Behind the scenes of #vBrownBag - CTO035

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

Hi, this is Keith Townsend from the CTO Advisor, and you're listening to episode 35 of the CTO Advisor podcast. This podcast, I sat down with Jonathan Frappia of V Brown Bag and EMC. Great conversation. V Brown Bag is a great community program, something that I absolutely love. I've used it in the past. I've gotten involved in this community. I highly recommend you guys listen to the podcast, understand what the group does, benefit from it, and also give back. Jonathan shares what is a V Brown Bag and how do you get involved in V Brown Bag.

Thanks a lot. Hope you enjoy the podcast. All right, Jonathan, can you go ahead and introduce yourself? Sure, my name's Jonathan Frappia. You can find me on Twitter at JFrappia. com. I am a Senior Technical Education Services Consultant for EMC, so I work on training for mostly for our internal teams, so folks that are out implementing our hybrid cloud solution and any other cloud-related technology that we may have an offering around. So I pulled a V Brown Bag trick, which is to send out a random tweet, and for any random sucker that responded to my tweet, I pulled them into the podcast.

But this, I lucked up with you because, one, as part of your day job, you do training, so you're a formal trainer. You create content daily for your day job, and then you're really involved in the community in helping individual engineers gain skills they need to do to either enter the industry or expand their skillset. So I think this is a first that we have someone who actually does community work outside of work hours and a relevant job title within their organization. Specifically, you're involved with V Brown Bag.

What is V Brown Bag? So V Brown Bag, we are a podcast that is dedicated to technical education on various topics. So we started off with VMware-focused. com. So we started almost like a study group. So people that were studying for their VCP or their VCAP certifications, rather than do that alone, we would kind of share the journey that we were on and how we were learning and what people were doing with that. And it's since grown from a single podcast most weeks for podcasts or webinars going on about some virtualization or technology topic.

So we kind of branched out from there from the VMware-focused, certification-focused into networking. We're actually wrapping up tomorrow night a series for the Cisco Certified Network Associate Data Center exam. So we've been doing that for a couple months. We've done some DevOps series recently. Back in December, we did almost a month of podcast. We just did the weeknights, but we did a podcast every night for the month of December on GitHub called Commitmas, which Matt Brender actually came up with that idea a couple years ago.

So we kind of, we blew it out this year and went bananas with it. So things that a technologist would need to know, not only from a certification perspective, but also some areas where the industry is shifting and to help them get their skillsets. So they are ready for things like GitHub to be introduced. So I podcast mostly weekly, mostly, I say that. So I have a small comprehension for the level effort that it takes to get out just a weekly podcast.

You guys are rocking four podcasts a week. How does that happen exactly? Because it's not like you guys are getting paid full-time salaries to do this. What's the mechanism behind cranking out four podcasts a week? Well, we've got, we're a pretty big group now, actually. We're 21, give or take, people that kind of, the quote, unquote, the brown bag crew. So there's some of us that will do the EMEA show, Greg Robertson, out in the UK, he handles that show.

I mentioned Kyle for the Latin America show. Brett Johnson has picked up the Asia Pacific podcast. And then we've also got, in addition to our podcasts, we also do a lot of live events as well. So next week, we've got folks heading out to open, I think it's next week, OpenStack Summit in Austin, where we'll be doing live tech talks. So we'll have folks from the OpenStack community doing short 10, 15 minute lightning style talks on some topic, and we'll record and broadcast those.

We do that at VMworld as well, VMworld Barcelona. And then I think we've got out to a couple other conferences like Cisco Live this year as well. So we've got a lot of people to cover that. I tend to be on the US podcast side, so I get to benefit because if I wanna learn something, if I see something cool, like I just, so yeah, I just text Iwill on Twitter. He was tweeting about some work he's been doing with Log Insight and for logging and forwarding things from Log Insight into other tools so we can kind of create dashboards and alerts for them and whatnot.

So sounded pretty cool area I'm interested in. So I get to build the schedule out when I see cool and interesting things happen, but also chat with people about what's going on in the industry and what they're interested in. So the Cisco CCNA DC series came up because a lot of people were asking about Cisco certification. So we pulled some folks in and we kind of take a look at what the exam is focused on. We'll take a blueprint and try to carve it up so that we can get about an hour, hour and a half showing on a specific topic.

And if we need to, we can break them up into multiple episodes. So we might have some parts of the certification that get two or three nights, where some may only get one just because of the type of content or how much it's weighted in the exam. So this is awful lot of work. And obviously, depending on your personality, for me, I podcast once a week because I get to talk to interesting guys like you. And to your point, I walk away from every podcast learning something.

io and I walked away with a new understanding of exactly what's API and how API used. What's the feedback from the community? Obviously, you guys have grown to something, one podcast a week to four a week. What's the general shift or response from the community about the work that you're doing? We chat mostly with folks if we're not live at an event like VMworld or OpenStack Summit via Twitter. So it gets validated every now and again because we'll just get sort of a random tweet with the VBrownBag hashtag.

