an awesome thing. I just really wanna talk about how we got to that. So in terms of, talk to me about your first, like getting paid for doing the program, right? like in
- So this is a fun story too, 'cause this was way back in the day, 1980 something. And my uncle owned a bunch of Hardee's Restaurants in Illinois and Iowa and Wisconsin. He had all of these restaurants mailing and driving their sales reports into some central office somewhere. And I'm like, "You know, you just need to get a bunch of IBM PCs and some modems and get them all going into a Lotus 1-2-3." And he's like, "I have no idea what you're talking about." But he let me install computers in all of the offices. This is before I could drive, so I had to have somebody drive me to do what, I think it was 14, maybe 15 at most. So we installed PCs in all of the offices and we scripted Lotus 1-2-3, so that it would take their day sales numbers and automatically send them by Kermit or Z-Modem who knows which protocol it was back then? And load them up to a master server that listened to everything, and then another script that took all of those nightly reports from each of the restaurants and put them together into a master sales for the previous day. And my payment for that was a hard drive. I got a hard drive for my Tandy 1000 computer, which was one of the first PC clones. And I remember at the time it was a MFM controller. If anybody remembers MFM, those were the days and it didn't work in the Tandy 1000 without cutting a trace on the controller card. So I got the hard drive, I got the controller card and I got on my bicycle and I went out to some trailer park somewhere because this guy on like a local bulletin board told me that he knew how to make it work on the Tandy 1000. So instead of getting kidnapped and murdered, I show up with this controller card and he pulls out a razor blade and he cuts a trace on the controller card and I pedal back home and put it in my Tandy, and the next thing you know, I've got this 10 megabyte hard drive and I felt like I wasn't the man, literally just the man. I had so much storage, I didn't know what to do with it.
- Can we dissect that story? I mean, here's what I mean by that. That's the first time and what, I think anybody that's either a go to cloud developer advocate or somebody that's in pre-sales or something that is out there technologically selling a project is you have to map it to the business solution. Look what you did there. You said, there's something I need to do with these Hardee's to synchronize all of these restaurants together. And you took technology and did that. That seems to be, and again, I looked at your LinkedIn profile and I'm like, Brian has this exactly from somebody says, he's perfectly knows how to map somebody's business objectives to technology. Look at what you did early on, man.
- That's what it's all about in the end. If you're not solving problems for somebody, you're spinning your wheels and wasting money and time. You've got to find solutions to problems. Sometimes they're technical, sometimes they're organizational and management, and people problems. I'm not as good at those as I am with the technical ones, but I certainly am good at recognizing all of them. And that's been a strength of mine. And something that I enjoy doing is solving problems and figuring out how to get solutions for people, maybe when they're just not obvious to the people who have the problems, but they always jump out at me.
- Incredible. Would you say it's just this innate ability, or it's just like it took through practice, or a little both? You know what I mean? Like, did you have to hone that craft a little bit?
- I don't know. I think some of it is, the first foreign syndrome, I was always solving problems around the house with my little brother and my parents were working. And so I was taking care of my brother while everybody else was working and we were at home during the summer. There's gotta be some of that in there. You know, some of it's probably just my personality.
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- So the first time I saw GO was launched date, November 9th, 2009, I think November 11th, November something, 2009. And I was amazed and it was really neat, but it didn't really hit me what I could do with GO, until a couple months later. So 2010, maybe five or six months later at this point, I was a CIO at a credit bureau and we had used Ruby on Rails to create a credit reporting system and it was all online, it was an API. So lenders would call us over an API and they would get back a credit report in XML or JSON format. And all of that was processed in Rails and it was a little slow. Our typical credit report was processing in three to four seconds because we were calling out to nine different data vendors to get the data, compile it together, run it through a scoring systems, and create these aggregated reports. And it wasn't until I was taking another look at GO when I realized this parallelism that GO has, this concurrency, that might be something that we could use to speed up our credit reporting. So I took one of the tiny components of our system that took the longest time. It was about two seconds because it ran several 100 queries against my SQL database. And I rewrote it in GO and the first time I deployed it, I crashed the production systems terribly because I didn't close the database connections. So even though we had, just monster MySQL Server cluster, I crashed it horribly because within just a moment, we had taken several thousand open connections to the MySQL server and I ended up having to reboot the server' just to get those connections back open. So I learned a valuable lesson in closing resources in GO, closing your connections. But after I fixed that bug, it took our, that product from two seconds down to half a second and dropped our overall average for our reporting system from four seconds down to like two and a half. It was a really big deal and that was just one of the many products that we had that contributed to the credit report. And that was the moment I knew that GO was gonna make a big difference for me personally. It's just a simple way, and I hate using the word simple because nothing's simple, but a concise way to do a concurrency and reason through getting concurrency as correct as you can.
