This week on the POPCAST our Veterans Day Special with Jorge Castro, Community Manager @ Cloud Custodian | Stacklet.io | Mostly emeritus from Kubernetes. In this episode, one of the best Open Source Community Managers that has ever lived Jorge Castro. He talk's his journey and military service, OSS Community Management Tips, Early Kubernetes Community, Stacklet and Cloud Custodian
This week on the POPCAST our Veterans Day Special with Jorge Castro, Community Manager @ Cloud Custodian | Stacklet.io | Mostly emeritus from Kubernetes. In this episode, one of the best Open Source Community Managers that has ever lived Jorge Castro. He talk's his journey and military service, OSS Commununity Management Tips, Early Kuberntes Community, Stacklet and Cloud Custodian
Timeline Topics
00:00 - Opener/Sponsors
00:14 - Welcome Cloud Native Yoda Jorge Castro
01:59 - Jorge's Service and Journey
12:27 - Tech Skills and Job Skills learned in the Army
19:21 - Early Castro Career as an admin
23:31 - Why Ubuntu?
25:59 - Cannonical
30:42 - Flatcar Linux Love
32:13 - Jorge finds Kubernetes or does Kubernetes find Jorge
48:12 - Heptio and Kubernetes Community Management
50:22 - Dockershim Blog Behind the scenes
51:37 - Ann Arbor crew -- The Origin Story and Kubernetes Office Hours
59:41 - Stacklet and Cloud Custodian... what do they do?
1:07:01 - Music: Metallica and Tool
1:11:48 - What work is Jorge most proud of?
Episode Links
https://kubernetes.io/blog/2020/12/02/dont-panic-kubernetes-and-docker/
https://github.com/cloud-custodian/cloud-custodian
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- Hello everyone and welcome to the POPCAST. I, this right here. This is my Yoda. If you all think like, oh, Hey Pop, you know, your so into the community. This is the guy. This is my godfather. This is my Yoda. This is the guy that brought me in, nurtured this little guy here. And I love you to death. This is Jorge Castro. He's the community manager at Stacklet. Welcome to the POPCAST.
- Hey Dan, it's good to hear, you know, I was wondering what adjective you would use to describe me. Cause you always say like the godmother of Kubernetes or the, you know, the adjective of something. So.
- You were the Yoda man, like things you do, like, I'll give you an example. Before we get into the journey you all, okay, we're gonna get into this. Like it was office hours and like, you know, Kubernetes, office hours. And so he was like, hey, Pop. He's like, why don't you come on and help us out. He threw me right in the fire. We ended up doing like something, he was like, here's the stream key. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I think it was great because I got to learn all that stuff so quickly. And now like David and I are doing it, but you totally yodad us, like both of us, like we always talk about it. It's and I love you for that because like all of us, like we have our things, right. But we don't like you don't ever get, you know, the encouragement, right, to be able to do that. And that's what I love about this community. So it's amazing, dude. So I appreciate that. Yeah.
- Yeah. That is the, I've always said that like, if you want to volunteer to do open source stuff, you want to do a good job, but not too good of a job because next thing you know, it's like your project and stuff. But yeah, man, I got the backstory on that. That project is one of the coolest things I did, I think. It's pretty fun.
- We're gonna get into that, but this is also a special day cause we're airing this on Veterans day. We're close to veterans day. Again, you're service. And we're gonna talk about that as part of your journey and some things that you've learned that you've applied to, you know, later in your career, but let's talk about this, man. Let's talk about like, hey, you know, I started here and this is how I got to where we are now.
- Yeah. Yeah. So if this gets too long, just go like this and I'll speed it up. And I'll-
- No way Yoda. You get two hours, man-
- So I got my first computer where actually my army and TAC life is kind of together because I grew up as an army brat. My dad was in the army. My grandpa fought in the Korean War. I actually like, you know, when you go and you do those ancestry.com and stuff, I found like my great, great grandfather's World War I draft card and stuff like that. So there's this long line of Castro's I guess, I don't know. So I was growing up on in an airbase, Selfridge Air National Guard Base here in Michigan, just right here. And I got my first computer when I was 10, my dad got me a TRS-80 model 4, the thing was, the jam had two floppy disks and everything it was pretty dope. And I learned basic on it and I was just, was kind of a computer nerd and things like that. And then at some point my dad got out of the military and we lived in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and I always kept my kind of computer stuff. My dad eventually got like a 286, that's when I started BBSing, my friend Gordon got me into BBSing. So that's like spending the summer to get that US robotics 9,600 that I wanted. Eventually I wanted to get that dual standard 16.8, if I'm too nerding out on the BBSing thing, let me know. And then went to school. I went to Michigan State, who's playing Michigan this weekend, it's gonna be a great game. And joined ROTC there. I actually had a scholarship. And then, but I did, I did the computer thing also, right? So I was a computer science major for a while, but I actually really struggled with mathematics in particular. I don't know how schools are now, but when I went to school, you didn't really go to school for computers. You went to go to school for math and then they used computers. So I never actually like, you know, just learned the computer part, right? So it was always coupled with mathematics for me, which I always struggled with. So I actually changed majors. I got out of computer science cause I can not, I can not handle the, that workload. So I moved on to telecommunications. So any of you remember you asynchronous transfer mode? That was my jam. So I did that. I majored in that and I also went in ROTC and I was part of the scholarship. So the way, the way ROTC works is you go to school and then you owe Uncle Sam some time. So I had four years to do the army thing to pay for school. I was always kind of gonna go in the army and my brother was the same way. We just kind of, it was always just like a thing you did. It was whether I was gonna make a career out of it or not, whether I was gonna do. So I joined the army to travel the world and got shipped to Fort Irwin, California and spent like four years, three years after all the training and stuff was done. Fort Irwin, for those of you who don't know, any movie that you've ever seen, where they're driving to Vegas and they're lost in the middle of the desert, that long highway, that's where that is. So I didn't actually get to go anywhere interesting or fun. So I just went in California, blew stuff up in the desert, was kind of cool. And then got out. I decided I kind of want to, I learned about this Linux thing. And at the time I was very, very interested in like technology and things like that. And it was really hard for me to do Linux stuff because it was really hard to get online back then, like you had to have AOL and back then you had to like try to figure out how to make your own tunnels and stuff like that with-
- Time out. Time out. Folks, folks, folks, young folks don't know, it was America Online. He said, AOL it's America Online.
- America Online. Ask Paris. Paris will be mentioned many times in this episode. Ask Paris about America Online. Yeah. So back in the day, actually I had started with OSI. I'd always been a weird alternate operating system person. So I use DrDocs instead of MS docs, I'd use Desk View, I used OS tool a lot when I was in school. And back then the OS didn't come with a TCIP stack. It was like a separate thing you had to set up. And then I started dabbling in Linux, but it was hard because you know, it took like 25 floppies or whatever it was, right. And then if like disc 14 didn't work, you're just SOL, right. And like I was having a hard time finding, you know, broadband and stuff back then was really difficult. Until this one thing came out called Corel Linux. I don't know if anyone remembers this. But this was one of the very first distros that tried to do that, we'll take W and make it friendlier. So I got that. And I still remember to this day, when I saw ACT get working and I was like, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. So I kind of became a Linux nerd. And then I got out of the army and I moved back home to Michigan. And then my dad was flipping out. He was like, you need to find a job and stuff like that. And right then I had left-
- Can we talk about Michigan in general? I mean, you grew up, you were born in Michigan, right? Am I right or?
