Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Today was the main day of DevOps World Silicon Valley. As I explained last night, I dressed today as Jenkins the Butler— the logo/mascot/logo/spirit of the open-source project Jenkins CI. And unlike past shows when I've portrayed Jenkins, I stayed in costume the whole day today.



Yes, I dressed like the guy in the logo. Yes, I did it convincingly. I posed with a lot of people who wanted selfies and group pictures with Jenkins the Butler. When one of my company execs saw me in character this morning he asked me to present one of his slides on stage during his keynote. We agreed before the keynote and spent two minutes discussing the slide together... and that was all the prep I had. I killed it. Our company founder transcribed my presentation and shared it with the company on Slack. Later in the day I did a 15-minute streaming TV interview with an industry journalist in character.

I'll post pics and links for these Jenkins hijinks tomorrow or this weekend, when I have time and energy. Right now it's late in the evening and I am tired from wearing a tuxedo all day and being in character.

I'm in Los Angeles Thursday afternoon through Sunday this week to work a trade show. After setup yesterday today was Day 1 of the show itself.

I began the day early, having woken up around 4am then sleeping fitfully until about 6 before deciding, "Screw it, I'm up." I split my time between personal web surfing and working to calm a few of urgent issues with some customers & sales prospects. I also created a few intro slides for the workshop I'd give later in the day before taking a shower and dressing. Breakfast? I nibbled on a protein bar and drank a $5 bottle of soda while crafting slides.

Making the Workshop Work

The workshop I was teaching didn't start until 10, so around 8:45 I went to the show floor to check on my colleagues getting ready for booth duty. I thought then I might catch the opening keynote at 9, but just as it was due to start my co-presenter for the workshop popped in and warned me that he'd tried working the first exercise 3 times this morning and it failed. "Shit!" I thought to myself as I suggested we go to our workshop room to debug the failing system without distractions.

Good news/bad news: My coworker's problem was operator error. He made a rookie mistake— and at this point, after supposedly helping deliver variations of this workshop for two years, he ought to know better.

Workshop attendees started arriving early. We had 3 students already 10 minutes before the start of our period. Great! Right? But those were the only 3 students we got. I made the best out of it by making the seminar very interactive, taking lots of questions and sharing lots of colorful stories. ...Colorful stories about devops, that is.

The workshop schedule was 10-1, giving us our lunch break late. The conference team put out the lunch spread at 11:30. One student asked if we could break at 12, grab some food before it all disappeared, and come back to eat while we finished the class. "Sure," I said, thinking that lunch wouldn't be amiss. But by 12 the food was already pretty well picked over. I grabbed a snack and figured that'd have to tie me over to dinner.

We wrapped the workshop at 1:30. One of the students had left early but the other two were really pleased. I wish like hell we could get bigger crowds for these; at this level they're not even close to worth the effort.

On the Show Floor

By 1:45 I was on the show floor helping staff our booths. Yes, booths plural. There are two shows running together. One booth had all 3 of us technical people assigned to it while the other had none. That was absurd, so I unilaterally reassigned myself to the booth with nobody technical. Everybody else there, struggling to answer questions deeper than "What is your company?" was really happy about that.

The thing is, though, probing questions from attendees were extremely few and far between. Here's the typical dialogue I had with attendees at our booth:

"Hi, can I get this free piece of swag?"

"Sure. Hey, what do you know about [my company name]?"

"Nothing."

"Well, have you heard of [very common open source tool we're based on]?"

"No. What's that?"

"I'd be happy to tell you about it. But first tell me what your role is on a software team."

"I don't work in software."

I. Don't. Work. In. Software?? This is a devops conference. It's all about creating & delivering better software. Who's here that doesn't work in software?? Apparently: a) Jobless people. b) Kids. Yes, there are kid here. No, I don't mean "kids" as in people who look like they're under 35, I mean literal 12 year olds. Apparently the conference organizers figured the way to increase attendance of working parents was to let them bring their kids for free.

The Dumbest Booth Conversation Yet

The weirdest conversation I had wasn't with a child, though. It was with an adult who was totally clueless about the conference.

"Do you work for Linux?" she asked.

"Pardon me?"

"The show has 'Linux' in its name. I figure you all must work for them."

I won't relate the rest of the converastion. It didn't get any smarter from there. I'm not sure what she was doing at the show. Did she come to the wrong hotel by mistake? Was she here just to scam the free food? ...Because, let's be honest, the food was crap— not worth going any distance out of your way for!

Out of Energy this Evening

The show was scheduled 'til 6pm today. Attendees thinned out after 3. I figure that's because people who actually live in LA didn't want to get stuck in its infamous traffic during rush hour. By 5 many of our peers were shutting down their booths for the day. We started doing the same. By 5:30 a conference organizer came by and told us to leave for the day as soon as we were ready. One of our neighbors was already gone by then, their booth looking like it was ransacked.

After 6 my colleagues were debating where to go for dinner. I had a pretty good quorum aligned to the idea of "Somewhere comfortable, with good food, not too expensive, and not far away." Then one of my colleagues proposed, "Let's just eat at the hotel restaurant!" Oookay, that's definitely not far away, but it fails on "good food" and "not too expensive". It's hotel chain branded pap, the same they serve at airport hotels in the midwest, except here it's at airport prices. Meaning, a bland dinner is $40-55 before adding sides, drinks, tax, and tip.