- So again, it was this innate ability to find the business solution, but it's also that you find it, you have an ability of find like a technology and seeing like how it can address certain thing. You have to keep your eyes open all the time. You hear like Rust and you hear GO, and you hear WebAssembly and stuff which we'll get to, but like how do you like, and just for anybody listening or watching this, what is your kind of process of elimination? Like, what do you look for in a technology to be able to say, yeah, you know what, this could be something we could look at. There's a lot of trial and error.
- Yeah, I play with probably 40 or 50% of the things that I see and whether it's new languages or frameworks, if they are roughly in the problem domains that I like to or need to solve, I'll play with them a little bit and just kind of get an idea of the things that can and can't be done with those. So for example, the Zig language came out and the first thing I did was download it and see, what does Zig look like? What does Zig bring me? And at the time I decided that Zig wasn't ready for me to solve anything with it yet, but it's going to be. So Zig is on my short, near term radar. I watch Zig pretty closely because as of now, I think it's like 0.7 in its release version. It's not far off from a place where it's gonna be really useful. And for me, that means being able to solve good business problems reliably and better than we can solve them with other technologies. So I find these things, I have filed them away in the back of my mind as a potential or not a potential. I may look at a web framework and say, this is great. If this is the way that you can map a problem in your head to code, then that's great, but this doesn't work for me. And that's totally cool, but it's not gonna be in my toolbox.
- Got it.
- But I do, I spend a lot of time prototyping things, playing with things. Maybe 10% of my week is just doing things in random languages, random frameworks, random operating systems, who knows? Just so I can see what's out there and get a feel for what the newest things that I should be watching are.
- Do you think as a suggestion to somebody who's just coming out and stuff like that is to like experiment as part of their... Look, we all deadlines and things we need to do and stuff like that, but would you say dedicating some time to that is a useful thing?
- It's absolutely useful. I wouldn't go too far, really early in your career though, if you're just starting off and you're just learning things, focus on mastering the things that you're learning now. And then as you get a little bit stronger in that, you can start to look at other solutions to the same problems and experiment and grow from there. But trying to look at too many things at once while you're first starting off is probably a recipe for confusion and pain.
- Got it. Let's go back to GO and talk about GopherCon because again, it's I saw like, it was like, go hit and then just everybody was just like, okay, you know, it's obviously the Google aspect of it and whatever. But in terms of like, GopherCon like, tell me about the first one and the evolution of it, and all of that? It was crazy. So it started on a dare. We were all collectively kind of sitting around, waiting for somebody to make a conference for GO, and it just kept not happening. And I said something about on Twitter. I'm like, all right, who's going to do it. Somebody needs to do this and somebody, Kyle, somebody, I can't remember his last name said, "You know, I dare you, do it." So I went off and registered gophercon.com. I called up Eric St. Martin, who was my coworker who also worked on GO with me at the credit bureau. And I said, we're gonna do a conference. And it's like, hell yeah, let's do a conference, and that was that. We made a LLC and, and we decided we were gonna do this thing. We called up Google and they kind of looked at us side, who are these chumps? Maybe we don't know you from Adam, but to their credit, they gave us a shot. They became sponsors for the first GopherCon. We had no idea how to run a conference, I mean, zero clue how to do a conference. So the first one we ended up having to take out the second mortgages on our houses to pay for all the stuff. I mean, we were dangerously close to financial ruin, just because we had no idea how to finance these things, how to do sales for sponsorships, how to do ticket sales. Apparently that's why people do early bird ticket sales, so that they can fund the deposits for the venues and things like that. We didn't know those things at the time, but there was so much demand for GO and so much of a pent up demand for people to get together and talk about GO that we ended up increasing the size of the venue twice and doubling the original number of seats that we had open. So we started off thinking, hoping that we could sell 300. We ended up with a maxed out auditorium of 750 people and we were just blown away by the support from the community. And to me, to this day still, the best thing about GO isn't parallelism or concurrency it's the community. The people in the GO community are freaking fantastic. They're just so willing to help, so friendly. I've made some of my best friends in the the GO community, and I know without a doubt that if there were ever anything that I needed, I could just put out a tweet and half of the people I know would come out and say, I can help with that, I can hook you up, I can take care of this. They're just great people.
