LIU003: A Chat With 'The Cloud Therapist'

Kevin Nanns (0:04 - 0:42) Welcome to Life in Uptime, the podcast where we talk with the people behind the technology that keeps our world connected. I'm Kevin, joined by my co-host Alexis, and every episode we sit down with engineers, leaders, and builders in tech to uncover the stories behind their career, how they started, what they've learned, and where they're headed next. Our goal is to help you see how far tech can take you, no matter where you start from. Our guest today is Chris Williams. I'm super excited by this guest because he calls himself the Cloud Therapist. Chris, I know there's a story behind that.

Why do you call yourself the Cloud Therapist?

Chris Williams (0:42 - 2:44) Yeah, so hey everybody, my name is Chris Williams. So the reason I call myself the Cloud Therapist is because I actually got started, my studies at university were in psychology. I got halfway through a master's, I was starting my rotations, and I was doing conflict resolution. And then I pivoted over and got into tech. That's another story. Networking and video games was my advent. But after I went further down the path, like much later in my career, 10, 15, 20 years later, as I was working with the C-suites and a very large companies and doing these projects that were, I would be injected into these projects that were just completely on fire. Please help us fix these environments. Nine times out of 10, it was the people part that was the issue. It wasn't the technology, it was the people part. And so I found myself dipping back into my therapy skills, my psychology skills, to get these people to get along with each other so that the project could fly true. And so I would be injected into these very large problems, multi-million dollar, Fortune 100 issues, projects gone sideways, everybody's screaming at each other, dumpsters on fire, everything. And I would come in and I just start talking to people and trying to figure things out. And they're like, Chris is doing his therapy thing again. Let's go, what is happening? And all of these projects were like cloud-based because I'm an AWS hero, MVP, the expert from way back. And so it just caught on. I was like, they bring in the cloud therapist and I got a reputation for being like the smoke jumper, like the guy that you would bring in when everything was on fire and you had to just get drop shipped in there and fight your way out. And so I got that nickname. It stuck for three different positions at three different companies. And so yeah, I just carry it to this day.

Alexis Bertholf (2:44 - 2:54) That's great. I was going to say, and Chris, community is still a big part or the people are still a big part of what you do now, right?

Chris Williams (2:56 - 3:30) It's really interesting because my current role is I'm the developer relations manager for HashiCorp, an IBM company. And I had never been in dev advocacy or developer relations until this position. So when my current boss, Melissa, approached me, she was like, hey, do you want to be dev advocate manager? I was like, that sounds like a terrible idea because one, I don't know what that means. And two, how would I manage something for a role that I don't know what it does? Then she described the role to me and I was like, that's what I've been doing at night for free.

Alexis Bertholf (3:31 - 3:32) Someone's job?

Chris Williams (3:33 - 3:59) Yeah. So for the past 15 years, I've been doing user groups, talking at events, going to conferences. I have my own podcast, vBrownBag. I do a blog. I'm, like I said, an AWS hero. And all of those things were leading up to this role of developer advocate, which is literally my evening hobby is now my day job. So dream come true.

Alexis Bertholf (4:00 - 4:10) So Chris, for someone who doesn't know what a developer advocate is, I didn't know what a developer advocate was. Could you describe what they do and maybe how someone would work with one?

Chris Williams (4:12 - 6:16) Yeah, totally. So it's a really interesting role and the kinds of people that gravitate towards it are fairly, they have to be very technically advanced. They have to know their field, but they also have to be willing to stand up in front of a bunch of people and talk about the thing that they do. They don't necessarily have to be an extrovert, though it certainly does help. I do know a lot of DAs that are introverts and they have to go recharge after conferences. But they have to be very community driven and very willing to get into sticky problems that they want to see fixed. So a developer advocate, when they're in a company, they sit at the epicenter of sales, marketing, product engineering, and the customer. So we go out to these user groups and to these conferences and stuff and we give these talks about, you know, this is the cool thing that you can do with Terraform or whatever your thing is that you want to talk about. You speak from a position of expertise.

You've been there, you've done that, you show them the battle scars. This is the things that are going to trip you up. And then they come back to you and say, hey, that was a really cool talk, but these are the parts that I'm getting hung up on. So what you do is you then take that information, you come back to product and engineering and you drive pull requests and issues and you make sure that the voice of the customer and the community user is being heard. And so there's a lot of passion and love that you have to put into it and you really have to care about what's happening with your community to make sure that their voice is being heard. And it is this virtuous cycle because the better the product is based upon what the community has been asking for, the better the enterprise version of that product becomes too. So if you ask 10 people what a DA is, you'll get 11 different answers. That's my answer.

