Screaming in the Cloud - Becoming a Rural Remote Worker with Chris Vermilion

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

About ChrisChris is a mostly-backend mostly-engineer at Remix Labs, working on visual app development. He has been in software startups for ten years, but his first and unrequited love was particle physics.  Before joining Remix Labs, he wrote numerical simulation and analysis tools for the Large Hadron Collider, then co-founded Roobiq, a clean and powerful mobile client for Salesforce back when the official ones were neither.Links Referenced:Remix Labs: https://remixlabs.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrisvermilion

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. Tailscale SSH is a new and arguably better way to SSH. Once you've enabled Tailscale SSH on your server and user devices,

Tailscale takes care of the rest, so you don't need to manage, rotate, or distribute new SSH keys every time someone on your team leaves. Pretty cool, right? Tailscale gives each device in your network a node key to connect to your VPN, then uses that same key for SSH authorization and encryption. So basically you're SSHing the same way you're already managing your network. So what's the benefit? Well, built-in key rotation,

the ability to manage permissions as code, connectivity between any two devices, and reduced latency. You can even ask users to re-authenticate SSH connections for that extra bit of security to keep the compliance folks happy. Try Tailscale now. It's free forever for personal use.

This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Logicworks. Getting to the cloud is challenging enough for many places, especially maintaining security, resiliency, cost control, agility, etc., etc., etc. Things break, configurations drift, technology advances, and organizations, frankly, need to evolve. How can you get to the cloud faster and ensure you have the right team in place to maintain success over time? Day two matters. Work with a partner who gets it. Logicworks combines the cloud expertise and platform automation to customize solutions to meet your unique requirements. Get started by chatting with a cloud specialist today at snark.cloud slash logicworks.

That's snark.cloud slash logicworks. And my thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. When I was nine years old, one of the worst tragedies that can ever befall a boy happened to me. That's right, my parents moved me to Maine, and I spent the next 10 years desperately trying to get out of the state. Once I succeeded and moved to California, I found myself in a position where almost nothing can drag me back there. One of the exceptions, basically the only exception, is Monctoberfest,

a conference put on every year by the fine folks at RedMonk. It is unquestionably the best conference that I have ever been to, and it continually amazes me every time I go. The last time I was out there, I met today's guest. Chris Vermillion is a senior software developer at Remix Labs. Chris, now that I finished insulting the state that you call home, how are you? I'm great. I'm happy to be in a state that's not California. I hear you. I talk a lot of smack about Maine, but to be perfectly direct, my problem with it is, is that I grew up there and that was a difficult time of my life because I really, I guess, never finished growing up, according to most people. And all right, we'll accept it. No one can hate a place

in the same way that you can hate it if you grew up there and didn't enjoy the experience. So it's not Maine that's the problem. It's me. I feel like I should clarify that or I'm going to get letters and people in Maine will write those letters and then have to ride their horses to Massachusetts to mail them. But we know how that works. So what is Remix Labs? Let's start there because remix sounds like, well, it sounds like a term that is overused. I see it everywhere in the business space. I know there was a remix thing that recently got sold to, I think it was at Shopify or Spotify. I keep getting those two confused. One of the two, yeah. Yeah, exactly. One of them that plays music and one of them that sells me things,

except now I think they both do both and everything has gone wonky and confusing. But what do you folks do over there? So we work on visual app development for everybody. So the goal is to have kind of a spreadsheet on steroids-like development environment where you can build interactively, you have live coding, you have a responsive experience in building interactive apps, websites, mobile apps, a little bit of everything, and providing an experience where you can build system engagement. So tools, mobile apps that kind of work with whatever backend resources you're trying to do.

You can collaborate across different people, pass things around. And you can do that all with a nice kind of visual app developer where you can sort of drop nodes around and wire them together and build in a way that's hopefully accessible to non-developers, to project managers, to domain experts, to whatever stakeholders are interested in modifying that final product. I would say that I count as one of those. I use something similar to build the tool that assembles my newsletter every week. And that was solving a difficult problem for me. I can write backends reasonably well using my primary tool, which is sheer brute force. I am not much of a developer, but it turns out that with enough enthusiasm, you can overcome most limitations. And that's great, but I know nothing about frontend.