- No, I was born in Puerto Rico, actually, but we moved around cause my dad was in the army. I ended up there. Yeah. That's where he like got out.
- But like, think about this little guy, right. We're talking Jorge and he comes out of Puerto Rico and then Michigan, that must've been like somewhat of a, you know-
- It's cold here, man.
- Yeah. Right. I mean, it's just a little bit of a culture shock thing as well, right? Like, so I mean, in terms of like, in terms of ROTC, like is there, was there specific things like, and also your service, right. Is there certain things that you feel like, you know, you applied these things to the like early career stuff. Like, did you feel like you had an advantage?
- Absolutely. Yeah, I was gonna add those as we got to them. But I was thinking about like my top three things that I probably learned and the first is, oh boy, how do we say? There's so many things that we like swear, but you can't anywhere, you know. There's a lot of messed up things that happen when you have large groups of people trying to do different things, right. A sandwich of sorts. And that's just something that I learned to kind of, you just get that when it comes to having groups of people doing a thing. Like, for example, when we do the Kubernetes contributors summits, right. There's 400 people that are gonna be there. So you kind of know that in order to, in my mind, I always think about this cause towards the end of my army career, I did like a lot of logistics. It's like 400 people. All right. How do you feed them? Where do they go to the bathroom? Where do they get water? You know, if somebody has an emergency, where do they go? Who's your battle buddy? Right? Like if we're going in the room, it's like, Dan, where's your battle? Like if 400 people are gonna get on a bus, this happened in one of the CubeCons, we got on a bus to go to an event. I forget where it was. And I don't know, I ended up in charge of one of the buses or something and I had to assign people. And I was like, you know, when you get on this bus, you're sitting next to that person. When we come back, you should be sitting next to that person because we don't want to be minus one. And then figuring out who's missing when the bus goes back, because then like, who's, you know, I always imagine I'm wandering around some country, I don't know where I am and I'm not supposed to be there. So my people are getting on my bus and I'm just like counting them off, just like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It was like, okay, we're good to go. And I'm like giving a thumbs up to the bus driver and things like that. So I kind of like thinking of, you know, what humans do and what they need to do and where they need to go. You know, it's like, well, what happens if someone loses a bag or, you know, luckily there's a lot of common things with like event planners and things like that. Or people like Bob or someone like that, that like run events and things like that. So I kind of tend to slot in naturally things like that. So that's one thing, I guess, always kind of being organized, attempting to be organized. Cause I know people are like, wait a minute. I know Castro. That's not true. And then the second thing I was learning was backwards planning. Which means if you have a certain date, you think about everything that needs to happen and you plan backwards from there. And then that's how you figure out when you start work. So if we say the Kubernetes contributor summit is going to be on Friday, September 1st, that means a week before these things should be finalized foo, bar, baz. Two weeks before we should know who's going to attend and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, two weeks before that, is when CFP should announcements or CFP decisions should be made. And that's how I kind of learned how to make like a time, like a time schedule backwards, because what I would like to do is, and then the last thing is front load all your work, right? It's like reinvent is about a month away and next week will be my busiest week for reinvent. Because as I'm coming up to it, ideally I'm just like checking boxes and you know, double checking things everything's okay. So that's what I strive for is I kind of, like army planning style. Now, whether it actually works or not, now you've got to ask Paris what she thinks about whether that works or not.
- So, so that's good. I mean, in terms of, like I said, using those skills that you learned and stuff like that, but I'm talking even technical skills, did you, I mean obviously ROTC, but when you got into the service, was there anything like, you know, again that you picked up there like-
- Oh, repetition. So I didn't learn any computer stuff in the, in the army other than like radios and... I was infantry, I was like shooting guns and stuff. So like, I actually didn't learn any technical things at all, but what I did learn is how to learn things. And like the military kind of teaches you, you just repeat things over and over again. Like, so that's how I kind of learned stuff. So when I started to figure out Kubernetes and I did Kubernetes the hard way, oh man, that dude, that was rough, man, that was rough. And then normally, so ideally I would say, and then you do it over and over again until you get it. But that one I did twice and I was like, never again. So just that, you know, that idea about just repetition, doing stuff, you know, kind of the ability to think on your feet, I think. But I think a lot of people in tech share that. I don't think that's something that, you know, I'm bringing with from the military. I think a lot of people just because technology breaks, it changes, it doesn't do what it says on the box, you know? And you kind of have to figure it out on the fly. So that's like one of the things where I think there's a shared mentality.
- That's why I think musicians and people that are in like any type of like educational thing, repetition, and then learning on the fly, because think about it like musicians, typically have to improv, right. Or like, you know, people are doing like educators, right? Every kind of semester they have to come up with a new plan. They have a new learning plan. They might just adapt the learning plan that they had. So it's like, that's why I think they make, if you think about Jace, right, Jace, they are like a jazz, like, you know, just aficionados. They have to think on their feet constantly about notes and all that stuff. It's just like, it's crazy, man. It's crazy. So.
- That's why I do reputation in everything I do. Like when I run meetings, we have a community meeting for Cloud Custodian. I have a format that I like, brought with me from Kubernetes AKA stole, always steal from other projects. That's a good tip-
- I aped everything from Kubernetes, for the Falco. I mean literally every, like everything could trigger them up. I call it, I asked you, I remember I asked folks, I was like, you, I asked Zach core lesion. I asked a bunch of people, like, what is the, you know, what are the things? Because it's exactly that it's like, it's not so much stealing, what it is, is it's really just like using it to, like using those sensibilities to route the different project. Because regardless of what it is, Kubernetes is the number one open source project of all time. It's like, it's the Metallica dude with source projects, bro.
- How far are we in and he already mentioned Metallica. I knew it was gonna be you. So I was like, do not mention Metallica first. No. So I love, so what I like to do is just have a set of projects that I'm always following and kind of looking at what they're doing. So another one, Kubernetes is one obviously, but Knative. There's a lot of stuff they do. They just revamped their docs and I've never used make docs dash material. I don't know, is it MK docs, make docs? I don't know what it's called. But I was hanging out with April and I was like, hey, that's a really nice looking website you got going on. And she's like, yeah, check this out. Boom. And I was like, thanks. And I started to adapt it for my own needs, change the colors and stuff. And then I always liked to do, you know, you do the cool thing at the bottom. You say, you know, shout out to whatever project you got inspired from or from or something like that. So I'm always looking at that. Yeah.
- When I had Vlay on, it was like, we talked about it. Cause we had the, we talked to the contributor of a month. That's something I, you know, I brought in, but like then Knative's, like, yeah, we're gonna do that and Knative. And I'm like, well, filet inspired me. You know what I'm saying? So did Craig and so did Joe Bannon and stuff like that. So it's just like, it's not aping. It's literally just being inspired. Just like, dude, the Beatles, right, and Led Zeppelin, everyone's aspired by that music and stuff.
- Now, we're open source people, if I came to you and I was like, hey, I redid this whole thing and I did it from scratch. What are you doing, man? I'm like, that probably took you five times longer than it should have. That's actually that's, you know, when someone's like, how did this, that's when like your alarm kind of goes off, you're like, Hm. If they just decided to do it on their own, why would they do that? And then, and then nine times out of 10, it's like, oh, I didn't even know that other thing existed I could've stolen this whole time. You know? Like, ah, so yeah. So I think riffing off each other is it's the best way to do it. I think it's absolutely the best way to do it.