- There's amazing parallels because obviously GO as a route kind of element for like, Kubernetes is amazing. I think they took a lot of those elements from GO and the community to be able to do the things that they do with Kubernetes, I think, I saw that as well. So Carolyn is very cool and obviously, you and stuff like that. But yeah, it's an amazing community. It really is like exactly what you said. Is like, if somebody wants to just go spend something up, I remember I posted something, hey, everyone, I just wanna get started on understand this. I had like 16 tweets to our responses. It was incredible, so yeah, that's very cool stuff.
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- And so some other technologies, I think right now, you're this principal cloud developer advocate at Microsoft. You play with all that, some technologies. Let's talk about some stuff that you're involved in now. Is there anything that you're like, this is really cool, like maybe WebAssembly or something?
- So yeah, most recently, I think probably one of the bigger things that I've played with is Krustlet, which is a WebAssembly runtime for Kubernetes. So it's basically a controller that allows a WebAssembly package to be run as if it were a pod, or there's no container involved. It's only a WebAssembly execution. And it's written in Rust, which was new for me. I hadn't really done much Rust before, but I saw the idea and I liked the idea of WebAssembly as this more secure and cross-platform portable binary format. So I had to jump into the Krustlet project and play with that. And I had a great time learning Rust and learning from all the people and the day of slabs team. I mean, talk about a brilliant group of people. The DEUS folks, everything they do is just gold helm and pretty much just everything that they've done is amazing. So I learned so much from them and had a great time playing with Krustlet, and that was a lot of fun. It led to my favorite demo that I've ever done. Eric St. Martin had these these controllable robot arms, and we built a Kubernetes WebAssembly module that we ran that controlled this robot arm. And we set it up like the Mars movie, the Matt Damon stuck on Mars movie or "The Martian". And we set it up so that it would point the arm to the different X numbers around a circle, so that we could communicate. And we opened it up as a web service during this demo, so people could send messages and make the robot arm point to letters, and we could communicate through that. And it was just so much fun.
- I kept the-
- That's incredible.
- I kept the Mars landscape that I built because it was so cute.
- It's such a pull, that's a powerful demo. Again, it's like having people interact, anything that, especially like these days, folks are just getting obviously with the pandemic, whatever, but like, even before that, but they're just getting a webinar and like just content slides and okay, somebody live coding. But it's like, if he can be interactive, oh, I see how Brian did this. That to me is gold because then they're like, okay, I'm gonna come away from this. And I have an idea of what he did, and then I can take this and apply it to whatever I'm doing. I think that's and this is my tangent. But folks right now are like, I'm approached because of what I did with this podcast It's just make it a very different thing than whatever. But I'm approached for folks who are like, how do I do, this content is different. I'm like, well, first off, they can see a webinar and a talk or meet up anywhere. It's like what you were doing with yours is like making it more of an interactive process with exact, like, use case that's in front of you, that's a visual, not just like conjecture, you know what I mean? So that's, that's incredible.
- Yeah, and I think it's always important if you're gonna make a demo or tutorials. Never use foo and bar' and these horribly made up contrived examples don't do anybody any good? I don't learn by looking at class foo and method bar. I learned by seeing something that models a real world behavior. So I can take a look at it and easily connect it to something that needs to be done. So for me, that's always been a main goal, is to connect with developers when I'm teaching or showing something off by using something that's real, something that's visceral, you can touch it, you can feel it, you can see it, and that makes learning so much more fun. I don't wanna be lectured. If the second lecture starts, my brain drifts. I'm surfing hacker news, I'm playing with some new technology. I can't be lectured. I wanna be interactive and have fun-
- No doubt.
- Just learn well.
- Yep. And that's another question, in terms of like just developer advocacy in general, what do you think is in the DNA? You've done this a ton, I learned from you just in terms of in general, like the interactive aspect of it, but also the practical solutions. We'll talk about one of the articles wrote later on WSL, but what do you think is in the DNA of a good developer advocate?
