Justin Garrison wasn't one of those kids who grew up in tech. In fact, he loved cars and wanted to fix cars for a living. He didn't own his own computer until university, and literally didn't know what to do with one once he got one. But then he took a job at university fixing computers, and that's when was exposed to Linux. After that, he was hooked. Since then, his career has been fueled by curiosity, a willingness to learn in public, and a love for technology. Join Adriana as she talks to Justin about his career, what inspires his fun tech content, and more.
Justin Garrison wasn't one of those kids who grew up in tech. In fact, he loved cars and wanted to fix cars for a living. He didn't own his own computer until university, and literally didn't know what to do with one once he got one. But then he took a job at university fixing computers, and that's when was exposed to Linux. After that, he was hooked. Since then, his career has been fueled by curiosity, a willingness to learn in public, and a love for technology. Join Adriana as she talks to Justin about his career, what inspires his fun tech content, and more.
About Justin Garrison:
Justin serves as Head of Product at Sidero Labs and hosts the Fork Around and Find Out podcast. He has been called the Steven Spielberg of Cloud Native and the Bill Nye of tech. His career includes contributions to Oscar-winning films, the Disney+ streaming platform, and Amazon EKS. In his free time, Justin enjoys building modern-retro computers and watching Moana.
Key takeaways:
Find Justin on:
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Links:
Chapters:
00:00 Opening credits
00:26 Guest intro
03:22 Lefty or righty?
06:07 iPhone or Android?
12:38 Being "accidentally offline" for a business trip
17:30 Mac, Linux, or Windows?
20:48 From zero to Linux hero?
23:25 The least offensive major
29:12 Programming == manual work avoidance
33:29 Becoming a Linux sysadmin
36:25 Making tech content relatable and fun
41:30 Everything we learn is a lie
47:20 Working at Disney
54:31 From Disney Animation to Disney+
58:00 Being a Cloud Native Ambassador
01:01:00 From big enterprise, to small startup
01:10:11 Final words of wisdom
01:13:10 Peace out and geek out
ADRIANA:
Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast, in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech and geek out on topics like software development, DevOps, observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have JUSTIN: Garrison. Welcome, JUSTIN:.
JUSTIN:
Hey, thanks for having me.
ADRIANA:
Super excited to have you on. And where are you calling from today?
JUSTIN:
Outside of Los Angeles. I just saw a stat yesterday. In the United States, one out of every 34 people live in Los Angeles County.
ADRIANA:
Really?
JUSTIN:
That's crazy. Right? One out of every one at every nine, I think it was, live in California. In the all the United States. It was like there were 50, 50 states in one out of nine live in California and one out of every 34 live in L.A. County.
ADRIANA:
Damn, that is trippy.
JUSTIN:
It's a big it's a it's a populated place.
ADRIANA:
It is, it is. Have you been in in the LA area, like, your whole life or...?
JUSTIN:
I've. I've lived in Southern California my whole life. Yeah, I've lived further, like closer south, like near San Diego and a little further north. I was in, like, Pasadena for a while, but I've been like, within a, like a two hour radius - LA driving - my whole life.
ADRIANA:
Nice, nice. That's so cool. The sun, the beach.
JUSTIN:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, that's one thing I miss. I'm originally from Rio, and you know, I only lived there combined total of six years of my life. And it wasn't even six consecutive. But I still, like, have such a deep connection to, like, the beach that every time I go to a city that has a beach, I just I feel like I'm home.
JUSTIN:
Well, yeah, I don't know, like I'm a bad Southern California resident because I don't even like the beach that much. Especially Southern California beaches. Like, they're just really crowded and hot. Like, I prefer going to Hawaii, going somewhere else. Like a more tropical beach.... like, absolutely fantastic. LA beaches are. Like I said, it's a lot of people here. It's crowded and there's often a lot of trash. And it's just kind of like, okay, this is this is an LA beach, right? And there are nice ones. There are, you know, you can go a little further up the coast and stuff like that, you know, go out Santa Barbara or something like that. Plenty of nice beaches, but they're not the easy ones to get to.
The ones that I often go to are just like, okay, we're going to the beach for the kids. We're going to be there for three hours and then we're leaving.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That. See, as much as I like the beach, there's one thing I absolutely hate, which is like cleaning off the sand from my feet after I'm done.
JUSTIN:
For the next three days.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah. Like, it's such a sensory thing for me. It bothers me so much. Like we're at a we're on vacation in Portugal and I was good until, like, we left the beach and my husband and my daughter are just, like, walking around with their flip flops with with sand on, on their flip flops. I'm like, no. So I'm like the prissy one, like, getting the, getting the sand off my feet. I'm like, I'm the foot princess. Yeah, that's that's my own great. Only gripe with beaches is the sand. Sand on your feet part. All right. Well we're going to start off with some icebreaker questions. So are you ready?
JUSTIN:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Let's go. Okay. Question one are you a lefty or a righty?
JUSTIN:
Right handed, mostly. I have I have wrist issues. So I do more things with my left hand. It's not natural to me, but I do.
ADRIANA:
So. But you've trained yourself.
JUSTIN:
I've trained myself. I can shoot a basketball with my left hand. I can, I can. I used to be able to type and write with my left hand. One-handed typing, because I had a broken wrist for a while. But yeah, no, it's generally righty. But yeah, I have learned some things.
ADRIANA:
That's cool. That's cool. I always find it’s kind of a fun brain exercise to do that. Like I'm, I'm left-handed and I, I learned how to play squash right-handed. I'm okay at it. Just for funsies. Just to see like, hey, what's it like? Although I do find being a lefty playing against a right-handed person always throws them off.
JUSTIN:
Yeah, I've actually been trying to learn how to play hockey left handed. You get a lot of advantages being on that side of the goalie.
ADRIANA:
Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. How's that going?
JUSTIN:
Not well. No, I haven't played I haven't played a full game left handed. Yeah I feel comfortable switching like in mid game. Like for 1 or 2 like hey I'm just going to try to take the puck or something like that. Yeah. But yeah. No like I'm not I'm not playing full games with it yet. I'm still trying to get used to just like shooting and general handling.
ADRIANA:
Is there like, a left handed hockey stick? This is the shows me how. How shows you how much I know about hockey.
JUSTIN:
The curve goes the other way. My youngest my youngest son is left handed and he's playing hockey. And so he. But he plays right handed, which is really interesting. And I learned recently that a lot of the professionals, even the left hand, they'll they'll play left handed because of the goalie advantage of shots, being on the goalie side.
And also when you play you have like a slight advantage on like better handling if your right hand, like if your dominant hand is on top of the stick, then you have better handling but a weaker shot. So there's like trade offs. Oh, it's something I've been learning about. I've been playing for like two years now and it's just like I'm kind of learning all the ins and outs and trying to get better, so.
ADRIANA:
Cool. Wait. Playing left handed for two years or.
JUSTIN:
No, just. Just hockey for two years. I play roller hockey. I'm in some. Cool. So it's not. It's not on ice.
ADRIANA:
Oh yeah, I you know I'm in awe whenever I see the hockey players skate around because like, I'm me on ice skates, I'm like, my goal is to not fall. I can get from A to B. I can stop-ish thanks to friction.
JUSTIN:
Or walls. Walls also help.
ADRIANA:
Or walls or walls, I'm definitely better on, on inline skates. And even that is like touch and go, but I can break on inline skates. So that's that's an advantage. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?
JUSTIN:
I don't have a preference. For the longest time, I went back and forth every time my phone was due for an upgrade, which in the United States is usually every two years. You had contracts for a long time. I would switch. I would switch back and forth, and I did that for probably 8 or 9 years. And I just went back and like just back and forth.
Let's see what the other operating system has. I honestly like I use an iPhone today mostly for the camera and the fact that I don't really care for Samsung's software on Android, which is the dominant Android platform in the United States. I think the Android hardware is phenomenal these days. Like, they have such interesting ideas with foldables and all this stuff that you just can't do on an iPhone. The the software ecosystem is is good enough for what I'm doing and and somewhat better on Android because I use G suite for work and for personal stuff. And it's just the integration is so much better there. So that sort of stuff is better. The AI, the AI, the assistant, all that other stuff on Android is better, I think, than Siri. And what Siri can do. Shortcuts is just a the most potential garbage application I've ever used on iOS, whereas Android has a bunch of cool things like that. So it's like, I love a lot of things about Android. I've been on an iPhone for my last two phones.
ADRIANA:
Oh.
