Chill vibes? Capybara lover? Networking guru? That’s Duffie Cooley! Come geek out with us as Duffie talks about his tech journey, the importance of seeing problems from different perspectives, and how living with dyslexia hasn’t stopped him from kicking ass.
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About our guest:
Duffie Cooley is the Field CTO for Isovalent @ Cisco. He has been involved in the Kubernetes Community since 2017. He is an emeritus member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee and has helped lots of folks learn more about The Kubernetes Ecosystem and eBPF through tgik and eCHO office hours. His handle is mauilion as he grew up in Maui, Hawaii and likes big cats. If you see his face come say hi! He's usually carrying around a few cool stickers as well.
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Transcript:
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 Duffie Cooley. Welcome, Duffie.
DUFFIE:
Thank you so much.
DUFFIE:
It's an honor to be here. You have such a tremendous, you know, history of podcasts so far. So I'm just really grateful to be a part of it.
ADRIANA:
Oh, thank you so much. And, Duffie, where are you calling from today?
DUFFIE:
I live in Alameda, which is not too far from San Francisco. It's right across the Bay Bridge.
ADRIANA:
I got to, like, nerd out with you when you said Alameda is. It makes me think of Star Trek IV. It is. It is the same place.
DUFFIE:
This is where the nuclear vessels were hosted.
ADRIANA:
So this is why I know of Alameda.
DUFFIE:
Another one that, people connect with is, what do you call it? MythBusters.MythBusters did a bunch of stuff, like, out on this, like. And you're like, where in the Bay Area did you find such a big, flat space to, like, crash semi-trucks? Here on Alameda out on the point. That’s where it was filmed.
ADRIANA:
Oh, that's so wild, I remember MythBusters. That was a great show.
DUFFIE:
It was. I love the whole premise. You know, it's like people having, like, the the, some challenging thing, and you're like, is it real? Did it really happen? All right.
ADRIANA:
Let's. Yeah. Yeah, and by the way, my my my final comment on Alameda and the Star Trek movies, I know everyone loves Wrath of Khan, but Star Trek IV still holds a place in my heart as the best one, because there is time travel and Scotty talking to an old Mac. So...
DUFFIE:
I remember seeing that movie for the first time I was, I, I grew up in Hawaii.
ADRIANA:
Oh cool.
DUFFIE:
That movie is one of the movies that I absolutely remember seeing in the Kaahumanu Theater, like in in Kahului in Maui. It's like, you know, there are a few movies where you like, really connect with a place in a time. And that's one of those movies for me.
ADRIANA:
That's so awesome. Cool. I have so many questions now about, like, growing up in Hawaii, but, I'm going to start first with our, lightning round questions. Are you ready? Tsk... icebreaker. Used to call them Lightning Round. But they're not lightning. Okay. First question. Are you lefty or a righty?
DUFFIE:
I'm a righty, but I am dyslexic, so jury's out.
ADRIANA:
Love it. Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android? iPhone. All right. Next one. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?
DUFFIE:
Linux. All day. I've been a Linux on the desktop user for 20 something years.
ADRIANA:
Oh, damn. What's your what's your favorite distro?
DUFFIE:
My favorite distro. That's a tough one. I've been through so many. I think Arch is probably my current favorite because of the the community builds and everything else like that at work, however, when I'm at Cisco, I have to. I have to use Ubuntu, which I don't mind. It's a great distro as well, but but yeah, like for the, for the obscure kind of stuff that you need to make your desktop your own, I think Arch is really the great one.
ADRIANA:
Nice, nice. And, that is one thing like Linux does let you, play around a lot.
DUFFIE:
Almost to its detriment. Yes.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That's true. My, my only, my only beef with with Linux and maybe it's improved. It's been a while... was like I couldn't get it to play with all the peripherals all the time. And when I used to have, like, you know, an iPhone that I had to connect to, to my computer to sync, or actually, before that, I had BlackBerry. I couldn't use the BlackBerry software to sync my BlackBerry in my Linux box. Sadly.
DUFFIE:
It's a challenge for sure. I mean, it's I was just recently. Speaking of geeking out, I'm also a motorcycle rider, and I was recently changing the programing of the computer that operates the motorcycle's fueling and electrical systems. And for that, I needed a Windows computer, because the only software that I could use to load the program onto the device that was doing the programing was the windows computer.
And so I again remembered how to do this with Vagrant. I spun up a Windows 11 machine, figured out how to do a USB passthrough, because I'm not going to install Windows just to try this out. Right? Like...
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
You know like but yeah, I feel you on the on the challenge of like being able to having to deal with stuff that sometimes it's, it's-- Windows is the only way. And...
ADRIANA:
Yes. But also you're like updating software on your motorcycle. Feel like you buried the lede there.
DUFFIE:
Well, it's interesting stuff. I mean, just like with motorcycles, actually, with most fuel injected vehicles, especially recent ones, they have an ECU that's responsible for like good timing in the fueling.
And and from the factory they come in this issue in this state where because of the way that the regulations work, they have to stay within a particular range of fueling and timing to remain underneath an emission thing, which does two things. I mean, I appreciate the emissions challenge, but the other part of it is that it causes the motorcycle to run very lean a lot of the time, which causes the motorcycle to run hot.
And actually you end up in this kind of like weird bad loop where the motorcycle can't really operate at efficiency. So it's continuing to run badly. And and if it were to able to run efficiently, it would actually run significantly more efficiently then the computer program allows for it. And so that was the change I was making, was allowing for the computer to actually learn from the sensors on the bike how efficiently it's running.
So it could actually do a better learning loop and operate correctly. Right. It's still in the the, the two that I put on this motorcycle is still a 50 state tune. If I had to go and get my exhaust checked, it would still pass.
It's just that it allows the motorcycle to be unrestricted in how it fuels and times the bike so that it's still it's still being very efficient, but it's not being held back by that regulation on it.
ADRIANA:
Got it. That's very cool. Speaking of... so, like, what do you what do you write that in?
DUFFIE:
Oh, I'm not sure. I didn't actually write this one. So this is all like, I so basically what I get back is a program that looks like a map, right? It looks a little bit like a graph. And the units on one side are perhaps things like, measurements of oxygen and, and measurements of temperature and things like that.
And on the other side we have like timing adjustment, like up or down and also fueling how much fueling. And you can think of this like a big heat map. Right. And what it's trying to do is it's trying to figure out a way to make it so that as you move through the power cycle of the motorcycle, it's creating a scenario where everything is fueled and timed correctly based on the temperature and the, oxygen levels being measured at the exhaust system.
ADRIANA:
Oh, cool.
DUFFIE:
Right. And so it's like, it's this and this is what I mean by that second, but it's kind of a closed loop system, they call it, because it's constantly measuring the situation at hand and trying to adjust timing and fuel based on that.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool.
DUFFIE:
But I think it's probably written in C or, you know, something crazy because it's been around forever. Yeah, I feel like it's one of those industries ripe for disruption, but nothing is ever... it’s like, such a niche thing, you know?
ADRIANA:
So true, so true. Yeah. That's so cool. It isn't it wild to realize, I mean, I think we already know, deep in the back of our minds that computers run our vehicles, but it's still, like, kind of blows my mind.
DUFFIE:
It is a trip. Yeah. For sure. Like and it's funny there's there are still you can still find vehicles for which this is not true. Right. Like there's still plenty of vehicles out there that that are still, you know, carburated and all of that stuff. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
Like with, with fuel injection and all of that. It's really come a long way. Just a couple of years ago I bought my first all electric car and that's nothing but computers, right? Like there's. Other than the brakes, maybe, you know, like I.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
And speaking of electric cars, like, so I, I have a hybrid and when we, when we bought the hybrid, the first time I drove it and it was in electrical mode, I'm like, what's going on? There's no noise. Like it breaks your brain.
DUFFIE:
Yeah, it's a trippy thing. And then, you know, it's just a power powerband and everything. And then I thought when I bought this car, because I come from the, you know, like, I had, had a mini Cooper Clubman before this, and I had a Honda Element and a bunch of other cars that are great cars. But like, I thought that when I bought the electric car, I would have, like, range anxiety that I would be worried, like I would I would have this concern of like, am I going to be able to get to the next charging station?
You know, like, and really, it's not a thing in California in California where I, where I do all of my driving.
ADRIANA:
Right.
DUFFIE:
It's not a thing I have to worry about at all.
ADRIANA:
Right. Right. This is THE place to own an electric car.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. And also, the car goes 200 something miles on a charge.
ADRIANA:
Damn.
DUFFIE:
So it's not like, you know, it's not. It's not like. It's like that's about what a tank would have taken me.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Right. Like I take a gas, so they're taking me about the same distance. So it's like it's already kind of like aligned with, like my mental picture of, like how far I can go before I have to deal with the gas thing.
ADRIANA:
That's great. And does your car charge fast?
DUFFIE:
It is. Yeah. It's like the 400 volt system or the 800 volt system or something. So I pull in to a fast charger and 20 minutes later from empty, I'm at like 80 or 90.
ADRIANA:
Oh that's pretty good. That's pretty good. I heard there's like some really cool technology out there in the world that allows you to, swap out car batteries. So then I guess it makes the, the experience a lot better so that you're not having to sit there, you know, waiting 20 minutes for for a charge, even.
DUFFIE:
I've heard of that one. I've also heard of like there's another one that I've seen or I haven't seen it, but I've heard it read about, which is like they put like a mat in your driveway or whatever. And then like, it's like wireless charging speeds.
ADRIANA:
Oh my god. Oh my god.
DUFFIE:
Right. Like overnight it would just wireless. It would be like your little mouse or whatever. It just wirelessly charge. But yeah, I haven't seen any of that in person. But it's pretty amazing.
ADRIANA:
Damn mind blown. Yeah, that is so trippy. Well, I could I could keep on asking questions about this, but, I'm going to move on to the next question in our series. Do you have favorite programing language?
DUFFIE:
Do I have a favorite programing language? Whew. That's tough. I will say Python.
ADRIANA:
I love Python. So, Team Python.
DUFFIE:
And and to qualify that I think I'll say Python because of IPython. I'm a, I'm a type of learner that I kind of need to be hands on. I need, I need to be able to ask questions, everything with my hands and like figure out how it works.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
And it really unlocked my ability to understand how programing works because like, you can write all kinds of crazy ways of transforming data dictionaries and all this other stuff. But unless you're able to, like, jump in and see what state it's in, like, did it work? Is it doing the thing I expect, like in an interactive way?
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
I have a hard time, like in my head, like putting together how it works. It's easier now with like structs in Go, like it's, it's like, it kind of like it makes it a little bit easier to understand what the data will with the shape the data will take. But like in Python, I feel like was the first one that really unlocked. Like being able to understand and being able to watch a program work through the different parts of the logical flow.
ADRIANA:
Right. Right. That's so cool. Love it. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer dev or ops?
DUFFIE:
I think I prefer ops, and the reason is like for me, a big part of the thing that gets me up in the morning, the thing that drives me to go and do it again is the people.
And so between dev and Ops I feel like dev frequently like we were, we are working on our own to build, to improve a piece of software or some piece of infrastructure or whatever it is. And we're, we're focused on that work and then like maybe once a day or perhaps like a couple times a week, we go and we meet each other and talk about what we're going to work together, etc..
And in ops, it's like a daily you're working in a team, right? Like it's you're handing off between the different parts of it and all that pretty constantly. And I feel like that's definitely more my speed of operations before for a number of different companies. But.
But yeah, like, I really like the, the people part of the puzzle as much as I like the technology. So I need both of those things to, to really feel like I'm doing the right work, you know?
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah. It's true, it's true. It's Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, it's it's so interesting. I feel like we all crave, like, human connection, a place to belong. And then finding, like, our people in our little like niche of work. Right. Is so, so important.
DUFFIE:
I completely agree. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, dev is the other where I feel like dev is challenging because like, it can feel very isolating, right? Like, I feel like in many ways. And some people are into that. Right. Like it takes all kinds. Right? Like some people... for them, like being able to really apply their whole self to that problem and move that problem along is all they need.
And that's great. Right.
DUFFIE:
But for me I need that multiple puzzle piece, you know like.
