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**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. And not subscribe to every newsletter and not read it, and all these email marketing campaigns, and everything else that comes. Like, "No, I have 10 megs. Get out of here. This is my space." MySpace. We're back to MySpace. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Bring back MySpace. |
**Justin Garrison:** Gareth, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us all about open source and Salt and your journey there. If anyone is looking, you're on LinkedIn, people can reach out to you, and we'll have a link in the show notes. |
**Gareth Greenaway:** Alright, sounds good. Thanks for having me. |
**Justin Garrison:** Thanks. |
**Break**: \[49:42\] |
**Justin Garrison:** Thank you so much, Gareth, for coming on the show and talking to us all about Salt, and generally just open source and foundations. It was a lot of fun. |
**Autumn Nash:** It was a very appropriate interview for the times of open source that we are currently living in. And technology. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. The world is looking different. We don't know what it's gonna look like on the other side, but right now we're in this weird place. |
**Autumn Nash:** I swear to God, tech is in like a sunken place right now... It's so weird. I'm like, I don't know how this all shakes out. |
**Justin Garrison:** So for today's outro we're kind of bringing back a little bit of links of the week, but really it was just I had a couple of links that I wanted to talk about... And more broadly than just the links themselves. One of them was called "The serverless illusion." And this is a very thoughtful piece, n... |
Essentially, what we're saying is "Hey, we all want to build these abstractions to not deal with the lower-level stuff." But sometimes you need the lower-level stuff. Sometimes you have to know what's happening under your code, in the server, on the network, something like that. And if the abstraction hides that from y... |
He goes on to say this isn't just a serverless problem. This is an abstractions in general. And this is any platform, and even things like Kubernetes... We always try to balance this, like, what is the abstraction we want and need, and what is the access to lower-level knobs that make the platform or the abstraction le... |
**Autumn Nash:** I don't know how to feel about this. Here's why. Because I feel like we do this thing where we get really excited about the newest technology that's supposed to make our lives easier... And then everybody jumps on board and puts it in everything, and is obsessed with it, and we put it in things we need... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. |
**Autumn Nash:** And now it's like "Serverless is bad." And I'm like "It's really not." |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, I don't think -- he's not necessarily calling out "Serverless is the bad thing." |
**Autumn Nash:** No, no, I know. His actual sentiment I agree with, but it just seems like it is still somewhat bandwagoning the "Let's eat serverless." I think the sentiment that he's saying, we've all been saying. I think that you could apply the same to AI and a bunch of things, and a lot of services. But I think yo... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[58:13\] The other two things he points out was one that I've talked about a lot, where serverless doesn't hide operations, it makes operations part of your application. It used to be I had a message queue somewhere else; the ops team ran the message queue. I didn't want to do that, because that w... |
**Autumn Nash:** I think this is going to get worse though... Because the more that we try to do at scale with the least amount of people... Like, really, automation, AI, all of these things, serverless - all of this is ways to do more with less developers. But the more you automate something, the less information you ... |
**Justin Garrison:** That's the balance of like an abstraction versus an illusion, right? Because it's like "Oh, I need access to know what port I'm connecting to." Some platforms, you just say it's a web server, and they figured out the port. But at some point you need to debug it, and you're like "Oh, actually, I nee... |
**Autumn Nash:** And I think that's going to drastically get worse in the era of AI and firing developers and layoffs... Because for one, so much of infrastructure was either abstracted and automated, but those people that built it or applied it knew what it was. And yeah, everything's still running, but eventually you... |
**Justin Garrison:** And if you want to talk about a piece of technology that no one knows how it works, LLMs are -- |
**Autumn Nash:** That's what I'm saying. |
**Justin Garrison:** How did this output get here? Uhhh... |
**Autumn Nash:** Be real, we're going to use that, right? And then we're going to have it -- people are like "We'll have it do security for us, we'll have it build infrastructure." That is a terrible idea, because nobody will then know how to fix that infrastructure or why those decisions were made. And then what happe... |
**Justin Garrison:** But \[unintelligible 01:01:54.04\] still call it a person? That's the problem. |
**Autumn Nash:** But the person