I know my company's finance team throws a fit if meals are over expense guidelines— guidelines which, BTW, are $35 for dinner— so I opted not to eat bland food I might have to pay half of out of pocket. I walked 3 blocks down the street for pizza and a few glasses of beer. I ate my fill for less than $25.

It wasn't just money and avoiding arguments with accountants that sent me out on my own for dinner. I was so out of energy I didn't care to sit down at a big table with colleagues. I ate by myself, happy to not have to talk to anyone, and I'm now back up in my room, happy not even to have to see anyone. I'll need the recharge to be ready for 8 hours on the show floor tomorrow.

At the trade show I attended last week one of the keynote speakers was Steve Wozniak. "Woz", as he's known for short in the computer industry, co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs in 1976 after inventing the prototype of what became their first personal computer, the Apple I. The topics outlined for Woz's appearance seemed only tangentially related at best to devops, the purpose of the conference, but I made sure to attend as I really wanted to hear what this legendary technologist has to say.

It turns out a lot of he said was, in so many words, "I'm a naive man-child oblivious to the astonishing privilege I have." Yes, I'm going to rip into an industry icon. Buckle up.

Woz's appearance was formatted as an interview. He reframed the first question asked of him to be, "What do you do for money?" He talked about how isn't it great that he gets paid to speak. Then he talked about opportunities he's turned down from a few cryptocurrency companies, explaining that they didn't want him to help build the product, they just wanted him to attach his name for advertising.

Um, okay, but what do you think this get-paid-to-talk thing is? You're not helping us build a product, you're not even helping us understand how to build a product, you're only being paid to appear in front of this audience because of your accomplishments in the 1970s and 1980s. Like, literally, what's the difference? And BTW, according to the speakers' bureau Speakers.com, Woz's fee for this appearance would be anything from $50,000 up to $100,000 or possibly more.

I only looked up his speaking fees as I was composing this blog, not as I was listening to his presentation paint an increasing picture of his naïveté. Let me come back around to that later, after I touch on the part of his keynote speak where he really jumped the shark.

Woz spoke for a brief minute about his involvement with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. That was actually my main interest in attending his keynote as I've been a fan of the EFF since watching with dismay when The Communications Decency Act of 1996 imposed draconian restrictions against free speech online, passed by a Congress that collectively had no f'ing clue what the Internet was other than what they saw in a scary movie somewhere, and signed by President Bill Clinton who had a tiny clue but was too timid to take a stand against it other than muttering something like, "This probably isn't even legal" as he signed it into law anyway.

So, what did Woz have to say about the EFF? In a nutshell, "It's too political." He explained when he found out they had lobbyists, people paid to lobby government lawmakers— yes, he spelled this out, with a sneer in his voice, like adults in America don't know what lobbyists are— he quit.

"I don't like politics," he reemphasized. "I don't vote. Well, except for last election."

He. Doesn't. Even. Vote.

That's where I had to speak up. Mindful of the fact that my comments in the virtual trade show platform had my name and my company affiliation on them, I fired off "Championing not voting 👎".

A colleague of mine, who coincidentally will no longer be employed at my employer after this Friday, posted at the same time, "Ahhh... must be nice to be able to ignore politics."

What does he think organizations like the EFF do? Does he think they just write blogs about digital privacy and free speech, which companies and governments choose to enact policy on because their better saints say they should? No! Politics is how we make social policy through government. Political change takes lobbying. And voting.

Moreover, think about what it means when a person gives a list of socio-legal-political causes he supposedly cares about (digital rights was just one of three causes he discussed in this interview) but then says he doesn't vote. If you don't vote you don't care— or you don't understand. To put it harshly, it means he's stupid or a liar.

I don't think Woz is a liar. I do think he's naive though. Through his whole 15-20 minute interview he came across as having a child's understanding of the world. He's a brilliant engineer and loves to tinker. But he's basically a technical genius 10 year old.

As an addendum, as I was researching background information for this blog entry I stumbled across a few interesting things that further paint the picture of startling privilege and naivete when put together. Woz has been widely quoted as claiming he doesn't care about money. "I didn’t want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values," is one famous quote. Yet his net worth in 2020 was estimated at $120 million, and the fees he earns for speaking/appearances earn him probably north of $1 million per year. Sure, it's easy to say you don't care about money— and to see voting as irrelevant— when you've got the privilege that wealth affords!

Another bit I found is that Woz is dishonest, perhaps even intentionally so, in downplaying how much he earns. When asked about jobs and income he mentions that he still gets a salary from Apple. He routinely describes it variously as "$5 a week", "$50 to maybe $100 a month", etc., "After taxes and savings are taken out." But here's the thing: that Apple salary is $120,000 a year (published record). Obviously he's trying to paint himself as a down-to-earth person doing what he does for the pure love of it. That one gig alone— which is only a tiny of his income and capital gains— is by itself more than the average American earns, yet to Woz it's such a pittance that he routinely passes it off as if it's just a few bucks.