- No doubt.
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- So let's get back on the path, man. We did some side roads, man. We did some jam over here-
- Yeah. We're jammin. Where am I in college now or? no, no, I got it.
- We're out of college. Moved your little ribbon over to the other side.
- I was a government contractor for a company called SAIC. I think they renamed now. They're big in San Diego or something like that. And I did that for awhile and I was doing kind of local, like computer support, learning about outlet PST files and stuff that, I never want to touch again. But on the side I actually had gotten this old computer and I was like learning Linux on my own. And I had hopped on IRC, which was the thing back then, I guess it still is. And I started meeting like Linux people on Ars Technica, which was, it's a website. So I just found like a tech website. I was like, these people look pretty good and they had a forum about Linux. So I went into IRC there. And I had my junkie, I don't even remember what it was, but like I found it, it was like supposed to be donated or something. I put Debian on it and I, and me and a few friends were like, we're gonna learn Linux or whatever. So we decided that we were gonna figure out how to make a mail server on Debian and then we're gonna write it up for Ars Technica. It's like a series of articles. So that's when I started doing that. And I actually started to learn Linux, but making a lot of mistakes, deleting my own files, losing mail, whatever horrible, horrible thing you could possibly do.
- Permissions and choning and all that fun stuff.
- Chamar is my favorite. So I was, you know, I was doing all sorts of unholy stuff, but I was writing it up, you know, and it was cool. And, and you know, I learned a lot. I met a lot of really interesting people that we actually became lifelong friends now and eventually coworkers, some of them and things like that. And then one of them was like, hey, I work at a local university and you know, our guys our UNIX administrator's gonna go work at a visual effects company in Hollywood and we need a Linux administrator. And I was like, well, I have no idea what I'm doing, but sure. And so I interviewed there and I moved, I moved over to an EDU, Oakland University, which is in Rochester Hills, Michigan, not Oakland, California. So I did that. And while I was doing that, I got to know people in like the Linux community and got to know this guy named Jeff Wa. And I got this strange email from him one day that said, hey, a bunch of us are doing a Debian, a Debian thing. I was like, what's a Debian thing or whatever. And at the time I didn't know that in hindsight, it was called Mark Shuttleworth's super secret Debian project or something like that. And the URL was nonamenet.com. So Jeff Wa sends me an email and he's like, hey, here's a link to a random ISO or whatever. Do you trust me? Or something like that. I was like, of course, man. He's like, install this on your computer right now. I was like, you want me to blow away my computer? He's like, yeah, do it or whatever. And the ISO was like wordy, pre-release something.iso. And it was the first version of Ubuntu. So I went and I fired that up and it looked a lot like Debian except it was brown. And I started messing with that a lot. And I kind of was, I was fortunate enough to be one of the early like community folks that got involved in Ubuntu. And at the time in the market, there were still a lot of Unix. And at least our university and some of our local universities, they were migrating to Linux for cost reasons, right. So I was spending my time ripping out a lot of Solaris and putting in a lot of Linux. So I was learning a lot about Linux and trying to get that CADded software that wasn't quite ported right, to Linux, to like work, you know, like I don't think REL was a thing yet. Or maybe it was like an early days. I don't remember. I don't remember when the cutoff from when REL had Linux to Fedora to REL was, but it was like that kind of, you know, that kind of free time or whatever. We're like Linux was this thing. And it was like really catching on now. And there was like-
- That's why I want to know like, was it just, hey, man, you picked it up and like, what were the things that you were in to. Cause you know, you had this Unix experience before. You're like, I want to learn everything about it. Cause you were with Debian. And I'm assuming that because it's Debian based, you were just like, this is kind of home for me-
- Yeah. So Debian was great. And back then, Debian didn't release like it does now. Like it feels like Debian definitely has caught up as far as releasing on time. And at the time, man, what's the name of it? I should've looked up my Debian history. Potato, no it was after potato. Someone in the comments tell me, there was a really, really, really long, maybe Woody. There was a really long lapse between when Debian had made a stable release. And remember, this was also back then. So like RPMs, weren't exactly all like, you type DMF now and it all works. It's magical. Like back then I had to figure out how to RPM. And then the user space on Solaris was not awesome. Like you had it wasn't like a new user space. Which we're all spoiled now. Like your tar has zip built in and stuff like that. Like back then, like I couldn't even use a Solaris machine unless I installed like this three-weave, blast-weave. I don't know, I'm mixing up my Unix mods and my Quake mods I think at this point. But you used to have like, and just Unix wasn't for me, right? Like it was already this established thing and learning on Linux with the new user space and then going back to normal Unix, just didn't, it never vibed with me, right? Like on Solaris, like the backspace key doesn't work, like tab completion doesn't and all the pros knew all that stuff. But I, you know, I kinda just went to a bookstore and bought like the big unleashed books. Do you remember? And it came with a copy of like Red Hat in the back or whatever.
- Yep.
- And then I had settled on Debian because like once, once you kind of figured out the Debian philosophy and the Debian policy, especially around packages, in my brain at the time, I was like, well, this is just the way, this is how an operating system should be. And then Ubuntu gave me all of that, except with like a default nicer desktop and fresher packages. And over time kind of like, like the guy Seb, Seb128, who makes your desktop and still does today, right. Like he's made my desktop for 20 years. And it's sort of like your mom's apple pie or your aunt's apple pie, where it's like that's just how I eat, you know, that's just my, it's just my thing.
- I got to understand this. Okay. So you're, you know, again, you're at the, you know, the University of Oakland, which is in Michigan or whatever it is, right. How does that get to now I work at Canonical?
- So this is weird. So my boss, the dean of engineering was actually South African, which was really interesting. One day he comes into the office and Ubuntu was very unique back then, as far as the wallpapers and the brown, like you can kinda can kind of tell. And he goes, oh, that's really interesting. Ubuntu, I'm from South Africa and that means this. And I was like, how did you know, how did you know what that means? You know, and then ends up, and then he knew who Mark Shuttleworth was because Mark had gone to space and he was the first African in space. So after I explained everything, he was like, so are you telling me that our entire servers and the servers were still Debian because this predates a Ubuntu server. So you're telling me that our labs and all that stuff is made by this guy. And he thought it was the coolest thing ever cause he's like South Africa. As it ends up. This is, and those of you that are listening, here's how you negotiate. So a university, they can't really pay you that kind of money. Compared to like the rest of the, of the, of like the field or whatever, whatever word I'm looking for. Because by now, like Linux is like the thing now. And then people are starting to get good jobs. And I remember at my LUG, people were leaving to go like work. Like there was this time where Google just poached everyone in LUGs around, you know, around the country. And they all moved to Mountain View, it felt like.
- Which would lead Linux user groups everywhere.
