Screaming in the Cloud

This episode of Screaming in the Cloud features Katie Reese, an experienced events producer at Tailscale, who walks us through the ins and outs of event marketing within the tech industry. Katie shares insights on effective swag management and event planning to create memorable experiences that drive product adoption. Additionally, Katie and Corey discuss the challenges and strategies of marketing in a post-pandemic, budget-conscious world and explore how remote-first companies have adapted to these changes.

Show Highlights:

00:00 - Intro
00:19 - Welcome Katie Reese, discussing life in sunny Mexico City and her work at Tailscale
03:03 - How Tailscale's product-led growth feels like magic
05:08 - Success stories from the Tailscale Up conference
06:25 - Event strategies in the post-pandemic, budget-conscious era
09:04 - The benefits of remote-first companies and changes in the event landscape
10:36 - Katie's career journey and the value of networking at events
14:34 - The thoughtful approach to swag and reducing event waste
20:14 - How bad marketing can ruin customer interactions
25:40 - Ensuring swag runs out at the right time at conferences
28:10 - Discussion on ethical event practices and avoiding waste
32:04 - Closing thoughts and where to find Katie online

About Katie:

Katie leads field events at Tailscale and, when she is not traveling, splits her time between small-town Tennessee and Mexico City because it's all about balance.

Links referenced:

*Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/
*Katie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-reese/
*Katie’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/katiereese317?lang=en

Sponsor
*Panoptica Academy: https://panoptica.app/lastweekinaws

This podcast features people doing interesting work in the world of Cloud. What is the state of the technical world? Let’s first focus on the up or down, on or off function of feature flags.

Today, we’re talking to Heidi Waterhouse, a technical writer turned Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly, which is a feature flag service - a way to wrap a snippet of code around your feature and make it into an instrument to turn on or off. It lets you turn things on and off in your codebase quickly without having to do several commits. However, it is difficult to track it when there are more than about a dozen flags. So, LaunchDarkly provides a way to manage your features at scale with a usable interface and API.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• A feature flag allows you to hide items before you want them to go live on your Website. You hide it behind a feature flag, doing all the work ahead of time. Then, at some point, you turn it all on instantly without the risk of pushing untested code into your production.
• You can test at scale to gain authentic data. Test something with your team, your company’s employees, your customers, etc. However, no matter how good your integration tests are, there’s always wobbles to watch for in the system.
• With implementation, there are a few paths that can work, such as the massive reorganization path. Or, you can just start incrementally with feature flags for new features.
• LaunchDarkly thinks in the Cloud as the surface because it mostly works with people who are doing Web-based delivery of features.
• Major companies, like Google and Facebook, offer services similar to feature flags for their own development. They’re operating on such a giant scale that they have internal teams doing it.
• Companies use feature flags on the front-end and other purposes. It works through the whole stack from frontend page delivery, pricing tiers, white labeling, style sheets, to safer deployments.
• Do not focus on documentation. You should not have to read documentation for anything that you don’t own. Every feature should have documentation tied to its code. Create a customized experience.
• Feature flags effectively manage and minimize risk. There is always risk in the world, but what causes disaster is not just one failure. It is a multiplication of failures. This goes wrong and that goes wrong. Feature flagging breaks monolithic releases into tiny chunks that can go forward or backward.
• LaunchDarkly holds monthly meet-ups called, Test and Production. People share their use case regarding continuous integration, continuous deployment, DevOps, etc.

Links:

• LaunchDarkly
• iPad
• Autodesk
• Slack
• IBM

Quotes by Heidi:

“What feature flags do is make it possible for you to push out a deployment with things hidden, we call it launching darkly.”

“We’re all about avoiding risk, I think this is our motto this year, eliminate risk...you can’t eliminate risk, but you can make it much less risky.”

“Go ahead and write your feature. You know that it’s hidden behind the magical feature flying curtain until you’re ready to turn it on.”

“If 20 years of technical writing taught me anything, it’s that nobody wants to be reading documentation.”

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In this episode, Corey Quinn is joined by Senior Security Engineering Lead at Mattermost Paul Harrison in a discussion on the often-overlooked ethical implications of artificial intelligence in technology. They discuss how the rapid adoption of AI technologies might compromise user privacy and consent, reflecting on instances where companies may prioritize innovation at the expense of these core values. Their conversation highlights Mattermost's dedication to data privacy and user control, positioning the company as a privacy-centric alternative in the tech landscape.