- Well, I think a lot of it comes down to the attitude of being together, solving a problem rather than lecturing and sharing. I wanna share my knowledge. I wanna share the process that I use to learn something because I don't know all the things, I never will. But I have a pretty decent framework for teaching myself things. And that's what I use when I'm creating content for my developer advocacy role. I'll teach myself something and then in the process of writing it down, so that I can teach someone else, I learn it better. And that works out really well for me. But it's again that interactive part where now that I've got it, I want to share that information, not project it, share it. Now this is how I solved a problem. Be really cool, if you have this problem, you can solve it using the same knowledge. And I liked the light touch. I hate salesy, pushy developer advocacy. It instantly turns me off. There are many times where the content pieces that I write and publish for Microsoft, for myself, for whatever, might not even mention Microsoft or Azure. It's a light touch. You know, it just happens that I'm running it on an Azure virtual machine or I'm using EKS in the background to power my Kubernetes cluster. It's a light touch and it's not necessarily, you have to use Azure, you have to use Microsoft, you have to use Windows, to hell with that. I don't have time for people pushing things down my throat and I don't want the same thing from anybody else.
- One of the articles-
- Soft and gentle.
- Soft and gentle, exactly. One of the articles you wrote and I cite it, and there'll be a link in the liner notes of the episode, building a dev-box with the WSL. So it's in the subsystem for Linux. A lot of folks look, maybe they can't afford a Mac or wanna build a Linux system, but they also want to play games and do other stuff, and all that fun stuff, right? So they can do it. And again, you said it's SoftTech. There's no direct mention, it's just you're solving a problem. You said, I'm sure you said the same analogy you made earlier. I wanted to learn something, I jotted some notes and I made that a blog. And I love this article because it's like, okay, I get this. Here's the steps I need to do to create a dev-box with WSL or use VS Code, all of the things that you need, all of the auth aspects, you have to check the boxes with screenshots. It is like a perfect, perfect article. And you see its influences on other people and we'll talk about it. It's like Nuno, like Nuno the karma is like that he's so influenced by you. And it's like-
- So awesome.
- Isn't he like-
- And if I had third of his energy, I'd take over the world. That guy is so amazing. I like to collaborate on the wsl.devblog. So I bought the domain and I put up a Hugo blog for it, and I said, "You got to write blog posts for this." And so I gave him advance, so just go to town. Whatever experimenting you're gonna do, write it down so the world can enjoy it. And he's just-
- He's so great.
- Amazing.
- He came into our community stuff for Falco 'cause I'm the community lead for that. And he basically was like, "I'm gonna get Falco working on WSL," and like within two days he had it working. I'm just like, man, how? Man, you recompiled the kernel? And I'm like, dude, that guy-
- He's crazy.
- Is a treasure.
- He's a treasure.
- He really is He really is.
- So yeah.
- And that's the... Those are the kind of people that we run across, constantly in this industry. It just amazes me for every asshole, for every Reddit downvoting jerk out there, there's 20 Nunos, there's 20 Dans, there's just all these great people that you run across that are willing to help that are willing to teach, that want to learn, that are friendly. I love traveling because it doesn't matter where I go, when I'm giving a talk or attending someone else's talk, I make friends and meet people. It's amazing. It's a real blessing to work in this industry right now.
- I think this community, this Cloud Native Community is very different. And I've said this a billion times, but it's like it's completely different because there were back in the day, it was like, everybody's just like so standoffish and hold off on their kind of what they know. But everybody is just an open book and they wanna help you, right? Or you wanna help them. You wanna help them understand this technology because this shit is not easy. You know, it's just not. And if you go together, it's just, that was that old analogy, if you will paddle the boat by yourself, you're going nowhere. If you do it with a bunch of people, you're going everywhere, so yeah. I'd probably-
- Yeah, it's true.
- Screwed up that analogy. I'm not good with this stuff. I'm from Brooklyn, I haven't that kind of-
- So we understood.
- All right, good.
- But this is kind of an interesting juncture where the Cloud Native stuff is a little bit new. You know, we're still kind of on the pioneering side of Cloud Native and our ability to communicate is exponentially growing. Right now, we've got Twitter, we've got YouTube, we have got blogs. We've got all of these great new technologies for sharing information that didn't exist in the same capacity, 10 or 15 years ago. So you've got all these pioneers that are going off and learning cloud native technologies and sharing them. It brewed up into this perfect storm of people who wanna help each other because there's too much information for one person to know ever. You cannot possibly know every end of a Cloud Native stack. It's just, there's too much. So everybody's got their corners that they specialize in and we just go off and we learn from somebody else when we need extra pieces, and it's fun.
