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**Justin Garrison:** I don't know when I got into white papers. I got into white papers before I got into reading RFCs. RFCs are for me like I need to debug something... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[unintelligible 01:05:04.22\] white papers when I started reading them for work at AWS, and then I just -- it became my favorite way to consume things. If I'm going to study for a certification, I will read a bunch of white papers on that technology first, because I hate -- I definitely like watching ... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. I mean, it's long-winded sometimes. But it helped me -- I started reading white papers when I had my first sysadmin job, because I was learning all these technologies I never had access to before. |
**Autumn Nash:** Yes. |
**Justin Garrison:** And the best thing about white papers was it told me when to not use a technology. |
**Autumn Nash:** But when you're trying to learn something new, that's what -- especially from the context of a solutions architect, which is where I started reading papers... I want to know what the use case is. When do I use this? When do I not use it? How does this compare to something else? |
**Justin Garrison:** That has helped me so much in my career. My meetings were like "Hey, we're talking about this new technology. We want to use this new thing. And we think we can apply it to this domain." And I would read the white paper. I'm just like "Hey, in this white paper they didn't use it for that, for these... |
**Autumn Nash:** \[01:06:17.01\] It helps you not get tech debt for nothing... Because people are like "This is the new fancy thing", and you're like \[unintelligible 01:06:19.26\] |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, I've seen this before. And there's a lot of white papers that are not technology-related at all, or they're technology-adjacent. When I was at Disney, I loved reading the Pixar Animation, and Disney Animation white papers, because they were just papers that got put out. Most of them were not ... |
**Autumn Nash:** Interesting. |
**Justin Garrison:** They were rendering, they were -- we had a white paper at Disney that was like how to render snow accurately for Frozen. |
**Autumn Nash:** Wow. |
**Justin Garrison:** There was a whole research thing, there's a research team at a lot of these studios. |
**Autumn Nash:** That sounds really cool. |
**Justin Garrison:** A lot of the special effects companies will have research teams that will do this deep research, and then they write a white paper and say "This is \[unintelligible 01:06:53.19\] |
**Autumn Nash:** How do you get a job on making snow? That just sounds funny... |
**Justin Garrison:** So RFCs are kind of the other end of that. Research papers and white papers are like when do we apply things, and how the technology works, and RFCs are kind of like "This is a spec of a thing that we want to exist, and we want people to adopt it for some way." And it's not a set in stone thing, be... |
**Autumn Nash:** I love that though, because when you're really solving hard problems in technology you know that you want to build something, but learning what the blocks are... Sometimes you know that you want to build something, but you don't know what's available to help you build it. So knowing what the Lego piece... |
**Justin Garrison:** Speed-building Lego pieces in the dark sounds like a -- |
**Autumn Nash:** It's hard. It's not fun. So it's like \[unintelligible 01:08:18.21\] |
**Justin Garrison:** \[unintelligible 01:08:24.26\] Don't step on the pieces. |
**Autumn Nash:** No instructions... |
**Justin Garrison:** Barefoot. |
**Autumn Nash:** "We want it in an hour." So I feel like when you have white papers, when you have any kind of -- that helps you to understand the tools better for you to understand how to build these things, and to be able to use the tools better and more efficiently, always makes you a better engineer, builder. |
**Justin Garrison:** In the times I have used RFCs have been the times I've been taking a system apart. White papers helped me build it, or know which technologies that build it. RFCs help me understand it when I need to dissect it, and say like "Oh, what's the header for this IP packet?" Or what's the protocol I'm loo... |
I was looking at tunneling protocols, a white paper about tunneling IP and IP. And I went down this rabbit hole, watching TV one night, I pulled it up... And that's what I do for fun. |
**Autumn Nash:** I love the rabbit holes that you randomly go through, and then I get a signal or a text message, like some random thing, and it always makes my day. |
**Justin Garrison:** "Did you know...?" |
**Autumn Nash:** Yes. Dude, I was reading a meme, and it said "Being friends or having loved ones who are ADHD is micro-dosing Wikipedia." And is that not our conversations? |
**Justin Garrison:** But we go far enough to -- we're off of Wikipedia. We're the Wikipedia of resources. We've found the resources of the resources, and we're like "Okay--" |
**Autumn Nash:** We've gone down the rabbit hole... |
**Justin Garrison:** "I've gotten to the bottom of this hole... Guess what - it's Bash." |
**Autumn Nash:** It's always Bash. It's Bash and Assembly, and it makes the world go around. |
**Justin Garrison:** \[01:10:09.14\] Yeah. We just wanted to call it -- like, RFCs in general; we'll have a link in the show notes. |
**Autumn Nash:** Okay, so what's the coolest RFC that you -- give us two really cool ones that you were like "I did not know that", or that made your day. |
**Justin Garrison:** I mean, the 2068 is HTTP protocol, first-gen, a 1.1 or whatever. 2068 is a really foundational one if you're trying to understand how verbs work, and how HTTP is supposed to work in the real world... Ones that I remember reading were the TCP and IPv4. So that's TCP's 793, and IPv4 is 791. So around... |
**Autumn Nash:** This is a really nice little summary, kind of like the list of things, and... I like this. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah, we're gonna link to the one from -- Wireshark had a really good roundup of some of the foundational ones for network stuff, which is a lot of RFCs... |
**Autumn Nash:** Do you feel that networking sometimes feels Charlie Brown's teacher talking to you, until you go down like five rabbit holes, and then you kind of understand the first thing, but then you're confused about two other things after that? |
**Justin Garrison:** I mean, if you like acronyms, then you know what to do... |
**Autumn Nash:** I'm always like "Okay, I know the first thing that I wanted to know, but now I'm confused about five other things... And it's been four hours..." |
**Justin Garrison:** The best thing is just to try to pronounce all of the networking acronyms... Because at least with Kubernetes -- |
**Autumn Nash:** Nobody told me there was so much math, though. Like, why? I was \[unintelligible 01:11:49.03\] I think, when I was learning how to be a solutions architect, and dude, they were like "And then we're gonna do this math." And I'm like "Whoa, whoa... Networking and math? Too far. Whoa." |
**Justin Garrison:** And you've just reminded me that I read a white paper, which was probably one of my favorite white papers, which is one of the early Software Defined Networking white papers. And I for the life of me cannot remember what the title of it was. If any of our listeners know the foundational, software-d... |
**Autumn Nash:** You are my favorite type of hyper-fixation nerd. Okay, be real... Friends that you can have fun conversations and then learn something with, and make things not so daunting are the secret to life, okay? |
**Justin Garrison:** Oh, yeah. And having friends that are experts in very specific things... Like "Hey, you know cosplay. 3D printing cosplay. How do I do this piece?" |
**Autumn Nash:** Well, not just that, but when somebody asks me a Kubernetes question, I'm like "Hold on, let me text Justin." The idea that you have to be an expert at everything in tech is just a pipe dream. You are not going to know all the things. Everything's constantly changing. But knowing the right people to as... |
**Justin Garrison:** One of the things that I think in developer relations, in DevRel, that I've done fairly well is I don't have the answers, but I know who to connect you to. And that is a huge win. |
**Autumn Nash:** I think that's real in engineering, but not even just dev rel. I think you can help your cust-- and a solutions architect. That's basically what a solutions architect is. You are either the expert specialist who knows that area deep, or you are the generalist that knows all the specialists to talk to. |
**Justin Garrison:** And a lot of it is just to helping someone sidestep the process of filing a ticket. That's the whole point, of like "Hey, we have \[unintelligible 01:13:42.12\] |
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