JUSTIN:
And that's I think now just lock in because we have my oldest is at the phone age. So like the hand-me-down cycle has has kicked in. So the lock in of family family hand-me-downs and the iOS ecosystem for like find my phone and locating kids and AirTags and all that sort of stuff has has been lock in that I don't like. If I found a cross-platform and I use tiles and stuff, and they were just not as good, the networks weren't as good and all this stuff. And so like the the actual benefit of the Find My network is now probably the biggest thing that locks me into iOS. But I really like Android.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I have to agree to like the find my stuff. Like the only reason why I let my daughter have a phone when she was younger was when she started coming home from school by herself. I think she was around like nine. I'm like, I'll be okay with that as long as I know where you're at.
JUSTIN:
That's like my my oldest one. He was, I think ten, maybe 11. We got on a flip phone and just glued an AirTag on the back. It was just like, here you go. We can find you and you don't need distractions. You can call, you can text us. That's all he needed. And it was great now. But now he's he's getting to the age of like, hey, I actually want a smartphone. I'm like, yeah.
ADRIANA:
The FOMO. I miss flip phone. So like, I honestly, there's nothing like the feeling of like flipping your phone open or like I had an LG chocolate for a bit and that was like a slider phone and it was like the cutest little phone.
JUSTIN:
I was a huge fan of webOS, if you remember, webOS, the Palm Pre.
ADRIANA:
Oh yeah.
JUSTIN:
And the veer. And they had this whole line and they had they had the slide up keyboards, but you also could answer phone calls by sliding up. So it was kind of like a flip phone feel you can hang up by by closing it. Yeah, yeah. The homebrew hackerspace around webOS was huge. There were so many people that had so much cool innovations around it, and it was all HTML and JavaScript, like all of the front end, all the apps which which had some downsides, right? Like some things were slower, more resources, all that sort of stuff, but it was so much easier to get into it. So I was part of their dev program back in the day. And and I loved webOS, like all the things that like new features coming out now are basically just like webOS features, however long ago. But I like the hardware wasn't great, but I loved the feel of it. It was small. Yeah. The operating system was was minimal, and so it wasn't a huge distraction. But it also did things like integrated chats where all of your chat apps were one. They had a thing called synergy. So like Skype, and AOL Instant Messenger, and SMS all went to the same place. And it was one integrated app that like you had a contact and you added their Skype name or their, their, their AIM name, and it would just go, oh yeah, you have one chat with your wife.
Doesn't matter where she talked to you from. It's all one thread. And I'm like, this is nice. And we're kind of getting back to some of that with like things like Beeper and Matrix and, and things like, we're reinventing Trillium from back in the day if you remember that?
ADRIANA:
Oh my God, I loved Trillium. Yeah. And you mentioned AIM I'm like, Holy crap that brings back memories!
JUSTIN:
AIM, and Pidgin. I'm like, people. People these days don't know the struggle. They don't know, like we have we have, you know, all these individual platforms like, yeah, we had it back then. They’re just different.
ADRIANA:
You remember ICQ?
JUSTIN:
I had an ICQ number, but I was really late to ICQ. I remember my roommate in college had like a five digit ICQ number and it was like, dude, you have been around for a while.
ADRIANA:
I was a later joiner too. “Uh-oh!” Those were the days. Yeah, yeah. It's funny how much it's evolved. And I was listening to a podcast that was talking about like the fall of, like AOL and they were talking about, you know, AIM and how it was retired in 2017, oddly enough. And that, like, that was the way that we would communicate with each other before, like text messages were super popular, like.
JUSTIN:
Even just the notion that you could be away.... is fascinating for today.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That's the that's the other thing that they were talking about. Like when you're away, you’re away. No one can send you messages. And it's like, what?
JUSTIN:
Yeah. My son was asking me. He's like, what is offline? I'm like, well, like, you weren't on the internet. Like, what do you mean? Like, how could you be offline? I'm like, whoa. Like, I just you don't think about, like, what does it take? Like, right now, it's like I could travel to the mountains and I still have cell signal, right? Yeah. Offline is a choice. It's not the, like, defaults. And typically back then. Right. Like this offline was like you had to go make a choice to be online. You know, if you, if you did not say, I'm going to sit at this computer in my family computer room at this desktop, right. Like we had a computer room.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
JUSTIN:
And that was, that was you had to make the choice to be online. And now it's, we’re online all the time. Hey, let's let's maybe, you know, for myself, I try to change that dynamic occasionally.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every so often, like I try when I'm on vacation, for example, I try to not check like my socials, especially the ones that are really, like tied to work, work related stuff. Like I just, I don't I don't want that.
JUSTIN:
I went on a work trip and I, as my wife, was dropping me off at the airport. As I get out of the car, I grab my bags. I get inside, my phone was on the seat. It's a work trip. I'm going. I'm going for work. We're traveling for a few days. We're visiting customers, going to like an event or whatever. And I'm like, my ticket’s on there. My ticket’s on my phone.
ADRIANA:
Oh shit.
JUSTIN:
It's like I have my ID, but my tickets are on there, and I can't call her now because I don't have my phone.
ADRIANA:
Oh, no.
JUSTIN:
I couldn't tell her to turn around. So I was like, okay, what can I do? Like, how do I how do I get around like and actually ended up being like, I it's a super memorable trip because I was offline. Like not by choice necessarily, but I was when I didn't have a phone, I didn't check anything. I had a laptop still. So I literally like, I could like message her from my laptop. I'm like, hey, by the way, my phone's in the car. Don't worry about it. I'm on the plane. I'm gone. It's cool. Like I'll get it later. If you need to talk to me, you have to email me and I will check it at night.
ADRIANA:
Oh my God.
JUSTIN:
Like, I will check it when I'm not at the conference. At the conference, but but like just that trip was fascinating because constantly I'm standing around doing nothing. I'm like, what should I do? I look at my hand like, what should I be doing, right? I don't... like, I just talked to people and like, I'm extroverted enough that I'm like, I don't care about walking up to someone saying like, hey, how's it going? Right? But oftentimes I look around like everyone else is on their phone. I'm like, I can't even do that right now. And so that trip was was fascinating. I want to do it again intentionally, because then I would actually, like, print out my boarding passes and stuff and have some things prepared, because that was a little bit of a concern of like, oh, I don't know how to get home now because I have to check into my flight and they only have an app and they don't have like the website doesn't work or whatever. So there were things that I if I prepared better, I would have enjoyed it a little more. I, you know, a couple of times I'm like, I don't know how to do this now, but in general, like things still work in an offline manner and they always should work in an offline manner. Maybe, you know, it's maybe not the most convenient, but it should be an option.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, absolutely.
JUSTIN:
QR codes are everywhere now, and I can't I can't do anything without a phone that has a camera that can open a web page.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, that's so true. It's wild when you take things like that for granted. Like a couple of years ago, I remember, I want to say it was 2022, one of our big mobile phone service providers in Canada, like, had an outage. And it wasn't just I think it was like not just mobile. I think it was also internet. So and we used them for both mobile and internet. Holy crap. Couldn't do anything. And the only and I had to get a message out to work to like let them know what was going on. And fortunately at the time, like, I live close to a subway station, like it's it's like less than a five minute walk from my house. And they had Wi-Fi at the station. So I tethered onto the Wi-Fi standing outside the station so that I could get a slack message out to my coworkers and say, hey, I'm not going to be able to do anything today. And, and, and I went for a lovely walk, and it was just delightful. Yeah. It was so great to be disconnected. And. Yeah, but it was a little terrifying, though initially, like when we woke up and like, there was no cell signal. And, you know, the first thought is like, okay, did something really bad happen? And then.
JUSTIN:
... you have no other...
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah. It's like, where's the damn radio? I, you know, I don't even have like a physical radio. So, you know, trying to. So then we, I think we had to, like, go to our car to turn on the radio and figure out the hell's going on. So just trippy.
JUSTIN:
That's one thing. Living in Southern California my whole life is I've always had an earthquake kit. It's just like a thing. Like we have an earthquake kit. That's like I have. I have a radio that doesn't need batteries. Right? Like I can wind it.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
JUSTIN:
Like, hey. But I also like, I have solar panels and batteries on my house now, too. So it's like, yeah, we're like as prepared as we can be for some of this stuff. It's like, yeah, we have, we have a cabinet full of water bottles. Like if this is if this if something happens and we need to be four days here or whatever, right. Like we have a family of four, we have cats, we have things that need to still stay alive. And and we would like those things to stay alive.
ADRIANA:
That's that's definitely worthwhile. Yeah. I find every time something like that happens, like we we don't have earthquakes here. Really. Like, you feel like a rumbling here and there. But we do get some nasty ice storms sometimes in the winter that take down power lines. And so we've been lucky, knock on wood, to not be affected like that. But I've had some family members who were like without power for days. And you know, what do you... those types of things kind of have you thinking like, oh, I actually need to have some stuff at hand in case, you know, things go south.
