About Jeremy

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• Uses This: https://usesthis.com/
  
  

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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. Normally this show is about the business of cloud in some way, shape, or form. It’s intentionally overbroad, and I can fly a boat through it, which is, mmm, let’s be honest, a terrible abuse of a metaphor, much like my typical terrible abuses of inappropriate services as databases. But as I’m recording this as the year 2023 closes out, let’s do something a little bit different. My guest today is Jeremy Tanner. Jeremy, how are you?

Jeremy: Oh, better than most. Yourself?

Corey: Not dead yet. Thank you for asking.

Jeremy: [laugh] Same.

Corey: You have done an awful lot of things over the years that increasingly look like—let’s just call it what it is—DevRel or Devrelopment, or whatever you want to call that. And you are currently not employed. You are taking the rest of this year off. You have explicitly demurred on conversations until the new year on this, so you’re experiencing something that I don’t get to experience—especially when, you know, you own the company—I don’t get to let it go and relax and sit for a bit. What’s it like?

Jeremy: Wonderful and terrifying at the same time. You said the business of cloud, and I was like, “No, no, no.” We’re here for a few minutes, like, delightfully unencumbered by capitalism. I’m sure there’ll be an ad read, I’m sure folks will listen to this on devices that they’ve paid for, but taking a moment to do something that’s not in service of your collection of capitalism tokens, I think, is… it should be done as much as possible, and I suppose you can also do when you’re not a [ronin 00:02:08].

Corey: I think that goes a decent way toward explaining a lot of my early approach to what I did. I didn’t build the podcast that we’re having this conversation on, or the Last Week in AWS newsletter, with an eye toward, “Oh, that’ll make a lot of money.” It was, “I want this to exist. I want to have fun. What would I do if I weren’t being paid because I’m clearly not.”

And in fact, it came at the time at considerable cost, not because it’s expensive to produce a podcast or send an email newsletter, but because of the time investment it takes to do that right, assuming you’re, you know, respectful of your audience’s time. And then when people started reaching out, “Hey, can we give you money for this?” It was wild to me. “Are you sure you have the right number?” It worked out.

It’s nice to be able to do things just because it amuses you to do them without seeing the financial story. But everything does come back to resource scarcity, which is fundamentally the underpinnings behind all economics. And here we are.

Jeremy: Yeah, you said starting a podcast, and it makes me remember listening to podcasts—I guess it’s been about 20 years—and you said it’s hard because the ocean level has both risen in terms of production quality and how much else is out there, but also it’s been democratized in that if you have something interesting to say, I think you can put it into a mobile device with terrible background noise and, yeah, audio is important, but what you have to say is usually more important.

Corey: People will forgive an awful lot of bad production value if the content is great. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter what your production value is. Look at the success of TikTok. Things that do super well are very rarely the overproduced, massive budget things. It’s the, someone grabs a cell phone when they’re bored waiting for a bus, says something freaking hilarious into the thing, and it blows up inadvertently.

Now, I’m sure that companies and influencers have their fingers on the knobs, the dials and whatnot, but it’s nice to dream about it. Something I was—thought was admirable when you filled out the form that we wound up having all of our guests fill out, so, you know, we get your name right and things like that, your title is right now, ‘dad,’ and that’s an important thing. That is one of the most important things that people do in life, if that is a decision that they undertake, because you can’t unring that bell. It’s one of the things that will actually matter. Like, what was the line I heard the other day?

It was that in 20 years, the only person who will remember that you worked late every night were your kids. And it resonated. It hits. Is the thing that is actively important to me. When I get a phone call that which—because I have a strong belief that my cell phone is for my convenience, not the convenience of others—when it’s the school calling, I will not even bother to excuse myself. I’m slapping the mute switch and answering that because that’s important.