ADRIANA:
I totally feel ya. Yeah. It is interesting that dev really is a solo endeavor. Unless you do, you know, you do like,
programing or swarm programing, which I don't know. I'm, I'm too much of a control freak to do pair programing. And I'm, I'm the one who has to be on the driver's seat.
I've only paired successfully, like, with one friend, and it was like, you know, he he knew that I was the one who had to be in the driver's seat, and he, he he, he was happy to, to stay in the passenger seat, and it worked really well. But I don't know if I could do that with anyone else.
DUFFIE:
I'm curious if you have have tried doing, like, pair programing with, like, a computer or like, AI or something.
ADRIANA:
Oh, like vibe coding. I have not, I'm not not. Yeah. I wouldn't say I've tried vibe coding yet, but that's on my to do list
I finally, I feel like I finally have a project for vibe coding. Because I hate doing front-end. I'm allergic to front-end dev. Like, JavaScript lost me years ago.l
DUFFIE:
That is an entire thing. Like, oh yeah. Like completely with you on that. It’s like, you might understand databases and data manipulation, all this other stuff. And then you get in the front-end, you're like, what in the world is happening?
ADRIANA:
Exactly. Like, you lost me at JavaScript and CSS and like the fact that shit doesn't work for multiple browsers and like, no.
DUFFIE:
Oh my god. Yes. Right. Like, wow.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. So my my vibe coding project is build me a website. I like it because right now, like I host my my blog on medium and I'm happily doing that.
But like I have owned my own domain since I think 2000 and I've not. It's been a while since I've done anything with it. I think I might have had stuff on it a long time ago. Some like shitty static web page that has long since been taken down. This is my excuse. So yes, I, I, like you are so right though on on like pair programing... like, vibe coding is like pair programing with the AI. That's cool.
Okay. Next question in the series, do you prefer JSON or YAML?
DUFFIE:
JSON or YAML? Wow. Well, I was, you know, a few years ago, I was working with Rory McCune, Ian Coldwater, and Brad Geesaman, and we were looking at a, an exploit on YAML which allows for a multiple multiple application attack where, it was called “Billion Laughs”. It's a really fun CVE in the Kubernetes CVE history.
And what this would do is in YAML, there's this idea that you can take a, an anchor and then copy and then generate code based on that anchor, where you apply it within your YAML file. And there was no upper bound set on the expansion of the anchor. So what the submit was that like, you could actually like submit a very small YAML file that would result in an expansion of memory and the API server cut it off all over.
ADRIANA:
Well down.
DUFFIE:
So there is no such thing in JSON. Like there's no like expansion idea in JSON. This is a feature only of the YAML of the only of the YAML thing, so I don't know which one I prefer. I'd say that YAML is probably easier on the human, and JSON is definitely easier on the computer.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I can see that. I could see that. Yeah, I find YAML easier on the eyes. I found the curly braces of JSON like too much for me. It's just it's noise.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. And if you don't have like if you don't have some kind of ID to tell you when you're blowing it, it's really very difficult to write.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Like but it's also interesting that JSON that YAML has these like challenges like, like it'll, it'll determine it, like a boolean value is different than, you know, is detected as a YAML feature rather than as a Boolean value. And like the date thing, there's, there's a bunch of weird little peccadilloes about YAML that make it maybe not quite incompatible, but certainly not the perfect tool for what we use it for.
Where you apply quotes and where you don't. And how do you escape sequences and like oh yeah. Oh my gosh. There's so many things.
ADRIANA:
Quotes. Yeah, yeah. The quotes, the quotes, the dam quotes. It's like, do you like quotes? Do you not like quotes?
DUFFIE:
I came across a very interesting problem leveraging YAML in, Ansible, the other day. And I was because I was trying to basically create a string that actually had quotes in it, and I was having the hardest time getting, Ansible to do the right thing in templating. It was actually using Jinja, really at the end of the day.
But like, I couldn't get you to do the thing I was trying to get it to do because of the escaping. And then I finally figured out that they, they have actually built a function called unsafe.
ADRIANA:
Oh.
DUFFIE:
And they were just like, mark this particular string unsafe. And they're like, just don't interpret it. Just put it in and just put it in and and take it out and like don't try to play with it. Don't try to understand what it says. Just use this string as I have given it to you and it works great now.
ADRIANA:
Wow that's great.
DUFFIE:
Absolutely amazing. Life changing, right? Because like trying to manipulate. I was like, is it three single quotes and then a double quote, is it like like I'm trying to figure out how to make this work. And I could not get it, and then finally I found “unsafe”.
ADRIANA:
Oh my God, I gotta love the name too. Unsafe. Yeah. Oh my God, yay software people. Okay, next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?
DUFFIE:
I prefer that my tab presents as two spaces.
ADRIANA:
Because of the YAML shit. That's honestly why I started like converting my tabs into spaces in VS code is because of YAML. I still like YAML over JSON though. For all its shortcomings.
DUFFIE:
For sure.
ADRIANA:
Okay, two more questions. Are you more of a video or text person for learning stuff?
DUFFIE:
Ooh, tricky. I think it depends on what I'm learning actually. So I think if I learning programing or learning a new language or learning some new tricks about that language, I'll typically read it or I'll typically like, find a program, a sufficiently advanced program written in the language that I want to learn, and then go see how they do it and figure out, like, the different little challenges that they run into and how they solve them, and like, kind of dig into it from that perspective.
But I'm always looking for stuff like the pragmatic this or like, you know, 101 weird problems with ECS. You know, like, I'm always looking for that kind of content to understand what's happening. Like, there's a great article, that a good friend wrote that was, that was writing about about the language that, like, describes all the weird stuff that you don't really expect, like shadow copies and like that kind of stuff.
So that's reading. But then on the learning. So I'm, I'm a Rubik’s cuber. I play with Rubik's cubes all the time. It's like one of my, one of the things I picked up during the pandemic.
ADRIANA:
Oh, cool.
DUFFIE:
And for that, I feel like I need to watch somebody solve using a particular algorithm a couple times and then I can then I can try it manually. Yeah. And then and then once I start doing it manually, then it's like a manual memory and I can actually remember it. Right? Yeah. Actually I think it depends on what I'm learning.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense I yeah, I, I feel like... try to solve a Rubik's cube by reading instructions. This would be so hard. Yeah.
DUFFIE:
It's really, I mean, and that's how it was for a long time. I mean, there was the Rubik's cubes were around before YouTube, right?
ADRIANA:
Like, yeah, that's true. That's so true. Yeah. I mean, the stuff we take for granted, honestly, like, it just blows my mind. You know, like the other day I was watching, the show on Apple TV+ called Constellation. I don't know if you've seen it yet. Really good. Really good sci fi. But they, when the characters had, like, it's she was it's it's like, you know, like current current day.
But she had she had a cassette tape and someone had sent her cassette tape and my thought was, how the fuck is she going to play this cassette tape? Right. And she had like, a toy, like cassette tape player, I guess that her kid had, and that's how she played the cassette tape and I'm like, damn, you know, like, I'm thinking back, I think I got rid of my last tape player.
I don't know, like five years ago when I moved. And I've got, like, I don't have an actual dedicated CD player. I've got a couple of, like, external CD drives sitting under my desk for just in case. It's I mean, all these are these things that we used to rely on, like just gone. I remember handing in, like, my homework in university on floppy disks.
DUFFIE:
Or Zip drives. Remember zip drives? So that was like even a shorter flash in the sun, right? Like that was like.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, that was very short lived. I it was so short lived that I never owned a Zip drive.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. So it's one thing though, my experience with Zip drives, which was funny, it was like I worked at Juniper for about six and a half years, and Juniper builds routers and routers and switches, and some of those routers were built during the period of time when flash drives were a thing. Yeah. And so like to load software onto the router.
There was a class of router. I can’t remember which one it is. But there's like some there's some Juniper router that it actually uses Zip drives. So load the operating system into the router. And we and you know this is in like 2006, 2007. So we're there and like and like we're we're like trolling eBay trying to find flash drives.
ADRIANA:
Like because.
DUFFIE:
Because like even working at Juniper, like nobody's selling them new anymore. Right? Like you're... old stock so we can keep these routers alive. It was amazing.
ADRIANA:
Holy crap. Okay, final question. We've reached our final question of the icebreaker questions. What is your superpower?
DUFFIE:
Like superpower? I think when you ask other people what my superpower is, it's that I am able to communicate complicated things in a way that is easy to understand.
I think my superpower is that, you know, we all have our own challenges. And one of the challenges that I have is like, I, I, I had a series of experiences that really taught me that I have to think about perspective differently.
And that means that if I'm looking at a problem, I can only ever understand the problem with my own faculties, my own eyes, my own brain, my own hands. I can only understand it so far. And that's and that's limited by my experience. Right. But but what I've been through before, whatever it is, however, if I try and teach that thing, then I get exposed to the faculties of others, right?
They might say, what happens if this happens? What happens if that happens? Hey, have you thought about this? You know, like what? What happens when this other part happens? And I'm like, and those for me are like the most valuable thing. So in a way that's my superpower is I don't rest on the idea of a single perspective.
ADRIANA:
Ooh, I like that. That's very cool. And so, so important because I it, it made me think back to like, yeah, my, my husband's also in tech. And so I'll... and we're in different different areas. And so I'll be telling him about some of the stuff that I'm, I'm working on. And then he'll start asking questions because it's not his area.
And, and I'm like, oh, and I don't... I have I have to say I almost get annoyed. Because I'm like, why are you thinking about it that way? And it's like, but then I have to kind of take a step back and think, of course, he's thinking it that way because he's approaching it from a completely different angle. So yeah. Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Exactly. Yeah. It's always I mean, it's it's such a trippy thing that I feel like all of us bring there's a number of different like concepts that talk about this. Right. Like one of them is the idea of the beginner's mind. Right. In the beginner's mind, all things are possible in the expert's mind. Very few.
But there's, there's a ton of different like concepts that, that speak about this as it relates to people and I love and I love the whole idea that like, you know, we each bring our own perspective to a set of problems, whether that problem is related to humans, whether that problem is related to coding, whether that problem is related to logic.
We we each have a built up over our, our journey, you know, like a different set of understandings and expectations about how these things work. Yeah. And being open to that is huge. Right. Like that's I think probably the biggest skill of a teacher that we don't really talk about is that like being open to those perspectives that are not their own is such a huge thing.
ADRIANA:
It really is because it, it, it opens so many doors.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. In your own brain and everybody else's brain, like, it's like, you know, it's like we, you know, we are you and I, we're both talking about, like, lifelong learning. I think we were talking about this. So lifelong learning is when you're in tech, you're constantly learning, you know. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
I feel like that's a big piece of it too, right. Like the way we're way to really actively engage in that is to think about it, think about the limitations of perspective.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And I think, you know, going staying on that lifelong learner topic, you can't I feel like you can't be in tech and not be a lifelong learner. And expect your career to progress. And I think that being open to different perspectives is what allows that to happen, because I think people who jumped on to like any anytime you're jumping onto new tooling or new concepts like getting, you know, open your mind around DevOps, like what you're telling me, I have to like, do my work differently. Like it's hard, it's scary.
DUFFIE:
Totally true. Yeah, yeah, I think I mean, even even outside of tech, I think that's true. Right? If you're if you're a chef, you're oh my god. Yeah. You're a hairstylist. You're like any number of different things for you to really progress.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And certainly anything artistic I mean you can't just be like okay with the status quo. Can you imagine? No evolution. How boring. How boring.
DUFFIE:
Nope. Yeah. Wild stuff.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Well, we got through all the all the icebreaker questions with who? Thanks for playing along. I have so many questions because. So, actually, there's one thing I want to touch upon because you mentioned earlier on, that you're dyslexic. And, I was wondering because my, my husband's, dyslexic as well. And, so for him, like, one of the things that I've learned because, I'm, I'm, I'm a fast reader, I guess certainly compared to him and I it it has taught me being married to him that if I'm showing him something, I have to be super patient, as and respectful of the pace in which he reads.
And he talks about a lot about, coping mechanisms, as being as a dyslexic person,
DUFFIE:
My experience is very different than your husband’s. I imagine that, like, everything is on the spectrum at some point.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course.