- Yeah. Yeah. You had, you had to go to a meetup to get it to install. That's how old, that's how old I was. But, and I'm saving my university. Like, and I, you know, I'm doing the math with like my, you know, my sun licenses and things like that. And he goes, I'll tell you what, I want to keep you, but you've basically pretty, and me and my student Ken, who we ended up working together later at Heptio, we had automated ourselves, like not out of a job, but we'd really automated a lot of the processes in the university. So he was like, I'll tell you what, you saved us so much money, we'll let you work on Ubuntu reasonably on your work time. You know, as long as it's, you're working on something that like is useful for the university. So, you know, authentication, figuring out Kerberos, you know, I volunteer for all these things, which was a mistake later on. And then I just started working on that. And then eventually I started going to conferences and things like that. And that's, I went to an Oscon, which was the O'Reilly conference back then. And then I met Jono bacon and he was like, hey, I'm forming a new team. We're gonna be working on, you know, community stuff. Are you on board? And then I was like, sounds good to me. And then I went, I told Peter the dean, he was like, ah, Mike's taking you away from me. I knew I couldn't keep you forever. And I was like, don't worry, I'll be around. So I still fixed his laptop for him, by the way. You always get that person who was like, what should I buy? And I'm like, just buy the system 76 and then I'm good. So, yeah. And then I went, I did Canonical. So I had been with a Ubuntu for maybe four or five years already as a volunteer. And then I did Canonical for about another 10.
- And what did that entail, you was just pretty much like product management, like what'd you do there?
- So it was, it was community management. I was on Jono's team. Like the first two thirds was, was more desktop stuff, general stuff. And then the tail end was more server stuff. So around 2008, when cloud started to really land. I feel like a Ubuntu server, that's where it really found its stride was those AMIs that went on Amazon, I think was a huge deal. Which was Eric Hammond, by the way.
- I've used Ubuntu server since 11, man, like my machines are all right here, are all like Ubuntu. I'm a zealot for it too, man. Like you said, when I saw the first time. So like in terms of just like, you know, the ease of deployment, and it's progressively gotten better and better, look, I don't like SINAP, I'm gonna throw it out and say that, just not a fan and it's just against my, like my fiber of my being.
- Your fiber of being?
- Yeah.
- You know what I'm digging on server right now, Flatcar Linux, man. I go to their community meet. I sit in their community meetings and everything, man. Like, it's-
- Shout out to Andy and Andy Randall and the team over there. So we just did the EBPF show at CubeCon, the CNDBPF day. And like, they're just wonderful, wonderful people, the reject show over there. And shout out to Chris Cool and the rest of the team, they're phenomenal people. So, and also POPCAST alumni. Anyway. So-
- Oh yeah, that's right. I remember that-
- Christmas.
- Yeah. I was at Flatcar, Flatcar's invisible.
- Beautiful.
- Chef's kiss. Good job, team.
- All right. So let's talk about the going from Canonical to Heptio VMware.
- Yeah. So I, so I'm hanging out and I'm with a buddy of mine, Marco, which I'm working with again at this company, which is weird. Like open source is a very large community, but it's not that large. Right, like some, you know, advice for any of those that are listening that are maybe just getting started into open source. You never know when someone might be like, you know, changes jobs or, you just end up running into people, right? Like if you're kind of passionate about open source, you're gonna end up, you know, like I know Josh Berkus when he worked at Sun Microsystems.
- Shout out to Berkus.
- That's weird. Yeah. Yeah. Now he's all super Linux guy. But he's always been a PostgreS person, So shout out, shout out for that. Yeah. So Marco and myself have spent like the last year at Canonical just kind of diving into Cloud Native. And I really wanted to do Kubernetes. I didn't want to do anything else. Like I really wanted to do Kubernetes and I kind of wanted to take in my brain, I was like, well maybe there is no go to server in the future. It's just a host for Kates. And if you ask Joe, he'll tell you that, he's like operating systems are over.
- Well, let's talk about that. You know, again, like your first exposure to Kubernetes, cause, man, you're early Kubernetes, dude. I mean, you know what I'm saying? Let's talk about that, you were like wait, so you were at what's canonical and they're like, I saw this thing-
- Yeah. I wasn't that early. I was an early fan, but I wasn't like, OG, I feel like I'm, maybe, I'm still in the front of that curve, but not early. I was at Scale, which is a fantastic show, by the way. You should get Alan on the show.
- He's a talker-
- Yeah. Yeah.
- He'll be, ooh, go ahead.
- Spoilers. I knew it. I knew I was gonna get ya. Tim Hawking was doing a talk on Kubernetes, what it takes to get to 1.0. And I was at Scale. I remember the exact chair I was sitting at and he's like showing all the stuff. And the guy was with, I want to say Chuck Butler was his name. He was really big into Kubernetes already. And he has his laptop out and he's like showing me. Right. So I'm sitting there, you know, trying to figure out what Tim is trying to say, you know? And while I'm learning it, and then after the talk, we went back to our booth because we had orange boxes back then. I don't know if you know what those are. They were custom cases with like 10 nuts in them. And they came with like OpenStack. But you can also run whatever you want on that. So then we went back to our booth and we're like figuring out, I'm like, we're gonna figure out Kubernetes this weekend. So help me, God, I never did. But you know, they walk me through it and I was like, I don't know, you just kinda know. I don't know what it is about certain technology. And like, I'm not that much of a technical person where I can explain why, but I saw it and I was like, that's what I want to work on.
- Just like again, you had that feel thing when it came to Debian, you had that feel thing when it came to Ubuntu, it was just like, this is something that feels comfortable. You just knew, this is the thing-
- Yeah. I just knew that was gonna be my thing. I just knew it was, I didn't know if it was going to be a thing or not, because I mean, it is complicated. You think it's complicated now, back then it was a little rough, you know what I mean? But the thing is, and this is what's great about people like Tim, when they, when they do public talks, right. They talk about the tech stuff, but they're also kind of teaching you about the, the way, like the Zen of how they're thinking. And back then, it seems so trivial now, but the idea of just killing something and then restarting it instead of moving it from one node to another, like a V motion, you know, like that, I just remember struggling with trying to figure out why that is, you know? And then you listen to the way he talks and how he explains it. And then when others, others how I always lean on people that are much more technical than me to kind of explain it. It's like, well, you know, if the data is all in the same place, that doesn't really matter, you just kill it. It's like way faster. And then you actually see it. Like, remember the first time you saw CoreOS, the, the installer, they had that gooey that kind of showed when nodes went up and down. Like, I kind of saw that in my brain, but didn't quite see it until like, like a few years later and you see it and you're like, ha, that's the thing, you know, that's what, you know, that's what drew me to it, I guess.
- Cause I think it's the same thing that drew me too, the same thing, was like the fact that look, you know, I have servers right, that aren't in a cluster, If one goes down, I'm kinda screwed on, you know, like I have to redo everything and stuff like that. It's like, wait, at least things are, if you have a stateless application, right. And sometimes stateful if you do it right. It literally doesn't matter if one of these nuts goes down. It's, you know what I mean? Like, and, but we've also been in that world where one of those things goes down as a mission critical app. It's like, wait a second. Kubernetes is this like magic, magic thing that resolves the things. And so like the, the theory of it is what brought us, you know, brought the milkshake, you know, to-
- The cruise control aspect, right. Where it's like, if the thing breaks, at least the thing that's on the node stays running, And I always thought that was like a cool, the first time you see that actually happen.
- And so again, being such an early fan, like you were early fan of, you know, of Debian, early fan of Ubuntu. Now the Kubernetes community comes up and I've said this a thousand times, the greatest community in the world, the greatest open source project that has ever been, I want to understand early Kubernetes, like community stuff, you were like, these are the things we need to do. Like these, I want to hear, I want to understand that.
