Retirement is for suckers

Welcome to changelog and friends a weekly talk show about teaching by doing big thanks to our partners at fly the home of changelog.com launch your app as close to your users as possible for peak performance it's easy learn how at fly.io okay let's talk yes let's talk about Sentry's launch week and I'm here with Rahul Chabria from the prime team at Sentry so Rahul can you tell me about

the launch week this year for Sentry. We're making a huge investment into our product platform we're trying to make it faster better in November we shared a sneak peek about our new metrics offering so now developers are able to

define custom metrics they care about and monitor how quickly their app is responding to the business measures they have to be accountable for plus also like the customer experiences that they've committed to and that's gonna be available in an alpha people can sign up to get access we'll turn it off for them like within a couple days once they write in and they can get going right away on top of that it's like we are looking more at how do we make the product smarter now I know the world is talking about AI and ML and they're all solving like we think like entertaining problems but Sentry is taking a more thoughtful approach to it we are trying to look at what is the developer trying to do like our goal is not to have you sit in Sentry all day long our goal is not have us like be the tab that you need to keep open our goal is to have this be a tab you open when something is wrong give me the information you need right away tell you how impactful it is to your user base and if you should care and if it is something you should care about here's how to fix it so we're taking a broader look at how developers use the product where is the noise they're seeing like are they seeing repeat events are they seeing like things that are not critical rise to the top and have to automatically resolve the burden on them so we're gonna make Center a little bit smarter with the artificial intelligence to give you a more prioritized view of the issues that

really matter so you can solve them quickly and move on and not be distracted by random rage clicks that are you know just ghost issues okay

centuries launch week is happening as we speak check the show notes for a link to the launch week page I'll be showing off new features products you can tune into their YouTube channel or discord daily at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time to hear the latest scoop or if you wanna get swag along the way enter your email address at the page will link up to get swag all along the way or join the discord whatever works for you the next step is to go to century dot i o slash

events slash launch dash week again that link is in the show notes we are joined

by Cameron say Cameron you were our most beloved interview of last year by our listeners we haven't had so much feedback ever I think I'm glad to hear

that thank you look very very kind of everybody I love what I do I'm having a great time Emma I say I don't have a day job but this is cut it is if I have a day job this is it and I look I love every bit of as right now as we're speaking I'm running a boot camp I got a guy teaching COBOL I had to check with him right before the class started three make sure the class going alright so

love what I do nice how long you gonna do it I mean you've been in the biz a long time what are you gonna do till I can't so you can't anymore I can't do

it till I can't that's the way to do it retirement food suckers man that's right

people don't know my wife often asked me she's like what we gonna do for retirement like I just can't imagine that kind of life you know I mean I want to retire like I think I'll always gonna have purpose I think people conflate work you know in quotes work and the idea of retirement with not doing something of purpose right and I feel like as long as I have some version of purpose I'm gonna keep doing that until like like you just said until I can't why would you not cuz what would I do otherwise I'm just like sit there you

know come on I sat down and watch TV for like almost I didn't make it a week I'm like no I got to do something so mm-hmm I could probably make a little longer than that though maybe like two weeks struggle for me yeah well I took a week

off last two weeks ago with my wife and we just we planned on nothing pretty much we went down to Phoenix stayed at some nice places ate good food and our plan was like let's sit by the pool and unplug and I found that to be so difficult I could do it but like I was ready to get back into doing stuff I think I need more adventure in my vacations but I couldn't imagine that just you know on into perpetuity or the end of my days for me it's gotta be how

many times you check injured did you check in on anything at all oh yeah of

course well my brain didn't leave you know that's right that's the hard part about sitting by a pool is that you got to think about something you know and so maybe more adventure would have distracted us a little better yeah I

think I'm a guy like you Jared guys like us and you know we have spouses we have significant others and we have families guys like us can only be away from this stuff so much yeah and we go on a vacation but we're gonna check emails we're gonna check text I'm sorry it's just yeah that's just the way it is I mean we can't help it we can't help it and we're gonna give our family the time but yeah we're gonna keep our finger in it to some degree part of me

wonders though however if that is a a reconfiguration of our brain OS so to speak like habit slash dopamine like where do you get your dopamine because then you gravitate towards you know the places you get that dopamine hit and we do have brains that control us in more ways than we realize they control it controls us and so I wonder myself that's not just a question for you all but like just generally this is what I ask myself Adam I'm am I thinking about this while at the pool on this vacation or whatever it is because I love it or is it because that's where my dopamine hit comes from let me give you the answer

to that Adam you will never know you will never know I mean exactly why you

have the invite back right there that is it right there you will never know you

will never know and I mean how important is it I mean how I mean it may be of some importance at some level I really don't care anymore not care why somebody like strawberry ice cream I mean it doesn't I don't care I mean there I'm sure there's a reason for it all right maybe neurological maybe psychological but they like strawberry ice cream simple answer they like strawberry ice cream right keep it simple then okay I mean the way I think

about it is when my mind wanders it wanders to things that I care about you know and so I think about my kids I think about my family I think about my life I think about the change log and what we're doing here yeah I want to check in and see how it's going because I care and so some of it might be habitual wiring is what you're talking about Adam like I habitually check my email is that good for me I don't know but when I do have time for to just think I do think about the things that I care about and so this just happens to

be one of those things let me interject this because I'm considerably older than both of you gentlemen mm-hmm and I don't know if it's a function of age because some people learn to learn this much younger than I do well than I am but I have learned how to make myself happy how to be happy right and it comprised a series of processes and activities and habits and behaviors and work is part of that but there is the stasis that I've learned how to maintain and I don't know when it happened work is a part of that that work is a part of that I'm working seven days a week 24 I'm never off the clock when I'm running a boot camp but I don't feel under any stress I don't feel any everything is organized everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen so this is just my stasis and I don't go up or down I pretty much stay the same pretty much stay the same so I don't know if that's something for you look forward to or you want to learn or but it makes me very comfortable I don't spend a lot of times worrying why am I doing this because it works my life is good and I want to focus on doing more of the things that make my life good and less of the things that make my life not good and that's what I that's what I'm that is what I'm contemplating 24-7 wherever I am I love that so how did you get there how'd you get here pain hurting a lot of people dead bodies along the way

suffering you know I can't help but laugh I was like yes I love your

responses I mean I was married to the one of if there is a ranking for the best most noble human beings who have ever lived I was married to one of them for 14 years and didn't have a clue what that meant didn't have a clue what that meant mm-hmm right because I was so in my own mess it's all psychological I'm sure my parents in there somewhere I don't care they're long dead may they rest in peace they did the best for us they could I have no ill will for my parents was I don't go back and try to ant psychoanalyze why I was as deficient as I was I just acknowledged for whatever reason I was deficient and what what it takes to live a good life to make good decisions however it happened whatever the cause I was deficient until I wasn't and the thing that made me not deficient was putting my hand on a burning stove and then not doing that again and so that's that's the clearest answer I can give you okay good old-fashioned experience I guess yeah no substance for because now I'm able to make a decent living relatively effortlessly because I'm old I've done the same thing so many times what other people find complicated and complex I find easy not because I'm so much smarter than them I've done it a thousand times more than they've done it so yeah I'm better at it than they are

