Jason Dobies I Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat | In the Open with Luke and Joe

Luke: Today I am pleased to bring you a conversation with Jason Dobies. Jason is the Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat. We're going to be discussing a variety of topics including Kubernetes, operators, OpenShift, as well as some career advice. But before we welcome Jason, let's say hello to our co- host, Joe Zepi.

Joe Zepi: Hello Luke. How are you my friend?

Luke: Good. How are you doing Joe?

Joe Zepi: I'm all right. I'm all right. Every time you say don't forget to subscribe. I think of my son who watches all those YouTube videos and they're like, " Don't forget to smash that like button". So yeah, don't forget to smash it.

Luke: Well, when I was recording it the first time, my wife, I asked her to listen to it and that's what she came back and said, " You didn't say like and subscribe. You got to say and subscribe."

Joe Zepi: That's so true. Yeah. So how is the weather by you? I'll say here it is gorgeous. We turned off the AC, we have got the windows open and it is a nice day.

Luke: It is lovely as well where we are 30, 40 minutes away, but I would say two or three days ago it was sweltering and I was building a plank ceiling and I was up on a ladder. I was pouring sweat. It was brutal.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. Yeah. You take some time off to do some work on the house in the hottest part of the year so far.

Luke: It's funny, coming back to work is actually relaxing. If I take time off, it's worse. Before we bring Jason on, I just wanted to mention to everyone listening. We have been doing the live streaming. This is actually our eighth episode, but we have now pushed these over and you can listen on your favorite podcast platform. So we're on, I would say, probably a dozen different platforms. Your favorite is probably on that list. That link is also on our normal page that we have the live streaming on IBM Developer, which you can find with this link. But there is also... Find us on your favorite platform, and please subscribe there as well.

Joe Zepi: Yeah, smash it.

Luke: So without further ado, let's welcome Jason in.

Jason Dobies: What's up guys? Thank you for having me.

Joe Zepi: Yeah, how are you Jason?

Jason Dobies: I'm good. You had me cracking up with that whole like and subscribe thing. So last year, COVID changing everything, we started streaming on Twitch, Red Hat, and OpenShift got a channel, but I actually started on the IBM Developer Advocates channel with JJ and I mentioned it to my son and he's like, " You're on Twitch?" And I'm like, " Yeah dude, it's not nearly as cool as inaudible." Do you have followers? I'm like, " Sure, let's call it that." He's nine. He has got no idea that I'm a giant nerd at my job. But yeah, let's just think I'm cool and I'm a Twitch streamer, let's run with that.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. Yeah. I've been on YouTube for a long time, I think maybe 2004 or 2005 or something because I'm a musician and so I was putting up videos of music stuff there. So yeah, my son is the same. He's like, " You're on YouTube. You've got a hundred subscribers or something." And I'm like, " Ah, I wish I had more," or whatever. But he's like, "It's so cool." So yeah, it's funny. Kids bring perspective.

Jason Dobies: They do. You know what though? Adults do too. So I'm a developer advocate and I don't know what you guys intended in terms of introduction, but I'll do it anyway. But that also means I do a lot of traveling or I used to do a lot of traveling and speaking in front of people and it's never something... If you asked me five years ago if I ever thought this would be something I'd want to do, I'd be like, "No." I used to be scared of public speaking and now I'll come back from a conference and people at my gym are just talking to me and relatives are like how it was and I'm like, " Good. It was a small audience like 300 people." And they go white imagining talking to 300 people. So it's also impressive to them in a certain way. Like you said, the kids thing, I get to flex the whole Twitch and stuff like that and I've shown them pictures, but they get like, " How do you do it?" And I'm like, " Anything under 30 is informal. That's a classroom. We're all chatting. Anything beyond that to 800 is just the same." It just blurs in and then over that, then you start to get a little bit nervous again, and then you're talking like you have to look left and to see people and that's when it gets a little intimidating.

Joe Zepi: Yeah, it's interesting that you bring this up because I find it sort of fascinating, especially thinking about myself. I've been in bands since I was young and I just love getting on stage and performing for a crowd. Usually, our band plays to between 30 and a hundred people, but we've played to some sold- out theaters, 600, 700 people and I love it and I jump on stage in a moment. That being said, speaking was a challenge for me and I wanted to do it, so I did do it, but I remember... I shouldn't say I remember, I'm still always nervous and I get up there and I still need to un- psyche myself out. Whether it's a small group or a large group, I'm still always nervous. So I kind of wonder about other people who are advocates and speakers. My nerves never went away. It's a little better and I feel a little more comfortable up there and I've gotten kind of my own way of doing it that helps me to get through it. But I'm still nervous every time

Jason Dobies: I am too. This is funny because it's going to sound like I'm kissing your butts, but I was genuinely not nervous for this for a couple reasons. One, we had our little inside baseball here, but we met up last week to just do a tech sync and I immediately knew I was going to gel with these two guys, but the real reason is I don't have a live demo prepared for this. And so many of my talks are live demos and that's just a whole new level of what is going to go horribly wrong in front of me. So this has been refreshing in that respect. I'm going to have to change my wallpaper and set up my prompts so you can actually read it and stuff like that. I'm like, no, all of that just stays the same. But you're a hundred percent right, we do still absolutely get nervous about it. A buddy of mine does probably three times more speaking engagements than I do. And I said that to him, I was like, "Are you just completely numb to it now?" He's like, " No." He gets nervous every time. For me, a lot of is an evolving thing. If I were to talk to you in another six months, my stance would be different. And another six months after that, everything is changing. But it started 2019, I was in Detroit speaking and it was a theater- type setup and it was a stage and they had smoke and lasers. The coolest I'm ever going to feel in my entire life because I don't even have the music to fall back on. I am just a nerd through and through. I was psyched and I was the first one to go and I was psyching myself up my head, my headphones on in the back, and I started picking certain songs that at the time I was like, " Yes, this is going to hit. This is going to hit." And then I just saved that as a playlist and that is my prep. 10 minutes before a call, I will at this point now that I'm home, I'll lock myself to my bedroom, so my wife doesn't see me spazzing out. I'll have my headphones on and I'm getting JJ, again from IBM had used the term perform for when we do a live stream or a talk. And that's really the best way of putting it. Entertain feels a little presumptuous, maybe be like, " Oh, I'm going to go entertain." Don't go that far, but it is a persona, it is a different feel. And then I'll come out of this even today and just be spent and there's usually that kind of calm down. But it's almost like a high, I'm not going to be like this is... I'm not going to go that extreme to say it's a high, but you definitely come off and as long as you don't completely do awful, you get that. The energy starts to die down and you relax and this is great because it's a Friday.