JUSTIN:
Right? As soon as that happens, then all of the toilet paper at the store is gone. All of the batteries are gone. All of the things that. You might you might want to go, oh, just go to the store and get it right. Like we all lived in through Covid, right? Like every. Every shelf was empty for weeks and people were actually this isn't good.
ADRIANA:
Okay. Next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?
JUSTIN:
100% Linux I, I guess I've been I've been my I didn't get a computer until I was in college... like my own computer. We had a family computer.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
JUSTIN:
I think my junior and senior year we got it because our typewriter broke and I had to type papers. That was the only reason.
ADRIANA:
I remember having a typewriter. So I'm right there with you.
JUSTIN:
I 100% had a typewriter. It broke in high school, and then we got a computer from, like a used one from a friend. And like, I didn't know how to do anything on it. I took typing classes so I could type my papers, but my first computer didn't come with an operating system, and it was like a beige box. No name something. There was no operating system. Like, what do I do? Like, I don't have money. I'm in college. Like, I don't know how to do anything on this. And and right around this was in 2002. It was a little before a Ubuntu, but I was running Linux. I don't remember what it was, probably Slackware or something like that, but I just like someone in my IT shop or whatever. It was like, hey, here's the CD, go install it. I'm like, okay. Yeah. And and it's like, all right. And so I used it and I was like, I was just a broke college student and I didn't know what else to do. And some people were like, oh, you should just go pirate Windows. I'm like, I don't know what that means. I literally like, this is my first computer. Like, I don't know what you mean. And so yeah, I just kind of like I, I learned Linux and then I learned like benefits of it. And I had Windows for a while. I've tried Mac over the years, various times I'm like, oh, everyone says it's the best thing ever. And I tried switching 3 or 4 times in my past. Every time. I hate the operating system like it just doesn't. It doesn't make sense to me. It feels kind of sluggish and it's different enough from things that I manage, like Linux servers and stuff as a sysadmin and whatnot. Then I'm like, oh, it's just weird. Like there's things that just feel off and I don't like it. And so every time I switched, I always switched back, or I left it as like a secondary computer or a backup or something. But I've been using Linux as my primary operating system since 2002.
ADRIANA:
So you are hardcore Linux user.
JUSTIN:
I just I just didn't do anything else. Yeah, yeah, I mean I did I did use Windows for a while and I was actually an admin for Windows at a university for quite a while, so it was like, but I, I still hate it. Like I didn't like it. It was just like, oh, I can do all this stuff on it, but I can do a lot more stuff on Linux. And so I usually had a Windows VM on Linux to manage all the stuff.
ADRIANA:
When, when I had my, my, my dedicated Linux box, I had a Windows VM because I had a BlackBerry at the time. And the only way to.
JUSTIN:
Oooh! There you go.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. The only way to sync that was, was with Windows because you couldn't do that. I was using Ubuntu and yeah, I didn't even know Linux existed until university. Actually, I didn't even know Unix existed until university because up until then I've been using Windows. I started with Windows 3.1, then Windows 95, and then I go to university and in the computer lab I think they had these like Solaris workstations and I, I'm like sitting there. I'm like, what the fuck is that?
JUSTIN:
Why is this different?
ADRIANA:
I don't. I don't I have no idea what this is. And and someone's like type in “pine”. I'm like, what does that do? That gets you your email? I'm like, great, now I can do one thing.
JUSTIN:
I remember someone I was I worked in a computer lab fixing computers before I had a computer in college. Like it was one of my first jobs there. And I was just like, hey, I just need a job. And they're like, oh, well, you can work in help desk. And they're like, oh, well, go like scan viruses on these machines. Like, I don't know what the heck I'm doing. Like, well, here's a, here's a document. You just read it and follow the steps. I'm like, okay, we're putting this CD called Knoppix. And like, what the heck is this Knoppix thing? Like, what is this like? Well, it's a Linux distro. I'm like, what is that? Like? Well, it runs all from a CD. Like, I don't know any of the words you're saying to me right now. And and I'm like, but it's fascinating that I always assumed that, like, these were special things that could only be built by certain people. Yeah. And just the fact that, like, this existed for free and it was the source was available and all this stuff like, you know, Galaxy brain sort of moment of like, what else is free? What else could you do with this stuff? And all of that stuff like starts happening and like, that's why I just started like, oh, the only thing this cost is my time. Yeah. And for me as a college student, I had lots of it. Yeah. And I could, I could invest all the time in the world and not spend any money because I didn't have the money, but I had all the time in the world to, to learn it. And that's kind of what I did. And I just kept learning it and figuring out more and more things and plenty of days without a cell phone, without a smartphone, trying to fix WiFi drivers, you know, on on various laptops. And I always, almost always had like a used second hand computer. I don't think I got a new computer for like a decade or something. It was always some like, oh yeah, this is this is great. Like, I'll take it. I'll, I'll run it, I'll figure it out. And installing Linux on pretty much everything I could touch.
ADRIANA:
That's awesome. So Linux was like your gateway drug.
JUSTIN:
It definitely was an eye opener for like, what software was. Yeah, yeah I didn't again, I didn't grow up with a computer. I didn't grow up with software. I didn't know... like, I wasn't a programmer when I was five. I was outside digging holes in the ground, like I just went outside. We dug ditches. I was like, oh, this is fun. We got to play in a hole. Now that's literally what I would do as a kid. And then I got into cars in like teenage high school years. And I for the longest time I loved cars. I loved working on cars, I loved driving cars, I loved going to car shows. I still take my kids to car shows. Like, dad, we don't want to go. Like, no, it's fun. Look at this. You know, this is like, you don't know this is an 87, you know, Toyota, whatever. Like, it's like, I love cars. And I was going to college, but I, like, I thought I'd be a mechanic or a driver or doing like performance tuning or something like that, because it was just like, oh, I like cars. I didn't know software was an option. I didn't know technology was like a thing, until like, kind, of getting into that. So yeah, understanding and learning Linux and then realizing like what Linux was actually used for, what people paid for. It was definitely an eye opener to like, oh, I don't have to work on cars.
ADRIANA:
So. So what did you study in college?
JUSTIN:
I, my my major for my undergrad is a math physics, mostly because I didn't like everything else. I went and I like I didn't know what the heck I was going to do. I didn't. I was like, they started me at the bottom tier math class because I didn't have... no math background. And like, well, you're starting in like algebra one or whatever. Like it was like really, really low. And I went through and I was like, I was just trying every class I could. Yeah. And I was like, well, you know what? After I had to declare a major for my junior year, I was going into my junior year without a major. Like, I don't know what I'm doing still. But it's like, but I know what I don't like. I don't like writing papers. I don't necessarily like reading reports. I'm terrible at art and music. Business is super boring to me. So it kind of narrowed down to like, okay, I like a science. I like the sciences. What do we have available? I was not good at chemistry. Chemistry was just not. It didn't agree with me for various reasons. And and so I was like, okay, well I do like... I like physics. I'm not very good at math. Like the math is still kind of a weak point for me. So like, I really like this physics stuff. My favorite class was like I jumped into one called statics. And it was like my first class that actually like had like trigonometry, like I had never taken trigonometry. I didn't know... I but like, I threw me in this class. It was like, a mid-level physics class, and I loved it. I was like, this is fascinating. Like, you actually are practically applying math to like, real world problems. Yes. Yeah. Of like bridges, bridges and all this stuff. I'm like, I love that. And I'm like, how do I do more of this? And so then they're like, okay, well, here's your options. And I was like one major that would let me graduate in time. And I'm like, cool, because I don't want to be here for five years. So I picked... math physics was my was my undergraduate. And I have a major, a master's degree in information technology, which is like a generic. They didn't really have a CS course. So it was kind of it was almost like a sysadmin, sort of like, you touched everything. We wrote some assembly. We did a lot with Java. We did a bunch of database tuning and management. So it was like it was like this generic kind of systems sort of like idea. But that was like my master's was was from the same university. It was it was like eight years later, but it was. Yeah, I get it. IT.
ADRIANA:
Cool. It was that like a 1 or 2 year program?
JUSTIN:
It was supposed to be a two year online program. I did over four years because I was only taking one at a time, partially because I was working at the university. So I got the class for free. Like the one one unit, one class per semester was free, and like, cool, I don’t have to pay for it. And then when I. Yeah, when I moved, when I switched out of the university, I'm like, oh, this is going to charge me now. So I worked to Disney and like, hey, do you have like a education program? And they did. And they Disney actually paid more than what the university was giving me. So I finished the last year like like in six months or whatever because I'm like, oh, I can pay for all the classes at once, or Disney would pay for it. So, I finished it off, but it took me about four years to get the master's.