- Yeah, So-
- And then we'll get into Haptio, then we'll get into it.
- Yeah. So I actually moved over to Heptio to do that, but I went and at the time, like, you know, we wore the bright orange shirts or whatever. So I would like go to the talks, and sit in the back and then ask a bunch of questions and things like that. And I was actually fortunate to have been involved in the OpenStack community previously. So there was a lot of people, I think who had kind of made that transition. So for me, it was seeing a lot of familiar faces already. And so that kind of gave me like a little bit of an on-ramp to like, figure out who's gonna help me out to figure this out. I had known Sarah Nevani already from, she was one of the organizers at OSCON. So if you spoke at OSCON you know, she was the one that got you in the room with the good snacks and stuff. So I've known her already. And she was already kind of onboarding me like, hey, we have a community meeting and we might like to have a rotating host. Would you like to host one or two meetings? So, you know, I went and I did some of that. That's when I started to get involved with SIG Cluster Lifecycle. And I really started to meet people like Ilya, Luke, I forgot Luke's name, last name, the first chairs of SIG Cluster Lifecycle. That's where I met Tim St. Clair. That's where I met Chris Nova. That's where I met Jason Ditibreous, Tiberius Kirk. And like a lot of the people that I kind of just became my fam, SIG Cluster Lifecycle I think in the early days was like, you know, because then it was like, how are we gonna solve Kubernetes and Cubic Admin was, was an idea. It was, you know, it was like a prototype. It wasn't, it wasn't a thing yet. You know? So I started to get to know a lot of people there. And that's, you know, once you meet one person, one of the CoreOS folks, you kind of meet them all. So I started to meet them and then that brought in and then I was fortunate enough, we went out to the Presidio, Dan Kahn invited us out. And that's where I met Ann crystal. Yeah. And yeah, that's where I met Dan Crickenberger because Dan's vision of the CKA was like a certain, like, he didn't want, he didn't want like, just like a rubber stamp exam. But you don't want this thing that's like impossible either. Right. So there was like a working group. And I remember that's where I met a bunch of smart people and we just sat in rooms, figuring out how we're gonna do the CKA and stuff. They did most of that. Like I'm not the engine, you know, I'm not the engineer guy. I was there for the Yoda gift shop more than anything else. But that's when I met Aaron without a beard, he didn't have a beard back then. And then Dan from CoreOS, I forget Dan's last name, another Dan. He was one of the release managers when we were in Berlin. I'm gonna have to look that up. Sorry, Dan, sorry, other Dan. So I just started to get more involved in the community. And like you said, like once, once, you know, you know. And then I was sitting in a SIG Cluster Lifecycle meeting and Joe was there and we were working on our, our Kubernetes installer. And I was like, wow, that Joe Guy really hates a bunch of stuff. If he hates my stuff, as much as he hates everything else, maybe I'll be good to go or whatever. So I started talking to him and he was like, yeah, I'm doing a startup around Kubernetes. And I didn't know who he was at the time. Like I knew he was like important, I guess. But everyone I met felt like they were important, because everyone kind of treats each other the same, which I thought was cool. And he was looking to hire people. And Ken, my old student from Oakland University was like bored at Apple and he loves distributed systems. So I was like, you should hire Ken. And then he went to go do Heptio with Joe for a while, while I stayed at Canonical. And then later on, I got the call and they were like, hey, we want to do a community manager. And it would be by then Kubernetes 1.0 was out and Sarah and those folks had just kind of pushed themselves like really hard, like that kind of 10,000 yard stare when a project goes through like a slog like that. And, you know, immediately John Craig, they're like, well, we got to help Sarah out. So like the way we're gonna show people we're serious is we're gonna hire this position and then, you know, you gotta do what Sarah tells you to do and figure it out. And I was like, cool, sounds great. So I went and I talked to her and she was like, oh, it's really great. We're bringing on a bunch of more people. I'm bringing a team. There's this firecracker of a girl from AOL who's gonna start in a few months and y'all be working-
- America Online, everyone.
- America Online or whatever. And Paris started like two months later. And that, to me, that was kind of, cause like, you can't really follow like a Sarah, like, you know, so like you can't be Sarah again. You know what I mean? That would be-
- But that's the beauty of the communities. They, you know, laying this foundation for the, you know, again, not the second generation, but the next generation to take it and run with it. And then the next generation is taking, like, I see, like, again, it's like, you know, you all have that, you kind of passing the, to other people like myself and like, and you know, obviously like Jefe and other people like, and Bob and other stuff like that. But you can, you know, you have to have that foundational aspect, which you all built, which is incredible.
- Yeah. Yeah. And that was when the project had it elected, it selected a bootstrap committee, whereas a bunch of the co-founders were like, okay, let's pick like seven people and then it grew to nine and then you add elections. And then our job was to kind of figure out an election process, right? So, I did what anyone else at open-source did. And we looked at how Debian does elections. We looked at how OpenStack does elections. That's how we ended up using Sieves, which was a software for elections. They just finally migrated off of. And then mostly just kind of working with the steering committee, you know, we were kind of like the, the legal clerks, I guess you could say of the steering committee where they're like, well, we want, we want the governance to look like this and like this. And then they would kind of, each person from steering would kind of figure out what they were passionate about and maybe write that up. And then anything that they want to duct tape together, you know, they're like, no. Put together a proposal for this and then we'll look at it and then they'll tell me what the change or whatever. So that became a lot of, a lot of markdown and get, you know, and then just shoving in it, shoving it in there. And over time the bootstrap committee kind of expired over and they kind of did it right. Like, you know, there's like an odd number of people and then certain ones expire every year. So that there's never too much turnover in the project at once. You know, there's always kind of the, you have experienced people on steering and you see that in the election today, only certain amount of seats are open, but then you have the incumbents. And then one of the cool things Kubernetes was more explicit about, I think, was the, the affiliation enforcement. And then also those values that Sarah talked about, right. There's, you know, once you explicitly say it, the community always comes before each individual company, everyone kind of knows, everyone kind of knows, you know, and then like, that's what it is. And that's what it's gonna be. And then from then, it's just a matter of repetition. We know we have these values, we know we gotta get this stuff done. How do we continue to do that? Which is why now that CNCF got a intern and they did an entire electo, election software, and Josh like mentored the person and everything. And I went to go vote. And before we sent you an email, it got lost. Like I used to sit there and have to manually, Bob and I would mail ballots to people and stuff. Now you just log in with your GitHub. I did my vote, I was done in 30 seconds. And now any open source software, any project can just use that software now. So elections are solved now.
- Beautiful.
- That's just, that's just one aspect, you know, like it's too cool. So that's the kind of stuff that wakes me up in the morning, you know, I think it's cool. It was a slog, man. There were days where I was like, man, why am I emailing ballots? We're smarter than this, you know? But I think people also, just because a group of people are like really sophisticated, the first thing you try isn't exactly, isn't exactly, you know, magically awesome. You know, it's like, how could Kubernetes people not figure this out? Here's a pro tip when you go to CubeCon, watch all these distributed computing people, when the lunch lines open, they all go to, and they stay in the same line, even though there's multiple lines open. And I always, a bunch of us always go and remind people, hey, you can go to this line over here. And I just think it's really interesting. You get a bunch of distributed computing nerds, right? And then you have 10 lines for them to get food and they all go to the middle line. So, you know, I've always thought that was kind of interesting.