Joe Zepi: Yeah, I think it's a inaudible has a high too. You get endorphins or whatever it is exactly.

Jason Dobies: Is that what that is? I was told it was asthma and that's why I usually black out about 200 meters in. So we'll call this the nerd version of the inaudible.

Luke: And something I think that feeds into that good feeling too is if you give a talk and you get to answer some questions or someone later writes to him, that it makes it like, " Oh this was worth it." Someone actually cared that this happened, which makes me want to mention: Hey folks, if you're listening, if you have any questions for Jason, Joe, or myself, feel free to drop them in the chat wherever you are and if you happen to be listening on replay, feel free to just tweet at us. We're happy to answer these things asynchronously. And this also ties in... I was going to mention some of these techniques. I like what you were saying about listening to a music Jason. One of our coworkers, Roger, used to be an executive coach and he would tell us to do this power pose. He would raise your hands and it's the fake it till you make it smiling. It's like it actually worked. And then the other thing that I came up with on my own, I'm sure other people do it as well, but I find that if I'm going to talk and I'm nervous before the talk, instead of being backstage and being completely secluded, I start talking to the audience right away. When we would run meetups in New York, Joe, it's I work the room ahead of time so that I'm comfortable with that crowd and I feel like by the time I get to stage or the front of the room, it's just continuing what I already started as a one- on- one.

Joe Zepi: Yeah, that's smart.

Jason Dobies: That is smart. It has been such a mixed bag doing everything virtual for the past year and a half. It has been... You lose exactly what you just said, but you gain things like that chat. And I've adopted very early on, I migrated a lot of my stuff to this Twitch streamer type of thing where I'll tell people when I'm teaching a workshop that I've got chat open on the side, interrupt me, ask me questions, tell me to try to break my demo. It has been an interesting new level of interaction where it's obviously super canned if I type in a series of 10 commands and I'm like, " Look to dot works," and it's great when someone is, " What happens if you do this?" I'm like, " Crashes. Let's watch it." And those are the best. That kind of interaction I am going to miss that when we go back to onstage and preaching more out to people because they do, that kind of classroom atmosphere where I'm like, " Yeah, interrupt me, and let's cover what you want," because ultimately that's the best part of this whole thing is if they're like, this is what I really wanted to see. Cool. Let's see it.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. And I'm curious, I thought of a question earlier that I want to circle back to on this is you said you're exhausted after a talk. And I think it's important to acknowledge this too. There are a lot of speakers. I'm an extrovert. I perform in a band and I love just being out with people, but I know a lot of speakers, advocates and such are more introverted. And I was working with this guy who is just extremely online and does a lot of talks and stuff and then we work together, we're on the same team and we did our first event together and I was like, " Oh, you want to go get something to eat and go out afterwards?" And he was like, " Nope, I'm going back to my room and I need to decompress and maybe I'll talk to you tomorrow." And I was like, " Oh, okay." So I'm number one. I want to acknowledge that is sometimes the case because I think people in an audience are like, let's go and they're turned off when somebody is, "Eh." So definitely want to acknowledge that. But I'm curious, where do you fall in that spectrum of introvert, extrovert?

Jason Dobies: I am a hundred percent introvert. This is such a fascinating topic. There are so many places I want to go with this. Okay, let's take it to a very small tangent here. My daughter is 13 and my son is nine. Now my daughter is an introvert and she's shy. She has got a small handful of close friends, but she doesn't even want to be the popular kid or anything like that. And we're fine with that, my wife and I. But I remember back to when I was growing up, now I'm 42, so that was a generation ago and that was, " Oh, the shy kid needed to be fixed," and go out of your comfort zone and enroll you in stuff to break you of that habit. And personally, it was maybe five years ago that I started to embrace introvert as an actual trait and not a flaw. I had a friend, her name is Amy, and she was aggressively introverted, and what I mean is she would post memes about it on Instagram, but you see more and more of them and you see the people being like, " Oh my God, this is so me." And I'm like, " Wow, that's a thing. Other people feel that." And it took me a while... And then to the conference thing, yes I have a finite of amount of energy and when my energy is there, cool, let's talk, let's hang out. I will do booth duty, especially now after COVID, put me in a 12- hour booth shift. I don't care. But the second that energy dies out, I am done with anyone and I'm a go back to my room and play Switch or read a book and get room service. Back when I used to do partner relationships, " Yeah, we're going out to dinner, do you want to come?" And I'm like, "I really don't." They're like, "No, this is a really nice steak place." And I'm like, " I'm sure it is, but it's got people around and I just don't have it in me anymore." And people don't understand that either. I meet people at my gym is all a fairly close group of people that talk regularly and they're like, " I can't imagine you're an introvert." And I'm like, " Like I said, when I have the energy I will hang out with you and talk to you. And then when that is done, it's an instant switch. I don't slowly peter out, I am just done. And you'll see me duck out of a conference and just disappear." And like I said, it has been a lot to come to grips with as odd as it sounds and in my mid- thirties I'm still having these existential life crises. But seeing it, I've accepted more now and I'd like to think it's making my 13- year- old's life a little bit easier that we're not like, " No. Fix this. Go out and have thousands of friends." I'm just like, " She's like me." I get it. I totally get it.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. I wonder, I've thought about this too. Is it me becoming more aware and therefore it seems like the world is becoming more aware or is the world, and I feel like it's the latter here, that the world is becoming more aware of everybody has their things and people are becoming more tolerant and aware and stuff.