Kevin Nanns (6:17 - 6:33) Chris, it sounds like you need to have a lot of different skills, people skills, technical skills. How do you go about starting to build that? If you're an IT person right now and that seems like a dream job to you, what kind of skills should that person start working on to be in a role like yours?

Chris Williams (6:34 - 8:21) So there's the day job, which obviously that's where you're building the expertise and the acumen and getting the gravitas, for lack of a better term. But what you also want to start doing is attending meetups, going to your evening local meetups for the thing that you're passionate about. If it's open source software or Python development or AWS or whatever, go on to meetup.com and find the thing that you want to do. If like me, you reach out and you see that there's nothing in your area, you then start one. And then that's an entirely different rabbit hole. I've been a member and or started four different user groups now, and it is a lot of work to launch and to keep flying and everything, but you kind of have to love it. So you start attending meetups, you reach out to the users, the co-organizers, and you say, hey, I want to do a talk. The one thing that leaders always need is more speakers. If you are passionate about a thing and it's relevant to that user group, then they will absolutely let you do either a five-minute lightning talk, or if you've got a lot to talk about, you want to do a whole hour, they would absolutely love that.

And then you just start getting that muscle memory in. You have to practice getting up on stage. You have to practice speaking in front of people. You have to remind yourself over and over again to slow down and not freak out when you see more than three people sitting in front of you expecting knowledge. And then eventually, one day, like me, you get really, really lucky and you talk to a room of 600 people at reInvent and try not to freak out, but you will.

Alexis Bertholf (8:22 - 9:01) What I was going to say is, I think joining the NOGs and getting up there and trying to present or applying to present, that's all great. But if you're someone who's even more shy, maybe a presentation sounds really daunting to you. Even just going and meeting people, right? Maybe the first NOG or the first meetup or user group event that you go to, your whole goal isn't to present. It's just to meet other people. Can you make five new friends? Instead of sitting in the back of the room, can you sit in the middle of the room and talk to the people who sit next to you and try to build new connections? It doesn't always have to be you or the person in the front of the room.

Chris Williams (9:03 - 10:25) Yeah, no, absolutely. If you want to become a DA but you're super shy, then getting to the meeting might be the first 5, 10 things that you do and just showing up. There have been a number of times when, in the course of me running an event or something, I see the same person in the back of the room. Every single time, I approach them. Invariably, what really kills me is that that person is usually the person that has the crazy killer story. They're an immigrant that came over at the age of 18. They didn't know anything. Then they learned Fortran or some archaic language. Now, they're the lead of Fortran at a Fortune 100. You're just like, what? Oh, my God. I want to hear this life story.

I love talking to people about their journey and their trajectory and stuff like that. They're like, oh, it's nothing. I didn't do anything. I was on a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean. I'm like, gee, that is the best story. Yeah. If they're shy, then little tiny baby steps. If they've got some overeager organizer trying to encourage them and coax them up on stage, then sometimes that's helpful, too.

Kevin Nanns (10:26 - 10:43) Speaking of stories, I'm really curious. You said you started out as a psych major and you transferred to tech. Now, you have this amazing job. You're standing in front of people and being an advocate for developers. How do you make that transition from psychology to IT?

Chris Williams (10:45 - 12:27) It was actually video games. Every summer, this was down in Alabama. I worked as an electrician's apprentice. I've done a bunch of different jobs. I advocate for being a generalist and learning a lot of different things before you figure out the thing that you want to do. In the summers, to pay for my tuition and everything like that, I would lay electrical cable in housing, like housing new builds. I would lay the cable as an electrician's apprentice. I got really into video games, so I wired my dorm room up for a LAN party. This was like a year old in times when we still had LAN parties. This was at the beginning of the internet. At the end of it, I went out and I bought a little four-port repeater hub. Our friends would come over with their CRT screens and their giant 486s with a math coprocessor. We'd play Doom together. My roommate, who was a CS major, his proctor came in one day to talk to him about his courses or his classes or whatever like that and saw the layout of the room, saw how it had been wired up and everything. He was like, holy crap, Tom, this is amazing. You did a great job with the networking in this room. He said, it wasn't me, it was Chris. My university contracted me to rewire the entire CS department's layout.

