Screaming in the Cloud - The Sly Skill of the Subtle Tweet with Laurie Barth

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

About LaurieLaurie is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. You can also find her creating content and educating the technology industry as an egghead instructor, member of the TC39 Educators committee, and technical blogger.Links:Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurieontechNetflix: https://www.netflix.comEgghead: https://egghead.ioThe Art of the Subtle Subtweet: https://laurieontech.com/book-launch/

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. You could go ahead and build your own coding and mapping notification system, but it takes time, and it sucks.

Alternately, consider Courier, who's sponsoring this episode. They make it easy. You can call a single send API for all of your notifications and channels. You can control the complexity around routing, retries, and deliverability, and simplify your notification sequences with automation rules.

Visit courier.com today and get started for free. If you wind up talking to them, tell them that I sent you, and watch them wince, because everyone does when you bring up my name. That's the glorious part of being me. Once again, you could build your own notification system, but why on God's flat earth would you do that? Visit courier.com today to learn more. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at VMware. Let's be honest, the past year has been far from easy due to, well, everything.

Caused us to rush cloud migrations and digital transformation, which of course means long hours refactoring your apps, surprises on your cloud bill, misconfigurations, and headaches for everyone trying to manage disparate and fractured cloud environments. VMware has an answer for this. With VMware's multi-cloud solutions, organizations have the choice, speed, and control to migrate and optimize applications seamlessly without recoding, take the fastest path to modern infrastructure, and operate consistently across the data center, the edge, and any cloud. I urge you to take a look at vmware.com slash go slash multicloud. You know my opinions on multicloud by now, but there's a lot of stuff in here that works on any cloud. But don't take it from me,

that's vmware.com slash go slash multicloud, all one word. And my thanks to them again for their sponsorship of my ridiculous nonsense. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Lori Barth, but no one really knows that's her last name. In fact, Lori on tech is how most people think of her. She's a senior software engineer at a company called Netflix, which primarily streams movies and gives conference talks in the before times about how you're doing it wrong. She also creates a lot of content and educates the technology industry as an instructor at Egghead. She's a member of the TC39 Educators Committee and, of course, is a technical blogger. Lori, thank you for suffering

the slings and arrows. I'm no doubt going to be hurling your way. This is the most fun I've had all week. Well, it's a pandemic on, so presumably that isn't that high of a bar for the pony to stumble over. Yeah, unfortunately not. I think that's maybe the problem. So you're someone that I have been aware of for an awfully long time. You're always sort of omnipresent in conversations. You are someone who has a lot of great opinions that present well. You talk about an awful lot of things that are germane to my interests, educating the next generation of engineers, for example. And of course, you recently started at Netflix, at which point, well, if you're not familiar with what Netflix is doing in the cloud, have you ever even talked to an AWS employee for more than 35 seconds?

Because they'll reference Netflix for a variety of wonderful reasons, both based in technical excellence as well as because AWS is so bad at telling the story of what you can build out of their popsicle stick service collection that they just punt to companies like Netflix to demonstrate what you could do. So you're sort of this omnipresent force on Twitter, but we've never really had a conversation before. So it was long past time to rectify this. I mean, you sent me two cents. So I think that was pretty... That's what the tip jar is for. You just wind up hurling very small amounts of money at people, along with insulting comments. And it's a new form of social media. That is the microtransaction way. I quite enjoyed that. So for context, I was one of the first people to be part of the A-B testing for Tip Jar on Twitter. And Corey was the first person to send me money with, of course, a very on-brand Corey message,

which there's a screenshot of on Twitter somewhere. And a couple of people followed, but it was great fun. And I think that's the first time we had ever directly interacted in a message or something other than obviously in threads and that sort of thing. Yeah. And that's an interesting point to lead into here because I'm also in the AB test for tip jar and I've largely turn it off except for when I'm doing something very small and very focused, usually aimed at some sort of charitable benefit or whatnot. And even then it's not the right way to do it. And it's weird. There was a time I absolutely would have turned it on, but it doesn't seem right for me to do it now. And that's partially due to the fact that, first, I don't need tips from the audience in order to sustain