Jason Dobies: I think tolerant is a great way of putting it. You look at... So my parents, I had to lean on them and I don't want to get political about this, but to get the COVID vaccine and my dad is one of these, "I don't go to a doctor. I'm a man." I'm like, " Dad, you literally have a bone sticking out of your arms inaudible duct tape." And he was a computer guy too, don't get me wrong. I know you're picturing this kind of big burly trucker dude having that kind of mentality. He was a computer nerd like me. And I remember my mom telling me. She was like, "You'll be happy we finally scheduled our vaccine." I'm like, " No, you should be happy that you don't have the self- preservation to do this and I pushed you into it." Where am I going with this? But the generation, the tolerance differences, doctors are different now. Not only health issues but quality of life stuff that I'm not afraid to be like, " Yeah, I want to get this checked out." This is something I can use to make my life a little bit easier. And I think that mental health, which is ultimately what this kind of comes down to is in a similar boat. People are different. And it's not this kind of cookie cutter mold you need to shove them into and then don't want to go down this route. But in terms of tolerance, the past 10 years have just seen so much of a better approach. And it's not great by any stretch of the imagination. There's still a ton of work that needs to be done. I look at my 13- year- old in the world she's coming into and I compare it to when she was born. And yeah, there's a lot more understanding out there that people are different and that's okay.

Joe Zepi: And I think kids really help adults to bring a lot of perspective to that. But I do think generationally things are moving in the right direction. I know there have been some challenges over the last however many years, but I think to see some government stuff happening where they're taking more quality of life issues such as infrastructure, I think, to me that makes sense. But to think about the kids too and the perspective that they're bringing. My son is a little more like my wife in some ways and I remember taking him to skateboarding and he was just overwhelmed by everything that was going on and he just stood there. I was like, " What are you doing? Come on, let's go. We're not just standing around here a little bit."

Jason Dobies: Let's do a kick flip.

Joe Zepi: Yeah, exactly. Kick flip dude. Yeah, so it's interesting. Kids bring a lot of perspective but I do think generationally things are progressing for lack of a better term, perhaps.

Jason Dobies: Yeah, definitely in the right direction.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. Cool. So that's all interesting. I'm curious, you've intro- ed yourself a little bit in the beginning, but what does your day look like? What are you typically doing? And I'll also add, I updated your name, I hope that's accurate, OpenShift Advocate and your Twitter handle there.

Jason Dobies: Yeah, that's close enough. I'm also at the point in my life where I need my job title to describe what I am rather than be whatever. Yeah, I'm actually the OpenShift Developer Advocate lead. I got moved into that role a couple months ago. My day- to- day varies very wildly, which is so cool because I look back... Let me take a step back, actually. So I've been at Red Hat for 15 years, been in the industry for a little over 20 now because we just had my 20- year college reunion like a month ago and woof that was so... And yeah, I spent the first 16, 17 years of that on engineering teams in development, bounced around languages, different types of teams, did government work where I had classified access, which is nowhere near as cool as it sounds because you think, " Oh, it's going to be all these cool secrets." No. It's a whole bunch of data that I don't know what it is and then I look like an idiot when I use it in the wrong way. But I'm not allowed to know what it is. And that's actually a very true story. Real quick. We did... It was a weapon target pairing system and the planes that we used in the data were actually cargo planes. And my boss who was ex- military was like, " How could you make that mistake?" And I'm like, " Numbers. I have no idea what I'm looking at. I'm not allowed to have an idea of what I'm looking at. This is the best data I was given." So not as fun as it sounds. You think it's going to be Mission Impossible- type cool stuff, it's not. Where was I going with this? Oh, but I think back to the days when I was just on a project and coming in every day and spending two, three, four sprints in a row, fine- tuning a small piece of a small puzzle. And I look at it now on the breadth of different things that I get to do is exhausting but still super cool the past couple of weeks. So we have a website KubernetesByExample. com. My team originally started it a couple years ago, ta- dah. I say that this is the first podcast or thing that I've been on all COVID that is ultimately going to find its way to a podcast. And only now am I realizing how much visual stuff I do where I refer to something on screen and you did the superhero pose. I'm like, "This is all lost in audio." For anyone listening, there's a really cool URL appearing. So KubernetesByExample...

Joe Zepi: Dot com.

Jason Dobies: Dot com. Thank you. But it is meant to be just Kubernetes specific content. So very loose touch on top of Red Hat and much more educational. And that's ultimately where my interests lie in the teaching and the kind of upstream technology. So we are redoing that. If you go to that right now, you'll actually see a banner at the top of that next Tuesday with our summit. We are launching a new version of that site and it's got a huge wealth of content coming to it in terms of video and different topics covered in programming languages and so on. So the past couple of two, three months of my life have been a lot of time dedicated to that everywhere from writing new content to porting the existing content, but also involved at the planning level. So this is really cool because I've never been part of this type of branding thing where we got pitched the new logos and stuff like that and it was fascinating to me because I have no graphical talent, but I'm interested in it. So seeing them and hearing his rationale for, oh we went with this ASKE approach and the command line and stuff and I'm like, " This is so cool," to get to be part of those conversations and planning and general guidelines and stuff. There's been a ton of work around that and that's been really cool. I mentioned speaking so when I get CFPs or when I get papers or proposals accepted, I get to create demos and that's probably my favorite part of the job because I get to do all of the cool stuff of coding without any of the production and maintenance of it. Yes, exactly. Getting a big thumbs up on the video here because... And I don't know if I could go back to this point of having to actually have good error checking and logging and maintaining bugs. The amount of my demos where I leave notes to myself, " LOL don't do this again," it's amazing because I don't have to maintain. It goes away. But they can be fun too. I did one... I have one talk where I connect a Philips Hue light bulb where it can do... They claim 16 million colors but you can basically programmatically control the color of it to these vibrant reds and purples and blues and still got the various whites and tans. But I connect that to an OpenShift cluster and I show how basically showed it user load testing and that there are different users changing the color of the light bulb. And as I'm explaining containers and all that stuff, the light is flashing different colors for each user. That was fun. I do have another talk where I was sitting at a coffee shop, I'm like, "All right, got to write a talk today." And it was one of half an hour staring blankly. I was like, " I got nothing on this." But it finally dawned on me that I like watching computers in movies. I don't know if you guys have this too and how absolutely poorly they're represented.

