Intro: 0:00

Every podcast needs an amazing co-host. As we pass the midpoint of 2024, Yvonne Sharp will be joining the Cloud Gambit as our resident tech philosopher, merchant of wisdom, and co-host. In this episode, we break the exciting news and also dive into other interesting happenings in tech.

William: 0:32

Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Gambit, and this is kind of an exciting episode. So the podcast has been sort of a kind of a just me thing, you know, going through the motions and kind of a you know kind of alone, and, as we all know, any podcast, you know, should have a co-host at the end of the day. So Yvonne Sharp has agreed to join me and co-host and provide her wisdom and, you know, and also be a cloud psychologist if you will, oh dear.

William: 1:10

Philosopher and such. So how are you doing, Yvonne?

Eyvonne: 1:13

I want to say that I have no qualifications to provide mental health services, just so we're completely clear. But I'm happy to hear to be like an emotional support co-host, Um, and and to you know, share an opinion, Cause I always have one of those Sometimes I have more than one, which can get interesting.

William: 1:35

All right, well, yeah Well. Whenever you have more than one, bring all of them, like in succession Okay, bang, bang, bang, bang bang.

Eyvonne: 1:41

Okay, all right, we'll do that.

William: 1:42

Yeah, happy to be here. Are you a coffee drinker? You can stack the coffee before.

Eyvonne: 1:47

I am not a coffee drinker. I have long said that. My one vice is that I enjoy a Diet Mountain Dew frequently, so that is my caffeine source. I'm trying to alternate with water, now you know, but yeah, my caffeinated beverage of choice is a Diet Mountain. I'm trying to alternate with water now, um, you know, but uh, but yeah, it's uh, my caffeinated beverage of choice is a diet Mountain Dew. Um, and then that's unsponsored, just for the record.

William: 2:14

Right, and I you know, for those that don't know um, you have many accolades in the podcasting industry, if you will. So you, the podcasting industry, if you will. So when did you start Network. Collective.

Eyvonne: 2:29

I can't even remember now it's been. I think that would have been around 2018. Yeah, so Jordan and Phil and I were in another industry Slack and he said, hey, who's interested in starting a podcast? And a few of us raised our hands and the Network network collective was born. So, yeah, we were super excited and it was a. It was a fun time, got to know a lot of people and I think it grew a lot more quickly than we expected and it was really really great. And then I'm also co-host from time to time on the hedge round table with Russ White still do that, and so you'll still hear me over there, at least on Roundtable episodes, and then here at the Cloud Gambit.

William: 3:10

Awesome. Yeah, it was really cool having Russ for the USNUA event. You know, because he doesn't live that far away, you know it's not too terrible of a drive and he, you know, he really owned it. He brought his new book. He was, you know, signing copies for folks and actually I was just at one of the folks that attended that. I was actually at their office and that person had his book propped up and it made his way through most of the book and said it was really good. So if you ever decide to listen to this, russ, you wrote a good book.

Eyvonne: 3:40

Awesome, awesome.

William: 3:42

Yeah, one of the many. Awesome, awesome, yeah, one of the many. So I guess, kind of going in, what we're going to do for this episode was just kind of like there's a lot of news lately, a ton of news From the economic, business side of things to cybersecurity, to AI monopolizing the news cycle like normal. So we had a few things that we both found interesting, that we thought, hey, you know, it'd be worth talking about is sort of our first episode, and we could have done an episode where we just talk about Yvonne the whole time. But everybody really knows. I mean, I think most of the audience knows who you are and they've seen you around and they know all about you.

Eyvonne: 4:23

So, yeah, Plus, you know, let's introduce our whole new co-host to make it all about her. Is, you know, not super excited about that approach? So we'll talk about the news.

William: 4:35

We have the links to each one of these articles in the show notes so you can go back and read for yourself and form your own opinion. So this is the first thing that I had on the docket. So, like in this article, it's basically from S&P Global, titled Tech M&A Outlook Survey a historical bust to boom reversal in 2024. So I guess, first off, I guess it's worth exploring why M&A you know, merger acquisition has really come to a screeching halt. I think the first thing that pops into my head anyway, is the economic uncertainty. So you had COVID-19.

