#055 Embracing Change in Tech with Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray - Part 2

Speaker 1: 0:00

Network Automation Nerds Podcast. Hello and welcome to Network Automation Nerds podcast, a podcast by Network Automation, network Engineering, python and other technology topics. I'm your host, eric Cho. Today we'll continue our conversation with the host, friend Packard Pushers, ethan Bank and Drew Connemir. We're talking about embracing change.

Speaker 1: 0:27

But I am so sorry, in the last episode we just went all over the place, although I thought those were very valuable content and very interesting to me and I hope it was interesting to the listener. But last episode I think we're just talking about the changes that we experienced and you know, kind of the progression of podcasts overlay on top of that topic, the change topic, right, Like the changes in the industry, why do we think that is? And some of our personal feelings about meritocracy, shall we say. So this episode I think we should start with what are some of the technology change that you think is? There's so many of them, but in my mind there's one that stood out from them. But I will listen, I will, you know, be very interested in hearing your thoughts on. You know, what is the technology change that stood out in your mind that just I don't know one change that rolled them all, I guess if we're just sort of leaving out the internet as the one change, because I was born before the internet.

Speaker 2: 1:32

Me too, me too, yeah. But setting that aside, thinking about you know, maybe sort of the last 10, 15 years, I feel like I'm gonna put my money behind virtualization. So, whether we're talking hypervisor containers, whatever, multi-tenancy to me is, I think, a core technology that has enabled all kinds of stuff that's happening now.

Speaker 1: 1:55

Yeah, that's a major one, for sure. What about you? You can. Well, if you look at the context, here is biggest change in technology over the last 10 or 15 years.

Speaker 3: 2:04

I think, right, that's what was in the show notes. So that's what I was thinking about as I was getting ready for this. Sure, yeah, go for it, and for me.

Speaker 3: 2:10

I'm gonna take a little bit of a departure from infrastructure and talk about something that I think has affected us within tech, but then also society as a whole, and that is the rise of ubiquitous smart screens. Because we got them everywhere, eric. They're on our. We got phones, tablets, watches, tvs, our monitors, of course, whether that's laptop or whatever Head sets now VR headsets, more and more of a thing. They're in our cars, they're on personal assistant devices. It's not just you know, hey, robot lady, do the thing for me.

Speaker 3: 2:41

Now there's screens on some of these devices as well, and more, and I raise that because I think it's fundamentally changed how we behave and how we think and, as people, how our brains work, since most of our engagement with the world is mediated by a screen now, and all of these screens are internet connected. That that's our gateway for information. It's everything we look at for entertainment and where we seem to be addicted to them. Or maybe more accurately, we're addicted to the brain chemicals that make us feel good. When we get a like on social media or we watch a little short video on TikTok or on YouTube, we scroll through a shopping site and hit that buy button. All that stuff is like this addictive behavior that changes again fundamentally who we are as people, how we interact with each other, how we interact as a society and there's so many articles and stories about we're less happy as human beings, we're lonely, we're outright depressed and depression and treatments for depression are just a very popular topic to discuss that we become fragmented into these isolated groups. We got these increasingly extreme or unique or specific viewpoints about the world because we're in our little group talking about things, taking it back to us as technology professionals that with that context I think we as people can't focus like we used to be able to focus. It's harder for us to like read a book for hours at a time.

Speaker 3: 4:05

I used to be able to do that, man, like studying for a cert. I could just sit and grind and study a book and then write about it and then do lab exercises and go. That was my Saturday back when I was studying for the CCIE. That was how I spent 10 to 12 hours a day was doing that stuff. Now it's hard to imagine that. I mean I can't even sit through a two hour movie without having to pull my phone out because this thing's moving a little slow. Let's see what's happening on Insta. I got to scroll, fill in with a little blank you had there, even though I'm looking at this TV in front of me, glorious 4K color. It's beautiful, the acting is amazing, the soundtrack is top notch. I got bored for half a second. Let me grab my phone. That says something about the way my brain works now. That's different from the way it used to. I don't know.