Joe Zepi: On your butts.

Jason Dobies: Yes. Oh my God, yes. It's very funny you mentioned that particular line because there's a sub- Reddit called, it's a Eunuch system based on that quote from Jurassic Park. And it's all of these different screenshots and examples of movies and TV that use technical- sounding stuff. But it's wrong. They'll zoom in on somebody's window and they're doing an LS and they're like, " Oh, we're hacking." Okay, you're listing files are in a directory. But yeah, and I did a talk around the movie War Games, which is from like'82 or something like that. Had to look up the dates to remember how old it was. And I take a couple of different scenes from that movie of him using computers and I modernize that to containers. So the war dialer scene and the whopper stuff. So getting to write talks that demonstrate technology-

Joe Zepi: But I'm sorry to interrupt you. Hang on. So you already gave this talk because I'm fascinated now I want to go watch it after we're done here.

Jason Dobies: I've done it a couple times. I don't know that I have it recorded anywhere. It was that 2019 talk I just mentioned where I was on stage. But it was a blast, especially on stage. It was one of my last couple of times on stage before COVID. But let me go back for a second. And you're right this time totally does fly by, especially when you're off- topic like this. Yes, exactly. You can probably just keep that up because I tend to go off on the... Like I said, my dad was in computers, so growing up I was in computers because they were in the house and back in the eighties and nineties most people didn't have that. And he would take me to this PC expo in the Javits Center in New York and it was cool to see all the stuff in the booths, but that was a big time where they were giving T- shirts out and what they used to do is if you go see a session and I started to learn that the louder you cheer, they tend to throw a T- shirt at you. So then it became how many T- shirts can I come away with? Now current conferences and stuff, it's a lot easier. You usually walk up and they scan your badge and they hand you a T- shirt. But at this conference doing this particular talk, I featured three movies where I showed just still screenshots of the poor hacking scene. And then I had the audience shout out what it was and they figured it out. And usually to the loudest one, I flug a T-shirt at it. And like I said, this was only with the smoke so I couldn't really see. So I have no idea if people were spilling coffee or whatever because I probably should have lobbed it and by the end, I am full- on baseball winging it at people. It was so much fun. Yeah, but that's probably my single favorite talk to give. It was really cool. And I try to do things that are a little bit interesting to see while still being taught because 45 minutes of just lecture is a little rough to listen to.

Luke: Did you use the 1995 movie Hackers in that talk at all?

Jason Dobies: Of course, I used the movie Hackers in there. Yes. I cannot not. So I started with Jurassic Park was one of them. I had the little girl in the... It's a Unix system, which interesting note on that. If you've ever read the book, I hadn't known this. The genders are swapped. So in the book Jurassic Park, the older hacker child is the boy and the younger one is the girl. And the really cool... Yeah, this is'95, that it was an intentional change for the movie to be more inclusive. And you look back as far as'95, that was way ahead of its time to be really like, " No. Girls and computers is a thing. This is good. We can promote this kind of stuff." And that's really cool to find out that far back they were already starting to, " Yeah, we should probably be a little more representative than your standard generic computer dude." But yeah, absolutely used Hackers. I love that movie in all of its awfulness. I use three screenshots and I'm like, " Guys I could talk for an hour and a half on these screenshots alone." The one in particular... I'm sure you guys can picture it too. It's when they first go in, when the plague first goes in, he's on the skateboard and they're going past the file servers and the file servers are for some reason glass panels with light up file names on them and there's this big six monitor screen and the password comes up and it's a password field of three characters and they type in God and it's the password and it fits and it's so awful. And as he's hacking, they show the file servers and they're like electricity arcing between them because apparently OSHA wasn't a thing back then. Amazing movie.

Joe Zepi: Oh, it's so great. We can do a whole podcast just on this topic.

Jason Dobies: Totally could.

Luke: I think we should. I think we should. You mentioned War Games as well and recently I was reading a post that, that film corresponded to when modems first came on to the consumer market and that film actually was a big boom for modems being bought in... What was it?'82 or '83.

Jason Dobies: Wow.

Luke: That film exactly was the thing that put it in this-

Jason Dobies: That's really cool. We did... So we had a modem early on of 2, 400 that long ago that my dad was into it, but we never had the pickup the receiver... And again podcast, I'm doing visual stuff. Pick up the receiver and put it on the actual little container. We always just had the plug- in ones but they still played the screechy sounds out loud. Still epic and amazing to think back on. What a weird world that... I look at my kids and I'm like, " I grew up before the internet. I saw the internet being born and they don't completely"... Some of my students... I'll mention what I mean by that in a second, but college level kids won't understand that. They're old enough to be like, " No. Did you have electricity back then?" Yeah, we had cars too. But so I'm also an adjunct professor at Villanova University. I teach software engineering and senior projects and I started in my mid- twenties. So it was fun because I used to blend in with the students because I still looked young at that point. I still had hair and no grays and didn't have kids. So all of this wear and tear is not there. And I had one time where I was sitting with a student and his friend comes over and he starts talking to him and he is, " What are you doing tonight?" And my student's like, " Oh, I have class." And the friend is like, "Ah, just blow it off." And he's like, "Dude, that's my teacher right there." And I took that away. That's funny at that point. But I made a comment where I first started to really feel old. All right, see where I'm going with this... Last semester I mentioned the Y2K panic I guess you can call it. And I'm telling them about what it was like and I was just graduating college, I was there anxious to go out and make all this Y2K porting money. And then I graduated, it was all gone and I mentioned it to them and a couple minutes later I'm talking to one of my students, he's like, "Yeah, that was really interesting for me to hear because I wasn't even born until 2001." And I'm like, " I'm failing you right now just for making me feel that bad." That one hurt. That one was particularly painful.