I learned Cisco switching. I learned routing. This was a RIPv2 or RIPv3 routing. This was way back.

Alexis Bertholf (12:28 - 12:30) This is all off of rewiring your friend's room.

Chris Williams (12:32 - 13:12) Yeah, our dorm room. Exactly. Yeah. It's crazy. They really liked that I did a clean job of laying the cable. Old Cat 5, I did my own crimp jobs. I had my own little crimper and everything. Orange, white, orange, green, white. I still remember the patterns and all that stuff. So they contracted me and it paid for my university, for the quarters. I was like, oh, I'm making a lot more money right now than what I would be with a master's in psychology. So that's when I peaced out and flipped over, got my CCNA and my MCSE and the rest has been history.

Kevin Nanns (13:14 - 13:29) Just proves that when you're doing a wiring job, your own home, your own area, you should make it nice and clean. Because the instinct there is just to throw the hub, throw some wires across the room and be like, yeah, it's good enough. It works. But you're proof that if you actually take time, you might get a job from it. Who knows?

Chris Williams (13:30 - 13:42) Oh, yeah. I ran it through the dropdowns. I mean, I tacked it up nice and clean. And everybody thought it was over-engineered, but then it paid for my entire university. It works on them, yeah.

Alexis Bertholf (13:44 - 14:18) Has that ever come up? I'm curious. In interviews, having a non-traditional background or a non-technical degree, when you apply for a job, Kevin and I get a lot of DMs. It's, oh, well, they're looking for the perfect certification or the perfect course, the perfect degree. Or if I study this, do you think I can do this? And if I take this course, do you think that I can do this? And I think you're proof, right? You have a degree in psychology. Has that ever come up on a job interview of, hey, Chris, your bachelor's isn't in engineering, or it isn't this, or it isn't that?

Chris Williams (14:19 - 15:32) No. No, absolutely not. After I got my certifications, my CCNA and my MCSC, I did really well in the learning path there to the point that this was like LearningTree. I don't even know if they still exist anymore, but LearningTree was like the certification place where they had these training centers. They asked me to come and teach at the LearningTree. I crushed my MCSC exam so hard that they were just like, hey, can you come teach this? Because you were talking with the deliverer of the course like you were a teacher. So via that, via me teaching courses at LearningTree, I made a lot of really good connections in my local area for people that were looking to find people that knew various technologies. I've never once had somebody look at my resume. Well, I don't know. I mean, they might have like looked at my thing and then bend it, and I never heard from them again. But I've never sat across from somebody and they're like, oh, psychology, what's this?

Because if they did, I'd immediately be like, how does that make you feel? And you just make it really weird, make it really awkward for them.

Alexis Bertholf (15:34 - 15:34) Incredible.

Chris Williams (15:35 - 15:46) Are you threatened by that? Tell me about your mother. I'm dead. I love how she freezes. That's like the purpose of this right there.

Kevin Nanns (15:47 - 15:49) She freezes the worst possible places.

Chris Williams (15:50 - 15:54) I want to wait for her to like picking her nose.

Alexis Bertholf (15:54 - 15:59) I never know what's coming either, clearly. Anyways.

Chris Williams (16:00 - 16:00) Thank you.

Kevin Nanns (16:01 - 16:31) I'm full of surprises and cheese. So it hasn't had any really negative effect on you, but can you talk to the positive points of having a non-traditional IT background? I feel like a lot of people come into IT with the general CS degree, IT degree, and they're like everybody else. You kind of get lost in the shuffle. But the people who kind of stand out are the ones who came from a non-traditional path, came from the background of non-IT people. So can you talk to a little bit about the strengths that's brought you?

Chris Williams (16:32 - 18:59) Absolutely. As a current hiring manager, I will say that I actually look at resumes to see if they do in fact come from a non-traditional background, especially in like the DA role. I have found that the best DAs do come from non-traditional backgrounds simply because they had to, DAs are teachers at the end of the day. We teach people how to use the thing. So if you come from a very steeped in CS position, you have this presupposition, you have all of this baked in knowledge that you already know about. You just automatically assume that everybody on the planet knows how to use an if-else loop or a for statement or how iteration across a string works or something like that.