- Yeah, that's great.
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- So let's switch gears, again. Let's talk about the guitars and kind of your past time-
- Let's talk about the guitars.
- Let's talk about the guitars.
- Yes.
- So look, I see some couple of Ernie Balls there, I see a Stratocaster, actually a Telecaster right behind you as well. So talk to me about this passion for just guitars, guitars and guitars in general?
- So I love to play. I've never been great, but I'm good enough that I can play in a jam band and screw around and have fun. But I have this addiction to collecting beautiful guitars and it's such an inexpensive hobby. But you know that, the Telecaster, for example, I don't really play a lot of music that a Telecaster fits well with. But I saw that top when I was at the guitar store and it's just gorgeous burled maple, ocean green, sea foam kind of top, and I was like, shh, that's mine. I had no choice. And the acoustic guitar, which you can't quite see over there, it's got a bunch of Mustangs riding off into a mountain sunset, and it reminds me 100%-
- You grew up in Wyoming?
- Of growing up in Wyoming. No, it's a Luna, which is made here in Tampa. It's made by Dean Guitars and it's their acoustic brand. And-
- Interesting.
- It's got those horses on it and it's like, that's home. I had to have it. And it turned out to be a great sounding guitar, which is fortunate because it would have been sad if I bought it for nothing.
- That's awesome.
- Yeah. Just I love collecting them. And a lot of these behind me are assigned, like the the tobacco burst Ernie Ball of to here, there, that's signed by all of Dream Theater. This a red-
- I see you got John Petrucci's.
- Yeah, he's he's right under the whammy bar there. I don't know if you can see that. That's John Petrucci's signature right there.
- Yeah, I was thinking, I was like that looks like, that's a signature and his music .
- Yeah, that's his signature music band and then the black one is the newer Majesty, the one right above my head. And that's my go-to guitar for everything. It's just such a versatile instrument. I love it.
- So I was in a music industry kind of club. I was a president for this in the school I went to. And we were at the NAMM Shows and I got to hang out with him. He's from long island, right?
- Yeah.
- And he's a really cool dude, like very down to earth. And he was like, he had just signed that, basically to be their a spokesperson for them. And this was, Jesus, that's what I'm saying, this is like '90 something, '96 or something.
- Wow.
- That's awesome.
- He's really cool person
- I've met him several times. He's just a down to earth, humble, just an amazing musician. I don't think there's anybody that's more technical and more capable than he is in the guitar.
- So gifted. And also the way that he gets tones through like Mesa/Buggies, he sponsored by Mesa/Boogies Amps and stuff. And the way that he gets tones is just, if not, I saw this like YouTube video the other day. You know how you do, you just go like a search. I was like, oh, so, you know, the next video in the watching "Pull Me Under" video was like, listen. And I was like, the way, he just picked up a standard guitar, plugged it in, and he was like, . It's all in the hands. You know what I'm saying?
- Yeah.
- So you could pick that guitar up. You could probably or whatever, but the way that he plays it, the way that he does his phrasing, he's just a phenomenal, that whole band is just phenomenal.
- I remember seeing a video of him where he had a picture of a chocolate cake slice, the slice of chocolate cake and he said, "This is how I want my tone. It needs to be layers of delicious chocolate." And that's how his tone is. It's just, it's so well layered and yeah, he's a gifted man.
- Yeah, and that's a great band. Another great band, which we can talk about Tool.
- Yeah, I know you never heard of them, right?
- I've heard of them a little bit. Yeah, they're okay. They're all right.
- And you know, there seems to be like this group in a certain age group that are just like tool heads. And we waited what, 13 years for a new album and stuff. So like, I'm such a tool fan that I have like, this is you know Alex Gray piece. This is Alex Gray,
- You know-
- Nice.
- That the inner being. And I saw this on the 10,000 Days Tour and I saw it behind them and I'm like, "That's the tattoo I want it" and so that's what I got that. And, but like, I am such a huge Tool fan, like Maynard and I have his wine, I get his wine delivered and stuff like that.
- Yeah.
- Tell me about like the first time you heard them and then tell me about like, just how you became a fan. 'Cause I'll kind of share some notes as well.