Speaker 3: 4:55

Everybody was talking about digital minimalism a couple of years ago. Remember that that was a thing, that topic that kept coming up Digital minimalism. We're going to go from smartphones back to dumb phones and all this stuff. I think the reason for that, even though we're not talking about digital minimalism so much anymore, I think it's because it's we recognizing that it's breaking our brains that we're addicted to whatever the chemicals are in there Dopamine, I hear that that's one of them that comes up. I'm not the science guy for that stuff, to remember Chemical names that are supposedly making us addicted to our phones and so on, but I think it's stealing our ability to focus.

Speaker 3: 5:32

If you're a technology professional, you've got to be able to focus to grow your skills usefully. If you want to learn Kubernetes. It's a complex product, it takes a lot of time and hours of reading, studying and working with the product to get there. If you want to learn VXL and EVPN, there's a lot going on. Maybe you've never worked with BGP before. You got to start there, just to get in the door and be able to actually deploy VXL and EVPN. The focus that's required for that is extraordinary To be good at it. Our brains aren't wired to do that anymore because we wired them with all of our stupid smart screens that we love desperately because they're colorful and awesome and give us that immediate chemical release in our brain that makes us happy. That's the thing that I see, eric. That's the change for the last 10 to 15 years. That is just fundamentally transformed things.

Speaker 1: 6:23

Yeah, like Drew, I was born before the internet was there. I remember dial up and say, hey, mom, stay off the phone. I got to go do this research work. But yeah, I agree with what you're saying. Especially after I had kids I didn't realize how much it had fundamentally changed us until I start to observe my kids on how they behave, because initially we were very strict about having screen times and the kind of screen that they use. But since COVID that just all gone through the window. Once you go down that slippery slope, you're not coming back. Now I observe them with a shorter attention span, like you said.

Speaker 1: 7:07

If I compare that back to what I used to do like you, even like I used to study a long stretch of time on CCIE in particular, but also technology, just labbing it up for hours and lose myself in that flow I desperately want to get that back for my kids but I just don't know how because there's so many distractions. And even if I prohibited her from taking a mobile phone to school, the math teacher would say I hope the math teacher is not listening. But the math teacher would say oh, everybody, just take out your phone and take a picture of the screen. Maybe he has some formulas or schedules, and she will be the only person who writing down on the you know, desperately trying to scramble it down 30 seconds on paper, and everybody. I would just take a phone and take a snapshot, so I don't want to put her in that disadvantage.

Speaker 1: 8:02

But at the same time I realized what you just everything that you talked about, ethan, on you know, the shorter attention span. So I don't know. So I mean, so I guess you know there's two sides of things that change brought right, like there's. There's the advancements on the convenience of having a super computer in your pocket nowadays that's always connected, and the downs. The downside, for that is maybe now you train your brain to have shorter attention span and now you have to go back to a dumb phone. So I don't know. I mean, what do you think, drew? I mean, is there any downsides to, I don't know, hypervisor and virtualization, like that change that you talked about?

Speaker 2: 8:47

Well, if I come back to that, I didn't know where Ethan was going, so now I feel like I should change my answer, because I know right.

Speaker 1: 8:51

Like he gave such a good answer, I'm like, oh my God, I got to put on my philosopher hat there and talk about the macro changes, but just that.

Speaker 2: 9:01

One thing I want to mention is that I think humans as we've, you know, starting in the Industrial Revolution, have kind of grappled with this phenomenon for decades, and every new technological advance that emerges is sort of like this is the end of civilization and the end of our ability to behave as you know, sort of rational functioning humans.