ADRIANA:
Oh, that's so cool! I so agree with you though. On on like when it comes to university majors, like all the stuff that you said that you didn't like. I'm like, yeah, I can completely relate. Like for me to, like, I have an industrial engineering degree and I hated most things. I certainly did not see myself writing papers, reading stuff, interpreting what some guy decided or what what we think some guy thinks he meant when he wrote a thing. Like, no, not for me, not for me.
JUSTIN:
To my knowledge, I'm the only person that ever graduated with the degree I have from the university I graduated from. They only they only offered it for a few years. It was intended to teach... for teachers. It was. It was intended as it was. It's actually a Bachelor of Arts degree, because it was for teachers. It was for math and science and physics teachers, for like, junior high and high school, was like kind of where they target it. And and I was like, well, it's the only one I can graduate on time with. So I'm going to I'm going to do it. And then they like got rid of it like a year or two later. I don't think anyone else ever graduated with that. So I was like, I have the only one. I was like, yeah, I don't know, like it worked for me. I didn't have to take as many of the upper division math courses, and I got to like, pick and choose a little more variety on the physics courses. So it was a lot of fun. But it's not a it's not a straight physics degree because I didn't have to take some of the, like the really hard core physics. I didn't take whatever the Newtonian physics, I didn't I didn't go into Newtonian physics.
ADRIANA:
Oh yeah, like mechanics and dynamics and... yeah, yeah. So what did you do? Like, once you graduated from university? Did you like, did you know what you wanted to do at that point?
JUSTIN:
I was going to work on cars. I went to university. I was the first person in my family to go to university. Yeah, mostly because everyone thought I'd go to armed forces. My whole family. Big, big Navy family.
ADRIANA:
Oh, no way.
JUSTIN:
I had my grandparents, my uncles, all... Navy family. All all through and through. I'm like, I don't I don't really want to go to the Navy. I don't really think I want to do that. I want to go... but I have to move out of this house. Like I was like, I have to move. I have to get out of my house. It was not a great place for me to be. And so I was 17 when I graduated high school, and I moved out of the house. And, and I was like, well, I'm going to college. And I got accepted to the university. I filled out all the FASFA paperwork for like grants and whatnot, and we didn't make much money. So I got all of them approved. And so it basically was going to pay for half of my tuition and, and room and board, but I need a job still. So my freshman year, I just went, I was like, I have I had three jobs. Immediately I worked at the mailroom, I worked in the help desk, and it worked in transportation. Mailroom was my morning job. Transportation was my my afternoon, my Tuesday, Thursday afternoon job. And I wanted to work with cars and and then my the IT job was my weekend job. And so I was like, hey, I need the money. Like I'm not getting money from anywhere else. Like, this is, this is how we're going to do this. And I did not want to take loans. Yeah. And so I was like, I'm just going to do this as much as I can. I get much money from the government as possible, pay down as much as possible. And and so that was like, it. And so I was working at least two jobs the entire four years that I was there.
ADRIANA:
Damn.
JUSTIN:
At every point in that year, I was working at least two jobs on top of the being a student. And and so my final year I was, I'd been working at the IT department for all four years, and they had an opening of like, hey, we have a full time job in telecom. So I literally, I would answer the switchboard for the university for a little while, but I also would manage their cell phones. And that's how I got into smartphones, was, I was managing this bill of 350, 400 cell phones, and the executives had smartphones. And this was like, early, early days of like, Windows CE, like no Android, no iOS.
ADRIANA:
Oh my god, I remember that.
JUSTIN:
You had a BlackBerry or you had Windows CE. Windows CE was absolutely garbage, but it was the thing that my executives wanted. So they bought those, and like, we need you to support it. So they bought me one. And so I had in 2005, a smartphone,. And I had a Windows CE smartphone, and I was supporting the executives on it and stuff like that and managing stuff. And that's when I learned how to program, actually. Because I didn't, I took some CS courses that I thought I might want to do this computer science thing. I hated it. Terrible, terrible experience. But then I like, in my job. They're like, hey, this is our Verizon bill. And they would send the Verizon bill in a box. Like, it was like a full on box. Here is everything. And the person before me, it's like, hey, three weeks out of the month, I audit the bill. And I’d go through lines and I’d find out who was using... because people would charge you for, you know, they, back then, they were charging you per minute, per text message. You had to keep a clear like, personal versus work usage. And so I had to go through and figure out, are you using this for work or using this for personal? What is... I had to audit the bill and see, are you spending more money? Let's get you on a plan that works... all this stuff. But I was like, this sucks. Like, this job just sucks. Like, we're looking at this bill, hundreds of pages, and I'm like, what if I can get like, an Excel document of it? And this is early days. Like, I got a CSV from Verizon. And then I learned Visual Basic script and I learned that Excel, you could you could automate it with Visual Basic. And so the thing that took after, you know, copy and pasting a bunch of... not StackOverflow. ExpertsExchange. Copy and paste and Experts Exchange into Excel. Excel was my first IDE. I learned how to program and automate things with Excel. And I just went through, I was like, well, I want to do this better. And I took what took the person before me three weeks. It took me three hours. And I was like, cool. It would do the mail merge, it would automatically audit things. I would review it and I just, yeah, mail those out, send out emails that said, hey, it looks like you spent... you did a bunch of text messages. You owe us $5. Whatever. Right. Like it's like it would do all the calculations. All that stuff. It would do it for three hours and then I would bored out of my mind in that job. Right. Sysadmins where like, we're going to automate ourselves out of the job. And I got in trouble because I started like, oh, I could do whatever I want. So I started like cooking. Cooking ROMs for Android on Windows, Mobile phones and Android. And I was doing all this like hacking, like sort of like, oh, I got to root this phone to be able to get to this other thing. And then I started like, well, what else could I do? And I started downloading torrents. I'm like, well, like video games, I start downloading ROMs and I got caught downloading ROMs and then cease and desist, to the school that I was working at. It turns out like this is again, back in the day, my desktop computer at my desk had a public IP address. Straight up.
At 199 public IP, and they're like, yeah, this IP address was downloading ROMs and serving ROMs, and so you need to stop. And I was like, wow. Yeah. That was, how’d they... how’d they do that? That was fascinating. I get in trouble. I ended up switching jobs. So the person, the computer technician. The manager had to come clean my computer, make sure it was. I was like, oh no, I took it off. It's fine. I won't do it again. And then he offered me a job. He's like, it seems like you're bored and you're pretty good at this. You want to work on the computer side of things, like not the cell phones. I was like, yeah, actually, that sounds great. And so I worked computer stuff, doing, managing all the school stuff. This was again after after university, but I still was at the university. Managing the classroom, stuff like that. I ended up I was there for I was there for a total of nine years, but I was in that computer with the IT department the whole time. I was, ended up becoming the manager of the computer technicians and the sysadmin. I built our, like, the VDI environment, the virtual desktop environment for. We didn't have it at the time, but we like, hey, we want to be able to reemerge and deploy software to all these systems, automatically use older hardware, all these thin clients, all that stuff. So we're doing it for labs and classrooms, and I learned how to do it. I was like a Xen desktop certified administrator, doing XenServer, all that stuff. It was like I did I learned all that stuff. And then we had to have someone on the sysadmin side manage it, because the computer techs couldn't manage it. And so when they're like, hey, someone needs a manager, like, I'll manage it, okay. Why don't you like, come over to the sysadmin side. They also needed a Linux admin because their Linux admin left and I'm like, oh I know Linux. Like I know, I know well. And I had been part time writing for website called How-To Geek - howtogeek.com. And I was like, their Linux writer for for quite a while. And and so it was funny because like people were telling me, they're like, oh, we use your tutorial to learn how to do this on our servers. I'm like, cool, because I didn't have it on my resume.
I was not a sysadmin. I didn't have any professional experience doing this, but I was sharing what I was doing publicly. I had a blog since I was 2000... in 2005, right? I was just writing for myself because most of the time it was like, I want to find this later. This is my documentation. I just need to be able to look up.
ADRIANA:
That's my motivation.
JUSTIN:
And so since 2005, actually I got it in 2004. And ever since then I have I have averaged one blog post a month for over 20 years.
ADRIANA:
Wow. That's impressive.