- So, it's hard to remember exactly the first time I heard them, but I think that made the biggest impact on me around 97 or so the Aenima album. I distinctly remember driving in my truck to IBM. I worked at IBM in just North of Boulder in Colorado, and I had that Aenima album and I would listen to it all the way to work, which was a good drive for me and all the way back, just at maximum volume. I just loved that album so much and that's where I really became a huge Tool fan.
- Do you think it's... Is it obviously their every element is gifted, like their drummer, bass guitarist, Adam Jones that sound, which by the way, has got a signature guitar coming out. It's pretty incredible, but Maynard's lyrics to me is what said that. And the way that man sings is what makes that... To me there's three amazing guitar or singers in my echelon that I think from a rock respect of Layne Staley from Alice in Chains, right? Him and Steve Perry from Journey, right? It's those three, they have just these distinct voices that are just above and beyond, like anybody else. It's crazy. So were you in key, are you cool with like Maynard's lyrics? Or like what ?
- Yeah, I think it was probably the lyrics that attracted me most to Tool. Outside the music, the music is definitely in my wheelhouse, that's the kind of music I like to listen to but the lyrics just kind of punch you in the face. You can't ignore them, you have no choice, but to hear them and feel them deep inside and Tool is one of those bands that have a rare ability to instantly change your mood. And there are very few bands for me that can change my mood so rapidly, Pink Floyd is one of them, if I wanna mellow out and I want to just be calmer, I put on Pink Floyd. If I feel the energy, if I feel the anger, if I feel the beat, it goes straight to Tool. And then I'm punching steering wheels and bouncing around and a Tool does that for me still, at almost 50 years old, I got to turn it up.
- In terms of when 10,000 Days came out or Lateralus, it was, no, it was 10,000 Days, I'm sorry. My father was passing and it's a very similar, and I'm gonna go deep on this, but it's a very kind of similar thing that his mom, 10,000 Days is basically, basically how much his mom suffered from a brain aneurysm or something like this. And you're living in these lyrics and I'm just thinking during the time when my father was passing to pass to cancer, I was listening to this. And that to me was like, caught me through it. That music got me through it, anytime I listened to it, I think about that time, like not the bad parts, but just like the struggle. So to me, music has that nostalgic factor. From your perspective, is there like a Tool song or something that reminds you of a specific time in your life? Besides the going to work in Boulder with the Aenima play?
- Yeah, well, definitely just that whole album reminds me of that time. I can't think of a specific Tool song that takes me anywhere other than that time. Just hearing his voice takes me back to 1998, always.
- In the 90's, there was also an amazing movie that everyone that was, we know it's a classic. A lot of people don't think it's this big of a classic as we think it is. That is the classic called "RoadHouse."
- "RoadHouse." I think we need to start.
- Let's talk about this. Yeah.
- We need to start with appreciating, Patrick Swayze is genius. Because not only is the man a talented actor and an amazing martial artist, was the man I should say, cause he's now gone from us, but also a singer. I mean, "She's Like The Wind." How can you even quantify his passion? His soul, his everything. I mean, Patrick Swayze is the ultimate Renaissance person.
- Look, pain don't hurt, okay?
- I can't even keep a straight face talking about this. It's the worst movie ever. And I it's such a guilty pleasure watching it 'cause-
- It's a guilty pleasure-
- Horrible action, horrible acting, terrible plot. And I love every minute of it.
- Me too. Anytime it's on, you can't turn away. It's on, you're gonna watch it. So think about this, again, to Patrick Swayze's genius. I'm back to that. He's the Zen Country Western warrior, okay? He's gonna save the double deuce and he did.
- He came through this through philosophy. He studied philosophy in college, you know.
- Everybody go out well, we'll have a link to you all .
- You got to go to IMDb and read the quotes from "RoadHouse." And if you get an opportunity to watch the movie, it's an hour and a half that you'll never get back. And you'll probably want to repeat over and over because it's just that good.
- Opinions vary, me and my friends.
- That's true.
- But that's one of the lines that was like, I was talking to my friend about it, when we watched it back in the day, that's where the lines that Swayze says that was the comeback to somebody. And we never understood it 'cause it was like, it was meant to be a burn, but it was not even a good burn. It was like, he's like, "What am I supposed to do?" And he's like, "Opinions vary." And we're like, "How is that a sick burn dude?" Like, I don't know.
- This delivery of the lines too, is so mechanical and just, I mean really no acting at all. He could have taken all the money that he spent on cigarettes, which ended up killing him and used it for acting school and the world would have been a better place.