Speaker 2: 9:21

It happened with novels. I was reading some throw a long time ago, back when I could sit down long enough to do that, and he said something to the effect of a man can't take a nap for 15 minutes without waking up to say what's the news, and he was complaining about the telegraph having closed the gap between countries and stuff like. So if he's up in arms about the telegraph, I think he would probably have a heart attack about smartphones. But the broader point is that we as a civilization have sort of encountered this. We've coped with it. We figured out how to deal with it. Kids have been okay. Like you know, my mom was alive for the transition from radio to television and she's a perfectly well functioning human being. I'm the transition from television to internet. I think I'm a perfectly fine, at least a moderately functioning human being.

Speaker 1: 10:06

So yeah, okay.

Speaker 2: 10:10

And I do like. I have kids and I'm worried about their use of it. But they're now young adults, they're in college and holding down jobs and seem to be able to do those things. So I definitely share Ethan's concerns and your concerns, and I'm sure a lot of other people out there have them. I worry about it too, but I also think people adapt, people figure it out and as long as we can, I think hopefully in the end we'll be okay. I don't know.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Yeah, I mean, I think I think that's a great way to now I worry less, right, like thank you for making helping me sleep at night a little bit better.

Speaker 2: 10:46

There's not parenting advice Do not give a cell phone to your three year old.

Speaker 1: 10:52

No, no, we're not financial advisors and we're not like parenting, you know counselors or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 10:58

You, you, yeah, no, but totally I think, just like I said, I think just preparing for this week's episode and all the topics and just this word change just bring out so much emotions. And you could start at the very macro level and and you know, about society, about culture, like what we just did there, or you could be at the very minimal level on what to eat for breakfast, and now I have multiple ways to get food delivered to my door and you know, like in the, in the multiple culture of kind of food that's like readily available in the five miles radius. So I think I think those are just such a big topic and I think that's kind of reflected in our, our two episodes today where we just kind of discuss all over the place, which I definitely enjoy and I hope is useful for the listener as well. Do you have any other examples of the changes that you think that are important or that just comes into your mind when, when you know, preparing for this week's episode?

Speaker 2: 12:07

Well, I guess, if we want to touch on the virtualization thing that I brought up, that is a very weak second to Ethan's, but I feel like I brought it up.

Speaker 1: 12:16

Definitely week third, but go ahead.

Speaker 2: 12:18

I brought it up because I was thinking my first answer was you know, public cloud. But then I was like but without multi-tenancy, public cloud wouldn't have existed to the extent that it does today and I think that, as a service, wouldn't have been capable, because of that ability to run that the multi-tenancy where you can shard out that infrastructure multiple ways to maximize its use Without that innovation we wouldn't be in the environment we are today. That's why I picked it.

Speaker 1: 12:46

Yeah, I agree, I think go ahead.

Speaker 3: 12:49

Yeah well, there's another piece of that too, which is has to do with scale, in my mind. If you don't have virtualization, you don't get distributed scaling, you don't get the ability to scale out. You're stuck in that world of scaling up forever which doesn't, which doesn't. You can't, you hit limits there. So and so much of what the world does now is operate at massive scale, or you need to be able to meet that peak, because you peak once a year during Black Friday. If you're working for a retailer, maybe you know that's a, that's a thing.

Speaker 2: 13:20

And just imagine the amount of data center infrastructure we'd need if everybody had to have their own, like if AWS was running individual hardware for every customer. The power consumption, the land consumption, the resource consumption would be unsustainable.

Speaker 1: 13:35

Yeah, I think what I was going to say was that's exactly what. That's exactly to your point. That's how AWS was started. Right, because Amazon was trying to build for Q4, where even the majority of their business, or back then was between Thanksgiving to Christmas and they, they have to build to peak. And you know, then the rest of the three quarters was just sitting idle. And that is where, you know, mr Bezos said Well, you know, if we have these resources, how do we make it available for people? And that's how AWS was.

