Combining Community and Company Employees with Matty Stratton
Matty Stratton, Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud for a friendly debate on whether or not company employees can still be considered community members. Corey says no, but opens up his position to the slings and arrows of Matty in an entertaining change of pace. Matty explains why he feels company employees can still be considered community members, and also explores how that should be done in a way that is transparent and helpful to everyone in the community. Matty and Corey also explore the benefits and drawbacks of talented community members becoming employees.
About Matty
Matty Stratton is the Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, a well-known member of the DevOps community, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.
Matty has over 20 years of experience in IT operations and is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering focused events worldwide. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL.
He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke.
Links Referenced:
Aiven: https://aiven.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattstratton
Mastodon: hackyderm.io/@mattstratton
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstratton/
Pulumi Pursues Polyglotism to Expand Impact of DevOps
VALENCIA – The goal of DevOps was to break down silos between software development and operations. The side effect has become the blurring of lines between dev and ops. For better or for worse. Because the role of software developer is just continuously expanding causing cognitive overload and burnout. This is why the developer tooling market has exploded to automate and assist developers right when and where they need to build, in whatever language they already know.
In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded on the floor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, Matty Stratton, staff developer advocate at Pulumi, talks about this recently universal Infrastructure-as-Code and that impact on both dev and ops teams.
Earlier this May, Pulumi released updates that took the platform closer to becoming a truly polyglot way to enforce best cloud practices, including support for:
Full Java ecosystem
YAML
Crosswalk for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in all Pulumi languages
Deploying AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) in all Pulumi languages
These are significant updates because they dramatically expand the languages that are available in this low-code way of creating, deploying and managing infrastructure on any cloud.
"A lot of times, in Infrastructure-as-Code, we're using domain-specific language using a config file. We call it Infrastructure as Code and are not actually writing any code. So I like to think about Pulumi as Infrastructure as Software." For Stratton, that means writing Pulumi code using a general purpose programming language, like TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET languages, or now Java. "The great thing about that is, not only do you maybe already know this programming language, because that's the language you use to build your applications, but you're able to use all the things that a programming language has available to it, like conditionals, and loops, and packages, and testing tools, and an IDE [integrated development enviornment] and a whole ecosystem. So that makes it a lot more powerful, and gives us a lot of great abstractions we can use," he continued.
Pulumi now follows the low-code development trend where, Stratton says, "We're enabling people to solve a problem with just enough tech." But specifically in their common coding language, to limit the tool onboarding needed.
This is not only attractive to new customers but specifically to expand Pulumi adoption across organizations, without much adaptation of the way they work. Just making it easier to work together.
"I've been part of the DevOps community for a long time. And all that I want to see out of DevOps and all of this work is how do we collaborate better together? How do we be more cross functional?"
Episode 39: Give 10 Bad Talks All in a Row and Then Get Fired
Do you like to hear yourself talk? Especially while on a stage and in front of a lot of people? How do you come up with ideas to talk about? What process do you use to build a conference talk or presentation?
Today, we’re talking to Matty Stratton of PagerDuty. His job involves building conference talks and finding ways to continuously improve them. Public speaking can be intimidating, so he shares some tips and tricks that have worked for him.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
Avoid creating something brand new for every event
Don’t tell flattering stories about things that happened to you; may be uplifting, but doesn't resemble reality
Failure stories are fantastic because people relate to making terrible decisions
Everyone who gives a talk panics, gets nervous, and thinks they’re about a sentence away from stammering and falling off the stage; almost never happens
Audience wants you to succeed because they're there to learn; no one is hoping a presenter messes up
Preparation is key; could build a talk at the last minute, but it would be much better, if you prepared for it
Don’t intentionally try to think of something; have conversations with people and listen to other talks to develop anecdotes, stories, and cold opens
Humor can be tricky; what you think is funny, other people might not
Make things memorable; show good ideas by showing bad ideas - it’s the ‘don't do this, do this instead’ model
Submit early and often, but submit appropriately; if you are always submitting stuff that’s inappropriate for an event, your stuff starts to be ignored
Sometimes, you may want to avoid slides that auto advance; if you trip over yourself: Stop, repeat, back up, take questions, etc.
Try not to read from notes or slides; takes the life and engagement out of the talk
People can only do one thing at a time - listen or read
Practice: Record yourself every time you practice and watch it; focus on blocking and tackling
You have about 45 seconds to grab people's interest before they look at their phone; get them engaged via a story, picture, or anecdote
Links:
Matty Stratton’s Presentations
Matty Stratton on Twitter
PagerDuty
Arrested DevOps
Hot Takes, Myths, And Fake News—Why Everyone Is Wrong About DevOps, Except For Me
DevOps Dispatch
LastWeekinAWS
Jez Humble
Robert Rodriguez
Rebel Without A Crew
Adam Jacob from Chef
Terrible Ideas in Git
Azure DevOps
Emily Freeman
Decker Communications
Don't You Know Who I Am?!
Datadog
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