I'm really curious about this being next to this person for 14 years and not knowing it situation yeah is that did she pass is she still around no she

died at 56 and um okay she rescued me a year ago wonderful woman I met her purely by chance and I was not I met her when I was on that I was 36 when I met her and I said if I make it to 40 I'm not getting married because I was totally against marriage I was I was anti everything Western civilization I was I was an anarchist okay and I was an anarchist nothing in anything this woman treated me so good that I just that's it dude you know you know you're not right for this woman but you know that she's right for you so for whatever reason I don't look back with regret I don't have any I don't have any bad feel me we made up you know we made up we got when she died we were we were on very good terms but I just couldn't see it for whatever reason for whatever reason my family same way my sister I'm blue she's in the other room I treated him horribly for decades I don't know why they didn't they certainly never did anything to me I can't look back and said the reason I did this these people because of what they did to me no it was just because hmm what I wanted to do but that but the

person yeah that's about her yeah there's two points I'm curious about is is is one how what changed I suppose in your relationship to help you understand that she's this most magnificent person ever of rankings so to speak as you had said and then to what what began to change in life to make you not be so mean to your family or to be horrible as you said like what what began to change

for you I think I can give you a lucid answer to both with her it was for immediate it was immediate when I met her I knew she what it wasn't like love at first sight I just knew she was an exceptionally kind and compassionate person first meeting and that feeling never changed that feeling never changed what changed was my inability to accept my inability to be the person that she needed me to be that's what changed I couldn't take it anymore I could not take it anymore so that's that's why we part of ways because I just this is not gonna work for you whether that was the right decision wrong decision I don't I don't know I can't say you know I'm not I don't think I don't think that way but so I think that's the answer to both of your questions that well I'm what asked the second one when we broke up all my trouble I was a very unhappy person like a lot of people that doesn't make me unique but it was always somebody else's fault right I could blame it on something I could blame it on American society racism and when I got married to her everything was her fault if she was a better person I would I would be happy if she was different not true right so when we've parted company and I was still with I was out without her and I still had the same issues obviously she's not the problem so then I started you know and having some internal conversations some internal conversations let me turn man and I should have gone to therapy I really needed therapy my entire life but I didn't but that's what started my path back to my family my sister now we didn't we didn't speak for like five years over something trivial but we've been thinking it's thieves for the last 10 or 15 I mean it's over the last five or ten I live at her house you know they take care of me so yeah long road back long road back I like that one of the

things that you've done thousands of times more than most people is you've been teaching right you are an educator and like you said you got boot camps going all the time and you're willing to work 24-7 for the people who need your help you have a contagious enthusiasm about this stuff and in my limited exposure to you you're a very good teacher and so I wonder how do you teach do you what have you learned you have experience teaching that many of us don't who are younger or haven't taught as long can you impart anything in terms of like what works what doesn't work how you're effective why people who go under your teaching are so successful in their in their careers etc just like last time

you folks asked phenomenal questions I mean your questions are almost bringing tears my eyes don't let don't laugh don't laugh Adam don't laugh don't laugh me

well last time you couldn't help but compliment us the whole podcast yeah I invited you back here we like all these compliments I'm just I'm just giving a

smile because that's that's your style yeah it is but first I come from a long line of educators let's go back a little bit so I want you I used to want this to be about me let me tell you about me let me tell you where I come from my great great-grandfather Eli Madison was a slave on an Alabama plantation slave on album that's about as low in this this life as you can get not too much lower you can go so he escaped he escaped joined a new the Union Army killed Confederate soldiers for his freedom got his thousand dollar pension bought land borrowed money against the land sent his children to school Wow now when you hear the reparations talk in in the u.s. are you guys a Canadian guys a Canadian no are u.s. yeah so when you hear the reparations talking to us I want you to think about this the trajectory of my life was changed for eternity with that thousand dollar pension that all the black soldiers were supposed to get most of them didn't get it most of them got cheated out of it so he sent his kids school they had these things called normal schools with these microwave programs to rapidly train the freed slaves to be teachers so he and his wife he married they became teachers right couldn't read he couldn't read writers he was it was illegal you know you'd be killed if you want to be right so they became teach and they talked to other people they sit their kids at school his grandson Arthur Madison went to law school with Paul Robeson you may have heard of Paul Robeson they went to law school that Columbia University together and so I come from a long line of teachers my grandmother my father's mother had a master's degree in math in the 1940s right which is very unusual for a black woman you know so teachings in my blood and I was an IT for a long time and I never considered teaching I was in a PhD program my family's serious about education so you know if you're not gonna go to medical school you're not gonna go to law school the least you can do is just go get a PhD that's the least you can do so you know that's the minimum minimum requirement for membership and that's not that's an overstatement but that's why I did it that's an overstatement they're not that bad but anyway I never planned on being a university just because they didn't make enough money they don't make enough money you know but I would while I was finishing my decide to go and finish my PhD because understand the PhD is not adding anything to my IT career but it's taking time with my IT career so it really is a cost at the time but I made up my mind to go ahead and finish it so I'm skipping parts of this story for brevity's sake but I came up to North Carolina to visit a black college to meet a woman that had written an article that I read and I met a student there who is graduating the next day on Saturday and she asked me she said I'm getting a degree in CIS is this thing we're gonna help me get a job mind you she's graduating tomorrow I said to myself what kind of a question is that I mean why do you have this what why is this a question so I decided to teach at but I've taught at North Carolina Central I've taught at four black colleges I love it I love it and the reason I'm good teaching is more than anything else intentional it's intentional you got to want to be a good teacher you got to want to be a good teacher and in my doctorate is in education it's not in in tech right I was at a university program trained by university professors to be a university professor that's how they trained and they trained me well I identified a learning methodology a formal learning methodology that works for me it's called sociocultural learning theory that's what I've used the last 20 years the difference is it completely eliminates smarter dumb it doesn't care who's smart who's dumb we've got these activities out here that need to be accomplished for mastering domain I don't care how you have to do it what it takes to get you to do it if you do if you complete these activities you can participate in the domain that's how I teach and and guess what it works so so that's that's where we are today I love it well I've never heard of sociocultural theory in the classroom yeah Lev Vygotsky look look him up v y g o t s k y Lev Vygotsky look him up Russian guy interesting yeah and you've

been using this in your classes for the last 20 years it works I like this a this assumption that you know your smarts don't matter about effort and applying yourself and success is just at the other end of your applied effort we

have different abilities yeah and the value placed on those abilities is subjective completely subjective LeBron James a hundred years ago he would have been in the field chopping cotton I don't care how good a basketball player was it didn't make any difference right so it's all about opportunity and proper instruction that's what it's about and it's driving me crazy about women because I'm telling you I've been teaching mainframe for 20 years and I posted on LinkedIn several times I can take I can say with complete lack of ambiguity that women learn mainframe better than men I can say that with complete conviction complete conviction that women across the board injured why because they listen and they pay attention they pay attention and I don't make it I don't make it I don't have a theory whether it's biological because they're mothers or society I don't and I don't care it's just like strawberry ice cream they're just better at it you talk about diversity inclusion we're trying to include people in a field that they're actually better at the people that are trying to include them that doesn't make any sense we're asking men to include women in mainframe when women are better at mainframe than men are that makes no sense it should be all the way around men should be asking to do if we're if we're going by merit if we're going by who can do the job men

should be asking to be included so if opportunity is such a big part of it what do you do in your training to education in terms of opportunity good

question I think you found your niche yeah it is what he does for his day job

among many things but is it is definitely one of the many things Jared

it is a ballet it's a delicate ballet that you have to manage okay with some level of precision that everybody seems to be missing this ballet and people don't that's why there's this discontinuity between the students their academic departments and industry you have to have interplay when I first started doing this the problem was the students were taking a class but they weren't getting jobs right and I call IBM I said look here now you guys told me to teach this stuff and I taught it and I taught it well I they can do what you say they need to do if this is an elective course if students are not gonna get jobs out of this then I'm gonna stop teaching because I got to teach where the students are gonna get jobs and wouldn't you know IBM made a couple of phone calls we had six or eight students picked up by Bank of America the next semester and we're off to the races you have to continually try to identify the companies that need what you first of all I started with this I want my students to get jobs right so I was a Linux guy coming in the door with you know strong Microsoft background Linux was my preference mainframe was not on my agenda from an academic standpoint I was but what I'm doing I was gonna do with with other technologies but when I saw a mainframe I'm like man this is this is easy this is easy everybody needs this and nobody's teached it gee I think what should I teach oh I think mainframe I think mainframe and so you have to identify then you go to companies fidelity investments Lowe's Wells Fargo whatever you can do keep HR out of your business they add nothing to the equation in most cases some HR departments better than others but you need to talk to the hiring managers ask the hiring manager for you to hire somebody what do they need to be able to do they'll tell you you teach that and then they get students get jobs there's no more to it than that but you've got to manage that ballet and people don't do

