Doing Interesting Work in Ops with Matty Stratton

About the Guest

Matty Stratton is a HumanOps Advocate at PagerDuty, where he helps dev and ops teams advance the practice of their craft and become more operationally mature. He collaborates with PagerDuty customers and industry thought leaders in the broader DevOps community, and back when he drove, his license plate actually said “DevOps”.

Matty has over 20 years experience in IT operations, ranging from large financial institutions such as JPMorganChase and internet firms, including Apartments.com. He is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and ITSM focused events, including ChefConf, DevOpsDays, Interop, PINK, and others worldwide. Matty is the founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, as well as a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.

He lives in San Francisco and has three awesome kids, who he loves just a little bit more than he loves Doctor Who. He is currently on a mission to discover the best pho in the world.

Links

Transcript

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Mike Julian: Hi folks, I'm Mike Julian, your host for the Real World DevOps podcast. I'm here speaking to Matty Stratton today, DevOps advocate for PagerDuty and the host of my arch nemesis, the Arrested DevOps podcast. Welcome to the show.

Matty Stratton: Thanks Mike, I'm really excited to be here. It's always fun to be a guest on somebody else's show because you do a lot less work.

Mike Julian: Ain't that the truth? I've been watching or listening, I guess as it is, the Arrested DevOps podcast for, God since it began; it feels like a million years ago at this point.

Matty Stratton: It's over five years. December 2013 is when we started. I should know off the top of my head how many episodes we have but I don't. In the hundreds.

Mike Julian: Somewhere between five and 50,000.

Matty Stratton: Right. It's a non-zero number.

Mike Julian: Something that we were talking about before we started recording, was this idea of, there's a lot of people that shift from doing ops work into I guess you could call it an influencer role, where we're talking about the work and helping other people become better. It seems like that's what you've done five plus years ago with the Arrested DevOps as well as what you're doing now with developer advocacy or DevOps advocacy, whatever you want to call it. Is that about right?

Matty Stratton: I would say so. I have found that when I try to explain to people what I do for a living now, I say I worked in operations for 20 years and now they pay me to talk about it. But I didn't start out that way. The journey for Arrested DevOps was, it never started out to be a podcast. I didn't know what it was going to be, but when I was starting to learn about DevOps and started to do some DevOps transformation at an organization I was at, I was taking in a lot of the podcasts of the time, DevOps Café and the Ship Show and Food Fight. The one thing that I found was there was a lot of material out there that was related to DevOps but there wasn't a lot of stuff that seemed suited to people like me who were kind of dumb, for a better word. Just maybe a better way to say that is people who are very new to it. I actually originally intended to start a blog because I had done a lot of blogging, been blogging for years and years and years. I wanted to create a blog that was going to be very accessible. I don't remember if it was on Facebook or Twitter or somewhere when I was looking for ideas for what to call this blog and my friend Jessica, who is not in the tech industry, she's a writer. She's the one who coined the name,” Arrested DevOps.” I bought the domain but I didn't have anything to do with it for a while. I decided maybe I'll start a podcast. One thing I know about myself is I'm very good at starting things and very bad at doing them.

Mike Julian: Aren't we all?

Matty Stratton: Yeah. One of the things that helps with that is having a partner or having somebody else that keeps you accountable.

Mike Julian: Oh yeah.

Matty Stratton: I had met this cat named Trevor at an Azure meetup in Chicago and was like, he's a software engineer type and into this DevOps stuff and was like, "Hey Trevor, maybe we should do a podcast." That was back in November of 2013 — we did our first episode I think in December of ‘13. But what's interesting is how this, it never was intended to be in an influencer role. What I wanted to do was be able to take things that I was learning and make things accessible. One thing I learned very quickly with doing the show and Mike, I mentioned you've learned this lesson similarly with your newsletter and the show now, you can't control your audience.

Mike Julian: No, not at all.

Matty Stratton: Even in our very first episode, we had people who were tweeting at us because we used to live str...