It's somebody that's went out and passed some certification when they used our resources that is all built from other people in the community. So these aren't vendor-sponsored sessions. They're just other people that are out studying for these or involved in these specific communities. And you see that and it's like, we just helped this person advance their career or achieve something they wanted to do. So it kind of makes it all worthwhile when you hear from people that are using the content to get their certifications.

We did a survey, it's two or three years old now, but there was somewhere in the neighborhood of, there was a large percentage, I can't remember the numbers anymore, that kind of credited involvement with the community and community resources to getting their certification, which led to new jobs, which led to pay increases. So it's fun. And I've certainly benefited from your blog posts and podcasts and from the VBrownBag, which is how I got involved. I was using them to study for my VCP5.

And Cody was like, hey, we need help with, Cody Bunch, who started the VBrownBag said, hey, we need some help. And I said, sure, what do you want me to do? And I just started converting videos and uploading them to YouTube. And that turned into, somehow I managed doing the whole schedule. I don't really remember how that happened, but. I found it interesting that when Cody, and this is a warning to folks out there, if you follow Cody on Twitter, there's a good chance you might get, and this is if you follow him on Twitter, there's a good chance you might get tapped on the shoulder to do some type of VBrownBag type of activity.

And I tapped him on, he tapped me on the shoulder to do a series with Justin Warren on, I think it was a building to build or creating a business case, which is a little bit outside of the normal scope for you guys, which talks about your expansion out. But I was surprised to see, he reached out to me in like July or August and the schedule was full all the way until December. That's incredible. How big is the audience now? There's somewhere in the 100,000 downloads from iTunes, I think, which is our biggest platform.

Similar numbers on the blog. And then the live shows, the live events we track differently. So I'd have to go back and pull numbers on that. But I mean, when you're talking 100,000 downloads for a year, that's a pretty good reach, I guess. Content has to be great for people to consume it at that level. And I've watched quite a bit of VBrownBag stuff. It has to be going on a couple of years old now, but the Couch to OpenStack series, I thought was extremely beneficial to me.

I credit that with maybe about 40 to 50% about what I know about OpenStack came from that series. And I think that was like one of the first times you guys expanded beyond VMware, specifically to an adjacent topic, which is pretty cool. What's some of the more popular, outside of the CCNA, what's some of the more popular tech adjacencies you guys have gone into? A lot of folks using the GitHub series we did back in December of 2015, we called it Commitmas.

The guy that runs the community for GitHub saw it, thanks to John Troyer, kind of pinged him with like, hey, look at what these folks are doing. So we got a little bit of support there as well. I think folks are recognizing the need for automation. Those tend to be the popular series. And there is also a lot of crossover between different technologies there. So we can do something on automation and tie it in with VMware or OpenStack, and the tools and processes are similar.

So whatever you're supporting, those series tend to be pretty popular. I think there's a perception. We look at you guys and we kind of look up to you guys. You're running this huge machine that's vBrownBag, but I found it to be an extremely inclusive community. For example, I was just happened to be at VMworld studio, and there was a lull between sessions, and Cody kind of tapped me on the shoulder and say, hey, you know what, come up and do a impromptu career talk.

Politically incorrect way to say it. What's the barrier entry to participating in vBrownBag? Most of it is, it's similar probably to what's going on. There's been some VMUG post of late about getting more user contributed content at VMUGs. But I think a lot of it is folks that just don't think they're working on anything interesting, when in reality that's some of the most interesting content is people that are out using this technology every day, whether it's VMware or OpenStack or some other tool to solve a problem.

If they've got a problem, there's a good chance there's a lot of other people in the world that are having that problem. And hearing how somebody maybe uses Power CLI or some other tool to solve that problem is hugely beneficial to the community because other people are gonna run into it. Amy Manley today, she put out a tweet, not a whole show worthy type thing, but she was having trouble with some backups and errors she was getting. And it was something I ran into a couple of years.

So problem I had, I learned what fixed it for me seems to have fixed it for her. So hopefully that works out. But it's that type of giving back to the community. It's just, that's the most interesting stuff we have out there. And I think that's one of the things that I wanted to get out of this particular show, this episode, was this discussion around what you guys do at VMworld in the vBrownBed stage. Can you set up for us, what exactly, what's your relationship with VMworld at VMware?

So we've been doing the live tech talks, which are community sessions for a few years now. Forget when we first started them, but we, so we'll work with Corey, who runs the vExpert program. We'll basically set us up in the, what they generally call the community hang space. We'll have a stage up there, and folks can come and present. And it's not long, so if there's a stage fright thing, maybe where you're not quite comfortable presenting to a couple hundred people or presenting for an hour, because that can feel like a long time, you can get up on stage and share a quick story.

Maybe the one about how I fixed my backup problems would have been a good tech talk, because it would have been about 10 or 15 minutes. And you'll actually find that 10 or 15 minutes goes by super fast. So it's a good way to get used to speaking in public. We record, so you can kind of watch, go back and watch yourself afterwards, and see how you did, and see that you actually probably did a really good job. The first time I ever actually gave a talk was a vBrownBed tech talk, at VMworld 2014.

