Screaming in the Cloud - How Nicolas Cage Taught Me How to Code with Paul Chin Jr.

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

About Paul Chin Jr. Paul Chin Jr. is a curious human who likes to work with new technologies. His day job is at Cloudreach as a cloud solutions architect, working with enterprises to moderniz...e their applications in the cloud. On the side, he’s a prophet for Nicolas Cage and is called to spread his message. Links ReferencedTwitter Username: @paulchinjrLinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulchinjr/Personal site: https://www.paulchinjr.comCompany site: www.cloudreach.comTalk hashtag: #praisecage

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Paul Chin, Jr., who's a lot of things. He's a curious human who likes to work with new technologies. He's a cloud solutions architect at CloudReach, helping companies modernize their applications in the cloud. But most importantly, and the reason we're having this conversation, is that he is a prophet for Nicolas Cage and has been called upon to spread his holy message. Paul, welcome to the show. Welcome. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here with all of your listeners, my brothers and sisters, as I like to call them, in the Church of Cage. So tell us a little bit more about this.
Starting point is 00:01:10 To be clear, we are speaking with Nicolas Cage, the somewhat washed-up actor who could never turn down a role, correct? That is correct. I wouldn't say he's washed up, but yes. I do fancy myself a prophet of Nicolas Cage. I started off where I had been doing a bunch of different startup things, not even remotely connected to technology. I've had restaurants and food trucks and T-shirt businesses and photography studios. And the whole time it was all converging into this singular point where I was being called in a different direction.
Starting point is 00:01:46 And at that point, I knew I had to learn how to code, how to write it, how software was actually made instead of relying on somebody else to make it for me. And it's a pretty big daunting task, you know, when you're just like, I don't really know how to code. I'm okay with computers. I've used spreadsheets a lot. The logic in it seemed to make sense. But as you're starting out, as I was starting out, I really needed something to guide me, and I needed something to really focus on, because you get lost in sort of the tutorial madness of building the same thing over and over again. And so when I looked like almost jokingly deep down inside me, I needed to find like a muse or a source material. And it was, you know, it's the internet that really has given me the superpower of learning how to code. So I said,
Starting point is 00:02:40 I said to myself, how am I going to really give back to the Internet? And the best and the only answer was to worship Nicolas Cage as a god of the Internet. So all of my projects focused on creating things or exploring Nicolas Cage as the one true god. So I started off building IoT projects in order to worship him. I started building React components to pull in and modify GIFs of him. I built all kinds of crazy things, and they were all themed around Nicholas Cage. And as somebody starting off with no previous industry experience, it was the best way that I knew how to, one, learn core concepts of programming really well, apply it in a way that kept me motivated, and then gave me a really compelling reason to show other people so that
Starting point is 00:03:43 I can get myself in front of them to try to jump into a brand new industry. Gotcha. So can you give me an example of one of the talks you've given? Because if you just say in isolation, yeah, I give a whole bunch of talks about Nicolas Cage, you sound insane. So having a story around, give an example of how this might manifest so our listeners can visualize this as they are frantically trying to find any other podcast to listen to but this one. Sure. So one example being that this is a cloud podcast. Cloud technologies are so new all the time, coming out with stuff.