it hmm definitely have to have jobs on the side of education you can't it's like it's like you're the person you went and met is this degree I'm getting gonna be worth it yeah it's the day before graduation yeah well there should be some sort of indication months if not maybe at least a year in advance to say that okay on the other side of this effort is the opportunities that have presented themselves and I love the fact that you are willing to leave the education process of mainframe if you couldn't provide a path to employment for the students right like what's the point of going through the class in this particular case I mean because sometimes you go and learn things just learn things and that's okay but if you're gonna dedicate yourself to a class like this and learn a very high level very thought-provoking task and skill set like mainframe is what's the point of doing it unless you have an opportunity

on the side yeah and I mean and you know I'm gonna believe her that there is a layer of logic in the universe floating around that we could all if we drill down we can hit to it we can hit it and that's that's what we hit here the companies they got it and just like the boot camps now companies it's taken a while though because I've been saying the same thing for 15 years it's taken a while but it takes what it takes but they I think they understand now that this process the process I put together works for everybody works for the students it works for the schools works for the companies can you lay that out

for us the process the boot camp and like how it works and be glad to so now

there is an established way to do this and in the company if anybody tells you they can't find mainframe people they're just not looking there's an established way to do this what you do is you run them through apprenticeship program there's several people having Franklin has one you can look these guys up I'll give you some names you look at Franklin apprenticeships so they do a pre apprenticeship program there you're not really ready to get a job but you are ready to get into an apprenticeship program right you go through the apprenticeship program as it's six to twelve months depending on you know what the company is very pretty and then you get a job when you come in the door you make like 75% scale it varies because all this stuff is statutory by the federal government so there's a certain percentage that they can pay you less while you're an apprentice but once you complete that apprenticeship you go up to full salary so that's the process and our boot camp is like a supplement to the pre apprenticeship the pre apprenticeship gives them some general knowledge we drill them down in cobalt DB to MQ whatever we drill them down and then they're ready to go they're actually ready to go to work but the company's running through the apprenticeship anyway they're ready they're ready to join production teams when they leave us because they know enough to join production teams but the company still they're gonna save a buck and the students don't mind they got careers they got that's the process was that comprehensive enough for you Jared or were there pieces left out to me more

about the boot camp like how long is the boot camp what's it was involved in it

glad to I'm sure my colleagues my business partners would love me to talk about that we have very flexible first of all I've been teaching boot camps along this problem I probably taught 10 or 15 boot camps they have varied anywhere from two days to 12 weeks okay so there's all kinds of gradations of it these are like corporate engagement so a company comes to us and they say in this case that iterations but in this case we want you to train X number of people for us and we'll give you X number of dollars and this is what we want them to learn and we'll go through the process in this case they're learning agile a week of agile before everybody has a week of agile then mainframe basics then something called V sandwich is a foul thing there's something called kicks which is a you know credit think credit cards then cobalt and and then a little DB to little database in there too and so we have labs for them to do and like today right now the professor's lecturing but certain days like the last time we had three hours lecture three hours lab an afternoon now we have two days of lab and a day of half lecture so this one wanted MQ the last one wanted to focus on visa MQ is like a messaging service between applications you guys understand the concept of messaging right think Tom cat right it's just a messaging server right so they wanted that we can do whatever you want I've got a worldwide network of guys that are credentialed to teach this stuff and they want to teach it so you know instructions are no

problem so you're customizing these boot camps based on the needs of the companies and the students and everything like that it's not like there's one magical solution that produces this whatever you need that's cool how about graduation rates and like placement rates and how successful is it

I mean are you getting well I'll be candid well I'm I'm always satisfied with the with the placement rates but I'll be candid East Carolina is the first non HBCU I've taught and it's been it's been a great experience but it's the demographics are just different so everywhere I was before it all the the HBCUs mainframe was appointed to spear there was nothing in the department we had that was more successful to main at all for HBC because they weren't doing much in in other areas right and some they weren't doing anything this is a very healthy program it's in the College of Engineering my chair is dr. TJ Muhammad's got about 1,500 kids in the pro they've got I'm one of about three or four or five excellent programs that they have that kids are getting jobs and so and I don't mind it I mean you know in my classes more so at HBCUs everybody there is looking for a job at East Carolina about half my kids are they're not kids have my students already have full-time jobs so it's just a different demographic right and so I don't push this hard but but anybody that wants a mainframe apprenticeship I mean the mainframe internship at East Carolina is able to get one so that hasn't changed but just the demand among the students is different but my class are always full though my class are always full so

what are the people doing that are already have full-time jobs they're looking to change positions or just get a pay grade upgrade or what are they

trying to do again a great question you you've opened up this this might be open-ended because this speaks about my critic my critique of higher ed in a lot of cases here I really don't know why they're there I really don't know okay I mean they have no interest they have well sometimes they have no interest in the topic sometimes they have no interest topic and they do the work sometimes they have no interest topic they don't do the work right so I'm okay these are all adults so it would be a much bigger issue with meals if I was at HBCU not that I care about the students anymore at HBCU but it's different these folks gonna be okay they're going to be okay they're gonna be just fine so I think that I think they want the degree for promotability or something everybody wants a degree but what higher ed has done with this and you can blame COVID I don't we have almost removed the requirement of quality from online programs right and that is a shame if you're an instructor you have to figure out ways to ensure that there's quality of program because if you do it the way that you can get by with doing it there's no guarantee that there's going to be any any learning outcomes right and that's sad a lot of self-study like I'm teaching the course of community college now look I'm not berating I'm not going to name the community college I love the people I love the people but this is like a synchronous course now I'm giving lectures there's no meeting times there's no exams right and I'm not a biggest fan of exams but there's no like other than it's a red you may have seen it's the red hat course and it's a good course for what it does but that's not the way I would teach Linux that's not the way I would teach Linux but I don't want the community college to think I'm not grateful I am grateful for the opportunity to do what I'm doing but I just have a lot of a lot of concern that quality is not in where it should be describe quality in

educational terms like I understand it in like chocolate let's say I like chocolate I'm down with chocolate strawberry ice cream I can tell you yeah strawberry ice cream but how does it how does quality get quantified in educational processes I can give you the

pragmatic I can give you I'm gonna give you both I'm gonna give you the pragmatic answer and I'm gonna give you the kind of the philosophical answer pragmatically you've got a couple of things that you want the student to be able to do at the end of the class that they may or may not have been able to do when they came into the class you want them to understand a couple of things that that they didn't objectives you want them to leave this this class with some concepts and some and it's up to the instructor to determine what that is and how there's always a broad versus deep dilemma that's that's just that comes with with the turf but once you establish your objectives then you see okay what is it going to take for me I just I build activities I want them to be able to do things on the mainframe so I build activities to lead them to do those things on mainframe and then I have them write up this most important thing for me I have them write a narrative of what they just did you know 100 to 150 words so once they've done all that I'm pretty sure they've got it they've got parts of it anyway now from the more philosophical standpoint you want the student and I don't know how you would measure this but you want some someone to leave a class with the feeling that it has been a profound experience I've had several and that's not been all of them but some of my class many of my class that was a profound experience that was a profound experience I'm not going to use the term I learned something there it was moving I was moved but what happened that class what I learned and it could be historical it could be technical I don't care a guy taught me software engineering one time it was moving the way he taught it was just moving I mean when you're in the presence of a great teacher it's special it's special but yeah so you got objectives and everybody's got objectives but the problem is the way they're accessing you can't do this with paper and pencil tests you can't tell me the thing is I teach by teaching people to do the thing to me that's everything to do the thing and understand the thing they're doing right that's success for me because I don't care what your GPA is I don't care if you got 110 that doesn't mean you can do the thing I don't care how many searches it doesn't mean you can do the thing I need to see you do the thing that's