myself. I'm not that kind of creator. I have a company that solves very expensive problems for large companies, and that works out really well for keeping the lights on here. I've not that kind of creator. I have a company that solves very expensive problems for large companies, and that works out really well for, you know, keeping the lights on here. I've not tried to disparage creators in any way, folks who are in a position of needing that to cover their lifestyle in a variety of different ways. And even if they're well beyond that, I don't begrudge that to them at all. I mean, from a very selfish capitalist perspective, I don't want you to feel that you paid your debt to me for entertaining you by sending me $5. I want you to repay that debt by signing a five-figure consulting agreement. Yeah, those aren't really the same thing, are they? No, no. It turns out

signing authority caps out at different places for different folks. Who knew? But it was a fun experiment. I'm glad that they're doing it. I'm glad to see Twitter coming out of its stasis for a long time and trying new things, even if we don't like some of them. Well, they have this whole super follows thing now. And I got waitlisted for it the other day because they said they accepted too many people, whatever that means. Same here. Yeah, I think a bunch of us got that.

And I'm interested. My sense is it's sort of like a Patreon hosted in Twitter sort of thing. And I've never had a Patreon. Like, I have a mailing list that I made based on an April Fool's joke this past year where I made an entire signup workflow for the pre-order of my new book, The Art of the Subtle Subtweet.

I was very pleased with this joke. This was like very elaborate. I had a whole website. I had a signup flow. And I now have a mailing list, which I've done nothing with, right? So like I have all of these things, but that's not really been my, there's too many things to do as a content creator. And so like, I've sort of not explored most of those other avenues. And so super follows,

I was like, this could be interesting. I could try doing it, but you know, alas, they don't want me to. So I don't know that it matters. It's an interesting problem too, because at the start of the pandemic, I had a third of the Twitter followers that I do as of the time of this recording, which is something like 63,000. When I started what I do five years ago, and I just left a company which was highly regulated. So don't tweet was basically a social media policy. It was a, okay. I had something like 2000 followers at the time. I was, it had taken me seven years to get there. Let's be very clear here. And since then my following has exploded and yours has as well. You have, I think the last time we checked,

what is something like 30,000 and change? Yeah, something like that. And it changes the way that people interact with you. This is one of those things that there aren't that many people that we can have this kind of honest conversation with. Because let's be very clear here. For folks who have not established an audience like that, it sounds absolutely like it's either a humble brag, which I'm not intending that to come across that way, or it's one of those wish I had those problems. And in some ways, yeah, it's a weird problem to have. And it's also not a sympathetic problem to have. But something that has been very clear to me has been that the way that people perceive me and the way that they interact with me has shifted significantly as my Twitter notoriety

has increased. Yeah. I'm curious about how you have experienced that. Yeah. So I'm half your size. And especially in the front end universe, there's plenty of people with between a hundred thousand to, you know, I think Dan Abramov is at like 400,000 at this point. My Twitter following would explode if I either knew JavaScript or was funny. Either one would just absolutely kick me out of the stratosphere, but we work with what we've got. I either don't know JavaScript or I'm not funny or maybe both because apparently not. But yeah, there's these huge, huge, huge scales. And I'm sure by many people's judgment, pretty large, but comparing to other

people in my ecosystem, maybe not so much. And I didn't understand it until I was living it. I actually had the opportunity to meet Emily Freeman at a conference in DC probably three years ago now when I had less than a thousand followers. And I thought getting my first hundred was a big deal. I thought getting my first 500, and it is, don't get me wrong. Those things are like very cool milestones. I still celebrate the milestones, but I do it less publicly now. Yeah, exactly. And I had a whole conversation with her and she gave me some really, really helpful advice. Sort of don't look at your follower count as it goes back and forth. Five people, six people, you'll think people are unfollowing you. They're probably not. It doesn't matter. And recognize that the larger you get, the more careful you have to be. And trying to

keep me sane before I was ever there. And it's all sort of come true. There's two things that have stuck out to me, I think, during the pandemic especially. One is I can write the most nonsensical, silly tweet and people will like it because they think it says something insightful, whether it does or it doesn't. They're projecting onto the tweet something funnier or more relevant than the reason I wrote it in the first place, which, okay, that's cool. I'm not as smart as you're giving me credit for, but sure. The other thing, which is the downside to that, is everyone assumes that if they're having a conversation with me, they're having a conversation with me. So one-on-one, back and forth.