In 2014, so that was the first time I ever did any sort of public speaking presentation or whatever, even though I had been supporting vBrownBed behind the scenes for probably a couple of years at that point. So, and I think that's the thing that can be really intimidating to folks, when they hear, oh, I'm gonna give a tech talk at VMworld for vBrownBed, and they see the brand, there's the big party, it's part of the VMworld event. So I think the stage can appear bigger than what it actually is.

It's a big stage, but it's an intimate stage. So if you're, I think your example on the backup thing is dead on. We spend a lot of time as engineers, as architects, solving these major problems in our world that we think that no one else would care about. But when we package that up and tell the story, there's 100,000 of us downloads a year that that story resonates with. So whether it's a VMworld or a VMware user group, and this is a shout out to, because this is something that I'm pretty passionate about.

People might say, hey, Akif, Jonathan, we see YouTube videos of you guys talking all the time. Of course, you're gonna get invited to speak at a VMUG. The VMUG guys are thirsty to get community guys to come up, volunteer, to have these micro talks. It doesn't have to be a keynote. It could be a 10-minute tech talk that sometimes, depending on the VMUG, I've seen the vBrownBed crew out recording these sessions, and they are extremely, I find them to be some of the most interesting sessions of all of VMworld, these little micro, not just VMworld, but VMUG user groups as well, these little micro sessions that people have solved problems, whether they're technology specific or something adjacent to technology.

It could just be about my career that I've found extremely enlightening. So that's kind of a call out to folks that wanna get involved. So for people that do wanna get involved, how do they reach out to the vBrownBed crew? If you're tweeting something interesting and I'm following you, there's a good chance I'll hopefully see that tweet and ping you, but if there's something you're interested in presenting on, you can hit us up on our vBrownBed Twitter account at vBrownBed or use the hashtag vBrownBed, and we watch that pretty closely.

That's where we have, like I said, most of our conversations with the community. So if somebody throws that hashtag on there, there's any number of us that will see it. Any live events where we might be at, whether it's OpenStack Summit or VMUG or VMworld, just come over and say hello. Last year, actually, we had, at VMworld, two folks come over who had watched our videos before and said, hey, I wanna help, sort of the way I did a few years earlier.

I've used your content. I wanna help give back. What can I do? We'll sign you up right quick to help out because, as you mentioned, it's a lot of work behind the scenes to go into building a schedule and confirming schedules. So when we build out a schedule for some topic, if it goes out two or three months, I've certainly run into issues where three months later, that person that was gonna agree to talk in May agreed to do a show in August is all of a sudden like, oh, yeah, well, I'm moving or I've changed jobs.

So it's the behind-the-scenes work always needs some support. You can hit us up there. Cody Bunch has been doing a vSensei program. So for people that are interested in maybe contributing more to the community or talking, there's that program as well that he's run in the past to help people just do just that and kind of get over the hump. And hopefully, we'll be doing some similar things. I was actually talking to the person who runs the Boston VMUG about something similar instead of just sessions all day is maybe some one-on-one time with people, customers who maybe think they have a story to tell, but they're not confident in how to do it or they're not sure it's a relevant story and just spending time with folks and sharing what's going on.

And we've even done series before where something may not have seemed necessarily relevant that day, but over time, all of a sudden, things start to happen and evolve and that topic becomes very hot. So good to get your story down. And heck, I've gone back and watched videos and read blog posts that we've done because I know somebody talked about a thing and six months later, when I run into it, I'm like, oh, we talked about that. So I can go and refer to that.

It's almost like a knowledge base as well, not just learning content. Yeah, you've remanded me to now go back and look at the commitment series because even at my level, you gotta learn from GitHub. You never know, I might have to correct some documentation or something on the project. And it's just good to know GitHub from a personal growth perspective. So are there sponsorship opportunities out there for vendors that listen to the show? Yeah, there are. They can get in touch with Alistair Cook or if they wanna get in touch with me since they've got my Twitter handle on this show, they can reach out to me and I'll get them in touch with Al.

We do have sponsors for the live conferences that we go to, which is how we fund us getting out there and filming these community sessions. And we've got some ad spots on the blog as well. So anyone interested in that, let me know and I can get you in touch with Al who manages that aspect for us. Great, I really appreciate you jumping on last minute, Jonathan, and sharing the message around community and training and the importance of just, not just consuming this content, but giving it back and a little bit of behind the scenes.

Once again, so people don't have to rewind to the front of the show, what's your Twitter handle? It's at JFrappier, so J-F-R-A-P-P-I-E-R on Twitter. Yeah, it's the easiest place to get me because I don't have to spell out my full name. All right, thanks a lot, Jonathan. I really appreciate you taking out the time. Thanks, have a good one, Keith. That's it for this episode of the CTO Advisor. You can find me on the Twitter at CTO Advisor.

com, forward slash podcast, like us in iTunes, rate us, tell us what you think about the show and what I can improve. Talk to you guys next episode.