DUFFIE:
When I was, when I was coming up, I failed the second grade, and my mom figured out that the reason I was failing was that I was dyslexic and the school didn't have the wherewithal to make that assumption or make that, assessment themselves. And so my mom went to learn how to teach a dyslexic kid how to read, and she taught me to read.
And then after that, I was I was at a I was reading at a collegiate level, like very quickly, like, I, I understood how this worked. It was game on, you know.
ADRIANA:
Damn! That's awesome.
DUFFIE:
And like you at this point, like if I'm looking at a page of text, I have to I would have to actively not read it.
Right. Like I'm already processing the data on that page. Just have it. Just having it in my vision.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
I'm not thinking about like I'm not thinking about the process. I'm not like and I can read log files looking for a particular thing. It's like it's one of those. It's like a, it's an incredibly quick way of getting information into your brain. But like but but it's definitely a skill, right. Like it's. It's a trippy thing.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That's so cool. It's, it's cool that you got, like, a diagnosis or at least, I guess, recognition, early on in life because my, my husband was, he, he had the experience where I think it was he never even got, like, a formal diagnosis. It was like after, you know, a long time of struggling.
And I guess reading enough stuff online where he's like, oh, shit, I think I might actually be dyslexic. And it, it tracks and it his experience was such a negative one where it's like, you know, the, the teachers would like, harp on him over like, oh, you're not applying yourself and like, you’re too slow, and blah blah blah.
And, and you know, kind of, he was, almost dismissed. He bet on himself. But like, and computers kind of saved him, but like, it was no thanks to, you know, people who didn't recognize that at the time. So kudos to your mom for like, really...
DUFFIE:
Oh my gosh.
ADRIANA:
Helping. My god.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. I can't, you know, I can't it's it's a it's such a wild thing to think about, but like, I can't imagine that not working out the way that it did because like, where would I be? You know, like, I don't even know what life would look like if I had if my mom had not figured that out in the time that she did, like, help me out.
It’s wild. You know, like one of those. What? It's one of those turning points that happens so early in the, in the, in the maze that you're like like, oh, like, how else would that have gone?
ADRIANA:
Yeah, right?
DUFFIE:
It's crazy.
ADRIANA:
It's trippy. Yeah. So kudos. That's amazing. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. Another thing that I wanted to ask, you mentioned, so you said you're so were you born in Hawaii, or you grew up in Hawaii, or both?
DUFFIE:
I was born in California.
ADRIANA:
Okay.
DUFFIE:
And my parents, my parents were never, like, kind of, like, really together. Like, my father and my mother were like, together, and they were traveling together for quite a while, but they were never really, like, a long term thing. And, so my mother and my stepfather met and they met and they married. And then basically about a year after that, when I was. I think eight, and my sister was four, we moved to Hawaii because that's where they wanted to be.
ADRIANA:
Nice.
DUFFIE:
And I was in Hawaii from when I was eight until, basically just around high school, like middle school, high school ten, and then moved back to California to live with my dad, and then kind of went back and forth between California and Hawaii for several years. Yeah. To, in like visiting my mom, or coming back to live with my dad.
And I remember, like, all these weird little culture shock. So, for example, one of the first times back to California to live with my dad, the first time, he was living here in San José, he was living down in San José, and we had, I had this wild experience. So in Hawaii, it's always been very expensive. A lot of food you have to get in, right?
ADRIANA:
Right.
DUFFIE:
Go into the grocery store with 20 bucks. It's not going to end up with a lot of groceries. Even at the time, like in in the early 90s or the early late 80s, it was still very expensive.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
And so, having that experience of, like, being able to go into a grocery store in San José, like a big, Big Saver or whatever, right, and walk out with a grocery cart full of food for 20 bucks was mind blowing.
ADRIANA:
Oh, wow.
DUFFIE:
As a teenage boy, I'm like, this is not making sense to me right now. But it was like it was it was such a crazy thing, you know, like having that experience of like, wow, this like the, you know, understanding the economic climate of different areas and like realizing that while the different like or even gas, the price of gas in Hawaii was always more expensive than the price... I remember gas in California, being as cheap is like, not... less than a buck.
ADRIANA:
Wow.
DUFFIE:
Never a thing in Hawaii. Like...
ADRIANA:
That is wild. It's so cool, though, that it, it kind of it teaches you different perspectives and gives you an appreciation as well for those things.
DUFFIE:
These are some of those experiences that I was talking about that really drove me to think that, like that perspective is... That perspective is more important than your own, right?
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And and, out of curiosity, like what got you into tech?
DUFFIE:
So when I was in high school, I got into computers, and I was one of the people who kind of understood compu-- like my brain has always just kind of understand, have understood how computers work pretty well.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
And so I was like the teacher's aide in the computer class, and I was getting into, like, all the all the different things from that perspective. And I was also into theater at the time. So I was I it was technical theater. So doing lights, sound, staging, working all of that stuff. And so interestingly, both of these two fields involve technology.
And so I think that really kind of like became a through line for me was like working in different, technical fields. So, like whether that was, for, for years when I was working in Hawaii, I was doing lighting, sound, staging, rigging, and I was always, you know, working at that part of the tech. Because in Hawaii, if you're not working in the tourism industry in some way, you're not working, right?
ADRIANA:
Right, right.
DUFFIE:
It’s really hard.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
And so when I came to California and I was like, you know, I'm already pretty good with my computer already, like exploring Linux, already exploring Windows. And I was kind of like playing with all the different operating systems and how all they were, they all work and all that stuff. I started getting into systems administration.
And I went from systems administration into network administration because again, that's one of those like, things I really wanted to know how all of that worked. Yeah. And so best way for me to understand how all that worked was to go and play with it, like to go to work on it like. So that was network administration, systems administration... I first broke into real tech when I... and.... just before the year 2000 and I joined a couple of companies that were, that were providing DSL. There were DSL wholesalers. So they, Covad and NorthPoint communications were, were the two that I joined, and both of them were tremendous experiences because they were both. In in Covad
I was actually out doing physical installations of DSL. There's all kinds of crazy stories related to that. And then at NorthPoint, I went inside and I was doing customer support, and I was actually answering phone calls of installers and also customers who were trying to understand why their thing wasn't working or how to get this turned on or etc.
And so I went from like customer support up into the architecture level pretty quickly because I understood how these systems work pretty, pretty well, and I was able to communicate it and teach it and share it. I became like my path to, kind of a higher I don't know if like a more senior role or, or really gave me an opportunity to kind of jump into different parts of the system because I was able to teach and bring people with me.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And it's such a wonderful feeling when you're able to, like, get through to people, right? Through...
DUFFIE:
Seeing the light come on? It's amazing.
ADRIANA:
The network stuff that you were doing. Was it all like, self-taught or like, how did you, come to learn it?
DUFFIE:
A lot of it was self-taught. A lot of it was actually also, exploring how things work based, like there's always been a number of different technologies out there, like GNS, graphical network simulator. Where you can actually like, you know, on a reasonably inexpensive computer, you know, build their whole research lab and explore this stuff. And Kubernetes, there's KinD, right? Kubernetes, Kubernetes in Docker. It's another great example. You don't need you don't need to have an Amazon account to be able to play with Kubernetes. You can play with it in Docker on your laptop, right?
Those particular types of things have always been around for people who want to play with them and understand how how different parts work and understand different protocols and understand how to build adjacencies and how to troubleshoot them, like those things have been around for a long time, whether they were KinD or whether they were, GNS, or like, things like this.
And so that's that's always been kind of like I'm about to let my curiosity like, what happens if I'm trying to convert from, you know, BGP to OSPF. Like, I don't know, let's let's try it.
ADRIANA:
So yeah. So you've basically gravitated towards networking for for a chunk of your career then. Is that is that accurate.
DUFFIE:
Yeah, I think networking, distributed systems, people, it's always been one thing or another. I've worked on a variety of different technology efforts across a variety of different companies. I helped build the first shared infrastructure at Apple and it was great. It was called PIE, Platform Infrastructure Engineering. So “apple pie”, you know.
We were so proud of that name.
ADRIANA:
Oh my God. That's so cool. How was it working at Apple?
DUFFIE:
I think as with many big companies, I think Apple has an incredible opportunity to go and work with some of the and do some of the best work of your life.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
If you find yourself in the right group working with the right people, putting you, you know, giving you the right opportunity and really letting you kind of like, grow into that. I think that you can really find that at Apple. You can also find the opposite experience where, like, you come in with this, a bit, perhaps, it's not even really about what you bring to it. Sometimes that you're just you're in a situation where it's just untenable and it's not going to work for you, and you're going to need to go somewhere else and go find another opportunity somewhere else.
And I think that's true of most big companies. You find these little pockets of areas where you can really do the best work for your life, and sometimes you find pockets where that's just not a possibility. It's really hard.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And the, it, sometimes it just boils down. I mean, yes, there's the, there's the company culture, but also like, just finding the right team, the one where it feels like home. Which can be such a challenge.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. Where the people believe in you. Where they where you where you get to really, like, come into your own and shine and like, it's it's an amazing experience, but I, I really in many ways I wish there were some way of. Kind of guaranteeing that for people or.
ADRIANA:
I know. Right. It's so true. Like sorry. Good.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. It's it's one of those things that like I do feel like the Kubernetes community does pretty good at this. There's other communities out there that do pretty good at this where they're like, like we know everybody had to be new at some point, and we want to make it so that in your time as being new, you have somebody to ask questions of, like, how do we build that community?
Which is really the crux of the community problem. Like, how do we build that community to enable you to feel like you're not an imposter, to make you feel like your contributions are valuable, that your questions are valid, that you're you're not just that you're not alone in this. You're trying you're not trying to run up this hill by yourself. There's a bunch of us running beside you. You know what I mean?
ADRIANA:
Like it's so true. It's so true. And I think, like, there, there. Certain, as you said, certain communities that make it so, so easy to do that, that kind of give you that safe space. You know, I think back to like some of the nasty shit you see on StackOverflow where you're like, I'm just asking a question. And then they're like questioning your whole, like, existence.
And you're like, hey, I just want an answer.
DUFFIE:
And and the stress of all of this, I mean, even like the, the stress about this also really affects how people react or are able to spend time. Right? Like, if I like,
I've definitely run into situations where like I'm asking somebody a question and they're very resistive to the question because they feel that their interpretation of this question is I'm calling into validity, whether the thing you did was right or wrong.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
I'm like, no, I, I there's no right or wrong. But but but other. But how they internalize that question is... that I have no control over. I can say like hey man, I think you did the absolute best you could with the information that you had at the time, 1,000% every time. Otherwise you probably wouldn't have done it right.
But yeah, it's, it's, it's a challenging it's this is that people puzzle right. Like how do you, how do you communicate effectively when what you're, when the words you're using may be interpreted as a challenge. As opposed to just a question. Right. Like, I seek to understand.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think and I think, you know, to, to your credit and your superpower, having that perspective, can be extremely helpful because it probably primes you better to not have that resistance when, when someone comes at you with a question like that, that you know. Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Right. Like, you know, being able to prime the other person and say like, you know, first of all, let's let's play it out. I'm not trying to like, challenge the decisions that you’ve made.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
Let's trying to understand how it works. And you're the best person to ask because your name is on the good committee.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Take me on that journey. Right.
ADRIANA:
Like it's true. Yeah. It's all about disarming, right? It's funny because, you know, I've, I've, I've said this to so many people, like contributing, especially contributing to open source can be so, so daunting, especially like very well-established projects. Right. Where you've got, like your, your old guard and you're like, oh my God, dare I? Dare I throw my hat into the ring?
DUFFIE:
I feel like, you know, it's definitely... it's, it is absolutely one of those situations where, like, the longest journey begins with a single step, you know.
And the other part of this that I wanted to call back to on the whole perspective, which I think is an interesting thing for people to hear.
Some people feel like if they learn a programing language, and then the next programing language comes out, that everything that they did was lost work.
And one thing I've learned in my career is that there is no lost work. Like that, that everything that you have been through, every part of your experience has set you up for success moving forward. Like if you know how to troubleshoot networks, what you’re troubleshooting is a distributed system.
And you could apply a lot of the same brain logic to the problem of understanding why databases aren't redistributing, that you could, to understanding why, a network problem exists or a network partition exists.