That's not untrue, but I'm having a similar conversation in parallel with, if it's a popular tweet, 100 other people at the same time. And what that means is if you're being a little bit of a jerk and a little bit trolly, you're not being a little bit of a jerk and a little bit trolly, you're not being a little bit trolly. You're being a little bit trolly times the 100 other little bit trolly people. And so my reaction to you is not going to be necessarily equivalent to what you say. And that can get me in trouble, right? But there's no mental, emotional spectrum that was designed to work with the scale of social media. Oh, absolutely not. In fact, let's do an experiment now while we're having this conversation. I am

making a tweet as we speak. Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps. It's not particularly insightful. It's not particularly deep. And before the end of this episode, we will check and see what that does in terms of engagement, just because you can say anything, and there's some folks who will wind up automatically engaging. And again, that's fine. Everyone engages with Twitter in a bunch of different ways. For me, what's been very odd is I have talked to a couple of very large companies who I talk about on Twitter from time to time. And it turns out that they are reluctant to engage with me directly on Twitter or promote anything that I do or do retweets of me, not because of me,

but because of the element of the audience in some cases, of what people will chime in and say, because it doesn't align with corporate brands and a bunch of different perspectives, which, again, I have some sympathy for this. It's hard to deal with folks who are now suddenly given a soapbox and a platform that rewards clever insults better than it does meaningful, heartfelt content. And that is something that I think everyone is still struggling with. Let's also be very clear here. I'm a white dude in tech. My failure mode is a board seat and a book deal. When I post something about Git, for example, which I did a few days ago, and someone responds explaining the joke back to me, my response to them was, thank you for explaining Git to me. And that was all I said. And it led to

a mini pile on of this person because it's like, don't you know who Corey is? Yet I have seen the same dynamic happen with women tweeting about these things. And it's not just one response that explains Git, it's all of them. And when people say, Abby Fuller, for example, will tweet about password manager challenges and how annoying some of them are, and it leads to a cavalcade of people suggesting password managers to her. That is not why she's tweeting it. And she explicitly says, I do not want you to recommend password managers to her. That is not why she's tweeting it. And she explicitly says, I do not want you to recommend password managers to me.

And people continue to do it. And I don't, for the life of me, understand what goes on in some people's heads. Yeah, I mean, I've watched that happen countless times. I think the frustration, there's a point at which, no matter how big of a following you have, you just want to be yourself. I think most people who get to that amount of interaction have been

their self most of the way along the way, or they're just being like totally fake for the sense of growth hacking, in which case, okay, you do you. But like most people I think are being themselves because it's exhausting to spend that much time on a platform and pretend to be someone else or be fake the whole time. So I'm pretty much myself. And that means that sometimes when someone's being a total jerk, I really want to treat them and be like, yeah, you suck. But the problem is when I say that, I'm sticking 30,000 other people on them to defend me. And I can't do that. So instead, I've become sort of famous for subtweeting. And I will wait a couple of days to do it, or I will totally change the framing of the situation

so I can get out my same sort of frustration and annoyance and just needing to blow off steam or venting or whatever it is and not point at the person. Because if I point at the person, I discovered very, very quickly that there's a whole crowd of people willing to take them down. If they're being blatantly terrible, I will do it.