Starting point is 00:04:21 AWS is just cranking all kinds of features and services out. And whenever they come out, I have to play with them. So one that came out at the time was Step Functions. And I had been using Lambdas for a little bit. And we knew that Step Functions was going to serve a very interesting spot in order to help orchestrate how the lamb does get run. And I thought to myself, well, this is a perfect example of when you really need to bring some extra control to a certain process. And I thought, what is a better process than stealing the Declaration of Independence. And so I started exploring this idea of breaking down the heist in terms of singular functions for each thing that Nicolas Cage has to do as he goes through the process of stealing the Declaration of Independence. So in my step function, I have
Starting point is 00:05:23 all the different states that he goes through in the movie. I compared each function to what he actually does. And then I gave a talk about step functions and where I teach people about the step functions, how they're supposed to work, how you move past state around. But the thing that we're actually doing is calling to different parts of the movie just in code. So I thought that was a really cool and fun way to show off one thing while still talking about our one true God, Nicolas Cage. Excellent. So I tend to have a certain affinity for the ridiculous when it comes to conference talks from using illustrative points to tell a story. A while back, I started talking and evangelizing, I suppose, about my favorite
Starting point is 00:06:09 database, Route 53. And that was hilarious only insofar as that no one could quite tell if I was serious or not. Spoiler, I'm completely serious. And someone built an entire system in Ruby on top of Route 53. So you could query it, you could update records, create tables, etc. And someone on Reddit wound up posting later in time that they weren't sure if I was serious or not, and this actually sounded like a good idea, should they do it? At which point I started to realize, wow, people are actually listening to the nonsense that I say. That becomes something of a problem. I've spoken with some of the people on the Route 53 team who are in equal parts amused and horrified,
Starting point is 00:06:49 and it turns out that it's not the worst idea in the world for some applications. So my question for you becomes, does at some point when building these talks, does actually stealing the Declaration of Independence begin to seem like a good idea? All the time. I've done another talk where it was all about ETL pipelines,
Starting point is 00:07:11 and I compared it to Gone in 60 Seconds, when they have to steal all the cars. I map each of the AWS services to a different character in that movie and their role. And it's all about doing the pipelines and moving data from one warehouse to another, which is essentially just moving the cars from one warehouse to another. I really do feel like I have this extra superpower to go achieve these outlandish things like stealing 100 cars in a night or taking the Declaration of Independence or – it just keeps going on forever. There's 103 different movies that Nicolas Cage has done, and I only have six talks so far. So that's still at least another hundred talks I could probably give on these movies.
Starting point is 00:08:08 He is closing in on the number of AWS services. I should do that. Yeah, that's definitely a good talk idea. All the different services as Nicolas Cage movies. There are so many opportunities in there too. You give a talk on systems manager, Nicholas Cage's manager. So people do come up after the talks to me and really question whether or not I believe in Nicholas Cage as a god. And I definitely feel like the performances that he puts out belong in the realm of this like higher level thing. He does so many different things that there is room in there for
Starting point is 00:08:57 normal people to pull interpretation from it. And that is art, but that is also, you know, maybe part religion, you know, it's up to you, however you feel about it. But when people ask me about it, I've definitely seen – I haven't seen all of them. It's very difficult to see them all, but I've seen many, many of them. No, and I'm not one to mock other people's beliefs. Some believe it's a UFO trailing behind a comet and that ritual group suicide is the best way to catch it. Other people believe Nicolas Cage is a good actor. And who am I to crap on anyone's religious beliefs,
Starting point is 00:09:25 regardless of how outlandish they may be? Exactly. So on a slightly more serious note, you don't have a background yourself as a developer. So you wound up picking up learning how to code as an outgrowth of your job, and you went in a serverless direction with it. Can you talk to us a little bit
Starting point is 00:09:42 about what that journey looked like? Sure. Yeah, like I said before, my original upbringing was a lot of small business. I grew up in a restaurant. My parents had a Chinese restaurant here in Norfolk, Virginia. And I learned at a very early age about business and making sure that, you know, you have people coming in the door and you do your operations and all that. So I got a very long crash course in how to run businesses. And then when I decided to learn how to code, I knew that software was going to be the way that I can scale any business, whether that's a restaurant or a t-shirt company. I have to have some level of understanding with software development.