I call this like, building intuition. You're, you're constantly building intuition because you're solving problems at different levels of a stack or solving problems even within the same stack. Your, your problem solving skills are what you're building. That's the thing you take with you, regardless of where you're going next.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that that's what people need to remember. Even, you know, one of the things that I always tell people, from a coding perspective is like, never fall in love with your code, right? Because, like, yeah, you write something and then someone else is gonna look at your code and build on it and make it better.
And, like, isn't that the ultimate compliment? Someone, someone is inspired by something you've done and then thought of another way to like a way to improve it.
DUFFIE:
Oh my gosh, just add this KubeCon in London. There was a great talk that was talking about, kind of changing the way that we think about security and applications and stuff and, and it was neat because they based their talk on a talk that I had done with Brad and Rory and Ian in Amsterdam.
ADRIANA:
Oh, cool.
DUFFIE:
They, they took the idea of it and they were like, well, let's take it further. Let's understand container scanning even further than what they jumped into. Right. And I was like, I love that. Right?
ADRIANA:
Like, yeah.
DUFFIE:
Take the idea further. When I was a kid, there was this Creative Whack Pack. There was this set of ideas, and one of the things that they put in that pack was, don't ever fall in love with an idea. But it's just it's kind of a corollary to what you're saying about falling in love with your code, right?
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
The mental path you took to get to this idea isn't the only one we have. We all can agree on that.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, it's it's never it's never a waste like, you know, I, I, I'm, I consider myself a serial blogger. And oftentimes all like up there is the last blog post I wrote, I started writing, I had finished writing it, I and then I started like reviewing the, the the copy and I think the last thing that I had was like a conclusion to write and, and I'm writing out the conclusion and I'm reviewing the copy and I'm like, oh shit, I framed this blog post as X, but I kind of buried the lede and I need to reframe it and, and then, you know, I it wasn't a complete gutting, but there is definitely like a lot of rework. And whenever stuff like that happens, I just tell myself, like, it's okay. Because what you're doing is making it better. So even if you like, delete an entire section, entire paragraph or whatever, it's totally fine because what's coming out is going to be way better than what you had before.
DUFFIE:
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I love I mean, even the idea of challenging your own, it's like part of not falling in love with code or not falling in love with an idea is, is giving yourself that room to grow, right?
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Giving yourself that permission to say, actually, I've been thinking about this all wrong.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
You don’t need somebody else will tell you that. Like, you can tell you that too, right?
ADRIANA:
Being kind to yourself by giving yourself permission. Absolutely. And it's all part of the creative process. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about, your current role, at Isovalent, which was acquired, I guess, semi-recently by Cisco. So how did you, how did you come to, work at Isovalent, and talk to a little bit about the work that you do.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
So I, quite a few years ago now, I worked for a company called Nicira, which was a network virtualization company, and it was a fascinating role because it was I had just come from Juniper Networks, where I was, lab manager.
And so I spent like, basically, I think it was like 5 or 6 years or something at Juniper, learning every possible way to break a network at any type of scale.
And then I come to, to Nicira where I am, working on working with the team and developing network virtualization. And my part of that opportunity was like, how do I how can I bring this skill set that I have learned in troubleshooting networks to, this problem of building network virtualization?
So, like, in real... in “real” networks, right? Non-virtual networks, I should say. Like, there are things that I know how to... that I'm like, are ingrained in my mind about troubleshooting and understanding the state of the network as it relates to, like how all things are operating.
When they're building a network virtualization model, like we need we need similar tools. I still need to know when things are propagating. I still need to understand the state of that network, whether it's virtual or real. And so it was this fascinating role where I'm like working with a team that's developing all of this software and saying, I need to know how this works.
I need to understand when this happens. I need to, you know, just bring my real world experience from troubleshooting networks to this new virtual arena. And that was just a great role. I had a wonderful time. And at that job I met Dan Whitland. Who is the CEO of Isovalent.
ADRIANA:
Nice.
DUFFIE:
And I also met Thomas Graff, who at the time was a contributor to Open vSwitch, which was one of the open source projects that came out of Nicira as well. And so, Dan and I have been friends the entire time, like we've known. We run into each other at different conferences. We're always good, glad to see each other.
Etcetera. And so when, I decided to leave, so I was like, you know, I'm from Nicira, I did a bunch of other stuff. I went to Apple, I went to a company called Illumio. When I decided to leave Apple, I decided to kind of jump into Kubernetes because I saw this really incredible opportunity within the Kubernetes space.
ADRIANA:
Nice.
DUFFIE:
Having lived through the OpenStack days, I was like, oh, this is this is going to happen again, and it's going to be Kubernetes and it's going to be really fascinating to watch. And so I reached out to CoreOS. I said, you should hire me. They said, why? I said, just try it. And they interviewed me and I got the job. I worked at CoreOS, and then at Heptio.
And then after Heptio was acquired into VMware. I decided to leave VMware. I went, and then, at that time, I was chatting with, Dan, who had built Isovalent at that point. At that point, and Isovalent getting to a place where they were like, really going after the market.
And I decided that I wanted to go and do like a field CTO role. And I sibilant, and so I went to dad and I said, and I pitched it, you know, I'm like, hey, this is what I'd like to do for Isovalent. Are you interested in this?
And at this point, I'd already at Heptio and at CoreOS, built a very public persona around learning and engaging in technology and engaging an open source, which, you know, which is a big part of myself and a big part of what I've given to the community over the years. And I said, you know, I'd like to keep doing that.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
But I'd also like to be part of, like, you know, a customer facing role doing, sales, engineering and that sort of stuff. So we built a role called Field CTO, and that's where I came into at Isovalent.
ADRIANA:
Oh, cool.
DUFFIE:
And I was there for the longest I've ever been at a startup, actually. Cause like, the startups that I joined have, have either been acquired within a year or, or something around that space, which is, I will admit, a weird little humblebrag. I'm not trying to say [...] that [...]. Right. But like, but I think as it all works out, like I have a, you know, most of the startups I, I've been a part of have, except for, with the exception of Illumio have been acquired within a period of time.
When I first joined Isovalent, I did think that Isovalent was going to be another one of those, like, year long journeys.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
But then the pandemic happened. Actually it was in the pandemic when I joined. And then, you know, navigating all of that over the period of about, I think it was pretty close to three years when we were acquired.
ADRIANA:
All right.
DUFFIE:
Which is, you know, an incredible journey, incredible time as a startup, building the business from a, you know, from a very successful open source project to a reasonably successful enterprise product and a really kind of growing year over year. And, you know, and then helping uh, hire and helping train people and helping level people up in the technology and that space for doing a lot of public work around all of that.
And now, after the acquisition, continuing to be very successful within Cisco. Isovalent is continuing to be, to grow crazily. And I think it's one of the most successful acquisitions I've ever been a part of, in that even after a year and a half, nothing... I'm still excited to go and work on that.
Because it's changing, because it's the same team, because it's, because the people are still here. We're still moving. We're still, like, learning from our experience. We're still growing as a company within Cisco. We have just an incredible opportunity. And it's it's been it's been really, it's been amazing to just like, it's amazing to me that like, even after a year and a half, I'm still excited about doing it because, like in the past when CoreOS was acquired by RedHat,
I left, and went to Heptio. When Heptio was acquired by VMWare, I left, because I felt like that when the whole Pivotal acquisition happened, I was like, yeah, this is not for me.
When Nicira was acquired by VMware, we were like, oh, we have to rewrite everything. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to go. And like...
So after a year to be able to say so I'm just as committed to this role, just as committed to this opportunity as I was in the first year at Isovalent is such a radically different experience than I've had at any other acquisition that it's just... I feel very fortunate.
ADRIANA:
I mean, acquisitions can be so tricky, right? I mean, there's nothing like a culture killer if, if not done properly.
DUFFIE:
Like, in the Isovalent case, you're hiring 160 people.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
And you need and you need to make sure that you have in that, in that hiring. What are they going to do? What's the vision? How does it apply to the overall vision. Like what is... like how do you keep them motivated? As a startup it's pretty easy. It's like, be motivated or die, right? Like it's not going to work if you don't.
We're not all working on the same thing. But like, but within a large company like Cisco, you're like, okay, well now here's the thing that we're working on that is part of moving all of Cisco forward. And here's, and, and is that interesting to the 160 people that joined? Like, is it validating their assumptions? Is it like, driving them forward?
Like, it's so hard to do is an acquisition. I feel like so many of them fail because there’s not really, there's no concise story vision, that really helps people who are coming into that scenario understand what the way forward is.
ADRIANA:
And I think that's the, that's the hardest part is like, do you, do you know where you fit in in the greater scheme of things and you feel like you're, you're you're I don't know, like it's almost this feeling of claustrophobia. Right. The parent company is like engulfing the, the acquired company and and do you maintain your, your culture. How do you integrate with the existing culture. Like that's a lot of,
DUFFIE:
A lot of really interesting problems. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Isovalent is also known for, like, eBPF. Do you dabble... do anything in that, on that side of things? Just out of curiosity?
DUFFIE:
I do. Most of the time I spend my time on the frameworks that we're building. So things like, Cillium and, and, Tetragon. Tetragon is an incredible way of actually like, like if you have a problem that you want to solve with eBPF, Tetragon is a good framework for thinking about how to implement that.
ADRIANA:
Nice.
DUFFIE:
And you could definitely check out more about it at like Tetragon.io. But like I, I spent a lot of my time like helping people understand how that that might work. Like if you say, I want to do this, and I want to I want to have these outcomes, and I want to make this change, like, how do you how do I do that with Tetragon? I'm happy to help figure that part out.
I also spend a lot of my time just helping people understand Kubernetes and how networking works and all that other stuff.
DUFFIE:
Within Kubernetes, so much of the networking is abstracted away from your your day to day use. You're not thinking about, okay, how do I get this pod an IP address? Not on your mind at all. Right.
You might ask, how do I get traffic from outside into my application, right. Thinking oh, it's a load balancer. Right. How that creates, I don't know.
I'm not thinking about how how all of this works in the, in between. Right. And that's, that's the fun part for me is that I'm, you know, something of an expert in that part of it. Like how does that infrastructure part work.
And to be clear, like I'm defining expert as someone who can take other people and make them proficient at a thing. That's, in my mind, what an expert is. Not somebody who knows all the answers.
ADRIANA:
That's such a great definition. Man, if we knew all the answers, we would be rich! Alas, ‘tis not the case. I did ask, do you... are you actually a Kubernetes contributor as well?
DUFFIE:
I have in the past contributed. Mostly I contributed to the Kubeadm project, at the time. I was, I was working on Kubeadm. I've also worked on, contributed to Kubernetes in general and some of the docs I've contributed to, obviously to Cillium and to, other projects like in the space, like I contributed a little bit to Flux and to different things.
ADRIANA:
Oh, nice. That's cool.
DUFFIE:
But yeah, I think, but yeah, I mean, lately I haven't been contributing much because I've been focused on trying to help navigate this crazy big acquisition piece into into Cisco.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Fair enough, fair enough. Makes sense. Cool. Well, we are coming up on time. But before we wrap up, I was wondering if you have any words of wisdom for our audience?
DUFFIE:
I'll definitely reiterate that understanding a problem from multiple perspectives is a is a multiplier for your understanding and for your career. So being in a situation where you say, not only am I not in love with an idea, but I want to understand how you understand the idea. Really changes, really, really helps you grow.
The other one is make room for things to be hard. They don't have to be... Not everything is easy for everybody. Things that you assume are the easiest in the world. They're so obvious. It's not even things you have to think about. These things are true for you because of your experience, and everybody has a different experience, right?
So like, yeah, we were just talking about this earlier. Your husband has dyslexia and with the way you described his journey with dyslexia is so wildly different from my own that it may seem to me I'm like, well, why was that so hard? Like, I wouldn't say that, but you get what I'm saying, right? Like a wildly different perspective of, like.
You know, everybody, everywhere you look, you will see this difference in perspective.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Different perspectives, different journeys. Right?
DUFFIE:
Right? Yeah. I love that.
ADRIANA:
These are great words of wisdom. Also I cannot end the recording without doing a shout out to your awesome t-shirt, because... hello? It’s our podcast mascot. So I've got, and I was showing you earlier, I've got this little desk lamp that you could squeeze. Tee hee! It's so great. If I could, I would totally have one as a pet.