There is a line here. Someone recommending that I use a different tool because I decided to bitch about TypeScript, for example, or like telling me I don't understand TypeScript. Okay, fine. Someone saying, you only have followers because you're a pretty girl. Yeah, you're an asshole. Like, no, I'm not protecting you. Also, by the way, I tweeted two minutes ago, do all tweets deserve a like question mark? And we'll see how much that interaction gets. I'm looking forward

to seeing how that plays out. It's a responsibility, which sounds odd. But if I complain about a company, what I'm fundamentally doing if I complain about a company, what I'm fundamentally doing is I have the potential to be calling down an airstrike on top of them. And not every customer service failure deserves that. I deleted all of my tweets prior to 2015, a while back. And the reason most people delete tweets, or the reason we hear about most people deleting tweets, there was nothing especially problematic in my tweets other than jokes that were mean in different ways and punching down in ways that I didn't realize

were at the time. It was not full of slurs. It was just things that weren't particularly great, but that wasn't the real reason I did it. The honest reason was is that I looked at my early tweets and they were cringey beyond belief. I was shilling for the company I worked for in many respects. And there were long past swaths of which I did engage with Twitter. And the only time

I really did is I was out there complaining about various customer service failures. So it's just this never ending stream of complaints about different companies that had wronged me in trivial ways. And I don't know at some point if I was going to build something where it's easy to explore early tweets of a particular account. I don't want them some point if someone's going to build something where it's easy to explore early tweets of a particular account. I don't want them to do that and then figure out that this is how you get started being me. It's like I succeeded in spite of that nonsense, not because of it. And it's not something good that I want to put out into the world.

Yeah. So I have, I think, only once added a company when I was having a customer service issue on a weekend and we were in like really dire straits. And I was just like, okay, it's a weekend. Like I'm going to add. And I've never gotten a response so fast. And my husband looked at me and he was like, wait, what? And I'd done this with an old, I have like this really ancient Twitter account that I got rid of because I was mostly just screaming about politics. Um, I didn't want, I think I got Lori on tech in like 2016, 2017. And I'd done that before. I'd been like, Hey, you know, I'm making something up at Spirit Airlines.

They seem like an easy one to, I've never flown Spirit. So, but I mean, I never got a response. And so there's realizing that you have power from a brand perspective is really weird. But I almost want to go back to your point when you were talking about when you worked for a company and you had your account and, you know, they don't want you to tweet basically, or companies are not going to tweet at you now in your current state. I think it's really hard to be a company on the internet in tech because you're either going to make a joke that lands well, or everyone's going to think that you're shilling for yourself. There's no in between. And so this is a hot take, and I might get in trouble for that. Companies have realized that the best way to get around that is to hire people who

have their own personal names and get your company name associated with them. And all of a sudden, it looks less disingenuous. And even that's a problem because I've talked to companies who are hiring folks with large followings for DevRel style jobs. And I've interviewed for a few of those once upon a time, but the midway through when I was debating, do I shut this consulting thing down and get a real job again? Because that's always how I sort of assumed it would be for the first couple of years. And then now I'm going to get serious about it. And I took on a business partner and got very serious. And here we are. But talking to folks, my question was, in the interview process, I would talk to my prospective manager

and ask questions of the form. So what is your plan for when we eventually part ways? How are you structuring that? And they looked at me like that was the bizarre question. It's understand that done right. My personal brand will in some areas and some corners eclipse that of the company. So as soon as I leave, for whatever reason, the question is going to be, were you mistreated? Did someone wrong you there? We'll drag them just preemptively on the off chance. And you need to have a plan in place to mitigate some of that and have a structured exit for what that is going to look like. And they looked at me like I was coming from a different planet, but I still think

I'm right. You are right. And oh goodness, I've seen this in a lot of different places. I mean, I have left companies in the past and I have had to decide how I was going to position that publicly and how much I was going to say or not say, how complimentary I was going to be or not. Because the thing is, when you leave a place, you're not just leaving the company. You're also leaving your colleagues. And what does that mean for their experience? You're gone. Like, you don't want to be saying, hey, this place is horrible while your really close friends you were working with on Friday are still there.

Right? while your really close friends you were working with on Friday are still there, right? At the same time, companies don't think about this from the DevRel perspective. And I want to be very clear. I have friends who work in DevRel who are themselves brands. They are all fantastic people. They work incredibly hard. This is not a knock on them in any way. It looks easy from the outside. I want to be very clear on that.