JUSTIN:
It's just like, hey, you know, it's a habit. It’s a habit for me to write something down in a public way. And this is where I write it down. And social media, like, took some of that. But, I still try to write the permanent things, the things I want to find again, the things I want to share. Those go on my blog. And so that was like my kind of gateway into like, professional Linux administration. Was. I didn't have a resume for it. I was only doing Windows administration. I knew some XenServer stuff, but that's kind of a unique sort of case. And then but I had all this Linux stuff that I was doing at home and for fun, and I was running Linux, you know, I had I had YouTube videos back in the day for like MythTV back in the day. You had like, TiVos were big. But you can build your own. And there was a free version of it called MythTV. And so I built one, in 2005. And I started like, how does this work? How does TV tuners work? I don't want to pay the cable company. I will spend 18 weekends figuring this out. So I won’t give Comcast a dime. And that was kind of, you know, that was the motivation of just like I have the time to invest in myself. Let's learn it. Let's figure out how this works and then share it with people and then tell people, make videos, write posts, do whatever. And those sorts of things were kind of what drove into the like, you could do technology as a career. I was still, after my, after I graduated, going to the junior college next, next door for automotive classes because I still thought I was going to do cars for something. I was like, oh, this isn't going to work out like, this is just a helpdesk job. It wasn't until I actually switched to sysadmin that I stopped taking the car classes. I'm like, oh, I don't think I'm going to do cars for a living. I don't think I'm gonna make money from that anymore. I think I can do this technology thing. And that was like, the first like, turning point for me was, you know, 5 or 6 years after graduation that I was like, okay, I think I can use this like math physics degree to some, some sense of science and STEM, and then I can do this technology stuff and doing some automation and programing. I was doing it in all those jobs learning you know, as it needed.
ADRIANA:
That's so cool. And I have to say, like, I think I first heard about you because I stumbled upon some of your videos explaining like, how Kubernetes works. Which, I love the way in which you would explain stuff, because it was just so relatable. How did you, how did you get into like, how do you come up with these ideas? Like, what's the inspiration?
JUSTIN:
The inspiration is just me learning. It's just it's how do I, how do I think about things? And and I'm a big Bill Nye the Science guy, you know, like fan. I loved Elton Brown for cooking. In both those cases, they're like very. We're going to make this entertaining and hope that you learn something. We don't want to make it educational and hope you were entertained. Yeah. It's like that's the mindset of like, how would I be entertaining in this thing? How would I make it something that's like just either silly or fun or a story or whatever. And, and having that as the focus and then and then almost everything in technology has some physical analogy. Yeah. Like we call, we call things certain ways because they also exist in the real world. There are plenty of things in technology that's like, oh, we call it this because that term already exists and naming things is hard. But also we we use from the real world all the time. And so I'm just like, well, what if it was just the real world? What if this was just in real life things? How would you actually represent some of that stuff? So like the videos came from when I worked at Amazon two-thousand... 2020, I got a job at Amazon. I was on... that was my first like, DevRel role. I was in product, but like they used to travel to conferences all the time. It was just conferences, travel, travel, travel. I'm like, I don't want to travel. I have a young family. I didn't want to do it. 2020 happened. They weren't traveling anywhere. And so they started a live streaming channel and they're like, hey, we're going to start this “Container from the Couch” livestream YouTube channel and just kind of go through our How-Tos and workshops. And just learn some things. I'm like, cool. Yeah, what does that look? So I got really comfortable doing live streams and just being on camera, because I wasn't doing a lot of videos before that. And then I, during 2020, started watching TikTok. And I was like, wow, I learned a lot from this TikTok thing. I wonder what cool things you could do to educate people in a restricted environment, restricted format. And at the time, TikTok was still only one minute.
And it was just it was like TikTok was the only game in town, and it was one minute. And I was like, what could I do? And and so immediately I'm like, okay, let's just try something. And and so like I did... containers and pods was my first... “Containers versus Pods” was like, one of my first videos. Me and a friend, we like, rented a studio, like a place where we're like, we don't know where to film this or anything, like, we're just going to go for half a day. We're just going to try to get out like five different shorts and see what they look like. And and so I did it and I'm like, okay, well, like it wasn't super entertaining, but I like the restrictions. I like how I like how you have to fit something super fast. You have to boil it down to one point. I can't tell you ten things I have to tell you one thing, and if that one thing needs to build on something else, then I have to make that video too. And so I have to split this up, and I have to have them completely encapsulated in their own little thing. So I loved the restriction of one minute short form vertical videos and and being able to... and again, people swipe.
They don't... they didn't choose to click on me. They're choosing to not swipe. And that is a completely different mindset of like, do I need a banner image? No, I need a first five seconds that are like, what the heck are you doing? Yeah, just like, what is this? And that was kind of like the idea. And so I did. I did those five videos for Containers from the Couch, and we had been running that for years, and I posted them on, on TikTok. YouTube had shorts at the time, finally, and I think LinkedIn finally had videos, too. And the first five videos got more videos combined than the entire live stream catalog we had for the last three years.
ADRIANA:
Oh, wow.
JUSTIN:
And I was like, I think there might be something here. I think this is... just looking at that, like, it's not driving customers. It's not in-depth content, but it's the new place to discover things. It's the new entertainment platform for a lot of people. And and so at that point I'm like, okay, what else could I do? How else would I explain some things and what's possible? And everyone now has ten minute short vertical videos. I'm like, no one's sitting there for a ten minute. I still one minute is like, still where I'm at. I'm like, I still want to make this as one minute. I did a series of how to how to publish a website from your home internet. I'm like, how many videos would I need for this? Let's see. I think it ended up being 13 videos. It was 13 one minute videos. Hey! Run... this is how you run nginx. This is how you find the port that's open. This is how you open it on your router. This is how you create a domain name. This is like, and each one of those it's just like a progression of like... I will not watch a single ten minute video, but I will absolutely watch ten one minute videos.
ADRIANA:
Yep, yep.
JUSTIN:
It's just the mindset of like, that's okay. If I feel that way, then probably other people do too. And then all the like physical objects, creativity, stuff. Like I often try to explain the technology to my kids. They're you know, like, and they’re, they're really smart. They need it to be something they already know. You have to... every, everything we learn is because something else that we are familiar with. You can't just jump all the way to like, quantum mechanics without knowing mechanics. Like, progress into all these things. I like to say, everything we learn is a lie. It's just a slightly better, less, more true lie. And everything. You start with the, like, big abstraction of, like, this is the biggest lie. And anyone that knows any depth around this absolutely says, you are 100% wrong. I'm like, yes, I am wrong, but that's the point. It gets someone else to the next lie. And as long as we can progressing that and making it a little more truthful, then we can we can help them get to a place that they and they don't have to be in-depth experts, but they can understand it a little bit more. And that was kind of behind the whole thing was like, what's the better lie? I can tell. And almost every time, like every one of my videos that blows up is the one that has the most egregious lie. It's like, actually you're wrong. And someone comes in there and they're all upset. I'm like, I know, but thanks for being here, right? Like, I'm glad you found it doesn't care. Right? Like the people I’m trying to reach with this lie, is not you. And that's what.
ADRIANA:
Because you're using that to build on to the next thing.
JUSTIN:
Everything. Everything just builds.
ADRIANA:
That's such a cool observation, because it makes me think, you know, you mentioned that earlier that you hated, like, chemistry. And, you know, I loved chemistry in high school up until I got to university. And then, like, it just broke my brain. And I remember at one point, like, you know, in high school, chemistry was making sense, making sense. And then my last year of high school, they're like, and by the way, all that stuff from before. Yeah, it's not really that. And I'm like what? And that's, that's what what you know, your comment made me think of. But I guess, how could you possibly understand that next level of chemistry without having that foundational lie?
JUSTIN:
You need the foundation you can forget. Yeah. And it's just like. And that's the hardest part for a lot of people to learn advanced topics is forgetting the things they already understand. And saying, actually, why would this be wrong? And being able to think outside of like, okay, under what circumstances is that no longer true. And, and changing people's mind, because you had to... they worked hard to learn that thing. And now you're telling them, like all that work was not worth it. Like, not not really. I can bring you somewhere better if you want to put in more work, and some people don't. It's not worth the effort. They don't really care. Whatever. Like there's reasons that people stop learning in all those cases, but if they are interested and they want to go a little deeper, they can. And giving them some of that is is great.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah. And I also agree with you on, on keeping the format short and engaging, because like, for me, like I've said it many times on this podcast, I'm much more of a text over video person. And if you're going to present me with a video, it had better be a short video. And ever since, like Instagram, increased the length of their videos and even YouTube shorts, I'm like, if it's a long one, I'm just like, when is a stupid thing gonna end already?
JUSTIN:
Oh, look at that scroll bar. And if it's not going fast, I'm like, nah.
ADRIANA:
Like, buh-bye.