Well, thank you so much, Duffie, for, geeking out with me. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check our show notes to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time.
DUFFIE:
Peace out and geek out.
ADRIANA:
Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.
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 Duffie Cooley. Welcome, Duffie.
DUFFIE:
Thank you so much.
DUFFIE:
It's an honor to be here. You have such a tremendous, you know, history of podcasts so far. So I'm just really grateful to be a part of it.
ADRIANA:
Oh, thank you so much. And, Duffie, where are you calling from today?
DUFFIE:
I live in Alameda, which is not too far from San Francisco. It's right across the Bay Bridge.
ADRIANA:
I got to, like, nerd out with you when you said Alameda is. It makes me think of Star Trek IV. It is. It is the same place.
DUFFIE:
This is where the nuclear vessels were hosted.
ADRIANA:
So this is why I know of Alameda.
DUFFIE:
Another one that, people connect with is, what do you call it? MythBusters.MythBusters did a bunch of stuff, like, out on this, like. And you're like, where in the Bay Area did you find such a big, flat space to, like, crash semi-trucks? Here on Alameda out on the point. That’s where it was filmed.
ADRIANA:
Oh, that's so wild, I remember MythBusters. That was a great show.
DUFFIE:
It was. I love the whole premise. You know, it's like people having, like, the the, some challenging thing, and you're like, is it real? Did it really happen? All right.
ADRIANA:
Let's. Yeah. Yeah, and by the way, my my my final comment on Alameda and the Star Trek movies, I know everyone loves Wrath of Khan, but Star Trek IV still holds a place in my heart as the best one, because there is time travel and Scotty talking to an old Mac. So...
DUFFIE:
I remember seeing that movie for the first time I was, I, I grew up in Hawaii.
ADRIANA:
Oh cool.
DUFFIE:
That movie is one of the movies that I absolutely remember seeing in the Kaahumanu Theater, like in in Kahului in Maui. It's like, you know, there are a few movies where you like, really connect with a place in a time. And that's one of those movies for me.
ADRIANA:
That's so awesome. Cool. I have so many questions now about, like, growing up in Hawaii, but, I'm going to start first with our, lightning round questions. Are you ready? Tsk... icebreaker. Used to call them Lightning Round. But they're not lightning. Okay. First question. Are you lefty or a righty?
DUFFIE:
I'm a righty, but I am dyslexic, so jury's out.
ADRIANA:
Love it. Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android? iPhone. All right. Next one. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?
DUFFIE:
Linux. All day. I've been a Linux on the desktop user for 20 something years.
ADRIANA:
Oh, damn. What's your what's your favorite distro?
DUFFIE:
My favorite distro. That's a tough one. I've been through so many. I think Arch is probably my current favorite because of the the community builds and everything else like that at work, however, when I'm at Cisco, I have to. I have to use Ubuntu, which I don't mind. It's a great distro as well, but but yeah, like for the, for the obscure kind of stuff that you need to make your desktop your own, I think Arch is really the great one.
ADRIANA:
Nice, nice. And, that is one thing like Linux does let you, play around a lot.
DUFFIE:
Almost to its detriment. Yes.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That's true. My, my only, my only beef with with Linux and maybe it's improved. It's been a while... was like I couldn't get it to play with all the peripherals all the time. And when I used to have, like, you know, an iPhone that I had to connect to, to my computer to sync, or actually, before that, I had BlackBerry. I couldn't use the BlackBerry software to sync my BlackBerry in my Linux box. Sadly.
DUFFIE:
It's a challenge for sure. I mean, it's I was just recently. Speaking of geeking out, I'm also a motorcycle rider, and I was recently changing the programing of the computer that operates the motorcycle's fueling and electrical systems. And for that, I needed a Windows computer, because the only software that I could use to load the program onto the device that was doing the programing was the windows computer.
And so I again remembered how to do this with Vagrant. I spun up a Windows 11 machine, figured out how to do a USB passthrough, because I'm not going to install Windows just to try this out. Right? Like...
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
You know like but yeah, I feel you on the on the challenge of like being able to having to deal with stuff that sometimes it's, it's-- Windows is the only way. And...
ADRIANA:
Yes. But also you're like updating software on your motorcycle. Feel like you buried the lede there.
DUFFIE:
Well, it's interesting stuff. I mean, just like with motorcycles, actually, with most fuel injected vehicles, especially recent ones, they have an ECU that's responsible for like good timing in the fueling.
And and from the factory they come in this issue in this state where because of the way that the regulations work, they have to stay within a particular range of fueling and timing to remain underneath an emission thing, which does two things. I mean, I appreciate the emissions challenge, but the other part of it is that it causes the motorcycle to run very lean a lot of the time, which causes the motorcycle to run hot.
And actually you end up in this kind of like weird bad loop where the motorcycle can't really operate at efficiency. So it's continuing to run badly. And and if it were to able to run efficiently, it would actually run significantly more efficiently then the computer program allows for it. And so that was the change I was making, was allowing for the computer to actually learn from the sensors on the bike how efficiently it's running.
So it could actually do a better learning loop and operate correctly. Right. It's still in the the, the two that I put on this motorcycle is still a 50 state tune. If I had to go and get my exhaust checked, it would still pass.
It's just that it allows the motorcycle to be unrestricted in how it fuels and times the bike so that it's still it's still being very efficient, but it's not being held back by that regulation on it.
ADRIANA:
Got it. That's very cool. Speaking of... so, like, what do you what do you write that in?
DUFFIE:
Oh, I'm not sure. I didn't actually write this one. So this is all like, I so basically what I get back is a program that looks like a map, right? It looks a little bit like a graph. And the units on one side are perhaps things like, measurements of oxygen and, and measurements of temperature and things like that.
And on the other side we have like timing adjustment, like up or down and also fueling how much fueling. And you can think of this like a big heat map. Right. And what it's trying to do is it's trying to figure out a way to make it so that as you move through the power cycle of the motorcycle, it's creating a scenario where everything is fueled and timed correctly based on the temperature and the, oxygen levels being measured at the exhaust system.
ADRIANA:
Oh, cool.
DUFFIE:
Right. And so it's like, it's this and this is what I mean by that second, but it's kind of a closed loop system, they call it, because it's constantly measuring the situation at hand and trying to adjust timing and fuel based on that.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool.
DUFFIE:
But I think it's probably written in C or, you know, something crazy because it's been around forever. Yeah, I feel like it's one of those industries ripe for disruption, but nothing is ever... it’s like, such a niche thing, you know?
ADRIANA:
So true, so true. Yeah. That's so cool. It isn't it wild to realize, I mean, I think we already know, deep in the back of our minds that computers run our vehicles, but it's still, like, kind of blows my mind.
DUFFIE:
It is a trip. Yeah. For sure. Like and it's funny there's there are still you can still find vehicles for which this is not true. Right. Like there's still plenty of vehicles out there that that are still, you know, carburated and all of that stuff. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
Like with, with fuel injection and all of that. It's really come a long way. Just a couple of years ago I bought my first all electric car and that's nothing but computers, right? Like there's. Other than the brakes, maybe, you know, like I.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Yeah.
ADRIANA:
And speaking of electric cars, like, so I, I have a hybrid and when we, when we bought the hybrid, the first time I drove it and it was in electrical mode, I'm like, what's going on? There's no noise. Like it breaks your brain.
DUFFIE:
Yeah, it's a trippy thing. And then, you know, it's just a power powerband and everything. And then I thought when I bought this car, because I come from the, you know, like, I had, had a mini Cooper Clubman before this, and I had a Honda Element and a bunch of other cars that are great cars. But like, I thought that when I bought the electric car, I would have, like, range anxiety that I would be worried, like I would I would have this concern of like, am I going to be able to get to the next charging station?
You know, like, and really, it's not a thing in California in California where I, where I do all of my driving.
ADRIANA:
Right.
DUFFIE:
It's not a thing I have to worry about at all.
ADRIANA:
Right. Right. This is THE place to own an electric car.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. And also, the car goes 200 something miles on a charge.
ADRIANA:
Damn.
DUFFIE:
So it's not like, you know, it's not. It's not like. It's like that's about what a tank would have taken me.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Right. Like I take a gas, so they're taking me about the same distance. So it's like it's already kind of like aligned with, like my mental picture of, like how far I can go before I have to deal with the gas thing.
ADRIANA:
That's great. And does your car charge fast?
DUFFIE:
It is. Yeah. It's like the 400 volt system or the 800 volt system or something. So I pull in to a fast charger and 20 minutes later from empty, I'm at like 80 or 90.
ADRIANA:
Oh that's pretty good. That's pretty good. I heard there's like some really cool technology out there in the world that allows you to, swap out car batteries. So then I guess it makes the, the experience a lot better so that you're not having to sit there, you know, waiting 20 minutes for for a charge, even.
DUFFIE:
I've heard of that one. I've also heard of like there's another one that I've seen or I haven't seen it, but I've heard it read about, which is like they put like a mat in your driveway or whatever. And then like, it's like wireless charging speeds.
ADRIANA:
Oh my god. Oh my god.
DUFFIE:
Right. Like overnight it would just wireless. It would be like your little mouse or whatever. It just wirelessly charge. But yeah, I haven't seen any of that in person. But it's pretty amazing.
ADRIANA:
Damn mind blown. Yeah, that is so trippy. Well, I could I could keep on asking questions about this, but, I'm going to move on to the next question in our series. Do you have favorite programing language?
DUFFIE:
Do I have a favorite programing language? Whew. That's tough. I will say Python.
ADRIANA:
I love Python. So, Team Python.
DUFFIE:
And and to qualify that I think I'll say Python because of IPython. I'm a, I'm a type of learner that I kind of need to be hands on. I need, I need to be able to ask questions, everything with my hands and like figure out how it works.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
And it really unlocked my ability to understand how programing works because like, you can write all kinds of crazy ways of transforming data dictionaries and all this other stuff. But unless you're able to, like, jump in and see what state it's in, like, did it work? Is it doing the thing I expect, like in an interactive way?
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
I have a hard time, like in my head, like putting together how it works. It's easier now with like structs in Go, like it's, it's like, it kind of like it makes it a little bit easier to understand what the data will with the shape the data will take. But like in Python, I feel like was the first one that really unlocked. Like being able to understand and being able to watch a program work through the different parts of the logical flow.
ADRIANA:
Right. Right. That's so cool. Love it. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer dev or ops?
DUFFIE:
I think I prefer ops, and the reason is like for me, a big part of the thing that gets me up in the morning, the thing that drives me to go and do it again is the people.
And so between dev and Ops I feel like dev frequently like we were, we are working on our own to build, to improve a piece of software or some piece of infrastructure or whatever it is. And we're, we're focused on that work and then like maybe once a day or perhaps like a couple times a week, we go and we meet each other and talk about what we're going to work together, etc..
And in ops, it's like a daily you're working in a team, right? Like it's you're handing off between the different parts of it and all that pretty constantly. And I feel like that's definitely more my speed of operations before for a number of different companies. But.
But yeah, like, I really like the, the people part of the puzzle as much as I like the technology. So I need both of those things to, to really feel like I'm doing the right work, you know?
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah. It's true, it's true. It's Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, it's it's so interesting. I feel like we all crave, like, human connection, a place to belong. And then finding, like, our people in our little like niche of work. Right. Is so, so important.
DUFFIE:
I completely agree. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, dev is the other where I feel like dev is challenging because like, it can feel very isolating, right? Like, I feel like in many ways. And some people are into that. Right. Like it takes all kinds. Right? Like some people... for them, like being able to really apply their whole self to that problem and move that problem along is all they need.
And that's great. Right.
DUFFIE:
But for me I need that multiple puzzle piece, you know like.
ADRIANA:
I totally feel ya. Yeah. It is interesting that dev really is a solo endeavor. Unless you do, you know, you do like,
programing or swarm programing, which I don't know. I'm, I'm too much of a control freak to do pair programing. And I'm, I'm the one who has to be on the driver's seat.
I've only paired successfully, like, with one friend, and it was like, you know, he he knew that I was the one who had to be in the driver's seat, and he, he he, he was happy to, to stay in the passenger seat, and it worked really well. But I don't know if I could do that with anyone else.