It does not make sense to me. It does not click in the way that other things have clicked. So I was fourth and inches from just retaining a contractor to build out a barely serviceable internal app. And I discovered, oh, use this low-code tool to drag and drop things. And that basically becomes Visual Basic for internal apps. And that was awesome. But they're still positioned squarely in the space of internal apps only. There's no mobile app story. And it works well enough for what I do. But I have other projects I want to wind up getting out the door that are not strictly for internal use that would benefit from being able to have a serviceable interface slapped onto.

It doesn't need to be gorgeous. It doesn't need to win awards. It just needs to be cool. It can display the output of a table in a variety of different ways. It has a button, and when I click a button, it does a thing, generally represented as an API call to something. And it doesn't take much, but being able to have something like that,

even for an internal app, has been absolutely transformative just for workflow stuff internally, for making this accessible to everybody, building tools that work for people that aren't necessarily software developers, that they don't want to dive into code, although they can if they want. It's extensible in that way. That aren't necessarily front-end developers or designers, although it's accessible to designers. And if you want to start from that end, you can do it. And it's amenable to collaboration. So you can have somebody that understands the problem, build something that works. You can have somebody that understands design,

build something that works well and looks nice. And you can have somebody that understands the code or is more of a backend developer, then go back in and maybe fine tune the API calls because they realize that you're doing the same thing over and over again. And there's a better way to structure the lower parts of things.

But you can pass around that experience between all these different stakeholders, and you can construct something that everybody can modify to sort of suit their own needs and desires. Many years ago, Bill Clinton wound up coining the phrase the digital divide to talk about people who had basically internet access and didn't those who got it or did not. And I feel like we have a modern form of that. The technology haves and have nots. Easy example of this for a different part of my workflow here. This podcast, as anyone listening to it is probably aware by now, is sponsored by awesome

folks who wind up wanting to tell you about the exciting services or tools or products that they are building. And sometimes some of those sponsors will say things like, okay, here's the URL I want you to read into the microphone during the ad read. And my response is a polite form of, are you serious? It's seven different subdirectories on the web server followed by a UTM series of tracking codes that, yeah, I promise none of you are going to type that in.

I'm not even going to wind up reading into the microphone because my attention span trips out a third of the way through. So I needed a URL shortener. So I set up snark.cloud for this. For a long time, that was relatively straightforward because I just used an S3 bucket with redirect objects inside of it. But then you have sort of the problem

being a victim of your own success to some extent. And I was at a point where, oh, I could have people control some of these things that aren't me. I don't need to be the person that sets up the link redirection work. Yeah, the challenge is now that you have a business user who is extraordinarily good at what he does,

but he's also not someone who has deep experience in writing code. And trying to sit here and explain to him, here's how to set up a redirect object in an S3 bucket. Why didn't I save time and tell him to go screw himself? It's awful. So I looked for a lot of different answers for this. And the one that I found lurking on GitHub, and I've talked about it a couple of times, now runs on Google Cloud Run. And the front end for that on the business user, which sounds ridiculous, but is also kind of clever, is a Google Sheet. Because every business user knows how to work

a Google Sheet. There's one column labeled slug and the other one labeled URL that it points to. And every time someone visits a snark.cloud slash whatever the hell the slug happens to be, it automatically does a redirect. And it's glorious. But I shouldn't have

to go digging into the depths of GitHub to find stuff like that. This feels like a perfect use case for a no-code, low-code tool. Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, that's a cool use case. And as always, our competitor is Google Sheets. I think everybody in software development, in enterprise software, is only real competitor is the spreadsheet.