William: 5:16

It created an unprecedented economic uncertainty, making it really hard for companies to predict future performance and revenues, and that leads to big challenges for businesses to value potential acquisition targets, obviously, so if you can't realize the value, you don't take the risk. And also inflation. So inflation leads to unpredictability in cost and prices, affecting, I guess, profitability forecasts, so rising costs and eroding purchasing power. It's going to impact the valuation models for these things, as you know, future cash flows become, I guess, like harder to estimate. So and another interesting thing about inflation is that it can lead to actually massive discount rates in certain circumstances and that's, you know, of course, going to reduce the present value of future earnings. So, that being said, you know larger companies that do tend to make acquisitions go into more of a survive and adapt mode instead of, you know, aggressive expansion mode. Any thoughts there, yvonne?

Eyvonne: 6:51

Well, I think there are a couple other things too, like we've seen a change in the DOJ's approach to mergers and acquisitions. Any thoughts there, yvonne? The sister to inflation is the rising interest rates, and that has also created a ton of economic uncertainty and tied up a lot of capital that organizations had for acquisitions. So I think it's just been it's been a climate where it has slowed down, and why this matters especially to folks in tech is that a lot of the exit strategy for our startups is M&A. So for most startups they are successful when they have been acquired by one of the big fish, and so a reduction in merger and acquisition activity also changes the landscape for our startups that we know and love, that are out there creating the newest technology that we all like to talk about. So there are some vast industry impacts for the fact that M&A activity is slowed.

William: 8:01

Yeah, and that article basically predicts a comeback for tech mergers and acquisitions. I think it's. Let me look 80% of dealmakers anticipate activity across the tech M&A market to accelerate in the coming year. Also, generative AI is set to drive deals in 2024. Color me surprised on that one.

Eyvonne: 8:24

AI is set to drive deals in 2024.

Eyvonne: 8:27

Color me surprised on that one. Well, ed, I think it'll be interesting to see how the generative AI activity plays out right. I think there are some really interesting use cases and I think especially the places that I've seen it most effectively used are, you know, like your social media management tools. Canva has really done a great job integrating generative AI into their existing offerings. We see, you know your creative tools doing that Adobe and those sorts of folks.

Eyvonne: 9:00

I think in other industries we're still waiting to see how that's going to emerge, especially in financial services, in health care, where it's not just a creative endeavor but the accuracy of the data that's created and generated is incredibly important. I think we're going to see a lot there. But I also think, like we are, I think we're just past the peak of the hype cycle. I don't think we're quite into the trough of disillusionment yet, but I think it'll be interesting to see where AI is when it emerges out of that trough. I don't think it's going away. I mean, I think anybody who believes it's going away just isn't paying attention, but I think it's still very, very, very early days. It's like iPhone 3G, early, and so we'll have to see where it goes. It's like pre-Uber, pre, you know know, almost even pre, like social media explosion kind of kind of days.

William: 10:08

So we'll see yeah, I don't believe it's going away either. It's just yeah, we've got. You know the wheel is turning, we've got to get in the turn. So yeah, and we're gonna. We'll talk about this later too. I've got an interesting, interesting article to go through with a pretty cool new Gen AI awesome thing. All right, yeah, so do you want to take us to the next article?

Eyvonne: 10:36

Sure, sure, Our next article is actually a post from justicegov and it is a great Florida man story. So the headline doesn't say that. The headline is man convicted of violent home invasion robberies to steal cryptocurrency. But of course, it is a Florida man story. So the article kicks off with a federal jury in Greensboro, North Carolina, convicted a Florida man today for his leading role in an international conspiracy to break into US citizens' homes, violently kidnap and assault them and steal their Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. So for all of you folks out there on social media bragging about your crypto you just created, you just made yourself a target.

Eyvonne: 11:29

I think this is a. This story highlights some of the unintended consequences and what we're seeing, in and in, first of all, the importance of crypto. First of all, the importance of crypto. Another quote from the article evidence introduced at trial reveals that St Felix, this Florida man, and his co-conspirators gained unauthorized access to their targets' email accounts and conducted physical surveillance prior to attempting the home invasion robberies. So not only were they aware that these folks had crypto, they had broken into their email, were stalking them both physically, in person and online, before breaking into their homes to steal their Bitcoin.