DUFFIE:
I'm curious if you have have tried doing, like, pair programing with, like, a computer or like, AI or something.
ADRIANA:
Oh, like vibe coding. I have not, I'm not not. Yeah. I wouldn't say I've tried vibe coding yet, but that's on my to do list
I finally, I feel like I finally have a project for vibe coding. Because I hate doing front-end. I'm allergic to front-end dev. Like, JavaScript lost me years ago.l
DUFFIE:
That is an entire thing. Like, oh yeah. Like completely with you on that. It’s like, you might understand databases and data manipulation, all this other stuff. And then you get in the front-end, you're like, what in the world is happening?
ADRIANA:
Exactly. Like, you lost me at JavaScript and CSS and like the fact that shit doesn't work for multiple browsers and like, no.
DUFFIE:
Oh my god. Yes. Right. Like, wow.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. So my my vibe coding project is build me a website. I like it because right now, like I host my my blog on medium and I'm happily doing that.
But like I have owned my own domain since I think 2000 and I've not. It's been a while since I've done anything with it. I think I might have had stuff on it a long time ago. Some like shitty static web page that has long since been taken down. This is my excuse. So yes, I, I, like you are so right though on on like pair programing... like, vibe coding is like pair programing with the AI. That's cool.
Okay. Next question in the series, do you prefer JSON or YAML?
DUFFIE:
JSON or YAML? Wow. Well, I was, you know, a few years ago, I was working with Rory McCune, Ian Coldwater, and Brad Geesaman, and we were looking at a, an exploit on YAML which allows for a multiple multiple application attack where, it was called “Billion Laughs”. It's a really fun CVE in the Kubernetes CVE history.
And what this would do is in YAML, there's this idea that you can take a, an anchor and then copy and then generate code based on that anchor, where you apply it within your YAML file. And there was no upper bound set on the expansion of the anchor. So what the submit was that like, you could actually like submit a very small YAML file that would result in an expansion of memory and the API server cut it off all over.
ADRIANA:
Well down.
DUFFIE:
So there is no such thing in JSON. Like there's no like expansion idea in JSON. This is a feature only of the YAML of the only of the YAML thing, so I don't know which one I prefer. I'd say that YAML is probably easier on the human, and JSON is definitely easier on the computer.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, I can see that. I could see that. Yeah, I find YAML easier on the eyes. I found the curly braces of JSON like too much for me. It's just it's noise.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. And if you don't have like if you don't have some kind of ID to tell you when you're blowing it, it's really very difficult to write.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Like but it's also interesting that JSON that YAML has these like challenges like, like it'll, it'll determine it, like a boolean value is different than, you know, is detected as a YAML feature rather than as a Boolean value. And like the date thing, there's, there's a bunch of weird little peccadilloes about YAML that make it maybe not quite incompatible, but certainly not the perfect tool for what we use it for.
Where you apply quotes and where you don't. And how do you escape sequences and like oh yeah. Oh my gosh. There's so many things.
ADRIANA:
Quotes. Yeah, yeah. The quotes, the quotes, the dam quotes. It's like, do you like quotes? Do you not like quotes?
DUFFIE:
I came across a very interesting problem leveraging YAML in, Ansible, the other day. And I was because I was trying to basically create a string that actually had quotes in it, and I was having the hardest time getting, Ansible to do the right thing in templating. It was actually using Jinja, really at the end of the day.
But like, I couldn't get you to do the thing I was trying to get it to do because of the escaping. And then I finally figured out that they, they have actually built a function called unsafe.
ADRIANA:
Oh.
DUFFIE:
And they were just like, mark this particular string unsafe. And they're like, just don't interpret it. Just put it in and just put it in and and take it out and like don't try to play with it. Don't try to understand what it says. Just use this string as I have given it to you and it works great now.
ADRIANA:
Wow that's great.
DUFFIE:
Absolutely amazing. Life changing, right? Because like trying to manipulate. I was like, is it three single quotes and then a double quote, is it like like I'm trying to figure out how to make this work. And I could not get it, and then finally I found “unsafe”.
ADRIANA:
Oh my God, I gotta love the name too. Unsafe. Yeah. Oh my God, yay software people. Okay, next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?
DUFFIE:
I prefer that my tab presents as two spaces.
ADRIANA:
Because of the YAML shit. That's honestly why I started like converting my tabs into spaces in VS code is because of YAML. I still like YAML over JSON though. For all its shortcomings.
DUFFIE:
For sure.
ADRIANA:
Okay, two more questions. Are you more of a video or text person for learning stuff?
DUFFIE:
Ooh, tricky. I think it depends on what I'm learning actually. So I think if I learning programing or learning a new language or learning some new tricks about that language, I'll typically read it or I'll typically like, find a program, a sufficiently advanced program written in the language that I want to learn, and then go see how they do it and figure out, like, the different little challenges that they run into and how they solve them, and like, kind of dig into it from that perspective.
But I'm always looking for stuff like the pragmatic this or like, you know, 101 weird problems with ECS. You know, like, I'm always looking for that kind of content to understand what's happening. Like, there's a great article, that a good friend wrote that was, that was writing about about the language that, like, describes all the weird stuff that you don't really expect, like shadow copies and like that kind of stuff.
So that's reading. But then on the learning. So I'm, I'm a Rubik’s cuber. I play with Rubik's cubes all the time. It's like one of my, one of the things I picked up during the pandemic.
ADRIANA:
Oh, cool.
DUFFIE:
And for that, I feel like I need to watch somebody solve using a particular algorithm a couple times and then I can then I can try it manually. Yeah. And then and then once I start doing it manually, then it's like a manual memory and I can actually remember it. Right? Yeah. Actually I think it depends on what I'm learning.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense I yeah, I, I feel like... try to solve a Rubik's cube by reading instructions. This would be so hard. Yeah.
DUFFIE:
It's really, I mean, and that's how it was for a long time. I mean, there was the Rubik's cubes were around before YouTube, right?
ADRIANA:
Like, yeah, that's true. That's so true. Yeah. I mean, the stuff we take for granted, honestly, like, it just blows my mind. You know, like the other day I was watching, the show on Apple TV+ called Constellation. I don't know if you've seen it yet. Really good. Really good sci fi. But they, when the characters had, like, it's she was it's it's like, you know, like current current day.
But she had she had a cassette tape and someone had sent her cassette tape and my thought was, how the fuck is she going to play this cassette tape? Right. And she had like, a toy, like cassette tape player, I guess that her kid had, and that's how she played the cassette tape and I'm like, damn, you know, like, I'm thinking back, I think I got rid of my last tape player.
I don't know, like five years ago when I moved. And I've got, like, I don't have an actual dedicated CD player. I've got a couple of, like, external CD drives sitting under my desk for just in case. It's I mean, all these are these things that we used to rely on, like just gone. I remember handing in, like, my homework in university on floppy disks.
DUFFIE:
Or Zip drives. Remember zip drives? So that was like even a shorter flash in the sun, right? Like that was like.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, that was very short lived. I it was so short lived that I never owned a Zip drive.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. So it's one thing though, my experience with Zip drives, which was funny, it was like I worked at Juniper for about six and a half years, and Juniper builds routers and routers and switches, and some of those routers were built during the period of time when flash drives were a thing. Yeah. And so like to load software onto the router.
There was a class of router. I can’t remember which one it is. But there's like some there's some Juniper router that it actually uses Zip drives. So load the operating system into the router. And we and you know this is in like 2006, 2007. So we're there and like and like we're we're like trolling eBay trying to find flash drives.
ADRIANA:
Like because.
DUFFIE:
Because like even working at Juniper, like nobody's selling them new anymore. Right? Like you're... old stock so we can keep these routers alive. It was amazing.
ADRIANA:
Holy crap. Okay, final question. We've reached our final question of the icebreaker questions. What is your superpower?
DUFFIE:
Like superpower? I think when you ask other people what my superpower is, it's that I am able to communicate complicated things in a way that is easy to understand.
I think my superpower is that, you know, we all have our own challenges. And one of the challenges that I have is like, I, I, I had a series of experiences that really taught me that I have to think about perspective differently.
And that means that if I'm looking at a problem, I can only ever understand the problem with my own faculties, my own eyes, my own brain, my own hands. I can only understand it so far. And that's and that's limited by my experience. Right. But but what I've been through before, whatever it is, however, if I try and teach that thing, then I get exposed to the faculties of others, right?
They might say, what happens if this happens? What happens if that happens? Hey, have you thought about this? You know, like what? What happens when this other part happens? And I'm like, and those for me are like the most valuable thing. So in a way that's my superpower is I don't rest on the idea of a single perspective.
ADRIANA:
Ooh, I like that. That's very cool. And so, so important because I it, it made me think back to like, yeah, my, my husband's also in tech. And so I'll... and we're in different different areas. And so I'll be telling him about some of the stuff that I'm, I'm working on. And then he'll start asking questions because it's not his area.
And, and I'm like, oh, and I don't... I have I have to say I almost get annoyed. Because I'm like, why are you thinking about it that way? And it's like, but then I have to kind of take a step back and think, of course, he's thinking it that way because he's approaching it from a completely different angle. So yeah. Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Exactly. Yeah. It's always I mean, it's it's such a trippy thing that I feel like all of us bring there's a number of different like concepts that talk about this. Right. Like one of them is the idea of the beginner's mind. Right. In the beginner's mind, all things are possible in the expert's mind. Very few.
But there's, there's a ton of different like concepts that, that speak about this as it relates to people and I love and I love the whole idea that like, you know, we each bring our own perspective to a set of problems, whether that problem is related to humans, whether that problem is related to coding, whether that problem is related to logic.
We we each have a built up over our, our journey, you know, like a different set of understandings and expectations about how these things work. Yeah. And being open to that is huge. Right. Like that's I think probably the biggest skill of a teacher that we don't really talk about is that like being open to those perspectives that are not their own is such a huge thing.
ADRIANA:
It really is because it, it, it opens so many doors.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. In your own brain and everybody else's brain, like, it's like, you know, it's like we, you know, we are you and I, we're both talking about, like, lifelong learning. I think we were talking about this. So lifelong learning is when you're in tech, you're constantly learning, you know. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
I feel like that's a big piece of it too, right. Like the way we're way to really actively engage in that is to think about it, think about the limitations of perspective.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And I think, you know, going staying on that lifelong learner topic, you can't I feel like you can't be in tech and not be a lifelong learner. And expect your career to progress. And I think that being open to different perspectives is what allows that to happen, because I think people who jumped on to like any anytime you're jumping onto new tooling or new concepts like getting, you know, open your mind around DevOps, like what you're telling me, I have to like, do my work differently. Like it's hard, it's scary.
DUFFIE:
Totally true. Yeah, yeah, I think I mean, even even outside of tech, I think that's true. Right? If you're if you're a chef, you're oh my god. Yeah. You're a hairstylist. You're like any number of different things for you to really progress.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And certainly anything artistic I mean you can't just be like okay with the status quo. Can you imagine? No evolution. How boring. How boring.
DUFFIE:
Nope. Yeah. Wild stuff.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Well, we got through all the all the icebreaker questions with who? Thanks for playing along. I have so many questions because. So, actually, there's one thing I want to touch upon because you mentioned earlier on, that you're dyslexic. And, I was wondering because my, my husband's, dyslexic as well. And, so for him, like, one of the things that I've learned because, I'm, I'm, I'm a fast reader, I guess certainly compared to him and I it it has taught me being married to him that if I'm showing him something, I have to be super patient, as and respectful of the pace in which he reads.
And he talks about a lot about, coping mechanisms, as being as a dyslexic person,
DUFFIE:
My experience is very different than your husband’s. I imagine that, like, everything is on the spectrum at some point.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course.
DUFFIE:
When I was, when I was coming up, I failed the second grade, and my mom figured out that the reason I was failing was that I was dyslexic and the school didn't have the wherewithal to make that assumption or make that, assessment themselves. And so my mom went to learn how to teach a dyslexic kid how to read, and she taught me to read.
And then after that, I was I was at a I was reading at a collegiate level, like very quickly, like, I, I understood how this worked. It was game on, you know.
ADRIANA:
Damn! That's awesome.