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- So again, let's talk about like, again, the Heptio and kind of like it, I'll get back into it. And, it's, the Kubernetes stuff you were doing from the community perspective, what, you know, and what parts of Heptio were you kind of responsible as well, for as well.
- So I was fortunate at Heptio. It was a hundred percent upstream Kubernetes all the time. I didn't have to do any, like I sat in product stuff, I know we sold stuff. But as far as this position was concerned, and that's what I loved about Heptio that was very important to them. I wouldn't have taken the gig if, if it wasn't important to them. And the like projects, especially this large, they need to have obviously, volunteers and stuff are wonderful, but if you can have a paid person to do the thing that needs to happen, because you want volunteers to do the cool stuff, And I show up to a meeting and they'd be like, I want to do something that, you know, cool. Do a block, something visible, get their name up in lights, get them an easy win, you know, like you don't want a person to show up, it's their first time and be like, well, you know, we have to go add descriptions to all the YouTube videos for all the SIG network meetings. Ain't nobody want to do that. You know what I mean? But, for awhile it was Bob and I running the YouTube channel, you know, things like that. And so when you have a paid person to do that, I think it really kind of helps, kind of lay the line and kind of allows people to do the cool thing that they want to do. Cause no one ever, no one ever blunders about open sources, everybody loves to talk about the cool, you know, I wrote that, you've been to that talk, right? And then I wrote the feature that shipped two years later, and you're like, ah, you know, but ain't no one's sending you love letters to the person who's correcting the spelling on the blog posts. But it's important, right? And I think that's one of the reasons I think our group vibes in CIC attributor experience, a lot of them have been on the show. It's kind of like, how did you all figure out how to work together? And you just kinda, just kind of figure it out as a group.
- The, one of the things I think that was one of the best examples of that was the Dockershim stuff. I mean, literally, like we all were in a channel, we all got together and we literally just, you know, took this thing, this deprecated thing and made it, better for folks to digest, to figure out what the hell was going on. And I love that to this day-
- That was a long night.
- It was a long night, but like, it was like all of us in there. And like, literally just like contributing and talking about on there, that was like you, Bob, Kat Cosgrove, Justin Garrison, Dims, it was everybody, Duffy, I mean we had, but that's what I loved about it is everybody just got this thing out and it made everybody all the better for it. And that to me is a prime example-
- It was rough, man. I was like, how do we get to the point where the internet thinks we're ripping out container support? I told Dibs, I was like, hey man, maybe next time, can you, make the change log bullet a little bit longer? Like, just a little bit longer.
- Put that out and make a better process. The end of the day-
- Oh, I know he did it on purpose. I got you Dims. I know what you're trying to do. I get it. I get why we did it that way. I don't think I'd do it again.
- So I want to ask you this. And again, Ann Arbor crew very, very tight in my heart. I love you guys so much, but like explain the shirt. Explain the shirt.
- Cut out the rest of my talk and just put this part in. So I had started, I had started the Kubernetes office hours. And I was like, I had gone to Jono's community manager summit thing at Scale or something. And there was a guy there from Chef who had talked about his office hours program. And I was like, I'm stealing that. Cool. And I asked him a bunch of questions and he was like, do this, do this, do this, do this. You're going for the long tail and a bunch of other tips. And I did that and I started the program and I was struggling. I had to ask people at work like St. Clair, Andy Goldstein, I was like, hey, I need a panel to come on and then I'm gonna read you questions, right? And the last thing I wanted was like all the senior engineers to have to like, do the, you know, do this thing. But I had to bootstrap, I didn't have anybody to help me. I couldn't really ask for volunteers cause I had no audience. So I was like, desperate, I'd done like three or four episodes. And you know, the program just wasn't, it wasn't doing its thing. And I just happened to go to a meetup, my local meetup, because someone was like, just go to your local meetups so you can find some nerds or whatever. And I went and, on one night I met Mario Lauria, I met Bob killin and Jeffrey Seca in one night and we hung out and we just became friends like immediately. And then they had, they were Kubernetes nerds at the university of Michigan which is where I live now. And they're like, you actually work on Kubernetes, like on Heptio? Yeah and I was like trying to get this program or whatever. And they're like, why don't we just all hop on and then do your panel? And then you just read the questions. And we went and you know, obviously they know their stuff backwards and forwards, and they just nailed it. We just kept asking questions and then people started to show up and then they started to repeat. And then like, ah, here's Walead again? Oh, okay. Here's here's this guy. And the next thing I know, we start to have panelists volunteer. Hey, I want to get on the show too. And that's how we got Strabel on, Rachel, a whole bunch of other people. And the next thing I know is I just have a group of panelists and the program is starting to work. Now, something I do want to make sure that those of you that are listening, if you're gonna do a community management or any kind of program for your project or anything like that, it's very easy to look at your metrics and be like this isn't working. If you look at the metrics at the listeners, of Kubernetes office hours over the past three, four years or whatever, it's probably flat, it's like a few hundred, you know, we don't light the world on fire. But now that I think about it, now that I know what I know, I look at the amount of people that ended up getting involved in the project because of office hours. And not only did I have those three, I have Chris Cardi. I should've made a list. I should have made a list. There were a bunch of people who got started in the project.
- Borko's a beast.
- Yeah, Marco.
- No Borko, dude Borko.
- Borko?
- You don't know Borko. Borko's the best, dude. He's-
- You mean Puerco?
- No, not Puerco. B O R K O. That's his real name. He's in Canada. He's a Canadian guy. I think he works for Google, I want to say. Yeah, good dude. Anyway, moving on. I mean, there's a ton-
- I'm gonna spin it up, spin up on that dude. So we started to meet people that way and you know, for a lot of them, it was cool. They didn't know where to participate, but they could hop on, they could ask their company, hey, for an hour a day, you know, an hour a month or whatever. Can I answer questions about Kubernetes? And then people thought it was cool. So, you know, like I still, if you still look at the program that you're looking at, it's more of an on-ramp for people to feel comfortable, getting in than it is to actually, like we do solve people's problems, right? But there's only so much that you could do over the internet when helping someone with Kubernetes, you know what I mean? It's like, well-
- And that's why that this disclaimer is we can't debug your live pressers and stuff like that-
- So you're trying to teach the concepts, right? Like where to get help. Like if all we did was point that person to the SIG where they can show up. Or in a lot of cases, it's like, well, here are the notes from the last meeting and in chat, someone's like, there's notes? It's like, yeah, there's notes. Every single meeting has notes. So just teaching people, things like that, you know? And then over the time on the YouTube video, you have that Corpus of stuff. And there are people to this day that come up and they're like, hey, I remember you helped me, you know, on a question or whatever. And I was like, did you ever figure it out? And they're like, ah, no, not really, but you know, hey, I got involved with the project and then I went into my local meetup and then I met, you know, what do you do now? Well, now I work at ops on, you know, in this place. And you're like, that's cool, man. I'm like, you did your little, you know, you did a little bit for the project. And it's just great. Like so many of those people-
- Nole, Chauncy, like, dude,
- Oh, Chauncy. That's right, man. I haven't been in a long time. I need to go back. You know, I feel guilty. So many people too, they started, you know, like Jeff and Bob were in a university and now they work at Red Hat and Google and it's like, fantastic, man. The project will take you, open source will take you as far as you want to go. You just got to get in there. And I just, and that's where the love, that's where the love thing came in. And then, you know, and then we're just like, we want to, you know, if we can do that here, there's nothing stopping you in whatever population center you live in to do the thing. And then we got the shirt idea from Cloud Native Nordics, Nordeecs, cause Lucas wore all the Finnish, all the Norwegian, is that the other areas called?