William: 12:17

So thoughts, William, yeah, very sophisticated, very sophisticated, no, and that's so. Yeah, that's a really good point. So they hit. This is a very sophisticated operation and it was spanning I think it was spanning multiple states.

Eyvonne: 12:31

Several states, like it wasn't just a one-off?

William: 12:33

Yeah, so they were. They were, they were growing, they were expanding, they were scaling this operation and, you know, very well planned, well executed, they gained access. They basically, you know, very well planned, well executed, they gained access. They basically, you know, hacked them digitally and then, you know, once they had all the information they needed, surveillance wise, they went in for the kill. And the crazy thing about this and I think what makes this unique, is you can't they couldn't have done this gained access to someone's premises and said, ok, log into your bank account and just transfer all this money right now and you're done and we're out of here. So you know, cryptocurrency is a little bit different. Where they can go in, they can make the person log into the account and they can empty all the crypto they have in their account in a matter of seconds, a few buttons gone.

Eyvonne: 13:21

And then it's gone To some address. You don't have any regulatory control. This is the other side of a lack of regulation and control. You have no recourse, right. Once your crypto is gone, you lose your wallet. You've transferred it to somebody else, somebody has obtained access to that. It's no longer under your control, it is gone.

Eyvonne: 13:47

And the analogy that keeps coming to mind and you'll have to forgive my Kentucky roots here, but we are. You know there's a severe opioid abuse epidemic here, where I'm from and where I live. I know several folks who have struggled with that. But you know, when you go to the dentist, you don't advertise that you've just had dental surgery, because they're going to send you home with a huge bottle of opioids that any reasonable person is not going to use and that makes you a target. Same thing here, right, like it's, it's again we. You know, we don't want to blame the victim, but we also want to lock our doors at night, right, so it's, it's this, it's.

Eyvonne: 14:29

It's a dangerous thing to to talk about these kinds of resources online, I think. But if this, this attack is pretty phenomenal and I don't mean that in a good way, but it's remarkable in that it was a multi-state organized effort to steal crypto. It says in the article here that St Felix and his co-conspirator assaulted, zip-tied and held the victim at gunpoint and threatened more violence against the victim and the victim's spouse, while other co-conspirators transferred more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cryptocurrency from the victim's account. So they were caught, tried and all of those good things, but at the same time, nobody wants to to experience that.

William: 15:25

Yeah, and there's a difference too. There are newer ways. If you are going to invest in crypto, or if that's on your, you don't have to buy the raw Bitcoin. You can go to your Coinbase's of the world and just buy straight up Bitcoin. Or you can go and you can talk to a financial planner and you can actually go with one of the spot ETFs that have been released recently, and that might be a more less risky way to do this. But yeah, just the point is just have common sense with this stuff. Don't advertise things that you shouldn't advertise. Don't make yourself a target, because there are bad actors everywhere. They're watching, they're scouting all the social medias, especially all the public social medias, and they will try to find you.

Eyvonne: 16:14

And your virtual life can absolutely invade meat space right. The bifurcation that we sometimes assume is a figment of our imagination.

William: 16:28

Yeah, 100% Scary stuff.

Eyvonne: 16:31

Yeah.

William: 16:33

That's my contribution today is the scary stuff. Well, didn't you send me this next one? I thought that you sent me the I think you did.

Eyvonne: 16:42

You put it on the list under your name, so you have to take credit for it.

William: 16:45

Yeah, yeah. So you know, platform engineering's becoming pretty hot.

Eyvonne: 16:55

Becoming.

William: 16:57

Becoming it is. It is huge. Yes, there we go um, and there's always a good. You know, usually like these myths about something. Articles are usually like puff pieces and stuff, but this one is actually really really good um, where you know it goes through in in these. So, having come from the enterprise space, I read each one of these and I'm just like, yes, it hits really hard because I've the same pattern. That sort of powers these myths is also historical patterns that powered other myths that you know sometimes enterprises get like hooked into and do you have some examples of what you think those myths are?

