The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Song Encoder: Forrest Brazeal (Interview)

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Welcome to _Song Encoder_, a special series of The Changelog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. This episode features Pwnie Award-winning songwriter Forrest Brazeal.

You're listening to Song Encoder, a special series of the ChangeLog podcast featuring people who create at the intersection of software and music. My name is Jared Santo. Big thanks to our partners at Fastly for delivering our shows super fast all around the world. Check them out at Fastly.com. Forrest Brazil refers to himself as a cloud bard.

He plays the piano, sings, raps, and even yodels about cloud-based technologies and services. When I saw Forrest's HugOps song go viral on Twitter, I couldn't help but chase him down and ask, what the heck's a cloud bard? Well, a cloud bard is something that I made up because you can define any category arbitrary and small enough to be the best at it. And as far as I know, I'm the only person that calls themselves a cloud bard. So I'm number one. No, but basically I'm an educator, cloud advocate, been teaching people about the cloud, building on the cloud for many years. And this is just a way for me to encapsulate the way that I like to do that, which is creatively thinking outside the box with a little bit of fun, a little bit of magic. It seems to help people get excited about

technologies that can be a little bit arcane, a little bit abstract, unless you put them in a format that you can easily grab onto. Do you remember the first Spark, the first time you decided, I'm going to start singing about technology? Yeah, actually, I do. So it was at a conference called Serverless Conf, dearly departed back in Austin, Texas. This was 2017. I was giving a talk. It was about serverless functions, something like that.

I decided that I would end the talk by rapping acapella rap, which is just the worst thing you can imagine. All right, let's do this. Okay. Do you feel kind of nervous about functions as a service? Makes sense to be on the fence. That serverless learning curve is kind of steep. It's not cheap. Even if it's affordable, you know that node code you wrote ain't portable. Yeah. But look, serverless is not a panacea. It's an idea that infrastructure can be structured like it's from Ikea, running your code on a computer you don't manage, freeing you to pursue your true business advantage. Now, does the tooling have some gaps? Sure. But just like our apps, perhaps it'll mature.

In the meantime, the hype is a little bit fair. For the first time in ever, you don't have to care. If you're over-provisioned or paying for idle or managing servers where each has a title like Catalo1 or worse, My Special Pet, when they're really just beasts you should try to forget. No maintenance windows from midnight till 2. Jeff Bezos will pay those sysadmins for you. If Amazon isn't your bag, forget them. Try Azure or Google or, yes, IBM. Use Cloud Functions, Step Functions, Firebase, Cognito, or wrap them all up like a stateless burrito. In short, the quick kick on that serverless stack is addicting as heck and there's no looking back. So go write a function, deploy and test, and let the cloud do what the cloud does best. For whatever reason, it became a very memorable moment at the end of that talk and ended up

leading to some great opportunities. And I realized, hey, you know, people do enjoy engaging with these concepts in this way. And at some point I started putting more music around this stuff. And yeah, here we are. So how long have you been doing music? You know, I mean, a long time. I've been, I was conservatory trained. I'm a classical musician on the side. At some point in the past decade or so, I figured out that I could combine that with my day job to do something that was more fun than either of them. So here we are.

So has this accelerated your career, you think? Yeah, absolutely. I would not be doing what I am now, would not have had the opportunities I have, would not have met the people that I've met, if not for putting these songs out there. And it's surprising how quickly music can cut through the noise and help you to all of a sudden start having a different conversation than everybody else is having. I think about the song that I wrote on ransomware back when everybody was thinking about, hey, there's no gas right now. You know, there's no meat or there's every day there was a new business getting hacked and people didn't understand what was going on.

And so I spent some time trying to understand what was behind this phenomenon, putting it into music in a way that was pithy and easy to understand. That song ended up winning what's called a Pony Award at Black Hat. I got to meet a lot of cool security people through that, got to partner a little bit with CISA,

the government agency that's responsible for cybersecurity. And yeah, you just never know what doors are going to be opened once you start singing. One day I asked my teacher, what use is math to me? She answered, when you're older, someday, my boy, you'll see there's a world of computer systems out there full of valuable data and not secured with care. And you can make a fortune in ransomware with a little bit of math. It's called encryption, just a little bit of math.

Cause a conniption, lock the data, hide the key. They'll pay up eventually, it's all just math. Ransomware is big now because it's organized You can buy it as a service and sell it for a prize There's a whole world of tempting targets to hack Governments, hospitals, schools to attack And they pay up in Bitcoin Hard to trace back, it's all just math

We call it crypto, just a little bit of math No need to tiptoe, hackers whisper, don't be nervous We take pride in customer service Well then I told my teacher, I'm feeling terrified How can we protect ourselves from all this cybercrime? She said don't click weird links or use password 123 Make offline backups, invest in security And that's when I realized how screwed we might be

Just do the math So many systems if they all took a bath Wouldn't we miss them next time there's no meat or water or gas And we slide a little closer to the day of wrath You can blame IT or some Russian sociopath But personally, I blame math For those of us who don't write music, we just listen to the songs once they're fully formed. What does your creation process look like?