And that's 10% of the populace. If you want to get somebody to get excited about Terraform, if you're talking to a developer, you go, yeah, a looping structure is awesome. But if you're talking to the other 90% of humanity, then coming from a non-traditional background allows you to listen to that voice in your head a little bit better. There's a book called Generalists or it's actually just finished reading it recently. I can't remember the name of the book. It'll come to me. That talks about how generalists, people that have dabbled in a lot of different things before picking the thing that they really are passionate about invariably bring the skill sets that they learned from those other areas into the thing that they are then doing. For example, me learning how to lay cable as an electrician's apprentice, transferred over into networking, transferred into a job, blah, blah, blah. So there's all of these little skill sets that you don't know that you have, that you bring, that if you're one of the many, many, many, and I'm not knocking CS degrees by any stretch of the imagination. They can do things that I can only dream of doing. But they know what they know and people that have a wider background know what they know. And one's not better than the other. They both have their place, but depending upon what you're trying to do, one can be more beneficial than the other.

Kevin Nanns (19:00 - 19:13) Do you find yourself talking, you mentioned how it gives you easier time talking to the other 90%. Do you find that that's your audience the majority of the time or are you talking to the developer who is very technical?

Chris Williams (19:15 - 20:04) Chris Williams personally, which is weird, I don't know why I said that in third person. Me, I speak to the 90% more because I don't come from a traditional developer's background. I came from SysOps and operations and DevOps from, I'm the crusty ClickOps person. I had my vCenter and I was deploying vSphere ESXi clusters for millennia before the cloud came out. And then I flipped over and started doing that and then learning how infrastructure as code works. So the audience member that I speak to is myself from 10 years ago. And so that person is who I appeal to. And I know how to appeal to them because I know what got me excited about infrastructure as code and the cloud 10 years ago.

Kevin Nanns (20:04 - 20:26) It's crazy when you're talking, it resonates so much with me because that's kind of what I do on social media. That's what I do on TikTok and Instagram and stuff is I try to advocate for networking and also talk to myself 20 years ago and get that person interested. And so I'm just, every time you mentioned something like that, I'm like, it's clicking in my head. I go, I'm kind of already doing that. It's interesting.

Chris Williams (20:27 - 21:13) Yeah, it's super fun because I remember the things that got me excited about the technologies when I was first learning them back in the day. So, um, and, and I actually, the reason why I have my blog is my blog is I don't, I don't use it to like reach out to people or anything like that. It is my diary for future Chris. It is the things that I do one time, once every six months that I, that I invariably forget that I then have to go back. So I, so I said, well, screw it. I'll, I'll create an article for future Chris. And, and I don't start it with dear Chris or anything. I'm saying, this is how you do X, Y, and Z. Um, and so if I go back, you know, 10, 15 years, I'm like, wow, I've not only have I come a long way, but I remember the excitement that I had when I wrote that article.

Alexis Bertholf (21:14 - 21:17) It's funny looking back on old pieces of content. Really?

Chris Williams (21:18 - 21:20) Cause like, it's so cringe.

Alexis Bertholf (21:20 - 21:34) Well, it takes you right back to that place in your life. Almost like you were saying a little video diary and you're like, oh my God, like either. I looked so young or I can't believe I explained it like that or listen, like, listen to my voice. Even my voice has changed. The way I talk has changed.

Chris Williams (21:35 - 21:36) Um, my voice is much lower.

Alexis Bertholf (21:37 - 22:38) I think the other thing, um, when you were talking about CS majors and coming from a non-traditional background. And when I look at younger students today, the piece of advice I normally give them is how can you combine something technical with something business related? Because inevitably, if you are a technical person who was able to communicate your business value, you will be more successful. And if you're a business person who was able to work better with the nerds, you will be more successful, especially if you're going into any sort of technology driven role, whether that's being a business major with a CS minor or a CS minor with a business or a CS major with a business minor, right? Because either way you get to dip your toes in and understanding how to communicate with different groups of people or different types of people outside of your major, even if that's just joining a club with other people who have different majors. So you can understand the way that they think and the way they communicate. You know, I found that that's something that's been very helpful for me.

Chris Williams (22:39 - 24:33) Oh, absolutely. Um, one of, one of the most powerful tools. So this goes back to my, my firefighting days, um, firefighting, uh, the, that, that I, I, to, to me, for the people that, for the people that just jumped in, I was never a firefighter. I met the, the, the firefighting it projects thing. Um, from my consulting days, one of the most powerful tools that I would use during my, my cloud therapy sessions was I would, I would come into the boardroom with, you know, the VP, the C-suite and the engineers and the project managers. And I would be like, okay, we need to create a common dictionary of words.