Oh, God, yes. I wind up fixing AWS bills for a living, and my biggest competitor is always Microsoft Excel. It's, yeah, we're going to do it ourselves internally is what most people do. It seems like no matter what business line I've worked in, I've worked in companies that did robo-advising for retirement planning. Yeah, some people do it themselves in Microsoft Excel. I work for an expense reporting company. Everyone does that in Microsoft Excel, and so on and so forth. There are really very few verticals where that's not an option. It's like, well, what about a dating site? Oh, there are certain people who absolutely will use Microsoft Excel for that. Personally, I think it's a bad idea to hook up where you VLOOKUP, but what do I know? Right, right. Before you wound up going into the wide world of low-code development over at Remix, you, well, a lot of people have different backstories when I talk to them on this

show. Yours is definitely one of the more esoteric, because the common case, and most people talk about is, oh, I went to Stanford and then became a software engineer. Great. What'd you study? Computer science or something like it. Alternately, they drop out of school and go do things in their backyard. You have a PhD in particle physics, is it? That's right. Yeah. Which first is wild in its own right, but we'll get back to that.

How did you get here from there? Ah, well, it's kind of the age-old story of academia. So I started in electrical engineering and ended up double majoring in physics because you had to take a lot of physics to be an engineer. And I said, you know, this is more fun. This is interesting. Building things is great, but sitting around reading papers is really where my heart's at. And ended up going to graduate school, which is about the best gig you can ever get. You get paid to sit in an office and read and write papers and occasionally go out drinking with other grad students. And that's really about it. I only just now for the first time in my life realized how much some aspects of my career resemble being a grad student. It doesn't pay very well, is the catch.

You know, it's very hard to support a lifestyle that exists outside of your office or, you know, involves a family and children, which is certainly one downside. But it's a lot of fun and it's very low stress as long as you are, let's say, not trying to get a job afterward. Because where this all breaks down is that, you know, as I recall, the time I was a graduate student, there were roughly as many people graduating as graduate students every year as there were professors total in the field of physics, at least in the United States. That was something like the scale of the relationship. And so if you do the math, and unfortunately, we were relatively good at doing math, you could see, you know, most of us were not going to go on. You know, this was the path to becoming a professor, but... You look at the number of students and the number

of professorships available in the industry, I guess we'll call it, and yet, hmm, basic arithmetic does not seem like something that anyone in that department is not capable of doing. Exactly. So, you're right. We were all, I think, more or less qualified to be an academic professor, certainly at research institutions where the only qualification really is to be good at doing research. And you have to tolerate teaching students sometimes, but there tends to be very little training on how to do that or meaningful evaluation of whether you're doing it well. I want to dive into that a bit because I think that that's something we see a lot in this industry where there's no training on how to do a lot of different things.

Teaching is one very clear example. Another one is interviewing people for jobs. So people are making it up as they go along, despite there being decades and decades of longitudinal studies of people figuring out what works and what doesn't. Tech has always loved to just sort of throw it all out and start over. It's odd to me that academia would follow in similar patterns around not having a clear structure for, oh, so you're a grad student, you're going to be teaching a class, here's how to be reasonably effective at it. Given that higher education was not the place for me, I have very little insight into this, is that how it plays out? I don't want to be too unfair to academia as a whole. And actually, I was quite lucky. I was a student at the University of Washington, and we had a really

great physics education group. So we did actually spend a fair amount of time thinking about effective ways to teach undergraduates and doing this great tutorial system they had there. But my sense was in the field as a whole, for people on the track to become professors at research institutions, there was typically not much in the way of training as a teacher. There was not really a lot of thought about pedagogy or the mechanics of delivering lectures. You know, you're sort of given a box full of chalk in a classroom and said, all right, you know, you have freshman physics this quarter. The last teacher used this textbook. It seems to be okay. Tended to be the sort of preparation that you would get. You know, and I think it varies to institution to institution, what kind of support you get,

you know, the level of graduate students helping you out. But I think in lots of places in academia, the role of professors as teachers was the second thought, you thought, if it was indeed thought at all. And similarly, the role of professors as mentors to graduate students, because I'm being innovative in this one particular aspect, I can justify being innovative in all of them. I mean, that's the shame that you're such a nice person because you would be phenomenal at basically being the most condescending person in all of tech if you wanted to. Because think about this. You have people saying, oh, what do you do? I'm a full stack engineer. And then some of the worst people in the world, of which I admit I used to be one, are, oh, full stack. Really? When's the last time you wrote a device driver?