It's not easy. All this stuff is great, but part of the reason I decided to go to a place like Netflix is because I knew my brand had no bearing on them. And so I could be myself and just do my own thing and they weren't going to try and leverage me or there was no sort of hit to them based on who I was. Granted, did I go after someone the other day sort of hit to them based on who I was. Granted, did I go after someone the other day sort of in deep in a thread for being a jerk? And did they try an at Netflix engineering and say, is this the kind of person you want representing your brand?

And at Egghead.io, is this the kind of person wanting your brand? Yeah, they did. So like that part's still a problem, but that's a problem for me rather than being a problem for my company. If I decide that, you know, I don't always want to, like, no one cares if I talk about the new Marvel show, no one cares. I like Marvel. I'm allowed to like Marvel. I also love the stuff on Netflix, right?

But when you're at a company that isn't like that, honestly, when I was at Gatsby, I couldn't be tweeting about Next or Nuxt or even Vue for that matter, because it just doesn't look right. Because my brand had more of an impact in that smaller pond than it does now. People have said, oh, well, what if AWS acquires you so you can work on their behalf? Or what if Google acquires you or something like that? And it's, what people don't get is that my persona, again, to be clear, I am genuine on Twitter. I emphasize aspects of my personality, but I don't get up there and say things I don't necessarily believe.

And we'll get back to that in a minute. But what I do as a small company, making fun of trillion dollar publicly traded entities is funny and it works. But if suddenly I work at a different publicly traded company, it just looks like I work for my employer bagging on a competitor. And even if I'm speaking in an opinions my own sense, which is apparently Amazon's corporate motto, based on how often I see it in

their employees' Twitter bios, it's going to be perceived as me smacking at a competitor regardless. Further, I will not be the person that craps on my own employer on Twitter because that sends terrible signal in many respects. I won't even crap on previous employers who frankly kind of deserve it because when you do that, it does not look good to people who are not familiar with the situation

and no one's as familiar with it as you are. It just looks like sour grapes regardless of how legitimate your grievance was. To be very clear, I'm not saying don't call it abuse when you encounter it. That's fine. I'm not going down that path. Let's be clear here.

But yeah, they have a terrible management culture and they don't promote internally. And I hate those people. It just makes you look bad and it doesn't help anything. Yeah. I had always made a commitment to never talk about a former employer in any way that was easily identifiable.

I've changed that policy a little bit. Like there's a story I shared a couple of times where my CEO didn't want to give me a pay raise because he thought it was my parents and boyfriend at the time's job to take care of me financially. Like that kind of stuff, I will say publicly, no one's going to know who it is. You'd have to go back and figure it out. Like you don't have enough context. So how would you know? But it's stuff

like that, that I'm like, okay, I don't want to hide stories like that because that's not protecting anybody. No, I'm not talking about covering up for misbehavior. I'm talking run of the mill, just bad management, poor company, a culture, terrible technical decisions, et cetera. Yeah, if it's like, yeah, they sexually harassed every woman on the team out. Yeah, tell that story. Thank you.

I should absolutely clarify my stance. Heaven forbid I get letters. But yeah, it's- The problem is that you can't. And everyone has a slightly different experience with this. But from what I've seen, it doesn't matter if you say their management is shitty and they didn't promote

versus there was a ton of sexual harassment. If you're one person saying it, if it's the Blizzard situation where there's tons of receipts and it's made it into national media, then that's a little bit different. But if you're one person saying it about one company, people are going to think it's sour grapes.

And unfortunately, it doesn't reflect on the company. It reflects on you. So unless there's a sort of like, where there's smoke, there's fire situation, where a bunch of people are doing it at once, you have to weigh stuff really carefully, especially because your next employer doesn't want you out there

talking about your previous employer because then their fear is, what are you going to say about them when you leave? Like's lots of nuance and it gets, if you are screaming into the void, we're screaming into the cloud here. If you're screaming into the void, it doesn't matter if you're you. And I mean, I hate saying if you're me, right? That's such an obnoxious statement to make. But at 30,000, they probably care. There are inflection points. I started seeing around 40,000

is when I started seeing a couple of brands reaching out to me to, hey, you want to promote some nonsense? And I've never sold any social media promotion for anything. I sell sponsorships for newsletters, this podcast. I do webinar stuff. I do paid speaking engagements. My Twitter account is mine.