When I say project, that means something entirely different than when a, when a C-suite person says project, which means entirely something different than when a project manager says project. So I would, I would go to the whiteboard and I would say, what does project mean to everybody? I would dumb everything down. What, what does DevOps mean to everybody? What does SRE mean to everybody? And, and everybody's definition was different, but when we left that room through the lens of whatever thing we were trying to fix, we got, we got closer to everybody talking the same language. Um, so you're absolutely correct. If you're in business and you do not. Yeah. If you're in business and you do not understand how the tech, what technical people mean when they say words, uh, even the word dictionary means something completely different to a developer than it does to, to a C, a C-suite person. Uh, and, and that disparity is where all of the problems lie. So get, getting people to speak the same language is, is paramount to fixing, fixing all of, all of the project problems.

Kevin Nanns (24:34 - 25:11) How did you like go down that path? Cause what, I dunno, in real life, like real life, what I see most happen is if someone has a, doesn't understand something, they kind of just roll their eyes and go, okay, that person's an idiot. It takes, it takes some extra gumption to be like, no, I think we should all sit down, start over, start from the basics. I just feel like that's, that's rare to see that. And so like, what did you, where did that thinking come from? Where did that part of your background in psychology where you're like, you know, let's get down to the root of the, of the issue to, uh, to, to paraphrase a famous cartoon character.

Chris Williams (25:11 - 25:48) You want to know how I got these scars? I, I bled and, and slogged through this for years of just people screaming it. I mean, this, this is where conflict resolution therapy came in. Uh, me talking to the C-suites and you know, the CTO and the CFO screaming red faced at each other. I need to spend this money. You can't spend this money. F you, F you. Um, and then, and then me going, this, this isn't, isn't going anywhere.

Alexis Bertholf (25:49 - 25:54) So I would be, let me sit you both down and we're going to have a nice conversation.

Chris Williams (25:54 - 26:11) Yeah, no, put them in their get along t-shirt. I mean, it's literally sometimes like dealing with toddlers. Uh, I, I do have an advantage. I am six foot eight, 260 pounds. So, um, I can stand up in a room and, and people will stop talking for a hot second.

Alexis Bertholf (26:12 - 26:28) It's true. When I saw, when I saw Chris at reInvent the video of me and Chris, I look like I'm four feet tall, like to interview him. I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure my hand and I'm five, seven. I'm not short, right? Five, six, five, seven, depending on the day.

Kevin Nanns (26:28 - 26:29) You're definitely five something.

Alexis Bertholf (26:36 - 26:51) I'm so sorry. I'm five, seven, depending on what kind of shoes I'm wearing. And when I interviewed Chris at reinvent, I literally had to hold my hand up above my head, just so the microphone would reach his mouth.

Chris Williams (26:52 - 26:56) It was, it was, it was a great clip though. Your, your edit was, was fantastic.

Alexis Bertholf (26:56 - 26:58) My arm was hurting by the end of the interview.

Chris Williams (26:58 - 27:42) I would, I would be, I could, I could use that to my advantage in, in a like, let's please get along scenario. Um, and it's, it is, it is figuring out like the, the common thing that they care about getting, getting people to talk the same language, figuring out the common thing that they care about. Um, cause everybody in the is trying to be successful. Like they want the company to be successful. They want the project to be successful and make money. They just have different opinions about how to get to it.

Uh, so getting people to wear the other person's shoes, um, is very, very helpful. Getting people to speak the same language is helpful. And, and that's, that's how, I mean, to, to bring it back full circle, that's how I became the cloud therapist.

Kevin Nanns (27:43 - 28:09) So if you are a, let's say you're not, you know, a giant among men, but the average, the average person, like I'm five 10, I'm, I'm, I'm one of the little guys, um, for us little guys, how would you utilize that same mentality with, you're like, you're just a normal person. You have to deal with your boss, deal with coworkers. How do you deal with conflict resolution just as like a normal person? Yeah.

Chris Williams (28:09 - 29:59) You know, like, yeah, no, no, you just, I mean, I, I call it, there's no dumb questions, but I say Chris's dumb questions. I say, okay, I'm going to start asking Chris's dumb questions. Um, what, what does, what does this mean right here?