William: 17:42

So the first. Well, actually this is the second part of a two-part article, but these I thought were more interesting. So number six platform engineering eliminates the need for infrastructure teams, and we've seen this every okay, like automation has come along, okay, there's going to be no more network engineers or DevOps has come along and all this other stuff is going to go away. Did it ever go away? No, I mean the reality check, yvonne. Your infrastructure isn't going anywhere. Neither are the teams that manage it. They still have to deal with the usual chaos like scaling and troubleshooting and yada, yada yada. Platform engineering just means they can focus more on development and less on repetitive tasks, you know. So no pink slips for your, your infrastructure crew just yet. In fact, I'm seeing, like more hiring, um, for you know, skilled labor for infrastructure, um, ramping up again on the job market. There's a lot of opportunity out there. What do you think on that myth?

Eyvonne: 18:45

That's good to hear. And you and I were both talking with a software developer just in the last week who's taken a new role, and he was so pleasantly surprised, like hey, wait a minute. You mean, I don't have to figure out performance issues with the SQL server, I don't have to troubleshoot all of these things, like, my job is to just write code, and that was a refreshing change for him. And I think you know there are these models and cycles and thought patterns that come into the industry. I think the most recent one is DevOps. There was Agile and then there's DevOps, and there's nothing wrong with the DevOps philosophy.

Eyvonne: 19:32

But I think what we do often is we take these concepts and, instead of seeing them as a holistic system, we take pieces and parts out of them and then implement them in very small and ineffective ways. And then we're like, well, devops doesn't work, or platform engineering doesn't work, or you know, name your methodology, but ultimately it's because we didn't approach it as a system. And I think that's where the confusion happens. Like, oh well, we're going to create a DevOps team. Well wait, devops is a philosophy as much as it is a technical approach. Right, and unless you embrace it holistically, your mileage may vary, I think, and so platform engineering is another iteration of that, I think, and it's really how do we have the tools that we need to manage our infrastructure? Well, in a way that is more structured and holistic and based on code, because and a lot of it, I think, is a response to DevOps oh well, our developers can just do all this, right? Well, not not so fast, right, and I think that's that's what we're seeing here.

William: 20:51

They're all really good points. Yeah, I think the I don't know. I thought that we, I thought you know sort of as an industry like when we went through some of the overhype with how cloud was going to be used, along with the overhype about how DevOps is going to transform enterprises from top to bottom, like the whole hype thing, and then the sort of the steady trailing back to reality you think that the next big thing, when it comes, you would like learn some of these things, but it's still a hard thing. You know cultures. Again back to the importance of culture and looking in the past so you can learn from the past. Learning from the past it's, you know, hindsight's 20-20. It always remains to be 20-20, apparently it's really hard to learn from sometimes, especially with complicated technologies.

Eyvonne: 21:42

Well, I'm looking at myth nine on this article, which is you should apply platform engineering practices to every application. And this again is one of my hobby horses that you know. Every app doesn't need to be modernized and every tool doesn't apply equally to every application or every use case. I think the organizations that I see that are the most successful really understand their business. They understand how their technology maps to their business and then where it is most appropriate for them to optimize and apply modern practices. And that has to do with how their organization, how their business, obtains revenue. You know, show me the money right, like what applications generate revenue and where does optimizing create value? Because if you optimize a process that you run once a year and you spend a significant amount of engineering effort on that, you've not done much for the business.

Eyvonne: 22:56

And I think sometimes we want this easy button, holistic, like how do I, you know, how do I fix all the things? Ah, now they're saying platform engineering is the way, and especially for early in career folks who haven't been through a few cycles of these, it's easy to get swept up into that. But once you've seen a couple of these cycles blow through, what you learn is there is no magic, there is no secret sauce. It's really. You just got to pay attention to your business, understand the tools and apply the right tools in the right place.

William: 23:35

Yeah, those are great points. Let me try and summarize exactly what you just said in a way, so like. What you're saying basically is hey, let's not get carried away, let's focus on high level tasks and areas, you know, causing devs lots of headaches. Don't try to platform engineer everything at once. Do it where it fits, or else you're just going to make a big mess, you know. Think about the depth and breadth, you know, and avoid that temptation to fix everything in an eight-month enterprise program that has, you know, a few million in funding, kind of exercise.