- Yeah, Nordics. The Nordics.
- Yeah. Those Nordics. Yeah. All the Nordic countries had their own shirt and it was Cloud Native. And it was like a cool snowflake. And I was like, we have to have a Michigan shirt. And then we'll, you know, so we may, and we made this one and you know, everyone should have one, the Seattle one should have a needle on it, all that kind of stuff.
- Yeah. Definitely want to do it in New York as well, man. So I mean, again, it's, but like I said, the crew over there, fantastic, shout out again and office hours as well. Like I told you, it's like in the beginning of the show, Rocco and I think this is a complete honor. So we always want to make sure that like it's, it's in good hands and it's going to be, you know, that we show, you know, positivity. And like you said, it's a perfect on-ramp for folks to ask the questions that maybe they have that they're wondering about. And it's been a blessing this year to do that-
- And as soon as you all take over the production quality went up immensely. Cause I mean, Bob and I would talk. We'd be like, man, we got to get someone that actually knows how to run this equipment.
- That's all Rocco. As much as I loathe to give that man a compliment, but you know what I mean? Like it's all Rocco and it's all his ideas. He's great. So yeah. But-
- So that's me, man. I'm just a product. I'm a product of, of the open source land. You know, now I just concentrate on like finding people and, you know, do that like in the new gig, I met this girl, Liz Acosta, she's DevRel, and we're already, I'm already feeling it. I was like, man reinvent, we're gonna do an awesome demo. And it's gonna be great. And it's, you know.
- Let's talk about that though. Cloud Custodian is the open source project again. Great, great project. Let's talk about Stacklet. So like you were a head of community, community manager for Stacklet, okay, let's talk about like what is, what is Stacklet, what is Cloud Custodian? What is it, for anybody that doesn't know?
- Cloud Custodian, and it's very interesting, cause I ended up here and it's not very, it's old, it's seven years old , computing wrote this like a long time ago. And it was one of those that was donated to the CNCF from Capital One way back in the day. And this guy named, John Mark Walker, another community manager, who I've known, I think when he was at Red Hat, you always see the same people at conferences, right? So I'd known him already. So there's a lot of the stuff in there and I can recognize his work, things like that. And it's a relatively straight, not simple. It's a relatively straightforward thing. It talks to your cloud. And then you have a jamo file that says, this is my policies for things that are allowed to run in this cloud. And if something is running that doesn't match that policy, it kills it. I call it Pkill for the cloud, but it's in the compliance space, call it, you know, governance is code. You might've heard that term. They just, this is a very, it ties into all of the security things that you're seeing about and that kind of bad space in compliance. So it's very popular with like banks, regulated industries, that sort of thing. So Capeel and I had worked at Canonical a long time ago in a bunch of ex-canoniclers were there, including some of my old team and I loved it. It was time for me to leave VMware. I love VMware. They really do take care of their people. That's, that part's a hundred percent true. And, but I was just, I wanted to go back to a startup and I did a slight detour into VC and it wasn't for me, hung out with some cute flow folks that that was fun for three months, shout out to Ericto. But it was my friend Wayne, who I'd worked with at VMware was like, you know, if you're gonna work at another startup, you need to do it with your friends. That sounds like a lot of, it sounds like a lot of work, but it sounds like a lot of fun. And I'd wanted to get back together with Marco at some point and yeah, interviewed it and did it. Now I'm knee deep in the clouds. I'm not as Kubernetes anymore. I had forgotten, this is something very interesting too, as far as like echo chambers for yourself. I had found out that not everyone is using Kubernetes. Dun duh. Yeah. So like in this space, it's more just people using the clouds directly. So I had, I forgotten how many AWS services they are, you know, because we have to call each one of them. So we, you know, we have all of those in our docs and things like that. So I'm kind of like relearning that aspect of, of public cloud and then understanding, I was never really familiar with this space at all, like compliance, you know, but it makes sense. Like if you would have described the tool to me earlier, you know, I would've said, oh, this is the tool that you keep running so that your demo instances don't run over the weekend. And you end up with like a big bill that you didn't, cause everyone's written like Bash scripts that do that. But when you actually start talking to people, it's very interesting when you start to talk to people for your open source thing, how would they use your thing in anger compared to how you think they should be using? There's like a lot of learning going on there. Cause in a lot of ways in cloud software, the user is doing stuff, they're the ones running it at like massive scale, right? Like even production and things like that. And we are always kind of striving and trying to get feedback on how to make the product better. So I'm learning how that entire part of the industry that I wasn't very familiar with, you know, can't have open S3 buckets. So, you know, that's kind of the basic example. People remember, right? There's like an S3 bucket and there's a thing that should close it. That's kind of the hello world example, but many of these organizations, especially the regulated ones in health or whatever, they have hundreds of policies, that have to be enforced in their thing. I don't know anything about it. So I've learning that. That's what I've been learning.
- And that's good, learning and this also works for multiple other clouds, like Google and stuff like that. Okay. So, Jorge, how does somebody, when somebody wants to find out more about cloud Custodian and open source project and Stacklet, like how would they do that?
- Yeah. So if you go to cloud-custodian.io, you'll check it out. Or you can go to the CNCF landscape. We are, sand? Yeah. We're sand boxing, working on our way towards incubation. We're in the middle of the review right now and Stacklet is stacklet.io If you want to check us out and-
- That's S T A C K L E T . I O
- Yeah. If you go to Cloud Custodian, you'll see and you're come from Kubernetes, you'll see, here's where the public meeting is and there's the list. And then I have, I literally just have the same template and then just modified it and then inserted it at the bottom of the existing, read me. But for me getting, you know, public meetings, so users can come in like a manner and give you feedback and things like that. That's always something I've learned from Kubernetes, there's another tip. That's something I've always learned from Kubernetes. So I take that everywhere I go, you know, we try to have a public meeting.
- To any community managers that are listening to this right now, this is literally a textbook from one of the best, the Yoda of community managers out there that as- No, no, no, don't, Jorge, I need to tell them.
- I'm the thief of Kubernetes.
- No, you're the Yoda of community managers, that's it. So like I said, this is the guy.
- My vocabulary is about as diverse as Yoda's.
- So, dude, I want to change, go ahead.
- Like what a cool gig, this whole thing is, right? Like everyone you've had on the show and stuff like that, like I love all of this man.
- Dude, like I said, and it's because people are supportive of each other in this community and that that's why there's, that's why there's a Jorge Yoda. And then that's why there's a Pop.
- [Narrator] Learn how to operationalize open policy agent at scale with Styra. To get started, go to the link at https://hubs.ly/HOPnkm20.
- [Narrator] 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/popcast. That's goteleport.com/popcast.
- So let's, I'm gonna shift gears we're gonna talk music for a little bit. And then I'm gonna ask you another question. So let's talk. There's two bands that you and I love to death. We're gonna talk about Metallica here real quick. Hold on a sec. So I want to talk about Metallica here real quick-
- Oh, man.