DUFFIE:
And like you at this point, like if I'm looking at a page of text, I have to I would have to actively not read it.
Right. Like I'm already processing the data on that page. Just have it. Just having it in my vision.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
I'm not thinking about like I'm not thinking about the process. I'm not like and I can read log files looking for a particular thing. It's like it's one of those. It's like a, it's an incredibly quick way of getting information into your brain. But like but but it's definitely a skill, right. Like it's. It's a trippy thing.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. That's so cool. It's, it's cool that you got, like, a diagnosis or at least, I guess, recognition, early on in life because my, my husband was, he, he had the experience where I think it was he never even got, like, a formal diagnosis. It was like after, you know, a long time of struggling.
And I guess reading enough stuff online where he's like, oh, shit, I think I might actually be dyslexic. And it, it tracks and it his experience was such a negative one where it's like, you know, the, the teachers would like, harp on him over like, oh, you're not applying yourself and like, you’re too slow, and blah blah blah.
And, and you know, kind of, he was, almost dismissed. He bet on himself. But like, and computers kind of saved him, but like, it was no thanks to, you know, people who didn't recognize that at the time. So kudos to your mom for like, really...
DUFFIE:
Oh my gosh.
ADRIANA:
Helping. My god.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. I can't, you know, I can't it's it's a it's such a wild thing to think about, but like, I can't imagine that not working out the way that it did because like, where would I be? You know, like, I don't even know what life would look like if I had if my mom had not figured that out in the time that she did, like, help me out.
It’s wild. You know, like one of those. What? It's one of those turning points that happens so early in the, in the, in the maze that you're like like, oh, like, how else would that have gone?
ADRIANA:
Yeah, right?
DUFFIE:
It's crazy.
ADRIANA:
It's trippy. Yeah. So kudos. That's amazing. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. Another thing that I wanted to ask, you mentioned, so you said you're so were you born in Hawaii, or you grew up in Hawaii, or both?
DUFFIE:
I was born in California.
ADRIANA:
Okay.
DUFFIE:
And my parents, my parents were never, like, kind of, like, really together. Like, my father and my mother were like, together, and they were traveling together for quite a while, but they were never really, like, a long term thing. And, so my mother and my stepfather met and they met and they married. And then basically about a year after that, when I was. I think eight, and my sister was four, we moved to Hawaii because that's where they wanted to be.
ADRIANA:
Nice.
DUFFIE:
And I was in Hawaii from when I was eight until, basically just around high school, like middle school, high school ten, and then moved back to California to live with my dad, and then kind of went back and forth between California and Hawaii for several years. Yeah. To, in like visiting my mom, or coming back to live with my dad.
And I remember, like, all these weird little culture shock. So, for example, one of the first times back to California to live with my dad, the first time, he was living here in San José, he was living down in San José, and we had, I had this wild experience. So in Hawaii, it's always been very expensive. A lot of food you have to get in, right?
ADRIANA:
Right.
DUFFIE:
Go into the grocery store with 20 bucks. It's not going to end up with a lot of groceries. Even at the time, like in in the early 90s or the early late 80s, it was still very expensive.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
And so, having that experience of, like, being able to go into a grocery store in San José, like a big, Big Saver or whatever, right, and walk out with a grocery cart full of food for 20 bucks was mind blowing.
ADRIANA:
Oh, wow.
DUFFIE:
As a teenage boy, I'm like, this is not making sense to me right now. But it was like it was it was such a crazy thing, you know, like having that experience of like, wow, this like the, you know, understanding the economic climate of different areas and like realizing that while the different like or even gas, the price of gas in Hawaii was always more expensive than the price... I remember gas in California, being as cheap is like, not... less than a buck.
ADRIANA:
Wow.
DUFFIE:
Never a thing in Hawaii. Like...
ADRIANA:
That is wild. It's so cool, though, that it, it kind of it teaches you different perspectives and gives you an appreciation as well for those things.
DUFFIE:
These are some of those experiences that I was talking about that really drove me to think that, like that perspective is... That perspective is more important than your own, right?
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And and, out of curiosity, like what got you into tech?
DUFFIE:
So when I was in high school, I got into computers, and I was one of the people who kind of understood compu-- like my brain has always just kind of understand, have understood how computers work pretty well.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
And so I was like the teacher's aide in the computer class, and I was getting into, like, all the all the different things from that perspective. And I was also into theater at the time. So I was I it was technical theater. So doing lights, sound, staging, working all of that stuff. And so interestingly, both of these two fields involve technology.
And so I think that really kind of like became a through line for me was like working in different, technical fields. So, like whether that was, for, for years when I was working in Hawaii, I was doing lighting, sound, staging, rigging, and I was always, you know, working at that part of the tech. Because in Hawaii, if you're not working in the tourism industry in some way, you're not working, right?
ADRIANA:
Right, right.
DUFFIE:
It’s really hard.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
And so when I came to California and I was like, you know, I'm already pretty good with my computer already, like exploring Linux, already exploring Windows. And I was kind of like playing with all the different operating systems and how all they were, they all work and all that stuff. I started getting into systems administration.
And I went from systems administration into network administration because again, that's one of those like, things I really wanted to know how all of that worked. Yeah. And so best way for me to understand how all that worked was to go and play with it, like to go to work on it like. So that was network administration, systems administration... I first broke into real tech when I... and.... just before the year 2000 and I joined a couple of companies that were, that were providing DSL. There were DSL wholesalers. So they, Covad and NorthPoint communications were, were the two that I joined, and both of them were tremendous experiences because they were both. In in Covad
I was actually out doing physical installations of DSL. There's all kinds of crazy stories related to that. And then at NorthPoint, I went inside and I was doing customer support, and I was actually answering phone calls of installers and also customers who were trying to understand why their thing wasn't working or how to get this turned on or etc.
And so I went from like customer support up into the architecture level pretty quickly because I understood how these systems work pretty, pretty well, and I was able to communicate it and teach it and share it. I became like my path to, kind of a higher I don't know if like a more senior role or, or really gave me an opportunity to kind of jump into different parts of the system because I was able to teach and bring people with me.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And it's such a wonderful feeling when you're able to, like, get through to people, right? Through...
DUFFIE:
Seeing the light come on? It's amazing.
ADRIANA:
The network stuff that you were doing. Was it all like, self-taught or like, how did you, come to learn it?
DUFFIE:
A lot of it was self-taught. A lot of it was actually also, exploring how things work based, like there's always been a number of different technologies out there, like GNS, graphical network simulator. Where you can actually like, you know, on a reasonably inexpensive computer, you know, build their whole research lab and explore this stuff. And Kubernetes, there's KinD, right? Kubernetes, Kubernetes in Docker. It's another great example. You don't need you don't need to have an Amazon account to be able to play with Kubernetes. You can play with it in Docker on your laptop, right?
Those particular types of things have always been around for people who want to play with them and understand how how different parts work and understand different protocols and understand how to build adjacencies and how to troubleshoot them, like those things have been around for a long time, whether they were KinD or whether they were, GNS, or like, things like this.
And so that's that's always been kind of like I'm about to let my curiosity like, what happens if I'm trying to convert from, you know, BGP to OSPF. Like, I don't know, let's let's try it.
ADRIANA:
So yeah. So you've basically gravitated towards networking for for a chunk of your career then. Is that is that accurate.
DUFFIE:
Yeah, I think networking, distributed systems, people, it's always been one thing or another. I've worked on a variety of different technology efforts across a variety of different companies. I helped build the first shared infrastructure at Apple and it was great. It was called PIE, Platform Infrastructure Engineering. So “apple pie”, you know.
We were so proud of that name.
ADRIANA:
Oh my God. That's so cool. How was it working at Apple?
DUFFIE:
I think as with many big companies, I think Apple has an incredible opportunity to go and work with some of the and do some of the best work of your life.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
If you find yourself in the right group working with the right people, putting you, you know, giving you the right opportunity and really letting you kind of like, grow into that. I think that you can really find that at Apple. You can also find the opposite experience where, like, you come in with this, a bit, perhaps, it's not even really about what you bring to it. Sometimes that you're just you're in a situation where it's just untenable and it's not going to work for you, and you're going to need to go somewhere else and go find another opportunity somewhere else.
And I think that's true of most big companies. You find these little pockets of areas where you can really do the best work for your life, and sometimes you find pockets where that's just not a possibility. It's really hard.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. And the, it, sometimes it just boils down. I mean, yes, there's the, there's the company culture, but also like, just finding the right team, the one where it feels like home. Which can be such a challenge.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. Where the people believe in you. Where they where you where you get to really, like, come into your own and shine and like, it's it's an amazing experience, but I, I really in many ways I wish there were some way of. Kind of guaranteeing that for people or.
ADRIANA:
I know. Right. It's so true. Like sorry. Good.
DUFFIE:
Yeah. It's it's one of those things that like I do feel like the Kubernetes community does pretty good at this. There's other communities out there that do pretty good at this where they're like, like we know everybody had to be new at some point, and we want to make it so that in your time as being new, you have somebody to ask questions of, like, how do we build that community?
Which is really the crux of the community problem. Like, how do we build that community to enable you to feel like you're not an imposter, to make you feel like your contributions are valuable, that your questions are valid, that you're you're not just that you're not alone in this. You're trying you're not trying to run up this hill by yourself. There's a bunch of us running beside you. You know what I mean?
ADRIANA:
Like it's so true. It's so true. And I think, like, there, there. Certain, as you said, certain communities that make it so, so easy to do that, that kind of give you that safe space. You know, I think back to like some of the nasty shit you see on StackOverflow where you're like, I'm just asking a question. And then they're like questioning your whole, like, existence.
And you're like, hey, I just want an answer.
DUFFIE:
And and the stress of all of this, I mean, even like the, the stress about this also really affects how people react or are able to spend time. Right? Like, if I like,
I've definitely run into situations where like I'm asking somebody a question and they're very resistive to the question because they feel that their interpretation of this question is I'm calling into validity, whether the thing you did was right or wrong.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
I'm like, no, I, I there's no right or wrong. But but but other. But how they internalize that question is... that I have no control over. I can say like hey man, I think you did the absolute best you could with the information that you had at the time, 1,000% every time. Otherwise you probably wouldn't have done it right.
But yeah, it's, it's, it's a challenging it's this is that people puzzle right. Like how do you, how do you communicate effectively when what you're, when the words you're using may be interpreted as a challenge. As opposed to just a question. Right. Like, I seek to understand.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think and I think, you know, to, to your credit and your superpower, having that perspective, can be extremely helpful because it probably primes you better to not have that resistance when, when someone comes at you with a question like that, that you know. Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Right. Like, you know, being able to prime the other person and say like, you know, first of all, let's let's play it out. I'm not trying to like, challenge the decisions that you’ve made.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
Let's trying to understand how it works. And you're the best person to ask because your name is on the good committee.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Right. Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Take me on that journey. Right.
ADRIANA:
Like it's true. Yeah. It's all about disarming, right? It's funny because, you know, I've, I've, I've said this to so many people, like contributing, especially contributing to open source can be so, so daunting, especially like very well-established projects. Right. Where you've got, like your, your old guard and you're like, oh my God, dare I? Dare I throw my hat into the ring?
DUFFIE:
I feel like, you know, it's definitely... it's, it is absolutely one of those situations where, like, the longest journey begins with a single step, you know.
And the other part of this that I wanted to call back to on the whole perspective, which I think is an interesting thing for people to hear.
Some people feel like if they learn a programing language, and then the next programing language comes out, that everything that they did was lost work.
And one thing I've learned in my career is that there is no lost work. Like that, that everything that you have been through, every part of your experience has set you up for success moving forward. Like if you know how to troubleshoot networks, what you’re troubleshooting is a distributed system.
And you could apply a lot of the same brain logic to the problem of understanding why databases aren't redistributing, that you could, to understanding why, a network problem exists or a network partition exists.
I call this like, building intuition. You're, you're constantly building intuition because you're solving problems at different levels of a stack or solving problems even within the same stack. Your, your problem solving skills are what you're building. That's the thing you take with you, regardless of where you're going next.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that that's what people need to remember. Even, you know, one of the things that I always tell people, from a coding perspective is like, never fall in love with your code, right? Because, like, yeah, you write something and then someone else is gonna look at your code and build on it and make it better.