Jeremy: Yeah. I think—so it’s probably my favorite title that I’ve had. I have two tiny copies of myself that I’m helping be ama—grow into amazing humans. And… yeah, so… they don’t call me—I mean, they call me dad, but they don’t call me on the cell phone, unless it’s their mom’s cell phone. Will be eight and a few days and five, and so it’s more of a, yeah, it’s more verbal times.

One of the nice things about working remotely, as I’ve done for a good long time, is the school that they started going to is about five minutes out. And you don’t have to give any warning to the school. You can go and drop by for lunch, and have lunch with either of the kids. They have lunch early because they start school early.

Corey: That sounds amazing. If I wound up doing that at the local elementary school where my six-year-old goes to school, people will begin calling me ‘sir’ in increasingly distressed tones of voice. So, that’s one of those, yeah, okay, great. I have to be careful with some of that. That sounds amazing.

Jeremy: Just don’t wear a tie when you go.

Corey: Yeah. Something else I want to talk about because, like, before I was a dad, I had different priorities, different life situation, and things change. One thing that you put in your biography is that you’re a motorcyclist. I moved to Los Angeles a week before my 21st birthday, and within the next year, I basically lost my mind as far as dealing with traffic, and I—the only thing I had for a vehicle for the next decade was a motorcycle. What do you ride?

Jeremy: A Triumph Speed Triple, and whatever other loners or rentals I’ll encounter. So, very much love my motorcycle, but also love variety, and so if you go out and borrow someone else’s, or I don’t know if they’re still doing it after Covid, but there was the Long Beach Motorcycle Show, which was one of the few shows where they would bring all the motorcycles out and let you go ride them in the city. That was a great time riding up by the docks, up over the bridges, through downtown Long Beach. Borrowing one of Harley’s baggers, and so you get some in-N-Out and stick it in the bag and bring it back for everybody.

Corey: It gets a little colder when you get to San Francisco. It’s not quite the same culture around a lot of these things. I had for a while a Triumph Sprint ST as one of my motorcycles back then, and I learned so much from that bike. For example, I’m reasonably convinced at this point that the reason the United Kingdom does not have a cloud provider of any renown is they have not yet found a way to build a cloud that leaks oil everywhere. First, I had the expensive half of the alternator break one year, and then two months later, I had the more expensive half of the alternator break. It felt like it spent a lot of time in the shop. Has that gotten better in the last decade?

Jeremy: [laugh] I believe so. I thought you were going to slander British electrics, which also are deserving of the suspicion, I suppose. But yeah, I think that one’s also a triple. I enjoy that middle ground between the twins and the inline forwards. You have more torque, but also higher redline, and the sound is—you can hear it coming. It’s not quite like anything else.

I think motorcycle people are a… in so many countries, motorcycles are an appliance. Like, you have the affordability, you have the easy parking, you have that easy storage, but in the United States, it’s more of a luxury, and it’s something that you choose because oftentimes it’s more expensive than a car.

Corey: Oh, in my 20s I did dumb things on motorcycles, not the way that you would think—when most people say, “I did dumb things with motorcycles,” that implies a bunch of things that are not accurate in my situation. I did not ride 120 miles an hour through a school zone or ridiculous things like that. I did things like get a baby backpack and a very realistic doll, and then go on a motorcycle ride. Like, basically just things that I think were the days before YouTube pranks and whatnot. I don’t think I would do that again.

Now that I’m a parent, yeah, I would call the police if I saw something like that. It was childish stupidity, to be clear. But I remember those days. I always had the sense of feeling… like it was free in a way that few other things have been. My tagline used to be that it was cheaper than therapy. I loved my time on a bike, but it’s very hard to take your kid to school in one of those things now.

Jeremy: Yes, it forces you to be present. But I don’t think it’s the motorcycle’s fault that it’s hard to take your kid to school on one. It’s hard to take your kid to school on the motorcycle because we’ve ceded the road to giant SUVs, and we don’t do a good job with traffic-calming.

Corey: Well, it’s also because she is three years old, and I take her to preschool. And she’s adorable, but also short and stumpy, relatively speaking, so her feet don’t reach the pegs.