Joe Zepi: That's funny. I won't get too much off on this tangent, but the Y2K brought me into computer programming. I was playing in a band and our drummer's dad was like, " Yeah, the band thing is cool, but you should really try to get a job." And so he took a class on COBOL because Y2K was coming up and he was like, " You should take this class too. It's guaranteed money." And I was like, " Yeah, but it's really not interesting." And I really didn't do anything with computers at the time. But he did take the class and as soon as he got out, he got a great job. He brought home a laptop and then I was like, " Oh, what's this internet thing? How do I book my band on this internet?" And next thing I know I'm like, " Oh, JavaScript, that's cool. I understand this. This makes sense." And I started reading books in the back of the tour van about how to build websites and next thing I know I'm working at companies. So yeah, Y2K for the win.

Jason Dobies: This also... You mentioned COBOL on an IBM stream, which actually ticks my bingo card because when I was streaming with JJ. We went on this COBOL tangent where he is like, " Got to get it running on OpenShift." I'm like, " You're a sociopath." But you did a whole stream on getting COBOL stuff running in OpenShift and it became a running joke with us. And now I feel very good that I've checked... The COBOL box checked off.

Luke: I have a little bit more of a tangent to continue before we... I do want to bring up the summit coming up next week. But I just have to mention this, I had a Commodore 64, I had the 2, 400 pod modem. I was doing BBSs. Yeah, where are we going with this? I'm under BBSs. I got that space and then I had heard about the internet and I was like... This was mid- nineties. And I was like, " Okay. I want to get into this." So then I convinced my father to give me his credit card. I signed up, I dialed in, and then I'm like, " What do I do now?" I didn't even know what a URL was. I was literally just staring at it and being like, "What do I do now? I don't even know where to go." I figured it out since then. Spoilers. I figured it out.

Joe Zepi: Yeah.

Jason Dobies: Just a little bit. Last off tangent story. It's probably not the last. Mid- nineties, same timeframe. I was in high school and my teacher made us subscribe to Newsweek and every week she would quiz us on the issue. I eventually stumbled on Newsweek, would host those quizzes on their website, but virtually no one had really known what a website was at that point. So for months on end, I would see the quiz a day or two before we got asked it in class. And it was a nice easy classroom for inaudible, just leave it at that, obviously.

Joe Zepi: That's funny. So yeah, I feel like there were things we wanted to talk about today.

Jason Dobies: I covered everything. We talked about War Games, all sorts of fun stuff. Yeah, I should probably actually tie this back into something for work. So I did want to talk earlier about Kubernetes by Example. I did want to mention that's going live on Tuesday, which corresponds with our summit. So normally our Red Hat summit is the big Red Hat conference of the year. When I say normally, because when it's live, we usually do it neither Boston or San Francisco and we tend to alternate the past couple years. We go to a convention center, we do the old school things you used to do back when you got together in person and being Red Hat, we vomited red everywhere. I remember walking into Boston, the carpet is red, there are bright red lights. It was painful to be in, awesome at the same time. And I miss it. And I just say normally yearly. But this year we've actually split it up into a couple of different concepts. So we had Summit One because we lack creativity back in April. And then Summit Two is next week. So starting on Tuesday. And this is the one that has a lot more content to it, a lot more technical content. We have the website for it is going to have these different booths you can go to or booths in air quotes where we'll have chat rooms to interact like you normally would when you saw me at a booth if you had questions. It'll feature some of our self- driven scenarios and I'll come back to that stuff in a second. And then obviously, there are going to be some announcements and keynotes and things like that. And then in the fall, we have something called Summit Connect. Don't know how... I haven't been told. I can't say anything about this, but I will say vague that we are attempting to get back to in- person stuff. So these are going to be these smaller, almost road showy- type events. I have seen the dates and the locations and I'll just say various places across the US of these smaller, very lab driven events. And to me those are the fun types of things where you come in, you bring a laptop and then we give you credentials to, depending on what it is you're doing either an OpenShift cluster or maybe Ansible Cat Tower or something like that. But that's all coming up in the fall. So next week we'll start with Monday. So the 14th, right? Monday. We have a program called OpenShift Commons and this is this upstream community of partners and developers and customers. They always do, again in- person gathering before the major events, coupon and Red Hat summit. And those are a blast. A woman named Diane Yuler runs it. She's amazing. She usually does the intro and then has a ton of different types of speakers come in. A lot of them are not Red Hat, which is... I always like when we have the different perspectives come in. I'm sure you guys like it too. It's not just, okay, technology vomit, technology vomit. It's oh, this is our usage of it and this is our take. So that'll be on Monday. Thank you for putting that in: commons @ openshift. org. Completely free event. Going to be hosted online. Very cool stuff. And then Tuesday and Wednesday are our Red Hat summit. And like I said, it's still trying to capture as much of that in- person feel as possible. We've got the chat rooms for the booths. I do miss the booth crawls and the smell of the fresh carpet when they first put it down. And then-

Joe Zepi: The hallway track and yeah.

Jason Dobies: Yes. And then by the end of the week, the smell of the BO because everybody is just gross by the end of the week. You know what I don't miss? I don't miss shaking hands. We used to run... My team at these will, at the booth, put out laptops and we will have these self- driven scenarios, which again I promise I'm going to come back to where someone comes up, they take 10 minutes and they run through a scenario that teaches them about something related to OpenShift. If it's ODO, which is a developer command line tool, if it's Tecton for pipelines, if it's serverless technology, whatever. And then they spin a laptop around and they show they finish it and we get to hand them a T- shirt and then life goes on. A lot of times that will devolve into a conversation. Someone will either come running up to us and be like, " Who can I ask about OpenShift?" You're like, " Oh crap, this guy has got a serious problem. Not something I'm going to be able to answer." And you can tell because he's just out of breath and he's just like I'm going to hunt down those Red Hat guys and complain about something. But then a lot of the times the laptop stuff leads to some good conversations and it's always great. And then of course they're like, " Listen, but Jay, thank you for talking to me." And they reach their hand over and I'm like, " Oh, I got a shake a sweaty nerd hand," and I don't miss that. So we don't have that next week in the-

Joe Zepi: No handshakes.