Starting point is 00:10:36 And I came into serverless, it was very much a natural thing. When I got started, I used a lot of different cloud services because I didn't know how to start an actual server. I didn't have a computer to build a local machine on. I never learned any of the networking stuff at first. It was all very much what is the tool that's going to get me an application the fastest. And I started learning it in about 2015. And at that time, serverless really wasn't like a big name thing yet. It was almost about two years later, like all the blog articles would
Starting point is 00:11:27 come out about it and it was everywhere. But when I first started off, you know, I used a lot of cloud native tooling. I didn't know that's what it was called at the time. I just knew that there was a free tier. I could use this to get up and running. And I had an application, right? Like, I was able to host files without ever configuring anything. I was able to make APIs without worrying about Linux or installing it or running a shell command. Like, I never had to deal with any of that. And that gave me both a good advantage and disadvantage. When I look at customer situations now, I have to be empathetic and mindful of previous technologies, you know, what they the best that they could at the time. But I had to kind of go back and relearn all these challenges that they faced so that they could build the solutions that they needed. And now that, you know, I come in and try to help them modernize that stack,
Starting point is 00:12:36 it's both looking at it with fresh, fresh eyes, you know, as the possibilities never end in cloud technologies, but also knowing how much they had to pull and push to make that application work, you know, 15 years ago. It's interesting to hear you say this, where you don't come from a background of operations central focus. For example, I was a grumpy sysadmin for years. So running the Linux box was always the easiest part of everything else involved. Writing example, I was a grumpy sysadmin for years, so running the Linux box was always the easiest part of everything else involved. Writing code that worked was a whole separate story, and that was something of a challenge. The part of the story that resonates, though, is the idea of
Starting point is 00:13:15 having a larger goal that isn't getting the baseline stuff up and running, and just being able to move past that directly into doing the thing that you actually want to do slash need to do for whatever the outcome you're chasing is. So what's fascinating to me about the whole serverless ecosystem is that you have people coming from such a wide variety of different places when they start, and they wind up all gathering around over a shared goal of getting something done without, I guess, the ideological purity of having to spend four years getting a CS degree first? Yeah, totally. I'm constantly trying to back myself into a CS degree every time I dip into the theoretical waters of computational sciences. I ended up questioning reality again. Like, is this real? Is this bit real? Where does it exist? And I fall down this hole that doesn't, it's very cool. Like, it's very, very cool that you can learn how the code gets executed on a machine.
Starting point is 00:14:29 And for some workloads, it's very essential that you know how performant your stuff is. But in business, 90% of the time, it's not going to affect most systems, I would say. What's really affecting the bottom line is how quickly you can get this feature out and get it validated in the marketplace. And so I thankfully got to leave behind a lot of the grumpy sysadmin stuff and just focus purely on writing this code that's going to let me do what I need to. And I truly believe that making this technology more accessible to more people so that other folks like me who grew up never thinking that they could make a computer program. To make, to really empower other folks to say, you know what, I can do this. I can build a computer program. I can make the computer do what I want
Starting point is 00:15:35 and use it as a true tool. It's something that's really, like I'm really passionate about. I really look out for tools that have, you know, little to no configuration. I look for tools that are going to have very clean interfaces, whether that's programmatically with an API or, you know, with a browser-based GUI. I believe in this like so, so, so much. I help volunteer with a local great computer challenge that's been running for a really long time. And we actually give kids like first and second graders iPads with Scratch on it. And they create these amazing stories and amazing interactive art pieces using nothing but drag and drop tools.
Starting point is 00:16:28 And they understand the logic that goes into it. That's freaking amazing. I do the same thing with my little four-year-old daughter. And anybody I meet on the street, really, I tell them, you know, you could learn how to control a computer. I don't tell them, you know, code because that may or may not be too scary for them. But I tell them, you could learn how to control a computer. I don't tell them, you know, code because that may or may not be too scary for them. But I tell them you can learn how to control a computer. It is not, you know, outside of the possible. What also interests me is that you mentioned you grew up with your parents owning a restaurant.