Eyvonne: 24:09

Yeah, and I don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying that platform engineering is bad or wrong or you know. Just another shiny thing. I think it is an iteration, it is a model that we need to understand and that we need to apply appropriately. So this is not me being the curmudgeon like oh yeah, this is just another one of those newfangled things that's going to go by the wayside. I don't think so, but don't believe it is the panacea for all the things, because there is no such thing. There is no panacea 100%.

William: 24:47

That kind of ties right into number 10. All cloud services map to platform engineering and I would say just this is actually a really interesting section of the article I would say just because you're using a cloud service doesn't mean you're doing platform engineering. Obviously, integration, you know, and enhancing the developer experience are key, you know. So don't confuse adopting cloud services with actual platform engineering practices. You know it's all about how you use the thing, not just you know using the thing. Any thoughts?

Eyvonne: 25:24

You know, I, well, I, you know, and, and it's, it's, it's, it's, this is a, this is a Google cloud article, right? So if anybody were, we're going to be incentivized to say, hey, platform engineer, all the cloud things, Right. But I appreciate the balanced approach. But also, you know, as we think through the list here they a lot of this is not new or not brand new concepts, it's just combining them in into a discipline. We're now calling platform engineering like developer centric approach. We've been talking about that for a long time, since the the days of the Agile manifesto and then migrating on into DevOps, Automation and infrastructure as code also not a new thing. We're just trying to codify that.

Eyvonne: 26:14

Security compliance been around forever. Observability is what we would have called monitoring and logging back in the day, but observability is a whole other discipline that's coalescing around. How do we know what's going on in our environment, what data is important, how do we know what to measure? And then how do we take action on the things that we're measuring? And then continuous improvement right, I mean those are the five tenets listed here. None of those, I think, are original to platform engineering. We're just combining all of those into a new discipline and creating a new mental model for how to think about running our platform teams in a cloudified world where it's not the physical infrastructure, is not there to guide our processes the way it was a couple decades ago, Right.

William: 27:19

That's a really good you know. That just kind of reminds me of a conversation I just had with someone like maybe about a week ago. Actually, kind of ties into this other hold on. There's something in here about cost here it is. So introducing platform engineering will dramatically impact staffing costs.

William: 27:41

So I was actually just talking to someone the other day that was just kind of. He was venting to me a little bit about how the company that he worked for, you know really bit off on platform engineering and they said, hey, we're going to have a new vertical within their company about platform engineering. They're going to hire all new people to own platform engineering and like it was this whole structure rigid thing. And then there was timelines with everything to platform different components of different things for their company.

William: 28:11

And when I think about that, also tying back to what you just said, you don't need to hire a whole new army. It's about a, a reskill. You're almost, you're almost really reskilling your current devops folks and you know, voila, you know they sort of become your new platform engineering team. Well, I guess that would be one way to do it, but it's an investment that pays off by making your, your existing resources that you have today much more efficient. So, no, you don't need to hire, build out a new, special, shiny thing to show that you're today much more efficient. So no, you don't need to hire, build out a new, special, shiny thing to show that you're doing a thing and hire brand new people to do that thing, to make this thing work.

Eyvonne: 28:51

It's not one of those things Well, and I love what it says in the article here because it says when introducing platform engineering, an anti-pattern would be to expect a reduction of operation staff or developers out of the gate. Retraining existing teams works well because they're already familiar with your business needs, and I'm going to tell the emperor he has no clothes here In that a lot of times what happens when you're trying to we're going to create a platform engineering team. What is happening is we're saying our existing teams aren't functioning well. We've got people that don't want to grow and mature, and so we're just going to start a whole new team over here instead of dealing with the problems that we already have.

Eyvonne: 29:42

Right, we're not going to deal with either lack of accountability for our technical staff. We're not going to deal with the cultural issues that we have. We are not going to be really clear about what expectations are. We're just going to go burn the old thing down and start a whole new thing, and that is a recipe for just recreating the existing problems that you have in another organization and creating more bloat that makes it actually harder to fix the problems that you have Not technical, but that's the reality in so many of our organizations Like, yeah, we're just going to oh, this is the new hotness, we're going to go do that. We're going to ignore all of the stuff that we got and pretend like those problems are just going to go away.