Jason Dobies: No handshakes. Maybe I'll just lick my palms to feel clammy just to get the real full conference experience there.

Joe Zepi: I wouldn't. Don't do that.

Jason Dobies: No, I won't.

Luke: Or wash your hands first.

Joe Zepi: Yeah.

Luke: You have to. But I like it. I like it.

Jason Dobies: After the last year and a half my hands are never not washed.

Joe Zepi: Yeah, exactly.

Jason Dobies: But yeah, let me talk about learn. openshift. com right now too. Oops, my Alexis kicking in. So I keep mentioning these self- driven scenarios. So something else my-

Joe Zepi: Let me get you a baguette, is that what she said?

Jason Dobies: That might have been. I don't know what she picked up on. That has been the last year and a half of my life. I say something that sounds vaguely like it and it chimes in and they'll be vacuuming or kid set themselves on fire and you hear that through the microphone. Only problem with the nice technologies, it picks up everything in the house. There is a site we maintained learn. openshift. com and it is a bunch of the self- driven tutorials. The ones I was talking about earlier on. I mentioned a couple of topics. There's deeper dives into particular languages, a lot on Spring Boot, a lot on Quercus. There's stuff about ISEO and service mess technology, GitOps, just general container fundamental knowledge. And it's really cool cause you go there and it provisions you in an environment. So you start up and on one side you have all of the instructions and on the other side is a terminal and likely an embedded console for OpenShift stuff. And then as you're going through the content, you see a command and you click on it and automatically types it in the terminals. And that's always a really neat thing because the less fat fingering you have happening is certainly going to work out better.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Dobies: So this has been a huge thing for my team spending a lot of time in the next quarter or so, adding some new content and polishing some stuff up. But definitely, something for people to go to check out, just learning stuff because like I said, that's my favorite part of advocacy is the teaching. And hey, do it yourself. Start typing along, start messing with things.

Joe Zepi: And this is your job. So I know you're required to mention this, but I actually think I brought it up before we went live and I mentioned it because I'm super impressed with how the platform works. It's put together really well. The console and the contents side by side... Excuse me, works really well. And I was really impressed with going through some of those self- guided things. They're really good.

Jason Dobies: Thank you. I will pass that on to the team and it's so much more important to me instead of just reading something to actually do it. The Kubernetes by Example stuff that was coming out next week, all of that is written basically with mini cube in mind. So hey here's a quick and easy way to get a Kubernetes cluster, start typing along. Copy and paste. And if you're unsure... Because the hard part about teaching is you need to give instructional steps, but if the person watching it is looking, they're like, " Wait, what if I did," and then they can't do that in a prerecorded demo or when I'm on stage and that for me personally, I'll spin on that and I'll be like, " I wonder why he did it that way." So the hands- on stuff is just amazing. Just such a great way of learning.

Joe Zepi: And I'll call this out too because whenever I see Odio, I'm like, " Is it pronounced Odo? Odu? Odio?" I like Odio. Because then it makes me think of an Odio rodeo. So I'll remember that.

Jason Dobies: Yeah, we actually don't know the answer to that either. It gets shaded. It used to stand for OpenShift Due, but then it got conned out to not be called that anymore. Now that it works on vanilla Kubernetes. But even in that world, Odo, Odu, Odio, worse is when I'll be talking about it and I just swap in between them in middle of it. It's one of those unfortunately named things that we run into those all the time in the industry kind of stuff. QUAY. io. Do you know what that... First off, you are least familiar with it? I'm seeing nodding. How do you pronounce that?

Joe Zepi: I say quay.

Jason Dobies: Okay. That's what you say too. I'm told it's key. So we bought inaudible and they were like, " Yeah, we're bringing along our product and it's actually pronounced key." And we all looked at them and said, " Cool, I guess I should plug the product now." Quay. io is a public container image hosting repository similar to Docker Hub except it's not Docker branded, but have public and private repos, anything you would imagine out of an image repository type of thing. So key or Quay. io, Q- U- A- Y, for those of you listening on the podcast, and I guess that probably should have been said first before we started talking about the whole pronunciation part.

Joe Zepi: Too, I'll just add, looking up Odio the other day, I didn't know this because I'm not a big Star Trek person, but one of the main characters is named Odo, Odu, I'm not sure.

Jason Dobies: I'm not a Star Trek person either. And I'm pretty sure it was JJ who pointed that out to me and then got very disappointed in me that I didn't know the Star Trek reference. Since then, I've done talks on it and in chat someone will mention it. So now I can at least say, " Yeah, I've heard that's the case." But for all of my geekdom, Star Trek has just never really clicked with mine.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. Go ahead Luke.

Luke: I'm sorry, I have to go off on another tangent here of trivia about these other references too that I think are fascinating. Where are we going with this? And actually this one relates to our guest because you're coming from a Python, you are a Python developer in the past. Python is actually named after Monty Python.

Jason Dobies: Yep. Which is why you see a fair amount of times when they do variable names and things like that. They'll have spam and eggs and stuff like that. Oh, I don't have it available, but my... So bios slide before presentations. This is so not funny said out loud, I'm going to do it anyway. I did it in the style of a D and D character sheet and I put strengths, Python, OpenShift, whatever. And then in weaknesses I put your kind of typical computer jokes of exiting VI and semicolons, but I actually put on their actual pythons. And that comes from a friend of mine who... I'm petrified of snakes and he finds it absolutely hilarious that my favorite language or my language of choice is Python. But constantly... I'm playing a video game the other night, there was a snake in there and legitimately stop. This is ridiculous. But yeah, it's completely weird references where that comes from.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. So I'm curious, so one of the things that we had planned to maybe chat about is the adjunct professor stuff. And I think having conversations with the early career folks. I'm trying to use the term junior less and I like the term early career, so I'll call that out. But I imagine that in that role you are interfacing with a lot of folks who are early career and what sort of questions do you get, and how do you answer them?