Starting point is 00:16:58 And being able to, I guess, see the logistics side of that, of being steeped in a business that historically has always had to focus on things like making payroll and being able to handle like these silly outmoded concept that here in tech we don't care anymore but our legacy business do, known as profit, and being able to make sure that you can stay afloat every month, it feels like it gives you a grounding in reality that you don't always have when you're coming at this from a more theoretical point of view. Is that an accurate assessment? Definitely. So the big leaping block from doing, I guess, more main street brick and mortar businesses into understanding the importance of software was this small window
Starting point is 00:17:48 of time here in Norfolk where like the startup scene was really buzzing and everyone wanted to be a part of an incubator or have that you know million dollar Facebook idea and everyone's got an app idea like that whole ecosystem started cropping up around that time. And I knew that the business people who were able to understand the technology were going to, you know, make themselves be able to perform better. And I saw way too many people who think that it's the technology that drives the business. And I, you know, that idea was going to be able to scale to be able to support themselves, their family, employees, and all that stuff. So depending on what a business's goal is, I actually, side note, I think some of these businesses that come out and list as technology unicorns, I don't think their actual goal is to make money. I'm not sure what their goal is. I'm not really playing at that level yet.
Starting point is 00:19:07 But, you know, my essential upbringing is, you know, how many egg rolls can I sell? What did it cost me to put into that egg roll? And how many can I move an hour? And then I know how much money I can make. Like every day, that's what I think about. You know, what is the situation? What I think about. What is the situation? What are my inputs? What is my output?
Starting point is 00:19:28 And then I have what I have at the end of the day. How do you think that this is going to shape what, for example, you alluded to teaching kids how these things work and having a daughter yourself who's a couple years older than my daughter. What world do you think they're going to grow up in? How is this going to shape what education looks like? I mean, from my perspective, when I learned this stuff in school, in seventh grade, I had a typing class, and I was always getting poor grades in that for two reasons.
Starting point is 00:19:55 One, I skipped ahead and got the entire assignment finished in the first five minutes, and secondly, my typing form wasn't perfect, because for me, at least, at that era, I had a mental map of the keyboard, so I didn't hit anything from the appropriate fingers or whatnot. I just put my hands on the keyboard, and then words came out correctly, and that was the end of it. So it's weird in that typing is the least interesting part of any of all of this, but that was as far as computer science education went back when I was in school. I don't think that's the case now, but I'm curious as to what it's going to look like, especially with the advance of things like serverless technologies in the education space. Thoughts? Yeah. Man, STEM is such a buzzword, just like startup.
Starting point is 00:20:39 There's tons of initiatives and very passionate people about making STEM happen. And I feel like we have to come back just a little bit more fundamental of regular problem solving. And in education, I really want to see these serverless and cloud technologies enable people to control the computer, build a program without ever realizing that they're doing it. To them, it's just like making a game or creating some outcome that they want to have happen. And I show my kids, they're very little, they're one in four, how to use an Alexa. And they can communicate with it. They can utter things at it. I joke that my second daughter, her first word was going to be Alexa because we use it to do everything.
Starting point is 00:21:37 And all of that is powered by, obviously, AWS and serverless technologies. And now with on my iPhone, I can build drag and drop integrations with the Alexa without ever having to write any code. Like I had built Alexa skills, you know, writing JavaScript, but now I can also do it with my fingers. So for education, I think that we have to take a different look at what it means to be, you know, using technology as a tool and what it means to look at computer
Starting point is 00:22:09 science as a discipline, as a different craft that underlies the implementation of the tool. That really resonates. I mean, it hadn't occurred to me that the idea of voice first was going to be an issue, but you're right. My daughter was a couple months old, or damn near, it seems. She wasn't verbal yet, but whenever we spoke to Alexa, there would be an immediate, she would look exactly at the speaker and wait for it to respond, which was, oh, she's smart. It didn't occur to us this was a real first interaction with technology.
Starting point is 00:22:40 I think the world that she's going to grow up in is going to be radically different than the one that we're living in today, just from how pervasive technology can be. And that is a double-edged sword. I'm not one of those stars-in-my-eyes idealists who's convinced that this is nothing but a net positive. I think that there are serious questions about that. But the fact that it's more accessible, that it's no longer going to be a bunch of ivory tower types who are the keepers of the flame when it comes to working with technology is going to be transformative. And I do believe that serverless is a step along the way towards whatever comes next. Now, what that is, I don't know. I'm not a futurist. I don't consider myself a digital prophet.