And, like, isn't that the ultimate compliment? Someone, someone is inspired by something you've done and then thought of another way to like a way to improve it.
DUFFIE:
Oh my gosh, just add this KubeCon in London. There was a great talk that was talking about, kind of changing the way that we think about security and applications and stuff and, and it was neat because they based their talk on a talk that I had done with Brad and Rory and Ian in Amsterdam.
ADRIANA:
Oh, cool.
DUFFIE:
They, they took the idea of it and they were like, well, let's take it further. Let's understand container scanning even further than what they jumped into. Right. And I was like, I love that. Right?
ADRIANA:
Like, yeah.
DUFFIE:
Take the idea further. When I was a kid, there was this Creative Whack Pack. There was this set of ideas, and one of the things that they put in that pack was, don't ever fall in love with an idea. But it's just it's kind of a corollary to what you're saying about falling in love with your code, right?
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
The mental path you took to get to this idea isn't the only one we have. We all can agree on that.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, it's it's never it's never a waste like, you know, I, I, I'm, I consider myself a serial blogger. And oftentimes all like up there is the last blog post I wrote, I started writing, I had finished writing it, I and then I started like reviewing the, the the copy and I think the last thing that I had was like a conclusion to write and, and I'm writing out the conclusion and I'm reviewing the copy and I'm like, oh shit, I framed this blog post as X, but I kind of buried the lede and I need to reframe it and, and then, you know, I it wasn't a complete gutting, but there is definitely like a lot of rework. And whenever stuff like that happens, I just tell myself, like, it's okay. Because what you're doing is making it better. So even if you like, delete an entire section, entire paragraph or whatever, it's totally fine because what's coming out is going to be way better than what you had before.
DUFFIE:
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I love I mean, even the idea of challenging your own, it's like part of not falling in love with code or not falling in love with an idea is, is giving yourself that room to grow, right?
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
Giving yourself that permission to say, actually, I've been thinking about this all wrong.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
You don’t need somebody else will tell you that. Like, you can tell you that too, right?
ADRIANA:
Being kind to yourself by giving yourself permission. Absolutely. And it's all part of the creative process. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about, your current role, at Isovalent, which was acquired, I guess, semi-recently by Cisco. So how did you, how did you come to, work at Isovalent, and talk to a little bit about the work that you do.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
So I, quite a few years ago now, I worked for a company called Nicira, which was a network virtualization company, and it was a fascinating role because it was I had just come from Juniper Networks, where I was, lab manager.
And so I spent like, basically, I think it was like 5 or 6 years or something at Juniper, learning every possible way to break a network at any type of scale.
And then I come to, to Nicira where I am, working on working with the team and developing network virtualization. And my part of that opportunity was like, how do I how can I bring this skill set that I have learned in troubleshooting networks to, this problem of building network virtualization?
So, like, in real... in “real” networks, right? Non-virtual networks, I should say. Like, there are things that I know how to... that I'm like, are ingrained in my mind about troubleshooting and understanding the state of the network as it relates to, like how all things are operating.
When they're building a network virtualization model, like we need we need similar tools. I still need to know when things are propagating. I still need to understand the state of that network, whether it's virtual or real. And so it was this fascinating role where I'm like working with a team that's developing all of this software and saying, I need to know how this works.
I need to understand when this happens. I need to, you know, just bring my real world experience from troubleshooting networks to this new virtual arena. And that was just a great role. I had a wonderful time. And at that job I met Dan Whitland. Who is the CEO of Isovalent.
ADRIANA:
Nice.
DUFFIE:
And I also met Thomas Graff, who at the time was a contributor to Open vSwitch, which was one of the open source projects that came out of Nicira as well. And so, Dan and I have been friends the entire time, like we've known. We run into each other at different conferences. We're always good, glad to see each other.
Etcetera. And so when, I decided to leave, so I was like, you know, I'm from Nicira, I did a bunch of other stuff. I went to Apple, I went to a company called Illumio. When I decided to leave Apple, I decided to kind of jump into Kubernetes because I saw this really incredible opportunity within the Kubernetes space.
ADRIANA:
Nice.
DUFFIE:
Having lived through the OpenStack days, I was like, oh, this is this is going to happen again, and it's going to be Kubernetes and it's going to be really fascinating to watch. And so I reached out to CoreOS. I said, you should hire me. They said, why? I said, just try it. And they interviewed me and I got the job. I worked at CoreOS, and then at Heptio.
And then after Heptio was acquired into VMware. I decided to leave VMware. I went, and then, at that time, I was chatting with, Dan, who had built Isovalent at that point. At that point, and Isovalent getting to a place where they were like, really going after the market.
And I decided that I wanted to go and do like a field CTO role. And I sibilant, and so I went to dad and I said, and I pitched it, you know, I'm like, hey, this is what I'd like to do for Isovalent. Are you interested in this?
And at this point, I'd already at Heptio and at CoreOS, built a very public persona around learning and engaging in technology and engaging an open source, which, you know, which is a big part of myself and a big part of what I've given to the community over the years. And I said, you know, I'd like to keep doing that.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
But I'd also like to be part of, like, you know, a customer facing role doing, sales, engineering and that sort of stuff. So we built a role called Field CTO, and that's where I came into at Isovalent.
ADRIANA:
Oh, cool.
DUFFIE:
And I was there for the longest I've ever been at a startup, actually. Cause like, the startups that I joined have, have either been acquired within a year or, or something around that space, which is, I will admit, a weird little humblebrag. I'm not trying to say [...] that [...]. Right. But like, but I think as it all works out, like I have a, you know, most of the startups I, I've been a part of have, except for, with the exception of Illumio have been acquired within a period of time.
When I first joined Isovalent, I did think that Isovalent was going to be another one of those, like, year long journeys.
ADRIANA:
Yeah.
DUFFIE:
But then the pandemic happened. Actually it was in the pandemic when I joined. And then, you know, navigating all of that over the period of about, I think it was pretty close to three years when we were acquired.
ADRIANA:
All right.
DUFFIE:
Which is, you know, an incredible journey, incredible time as a startup, building the business from a, you know, from a very successful open source project to a reasonably successful enterprise product and a really kind of growing year over year. And, you know, and then helping uh, hire and helping train people and helping level people up in the technology and that space for doing a lot of public work around all of that.
And now, after the acquisition, continuing to be very successful within Cisco. Isovalent is continuing to be, to grow crazily. And I think it's one of the most successful acquisitions I've ever been a part of, in that even after a year and a half, nothing... I'm still excited to go and work on that.
Because it's changing, because it's the same team, because it's, because the people are still here. We're still moving. We're still, like, learning from our experience. We're still growing as a company within Cisco. We have just an incredible opportunity. And it's it's been it's been really, it's been amazing to just like, it's amazing to me that like, even after a year and a half, I'm still excited about doing it because, like in the past when CoreOS was acquired by RedHat,
I left, and went to Heptio. When Heptio was acquired by VMWare, I left, because I felt like that when the whole Pivotal acquisition happened, I was like, yeah, this is not for me.
When Nicira was acquired by VMware, we were like, oh, we have to rewrite everything. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to go. And like...
So after a year to be able to say so I'm just as committed to this role, just as committed to this opportunity as I was in the first year at Isovalent is such a radically different experience than I've had at any other acquisition that it's just... I feel very fortunate.
ADRIANA:
I mean, acquisitions can be so tricky, right? I mean, there's nothing like a culture killer if, if not done properly.
DUFFIE:
Like, in the Isovalent case, you're hiring 160 people.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.
DUFFIE:
And you need and you need to make sure that you have in that, in that hiring. What are they going to do? What's the vision? How does it apply to the overall vision. Like what is... like how do you keep them motivated? As a startup it's pretty easy. It's like, be motivated or die, right? Like it's not going to work if you don't.
We're not all working on the same thing. But like, but within a large company like Cisco, you're like, okay, well now here's the thing that we're working on that is part of moving all of Cisco forward. And here's, and, and is that interesting to the 160 people that joined? Like, is it validating their assumptions? Is it like, driving them forward?
Like, it's so hard to do is an acquisition. I feel like so many of them fail because there’s not really, there's no concise story vision, that really helps people who are coming into that scenario understand what the way forward is.
ADRIANA:
And I think that's the, that's the hardest part is like, do you, do you know where you fit in in the greater scheme of things and you feel like you're, you're you're I don't know, like it's almost this feeling of claustrophobia. Right. The parent company is like engulfing the, the acquired company and and do you maintain your, your culture. How do you integrate with the existing culture. Like that's a lot of,
DUFFIE:
A lot of really interesting problems. Yeah.
ADRIANA:
Isovalent is also known for, like, eBPF. Do you dabble... do anything in that, on that side of things? Just out of curiosity?
DUFFIE:
I do. Most of the time I spend my time on the frameworks that we're building. So things like, Cillium and, and, Tetragon. Tetragon is an incredible way of actually like, like if you have a problem that you want to solve with eBPF, Tetragon is a good framework for thinking about how to implement that.
ADRIANA:
Nice.
DUFFIE:
And you could definitely check out more about it at like Tetragon.io. But like I, I spent a lot of my time like helping people understand how that that might work. Like if you say, I want to do this, and I want to I want to have these outcomes, and I want to make this change, like, how do you how do I do that with Tetragon? I'm happy to help figure that part out.
I also spend a lot of my time just helping people understand Kubernetes and how networking works and all that other stuff.
DUFFIE:
Within Kubernetes, so much of the networking is abstracted away from your your day to day use. You're not thinking about, okay, how do I get this pod an IP address? Not on your mind at all. Right.
You might ask, how do I get traffic from outside into my application, right. Thinking oh, it's a load balancer. Right. How that creates, I don't know.
I'm not thinking about how how all of this works in the, in between. Right. And that's, that's the fun part for me is that I'm, you know, something of an expert in that part of it. Like how does that infrastructure part work.
And to be clear, like I'm defining expert as someone who can take other people and make them proficient at a thing. That's, in my mind, what an expert is. Not somebody who knows all the answers.
ADRIANA:
That's such a great definition. Man, if we knew all the answers, we would be rich! Alas, ‘tis not the case. I did ask, do you... are you actually a Kubernetes contributor as well?
DUFFIE:
I have in the past contributed. Mostly I contributed to the Kubeadm project, at the time. I was, I was working on Kubeadm. I've also worked on, contributed to Kubernetes in general and some of the docs I've contributed to, obviously to Cillium and to, other projects like in the space, like I contributed a little bit to Flux and to different things.
ADRIANA:
Oh, nice. That's cool.
DUFFIE:
But yeah, I think, but yeah, I mean, lately I haven't been contributing much because I've been focused on trying to help navigate this crazy big acquisition piece into into Cisco.
ADRIANA:
Yeah. Fair enough, fair enough. Makes sense. Cool. Well, we are coming up on time. But before we wrap up, I was wondering if you have any words of wisdom for our audience?
DUFFIE:
I'll definitely reiterate that understanding a problem from multiple perspectives is a is a multiplier for your understanding and for your career. So being in a situation where you say, not only am I not in love with an idea, but I want to understand how you understand the idea. Really changes, really, really helps you grow.
The other one is make room for things to be hard. They don't have to be... Not everything is easy for everybody. Things that you assume are the easiest in the world. They're so obvious. It's not even things you have to think about. These things are true for you because of your experience, and everybody has a different experience, right?
So like, yeah, we were just talking about this earlier. Your husband has dyslexia and with the way you described his journey with dyslexia is so wildly different from my own that it may seem to me I'm like, well, why was that so hard? Like, I wouldn't say that, but you get what I'm saying, right? Like a wildly different perspective of, like.
You know, everybody, everywhere you look, you will see this difference in perspective.
ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Different perspectives, different journeys. Right?
DUFFIE:
Right? Yeah. I love that.
ADRIANA:
These are great words of wisdom. Also I cannot end the recording without doing a shout out to your awesome t-shirt, because... hello? It’s our podcast mascot. So I've got, and I was showing you earlier, I've got this little desk lamp that you could squeeze. Tee hee! It's so great. If I could, I would totally have one as a pet.
Well, thank you so much, Duffie, for, geeking out with me. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check our show notes to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time.
DUFFIE:
Peace out and geek out.
ADRIANA:
Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.