Jason Dobies: Yeah, and it's funny, the early career thing. I actually like that because when I'm talking to them, I will stop... Not have to stop myself, but my gut inclination is to say people of your age and I'll always be able to stop and say your experience partially because I do have some students who are going back for their degree and have kids and are on the older side. But it's also as much as I... Oh my God, it is JJ. I was hoping you were going to show up."

Joe Zepi: Oh, I know.

Jason Dobies: We were talking about COBOL before buddy. Is that what summoned you?

JJ: It's true. My beard went up on its side and, " Hey, someone is speaking up. I got to go. I got to go."

Jason Dobies: COBOL. Oh my god. I want to check in and see how you're doing, but I'm going to direct the podcast. But by all means you'll have fun with this conversation here. So yeah, my college students. At the end of the software engineering semester, the very last class partially because let's call it what it is, since there's no following class, I don't have the threat of a quiz. So getting them to listen to me is suddenly a big trick. So I just run it as an open form. And I was like, " Listen, it sounds corny and I acknowledge that, but a safe place to ask things about the industry and your career that you don't want to walk into your internship and feel stupid asking your boss some of these questions." So I was like, " Absolutely." After the semester they reach out to me and over the summer I get things like, " Hey, what do I do in this situation," or something like that. Because yeah, I'm not working with any of them, so there's no harm in asking me. They can give me details and it's great. I'll have students four or five years later be like, " Listen, can we do a quick call? I'm having problems at work. I don't know how to address this." And I'm like, " Yeah, happy to." That's the real fun. The teaching part is nice, but you're locked into an academic curriculum. I still have to grade them and that's just annoying. But it's when they really run into the whole idea of, " Wow, this dude is in the industry." I'm going to be... Cool, inaudible be very super honest. I'll say I work at Red Hat, there's usually two or three whose eyes widen. I'm like, " Yeah, that's right." Red Hat guy. So what do they ask me? It's funny because every semester we get on some deeper topics about gender in the industry or race or things like that. And I can say, and I'm not going to try to go down this route with the conversation, but I have been lucky that I have never seen anything that I've had to report or anything weird like that. I did have one of my students, a female, went to her job and had a lot of issues for it and then she found a new job and everything has been fine for her since. But don't want to go down that route here. But oh, the thing is they're always like, "Well, how do I negotiate salary?" And I'm like, "Dude, you're a college kid." I'm like, " You getting a salary? Good. Just be happy." It doesn't help. I don't know what the industry's like right now for... Shoot. I was going to say younger. What's your term again? Early career. Thank you. So I don't have a great feel for how difficult the market is right now. I know there's the traditional like, " Oh, I want someone fresh out of college with 12 years of experience in Java or something like that." And that mathematically works out to before they were born type of thing. But I'm usually... And I'm also very bad at that sort of thing. It has never been a strong point in my career because I'm always just getting paid. I like eating. I don't want to piss off my boss and ask for more money. But it's funny to me how many of the college kids are concerned about that.

Joe Zepi: It's interesting though. I wonder because especially in our field, you can get paid more and there probably is a wide range of salary range I guess. And what I've seen in the past with some friends, I've done a lot of mentoring over the years. Some people get locked into a salary and then they realize, " Oh, I'm staying with this employer, but I'm realizing I am paid much less than some of my colleagues." It is an interesting conversation and a tricky area to navigate. I don't know if you've had much experience with this JJ or giving any advice or anything as well.

JJ: So I came up where if I wanted a promotion, I had to move to a different company.

Joe Zepi: Yeah, exactly.

JJ: The idea of staying in a company for X amount of years where X is longer than I've been alive just isn't the way, or at least for me right now, how I see the industry, it's not how you're doing it. Talking to my father's generation, he was proud to be at this company for 25 years. I did my dues. I got the watch when I'm bouncing around different startups in Austin, Texas. He's like, " Obviously, you're not a real company." He's blah blah blah son. And it felt always weird. But that's how you get up, become a junior to become a senior. You get the responsibilities of inaudible that you can do the thing from, I guess, senior, now we have staff. Is that right? Is the next thing because there's no longer junior, senior executive. There are steps between... I don't know.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. Yeah. And it depends on where you're at. But I've seen that too. I've been doing this for a long time and I remember for many years, because I would switch jobs every couple of years, I would always have to defend that in my next interview. Why did you only stay two years? And I was like, " You know," and I always had a good way to spin it. But I think it really has become the norm. And I'll just say working at IBM where most of the people around me have been here for decades, it's really fascinating. But it actually is the first place that I was like, " Oh, I can see ways to grow here." And I'm at a salary that I feel good about. So I'm not looking to make that sort of a jump. But it's interesting working in tech and navigating that journey.

JJ: So sorry, one thing J. Dob. So something about having J. Dob as a mentor, especially for the college students coming out. I never had that. Until I came to IBM, I never really had someone who is genuinely interested in my career, especially because I kept bouncing around to different companies. One reason why I do see myself at IBM for a long time is now I have actual mentorship. And that's because IBM has given it to me. But for your students, J. Dob, no joke. I would've given my left arm to have someone in that position to be like, "You know what? I know who you are and I want you to succeed." That would be awesome.

Joe Zepi: Yeah.