Like, like breaking down a project and asking like broad strokes, like at a conceptual level, what is this front end trying to do? What is this backend trying to do? We're all trying to make money here, but I'm going to ask my dumb questions and that I'm going to ask my three why's like, okay, the front end does this because of this. Okay. Well, why is it doing that? And then, and then like really drill down into the basics and fundamentals of those things by asking my dumb questions. What I'm doing is I'm getting the questions answered for the, the other 10 people in the room that always had that same question, but we're too afraid to ask it that, that when we leave the room, they're always like, dude, I've been wondering that question for like five, the five years I've been in this project. I've been wondering why the hell we do it that way. I'm like, well, then why didn't you ask? Well, I didn't want to ask. I didn't want to seem like I was stupid. What I was, I was an obscenely overpaid consultant and I would walk into the room and I'd introduce myself. Hey, I'm Chris Williams. I am the dumbest human in this room. And, uh, you guys pay me way too much money to ask them questions. And so here we go, let's do it. And it would disarm everybody and it would get them a little bit irritated at me and it would cause them to be like overly honest. I would, I would, I would artificially set up this kind of not friction, but I would, but I would set up this, this pattern where they would want to like, Oh, I'm going to get this guy.

I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to like show him that, not show him up or anything like that, but I'm going to like, and then, and then I would just ask my dumb questions. And I just, I just keep hammering at them until they like fully divulge the honest truth of what it is that, that, that they actually meant.

Alexis Bertholf (30:00 - 30:12) I was about to ask, um, we talked about you going into a DA role and how DAs are very technical. Where do you, where did you develop the bulk of your technical skills?

Chris Williams (30:12 - 31:01) That, that was my day job. So for, for 25 years, I was a systems administrator, a enterprise consultant, an architect. Uh, I mean, I was, I've been in the weeds on the technical side from building servers to installing software on servers, to then building data centers, to then migrating physical data centers, to then virtualizing physical data centers, to then taking those virtual centers and moving them up to the cloud and moving them back down. I'm really good at migrate application migrations at this point. Um, so, so my community stuff was, was the things I was doing at night. The things that I was doing at day was the hard tech that I could then use to feed my evening stories of like the, the battles. Like these are the lessons I learned today on how not to do, you know, uh, RDS restores.

Alexis Bertholf (31:02 - 31:20) Chris, if you're someone like me, where maybe you're a little bit earlier in career, but you are super interested in the people-y side, you feel like that's one of your strong suits. Um, but maybe you don't have as much technical hands-on experience. I'm asking this question for myself and maybe for others.

Chris Williams (31:21 - 31:22) Um, totally.

Alexis Bertholf (31:22 - 31:47) Do you feel like there's a jumping off point where there's a certain amount of years or skills or things you picked up where you can take your foot off the gas a little bit to go into a DA role? And also, how do you stay technical once you are not owning all of those projects? You're not owning a network and most of what you're doing is labbing or studying. How do you make sure you stay relevant to continue sharing with the community and, and keeping yourself up to date?

Chris Williams (31:49 - 34:02) That is, that is a fantastic question. And I get that a lot from, uh, early career DAs, um, as to, as to when, when, when is, when is a good, when is good enough? And it is an entirely subjective answer. The, it, it depends on a human. It depends on the role that they've been in. It depends on, you know, how the, the kinds of things that they are exposed to during the day versus what they want to be a DA in. Um, if a person is in a very large organization, there is a tendency because it's a large organization that they're doing very one specific thing. Um, and if you're, if you're trying to become a DA, you want that going back to that generalist mentality. You want to have like a large swath of exposure and experience. Um, I didn't feel like I would, was going to be a good enough DA until after I was, I had been doing, uh, the enterprise architecture work and the consultative stuff where I was being dropped into different large companies every six months. Cause I was able to then see how these people were doing it wrong. And then how company B was doing it wrong and how company C was doing it wrong and realizing that, Oh, they're all doing the same things wrong. And then, and conversely, they're also doing a lot of the same things, right? There's, there's motions to companies that, that just happen over time. Once you add in a certain amount of humans, all big companies do certain things good and certain things poorly. And that's just the nature of the beast. And if you haven't done that, then you, then you don't know. And you can't, you can't do that wink and a nod when you're on stage about like, eh, we, we know how it is, right? Fellas wink. I said, fellas, I mean, folks. Um, so it is, it is very subjective. I mean, I would say minimum five years, but I didn't, I didn't even flip the switch until 25 years into it. So, so I, I don't have a good answer. I know that there's a lot of people out there that want to just immediately become a DA. Like, like they, they just got that CS degree and they're like, Oh, I want to be an influencer. And I would, I would discern.