- I think that was part of his thing. He wanted to make him like real, like almost like a John Wayne type of thing. And by the way, can we talk about Ben Gazzara? Ben Gazzara in this movie is Brad Wesley. Brad Wesley is, he's bringing JC Penney, is coming to that town and it's because of him. And by the way, anybody who doesn't know what a JC Penney is, just look it up. We know what JC Penney is.
- That's a triumph, this man-
- Ultimate bad guy.
- This man was all in all a bunch of movies with jeez, like just a bunch of movies in the 70's, and he was award-winning all this stuff. And he showed up and this is the movie that we all remember him.
- So sad.
- So sad, exactly.
- It's a fantastic movie though. I watched it, I think most recently last year. And it's one of the few, I can't remember who was tweeting at the other day, but they were talking about how there's certain movies that you have to stop and watch the movie. If you're clicking through the channels, if you're streaming through something, "RoadHouse" shows up, you stop, you watch it, you finish it, you have to.
- "RoadHouse", "Beastmaster", "Starship Troopers". Those are the three-
- "Top Gun".
- "Top Gun", yeah. Although if you, there's an analogy though in "Top Gun" I don't know, like Quentin Tarantino does an analogy. You should watch it. It's just Google Quentin Tarantino on "Top Gun". Anyway, it's crazy. Picks an analogy on it, what can you do?
- Side note "Starship Troopers" was filmed just 50, 60 miles from my house in Wyoming, that whole alien scene where they're out shooting the bugs and whatever. That's Hell's Half Acre, Wyoming.
- That's Wyoming.
- Yeah, it's just really crazy landscape where all the rocks are jagged and it just feels like it was carved out by aliens. And it's this uncharacteristic of the rest of the landscape of flat boring Wyoming. These rocks, they're amazing. And that's where they filmed all of the extra solar scenes, the planet scenes where they're shooting bugs.
- All in Wyoming, everyone.
- We'll have a link to the where that is in Wyoming. Alrighty, so now let's get to, Brian, let's get to Twitter questions, you ready?
- I'm ready.
- All right, cool. I'd be curious to hear, this is from Bruno Borgess, "I'd be curious to hear Brian's take on the different worlds of Cloud Native, world separated by programming language ecosystems, wink."
- Wink, that's because Bruno is a cloud advocate or was a cloud advocate at Microsoft for Java. And we've definitely had some pretty spirited discussions about the environments and the communities around programming languages and people who are in Java, they don't know GO, they don't think GO people that are in GO. May have done Java in the past, that's why they're doing GO now. It is interesting, humans have to make tribes. It's a innate need that humans have to make tribes, which is good and bad. I mean, it's good to have a tribe. We consider ourselves this Cloud Native tribe, but the little factions inside, well, do you do GO, do you do Rust, are you a Java person? You're not a PHP person, are you? It does more damage than good in the long run. And now that I'm older, I definitely feel like, anything that you can do to solve a problem well, is a good solution. It doesn't matter whether which tribe you're in, as long as you're solving a solution well.
- Which you've done your whole career, which is great.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Next up, this is not a question, this is from Nuno again. Nuno just getting just shameless plugs all over this episode.
- If you don't follow Nuno, you have to follow noon on Twitter. He is legitimately crazy. And his Twitter handle is N-U-N-I-X T-E-C-H, Nunix Tech, got to follow him on Twitter. Every day, he's tweeting out some ridiculous compendium of things that he's slammed together that don't belong together. Like-
- Work.
- Yeah, running Kubernetes on five different laptops over WSL and he's got a cluster for it. How, I don't know. I don't know how he does it but-
- In his name, he has a nickname or or whatever is basically like the Corsairs-
- Corsairs.
- Because he's not like a Docker Captain 'cause that was the distinction as he just wanted to say, you know what, I'm gonna be almost like a pirate. I'm gonna be able to like pick up these things and I was like this guy, I have so much love for him 'cause we're CNCF ambassadors together and I have so much love for that dude. He's just such an awesome dude but he said this about you, he said, just let him and the world know that he is a Corsairs hero.