what I can see yeah that's deep I mean that's kind of like a a variation of learn by doing in a way too because it's like you make them do so they you know what I mean like that's that's an adage of uh of how to do or how to learn on your own self you know like right you learn by doing and if you could do it well then hey you kind of know what you're doing you

learn think about the term expertise you can only acquire it you can take a thousand tests you can go to a thousand classes right you can only acquire expertise one way that's by doing the thing purposefully over and over again for a statement that's the only way you that's the only place expertise comes from and if expertise is our goal we need to be focusing more on how to get them along that path than how to have these these artificial

subjective assessments what you're about to hear are real reactions from pager duty users in response to seeing signals from fire hydrant for the first time pager duty I don't

want to say they're evil but they're an evil that we've had to maintain I know all of our engineering teams as well as myself are interested in getting this moving the correct direction as right now just managing and maintaining our user seats has become problematic that's all that's that's

really good actually this is this is a consistent problem for us and teams is that covering these sorts of ad hoc time frames is is very difficult um you

know putting in like overrides and specific days and different new ships is

is quite onerous oh and you did the most important piece which is didn't tie them together because that's half the problem with pager duty right is I get all these alerts and then I get an incident per alert and generally speaking when she goes sideways you get lots of alerts because lots of things are broken but you only have one incident

yeah I'm super impressed with that because being able to assign to different teams is an issue for us because um like the one the one alert fires for one team and then it seems like they have to

bounce around and it never does uh which then means that we have tons of communication issues because like people aren't updated no I

mean to to be open and honest uh when can we

switch so you're probably tired of alerting tools that feel more like a headache than a solution right well signals from fire hydrant is the alerting and on-call tool designed for humans not systems signals puts teams at the center giving you the ultimate control over rules policies and schedules no need to configure your services or do wonky workarounds ingest data seamlessly from any source using web hooks and watch as signals filters out the noise alerting you only on what matters manage tasks like coverage requests and on-call notifications effortlessly within slack you can even acknowledge alerts right there but here's the game changer signals natively integrates with fire hydrants full incident management suite so as soon as you're alerted you can seamlessly kick off and manage your entire incident inside a single platform learn more or switch today at firehydrant.com slash signals again firehydrant.com slash signals either of you familiar with oppenheimer dr oppenheimer yeah the physicists yeah right yeah i recently i haven't gotten through the whole movie it's a three-hour movie and other than like knowing about the hydrogen bomb and the atomic bomb and knowing as just a person in culture in the last hundred years aware of dr oppenheimer i'm not really that familiar with like his life and his work and whatnot but in the movie there's a something that happens scientifically that he says is not possible because the math says it's not possible but in the very next room somebody proved the atom could be split because they were doing the experiment they were not doing the math calculation so here's one room over dr ahman we know what he did and we know that he you know in lots of ways he was a very brilliant man from a physicist standpoint but in one room he's doing the math and saying now that's not possible in the next room somebody's done the work and proved that it is possible and he's just like flabbergasted that you know the math didn't work that direction but yet somebody in reality can prove that they were splitting the atom and here's what happened with fission earlier days of it whatnot so this is an example of somebody that's really really well known name wise and has introduced something into society that is profound right in one room saying not possible with math next room it is possible with doing good that's a great example

it's funny she mentioned a physicist uh a physicist is responsible for me not getting tenure at ant no i bear no ill will whatsoever tell us more tell us more so i walked on water at ant i had the second highest award seven and a half million dollar award from federal government in history to school everybody just assumed tenure was a done deal okay i'm an old head i know the politics in university tenure is never a done deal never uh so they had like a restructuring and my dean who hired me i did what my dean said he got demoted he fell out of favor there was a there was a coup d'etat you know that was a coup d'etat and my side lost and so this other dean who was a physicist and a very well respected physicist he said well we don't need to be teaching mainframe because it's obsolete mind you at the time we had the highest average starting salaries on antes campus so you know uh but off my head so i go in peace no i i better met it wasn't personal the man just didn't understand what we were doing he just didn't understand it

he really did well that's a great way of looking at it cameron i don't know if i could look at it that way

what other ways you have to look at it jared that's productive yeah i mean whoa

is me oh you see you put that qualifier yeah

yeah yeah productive see see you you guys may have time for non-productivity i don't i'm too old so everything i do has to

be productive i got you i got you so speaking go back to the learn by doing thing when i was at university my best teacher you know talking about profound teachers my very best teacher was an adjunct and it was a night class because he was a databases guy a practitioner and he was out there doing databases all day long and then he came to our school and taught us databases and i learned more from him in a night class as an adjunct than i did from any of my other teachers who were full-timers and they were they were doing the theory and that taught me something which is like you got to have your hands in the dirt i mean you don't have to but i feel like the teachers who are active and are practitioners day-to-day pragmatics using the stuff they just have so much more working maybe less theory maybe they have the theory as well but for me they have the what makes a better teacher i wonder if that resonates with you or if you found teachers that are the

opposite of that it resonates you guys are psychic or something look when i was at georgia state in atlanta georgia state was the only school in the town where you get a master's degree part-time georgia tech emory atlanta university mercer y'all had to go full-time now who are you gonna be taught when you go to full-time academic program a bunch of academics that have done not been nothing but professor not there's a place for that don't get me wrong there's a place for that but in georgia state all of my professors they had day jobs they were actually doing the thing so yeah i will submit to do to you you can't teach somebody how to dig in the dirt unless you've dug in the dirt yourself you can teach them how somebody else dug in the dirt but you can't teach them how to actually dig in there because you've not done you've not done right yeah and that was a good and i'm still using that knowledge base today right ninety percent of what i learned what i learned i learned from that program i learned that program these guys are good gosh i wish we could somehow i mean

maybe even in boot camp from thinking beyond your boot camp specifically but a lot of teachers in more of a the startup boot camp ecosystem if you will a lot of these people are day-to-day practitioners who then decide to teach i mean i did it for a little while myself teaching web development and for me i was doing web development all day long so i had that credential right and i had the legit real world experience but i didn't really know how to teach very well so i had that problem like i didn't have a phd in education like yourself and so a lot of us practitioners though out there doing the work with our hands in the dirt we don't necessarily know how to pass on our knowledge very well and so there's kind of a

a mismatch there no no and i mean that is a dilemma and i don't think you need a phd to be a good teacher i know you don't a lot of the besties i've had but you know some of them didn't even have degrees but that's neither here nor how somebody can become a good teacher i really can't tell you all i can do is tell you the books i've read but a lot of people that are good teachers they've read different books or they haven't read any books so i don't know i can tell you how i became a good teacher but i don't know if that's the way you're going to become a good teacher i know the thing the thing is just to make sure that you focus on the doing you need to always be teaching them how to do the thing there's a place for for pure theory there's a place for it i'm not saying there isn't but lord knows the community i come from we've had enough theory we need some money you know we need money yeah yeah yeah i mean there is a great thing but we need we need to get paid

right so speaking of getting paid on one of our clips we put out on youtube of you from the last time was called kobol programmers are aging out and it's got some good comments on it one of the things someone said a couple months ago this is joe cooper 1703 he says that uh and responding to the overall thrust of the video which was you and i talking about how there's nobody to replace a lot of these legacy programmers who are aging out of the program right like this is why you're doing your work he says that salaries don't reflect it he says kobol has a much lower average salary than many other languages it's on the low end down there with php etc i'd be happy to herd big iron but i've have to take a big pay cut too if those giant companies need kobol programmers so bad they need to be willing to pay competitive rates does that resonate with you yeah no no you know