Speaker 1: 14:09

The concept of AWS was, was, was launched, or so the story told. Right, I mean, I was there, so I totally bought onto the idea of AWS existed because of Amazon's overbuilding the capacity. And then then you go, you work backwards on Okay, if that's, our goal is to extend this to the rest of the world and be a utility computing. What do I need to do today to get to that? And that is when, you know, mr Warner logo comes in as a CTO and say, okay, everything needs to be API driven. No backdoor, I don't care if you're. If you have, like the super duper database that needs super duper access, you're still going to go through a public interface that eventually we're going to expose to to the outside world. And that is how I mean that process started years before S3 was launched. Right, like they have to go go through that change in order for S3 to come back. And that's why I think some of the later cloud providers when, when they launch, you know, we were we being, you know, at AWS. At the time we were very nervous because of the branding power. But then we look back at the history on how long it took us to do that and we said, if they don't have that pedigree, if they didn't go through the same pain and learning curve that we went through, it's going to be an uphill battle for them to catch us. So, even though AWS was small at the time, you know, and we of course, we did our best to fend off the competition, launching features and all that.

Speaker 1: 15:38

But at the same time, that process started many, many years ago and it started with the multi Tennessee that you talked about and people. I don't know if people will remember it was a real doubt in the beginning on how the Zen hypervisor could perform like the, the, the VMs could perform to a bare metal. It was a real question on whether they could be on par with that. Right like, there's a real question on the CTO, the CIOs of the world and say, should we have a thing that we, you know it could take ourselves because it has a higher performance? And that is a lot of time. That's where we struggle with in the early days is to convince people that it's secure enough. That was usually the first and then the second question is you know what's the performance? Right like, if I have this web server that takes, you know, thousands of, you know thousands of requests per second, how can I trust you that? Or how can I trust you that you're not going to favor Amazon over my, my tenant? Right like so. So all of these questions started there.

Speaker 1: 16:42

But it's back to our topic about changes. Right like, these are the things that you realize you cannot control the customer's perception. So now you can only control your things like whether you provide more data, whether you increase your you know, isolation, like VPC. Vpc wasn't always there. People, you know, might, might take it for granted nowadays, but initially it was all just just VMs, yours and you don't know who your neighbors is right, but but yeah, you know, I that just again. That just brought back so much memories and I do agree that the cloud and multi Tennessee and hypervisor virtualization that is one of the biggest change in the I have. That was my even weaker answer to that I prepared.

Speaker 2: 17:33

I didn't think it was weak at all. We just got outplayed by Ethan. Yeah, yeah, I know.

Speaker 1: 17:39

But, but well, well, we'll play it to Ethan. I mean, I thought that was a much better answer on, you know, just to bring into a more macro level.

Speaker 3: 17:50

Well, thank you, I'm glad we had a thought for a fucking discussion on that. Now the question is what do we do about it? I guess because I brought it up honestly, because I see these changes in myself and it bothers the heck out of me. It's like, why can't I sit here and just read this document before I go like you'll squirrel, gotta go do something else. Yeah, and I've been frustrated by that and I've been really been trying to get back to. I need to build the focus. I need to be able to read. Okay, here's a 95 page report on Google from the state of DevOps 2023. I wanna read this monster. Forced myself to read it today. It wasn't without temptation to like, gonna check Slack, go to the kitchen for a reason. Oh, I'm sorry, that was me.

Speaker 1: 18:27

That was me this morning, like hey, ethan, I even CC you on it, right? That's right that alerts comes directly in, yeah, but I think that's a great point though. So how do we get back into something? I mean, we were taking all the benefits, but how do we get rid of the negative work in our perception, the negative aspect of it? I don't know. I mean for me, I don't know. About digital detoxing, I mean, I've tried it. It didn't really work for me. I mean, I even changed my phone to like Grayscale, which did you know like?

Speaker 3: 19:03

did- oh, I tried that for three seconds and I was like nope, can't do it.

Speaker 1: 19:07

Yeah, even for emails like that wasn't too appealing, but for me, you know, I try to. That's why I'm such a big fan of atomic habit and, by the way, they're not like sponsors or James Clear doesn't know who I am, but I am a big fan of the book Tiny Habits as well as Atomic Habit. It's just built habits into your daily routine, like if I. You know whenever I started that Pomodoro that I know I'm now building to a habit where I just kind of leave everything behind and try to do that 25 minutes of focus time on that particular task. I don't always succeed, but that's one way of me trying to, you know, get back some of that attention that I lost. I don't know if you guys have any tips or tricks on such things.

