Techstrong Gang – December 23, 2024

Hey everyone. What did you do this year? We are gonna tell you what we did.

You're watching Textron Gang. Hello everyone. Happy Monday.

It is the day before Christmas Eve, not the day before Christmas, but the day before Christmas Eve for those of you keeping score. It's also two days before the start of Hanukkah. We're very excited here.

I got my lot, lot kits ready to cook. Um, and this is gonna be what I hope our last Textron gang of 2024. Now, there's something to be said about that, right?

We, we started Textron Gang. I guess it was about nine months ago. Mike Vard, wasn't it?

Yeah, it feels that way. Yeah. No, it, it's been going on a while.

And it was an idea where I just felt like we needed, we needed a kickstart for every day's Textron tv uh, show, Right? Well, I think you had this idea two years ago. It just took us to, Yeah, it just took, you know, sometimes it takes longer to these things to come to fruition, which is the name of my boat.

But, um, but it's here. And you know what, I, I'll be honest with you, it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Because what I didn't realize is, in addition to giving you all a peek inside the depravity of our minds here at, at Techstrong and what we think about, you know, in the world in general, not just tech, it's also been cathartic for me, especially this crazy year.

And I'm not gonna get into the politics and the elections if we don't have to, but it, it's been cathartic. It gives me an outlet to, to vent, to say what I feel. And I don't have to write it on Facebook.

I don't have to defriend people or any of that stuff. So, personally, I, for that reason, I personally love it. But beyond that, we've had the chance to have people like Guy Coer and Tracy Reagan and John Schwartz, and John Willis and Tracy Martin.

And, you know, the list goes on. Tracy Bannon, hope Winslow, so many, so many gang members who regularly come on here. And you know what?

Universally, Steve t's another one, Steve Foskett. You know what I hear? I love doing the gang.

I love doing text on gang. We laugh, we talk about interesting things, and I'm glad it's become a place that people like to come to. I, I hope that you guys out there enjoy watching it as much as we enjoy doing it, doing it.

So with that being said, what we thought we would do this year, or this, this show being it's the last one of the year, is rather than talking about any timely topic, it's the day before Christmas, we're gonna talk about what we thought were our favorite things this year. Whether it was something we discussed on the gang or something in the tech world that, of an event we went to or what have you. So I've assembled, you know, some of the core gang folks here.

Let me introduce them to you. First of all, I, I mentioned his name earlier. He is the, uh, one of the co-founders of VI and a Future Analyst, sorry.

Yeah. He's from the Bronx. So we got two people from the Bronx here on the panel.

You don't see that too often, guy Courier. Hey guy, how are you? Really good.

Trying to work my way up from depravity to derangement at the moment. Well, That's something very good. I'm really happy to be here.

Hey, now there's you go for 2025. Better than Deplorable guy, you know. Well, that was me last year, So I thought You left.

So you guy, look, the arrows pointing up, right? You, you got from deplorable, the depravity on your way to hopefully the arrangement. Mm-hmm.

I can't imagine what deal you'll have for 2026, but good for you. Uh, welcome, man. It's been a pleasure.

Also joining us from, uh, from the hills of New Mexico. She, she, you know what, this, this person, she's a gem. I mean, she's always here for tech strong whenever we need a speaker or, or a voice or to bounce stuff off of.

And she co-host tech strong women. She's also the CEO of Deploy hub who, and she, we never really talk about Deploy hub a lot, but Tracy Reagan. Hey Tracy, thanks for being here and thanks for being you.

Oh, thank you Alan. And thank you for having had me for the last year on Textron Gang. It is fun.

We have had some hilariously fun conversations. Yes. As soon as I'm done, I always go and talk to Steve about, you wouldn't believe what we talked about today.

Yeah. That, that, and that's what makes It fun. I really enjoy it.

Good. Thank you. And we appreciate you.

And then what, what happened to the guitars, Mitchell? What'd you go corporate on? Me?

You know, like I did a little painting and I painted the whole room green, and now this background pops up, you know, it's like, Wow. Oh goodness. What happened?

I kinda like the guitars. But anyway, he's, uh, also a future analyst, VP DevOps and, uh, analyst. I own Mitch Ashley.

Hey, Mitchell. How are you? Hey, good to be here.

You know, it's a good Textron gang when as soon as we're done, I leave the room and email or with Slack, or go talk to my wife, Jody, say, you gotta watch tomorrow Show. You won't believe What happened. Yeah.

You don't, we won't believe what we did this today. And that's what makes it fun. Anyway, thank you Mitchell.

And then joining, you know, he, he's kind of the, he's the editorial guiding lighthouse of, of Textron Gang goes round and round with that spotlight. But he, he sets the agenda day in and day out, even when he's not on. He's our chief content officer, Mike Ard.

Hey, Mike. How are you? I'm well.

I I didn't realize that. I'm also your therapist now, so There you go. You know what, this, I think we're all Alan's therapist.