- Oh, that's awesome. That's really cool. I first met him right around the time my dad was passing away from cancer and I had just picked up knitting as a way to calm myself and knitting worked really well because I had to concentrate on what I was doing, but it didn't require all of my energy and it didn't require all of my thought, but it got my mind off of the hell that everything was going on around me. And Nuno is actually the recipient of the first hat that I made. So I made this hat and I put it in the postal system, sent it to Switzerland. And I think it costs me 40 bucks to send this 60 cents of yarn over to Switzerland. But it's in his Twitter profile still, proud recipient of Ketelsen hat. It cracks me up, he's such a great guy.
- And I love that we're just this worldwide network of people that we interact with. That's like, I love that. It's like, when we're at conferences and you meet people and then it's stuff like this, but this is the things that like... That gesture that you did was priceless to him. That's great, man.
- Yeah, and it's like Brandon sending everybody honk stickers, you know, it's a feeling of belonging and a sense of community when the world is a little bit too crazy for just normal life. It's something that keeps you going.
- Brandon's a fantastic person. I've actually met him in real life. He's come to Long Island, and we've had dinner, like during the first thing.
- That's awesome. And him and I have put together, we created some stickers. So the verify Ian ColdWater sticker that has Kat Cosgrove on it.
- Yeah.
- I designed that 'cause I was just like, dude, I was just laughing about it 'cause she's trying to-
- The purple wig?
- Yeah, the purple wig, oh, it was great.
- That day, will live in infamy for me as one of the most fun Twitter moments of my life, where everybody, all of a sudden had a purple wig and their name was Ian ColdWater.
- Yeah, there was like, there's all types of derivations. That was the best part of it.
- Yeah, that was amazing.
- Yeah, that was so much fun.
- Yeah. Last question from the Twitter questions is, is there still a Crafana to monitor the temperature of your barbecue?
- There is, a https://bbq.live, you can get to my barbecue and Eric St. Martins barbecue, where we both built our barbecue control systems in GO, and they're running on Raspberry Pis and they submit metrics up through the Pis wirelessly off to this Crafana dashboard. And I haven't done a cook on that particular barbecue for a while so there's nothing up there of recent, but yeah, you can still get there, but that was a lot of fun. You can go to get hub/barbecuegophers bbqgophers/qpid which is a pun on PID controllers, which is what you use to control the temperature of a barbecue. So, and we built our own barbecue controllers that send their metrics up to the Internet's.
- Fantastic.
- A great way to stay relevant in technology and have fun while you do it. All my hobbies inside projects are that sort of thing. How can I have fun while I'm solving maybe a slightly contrived problem. You can certainly barbecue about a Raspberry Pi, but it was a lot of fun learning how to do all of that.
- That's phenomenal. Teleport allows engineers and security professionals to unify access for SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. You can download teleport right now at goteleport.com. That's G-O-T-E-L-E-P-O-R-T.com. The last question I have for you is, what work are you most proud of?
- Eric and I are in St. Martin again, my partner at GopherCon, when we were at the credit bureau, we built a tool, a system called Skynet, and this is pre-Kubernetes. Skynet, if you were to look at it today, you would say it's Kubernetes without containers. Skynet did surface discovery and deployment and it had a demon that ran on every box that basically acted like the Kubelet X. It started deployments and managed kicking off processes, skilling processes, the AB deployments. We did all of that in Skynet and out of Skynet, we built Sky DNS, which was DNS-based Sky Service Discovery. And when Kubernetes first came out, it didn't have any service discovery and there was an open ticket on the GitHub for, we should do something about service discovery. And I replied to the ticket and not an hour later, I was on the phone with Joe Beta and Tim Hawkin and we took the Sky DNS code from Skynet and contributed to Kubernetes with a lot of massaging, obviously. And so now the DNS Service Discovery that powers Kubernetes has its roots in Skynet, which Eric and I created. So I'm probably most proud of that, that was a lot of fun.
- That's incredible.
- And for a good period of time, we probably had the largest bare metal Kubernetes cluster in the world. We had 20 nodes, bare metal Linux machines running in racks processing about 400 million API requests per minute. It was good fun.
- That's awesome.
- In the early days, there weren't great bare metal options for Kubernetes so we actually ran two different physical networks. We ran the host network and rebrand the container network as a physical network with its own set of switches on top of the rack. And it was beautiful, so fast.
- Wow-
- Good times.
- Software-based networking and all that. That's just like layering, that's phenomenal. So Brian, we did it. I appreciate you being on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. It was an absolute pleasure having you.
- My pleasure, what a great show. It's fun, thanks for having me, Dan