Speaker 3: 19:58

The big thing for me is just notifications, just shut them off. Like, basically, you can shut all of them off, you actually don't need to have notifications for anything. And then you can batch your checking of social media. You know, if you've got LinkedIn notifications turned on, you're insane. No, don't do it. Just, especially if you're interactive on LinkedIn, you post, and then there's so many levels of notifications on LinkedIn and especially if you leave it at default, you get buried in them. You don't want that percolating up through your OS and disrupting you or becoming an Ike, that the thing on your phone tells you how many notifications you've got over the app icon. And you can do the same thing for email and for any other social that you're on and pretty much anything, except for, like, rare exceptions. I have notifications turned on in case someone from my family texts me. If my phone rings from a known number in my contact list, I get notified. For that. That's almost it I mean I have.

Speaker 3: 20:52

I'm still experimenting with Slack. I've been trying to shut them off completely and I think I'm at the point where it's like, yeah, actually I can. I think I can just shut them off. I still haven't turned on for DMs, but as I'm beginning DMs, it's like good to know, not time sensitive. I didn't need to react to that right then, and so notifications is the big thing and that's not new, right? I mean, I think a lot of people that have talked about trying to get better control over their brain functioning, their brain pattern, have learned to shut notifications off and get back some of that spiral aspect so you have better control and better focus, you're not distracted and you're not. Sometimes leaving notifications on it is an excuse for distraction. I'm gonna leave them on because then I got a reason to go away from whatever I'm doing and go get that brain chemical hit by seeing the thing that I get from clicking on the notification, for whatever it is.

Speaker 3: 21:43

There's other things to work, but that's the biggest one for me. My notifications lately have been going down and down and down and I'm at the point of I actually don't think I need any.

Speaker 1: 21:54

Yeah, I don't know if other phones allow you to do it, but at least for the iPhone you're able to turn off notification but have something that pierced through it. Like I say, I will always want to hear about things, that the milk that my wife wants me to pick up. It may not be super urgent, but I do want to know about it, so you could always have these, I guess how we say, pierced through the firewall, right, so you put up that firewall role is to deny all, but hey, permit this. So back to our network engineering nerding out on that. But yeah, so that's a great tip. Do you have any tips that you wanna share, Drew, on how do you get that attention back?

Speaker 2: 22:37

I think the thing that helped me the most was I basically stripped down my phone. I took Reddit off. I don't have Facebook on there. I don't have any social media apps. The only thing I have on there that could be even a tiny bit distracting is the NPR app. If I'm really bored, then I'm like well, I'm just going to read this measured news article about something that happened at a meeting between two world powers. Okay, then I'm like well, maybe that 95-page article from Google on Kubernetes is worth going to back to reading. I found myself, when I had something like Reddit on my phone, that it was in my face all the time and I was just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, like Ethan said, for that hit of novelty, even though 99% of the stuff was just crap. Stripping that off my phone was the best thing for my attention.

Speaker 1: 23:24

Yeah, a funny fact was the author of Tiny Habit. I think he came to his fame because he taught. The two of his students went on to found Instagram and they took all the findings that like how do you get the dopamine hit and then the attention and how do what attracts people?

Speaker 2: 23:50

He was like what have I done? Yeah, exactly Like random rewards.

Speaker 1: 23:54

Yeah, all of these lessons they took and then they said how do we codify and make it an app? And that became like Instagram. So he openly talked about it. Like he just said, okay, I want to write this tiny habit book so that perhaps people could build more habits that are what they correct bad habits and get good habits, and so on and so forth. So, yeah, back to what you were talking about, but it's interesting that you mentioned NPR, because I want to sanitize my feet as well, being I don't know 20 plus year media guy. Do you have any suggestions? Obviously, this is totally outside the realm of what we're supposed to talk about today, but please share that knowledge with us. Like, yeah, what do you? What's your thought on that?