Jason Dobies: That's exactly what it is. A lot of how I teach that course and the things I gave to them are stuff I wish I had. I saw early in my career, I had a rough space. And it's funny because I did the same thing as you guys. My first five years out of college, I jumped five different jobs and found Red Hat and I was like, " Okay, this is where I want to be." And I mentioned it earlier, I did some government stuff and I'm like, " Yeah, that's not for me." And I did some consulting and that wasn't for me. And I had the generation thing, my dad looking at me like, " This is going to look bad on you." But same thing, I had explanations for all of them. And I tell my students that too. I was like, " If you're jumping around that's... Even if this isn't the case, you can spin it as you trying to figure out what you like and what you don't like." And for me, I like being at a software company where when I get bored here, I look around Red Hat, that looks fun, let's go do that for a couple years. And I just keep bouncing around things. Oh God, I forget that. Oh, the mentor thing. But yeah, so my first job out of college, my manager had a peer and he was just a jerk and he was abrasive to her. He was abrasive to my team. And then I adopted some of that and didn't realize otherwise. I'm like, " This is just what it is in the industry." Everybody looked at this guy. We'll call him John. And just as kind of leadership, I'm like, " Clearly you've got to flex and be this bully to get ahead in this industry." And then I got to Red Hat, which I interviewed with JBoss and my first was the JBoss team. And oddly enough, John was on that team too, along with two other extremely toxic personalities. And it was a very abrasive team. I'm going somewhere with this, I promise. My very next... There it is. Where is he going with this? My very next role in Red Hat, I moved to the Red Hat satellite team and I met a guy named Mike McCune who at the time was an engineer and now he's a manager. And he led the team in the sense that everyone wanted his input and valued his input. And were like, " Yeah, let's see what Mike thinks about this." And he did it as a nice guy. And I was now about six years into my career when I sat back and I'm like, " He's helpful. He's friendly. He compliments people, just enjoys this stuff." And I was like, " Holy crap, is that actually what you can be here?" And that really set me on this different trajectory. And then a couple years later he moved to a manager role and I emailed him and I told him exactly that. I was like, " This is a phenomenal destination for you because we need more people like that." But in terms of what JJ said, I didn't have someone like that telling me, " No, this is not how we do things. You're going to have your fun Holy War arguments over VI versus Zemax and curly brace locations and stuff like that." And JJ, this is particularly laughing because we did a lot of that last year on Twitch.

JJ: Oh, yeah.

Jason Dobies: So you'll have those. It's remembering there are humans on the other side of it and having someone to center you and be like, " Look, at the end of the day this is just code. You're still dealing with people and people have bad days." And to give you that perspective and give you just the experience. At this point, a lot of what I have to offer in that 20 years experience is I've seen this situation a couple of times and this is about my take on it. And to dial it back to the salary payment... I know we're almost up on time, but this is probably a good ending, is that I tell them when it comes to the salary that they need to understand... And they're never going to based on me just saying this, but having a bad job Sunday at 5: 00 PM becomes the absolute worst time because I've been at bad jobs before and 5: 00 PM hit and all of a sudden you're like, " My weekend is basically over and I now have a full week of this awful job ahead of me." And that is more important than, " Oh, did I negotiate an extra two grand a year or something like that?" Are you enjoying what you're doing? Are you finding it valuable? Because I can't stress enough when you don't like your job, everything just gets long and really brutal.

Joe Zepi: And I would say too to folks in the tech industry... I don't know. You're valuable and remember that. You can steer your own career path to some extent and figure out in ways do you want to grow and can you do that growth where you are or would you look elsewhere is what I would say.

JJ: Yes. So-

Luke: Oh, go ahead JJ.

JJ: No. inaudible, please.

Luke: I was going to say, I completely agree. I had this moment where I was working in technical theater and I got this job offer with Blue Man Group, but it wasn't the money I wanted. And I went to my mentor from college and talked to them about it and they were very much in line with what they were saying, they were like, " Yes, you can make more money over here in this industry job, but that's not the ladder that's going to take you where you want to go." So maybe sometimes it's... Especially in the beginning, good to make a concession over the money or that short- term gain if it's the place that you want to grow. And it worked out really well and made the relationships that I wanted and I got big raises within a short period of time. And that was the last thing I wanted to say too, is without being a bragger, document your value and make sure that the people you're working with. Be confident enough to share what you're doing and what you did. It's not bragging. You need to let people know your value and what you're working on and what you're doing.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. JJ?

JJ: Oh, my last thought was when Jay was talking about the five o'clock on Sunday, I still remember one of the times where I went to the exact same pizza place Wednesday noon for a whole year because that was my midpoint for the week and I knew if I was getting that pizza, it was downhill from there. And needless to say, I literally gained a hundred pounds and I'm still actually trying to get that weight off and they still know me there too, which is the funny part. I take my family there because it's my safe place. It was my safe place. It was a place that I was like, " I've finally gotten halfway through," and I got to pair at what Jay said is just you're going to have those bad jobs and you're going to have to push through it. And then you might not get that promotion. You might get that promotion. You might get a promotion or the wrong ladder, just like Luke was saying. Trust your friends. Trust your mentors, all that jazz.

Joe Zepi: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thank you, JJ for joining us, and thank you, Jason, for being our guest this week. Luke, we should plug the podcast again, right?

Luke: Absolutely. Please check out in the open podcast, we're on all the platforms you want to listen please like and subscribe there.

Joe Zepi: Smash it.

Luke: Smash that like button. And also... Yeah, next week a checkout Red Hat Summit. It's coming up. It's going to be a good time. I'm definitely going to check out some sessions and there's the URL for that below.

Jason Dobies: Real quick to just jump in. You'll see me in the OpenShift booth. So again, I have these virtual booths set up and I'll be doing chat room duty for a couple of the different times in there. So by all means, come through and say hi in there.

Joe Zepi: Cool. Cool. Looking forward to it. So thanks, everybody. It has been another great episode. Appreciate it.

Jason Dobies: Yeah, thank you, guys. This is a lot of fun. I will see you back for our movie Club Night where we talk about inaudible.

Joe Zepi: It is great. I love it.

Luke: I want to do that.

Jason Dobies: Take care guys.

Luke: See ya.