It is not the company's, and that is by design. It's me. That's what it comes down to. That does lead to challenges in some arenas because I talk to companies about their AWS bill, and these companies do not have much of a sense of humor about spending tens of millions of dollars, in some cases a month, on a cloud provider. These are serious problems, and they're a little worried in some cases, the first time we have conversations, that they're dealing with some kind of internet clown. And, and I often with talking to folks to convince them to come on this podcast, it's look, this is not me dragging you and making you look awful. Because if I do that, I'll never get another guest again. And if I do

it in the context of a consulting project, it's, that was a hilarious, entertaining intro here. Get out and never come back. It is not useful. People have generally taken a risk personally on bringing the duckbill group in. If we can't deliver and cannot present professionally, then they have some serious damage control to do for a variety of excellent reasons. And we've never put someone in that position and we won't. I talked to brands who sponsor all of these things and the ones that are the best sponsors intrinsically understand it. That if it's I start getting after some serious malfeasance style stuff, no one is going to not do business with you because I make fun of your company on Twitter.

Yeah. But an awful lot of people are going to hear about you for the first time. And advertising in the newsletter and having fun with that, or I talk about you in the podcast ads, it winds up being engaging in many cases, depending how far I can stretch it.

And it works. I did a tour at reInvent last year, virtual reInvent, where I led a Twitch tour for an hour around the virtual expo hall into a bunch of different sponsor virtual booths and made fun of them all. And I got thank you notes from the sponsors because that led to a bunch of leads because people cared about, oh, people paying attention because Amazon did a crap job of advertising the sponsor expo. And it was something that people could grasp and have fun with and get

attention for. It's top of funnel work and that's fine. But I just don't do it with the boring, stodgy stuff. I like to have fun with it. Bring a personality or don't bother. Yeah. And you can't take yourself too seriously. Obviously, I'm not the stand-up comedian that you are. I like to fashion myself as a little bit funny, but not that funny. I'm not the stand-up comedian and I don't have a consultancy to represent anymore. There was a time where I did, I was not the owner of it, but I worked there. So now it's sort of, I represent me, which is good in the way that you say, like, it's clearly you, it's not DuckBow group, it's your account. But at the same time, it freaks me out when in real life, people know that it's me.

So in my brain, Twitter is the internet and I have my actual real day-to-day life and never the two shall cross. And my, one of my, I had this popular tweet where I talked about all the companies I'd been rejected from. And it turned into a bit of a retweet situation with everyone sharing all these companies that they'd been rejected from. And the screenshots made it onto LinkedIn and made it into my cousin's feed. And she sent me a text message with a screenshot of she's like, you're on my LinkedIn. And I was like, no, no, this is not okay. This is not, I have my little circle of the world and it should not expand beyond that. I go to a conference, even a tech conference, and someone's like, oh, you're blue shirt crossed arms. I'm like, no,

this is not okay. Like, I only exist on the internet. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave, a new high-performance query accelerator for the Oracle MySQL database service, although I insist on calling it MySquirrel. While MySquirrel has long been the world's most popular open-source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, you know, work. With HeatWave, you can run your OLAP and OLTP, don't ask me to pronounce those acronyms ever again, workloads directly from your MySquirrel database and eliminate the time-consuming data movement and integration work while also

performing 1,100 times faster than Amazon Aurora and two and a half times faster than Amazon Redshift at a third the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense. I haven't been out in the world since I really started focusing on this. And now it's like I wear a mask, so it's fine. But I'm starting to wonder, am I going to get stopped on the street when I go back into the universe out there? And it's weird because you can't really unring that bell. No. It's a weird transition. And on some level, it's constraining in some ways. Like at some point of celebrity, I don't know if I'm there yet or not,

there's going to become a day where I can't just unload on a waiter for crappy service at a restaurant, not that that's how I operate anyway, without it potentially going viral. And oh, he's a jerk when you actually get to know him. And everyone has this idea of you and this impression of who you are based upon the curated selection of what it is you put out into the world. I've tried to be as true to life as I can on this. In conversations, I generally don't drop nothing but one-liners, but I think I'm pretty true to life as far as how I present on the internet versus how I present in person. More than I expected, to be honest. Yeah.