I think it comes down to wanting to have something on your mind that's important to share. I'm not writing stuff just to write it. So earlier this summer, I did a piece called That Sinking Feeling, a Hug Ops song, which is about the terrible feeling that we've all experienced as developers when you, one second too late, realize you've pushed something to production that you should never have pushed and you've taken down the site and pagers blowing up. What are you going to do about that? Are you still going to have a job?

Are you going to survive? And it brings in these concepts of blameless postmortems and how to build a team that can be resilient to something like this. I knew I wanted to put that into song format because every couple of weeks you'll see something like this floating around on the internet. Someone else who's panicked about it. I think it was right around the time that that HBO intern had sent out a integration test email to their entire multi-million email list. And I just, I wanted to capture that feeling in a way that would resonate. And so from that point, it becomes,

you know, well, what's it going to sound like? How are you going to make this accessible and also kind of cut through the noise, like I said before, in a way that people maybe haven't seen before. In that case, I ended up putting the song together as a, there's a few different instruments involved. There's a little rap break in the middle of it, and it's got a pop sound to it. That's very easy on the ears. I wanted it to sound like a hug, an aural hug to help you feel a little bit better about the problem you just caused kind of the, the audio equivalent of the hug ops discipline. So, you know, it depends on the setting, depends on the time, depends on the concept you're trying to get across. In my plumbing now my life is flashin' Hope my boss will show compassion

And I really, really need someone to say Hey, hey, it's gonna be okay It just set fire to your resume This happens to the best Try not to get too stressed It'll be an awesome story someday I tweaked a small config Turns out that it was big And now my app has been beheaded. Whoa, when I do something wrong, I fear I don't belong. How can the world forget it? We're trending now on Reddit. Oh, mistakes will find you, but you've got a team behind you. Oh,

so fix the process, yes, but don't dismay. Hey, hey, it's gonna be okay We'll do a full post-mortem some other day It was a swing and miss, but we will learn from this And we'll all be better engineers Like, look, here's what you need to know when something gets destroyed If there's negligence or malice, then you shouldn't be employed But if a human is assuming, then the problem is the system It's gut-wrenching, butt-clenching, but you work with them

It can happen to a junior or to a senior Just because you caused a little pause doesn't mean you're incompetent It means you're doing work with real effect It's a SCARA battle, baby, that'll earn you some respect We all have been there Made a slip or two or ten there So we try to do a blameless RCA It's gonna be okay

You will still be here when this blows away. We've all screwed something up, so welcome to the club. We would love to hear your story. Hey, it's going to be okay. You will still be here when this blows away. We've all screwed something up, so welcome to the club. We would love to hear your story someday. So in your day-to-day work, have you ever been on the receiving end of a hug ops or have you ever been the guilty party on one of these outages?

Absolutely, I have. I remember a few years ago, I'd written this thing that shut down cloud instances outside of work hours. And it was great because it saved a lot of money. So we'd turn it on in development accounts and at 5 p.m. it would shut down everybody's servers. Guess who accidentally changed the config to have it run on production instead of on development? Shut down 600 live databases. So yeah, I've been there. That was a long day. Singing from experience then.

Yes. It seems like a lot of the stuff that you sing about is about what you're currently doing. So you have a lot of AWS stuff. I saw some stuff for CloudGuru. I assume there was some sort of relationship there. Yes, I used to work for a CloudGuru. Never actually worked directly for Amazon.

I was what's called an AWS hero for a long time, which is kind of like an unpaid developer advocate for AWS, similar to like a Microsoft MVP or Google developer expert. And as a result of that, I was constantly involved with AWS technologies and trying to explicate those. I have moved on to Google. I work there now. And so you can expect to see more Google Cloud related songs coming out, I'm sure. It's certainly what I'm thinking about what's on the top of my mind. How did you come to work at Google? Did your singing play a role in that directly or indirectly? Yeah, it was interesting. Somebody had hit me up on a Friday night like, hey, you should do a serverless versus containers rap battle. And I said, if this person's tweet gets X amount of shares by Monday, I'll go ahead and write one. And so they did. And I ended up writing it over the weekend.