Show Highlights:

(00:00) Introduction to the episode

(01:50) How companies compromise privacy in the rush to adopt AI

(04:10) What is Mattermost? Paul explains the self-hostable, privacy-focused

communication platform

(06:00) The evolution of chat platforms and Mattermost's unique position compared to Slack

(10:01) Paul elaborates on how Mattermost enables user control over data and customization

(14:23) Discuss the implications of integrating AI in everyday applications and its challenges

(20:35) AI’s potential risks and unintended consequences, particularly in data management and security

(25:14) Paul and Corey critique tech companies’ approach to AI and data privacy

(28:59) Closing remarks and where to find more information about Paul Harrison and Mattermost

About Paul:

Paul Harrison is a Senior Security Engineering Lead at Mattermost, responsible for their Security Operations team. Prior to this he led Security Operations at GitLib, and several other emerging tech companies. Paul has specialized in building security operations and infrastructure security programs, enabling companies to have a secure footing as they grow.

Links Referenced:

Mattermost Community: https://community.mattermost.com/landing#/

*Sponsor

Panoptica: https://www.panoptica.app/

About Carla

Carla Stickler is a professional multi-hyphenate advocating for the inclusion of artists in STEM. Currently, she works as a software engineer at G2 in Chicago. She loves chatting with folks interested in shifting gears from the arts to programming and especially hopes to get more women into the field. Carla spent over 10 years performing in Broadway musicals, most notably, “Wicked,” “Mamma Mia!” and “The Sound of Music.” She recently made headlines for stepping back into the role of Elphaba on Broadway for a limited time to help out during the covid surge after not having performed the role for 7 years. Carla is passionate about reframing the narrative of the “starving artist” and states, “When we choose to walk away from a full-time pursuit of the arts, it does not make us failed artists. The possibilities for what we can do and who we can be are unlimited.”

Links Referenced:

• G2: https://www.g2.com/
• Personal website: https://carlastickler.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sticklercarla/

Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I’ve got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it’s more than just hipster monitoring.

Corey: What if there were a single place to get an inventory of what you're running in the cloud that wasn't "the monthly bill?" Further, what if there were a way to compare that inventory to what you were already managing via Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, but then automatically add the missing unmanaged or drifted parts to it? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Well, stop dreaming and start doing; visit snark.cloud/firefly to learn more.

Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn, there seems to be a trope in our industry that the real engineers all follow what more or less looks like the exact same pattern, where it’s you wind up playing around with computers as a small child and then you wind up going to any college you want—as long as it’s Stanford—and getting a degree in anything under the sun—as long as it’s computer science—and then all of your next jobs are based upon how well you can re-implement algorithms on the whiteboard. A lot of us didn’t go through that path. We wound up finding our own ways to tech. My guest today has one of the more remarkable stories that I’ve come across. Carla Stickler is a software engineer at G2. Carla, thank you for agreeing to suffer my slings and arrows today. It’s appreciated.

Carla: Thanks so much for having me, Corey.

Corey: So, before you entered tech—I believe this is your first job as an engineer and as of the time we’re recording this, it’s been just shy of a year that you’ve done in the role. What were you doing before now?

Carla: Oh, boy, Corey. What was I doing? I definitely was not doing software engineering. I was a Broadway actress. So, I spent about 15 years in New York doing musical theater, touring around the country and Asia in big Broadway shows. And that was pretty much all I did.

I guess, I also was a teacher. I was a voice teacher and I taught voice lessons, and I had a studio and I taught it a couple of faculties in New York. But I was one hundred percent ride-or-die, like, all the way to the end musical theater or bust, from a very, very early age. So, it’s been kind of a crazy time chang...

In this Summer Replay of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey is joined by Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. In this cost-cutting conversation from 2021, Matthew breaks down what exactly Cloudflare is up to, and how they are handling their clients' cloud cost needs. The pair focus on Cloudflare as a company and the options they are bringing to their clients. They discuss their mutual concerns with some AWS costs and why Cloudflare’s suite of tools has slowly been made available over time. Turn back the clock with this fan-favorite episode for more insight.

Show Highlights:

• (0:00) Intro
• (0:53) Backblaze sponsor read
• (1:20) Origins of Cloudflare
• (5:55) The Achilles Heel of the AWS cloud
• (10:09) What is Cloudflare R2?
• (12:26) Pricing philosophies in the cloud
• (17:35) Egress cost of the “static” internet
• (19:48) How Amazon’s pricing harms the overall market
• (24:34) Firefly sponsor read
• (25:10) Cloudflare’s endgame
• (28:32) Staying focused as a business
• (33:35) The value of providing a valuable service
• (37:17) “The internet is a fad.”
• (42:19) The strength of admitting you’re wrong
• (43:04) Where you can find out more about Cloudflare

About Matthew Prince:

Matthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world's largest networks, which spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. Matthew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Illinois Bar, and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College. He’s also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.

Links Referenced:

• The Cloudflare Blog: blogs.cloudflare.com

Sponsors:

• Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
• Firefly: https://www.firefly.ai/