Jeremy: The place that was going, and maybe in the show notes it’ll end up, I took a photo in downtown Boulder, Colorado, of a guy I called Motodad, and he put a baby seat on the back of his Suzuki motorcycle, and put dirt bike goggles on the baby and a little helmet. And this baby has to be smaller than three. From knowing baby sizes, I’d say maybe 18 months, maybe two years old. But depending on how fast there’s cars coming around you in traffic, it’s not a great idea because of consequence, but also, like, you make the decisions that are right for your family, and if you’ll see plenty of other places. I was in Amsterdam earlier in the year and bikes roll there, and the kids go to school in the cargo bikes, on the back of bikes, on the front of bikes—pedal bicycles, not motorcycles—but those can still work for a family if there’s—depending on who else you’re sharing the road with.

Corey: I think that there’s a tremendous misunderstanding of how motorcycles work by folks who have never been on them. And unlike so many things, it’s easy to judge by the worst examples. You remember the hooligans wheeling through city streets, dangerously running traffic lights, weaving in and out of traffic at a buck ten. All that stuff. Great. That’s never what I did.

I did the sensible thing of—like, when I was a kid, I learned very early on that if ten kids are doing something wrong, I’m the one that gets caught. This taught me to keep my nose tremendously clean. And I was never a particularly fast motorcycle rider because I had this novel idea that I’d rather get there 20 seconds later and still be breathing. Yeah, baseline stuff like that. But it was fun. It was freeing. It was a good way to escape focus on what’s around you, forces you to be present in a way that, in many ways, cars are actively eroding. It’s a simpler experience.

Jeremy: It prizes confidence and competence. Like, you need to both know what you can do, and what you can’t do, and what being a little bit wrong about either of those is going to cost you. Its natural state is upside down with you underneath it, and the entire time, you’re actively avoiding that. And so, in a car, if you let go of everything, you have airbags, your seatbelt, you have a metal cage around you, and a motorcycle, yeah, your both feet has something to do, both hands have something to do. And it might not be your fault, but it’s your problem, if something comes out and you—like, someone drops the ladder off the back of a truck, or you find roads that are not in the level of repair that they should be.

Corey: So, one thing that I notice about conversations with you because I’ve known you for a little while now. I’ve met you at a few different events when you were doing various things, we’ve spoken a number of times, never enough, but it’s always great to have five or ten-minute conversations here and there. You’re not that different when you’re working somewhere versus in your current fun employment stage. You are tremendously authentic, which is great. It’s one of those things where you take a look at developer relations across the board and there’s a strong spectrum.

There’s a certain class of developer advocate, where whenever they change jobs, that completely dictates, effectively, core tenets of their personality. And there are few things, to me at least, more disconcerting than someone who I trust and believe—when they work somewhere—in the things that they say. Then they change jobs, work somewhere else, and pull a complete 180, and in some cases, start trashing the thing they used to advocate. And it’s, “Oh, you’re effectively just being a mouthpiece at this point, and I can’t really trust the authenticity of what you’re actually saying.” You’ve been on the rather far other end of that spectrum, which has always been something I appreciate.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think that, like, if someone watches one of my talks which is a live stream, or podcast or something, you may not get a full picture, and it’s—occasionally people will get me confused with the character that I play for capitalism. But most of the time, no, like when introducing yourself, someone says, “What do you do?” And you’re like, “Oh, I ride motorcycles. I raise tiny copies of myself.” I’m like, “Yeah, we can talk about the ways that I pay for that,” which is usually talking to people who talk to computers, about talking to computers that talk to other computers, and tricking folks into building the future in whatever fashion the company that I’m aligned with is, but it’s usually the character that you’re playing for capitalism should be the least interesting thing about you.

Corey: And the response to that is probably usually in some form of, “That’s great, sir, but I need you to fill out a job title if you’re going across the border.”