Wait and see, the latency's no worse than your complacency. Facet, see, you're basically chasing the place you don't want to be. My services improve all by themselves. They get better. Meanwhile, you're out of luck, stuck chucking out the cheddar. Hey, remember Spectre and Meltdown? You were up all night. Me, I slept. That's right, the cloud provider kept it tight. You can patch your run times. I'll have happy fun times, delivering value while pal, you fight the same old fight. That sounds great. But wait, let's use our brains here. Yo, I got constraints here. I'm running Java 8 here, digging in the

brownfield, moving the ball downfield. Can't re-architect at all until we look respectable. I just want to build more. That's what I get billed for. Lambda gives me power our past selves would have killed for. I know, I'm just saying. We're in a different state of being. Yeah, but functions are amazing. wait, are we agreeing? Yo, I think it's possible that both of these architectural approaches are valid in different scenarios. I hesitate to admit it, but obviously use cases support both of our positions. Truce?

Truce. Let's bring it home. Ultimately both of us have the same destination, get rid of heavy lifting without differentiation. So whether your abstraction is a function or a node, you can get a lot of traction, Just keep trucking on the road. And if your app goes down at 3 a.m. and it will, you got to own that. It's your problem still. There's no silver bullet, hocus pocus, managed guarantee. But when business is your focus, you'll be where you want to be. Hey, that felt good. All right. We're not friends. Sorry. Hey, what does this error mean? Process exited without completing. On Monday, I got on a plane and went out to Seattle and we had

a bunch of AWS folks who were out there for like a developer summit Monday, I got on a plane and went out to Seattle and we had a bunch of AWS folks who were out there for like a developer summit. So I got out there and everybody had heard it. And it was just kind of a great conversation starter. And the guy that was over top of the AWS hero program at that time, Brian Hall, AWS's VP of marketing, ended up going on to Google. And he's now the VP that I report to at Google. So it was just, it was a great way for us to meet and start a conversation. And we kind of continued that relationship through the years.

What's your role at Google look like? What is your goals and what do you do for them? My title is head of content, which is kind of, it's more what you make of it than what it actually says it is. But I lead a group of extremely talented people who are responsible for telling the story of Google cloud to the world. So it's specifically the cloud side of the business. But you're talking about a cloud provider that, hey, it's third out of three, right? They're in a challenger position. And one of the advantages of doing that is you can be pretty outside the box in how you tell your story and what you're willing to do. So you can expect to see more unusual, creative storytelling coming out of

Google Cloud. Will there be some music? I certainly can't deny that there might be some. It doesn't seem so long ago that you were just App Engine and Google Apps. But while they called you just an embryo You grew up into something that kinda slaps And now when I use Workspace or GCP I get this funny feeling this is how Cloud should be Look at you now, Google Cloud Baby somehow you made us all proud Look at you run, clean as can be, sustainably So we can expect more Google Cloud content, of course. But what else?

What's next for the CloudBard? I'd like to expand a little bit and sing about some things that are maybe more tangential to tech. I feel like we need a supply chain song in these trying times. So we'll see if that happens. We need a supply chain song. There you go. Go mainstream with that stuff. Yeah, man.

You do have one that's related to tech, but it's not so much cloud and infrastructure and like explaining concepts like your 168 AWS services in two minutes is like a really fun way of kind of poking fun at AWS and how many services there are and how hard it is to remember all their names. But then more recently you have the big tech, it's probably fine.

This almost seems like a little bit of a commentary, right? Yeah, there's a song from back in the 60s called The Merry Minuet, made popular by a group called the Kingston Trio. And it's all about the atomic age and the razor edge of nuclear Armageddon that everybody was living on back then. But the very kind of serious commentary nature of the song is undercut by these whimsical lyrics and this very light melody. It actually is a minuet feel to it, and it just trips along very whimsically. And so the intentional triviality of the music and of the way it's phrased is in complete contrast to the civilization-destroying implications of what they're talking about. They're rioting in Africa They're starving in Spain

There's hurricanes in Florida And Disneyland needs rain So I wanted to write something like that about Big Tech. So if you listen to that song, you'll hear it's a very kind of calm, flowing, cheerful melody. You know, it just kind of flows along like that. But you're singing about a world where people are not in control of their own thoughts and feelings and where you have a small number of oligarchic technology companies that are making decisions about who can speak and who's not allowed to speak.

And that's our version of Armageddon that we're contemplating in some ways. And I just wanted to back that with music that absolutely didn't sound like it at all. Grandma is a Nazi now. Facebook swears it wasn't them. They don't know how their algorithm works. It's too opaque. It must have made a small mistake. She's probably fine.