And you can keep on going at that. You work in particle physics. So you're all, that's adorable. Hold my tea. When's the last time you created matter from energy? And yeah, and then it becomes this, it's very hard to wind up beating you in that particular game of who wore it better. Right.

One of my fond memories of being a student is back when I got to spend more time thinking about these things and actually still remembered them. You know, in my electrical engineering days and physics days, I really had studied all the way down from the particle physics to semiconductor physics to how to lay out silicon on chips and, you know, how to build ALUs and CPUs and whatnot from basic transistor gates. You know, and then all the way up to, you know, writing compilers and programming languages. And it really did seem like you could understand all those parts. I couldn't tell you how any of those things work anymore.

Sadly, that part of my brain is now taken up with Go's lexical scoping rules and borrow checker fights with thrust. But there was a time when I was a smart person and I knew those things. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Strata. Are you struggling to keep up with the demands of managing and securing identity in your distributed enterprise IT environment?

You're not alone, but you shouldn't let that hold you back with Strata's identity orchestration platform. You can secure all your apps on any cloud with any IDP. So your IT teams will never have to refactor for identity again. Imagine modernizing app identity in minutes instead of months, deploying passwordless on any tricky old app, and achieving business resilience with always-on identity,

all from one lightweight and flexible platform. Want to see it in action? Share your identity challenge with them on a discovery call, and they'll hook you up with a complimentary pair of airpods pro don't miss out visit strata.io slash screaming cloud that's strata.io slash screaming cloud i want to go back to what sounded like a throwaway joke at the start of the episode in seriousness one of the reasons at least that I told myself at the time that I left Maine, was that it was pretty clear that there was no significant lasting opportunity in industry when I was in Maine. In fact, the girl that I was dating at the time in college, graduated college, and the paper of record for the state, the Maine Sunday Telegram, which during the week is called the Portland Press-Herald, did a front page story on her about how she went to school on a pulp and paper scholarship. She was valedictorian or chemical engineering class at the University of Maine and had to leave

the state to get a job. And every year they would roll out the governor, whoever that happened to be, to the University of Maine to give a commencement speech. It's don't leave Maine, don't leave Maine, don't leave Maine, but without any real answer to, well, for what jobs? Now that COVID has been this plague over the land that has been devastating society for a while, work from home has become much more of a cohesive thing. And an awful lot of companies are fully embracing it. How have you seen Maine change based upon that for one? And for another, how have you found that community has been developed in the local sense? Because there was none of that in Maine when I was there. Even the brief time where I was visiting for a conference for a week, I saw definite signs of a strong local community in the tech space. What happened? I love it. It's great.

Yeah, so I moved to Maine eight years ago in 2014. And yeah, I was lucky enough to pretty early on meet up with a few of the local nerds. And we have a long running Slack group that I just saw was about to turn nine. So I guess I was there in the early days called Computers Anonymous. It was a spinoff, I think, from a project somebody else had started in a few other cities. The joke was, this is sort of a confessional group of, you know,

we're here to commiserate over our relationships with technology, which all of us have our complaints. Honestly, tech community is more of a support group than most other areas, I think. Absolutely. All you have to do is just name a technology and somebody will pipe up, oh, okay, I have a horror story about that one. But it has over the years turned into a very active Slack group of people that meets up once a month for beers and chats with each other. And we all know each other's kids. And when the pandemic hit, it was absolutely a lifeline that we were all sort of still talking to each other every day and passing tips of, you know, which restaurants were doing takeout and, you know, which ones were doing takeout and takeout booze. And all kinds of local knowledge was being spread around that way. So it was a lucky thing to have when we had this community because it

existed already as this community of people that were remote workers. And I think over the time that I've been here, I've really seen a growth in people coming here to work somewhere else because it's a lovely place to live. It's a much cheaper place to live than almost anywhere else I've ever been. I think it's pretty attractive to the folks come up from Boston or New York or Connecticut for the summer and they say, ah, you know, this doesn't seem so bad to live. And then they come here for a winter and then they think, well, okay, maybe I was wrong

and go back. But I've really enjoyed my time here. And the tools for communicating and working remotely have really taken off. A decade ago, my first startup, actually in kind of a similar situation, similar story, we were starting a company in Louisville, Kentucky is where we happen to live.