William: 30:36

And that's how technical debt blows up. That's right, and then, a few years later, you're like those problems don't just go away ever. Layer upon layer upon layer, since you installed those first servers back in the 90s.

Eyvonne: 30:52

Those floppy those 30 Windows 3.1 for work groups. Floppy disks into that old server.

William: 31:00

I still got those NT servers out there somewhere. Yeah, those were the days. So, yeah, that's a great, great, yeah, great perspective there. Um, and I, I guess we can go on to the the last, the last thing I had, you know, it's always, you know, let's save the best for last, and gen ai is just such a beautiful, uh, just it's so beautiful in all of its glory, so let me share. I thought this was really interesting and I'm actually going to share it. Different, let's see. So let's actually look at what. So I'll do a little, I guess, an overview first. So this next article was from tech radar. Um, it was titled forget sora, runway is the ai video maker coming to blow your mind? So runway ai initially raised 50 million in a Series C round back in late 2022. But last month they actually extended that round with an additional $141 million from investors including Google, nvidia, salesforce Ventures, on top of their existing investors.

Eyvonne: 32:19

That's a lot of cash.

William: 32:20

So that is a lot of cash. But with what you know, with what I'm about to show you, you're going to understand the computing necessities for making some of this happen. But you know, ultimately the big buzz was they released their Gen 3 Alpha video maker, which basically creates this hyper-realistic videos from text prompts, you know, and kind of like what we've seen with Sora. But I think one of the big differences with Runway is you can actually edit existing videos, you can make augmentations to. It's kind of like what you come to expect from your chat prompt, like your chat GPTs or your Geminis, where you can say, okay, yeah, I like that response, Maybe tweak it. Or I have this code, Well, I want to add more onto it. So you can kind of do that with the video. But check this out, Yvonne, this is video generated from this Runway AI. Like absolutely crazy.

Eyvonne: 33:18

All right, and so, for those listening, we see text and clouds in the background, and now we see a stone.

William: 33:25

Somewhere I want to take a vacation.

Eyvonne: 33:28

And now we're in the desert and space. Okay, the ocean.

William: 33:37

I mean, can you imagine typing in whatever you want and getting this quality of video?

Eyvonne: 33:44

yeah, it's, uh it. It reminds me of, like the soarin ride at disney world, a lot of that right, the early, the early bits, and so now we're seeing cityscapes and very, very realistic video of all these scenes combined yeah, insects climbing into tunnels, beautiful constellationsations, trees it's just, it's gorgeous.

William: 34:07

I mean it looks it's a cinematic. It's just cinematically beautiful and looks real. Like you can't tell that. You know you can't tell that this is generated by AI. It's pretty amazing. You know you can't tell that this is generated by by AI. It's pretty amazing. I just think of, like, what is the impact? I mean, I'm sure creators you know what is the impact to creators with this stuff in the future. You know, because it's getting so good. It's just, yeah, I mean a lot of folks make their money by cutting video, putting things together, I mean even generating songs, like some of the music you can generate with AI. And how does this play into royalties? And like just there's just so many things where my mind goes with this. It's just crazy.

Eyvonne: 34:57

Yeah, well, I think it's going to be interesting. I think there will be like folks are going to have to figure out how to pay for it. Right, because the compute to generate those sorts of things is not cheap. You know the GPUs, the compute, the power is really. I think you know we're discovering is going to be our rate limiting factor even more than the chips limiting factor even more than the chips.

Eyvonne: 35:23

But I think, by nature, humans are creative beings and anytime a technology comes along and subsumes what used to be a very human and creative thing, I think what you find is that people go on to create new things and different things, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. I think you know. For me, one of the four worst examples is architecture. Right, if you go to Europe and you see the architecture where it took hundreds or hundreds of years to build a magnificent structure, the hand crafting and the attention to detail. We've lost that in modern architecture, but what we have now is the ability to create spaces on a scale that we could not, you know, several hundred years ago.