Better to avoid a slip. YouTube seems to be all in on censorship Cause hey, that's always worked for the oppressed I'm sure their CEO knows best And we're hashtag blessed Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're totally fine Oh, fine, fine, fine, fine We're all just fine

Oh, we're falling through the algorithm Big tech took us down with them The hate is ours, the data's theirs to mine Advertisers sold our souls to propaganda Bots and trolls about, hey We're probably locked behind a garden gate of self obsession and lies and hate where every share reply and heart feels like it's tearing us apart

we're lab rats hooked on dopamine with psychopaths behind the screen deciding what is fake or real controlling what we think and feel now instagram is following me alexa listens when i pee and google stores my secrets for all time. And Facebook is just Mark Zuckerberg's way of trying to find out how humans behave,

so he can slowly become more human while the rest of us slowly become less human. But it's probably fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all just fine. Oh, we're totally fine, fine, fine, fine. I'm sure that we're fine. Oh, fine. What is it about cloud tech, serverless, this particular realm of the industry that excites you and keeps you so interested? You know, it's changed a lot for me over the years.

There was a time when my answer to that would have been very tactical engineering focused and saying, hey, I really just love not having to configure a server or I love not having to go out and rack and stack something. I really like just being able to deal with this API and have material provision for me. I think as I've progressed, some of the things that I've grown to appreciate about cloud are just about the consolidated and centralized nature of expertise that you have access to and of best practices and even honestly, sometimes corporate responsibility. Something that I really loved, and this was a super small announcement that came out at Google Cloud Next where it could have even just flown completely under the radar, this tiny feature where they added a sustainability recommendation into this tool they have called unattended

project reminder, where you're now able to say, Google's able to tell you, hey, you know, you created this project, but it doesn't seem like you've really been using the resources in it. Do you want to shut it down to help reduce your carbon footprint? And, you know, a lot of us for a lot of years have thought about cloud resource optimization as something that is just about optimizing our bill. But when you think about it as actually something that has a societal and planet scale implementation or implication, that gets very interesting. Do you find that you have to balance the leveling up of your skills or is this something you have to continue to work on in addition to keeping up with

everything that's changing out in the cloud and in technology all the time? I think it would be harder if I wasn't working full-time in this space. I'm always amazed by people like Randall Munroe at XKCD who are able to remain credible and get way down in the weeds with all kinds of dense STEM type of topics, whether it's computer science or math or all sorts of hard sciences that he writes about without seemingly having much professional experience in any of them. That's someone who has an incredible, obviously, commitment to researching and somehow staying up to speed on a lot of different fields. I'm not sure I could do that if I wasn't working in cloud. A lot of what you'll hear from me, it's just coming right out

of what I'm working on. I'm not trying to go out and like look at the broad landscape of the world and say, well, you know, material should exist on this topic. I shall go and create content. So it's not a content first experience. It's very much content as an outgrowth of things that I've learned and experienced. And ultimately, I think that does have a good chance of resonating with more people. Well, speaking of things that resonate, yodeling. Some people love it, others not so much. But either way, it is certainly a rare skill. Can you give us a taste? You really don't want to hear this, I promise.

So for context, this is a while back I had done a yodel about load balancers, elastic load balancers, which I've always thought are a yodelable concept just because of the sound of the phrase. Right. And so it was something like, um, scalability is a cinch for me when distributing my traffic with an ELB. There's the ALB and the NLB and the little load load is balanced just for me. Oh, the little old load, little old load, little old load will be balanced evenly across the ERP.

The little old load, little old load, little old load will be loaded, loaded, loaded, loaded. Well, if it's TCP or it's UDP, then the NLB will give me lowest latency. But if it's HTTP over VPC, then the little old load is balanced with an ALB. Oh, the little old load, little old load, little old load will be balanced evenly across the ERP. See you next time. Forrest posts his music all over the web, but Twitter seems to get him first. Follow him there at Forrest Brazil. That's F-O-R-R-E-S-T-B-R-A-Z-E-A-L. Every song featured in this episode is linked in order of appearance in the show notes. Special thanks to Richie K. Sherway's Song Exploder podcast for inspiring us to make this series. For more like this, check out our first Song Encoder episode featuring Standard Out the Rapper.

You can find it at changelog.fm slash 466. It's also linked in the show notes for easy click-ins. The Changelog isn't our only podcast. If you aren't listening to GoTime, JS Party, Founders Talk, Practical AI, or Ship It, you're missing out on some seriously good conversations. And if you want to be like the galaxy brain in the meme, subscribe to our master feed. It's all of our shows in just one feed. Get it at changelog.com slash master or search changelog master feed in your podcast app. You'll find us. My name is Jared Santo,

and I would love to hear from you if you have advice or requests for future episodes. Shoot me an email, jared, at changelog.com. That's it. This show's a wrap. We'll talk to you next time. Thank you. Game on.