Jeremy: [laugh].

Corey: “Just fill out the form.” Yeah. Like, there’s always a question, like, honestly, like, the creativity of, “What do you do,” is always contextual. It depends highly on what the context is. When I’m at the local block party, or hanging out volunteering at my kids’ school, “What do you do,” I cannot stay away from my professional side of it fast enough.

Historically, that was because if I say things even slightly wrong, I’m suddenly the neighborhood’s mouse and IT guy, but I’d rather avoid that mess, but also because I don’t want to be one of those people who is defined by their job. That’s an easy thing to fall into. I was very, very good—arguably one of the best in the world—at a specific skill, which was getting myself fired by surprise from jobs. And when that happens, you get exposed to it, you start to see things such as… so much of your social life revolves around your work environment, your colleagues, and the rest. Then you get let go or severed from the company in some way, and suddenly, people who are part of everyday life will never speak to you again. And you drift apart and you change it.

You cannot fall in love with the company because the company can’t love you back. And that’s a lesson that people often… often miss, until in some cases, it’s too late. We spend more time with our coworkers than we do with our families, in many cases. And when I talk to people who’ve been laid off for 15 years at a company, they’re walking around with their hearts torn out of their chest, and they don’t know what to do. And I don’t know how to help them when I see that.

Jeremy: Yeah, so I’ve been part of large companies—200,000 people—small companies—maybe three or four—and even at that point, so 200,000, yes, that’s a lot of people, but you don’t overlap with that many people. You probably work with 150 tops, or remember them if you’re going Dunbar style. But because of the type of work, travel, and surface area that I end up having, I’ve run across thousands of different people this year, many of them that I like a lot, a small percentage of them would be coworkers, and so, in open-source, in events, in personal interests, have cultivated a large group of people who love me lots who don’t care where the capitalism tokens are coming from.

Corey: On some level, I kind of wish I could… care less about where they come from. It’d be a lot easier, but there are companies that I don’t want to do business with, and so I don’t. And it’s weird because it’s always a gray area. If you want to take an absolute hard line on this, eventually pass some certain point with the no ethical consumption under capitalism, there’d be three organizations you can do business with, and that’s not much of a total addressable market. So, everything is a matter of compromising, and there are no easy answers.

Jeremy: I want to hot-seat and say, which three?

Corey: Yeah, and that’s the thing is that everyone can agree that oh yeah, the other three companies that are absolutely ethically pure. The problem is you’ll never get people to agree on which three.

Jeremy: Everyone’s three are different, of course.

Corey: I think there are a few that you can wind up getting a universal agreement that they are not ethically pure, regardless of where you fall on any given spectrum. But for once, let’s not name and shame folks on this. It’s nice to be able to take a step back. I mean, I have a lot of fun at those neighborhood parties I talk about, and I think people sometimes misunderstand that part of the aspects of my personality I emphasize professionally aren’t what I talk about when I’m having conversations with friends and family who aren’t in the space. Like, “So, what do you do for work again, Corey?” It’s like, “Okay, let me explain, but real quick, first, I have to teach you what a Managed NAT Gateway is.” Yeah, that is not how that conversation goes. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t align.

Jeremy: Yeah, developer. Sometimes that’s software, sometimes that’s people, sometimes that’s—most of the time, that’s people who use software or write software. And then, at that point, you can dig into why that matters. And when you’re selling something, everyone always wants to—your job title is sort of the feature and folks forget the benefit. And so, like, “What is the thing that you do?” You’re like—hopefully, it’s, “I make the world better in this form or fashion.” “I make it easier to entertain yourself.” “I make it easier to discover new medicines.” “I help folks with tools that make it easier for one F1 team to beat the other one.” Or different sports teams. Sports analytics are an area that I’ve been interested in for a good long time. You have F1, you have soccer, you have cycling, which is pretty much just F1, but made of meat.