- Every single day, right? So this like, again, my favorite album's, And Justice, and it's always been, right. And so like I listened to like, "To Live is To Die," literally like once a day, I just listened to it. It's just one of my favorites on the topic and stuff like that. Tell me your favorite Metallica album and song. And I know it's hard.
- It is hard, but I do love that song. It's one of the few songs that I can actually play on bass. It's kind of a slower song. Master of Puppets, "Orion." The instrumental on Master of Puppets. Absolutely.
- Think about it, that was like Cliffs pretty much like, swansong. Pretty much. If you think about it, right.
- If you go to Scale, Jono and I are kind of famous of having this argument at the bar, like every year, all the time. And like, people are sick of it, but I'm always right.
- Well what's the argument, the best Metallica song? What's the argument?
- Best album.
- Oh, best album. Okay. Yeah. You could go Ride the Lightning, without a doubt, man. I mean, Master of Puppets is also good. I mean the only thing that brings And Justice down is the bass, right? Which, you know-
- Have you heard that remix on YouTube? People remix it all the time.
- Justice For Jason, I think it's called.
- Yeah. I always listen to it. You know, I even liked the new, I like the stuff that nobody else likes, you know, I like Load and Reload. I like singing Anger, actually I don't like singing, but I'll listen to it.
- That snare is terrible, man. Terrible.
- Yeah, dude. I don't know what was happening on that one.
- I Watched that, you know, the documentary that they had again and I was watching and I was like, you know, they did like, you know, like 15 years later and they were talking about like how they went through that and I got, I forgot the name. Why am I spacing on it?
- Some Kind of Monster?
- Yeah, Some Kind of Monster. And I'm like, you know, that was pretty, you know, cause remember back in the day you knew nothing about Metallica. That was a mystique. It was like, oh, you knew nothing about them. And then when they went behind the curtain, it was like, oh man.
- You know what they say? Don't meet your heroes and your, Oh- Yeah. But, you know what? They were brave for doing that. I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have done that. I would've kept the mystique. You know what I mean?
- I have a story. Here's a story. So, you know when James went on that hunting trip to Russia, my uncle was on that trip.
- Really?
- My uncle, the best part is he takes this picture and me and my cousin, my cousin's a drummer, amazing drummer, shout out Bobby. And so this, he comes back and he's like, yeah, I had drinks with a musician. His name is Jimmy Hathaway. You see a picture.
- Was he using an assumed name or something?
- No, no, no. He mistaken his name- So he picks the picture up. And it's a picture of James Hetfield to him holding like a Yukon bear that they had hunted themselves. Our childhood like hero James Hetfield in this picture with my uncle.
- Yeah.
- Anyway, the other band we love, right, is Tool.
- Yeah. I got tickets ken went back to Apple and then he got me Tool tickets. I was like, you owe me. Yeah. We're gonna see, I've never seen Tool live. That's the only band I haven't seen live.
- Six times I've seen them. And also this tour with the latest, it's incredible. It is incredible. I saw them-
- A lot of people in Kate's like Tool. I think he likes the earlier stuff. Yeah.
- Oh, he does?
- Yeah. I've never seen tool live. I've seen Metallica something like 16 times or so. I lost track.
- Dude. I literally think it'll be one of your top shows and I'm not just saying-
- Oh, I know it will be. Oh, yeah. I know exactly. I've got the vision. See, I just know it. I don't know why, I can't explain why, but I just do-
- Dude, they have the best mixing. The mixes are perfect no matter where, like I've seen them every single time. It's been exactly like the album and they still riff.
- Yeah. Yeah. And Bob got me into Puscifer too, Maynard's other band. So you gotta be in the mood, for me I gotta be in a certain mood, but they got some good stuff in there.
- Green valley's good. Did you watch that documentary about Maynard? The one about him, his wine making. Have you seen that?
- I've scrolled past it and then I was like...
- You should watch it. It gets behind the scenes of also like, why he does the music. I thought it was very good. I mean-
- Okay. Well, if that's in there, yeah.
- It's not just wine. It's also like just the whole process of like Tool and what they do. So I'm gonna ask the last question here, Jorge, then I gotta let you go, my friend. What work are you most proud of in your career?
- There's a few, there's a few. When we lived in Florida for a year, I helped launch a stack exchange, ASCA boot to dotcom with Jeff Atwood and CO and Marco and I, and I put countless hours. Cause my wife's doing her PhD, So she's in school and we didn't have a kid. So I just sat there and computered the entire time. And I ended up editing just tens of thousands of questions and answers and things like that. And it was a really successful fun thing that I did. I met a lot of fantastic community people. The second thing I'm most proud of is as a whole, probably be just Kubernetes, pick a contributor summit, pick a, you know, it was cool to be up there with all those great people, getting the "Chop Wood, Carry Water" award. That was really, that was really awesome. Cause it was like a lot of people I really respected and you know, recognition from your peers just always feels good. You know, it's like, and then I know it was awesome because we don't even work together. And then like we still visit, like you all came to my house, you know? And like Val and Paris and a bunch of people were flying over Michigan and they decided to stay, you know, for a bit. And that's just like, you know, like it kind of transcends just like a work, a work thing. And then there's something every day that there's a lesson that I learned, whether it's Kubernetes or Ubuntu or whatever it was that, you know, it's still useful today, you know? Oh, I remember the last time I tried this, don't do it this way. Or, oh, I remember the last time I tried this, it didn't make, oh, okay. Maybe I should think this one through again, you know, like just having that kind of expertise and just like having the vibe. I think that everybody has just basically like, you can do anything you want, if you know that the people that you're working with will always be there to like help you out when you're not at your best, you know, or maybe you're having a bad day or, you might fly to CubeCon and have a bad week, you know, you lost your luggage or, you know, whatever. And it's like, well, you know, there was one CubeCon where there was weather on the east coast and a bunch of people were late, including like most of the volunteers to get the contributor summit ready. And those of us that were left were like, well, time to suck it up and let's get moving, you know? And then we did it. It was fine. Paris and I were panicking and everyone's gonna hate this. And then everybody loved it. And then they ended up showing up on time as well, which was really dope. So yeah, I mean, just you're almost under, you're almost undefeatable, you know, like if you know that someone's got your back and your team, everyone's got their little set of expertise, you know. It's like sometimes I got to Bob for something or sometimes it's Jeff, you know, or-
- It's like a phalanx, There's like, it's all one unit, right?
- Yeah. Phalanx. Yeah. Like an interconnected, mutually supporting fire is what we call. I didn't want to bring any of the, I didn't want to bring any of the lingo.
- Of the cult that is Kubernetes?
- Well, you know, like we're, we're at work, we're taking like, you know how HR does like thoughtfulness and it's like a seminar or something. And they're talking about box breathing, which I had learned from Sarah doing box breathing, but in the army box breathing and yoga box breathing are totally different things. So I was like, yeah, yeah. What else?
- Well, Jorge, you know, I'm so happy to finally have you on the show, dude, you know how much you mean to me, You know how much you mean to the community and everybody, this literally was a textbook, how to run community management by one of the best that's ever lived. Thank you so much for being on the show.
- So many awesome people on here. Like there's a show, let me shout out the Sarah Nevani Show, I made Liz watch it. I was like, if we're gonna work together, you need to understand what I believe, watch this. Thanks for having me on, Dan. I appreciate it. And thanks everyone for listening if you stayed til the end.