Alexis Bertholf (34:02 - 34:21) I found that with, I found that with myself. Right. I mean, I spent five years as a Cisco SE before I flipped over to doing evangelism full-time. And even now I'm like, man, I wish I spent two years in a NOC. I wish I, you know what I wish I wish I wish. And I can't really go back in time at this point, but it does beg the question.

Chris Williams (34:21 - 35:02) Five years as an SE though. So, I mean, you've, you've got the chops. It's it's when, when see as a DA, you're talking to, you could always have more chops.

What it could have showed up. No, as a DA, you're talking to every single potential job function out there. You're talking to the NOC dwellers. You're talking to the other SEs. You can speak to the other SEs very well because you did five years of it, but you can't speak to the NOC dwellers as well as you could. If you hadn't, if you hadn't lived in their shoes, but, but nobody can do everything until they've been doing like all the jobs for 20 years, like me.

So it's, so it's not, it's a, and even I can't, I don't, I can't speak to like.

Alexis Bertholf (35:03 - 35:06) At that point, I think you run out of time or you clone yourself with AI.

Chris Williams (35:07 - 35:15) Exactly. Exactly. Which is why I created the DevOps mentor.

Wait, that's a terrible segue. No. Buy my, buy my product. What? No, I don't have a product.

Alexis Bertholf (35:16 - 35:17)

Did you?

Chris Williams (35:17 - 35:30) No, I, I, so yes, I did build a clone of myself on ChatGPT. It's called the DevOps mentor. It is, it is the highest clicked on and questions answered DevOps mentor on ChatGPT.

Alexis Bertholf (35:30 - 35:30) Really?

Chris Williams (35:31 - 36:00) But I do not profit. Yeah, I don't profit from it. I just dumped all of my, all of my articles and a bunch of old emails. I said, speak in my voice and know what I know. I got permission from a couple of authors on books that I really, really admire that I read all the way through. And I, and I use them in the rag for the, for the backend of it.

And I was like, answer questions about the topics that you know about go. And yeah, I, I actually chat with my mentor frequently.

Alexis Bertholf (36:01 - 36:05) That's so cool. I want to try chatting with Chris Williams AI.

Chris Williams (36:06 - 36:08) I'll send you the link for it.

Alexis Bertholf (36:08 - 36:10) Yeah. Maybe we all will be.

Kevin Nanns (36:12 - 36:14) How would you find that? How do we, how do we search for that?

Chris Williams (36:15 - 36:26) I'll, I'll send you the link for it, but if you go to ChatGPT and look for the depth, so if you, if you put in the search bar, the DevOps mentor, it's, it's the one that has the most responses.

Alexis Bertholf (36:27 - 36:47) So Chris, I'm curious out of your career, either as a cloud therapist or as a developer advocate, were there any moments where you wish you either did psychology full-time and actually went into or you thought that maybe you picked, maybe you picked the wrong path?

Chris Williams (36:48 - 38:03) No, no. I really have enjoyed the things that I've done over the course of my career. I loved, I loved doing tech because I'm, I'm a, I'm a nerd at heart.

I still have my, my home, my home lab downstairs, three, three blades, a couple of switches, a NAS device. It's linked up to my, my VPC in, in, in AWS. And I loved the, the consulting.

I really liked the aspect of being able to go out and have large companies, you know, hit me up for, for the knowledge that I've accumulated over the years. And then when I found, you know, when I became a DA, I was like, oh my God, this, this I'm doing my evening hobby as my day job now. So if, if I had started being a DA earlier, I probably would not have had the confidence to do it because I didn't, I didn't, if I hadn't been exposed to like a new fortune 100 every six months for seven years, then, then I wouldn't have figured out like, you know, the patterns that all of these giant companies do and, and understand how to talk to them.

So yeah.

Alexis Bertholf (38:03 - 38:11) Being customer facing with a lot of customers, you really start to see all of the parallels. I can attest to that at least.

Kevin Nanns (38:13 - 38:13) Yep.

Chris Williams (38:13 - 38:14) Absolutely. Absolutely.

Kevin Nanns (38:15 - 38:28) So if you had to give one piece of advice for a, for a younger person, early career, who may not come from a traditional background, what should they start focusing on or should they start doing right now that would help them in their career?