Corey: It’s fun to actually get to be a full person. Sometimes. It’s also pretty clear that your career has led you down a path where there are clear, common threads that emerge. What you tell people does not change materially based upon where you were employed. I mean, yes, the subject matter you talk about does, of course, shift and align, but you’ve built yourself a reputation as being a trusted voice.

When you say something, it is not because it is correct, but it is because what you believe. I don’t want to weigh on the individual aspects of, “Well, you said this thing that was wrong.” No, no, no. We’re all wrong, but the trick is do you authentically believe the thing you’re saying, or are you just saying it to stoke controversy? You’ve never struck me as someone who builds a brand that way, and it’s appreciated.

Jeremy: No. Thank you. I think that, um… the artist formerly known as Twitter, like, one of the easy ways to get engagement was fights and hot takes. And I’d like to be funny, but so long as it’s kind, or it's mean to a trillion-dollar company instead of an individual.

Corey: I get it wrong sometimes, in that I don’t understand how things I say come across, and when you’re on a small team building something at a trillion-dollar company, and I dunk on the service you built, understand in many cases, I don’t understand that, from my perspective, what it’s like to build that service. I don’t know your team, as such, exists. From my external perspective, all I see is that this giant behemoth has now launched something out that has some fundamental problems at launch, and are, with a straight face, asking for millions and millions and millions of dollars a month to run this thing. And customers are trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, so let’s try it and find out, and I’ll be very honest about it. Yes, I understand that it doesn’t feel great that something you’ve labored over comes out, and my response is to dunk on it, but it also is not personal.

I know that we put so much of our identities into our work, and that’s a recurring challenge, but this product is not great today for this use case in my experience using it is a very, very far cry from saying, “And the people who built it are worthless,” which I do not ever say. I don’t go after people individually, unless they’re Larry Ellison—who is not, in fact, people—or they’re massively punching down from a height where most people refer to them as things like senator, or you have gone so far around the bend ethically, that a sharp shock is necessary, which I do less and less all the time. I don’t go after individual people. And people also tend to mistake that, oh, you criticize a lot of services that AWS puts out. Sure I do, but I also like to point out where the good things exist.

And I assume people know where the good parts are. That’s what the marketing department is for. I just want to point out the things that don’t work so well. It gets down to a different form of developer advocacy, whereas Jordan Sissel said famously, in a talk that changed my life back in 2012, “If a new user has a bad time, it’s a bug.” It’s a great way to think about things.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think about the experience of getting started with something a whole bunch, and a lot of the, a lot of the travel, a lot of the talking to people is hearing what their—hearing what their day is like, and like, what tools are you using? What don’t I know about what allows you to do your work? One of what I think is one of the best sites on the internet is, it used to be called The Setup is now called Uses This and is a series of short-form interviews with folks from all different types of work and artist’s, and what are the tools that you use to do your job? And some of them are, like, “Oh, this is a Japanese wood saw that makes very precise cuts,” or a particular cinema camera with a set of lenses, or a Mac Mini, or open-source screenplay-writing software, or whatever else.

And I like those looks into what people who have the ability to choose their tools, or who are sitting closest to the work are using to bring us movies and music and the software that we install and don’t appreciate. [We 00:22:26] use large piles of open-source software, and every time you run into something where you’re getting started, when you’re talking about if the user has a difficulty get started, that’s a bug, yes. And if it’s a company that’s making that software, that’s their problem, but whose problem is it when this is a library maintained by one person, part-time, who doesn’t really even want to do it anymore, but they’ve put it up on GitHub, which means that you will support it and open yourself to questions and criticism from now to all time.

Corey: One last thing I want to cover with you because we are here in the close of 2023—there’s a couple of weeks from it, let’s be clear, so anything that happens the next two weeks between this thing being recorded and getting published, don’t yell at us—interesting notes, high notes of the year, things that stuck out to you, things that over-hyped, under-hyped, superlatives, flex of the year.