That also does surprise people. They think there's some sort of writing team behind me. If you look at the timing of some of my tweets where I will respond with the witty, snarky thing in less than a minute, I wish I had a writing team with that kind of latency. I think that'd be terrific. I always assumed it was you, but I figured there was like a persona that you turn on and turn off. And I realized now that it's an always on sort of thing. One thing I did experiment with for a little bit was having my team write tweets for my approval to promote episodes of this podcast, for example, because

I am not the sort of person going to sit there and build the thing out correctly and schedule it at the right time. And I have people who can do things like that, but it's the sort of thing that led to a situation of never getting much engagement. And those tweets never did very well. So why even bother? We have a dedicated Twitter feed for that stuff and everyone's happier, especially since I don't have to share access to this thing through anyone. Speaking of, let's see how our tweets did. Oh yeah. Okay. Hold on. How did we do? All right. So I have, do all tweets deserve a like was posted 19 minutes ago. It has 12 comments, one retweet and 22 likes. My some mornings. It's just not worth chewing through the leather straps was posted at a similar time frame,

has 10 likes and 3 replies. Someone said that organic, eh? Probably better than nylon. Someone said, is this an NDA subtweet? And someone said with a gif of Leonardo DiCaprio saying, you had my curiosity, now you have my

attention. That's it. So yeah, not exactly a smash it out of the park success. Yeah, but I gotta say, do all tweets deserve a like? It's pretty mundane for that amount of response. You included a question mark, which is an open invitation to the internet randos to engage. So there is potential there. I'm gonna have to retweet this

and say that I'm not grifting and it was done for this podcast and they should all listen to it. Oh, of course, by all means. I am thrilled at any point to wind up helping people learn more things about the environment. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I have to honestly say that I wasn't quite sure what was coming, but of all the things you could have asked me to predict about this episode, not talking about how Netflix works in cloud was absolutely not one of them. So, wow, are you sure you work at Netflix? That's one of those odd moment things. Yeah, I got to say, I'm pretty abstracted from the cloud these days. So maybe that means that

I don't know enough to talk about it intelligently. I would argue that extends to lots of folks. To be clear, Netflix has a lot of really neat things. That never stopped anyone before, but... Oh, yeah. It's like, I like to get up there sometimes. I'll talk about how we do things at Netflix periodically on conference stages, even though I've never worked there. But people don't correct me, because why not?

I'm a white man in tech. If I say something, of course it's right. It's just, if you don't, nothing that gets right, you just don't have enough context. That's the rule. Corey, I'm going to need you to take the last minute or so of this episode and please explain your feelings on how to optimize your use of JavaScript on the front end, please. Oh, wonderful. You pay smart people who know what they're doing to look deep into the JavaScript

side of it. Because honestly, every time I've tried to get into JavaScript, I go back at it and I feel even more foolish than when I started. Async stuff just completely blows my mind, especially by default. How in God's flat earth is that supposed to work? You went cloud! It doesn't make sense to me in a clear sense, at least with Python, which is the, I would say it's the language I know best, but it's not. Crappy Python is. And I can at least do things top to bottom and it works about like I would expect unless explicitly instructed otherwise. But the JavaScript world is just a big question

mark and doesn't work the way that I would expect it to. To be clear, the failure here is entirely mine. JavaScript is a big question mark and doesn't work the way I would expect it to should be JavaScript's tagline. That's fair because I have this ridiculous belief from the dark ages because I spent 20 years as a systems admin that computer behavior should be JavaScript's tagline. That's fair, because I have this ridiculous belief from the dark ages, because I spent 20 years as a systems admin, that computer behavior should be deterministic. And if there's one thing that we learned about the internet, it's not. Yeah, no, there's that whole user thing,

and then that whole browser thing, and then that whole device thing. It's a whole bunch of non-deterministic behaviors. Just stick to the cloud cloud and there's one consumer and one producer and you're good. One thing I will say in a moment of pure seriousness here is that if I were looking at getting into tech today, the first language I would learn would be JavaScript.