and i can't i'm not gonna say it's not true i will tell you this i i hear a lot of commentary about this right all i can tell you is what i know right the people that we're training the boot camp they're gonna start around 60 they're gonna go to 80 you know within a year so that's not rich it's not starving my students that are coming back in the field that there's a seasoned program professionals they're getting between 60 and 75 dollars an hour as contractors that's what they're getting right so i know other people may not be seeing the same numbers when i see that people aren't going to make decent money from what i'm teaching i'm going to something else i'm going to something else now i don't know how i add this in conversation there is really not the shortage of kobol programmers right now that people think there is just not right it's just the people that need them just don't know where they are but there is going to be five or ten years there's going to be because nobody's teaching kobol and these these folks are retiring every day and if you're not teaching something and you somebody the leaves somebody's got to learn how to do that and somebody's got to teach about to do

that so so you think today's training will be more valuable five to ten years out because no no i do i can say that without

reservation because of the dynamics of it people are retiring at one point and people are coming to an industry at a much lower point right so so the numbers are what they are but and if i didn't believe that i mean and i'm open to data to the contrary because i don't the last thing i'm going to do is mislead students not going to enough of that's going on sure but i'm just not seeing those bad

numbers though i'm not what is the working environment of one of these developers like is it remote work from home like sometimes you're attracted to environment and sometimes you're attracted to a money outcome or a financial outcome you know 80 grand a year is not that bad of an income it's a really great income but at the same time if you're a software developer you can go and get a quarter million dollar salary at a startup or something that was just recently funded doing different work so maybe that's this person's commentary from that perspective yeah i'm not trying to really go there necessarily but i'm just kind of curious like if in five to ten years there'll be a shortage that means we need to have a we need to have more come into it so that means there has to be desire to come into it and potentially an environment where they're in software development and called themselves a software developer but then choose a lane that makes less money in comparison to other lanes they could choose to be in so what is the environment what are the opportunities how does it work do they get great pay i mean great vacation are there other benefits like what are the non-monetary non-financial strictly salary speaking benefits of that environment for folks

great question and i will tell you i mean you make some great points adam because 80 grand a year is not a lot of money for an experienced seasoned developer yeah but i will tell you this coming in the door a lot of my folks have not written a line of code all right they've not written a lot of code so it's a great it's the only entree for them into the industry to development now once they get there once they get with bank of america wherever they're going they're developer they're using the same tools everybody else is using they're using git they're using jira they're using all the big data stuff same tools one there's one set of tools now and one set of development processes also they're working with applications that are talking to other languages go python java so they are becoming in the truest sense of the word developers and i've not seen one of my students that came in as a very no matter what junior developer they were they stayed and all these i'm talking about came in mainframe side of the house all of them are senior software engineers now all of them not mainframe engineers senior software engineers at the enterprise level so it can lead somewhere it can lead to those other things and i've got folks making 250 now i've got people making 250 but they're not they're architects they're architects you know right or their sales but the money's there i'm just trying to get them in the door i buy the money argument i buy the money argument but then at the same time when somebody says okay they can make more money doing something well tell me how to place this person better then if that's true tell me what better i can do with this person because this person has no background this person if they don't get into mainframe door then open another door for them let them in another door right

that's interesting they haven't written a lot of code though you were saying before what makes them take the courses you said i don't know what makes them take the course well that was the other people right those were the full-timers that

wasn't yeah those were students those are university students i said they're taking degree for credit i don't know yeah the boot camps you find out the first day if you're if you if it's right for you or not you find out day one six hours a day five days a week so of the boot campers how many of those

people are just you know they they sit down that first day and then you know day two you don't see them again we look we've lost two

we lost two out of we had 20 start out with 22 we're down to 20 and we lost two we had 14 last time we lost two okay but i i don't think we're gonna lose anymore we have one young lady that's lagging a little bit but we're working to catch everybody else is on par

and how do you select them like how do they come in is it just whoever signs up

or is there a process in this case it was done by my client who is an apprenticeship intermediary they select them we were not involved in the selection process at all and for this card it's not problematic when it becomes problematic i'm gonna say look if if i don't select the people i'm not doing a boot camp because i don't do failure i don't do failure so but in this case they select and they did a good job they did a good job i don't know what their process is i think they have some assessments and things but um the last time we had like one little kind of high level assessment then we just interviewed them we just interviewed a bunch of people because i can you know a couple conversations with you all i need to tell whether you can do this because the only thing you need to do mainframe is to be able to read write at the sixth grade level and have a hell of a lot of determination that's it

i love that i mean that's a lot that's a lot of people that's a lot of people i was going to ask you what kind of skill sets required because sometimes people have they're doing something that is lesser lower value let's say in the in the job economy and they're making less money but the skills they're gaining in those less valuable less paying jobs can be transitioned to something else like this where those skill sets transition easy or they have learned something else that in a different application are worth way more can you point to other industries where people are like camping out in lesser paid jobs lesser valued jobs that would translate somewhat not so much easy in quotes easy but have a path you know a more viable path as part of like how well you know your students and where they came from

you mean to mainframe or something else it's a mainframe like

to this in particular because you said the sixth grade education reading reading education and determination let me think of the non-tech people

because i mean tech background always helps but i'll be honest with you our last boot camp it was full of comp sci majors and but there was a woman who was a social work major that ran rings around them so tech background plays a role somewhere but your question was what industries do i see well more like where

where are people at now where they're not they don't have that viable of a job they're not getting paid as much that if they knew of where else to go could apply their skills say what else are folks doing out there that are they're not getting rewarded well enough if they could just go to a boot camp like this and reassign their determination to a new

focus well i mean you may have given me something to look at because that is really a demographic that we hadn't tried to identify right and maybe maybe by by default we have identified those people when we're interviewing them we but i don't identify them as being a particular industry or something if somebody's doing something they don't like what they're doing and they know that they're getting some kind of marketable skills what they're doing they want to do something else no i can't give you a job role but i think i kind of understand what you mean what about the attributes of

the social the social work you mentioned you said she ran rings around them what are the attributes of that person

not so much where they came from she just i don't know she was taking notes but i would ask a question okay everybody uh how do i create a data set again and she would give me step by step room full of it and cops i made it everybody quiet now maybe they knew it they just didn't want to answer and she would do it over and over and not only could she recite it she could actually do it i don't know how she did it but she just paid attention and she's she's an ensono now in a lead role so i mean yeah i but i honestly adam i really don't try to figure it out that much i know having good parents is good not necessarily money but somebody who teaches you something about you know delayed gratification and seriousness of life that's true just about all of my students all of them come from you know people somebody brought them up right now not necessarily money but somebody just taught them right from

wrong sure the basics well determination i mean that's taught to a certain extent some people i think maybe are born with it i don't know more or less but like a lot of times you learn determination by example like you know someone in your life who's over you whether it's your mother and father or whoever a boss an uncle a teacher and like this person just not going to give up and you are alongside them growing up or whatever and you see them and then you see their success and you're like okay that's what success looks like it comes on the other end of this determination and then you just do what people do is you just start to mirror that in your own life and eventually you own it for your own and i mean i think it's such a huge predictor of success

in so many aspects of life you're absolutely right in two cases my ex-wife adam you mentioned the courage she said she fought brain cancer for 10 years the courage she showed you can't witness that kind of courage that kind of resolve without it affecting you and my maternal grandmother who i watched go through like serious health challenges living with us never complained never had a bad word to say about anything every day she was a double amputee she just wanted us to roll her out on the porch so she could watch the squirrels playing the trees and when you when you're around that it affects you it affects at least it affected me yeah so sixth grade