JUSTIN:
And even I've, I've especially during Covid time, I rethought what a conference talk would be. Because again, it was a DevRel at AWS. We were like, what does conference talk look like? And I had a talk accepted for KubeCon in 2020, before Covid happened, and even before I worked at Amazon. I was still working at Disney at the time. And so I had pitched this as like a semi Disney talk, and it ended up being a Disney talk, but you can go find it. It's called infrastructure for entertainment. And it was it was basically about all the stuff that I ran at Disney Animation and at Disney streaming, what that looks like, why they are different, how it works. But none of it was. Here's a slide deck. Here, let me tell you about this thing. Like it was I was I was acting it out. I was pretending that we were building it. And then I drew literally drew animations on my iPad for months. Every night I was drawing frame by frame animations that I like. In between scenes, I'm like, oh, now I'm going to explain this thing with a really bad animation, like a really bad stick figure, but like, that's, that's like, okay, what would this look like if conference talks were more like this entertainment, entertainment sort of style? I did another one called How Kubernetes Ships, something like that. I forget what KubeCon that was, but I was like a news reporter and I was like, hey, what environment should this look like? Why would we? I don't want to give you slides, but I want to tell you interesting, fun things and I want to have fun with it. I just want to be a little comedy. So I did like a whole weather report about like how release is like. What is a cap in Kubernetes? And I was a weatherman in front of a green screen with a tie and everything. I'm like, this is where the cap advance is. And this is like. And so like we just like just really silly fun with it.
And then I did one more for another, DevOps Days, which is kind of when I stopped doing it because people were starting to go back in into conferences and like the format just wasn't advancing. Or at least people didn't want pre-recorded talks, because people didn't want prerecorded talks the way they like a conference talk in YouTube. They wanted something more entertaining. And and so I just kind of switched to like, well, I'm just gonna do a YouTube videos now. Like, I don't need to have a conference talk. I have, I have a big enough audience on YouTube or TikTok or wherever. I can just do a YouTube. I don't need to go to a conference to show them slides. How would I convert these slides to something that would be a YouTube video? And that's kind of like the format I've kind of just run with. I do some talks still. I'm not a good I don't think I'm a good in-person conference speaker. I just... I'm not. It's like, it's really limiting. I can't do, you know, something? I usually bring a prop just to like for myself to, like, not rely on slides and to show things. But in general, I don't think I'm that great. I was just like, I'm there sometimes. But people mostly like my short form videos because they're like, oh, that was a great one minute. It was it was really fun. I don't want to listen to this for 45 minutes.
ADRIANA:
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I remember watching it was All Things Open last year. I cannot remember for the life of me what your talk was about, but I remember being entertained, so... I wanted to ask you about your time at Disney. How that came about was, was was that like kind of the job you took on after working at the university or.
JUSTIN:
I went to my first conference ever, the first first technical whatever conference that was in the Southern California Linux Expo. Fantastic. You know.
ADRIANA:
People.
JUSTIN:
It used to be down by LAX. And I went in, I think it was 2000... must have been like, 2009, 2008. And this was right when I was coming off managing cell phones. And it was really small. Like, this was still, maybe, a couple hundred people. And I'm like in the hallway and I see someone that had an iPhone. It must have been 2008, because 2007 was when the iPhone came out, and so was the first year, like after the iPhone was out, and I hadn't seen one in person. I was like, oh, like, I just I was managing cell phones, but I hadn't seen one in person. Someone at the show had one. And I'm like, hey, cool. How do you like it? And we just started talking about it and what they were doing, you know, like they're just standard user like, oh it's neat. But again this is pre App Store. This is not even the iPhone 3G, right. This is like.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
JUSTIN:
Yeah it's it's a Safari browser right. With some email.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
JUSTIN:
Yeah. Right. Like, it didn't do a whole lot. But then I was just like, talking to him, and turns out they're like, so what do you do? Like I'm a Linux admin. Oh that's cool. Where? Disney Animation. What? What does that mean? Like what does a Linux admin at a, at an animation studio do? And he's like, well like all the computers run Linux. I'm like, what are you talking about? And we just started talking. I, I met him there every year at the conference. Just happenstance. He was coming and I was going and every year for four years and I was I was still working at the university, you know, became casual acquaintance sort of friends and stuff like that. And we just talked about what we were working on, stuff. And, and it turns out when I was a sysadmin, like we were, I was implementing config management and git for a lot of our systems because this was still like SVN days. And so we were like, hey, what is what does it look like to have a git server and all this stuff? And so like we were doing this stuff and he's like, oh yeah, we're doing the same stuff. He's like, actually we have an opening on the team. Would you want to apply? I'm like, yeah, that sounds great because I was kind of getting bored and the university was not paying very well. To like, we wanted to start a family and all that stuff. Like actually at that point we had my, my first son, I'm like, hey, my bank account is going down. And I was walking into my boss's office at the university. I'm like, hey, I need you to pay me more money or I have to leave. And he is like, I have, you have to leave. I don't have any more budget for you. He's like, I think you do good work, but like, I can't pay you more money. And I'm like, cool, I'll go look for stuff. And so it happened that that year, whatever. They said, they had an opening. I was the first. They had expanded the team to four people. They were three people. For the longest time, they expanded to four people. I was the first new hire on that team. I think it was in 13 years.
ADRIANA:
Wow.
JUSTIN:
Those people had been there for 13 years on like the low end. Like one of the guys had been there for like 20 something years. And it was just like, this is like, you know, the amount of just like information that they know in their heads of how things work is just next level. Like, I was so hard, there was no documentation, there was not a lot of stuff. It was a fantastic experience. Like because I got in. Again, I didn't know anything about animation. I didn't know anything about these systems. A lot of the tools looked familiar to what I was doing before. They were trying to implement a VDI-like environment for their artists. I'm like, cool. I have VDI experience, obviously not XenDesktop, but a similar sort of like had we virtualized. But they were, they had Puppet for config management. I'm like cool, I'm Puppet certified. I took that course. I know how this works. They used it very much not the way that I knew how it worked. So like, learning those sorts of things. And then just like in general, the the entire studio was, was Linux based and like, wait, you don't have Active Directory? How do people...
Well, yeah, we have an LDAP server like. Oh! Where's storage? Like it's NFS. Of course it's NFS. Why wouldn't it be NFS? Like, people use NFS? Like, I thought that was just like a, like a really weird bespoke. No one did that anymore. Like all these things that I didn't know were, where people were using in real life. Like, oh yeah, we use all this stuff because it was Linux through and through. All of the artists’ desktops. All of the, anything that wasn't portable, was Linux. Yeah, like every server, everything. And so I was like, great. So I was on the Linux team for three-ish years, and they moved me into like, a core team. Partially because the Kubernetes stuff, partially because of other things I was doing there. But it was just, it was fascinating. People were like, what do you do? I'm like, I work on computers for most of the year, and then once a year I get dressed up in a suit and I go watch a cartoon. The entire studio, we’d go to, like, a premiere, and we'd watch the thing that we all made together. And it was the most, it was the coolest party, you know, all hands party you could ever have. Because like, hey, we've all been working really hard on this and everyone had a part and and you could just go and you'd see, literally see the fruits of your labor on like a big screen. And you're in a credit, like, it's like a fascinating like these movie credits are like, we actually gave credit to everyone here. Everyone in this room, you're on this screen right now. And I'm like, that is amazing. But the end of the day, end of the day, we were making box software. Like, the thing we made was an asset that went on a DVD that went and played in someone's DVD player. It... literally Bluray players have Java interpreters on it. Like, they run the Java software that we were making, box software. And the fascinating thing to me on that was like running systems for like a box software environment was like, we would build something, we would complete it, and then we'd move to the next project. And we would we would just do that over and over again. And there's 2 or 3 movies in process, but only one coming out a year, basically. And we're like, hey, that project’s done. Archive the stuff, move to the next one, right? I started creating the next environment sort of thing. And so I'm usually working in like 2 or 3 movies ahead of where like the releases are coming out. And so it was it was just fascinating being in that environment of like, wow, this is really cool and obviously really cool stuff that you have privilege of being at, like a big name animation studio where like actors in the building, and bands would come and play like randomly, and they'd have parties and whatnot, like really cool.
I know a lot of that doesn't happen anymore. Lots of budget cuts, animation industry is kind of in question with with current technologies and AI and whatnot. And then just like Covid decimated movie studios for a while, like all of the like the revenue streams that made it to have those parties all went away. But I switched from Disney Animation to Disney Plus in 2018, which was my first remote job because I had I had a second child and I... Disney Animation is in Burbank, and I was driving from Burbank to where I live, which was about 40 miles away, and I was spending 3 to 4 hours a day on the road.
ADRIANA:
Ouch.
JUSTIN:
And I was like, when I went back from paternity leave, the week I went back, I was driving more than I was sleeping at night.
ADRIANA:
Oh my God. Oh, that's not good.