Eyvonne: 36:27

So I think, yes, is it going to change the nature of human creativity? Probably. Does it mean that humans are going to be any less inherently creative? I don't think so. I think we'll just be creative differently. And because we don't yet know what that world is going to look like or what the revenue streams are going to be, it's a little disconcerting. I think it will all shake out, but I do think it's a whole genre there, and until now the voice to text capability has been so robotic that it's not been pleasant to listen to, and so you still have a human reading audiobooks. I think we're approaching a day where that changes and probably only the most dramatic cinematic novels are going to have human readers. I think all that is coming Right, and I do think this changes things, but I think it's just different. I think we'll. It's yet to determine whether it's better or worse. I have other thoughts, but I've rambled for a long time.

William: 37:51

Now those are all. Yeah, those are all really good points and it's definitely we can speculate all day, but nobody and I love your sort of glass half full approach to this, because a lot of times when you talk to people about this, it is doom and gloom. Just oh, they like there's so much hate thrown at ai right now machine learning, and I think as technologists we have to be cognizant of, just like when automation came along, just like when cloud came along. Hey, if we want to you know, technology is ever changing if we want to keep in this turn and we want to keep ourselves relevant, it's not like we have to go become a data scientist and like like be the person behind the curtains, but we should really know where the tools fit in, how they can augment and enhance our day-to-day workflows and what. What should we learn? So you know, sort of making that manifest of things like, okay, I should really learn this, this is on the list, and I should really learn this, this is on the list.

William: 38:49

But it doesn't mean you have to be a data scientist.

Eyvonne: 38:51

Well, and one of the ways I think about it there is a line that defines what's high value work and what's low value work. That line's going to move right. So if the work that you were doing that was high value work is now going to become a low value work, you need to find something different to do. That's the objective reality of the place in which we find ourselves, and that's been the reality since the beginning of time. I mean, you can go back and see articles when the personal computer was released and there were spreadsheets, which spreadsheets have changed the way we work on a level that I don't even know that AI is going to like, if you think about it. And you know, there were articles that these personal computers are going to. You know, take away our jobs and they're going to usher in a two or three hour work week.

Eyvonne: 39:46

No, that's not what happened. They just changed the nature of the work. So, like, cool your jets, look around and and yes, the, the, the puck is moving. Okay, you can move too, and I think that is what I want people to take away. It's like, yes, it's an inflection point, so move with it, right, and I think that is the place in which we find ourselves.

William: 40:18

Yeah, I'm glad you used the word. Puck is moving in that.

Eyvonne: 40:22

Yeah, well, I could have. I could have gone back to the whole who moved my cheese book from several years ago from you know, two or three decades ago now. But I know you're a hockey fan, and so I'm here for you.

William: 40:34

Awesome. Thank you so much. That was great.

Eyvonne: 40:37

I really, I truly appreciate it when you said that it just yeah, all the all, the all the feels, yeah, and and maybe it makes you feel a little bit, better about your investment in travel hockey.

William: 40:50

I don't know if I can have it. My only saving grace there is I don't have two in travel hockey. If if that was the case, then I'd be going. I, yeah, I'd be taking on a third. You know a second and third job, probably.

Eyvonne: 41:01

Yeah, we, we have four kids and have never been a travel sports family. Now our youngest is more. I don't know why in our 40s we now have our athlete, but we'll see what happens with that one. But yeah, we have not been bold enough to embark on the travel sports journey. So props to you for that bravery.

William: 41:26

Your life is much less stressful because of it. I can tell you that, okay, all right, good stuff. Well, thank you for coming on and thank you for agreeing to co-host with me. This has been fun. Yeah. Yeah, I'm looking forward to many fun. You know, we have some really cool guests slated to come on.

Eyvonne: 41:49

Yeah, I'm excited about some of our guests. I'm excited about a conversation we're going to have about hardware versus software. That's on the docket and, yeah, happy to be here.

William: 42:02

All right, Awesome, this is great and I think I'll you know, everybody knows where to find you, Yvonne, but I'm going to put all the socials in there anyway for everything. So, again, all the links we talked about, they'll be in the show notes. So thank you very much.

Eyvonne: 42:19

Please, and I'm doing some more writing, so if there's any topics you want to hear about from me, ping me on Twitter or LinkedIn it's probably the best ways to find me but if there's something that you want to know about, I would love to hear. I'm always up for a good writing prompt.

William: 42:37

So yeah, Right on. All right, everybody. Have a wonderful week, Enjoy the rest of your summer. Hopefully it's not too humid where you're at.