We should, we should submit it, you know, submit it to the insurance company. I've got coverage for this. Um, I think we've got coverage for this.

But anyway, guys, 2024, what a year it's been. Uh, when We look, as you look over the landscape of 2024, I don't think there's any doubt that the Textron gang idea of the year, 'cause it's not just a person is ai or maybe it is a person, is ai. This, I think 2024 will be the year of Gen ai.

Um, it's so much about what we talk about here on Techstrong. It's so much about what we talk about when we get together at conferences with people. It, it just seems to suck so much of the oxygen out of every conversation as well as a good portion of every dollar that's being invested in tech today.

Right. So, you know, obviously that that's the story for 2024, I think the big story. But let's hear, what are, what were some of your favorite highlights, whether they be, as I said, from gang conversations or, uh, um, events you've been to or what have you?

Who wants to go first? Mitch, I'll jump in with one. Um, it, it, it's somewhat of an obvious one, but I think it was momentous for a couple of reasons.

And that's the crowd, CrowdStrike outage and the, uh, you know, widespread outage. So yes, it was very big. It affected a lot of companies.

Um, people were down for several hours, if not days. But why it, why it stands out to me is for a couple of reasons. One is it wasn't a security incident.

It was a, it was a DevOps deploy software deployment issue and quality testing quality. Um, you know, and how do you control software that gets out, you know, beyond the gates that you need to stop deploying when there is an issue. Um, I think the other is about it is it demonstrated that there's some responsibility on the receiver end too, right?

You can't blame everything on the, the producer of software putting out an air air piece of software. You know, you know what happens, stuff happens. And you have to take some responsibility also to be able to respond when you get some bad, bad release, bad code, bad something.

And I can't say, I'm not saying you can prevent everything, but it brought to me, really elevated the CD part of CICD and the importance of not just pushing out code, but being able to respond as you push out code and do it intelligently. Yeah. Yeah.

I wish we had spent more time thinking through how the economy impacts it in the last year. And I think if you look post-election, I look at the election as a symptom of that economic conversation. And in addition to a lot of people being outta work, there's just not as many projects going on last year as we would've liked because of interest rates and things that are impacting us on a macro level.

And I think that theme is gonna continue in 2025. I think the economy's gonna be a bigger, bigger conversation. And, uh, a lot of the things, even ai, we are heavily enthusiastic about AI because it's more cost effective and theoretically makes us more productive.

But we are, we seem to be under a lot more economic pressure lately than I remember in years past. It's about the economy. Stupid, Right.

Has been always will be, I guess. Yeah. But it's like that Geico commercial where the, the kid says, she says, oh, you're gonna save money on Geico.

And, uh, he, she, the mother says, yeah, it's just, you know what the economy at all the sun says Western from economy, and nobody can question. Well, that's, you Know, they hear All the time. I didn't realize we were gonna talk about the current state of American education.

They must be gone. That charter school, charter school kids, oh Man. Well, the kid had already Know was, you know, there's something true about that, that commercial that, uh, and and The interesting thing to me about the economy this year has been, and I don't think I really realized this until you just brought it, Mike, is that, um, when you look at the broad macroeconomic indicators, the famous macroeconomic indicators, although unemployment has been going up this year, it's only been going up slightly.

It's still pretty low. Um, and, uh, growth has been good. The famous soft landing, you know, I, I'm not gonna belabor this point, um, but, um, I know people in general have been unhappy with the economy, but the economy overall, Wages have kept up.

The, the metrics of the economy is we have the strongest economy in the, in the world right now. And, and the metrics Bear it out. Yeah.

It's, It's, but here's the contrast. Yeah. Here's the contrast that's been exactly, Alan, but here's the contrast that's been interesting to me, which is that I think tech as a whole, or at least the largest tech companies, seem to have been laying people off left, right, and left right and center for a couple of years now.

And that has been a weird shift to me. There are more people I know, um, who've worked in tech, who have been laid off, um, who are looking for work, who gone through extended periods of work, then really, I remember since, you know, the Great recession, at the same time as those macro economic indicators show growth. And that's a little weird to me.

I felt like when, when AI became an excuse to do this, all of a sudden IBM Dell and like, uh, on and on were, were laying folks off with that excuse. But we all know that that's really, I think they were waiting to do it. It's, it's, I it's an unexplained thing to me, but a really interesting contrast.

Well, what I think it is, guy is, is quite frankly the tech job market. The tech market, the tech job market has been detached from re the reality of the economy for a very long time, for a very, very long time. com bubble, right?

Because I think even during 2008 and oh nine, the great recession, tech tech came out of it relatively unscathed, relatively unscathed, right? You had a lot of great tech companies that blew up in oh 8, 0 9, right? Think about that.

Amazon Web Services, Palo Alto, I can name a bunch. Because traditionally when the economy goes down, that's when you get that new growth tech companies that lead that lead out. So we didn't have as high unemployment in oh eight and oh nine in tech as, as the general pop did, right?