JUSTIN:
Like, this isn't healthy. Like I can't do this anymore. And I had struggled with, you know, management and trying to push some people forward to do things in a more what I thought was advanced sort of Kubernetes cloud native sort of way. They were pretty reluctant on a lot of those things because this stuff works. We don't have either budget. We don't we don't have trained people. There's a lot of reasons it wasn't going to work, so I couldn't work in a cloud environment. I couldn't do things that I really wanted to do, so it's time to move somewhere else. I heard about this Disney. It wasn't even called Disney Plus at the time. It was just like a streaming service that we were going to build. They bought a startup called BAMTech Media. It was a fully remote gig, and it was all in the cloud. And I'm like, cool. You know, I get to be home with my kids. I don't have to drive all the time, and I get to work and advance my career in the areas that I wanted to. And so I was there, like when I started December of 2018, they announced like, hey, this is going to ship November of 2019. I'm like, oh.
ADRIANA:
Oh, damn.
JUSTIN:
I was like, we didn't know that until I started like, we had one year. They're like, this can't fail. Like, this is literally, the company is riding on this. Like, this cannot fail. And I was like, I have never run a production cloud system in my life before I started there.
ADRIANA:
So this was like all new, like the whole cloud native ecosystem was stuff you wanted to get into but had not, until you...
JUSTIN:
I wrote the I wrote the book with Chris in 2017, the Cloud Native Infrastructure, but that was, for me, was an aspirational theoretical book. I interviewed a lot of companies and I said, this is how they do it, and this is how Kubernetes does it. But I personally was not running production systems in the cloud. I played with it a bunch, you know, trying stuff and whatnot. But like, I was never on call for anything in any cloud up until that point of working at Disney+. And I worked, as I started at Disney+ and and they, as a startup, they had a bunch of customers. They ran streaming services for a lot of people. They ran streaming services for HBO, for MLB, for NHL. It was mostly live stuff, but there was also on demand things like the original Twitter live streaming, not Periscope, but the thing before it, like all that stuff was on BAMTech media stack. And so I show up on the first day and they're like, okay, here's the 18 customers we have. You can't let their customers... their environments are live, like, they have customers using this stuff, like it's going. And also we're building Disney+ for next year. I'm like, oh my gosh. Like.
ADRIANA:
Oh geez.
JUSTIN:
I didn't I did not know. I was like, okay. I jumped into the deep end. And then within the first two weeks I started there, two people quit on my team.
ADRIANA:
Oh my God.
JUSTIN:
So it went from, it went from for people to two.
ADRIANA:
Oh God.
JUSTIN:
Within. Before I was on board, I was like, okay, we have to ship this thing.
ADRIANA:
That's stressful.
JUSTIN:
So it was it was a fascinating year of stress.
ADRIANA:
But working from home.
JUSTIN:
Working from home. I was not driving, I did go... they were based in New York, so I went to New York once in that in that trip. I did London once as well. Because they had Manchester teams and London teams. But yeah, that was like, it was, it was fascinating. I loved it. I left after the UK launch, which was would have been in 2020 or 2020, cause that's when I started at Amazon. So it was it was it was a fascinating environment, just like seeing what they built, how they built it on such a scrappy sort of team. The team that was building, it was like, four people. It was all on AWS and ECS. No Kubernetes. No. And like and I was, I was all like, oh I've never used ECS, like what does this look like? And it doesn't matter because our usage of ECS was not a traditional ECS usage. So it was like, yeah, no you have to learn our stack anyway. We built all these platform stuff on top of it, so it's not like traditional stuff. But I was I was managing the like observability stack of it and, and the infrastructure side of it. So we were provisioning clusters, managing access, integrating with the deployments and CI teams. And then we had deployed Datadog for monitoring and alerting or and logging, like just, you know, a few months before Disney+.
ADRIANA:
Oh damn. Wow. And were... correct me if I'm wrong, were you also, like, you had been at one point like, a Cloud Native Ambassador?
JUSTIN:
Yeah, yeah. That was, I mean, I, I was at Disney Animation when they like, invited me. Like, they were starting the program, and they're like, hey, you're writing a book about this. You've done some stuff. I mostly I wasn't contributing code. I was mostly doing like documentation and then like external, like education stuff. Yeah, they invited me as that and I didn't know what that meant. Like, it would have been an ambassador for something. I used that. I mostly used that for travel budget, because Disney would not pay, Disney Animation would not pay for me to go to conferences. So anytime I was going to KubeCon, I would have to take vacation time. And CNCF, because I was an ambassador, would pay for my travel.
ADRIANA:
Oh, nice. Nice.
JUSTIN:
So that was like how I went to KubeCons for a while. And it was just like, oh, I don't have a budget for this, and work’s not paying for me. I know it's a big name. I know they have money, but they're not giving it for this. And so I had to find other ways to be part of the community to be able to like, just show up. And and that was always like, yeah, I need to do that. Working at Amazon. I didn't need that anymore. I think I stopped being an ambassador when I was at Disney+, partially because I wasn't using Kubernetes anymore. That year was just stressful of like, I wasn't creating a lot of content or writing, you know, doing stuff to like, really engage in the community. And so, yeah, I was like, okay, now, now I need to figure out what else to do. And then after leaving Disney, Disney+ I went to Amazon because they were like, hey, you run a big ECS infrastructure on on containers, would you like to come help people learn how to do that too? I'm like, yeah, actually that sounds that sounds great.
ADRIANA:
That's cool. And so that was like, I guess a more official advocacy role compared to what you were doing at Disney+.
JUSTIN:
Yeah, all my Disney titles and jobs were engineer. I was systems engineer. I think my title at Disney+ was like super long. It was like I was as an SRE. I was like platform engineer SRE for Linux systems on something. I don't know, it was like a super long title, but like, yeah, I checked all the bingo boxes on that one I think I didn't have, but I had everything else.
ADRIANA:
Nice, nice and but yeah, you did a bunch of like basically advocacy work on the side of just kind of for fun.
JUSTIN:
Yeah, I still I still wanted to like, I still liked Kubernetes. I still have it as, as like an ecosystem and I definitely better than ECS at the time. Like ECS solved a lot of problems. And I still to this day give it credit for Disney+ would have failed if we tried to put Kubernetes in place in the short period of time we had, because we didn't have people to run it, we didn't have the infrastructure and expertise and all the integration and stuff like that. Like, ECS scaled beautifully for us on launch day, which was 10 million signups in a single day. And it was just like, yeah, no, this, this would not have been successful any other way, I don't think. And it worked. And I learned a lot about ECS, even in my time at Amazon. When I was part of the container team, I probably talked. I talked to more people out of using Kubernetes than people into Kubernetes. I'm like, actually, you're a team of two people. You probably want ECS. You should just go use that. And I'm like, here's why. And you know, like I had the experience, the production experience of like, this is this is why this is where it's where it's bad. So yeah.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's important to have those conversations because I think it's so easy for organizations to get caught up in the shiny new thing. It's like, oh, everyone's using Kubernetes. I too shall use Kubernetes. And it's like, well, maybe not.
JUSTIN:
And I think to this day I don't know for sure, but I think Disney+ is moving to Kubernetes or has been partially Kubernetes because I know Hulu was a big Kubernetes shop in Hulu and Disney+ are now much more entwined in management and infrastructure and cost savings sort of stuff, so I believe they might be using it now, but it's still, like, there's a lot of legacy stuff that has been built for a long time that isn't going away anytime soon.
ADRIANA:
So yeah. Yeah. Cool, cool. And after you and then you left Amazon or you left AWS semi recently. Right. And what's, what's your what's your role now.