We had a tech community there that were asking those same questions. Why is everybody leaving? Why is everybody leaving? And we started this company and we did an accelerator in San Francisco and every single person we talked to, and this is 2012,

said, you have to bring the company to San Francisco. It's the only way you'll ever hire anybody. It's the only way you'll ever raise any money. This is the only place in the world that you could ever possibly run a tech company. And we tried and failed. Oh, one of those innovative industries in the world. We've taken a job that can be done

from literally anywhere that has internet access and created a land crunch on eight square miles located in an earthquake zone exactly we're going to take a ton of vc money and we're going to spend 90 of it on rent in the bay area the rent paid back to the uh lps of our vc funds and the circle of life continues when i started uh this place as an independent consultant six years ago, I looked around, okay, should I rent a space in an office so I have a place where I go and work? And I saw how much it costs to sublet, even like a closed-door office in an existing tech startup's office space.

Saw the price tag, laughed myself silly, and nope, nope, nope, instead installed a door on my home office, and I got this place set up in my spare room. Now it's transformed into my home office slash recording studio. And yeah, well, wasn't it expensive to do that kind of stuff? Not compared to the first

three days of rent in a place like that. It wasn't. I feel like that's what's driving a lot of the return to office stories is the sort of, I guess, an expression of the sunk cost fallacy. Exactly. And it's a variation of nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM. You know, nobody ever got fired for saying we should work in the office.

It's the way we've always done things. People are used to it. And there really are difficulties to collaborating effectively remotely. You know, you do lose something with the lack of day-to-day contact, the lack of in-person contact. People really do get kind of burned out on interacting over screens. But I think there are ways around that. And the benefits, in my mind, my experience, you know, working remotely for the last 10 years or so, tend to outweigh the costs. Oh, yeah. If I were 20 years younger, I would absolutely have been much more

amenable to staying in the state. There's a lot of things that recommend it. I mean, I don't want people listening to this to think I actually hate Maine. It's become a running joke, but it's also, there was remarkably little opportunity in tech back when I lived there. And now, globally, I think we're seeing the rise of opportunity. And that is a line I heard in a talk once that stuck with me, that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity isn't. And there are paths forward now for folks who I'm told somehow don't live in that same eight square miles of the world where they too can build tech companies and do interesting things and work intelligently with

other folks i mean the thing that always struck me as so odd before the pandemic was this insistence on oh we don't allow remote work it's well hang on a minute aren't we all telecommuting in from wherever our offices happen to be to aws because i've checked thoroughly. They will not let you work from US East 1. In fact, they are very strict on that rule. Yeah. And it's remarkable how long I think the attitude persisted that we can solve any problem except how to work somewhere other than Soma.

Part of the problem too in the startup space, and one of the things I'm so excited about seeing what you're doing over at Remix Labs, is so many of the tech startups for a long time felt like they were built almost entirely around problems that young, usually single men had in their 20s when they worked in tech and didn't want to deal with the inconveniences

of having to take care of themselves. Think food delivery, think laundry services, think dating apps, et cetera, et cetera. It feels like now we're getting into an era where there's a lot of development and focus and funding being aimed at things that are a lot more substantial. Like how would we make it possible for someone to build an app internally or externally without making them go through a trial-by-fire hazing ritual of going to a bootcamp for a year first? Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think there's been an evolution toward building tools for broader problems, for building tools that work for everybody. I think there was a definite startup uberos in the kind of early days of this past tech boom of so much money being thrown at early stage startups with