Speaker 2: 24:42

I mean, I guess I feel like I am a news junkie and a politics junkie, so I feel like NPR is the one that I know people think it has a liberal bias. I disagree with that and we could have an entire other podcast about that. I feel like it is the most news focused, information focused, of the news providers, and also I just I love radio, I love audio, so I'm also a listener, so I think that's just was like I want to help them out, so I put their app on my phone too. But I think I do feel like it's actually trying to provide information as opposed to just keep you constantly engaged with whatever product they have.

Speaker 1: 25:22

Yeah, I agree, and I am biased as well. They're the only news organization that I trust for unbiased or as unbiased as possible of the news and they're the only news org that I donate to. So, yeah, as you know, ethan, right, like you know, I we talked about how I most of the all of the royalties from the first two editions of the book are donated to the nonprofit and the only media company within that nonprofit list was the NPR, and you know not CNN, not MSNBC or any other, definitely not. That news channel starts with the F and runs with, you know and then the box.

Speaker 2: 26:01

Yes, yeah, I don't know you can take this metric for what it's worth, but it's one of the few media properties that, after I interact with it, I don't come away feeling like furious or depressed or outraged or in some other way emotionally like must keep going.

Speaker 1: 26:21

Right, right, there are come. Yeah, I totally agree. Back to that hustle point thing, right, like, a lot of times you watch that video and go, okay, I'm going to run through walls and I'm just going to pull an O-Night or study that BGP or EVPN and I don't know. I mean, consistency is keen, like you. Just, you just have to build good habits. To me, by his opinion, build good habits, set up Pomodoro, do that every day and at the end of the day you just be a little smarter than yesterday, like what Charlie Mongos said, right, like, if you just do that long enough, if you live long enough, you're going to reap the benefits on that. Yeah, I'm, I'm that another happy thought. I think this is a good, good point to kind of end this episode. Again, I am super excited the reason you guys are on, because I'm moving my, my stream to packet pushers. It's going to start on March, the first week of March, so it should be March 6th 2024. And I definitely look forward to working closer with you guys.

Speaker 3: 27:21

Well, you know think having your content hosted by packet pushers. It's an honor for us, eric.

Speaker 1: 27:27

The pleasure is all mine, so thanks again for being here. Where can people find you on your content? To follow you, ethan. Oh, where can? Where can people do that?

Speaker 3: 27:38

Yeah, packet pushersnet is the best place. Linkedin, if you'd like to be social, I will post a briefing, summaries and ask questions and crowdsource information and so on. On LinkedIn, I try to be active over there at least, at least a couple of times a week, and and and that's it.

Speaker 1: 27:58

Yeah, he's not hard to find. Come on now, like we're in 2024, now you can find Ethan for sure. What about you?

Speaker 2: 28:05

Drew, yeah, you can find me at packet pushersnet. I'm also on LinkedIn and I'm on blue sky at drew underscore C M. If you want to go, follow me there. We're looking to build a good it community over at blue sky, so come check it out.

Speaker 1: 28:18

Right, and of course, we'll have all those links in the show notes. Thank you for listening to the network automation. There's podcasts today. Find us on Apple podcast, google podcast, spotify. Well, I should rewind that.

Speaker 2: 28:31

Hold on a second error. Yeah, hold on a second.

Speaker 1: 28:33

You know there, please find us, find the future episodes on packet pushersnet and you should be able to see, you know, amongst the eight different streams on our automation nerds. Obviously, we're going to have the new, new links to a new home in the show notes. Again, I'm very excited for this next step and I thank you listeners, for you know, listening and follow us up to this point. Please do continue to support the show and support packet pushers. Like I said, these guys are the ones who inspire me to start the podcast and I couldn't be more happier to continue this path on this team. And until next time, I'm packet pushers. Bye, bye.