education and plus determination equals success in this program i feel like let's get more people into this program you know what i'm saying

absolutely send this out here here and i will say this because i know i know you guys are tech guys i am playing with a bunch of different early models like with um middle school people and high school people people are reaching out to me and you know there's only 24 hours in a day so i'm trying to work them in but i'll keep you guys aligned it's not it's not necessarily mainframe we're just trying to get them into thinking this is all about thinking solving problems all right so i'll keep you guys up posted about that that's interesting well i just think if

you have this vacuum coming essentially or i guess brewing really in five to ten years of a need when folks do begin to you know further age out and you've got less like you don't have the problem now but in the five to ten year mark there's a bigger problem where you have less incoming you don't want to you don't want to keep this program full you know and not just marketed but for marketing sake but for help's sake you know there's lots of people out there that choose a different opportunity because the opportunities are limited and so their choices are limited and so they choose the best of what they've got available to them which is how kind of we all are but you know if you can transition if you got this education i mean you can have this determination too i was going to say jared you can probably teach them determination as well if you can't like maybe a prereq to this class is those skills that you mentioned those those attributes but then maybe a

a week on determination you know it might take longer than a week but i like the idea you know i do too what's up friends

this episode is brought to you by one of my good friends one of my best friends actually one of our good friends tail scale and if you've heard me on a podcast you've heard me mention tail scale several times in unsponsored ways because i just love tail scale and i reached out to them and said hey we're talking to a lot of developers i love tail scale i'd love to have you guys sponsor us and they reciprocated so what is tail scale well tail scale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default which makes it the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other wherever they are you get secure remote access to production databases servers kubernetes vpcs on-prem stuff anything it's fast like really really fast and you can install it anywhere windows linux bsd mac os ios android it is an easy to deploy zero config no fuss vpn it is zero trust network access that every organization can use so what can you do with tail scale you can build simple networks across complex infrastructure they have acl policies to securely control access to devices and services with their next gen network access controls you can replace legacy vpn infrastructure in just a few minutes you can use device posture management to granularly restrict access to resources based on a wide range of attributes like os version user location and more you can save time with a trusted and proven networking solution that just works you can transform networking security with a modernized set of solutions built on revolutionary protocols designed for today's mobile and multi-cloud era you can securely connect to anything no matter what operating system hardware type or configuration is in place such as your github runner to a database on-prem you can authenticate without authentication using tail scales app connectors you can send files securely to any node on your tail net using tail drop you can code from your ipad even with tail scale and vs code server there's just so much you could do with tail scale like the limits are literally limitless and that's why i love tail scale i've got 28 machines personally that i manage on my tail net and if you've heard me talk on the podcast you've heard me mention tail scale at least once or twice but today you can try tail scale for free up to 100 devices like me and three users for free at tailscale.com no credit card required again it's free up to 100 devices and three users all for free at tailscale.com no credit card required have fun i see that too in in my life there's there's been times where i see my wife and she's and she's not quitting and i'm not a quitter i'm a resilient i think i kind of am a resilient person like i can pretty much get through a lot of stuff if there's a hurdle i figure out how to get over it around it under it dig under it whatever it takes you know if the if the goal is worth it so to speak you know the determination is required there's times i'm like you know i'm ready to like okay this is the wrong road let me turn around and my wife's like nah we're gonna keep going down this route i see where we're trying to go here and she's an example of that and there's times that's been the case where in other cases been me you know there's a there's a i guess it's not really a philosophy necessarily but something we live by more recently in this last year i i kind of learned it even more myself was you never know unless you ask right in life and so the example was we were just on this random drive out in Fredericksburg here in Texas there's a place called Enchained Rock and it's a national park so you have to pre-reserve to get in there it's usually pretty busy and we were just on the drive in the area and we're like oh there's Enchained Rock we should go check it out and the sign says no vacancies you have to pre-register basically don't don't try to come in the sign said this and i'm a veteran and so i was like okay i can get in state parks because Biden passed something where you can get in the state parks as a veteran with just your ID and i'm like babe let's just we want to go on this little family adventure i should just let's just go and ask and she's like no the sign says this i mean this is what the sign says my wife is a by nature rule follower her mother was an educator so that should tell you something all right and she's like no but the sign says this but i'm like but babe the sign can be wrong right the person that we talked to may look at this family being like now they will they should come in here and have this adventure right and we had the best time ever so we made it through the gate i'll blow the story for you but we go up there to my wife saying she's like no we can't get in there the sign says this i'm like let's just try and so we go i'm like you never know and before we went in i was like we're in line waiting to get to the to the toll booth so to speak and i'm like babe and kids in the back you you never know in life until you ask and it's basically you never know until you try as well right you never know if you could do something in life unless you ask or unless you try right and so we get up there and sir how you doing good to see you are there any openings yeah actually we had two cancellations so let me see your id okay go ahead park over there you're good to go well we had the best adventure my kids climbed this massive rock but it's it was pretty steep like you would not want to fall down this thing we would not have had that adventure we would not have had the memories nor the pictures if i didn't just go and ask and if i said in that moment in the flip side seeing my wife is so determined and i'm the you know in sometimes glitter or wouldn't turn around in this moment i'm the one who said hey we don't know unless we ask you know and so i don't know why i told you all that story but that came to mind because that was a moment where like we would have not had these really precious memories from that adventure unless i just asked your kids are never gonna forget that never oh that's the it was the one of the best adventures ever and we have that we have photos of it we're on top of this mountain my three-year-old he was a three-year-old climbed this mountain we never thought like the three we thought he would be like i can't go anymore pick this kid up and carry him no he was he was ahead of us as a three-year-old and i'm like wow you know just like i learned a lot about myself and my kids that day and just generally just had so much fun it was the best ever

it's a good story with a good lesson i agree

i agree uh there's this this jingling sound camera that i hear it's not a problem but i'm wondering if it's like it sounds like a wind chime it is

it is it's the doors open for the dogs go in and out gotcha

yeah it's actually a pleasant sound like a lot of times we'd stop a show and say hey can we not have this but it's actually kind of a nice sound i thought it was like uh in silicon valley jr there's a two and a half second song uh that guilfoyle plays every time bitcoin is not profitable enough to continue to mine that's the song you suffer by napalm death oh yeah that's that's a whole song

it's like a second it's an alert whenever the price of bitcoin dips below a certain value it's no longer efficient to mine when it comes back up it is so i need to know when it breaks that threshold so that i can remotely toggle my rig at home

okay any idea how often that might happen

bitcoin is very volatile so this is so loud

a lot good all right well let me turn it down

only in silicon valley only in silicon valley

and that's kind of like a version of that maybe it's like hey a new a new developer entered the mainframe world the chime goes off

every time a chime the other cobalt program is born yeah exactly

on cue not even on purpose on cue i love that what's a good next step i mean you're an educator you're leading folks i mean it's got to be a fulfilling life that you're doing right i mean are you it's very fulfilling yeah you say before you were unhappy you were depressed you had some time like before how are you now how do you how do you feel about life now

never been happier my my state of mind has never been better my entire life i can't remember a time in my life where i was more at peace with my existence and more sure about you know what i'm supposed to be doing my time spending my time while i'm here so and for the future i just want to do more boot camps i'm not trying to grow too big i would like to expand them i would like to to open up something in india we're working on a business model because we get requests from a lot of indian individuals not companies but i don't like to take money from individuals i don't mind taking money from companies that doesn't bother me a bit but um you know especially in india where people don't have a lot of money but we're working on a business model maybe you guys can can help us work one

out i don't know that's interesting what does it cost

what's the normal boot camp cost we can we we can do them for 60k we do them for 60k more or less i mean we'll it just depends on how much i need and we can make a profit at that everybody makes out and see the companies don't seem to mind because you know they can train 20 people they can train up to 20 people you know they can train people so it's cost effective for them