Jeremy: [laugh] So, things that stuck out to me. Earlier in the year, I took a trip to Japan—my first—and was amazing to experience the country through new eyes. There was some things with products that I don’t see, some things with transit that—I’ve never seen transit that efficient, never seen a street with so many people on it be so calm. An ambulance came by, and the siren was on at a normal volume because the city doesn’t roar. The city is quiet, and so it just had to be a little bit of, “Excuse me, there’s someone coming through who needs help.”

Biggest flex of the year. Yesterday, day before, depending on when the recording eventually drops, Netflix released their—for the first time as I understand it, ever—the streaming numbers from their more popular shows, anything with more than I want to say 100,000 hours watched, and it’s 18,000 of these shows, which means this has to be more than any other streaming service is doing if they’re proud of us and going to tell us.

Corey: Oh, it’s absolutely massive numbers. The problem then is you look at this and, like, “Yeah, so here are the top 20 things. Six of them we’re killing.” Like, “What is wrong with you?”

Jeremy: [laugh].

Corey: Like, “The Bridgerton show and its spinoff doing super well.” Like, I’m waiting for that to get axed. I love me some vaguely risqué Victorian-era pageantry.

Jeremy: It was interesting to see how many of them were international titles that aren’t available in the US. It was interesting to see how many of them had characters titled in different languages. It’s released and downloadable as an Excel file, and so you just tap the top of the column, and it totals it up, and down in the bottom, you’re like, “That’s a lot of commas.” I think it figured out to—across those shows—for six months, like, 93 billion streams. And so, the average human on Earth saw 11 hours of Netflix in the first six months of the year.

Corey: It’s kind of wild to me just how massive they are. It is fundamentally kind of great. The downside—of course—to it, is that… once again, they’re becoming the cable company. The oligarchs that run our world demand constant growth at all costs, and the engine that previously drove Netflix’s massive growth were launches in different geographies. They’re global at this point. There are no new worlds left to conquer, so now you have to get significant numbers of people to subscribe for a particular piece of content or whatnot, or you have to start cranking the price up.

Jeremy: There’s that. Or crank the price up because people watch more. I may not remember correctly, but I think the CEO had said, “Our competition is not other streaming services. Our competition is sleep.” And I don’t know if Netflix is going to start mailing you amphetamines, but I’ve taken that, and I’ll tell that to folks who are promoting a product: your competition isn’t something else that someone will buy. It’s anything else a developer could spend their time and attention on, and sometimes that’s Netflix.

Corey: Yeah. It’s weird. But you’ll notice how it’s priced, though. Like, if this were an AWS service, they would almost certainly charge you per minute watched and some other dimensions around how much you weigh, how large are couches, et cetera, et cetera, phase of the moon. Great. And it becomes impossible to predict.

Whereas you can watch it not at all or binge the entire month, and it’s still the same price for that month. Customers like predictable pricing. It’s hard to get there for a lot of products, I get it. I’m sympathetic to the problem, but man, I like seeing that. I do miss the old days, though, of this ancient old-timey thing where you’d go and buy a DVD, and then it sat in your house, and you owned it. And, “Well, you don’t own it, you have a license to watch.” “Yes, shut up. You’re not going to flip a bit on the server somewhere and my DVD breaks.”

Jeremy: [laugh] But when watching, you’re also giving up valuable data as to what people are interested in seeing, and when you rewatch things or when you turn things off, that’s a valuable signal as what should be made more or less of. And when talking the way that capitalism is shaping the media that we appreciate, plenty of those Netflix hours watched were coming from my five-year-old son, and it’s wild to think how different his media consumption is. Because if I wanted to see kids shows when I was five, you’re like, well, you’ll need to wait maybe for three or four or five days until the weekend rolls around again, or that window of PBS when it’s not This Old House, and it’s things for kids. But if it is Saturday morning cartoons, not only do they have ads between them and jingles that infect my brain 40 years later, but even the TV programming for kids was mostly thinly-veiled toy advertisements for G.I. Joes, Barbies, My Little Ponies.