Starting point is 00:23:22 But there is clearly something brewing. I just don't know what it is yet. It's funny you mention your daughter understanding that she has to look at the device, right? My daughter would also just sort of look at it. She knows that it's a focus point for control. And I'm not one of those parents that really regulates screen time very hard. What I regulate is their intention on it. I tell my daughter, like, you can be on this device as long as you want, as long as you're creating, as long as you're trying to solve a problem,
Starting point is 00:24:01 you can be there. But if you're going to be passively watching a cartoon or something, then yeah, there's going to be some time to take a break, exercise your mind a little bit, let it wander on its own. And I think that that's a really powerful thing to think about as we continue to integrate with technology in our lives. For so much of it, it is about consumer technologies, about making things easier for yourself, about turning your mind off. Well, now I truly believe that the tools, the serverless tools and the new abstractions that other people are building can give us the ability to really flex our minds now with technology, not just consume. I think that's an excellent point and one that people tend to skip over far too frequently.
Starting point is 00:24:55 Now, before we go, I do have one more question for you. Out of however many movies he's been, I think you said 103. which is your favorite nicholas king oh everybody always asks this and i feel like i should be better prepared for it but every single time i try to sit down and think of of the best answer it's so difficult right because it's like if someone asks you what's your favorite anything you have different answers for the different moods so i'm gonna take a a cheat out and say that the movie that I like watching over and over again is probably Raising Arizona. I feel like that's just a great film, regardless of Nicolas Cage being in it or not. Him being in it is even
Starting point is 00:25:40 better. I think that he has, of course, an amazing track record of being that quintessential 90s action star. So I really love Con Air. I'm trying to work it into another talk. I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm going to do it. I kind of want to do the new AWS event cues with Con Air somehow. Not quite sure about that yet. But yeah, between Raising Arizona and Con Air, I just think those are timeless movies. And then he's in some really great brand new ones like Mandy and his voice acting in Into the Spider-Verse.
Starting point is 00:26:25 He's a very versatile actor. You can't take him to an Italian restaurant, though, because he gains 80 pounds because he can't turn down a role. But other than that... I'm going to make a believer out of you yet. I can still hear a little bit of skepticism, but I believe that you will come around to it. So where can people find more of you, your antics, etc., if they wish to learn more both about your philosophy to serverless, your journey you're on, and of course, our one
Starting point is 00:26:57 true prophet, Nicolas Cage? Yes, they can definitely follow me on Twitter. That's where I'm the most active. Paul Chin Jr., all spelled out J-R at the end. P-A-U-L-C-H-I-N-J-R, so P-C-H-I-N-J-U-N-I-R. I release a lot of the example code that I have out on GitHub. And what's fun on Twitter is when you use that hashtag, I can see when other developers are also working on Nicolas Cage projects. In fact, I have one pinned where another fellow Node botanist created a Nicolas Cage face that follows you around the room like on a servo with face detection technology.
Starting point is 00:28:02 So definitely some face-off nods there. But yeah, we'd love to have more followers and more folks coming into the Church of Cage. Excellent. It sounds like something that's well worth having a, I guess, a following built around. Yes. Paul, thank you so much for spending the time
Starting point is 00:28:22 to speak with me today. I appreciate you being so generous with your time. No problem. This was a ton of fun. And I want to give one last shout out to all my mentors and community members here in the Norfolk, Virginia area, Linda Nichols and Travis Webb and Kevin and all the folks who have helped me and welcomed me into the technology space. So thanks. And of course, you can never thank Nicolas Cage enough either. Also, our one true God, Nicolas Cage. Praise be to him.
Starting point is 00:28:56 Look up the three cats of Cage so that you know how to fight our devil, John Travolta. Thank you. Paul Chin Jr., evangelist for Nicolas Cage and all-around decent person. I'm Corey Quinn. This is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us
Starting point is 00:29:14 five stars on iTunes. If you hated this episode, please leave us five stars on iTunes. This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at ScreamingInTheCloud.com or wherever Fine Snark is sold. This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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