right i like that again the companies to pay for it versus the individuals we back when we started our deal back in 2013 2014 time frame it was all business to consumer it was all individuals and that was always very difficult because they're having to come up with some cash up front and then there's there's other models we know that people have tried where you don't pay until you get a job and like you know with more or less success but a lot of these boot camps are expensive for individuals but for a company and they're getting the

value out of it yeah that's a win-win yeah i mean i i mean i just if they say that's too much i'm like okay call us back next year when it's not too much yeah because this this price is right

this price is right yeah so in the areas that we run in which is a lot of startups and big tech firms there's been a lot of trepidation lately there's been more layoffs there's been the release of more sophisticated ai programmers devin the most recent one made a wave online as being a more sophisticated code generation ai tool that can kind of start projects from scratch and code them up from scratch you know so we're all sitting here thinking about our own jobs over the next five to ten years as as working software developers and a lot of people gotten laid off and there's so much competition amongst even senior engineers who've gotten laid off they're having a hard time getting rehired and so people are out of work for extended periods of time i'm wondering if you've seen any of that from your perspective there if you're feeling any of that if there's talk of you know we don't need a another boot camp cameron we're going to train an ai to do all of our cobalt programming

for us or something like that no i haven't heard that but but i've heard of it in other sectors i mean one of the problems with cobalt for to do ai is that so much of the business logic is embedded in the in the program that they're gonna be really hesitant there's this general hesitancy to just refactor that you know because you gotta you gotta understand what those particularly if you're gonna move to another language moving into using cobalt is less problematic but just leave the cobalt code just leave it alone it's fine it's fine you know if you want to run let ai do an analysis of the code that's fine just leave it alone it's okay it's not it's not hurting anybody sure what about like the main

frame like the people who are maintaining the mainframes now and will be retiring over the next five or ten years

oh i'm not seeing ai touch the systems program as the guys who actually write the assembler code that keeps everything together i'm not seeing it touch them i'm not i'm not seeing the least concern and maybe look i know probably less about ai than any other it professor you find so i'm trying to bring myself up to speed but it's low it's even a little too fast for me but i've not seen any uh concern on the part of the senior gotcha engineers main right mainframe side not this should not there shouldn't be any but i've not seen it

yeah fair i would imagine since it's uh because of its age and depth i wonder if like if documentation like how would an llm really repeat or no you know so much like there's got to be a lot out there yeah it's also behind the doors you know it's proprietary in a lot of cases so the llm has to train on some sort of model to get there

but adam that is a good point a lot of this stuff is in people's heads

it's just in their heads it's also like the most high risk code right like this is like financial transactions yes where i mean there's more high risk than finance but it's pretty high risk right yeah it is it is i mean it can do a

lot of damage i mean you know there's things with you know military and other other code is that that's probably more lethal but this financial stuff can cause a whole lot of problems you don't want to play with it

well our practical ai podcast guys did have a jack shanahan who's a retired lieutenant general from the jaic the joint ai something i don't know high up in the dod and the national security strategy towards ai very fascinating episode it's in the feed for those who are oh i gotta check it out yeah it's really interesting and they're working their way i mean they're working their way towards ai uh enabled killer drones but they're you know they but they start small like that's the thing i learned is like start small low risk right easy to revert stuff and like slowly build from there don't hop right into like letting it run our our credit card transactions and stuff like that

well you guys are kind of at the bleeding edge what do you what do you see what are your concerns about ai because i think you guys see more than most of the population well i haven't seen exactly what this new

devin tool can do the demos are always very impressive and yet they are demos they are demos yeah they absolutely are especially pre-recorded demos i mean don't put too much trust into those but what they are showing is the ability at least with greenfield software projects to take high level instructions from a product owner or it could be a programmer like myself and say my old thing that i always said is like when can i say make facebook but for dogs you know when we can say that and a program can code that up then like pretty much i've been replaced as a software developer but so far it's all been like assistive right it's like making us move faster right how can i write this function better how do i not have to remember so much etc etc that's all great i think that's that's probably my personal take i think that's where this current stage of technology with the transformer models kind of stops it plateaus and we just get better tooling based on the current llms and there's not another step change until we have some sort of new technology that comes out that has a step change i think that's the case but there are impressive enough demos where people are like that's pretty close to not needing a developer at least for small greenfield projects and so maybe for startups maybe for small businesses you know they need less software help that's about as what i'm seeing where

does quantum fit figure in with ai that's a scary

combination yeah i don't know man that's where it gets beyond my

yeah i mean i'm getting my head around quantum physics is not a pleasant experience it's just it makes my head hurt the most recent thing i read about

quantum is that the practical applications and usages are less broad as they thought it would be and further away than they thought it would be i i had some financial

reversals and i had to drive uber for gas money and um i had a duke university doc student in quantum and i know his professors i hang out with duke a lot and he said yes we're not as far along as you guys think we are you know we're not as far along we we can't do that's yeah we're not as far along as you think we are but i mean it's coming i mean it's coming don't know when well

three years ago we weren't as far as we could be as we are today with llms and training models and stuff like that either i think it really does get uh you know back to silicon valley to gilfoyle's advice to uh to rich or to what was his name to jared sorry it was the other jared jared yeah his name was jared jared well it was really it was donald donald dunn but everybody called it jared it's it's a whole thing he's like someone tell me how to feel abject terror for you build from there i kind of feel like you know at some point quantum is going to come around and something will be applicable and when it does if we have paradigms of artificial intelligence or just at least generation you know i mean someone was saying recently i don't know if i would call it intelligence i would just call it like a repeater you know some sort of thing that can like take something that's been done before and like repeat a version of that that makes sense and it's up to the human to apply if it um if it actually creates something of value which is really hard to consider but if we do get into the quantum world where it's a whole new paradigm shift and we're no longer bound by the status quo of what a computer is it's a whole new world and there's legitimate artificial intelligence out there that can be leveraged in that world it's gonna be pretty crazy i mean mind

you in the 60s a pc was i mean a computer was something that fit in a room you couldn't conceptualize a pc being something you put on your desktop it wasn't even thought about right alone in your pocket or on your yeah much less in your pocket or on your glasses oh your watch

your watch nowadays computers have computers right like you got i just had a conversation with kyle weins from i fix it and i knew these things but there's this idea of parts pairing so inside of any given iphone the well i suppose even the touch id version there's a parts pairing between that touch id sensor and some other part within the iphone so you couldn't just replace that one thing you'd have to replace you know a larger piece of it is a long story short but the point is what exactly is the point gosh

it's change talking to friends you don't need a point what are we talking about gosh well you said computers have computers oh yeah thank you

gosh i'm like so knee deep in explaining parts pairing i forgot my point come on yeah i mean that computers have computers essentially like you have a part that has its own smaller microprocessor that has a serial number and things like that so when you pair it with another part they essentially talk and say okay well because your part has a microcomputer in it i can tell it's serial number i can tell it what it should be okay i reject that one or i have a different way of working or a more you know an alternate version of working maybe slower clock speed etc because that part is not in quotes verified because the microprocessor the computer within the computer says i'm not an oem i'm not an apple original you shouldn't trust me kind of thing or the other part says because you're not oem or app original i can't trust you and operate the same way so therefore i operate in a degraded way which i think is just so interesting like your computer literally has its own computers within it it's kind of crazy to think about but thanks for getting me back on track there jared i was i was lost for about a second there i could tell parts pairing man parts things interesting that was a good