It is clearly the way of the future. It is a first-class citizen on every platform out there. It is the lingua franca of, effectively, everyone coming out of a boot camp. And it is going to be the way that computers are built. I say this not from a position of being an advocate for JavaScript. I don't know it. I can't stand it personally. But it is clear as day to me that that is the direction the world is moving in.

So if you're debating what language to pick up, you'd be hard-pressed to convince me not to recommend JavaScript as the first one. And do you want me to be my serious self and you're going to laugh at what I'm about to say? Hit me with it. If you're looking to get into technology, because of boot camps and some other things, we have an oversaturation of newbie front-end developers,

and they're all way more talented than I was at that point in my career, and yet there aren't nearly the front-door opportunities for being a, I hate the term junior, but newbie. And where there is the opportunity is cloud and security. I will absolutely point out further that I understand this runs the risk of being, Boomer gives career advice, but let's be clear here. I think that if you are going to enter

the front end space, and this does speak to cloud, it speaks to security as well, distinguish slash differentiate yourself by having another discipline or area of intense interest that you can bring into it as well. Because when you have a company that's looking to hire from a sea of new bootcamp grads that generally tend to look more or less identical from a resume perspective, the one that will stand out is the one that can bring in another discipline. And especially if that niche winds up aligning with the company's business, or at least an intense interest in something that is directly germane to the company, that will distinguish you. And everyone has something like that. No one is one-dimensional. So find the thing that is the in-between space

and focus on finding jobs in companies that do those things. And if you're a mid-career switcher, let me be very clear here. It is not a go-back-to-entry-level-roles-style story. I've never understood that philosophy. I do half-steps from thing I'm doing now toward thing I want to go to. Well, is there a job I can find to do next that blends the two of them together in different ways, and then once I'm there, then make a further transition? And of course, find someone who's in any career, in any path you're on, find someone who's five years ahead of you and ask them for their advice. What would you do in my shoes? If the answer is go to a boot camp, okay. Talk to a few people who've done this and make sure it validates it. If it's get a degree, okay, but

make sure you're not doing it because you think that's what you're supposed to do. You'll very rarely find me recommending six figures of debt in order to advance your career, but there are occasions. By and large, though, find someone who's been there before who knows what's going on. You can have a conversation with and give them context appropriate to your situation and then see what's right. We turn this into last minute career advice and I'm not even, I don't even slightly have a problem with that. Well, I was about to say that it's 2020, 21, 2020. Wow. You knew what I meant. It's 2021 and I guess I need to start taking my half steps towards becoming a Lego master before I retire. Oh, yes. The Lego world is vast and deep, and they have gotten no worse since I was a child at separating parents from money to buy Lego sets.

My daughter is four and is way into them already. So it's great. It's something we can bond over. If I ever have kids, we're going to need separate sets because they're not touching mine. Yeah. I'm looking at stuff like, oh, wow. I'd love to buy that awesome big Star Destroyer. Wait, it's how much money? And it turns into this, yeah. Wow. At some level, I never thought I would find a hobby that was more expensive than my mechanical keyboards hobby, but here we are. Oh, yeah. I blame Cassidy Williams for getting me into that one too. I have a shiny one beneath me and that's my first. She is a treasure and a delight. She's a treasure, a delight, and dangerous if you want to save money because she will draw you into the mechanical keyboards and there's just, there's no resisting.

I tried for a very long time. I failed ultimately. One of these days, she and I are going to have a keyboard off at some point once it's no longer a deadly risk to do so. It'll be fun. Do it. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Of course. Lori Barth, senior software engineer at Netflix, also instructor at Egghead, also member of the TC39 Educator Committee and prolific blogger. 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 a horrifying comment explaining anything we just talked about back to us. 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