Corey: Ugh, we live in a strange world.

Jeremy: [laugh].

Corey: So, what’s new for you in the next year? What do you want to have done?

Jeremy: I’d like to travel a bit. I’d like to see more places through the eyes of the kids. Last year—or this year, I guess, if we’re still in 2023—I was able to take them to see both oceans. They love the water, and beach time is good.

Corey: Yeah. “We just got to see both oceans.” Tell me you’re an American, but use different words.

Jeremy: [laugh]. Yeah, so getting to Australia is trickier than getting to either Oregon or the other side of Texas.

Corey: Yeah, I want to go to a lot more community conferences. I’ve had fun with the corporate speaking events that I’ve done for the last couple years, but they’re always tend to be highly focused, I can’t advertise them; [there’s never 00:28:50] a reason to advertise them, some companies because of NDAs, which I won’t break—obviously—and other times because, yeah, it’s a private corporate event, so why would I possibly advertise I’m going to be speaking at the thing? “I’m giving a talk, and you can’t come,” is kind of terrible.

Jeremy: When you say, “Do them,” are you saying that you’re going to, like, possibly organize CoreyCon and there will be, like, an unconference based around just fire your ADHD fixations at at each other for a delightful weekend, or attend more community conferences? Because—

Corey: Well, there is going to be a CoreyCon coming up, that is in April. Unfortunately, due to some of our event partners on this, we had to change the branding slightly, so for contract reasons, it’s being called Google Cloud Next. But it’s CoreyCon.

Jeremy: [laugh] Fair. I have the same goal, and part of it is helping those things happen. One of the organizers of Austin’s DevOpsDays, which is a community conference that, like, does take on sponsorship, but it’s not there to sell things to you as much as it’s to help level folks up, bring folks from the community together, and… that’s been, both DevOpsDays in Austin, and then… those are excellent shows if you’re able to make your way out to them. I’d also like to do things that are not explicitly like, here’s how to drive the computer better, but here’s how to be more [laugh] intentional in your practice, whether that’s some more journaling, or 3D printing, or storytelling, or take photo walks, and I think waiting for a reason or big thing to come around, isn’t necessary.

Like, grab one friend and take a walk. Let folks know where you’re doi—where you’ll be and what you’re doing, and collect a handful of them. That’s what the artist formerly known as Twitter used to be. I would invite folks to my house, out to movies, like, “We have enough meat. Bring beer. Whoever is welcome.” Probably get swatted these days, but that’s not a—things [laugh] things are different 18 years down the road.

Corey: Yeah, it’s amazing how the world has changed. Not always for the better.

Jeremy: But we can try.

Corey: We can. I really want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day of enjoying your life to have conversations with me. If people want to learn more about your ongoing adventures, what you’re up to, et cetera, where is the best place for them to find you?

Jeremy: I’m ‘penguin’ on most social networks, like the flightless bird. And so, recently I’ve been enjoying, I think, [BlueSky 00:31:27] and Mastodon on the Hackyderm instance. So @penguin over there.

Corey: Yeah, I’ve been doing a fair bit on Mastodon lately. BlueSky feels like it had its moment and chance to grow, and it didn’t go where it needed to. And it's niche, but I find that it is not where my audience is, for better or worse.

Jeremy: And that’s an interesting distinction, where like, what are you there for? Is it, “people need to hear what I have to say,” or it’s like, “I’d like to see some art. I’d like to hear some randomness that’s not necessarily, ‘how do I operate a computer better?’” Because there’s a lot of places where you can find that.

Corey: We will, of course, put links to all that in the show notes. Thank you so much for talking about, you know, stuff that’s actually important.

Jeremy: Thanks for having me.

Corey: Jeremy Tanner, currently enjoying his best version of himself and living his best life. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment, after which you should immediately then delete it and then go outside and touch some grass.

Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business, and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.