conversation we were there with you we were like here comes the big point

it comes the big point well you know any given reason well good to hear that there's not uh major things going on from your perspective in your particular sector that i hear about yeah i mean i hear about less the ai stuff right now i think and more that just paired with the fact that there's a lot of trepidation around jobs just in the big in big tech and in startup land in silicon valley area of course of course and so a lot of people are hurting right now and you know it's been it was weird because we thought we were kind of coming out of it in terms of end of last year coming into january things were looking up and you know the market has never been better than they keep telling us this you know you can look at the numbers and they're all big but the layoffs are still happening the work conditions are still not great opportunity is is scarce and a lot of very talented people are out of jobs which means they're all fighting for the same jobs

right and that's tough young cats like you out they're still in the wars that's got to make you real uneasy me i could care less i'm i'm at my last stop this is where i'm gonna be yeah this would be when i'm when i leave here you're gonna find me right here so i'll be right here but it's got to be i mean that's got to be a concern you know i don't know because you don't know coming with ai and economic stuff it's just a very unpredictable landscape yeah and i just i mean i i hope one doesn't even know what skills to acquire you know you don't even know what with skill set right can i sell this yeah i mean this

well last year everybody was talking about prompt engineering was going to be a new skill that everybody needs to learn and now it's like isn't weren't we already doing that with our google prompts you know we're already prompting google for what we want now we're just prompting something else right and of course it is something you have to get good at the best developers and the best tech people know how to find the answer to their solutions more than they know all the solutions right right right so being able to find answers is part of that determination yeah so of course yes you need to learn how to engineer the prompts in order to get out of the language models help that you need to do your job but people are acting like that was going to be a new career path it's like prompt engineer and it's like that lasted like six months as a career path and now it's like nah it's just part of everything else and so what do you learn you know maybe you just go learn mainframes i don't know

well i can tell you that i mean i could i could tell you that they're gonna need mainframes but i really don't know i mean to get people to if i would advise somebody today i don't know i i would come to you guys what should they study what should they learn you know i say linux and python can they still sell linux and python i mean i know i know linux and python but i don't know what else they should learn i mean what should they learn in

one sense things are changing at all times but in other sense things get they build on top of other things and i don't think linux or python are bad bets for like the next decade do you i mean i just don't think they would be i really don't where can you apply linux knowledge specifically in the market i don't know i don't know if

it's that much the linux skills specifically adam but i will expand at the cloud skills and i don't think you can acquire cloud skills without understanding linux you might be able to might be able to at that point isn't it

simply just apis and interfaces and i suppose determination because like you're willing to like get past that certain thing agree no no i agree i mean kind of a couple steps removed from linux you may have the understanding of maybe even like kernel things or which flavor of linux suits the best task i just wonder because

i mean no i mean i i can't disagree with you at all because being a heavy aws user that's because before i ran my bill up so i couldn't afford to pay it but um i'm like okay i would not know how to teach an it curriculum today because i would teach them these these constituent technologies separately like database web programming but here they use them all together with with like you say a series of apis and tools and stuff so i don't know how far they have to drill down i can't answer that question

i really can't well we're starting to see a pendulum

swinging back away from the cloud yeah and that there's that too there's

that too there's a lot of pushback i think it's just like people getting tired of the the bill maybe you know like why keep paying the rent when you can own it i think there's that aspect of it and then there's this aspect of like well the control even you know just literally giving you know several small like not small companies a small handful of very large companies the lion's share of the influx of dollars going into what is called the cloud when the cloud is simply you know what you could make of it in some cases like you can get your own rack and stack servers you can co-locate you can do a lot of stuff if you're willing to put in the work of literally sourcing the server buying it now you you have your responsibility layers grown right you no longer have to just be responsible for certain things beyond the api you have to be responsible for the actual machine itself and stuff like that and maybe you're willing to take that risk on but that's really what the cloud has promised us is like let's just give you a working thing you never have to worry about it apis have slas and slos and we adhere to those you pay us x dollars but yeah i mean there's lots of examples out there where you're overpaying over years for cloud when you can be

on-prem oh yeah oh yeah now what form is this pushback taking are they going back on-prem or are they looking for other models maybe a regional model where companies share a location or something what i mean what manifestation is to push back

other than just words so there are some companies and a lot of them are i would say a small handful with loud voices who are actually taking their infrastructure out of the cloud back on-prem and building their racking and stacking servers and they got they're doing linux administration and they're and they're doing all that

stuff that that's a revolt that's a revolt yeah yeah exactly and

they're doing that almost purely for cost savings i would say that's their primary motivation and the cost savings are significant if you are in that group of people who have a stable business with known growth you know trends because the cloud provides a lot of things but the main thing it gives especially for startups is that dynamic scaling right like being able to scale it up scale it out scale it back down again that's really powerful for companies who don't know what their server demand is going to be so that's that's one and then there's also this movement of taking cloud apis to either your own hardware or to co-located and cheaper vps style infrastructure so now you are you're still everything we learned about the dynamic scalability of cloud apis and aws and others have given us what if we could use those same apis but like build them on our own hardware for instance and that's another movement and that one's about i think it's also about probably privacy plus cost but without losing a lot of what the cloud provides it's trying to have the best of both

worlds i guess well i know this is not a total analogy but it's somewhat analogous uh 20 years ago when i was at the airport uh hartfield airport in lanta uh when i joined the ceo to hire me everything was kind everybody was a contractor contract to various companies he brought all the function in the house the database the networking everything in house and saved a ton of money now it's not the same as cloud but it was kind of the same principle you've been farming this stuff out to contractors we're gonna bring it all in house and he saved a ton of money yeah i mean

there's advancements happening there i think you know like even with integration layers like between even networking is a probably big deal for cloud right like if you can have your database talk to your application server on the same network at a higher speed that's probably worth it like we experienced what was the latency we had jr with with neon we had like a little bit of latency that we were okay with because we called out to our database versus having it like literally the same network on the same you know in the same stack basically and that's a an example to some degree

that's still cloud based but yeah it is but yeah yeah amplify that couple of thousand times and you can yeah same concepts

right so there's another fella ben yuwa with feedbin which is a business that runs an rss reader service and he's a small business i mean i think he's got himself plus maybe an employee but he went completely out of the cloud to his own on-prem infrastructure and it was a project that took him months to do and his primary reason wasn't money although he saved money doing it over the long run it was worth the investment because it paid itself off his reason was because he could just eke out way more performance out of hardware that was not cloud-based hardware and again knowing exactly what his application is doing being like intimately understanding the needs of his application is it write heavy is it read every how much is he hitting the database etc he could build custom infrastructure that just works great for feedbin and makes it way faster and it makes a better product so that was another reason why he did it but you know we're just telling a few stories here none of this is like a massive migration away the cloud's huge you know understood but you but you have

given me the first i've heard of tangible technical specificity because i've heard some rumbling some grumblings you know cost cost cost but you told me specifically kind of what was going on so i mean you you see what you see everything is ad hoc until it's not right well

you know if you're not in the cloud where are you yeah learned a lot today i knew i would as did i as did i awesome well you know

when folks like us get together somebody's gonna learn something that's

right that's right all right thanks cameron that's a lot of fun thanks cameron bye friends bye friends we had so much fun talking to cameron and we hope you enjoyed it too the guy is just so enthused about helping people about educating about living life and that enthusiasm it's contagious if this is your first time hearing from him go back in the catalog and find our episode called mainframes are still a big thing from earlier last year that one's much more focused on mainframes cobalt and the tech side of what cameron teaches thanks once again to our partners at fly.io to our beat freak in residence breakmaster cylinder and to our friends at sentry we love sentry and have been using it for years if and when it's time for you to check them out use code changelog that helps us because it tells sentry that we're making an impact on their business and it helps you because they give you 100 bucks off their team plan once again use code changelog all one word next week on the changelog news on monday some reverse interviews on wednesday where we share a couple of podcast appearances adam and i have made lately and on friday should software developers specialize or generalize it depends and i'll be joined by my new friend adolfo mocha gavia for the next installment of our it depends mini series stay tuned right here please share our work with folks who might dig it and let's talk again real soon