JUSTIN:
Yeah. So at AWS I was I was actually building a lot of on prem stuff, which was weird. Like I was building EKS anywhere with a team. Like we were planning that out. And I still really liked the data center on Kubernetes space, because that's what I was originally kind of got into the space at Disney Animation and Disney+ I didn't do any of that and then kind of got back into it at Amazon. And I was like, wow, this is I still like this. I still think there's a lot of value, and a lot of people can have benefits here. Yeah. And in Kubernetes as that like layer for on top of bare metal, it makes a lot more sense than something like maybe a VMware.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
JUSTIN:
And I had been a VMware admin in the past. I've used a lot of stuff on prem and, and so I had stayed in touch with Andrew Reinhard, who was the founder of Talos Linux and, and he created it while I was at Disney Animation. I was running Kubernetes clusters on CoreOS, and he built like this, this new way of thinking about it, like, what if you don't have SSH? What if you don't have a traditional Linux distro? What if everything's an API? I'm like, that's impossible, you can't do that. And like I stayed in touch with him. I like, I kept trying it, I kept playing with it in different areas and and it kept progressing. It kind of stayed in touch. And then when I was at Amazon, like we were building stuff, competing directly with it, Bottle Rocket was directly to compete with Talos Linux and EKS Anywhere wasn't to compete with, but it was at the same time Sidero was building Sidero Metal, which was like the exact same ideas like, oh, we could build this on prem Kubernetes management stuff. And and so they were they were disbanding the EKS Anywhere team. It kind of was a failure. Like not not a lot going on. No. No real customers. No big like all the things they thought might happen weren't happening. Like actually this is like really expensive to maintain. So we're just kind of kind of like, everyone go somewhere else. And kind of spread the team out various places and put it in maintenance mode. At least that's my my opinion of it. I won't say that's official because I'm not going to speak poorly of. I think the team was great, but like, the management was like, we don't actually want to be in this business sort of thing. And so I don't know what the state of it is now, but all of my friends or most of my friends don't work on it anymore. All the people I talked with that I'm like, hey, this was great. Good times. Like, yeah, I stopped working on that years ago. I'm like, yeah, me too. But Sidero was still like, no, this is still valuable. Like, there's still this space here that aren't in the cloud. Not everything's running into the cloud. They're still this really good Kubernetes story of like, how do we make this better? And Talos Linux as like a different way of managing Linux was just fascinating to me of I don't SSH I don't run config management, I just have an API and that includes installing and formatting disks. And I'm like, how do you combine all of those tools, all those config files, all those things I've learned for the last 20 years into a single API. And they're like, actually, if we have a single use pace, use case, it's really easy. Because we're just like, we just don't do all of the complicated things. You just do one. We just say it's just Kubernetes. I'm like, okay. And so I was talking to Andrew. I'm like, hey, how's it going over there? Like, do you have customers? How's it? How's the how's it adoption? It's still a startup, still pretty small. This is my first startup. This is the first time I ever went to, like, a small company. And and I was like, I'm nervous about it. But also like, Amazon was kind of was, was burned into the ground, like, how do I how do I get off this sinking ship fast, too? And and so Andrew and I, again, we had been talking for six years. We just casually, occasionally like, hey, how's it going? What's, what's going on? And so like I felt like I knew I knew him really well. I knew what they were trying to do. And I was like, what would it look like for me over there? And Andrew actually did he did try to hire me when I left Disney Animation and when I left Disney+, he in both times he reached out because he’s like... I announced it online and he's like, yeah, hey, by the way, would you be interested in coming here? And in both cases I was like, I, you know, I have a second kid. I was like, I need a bunch of money. I was like, how much? You know, what are you paying? What are the roles? What does it look like? He's like, oh, we're still small. We can't do that. Like, okay, Amazon is going to pay me like all the money in the world. So I'm just gonna go there for a while. It's like, yeah, that's makes sense. Like just, you know, and at the point I was like, you know, I think I can really have an impact on a product and an industry in a different way than being at a giant company that has this influence and broad reach, but also just like, change the story, just like, what would it look like if all this looked different? And the more I use Talos, the more I was like, this needs to exist in the world. Whether Sidoro is successful or not, API driven Linux needs to be in the world because it is like everything I've done in my 20 plus years of using Linux just gets so much easier if we have single purpose API driven Linux distributions. And so I was like, this really needs to be successful in of ways, and that means commercially successful to be sustainable. But then also just like it pushed the boundaries of what everyone thinks, when you think of a Linux server, you're like, yeah, I got it. I got to do a bunch of stuff. I got to learn a bunch of man pages and all this stuff like, no, no, no, no, like we can. It's different story today. And and that includes setting up and maintenance side of things. And so I've been really excited.
And I started as like, a DevRel person, doing content for them because they they had a lot of really cool stuff that they didn't tell anyone about. Right? I was like, I need to relearn this. So you need to tell people about this thing because this is really cool. So I kept like, I want to relearn this. I'm going to make a video about it. Like, great. I just was like, I think every week I made some form of content, whether it was a conference talk, a blog post, a video, something, I was like, nice open source project, whatever. I'm like, I just need to tell people, that's cool. Like, I have not been blown away by a Linux distro for a very long time. And and so I was relearning it. And then now they, they, I moved into a product role. So it's like I've been doing that but also like how do I have more impact on like the actual implementation, the roadmap, the, the where I think the pain points are for customers and talking to a lot of customers and partners, because Linux doesn't exist in a vacuum. Linux is still like this integrated system. Just like Kubernetes. You have a bunch of tools, and there's other hardware and ecosystem stuff that you have to integrate with. And so figuring out like where that's painful, where people want to run this, where people are, what they're trying to do with it, what access. Because Linux is a very big, complicated system, right? And people think Kubernetes is a big, complicated system, like, yeah, it's built on another really big, complicated system. The only difference is people have like boiled down Linux into the thing that makes like Linux side of it, like, oh, just don't look there, right? Like you don't have to look at that side because that's too complicated and you just hide the things that you don't really need. And Kubernetes is kind of getting there where they're like, hey, don't look at etcd. You don't need to look at the database. It's fine. We'll manage it for you kind of thing. And so like Kubernetes is kind of getting there with like it's settling down. It's getting a little more boring. It's getting a little more stable. People understand it a little more. But the, the underlying like how do we make Linux just more secure, faster, easier to run places, not just for Kubernetes. Like what would Linux look like for a non Kubernetes distro? That's API driven? What if I wanted a storage system or a load balancer or something else, like all of those things, all of those stories, NetApp and Port Works and F5 and all these, they're all Linux systems. They all just have some proprietary API interface on top of it. I'm like, what if that was all open? What if we just could do that in in democratize that side of things and saying, hey, instead of the Zen scaler, you know, API, we have a common API that you can use that Kubernetes did for containers and orchestration. You could actually do that for a lot of other components, and it makes running and running a cloud like environment easier. Because you go to Amazon, you go you have one load balancer choice, like they have one proprietary API, like they integrate with you want to run into your own load balancer. Good luck. Go run some EC2 instances and build something. Whatever. People do that sometimes, but not generally. But if you if you had that symbol, a simpler API that was easier to maintain and manage and deploy for various use cases, I'm really excited about that. I think that's so cool. As a longtime Linux nerd.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
JUSTIN:
Just knowing that, like, all of this stuff can be possible and it's not actually outside the scope of what people can do. Yeah, we just built the underlying system right now is so complicated because it does everything. And when you have a general purpose thing and you say, I want to do one thing with it. It makes it really hard to boil that down and secure it in certain ways and maintain it.
ADRIANA:
That's awesome. That's so cool. Now you've got me, you've got me. You've piqued my interest. So I'm definitely going to be reading up more on on Talos. That's so cool. We're coming up on time. But before we wrap up, I was wondering if you had any either words of wisdom or spicy takes for our audience?
JUSTIN:
That's too many. We were at time, so. I will say my, my, my career has been, I think, it's been mostly successful because I've invested in myself in various ways over and over again. And if I had the time, I spent the time to learn how to do something to to keep things on my own platform, put things on my blog post, on my domain, on my websites, when possible. And I often tell people I had Bitcoin way back in the day. Way back when Bitcoin started, I bought Bitcoin. I got it for two birthdays. I spent 100 bucks each time I had $225 in bitcoin. It crashed. It came back up. I ended up selling it for like 300 bucks, and everyone was like, aren't you sad you sold all your Bitcoin? Like hell no. I sold it and I bought a home lab to learn Kubernetes, and the the return on investment on me learning Kubernetes in depth on hardware got me multiple well-paying jobs, and it got me friends that I would have never got with Bitcoin. Like, it's like the amount of doors that opened because I invested in myself in those areas and knew that, like, actually, I could hold on to this until it goes to the moon and I could get tens of thousands of dollars from it.
You know what? Every time I left the company, at least going like, to Disney and Amazon, I doubled my pay. Yeah. Like that's a that's a return on investment that you can't get from other places. Right. Like that's just I learned the skill set to be valuable to a business to say like, hey, what do you want to do? What are you trying to do? Cool. I'm going to learn that skill set and I'm going to invest in myself. And even if you don't hire me, I now own that skill set. I know how to do that thing. I change my own voice still today, right? Like, I know how to do that. And it's easy for me. And it like, does it take some time? Yeah. Could I pay someone to do it? Sure. I also lets me disconnect and I'm offline for a little while to go change my. And that's okay too. So investing in myself in like if you are getting started or trying to do something like take the time to slow down and invest in yourself to learn the way you want to learn. Put things on your own things you control, your own domain, your own websites, your own, you know, file server, whatever it is like. Learn how to do the stuff yourself to take some ownership and responsibility, because that's the biggest investment that pays off over time. We only get the one life and you only here for so long and like it doesn't matter. Like if you made more money with some investment or just like, figure out where to spend the time and hopefully spend it on yourself and enrich yourself, your friends, your family, people around you.
ADRIANA:
Oh, that is such great advice. I love that so much. Well, thank you JUSTIN: for geeking out with me today. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time.
JUSTIN:
Peace out and geek out.
ADRIANA:
Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, ADRIANA: Villela. I also composed and performed the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who designed all of the cool graphics. And be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bio.site/geekingout.