Chris Williams (38:29 - 40:35) Right now in the year of our learn leading to AI that, that is, that is the thing that everybody is, is very excited about for, for better or for worse, that, that is the, the hot topic. And I we've, we have seen, you know, a number of, I'm not gonna say fads, but like, you know, the, the passing trends, the, the silver, the technological silver bullets that invariably end up not being silver bullets. But right now leverage AI judiciously, use it as a teacher. Don't use it as a replacement for your brain. Learn how to ask, you know, ask good critical questions of AI. Don't ask it to spoon feed you the answers. That's kind of that's, that's very important to not lose your critical thinking is an extraordinarily valuable skill. And AI is uniquely geared to impinge upon your critical thinking. Uh, if, if it, if it feeds you the answer every single time, then you, then you stop thinking critically. Uh, there's, there's actually currently studies coming out about exactly that right now. They're doing functional MRI studies where they're like, Oh, wow. AI is genuinely making these students dumber because they're not learning the information. They're just learning how to ask AI better questions. And that's, that's not good because AI can lie. It's a very confident hallucination machine. Uh, where was I? What would I do? Okay. Sorry. Um, I would, I would tell people, uh, getting into it nowadays to stay hungry and stay excited and pick, pick a thing, pick one thing, because you're going to find a whole bunch of things that really, really get you going, but get good at one thing and then branch out from that one thing. Don't, don't dabble across a whole bunch of different things and, and not gains gain true mastery over any one thing. Um, I, I like to see what the, are you, are you guys familiar with the concept of T shaped and M shaped engineers and all of that stuff?

Alexis Bertholf (40:36 - 40:38) T shaped. Yes. I'm shaped now.

Chris Williams (40:39 - 41:46) So, uh, a T shaped engineer is they, they have a marginal set of knowledge across a whole bunch of different domains, but then they're really deep on one. So, so it just, it draws the letter T M is you've got a, you've got, you're deep on a, on a couple of different things, not as deep as the T shaped engineer, but you've, but you're, you're lower on three, four or five things than, than you, than you would be. I, I would say that I'm more of an M shaped engineer because, you know, I've got the, I've got the three or four things that I'm really good at, but I have knowledge across literally everything from backups to security to networking, to, to development, to enterprise architecture, to, you know, therapy. So, so there's the, the, the more you generalize, the better off you're going to be as long as you make sure that you have that, the thing that you're good at and make sure that that thing isn't some kind of like passing fad or some, something that's going to be, you know, here today, gone tomorrow, pick up, pick a fundamental thing that, that isn't going to be gone tomorrow.

Kevin Nanns (41:47 - 42:10) Yeah. I think that's great advice. A lot of times we get stuck in the newest fad, the newest buzzword that comes out and we think we should jump on it right away. Cause if we jump on, you know, AI or whatever it is right away and dive deep into it, we'll be one of the first people, one of the first experts in this field, but inevitably you shoehorn yourself into a field and you have nothing else to back it up with. And it just hurts you in the end. Yeah.

Chris Williams (42:10 - 42:34) Yeah. And it's, it's super exhausting. I mean, it knowledge is coming at us faster and faster nowadays. So by picking one thing and marinating in it, you're, you're doing your own brain, a, a good, it's, it's a good thing to like find, find the thing that you get excited about, make sure it's not something that's going to be gone tomorrow and, and get good as the kids say.

Alexis Bertholf (42:35 - 42:46) Well, Chris, thank you so much for spending time with us today. I hope this was very insightful for everyone listening along. If people want to connect with you outside of this, where can they find you?

Chris Williams (42:46 - 43:45) So my online handle is mistwire M I S T W I R E. If you put that into Google, I'm literally like the first seven pages of hits for all the things. So you can find me through that. If you want to engage with me on the podcast on vBrownBag, it is a weekly technical podcast where we bring in people that are excited about the thing that they want to talk about. We encourage both long-term speakers and people that are new in the field and want to get their feet wet in presenting to come on. It is a, it's a, it's a live thing, but we moderate and curate the audience to make sure that, that it's a friendly environment for every, for all comers. And, uh, and we love having new voices come onto the show that are trying to get their feet wet. So back when you were asking, like, how, how does a DA get into it? Get some explorer, get some experience, come on, vBrownBag and do your first talk with us. And I will actually give you genuinely constructive, critical feedback on, on how to up your game.

Alexis Bertholf (43:46 - 44:09) Well, that is it for this episode of Life In Uptime. Huge thank you to our guest, Chris, for sharing his journey. And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow our show. So you never miss an episode. And if today's story gave you something to think about, share it with a friend or colleague who might need it until next time, keep learning, keep building and keep your uptime high.