a couple of young people building them. And they solved a zillion of their own problems. And there was so much money being thrown at them that they were happy to spend lots of money on the problems that they had. And so it looked like there was this huge market for startups to solve those problems. And I think we'll probably see that dry up a little bit. So it's nice to get back to what are the problems that the rest of us have? Or maybe the rest of you. I can't pretend that I'm not one of those startup people that wants on-demand laundry. Yeah, you wake up one day and realize, oh yeah, that does change things a bit. Honestly, one of the weirdest things for me about moving to California from Maine

was just the sheer level of convenience in different areas. And part of that is city living, true. But Maine is one of those places where if you're traveling somewhere, you're taking a car, full stop. And living in a number of cities like San Francisco, it's, oh great, if I want to order food, there's not the restaurant that delivers. you're taking a car full stop and living in a number of cities like San Francisco.

It's, oh, great. If I want to order food, there's not the restaurant that delivers. It's, I can have basically anything that I want showing up here within the hour. Just that alone was a weird transformative moment. I know I still feel like 20 years in that I'm country boy discovers city for the first time, loses goddamn mind. Like that is where I still am. It's still magic. I became an urban creature just by not being one for the forward of years. Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. I grew up in Ann Arbor, which is sort of a smallish college town and certainly more urban than the areas around it. But visiting the big city of Detroit or Lansing, it was exciting. And I got older. I really thought of myself as a city person. And I lived in San Francisco for a while

and loved it and Seattle for a while, loved it. Portland has been a great balance of... There's a city, it's a five-minute drive from my house. It has amazing restaurants and concerts and great art scene and places to eat and roughly 8,000 microbreweries. But it's still a relatively small community. I know a lot of the people here. I sort of drive across town from one end to the other in 20 minutes, pick up my kids from school pretty easily. So it makes for a nice balance here. I am very enthused on, well, the idea of growing community in localized places. One thing that I think we did lose a bit during the pandemic was every conference became online. So therefore, every conference

becomes the same, and it's all the same crappy Zoom-esque experience. It's, oh, it's like work with a slightly different topic. And for once, the people on this call can't fire me directly. So it's one of those areas of just, there's not enough differentiation. I didn't realize until I went back to Oktoberfest a month or so ago at the time of this call recording, just how much I'd missed that sense of local community. Because before that, the only conferences I'd been to since the pandemic hit were big corporate affairs. And yeah, you find community there, but it also has a very different element to it.

It has a different feeling. It's impossible to describe unless you've been to some of these community conferences, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think a smallish conference like that where you see a lot of the same people every year, credit to Steve and the whole Red Monk team from Oktoberfest,

that they put on such a great show that every year you see lots and lots of faces that you've seen the last several because everybody knows it's such a great conference, they come right back. And so it becomes kind of a community. As I've gotten older, a year between meetings doesn't seem like that long a time anymore. So these are the friends I see from time to time. And we have a Slack chat from time to time. So finding those ways to sort of cultivate small groups that are in regular contact and have that kind of specific environment and culture to them within the broader industry, I think has been super valuable, I think, to me,

certainly. I really enjoyed so much of what has come out of the pandemic in some ways, which sounds like a weird thing to say, but I'm trying to find the silver linings where I can. I recently met someone who'd worked here with me for a year and a half that I'd never met in person. Other people that I'd spoken to at length for the last few years in various capacities, I finally meet them in person. And huh, somehow it never came up in conversation that they're six foot eight. Like, yeah, okay, that definitely is one of those things that you notice about them in person. But here we are. I really want to thank you for spending as much time as you have to talk about what you're up to, what your experiences have been like. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you? And please don't say Maine. Well, as of this recording, you can find me on Twitter at Chris Vermillion, V-E-R-M-I-L-I-O-N.

Yeah, that's probably easiest. And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it. Well, thanks for having me on. This was fun. Chris Vermillion, senior software developer at Remix Labs. I'm cloud economist

Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice.

Whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment. And since you're presumably from Maine

when writing that comment, be sure to ask a grown-up to help you with the more difficult spellings of some of the words. If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need the Duck Bill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duck Bill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business, and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started. this has been a humble pod production stay humble