has no idea how it got there. |
**Justin Garrison:** \[unintelligible 01:01:58.22\] the robots, and then we'll talk. |
**Autumn Nash:** It's like, you have to pay either way. Do you want to pay up front and you teach humans, and you onboard humans and do that? You can either pay up front, or you can pay later. And I call this the "mess around and find out" era of tech. We're about to mess around and find out. |
**Justin Garrison:** \[01:02:18.03\] That's actually a really good point. Don't let LLMs write your code until LLMs can handle your pages. Let's handle that side first. Like "Hey, once we \[unintelligible 01:02:24.28\] all the pages, and they know the run books that are documented and exist, and we know how to solve th... |
**Autumn Nash:** And when it's their butts on the line to talk to stakeholders when that code goes in the toilet and we don't meet SLAs... You know what I mean? It's not that the technology isn't going to be useful, but you still need humans to use it. Use it to teach humans how to onboard; use it to teach humans how t... |
**Justin Garrison:** I mean, humans are so -- I am so lazy. If there is something that's going to automate a portion of that, I'm not going to bother learning it. |
**Autumn Nash:** But I mean, we have IDEs. There are ways that we can incorporate a way to be more effective, faster, without it taking our ability to know what we're doing. |
**Justin Garrison:** There's a certain amount of automation that is acceptable... But the "Hey, Copilot, write this chunk of code for me" I think is too much, especially for onboarding. Because if it spits out a thing, no one's gonna go back there and be like "Oh, which line was that in?" It's like my cruise control fo... |
**Autumn Nash:** But I was gonna say, you have to know how to drive first. |
**Justin Garrison:** I've learned how to drive the car, and now I could just go straight. |
**Autumn Nash:** But think about it - right now nobody wants to invest in junior developers. That kind of one to five year range... It's either they don't want people who are really, really expensive, and they don't want people that either are new, or have just enough experience, but need to grow to senior... And event... |
So if you're not investing in the next generation, or moving that person who knows some, but not all... It's a cycle. That's the reason why senior engineers have to be good teachers. And the more that we're like "Oh, we don't need developers. We don't need to invest in people. We can get all these things to automate." ... |
**Justin Garrison:** I saw a thread recently of someone saying that hiring junior engineers make your senior engineers better, because they have to teach. |
**Autumn Nash:** It is. Dude, one of the best ways to learn a complicated thing is to go and teach it to someone else. For Milspouse Coders there was a point where we would have people teach concepts, and then record themselves. But we would give an opportunity -- so they'd have a lightning talk, and they could teach i... |
**Justin Garrison:** That is literally the reason I started doing conference talks. I did my first conference talk back in Scale, that \[unintelligible 01:05:29.21\] |
**Autumn Nash:** And people are always like "You need to pay your dues first", and all this stuff, and I'm like "No, but it's a great way to learn." That's why people should allow open source people to contribute to documentation, because your documentation might suck. If you made it, and then you have to go tell peopl... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. The person who wrote the code is the worst one to write the docs. |
**Autumn Nash:** Thank you. You start with the doc, and then you have to -- dude, I love having somebody... Like, I'll write a documentation, or a readme, or a wiki, and then have somebody use whatever form of automation or thing that I built, and then go through it, and you always find gaps. Because you thought you in... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[01:06:14.17\] And some gaps are intentional. Because not every documentation can start from the beginning. And so you have these gaps that are like "Hey, if you're here-- let's say you're running Kubernetes. We assume you know how to containerize something." There are assumptions; you have to mak... |
**Autumn Nash:** Also, the more bigger picture that senior engineers need to be able to operate on, they can't get this full scoping and big picture if they don't remember where people started, and how much a junior developer knows... You know what I mean? So they can properly break down work to give them. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. And you don't know what the starting point -- I just literally... On LinkedIn, I put out a message, like "Anyone that has never used the Talos operating system that I work on, let's do a live stream." Because I want to learn from the beginners again. If you've never used this before, let's ju... |
**Autumn Nash:** And you'll make your product better, because you're going to find the holes; you're going to find out how to make it better. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. It's going to help with the docks, it's going to help with command lines, and so many other things. |
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