We, we've, we've always, it's almost been like a weird thing where we're, we're detached from those macro economic conditions. Because in bad, right? I was in security in oh eight and oh nine, no one ever said, oh, damn it, the economy's in the crap cancel security.

You know? No, they couldn't do that. So, well, let's face it, we haven't dealt with inflation since the seventies, right?

And we haven't had inflation. That's new. That's, that's a whole new factor.

And it, we're still filling that, you know, water, food or whatever. That being said, and again, I don't mean to be coarse or cress or unfeeling, but you know what, COVID was a big fat f*****g, excuse me, my language. Covid was a big fat party for the tech industry, right?

Money was being thrown around like water. com era, we didn't have valuations and money being thrown around like we did during Covid in Tech. I, it was, but We've seen, we've seen no, we've seen no mediation since Covid passed in it spending, if anything, Thanksgiving.

No. The IT spending, It spending's been stable or growing, and yet the vendors, It's like consumer confidence to that. It's consumer confidence to the reality of economic metrics is the shift to value.

But The, but that, I feel like that that money being spent during covid, a lot of it was just to keep ahead. We were shifting from a, No, it wasn't, we accelerated digital transformation projects that might've been five years out we're done in that year. Mm-hmm.

We hired people like, you know, we were, we, like we had pickup trucks in front of Home Depots, right? No, I, and we had field work to do. I mean, the amount of money that was, the amount of people that were hired, the amount of money that was spent, Mitch, you know, Mike, you know, you hear a tech drunk.

Yeah. We were taking people down to the keys. I gave out two bonuses a year.

We were rolling in dope. We were fat drunk and stupid. I would just point out that the metrics though, are off, right?

And the unemployment statistics that the Department of Labor puts out, or, you know, any kind of, well, you Know, who you sound like Kinda look into that, and they're shaky as can be. And even the inflation rate that we track, you know, the basket of goods is kind of like, really, it doesn't really reflect what people actually do every day. So I think that's the reason a lot of people are unhappy or uncomfortable because The price of eggs go up because of inflation.

Or is there, is there profits being taken there? Again, a little bit of both. No, there's a bird flu problem.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. But again, it's separate and apart from, I, I think the tech job market guy and, and the blow up in VC money, 'cause look, when the VC mons come out, it's like taking the air out of the balloon of the tech market, right?

And so there's two reasons there. Number one, interest rates killed vc, the whole VC model vc the VC model's based on free money almost. And two, once that happened, someone had to pay, someone had to answer for santino, Carlos, we, we, we spent money like crazy.

And, and, and, you know, it had to come back. What goes up? It must come down.

It had to come back down to earth. Um, now, quite frankly, I think what's happened, guy, to your point, is the real economic metrics, not, not consumer confidence, right? Tech came down, the metrics came up and you know, at some point we passed that, you know, that thing.

And, and hopefully it'll align going forward. But, you know, I think the reason we had the election results that we had in this country is the perception was the economy wasn't good. And let's blame the immigrants and let's blame, you know, whoever.

So, but the tech economy, I think is still fundamentally, I mean, we still, you know, we dictate the future tech is still healthy. If we don't do legislations or do stupid things to kill it here in this country, it'll remain, I'll remain. So, but, you know, I think that's where that is.

Well, I think tech's gonna gonna change and, and, and where we find tech will change. I think one of the interesting thi interesting things for 2024 for me was gadgets becoming medical devices. Um, as a person with hearing issues who I've had hearing, uh, issues all my life, the idea of having a, a, a $200 pair of earbuds that I can use here on my computer to talk to you guys and use as hearing aids elsewhere is a big shift.

It is huge for pe people with hearing issues. I mean, when I first started having to get hearing aids, I was spending $5,000 and I had to go only to a doctor to, to help to get them. Now with new changes and new, new, um, approvals through the FDA, apple could give me hearing aids in my earbuds.

I, you know, I just played with this on my phone the other day, but it's telling me my air budds, my air pods are not fitting right. I think I gotta put smaller thingies on, but yes, you're right. You're a hundred percent right.

It's, it's crazy. There is some kind of gadget, old gadget gadget ian or something going on. I remember Tracy like 10 years ago, maybe a little longer, Mike, remember we covered this, the, like, what was it called?

The internet of your body or something like, or no body, uh, something area Network. Meaning Personal area network. That's what it was, man.

Where now you've got all these things that can communicate with each other, that's just starting. Oh, no. I mean, look, I wear my, my ring, my, I, yeah, yeah.

The, the, the thing is, is it's democratizing healthcare in a way. Yeah. Right?

Not just rich people can have hearing aids now, right? Um, you can, you, you can test your sleeping now with devices. Have, you can at home.

You can, you can check, check your, your, your blood pressure and your, your and Your glucose, Your cardiac results. So I tell my wife, this changes our lives. It really does.

It does. The 2024 offered a lot of that. I, I tell my wife regularly that all males have hearing problems, so therefore you can't yell At me.

It's selective elective. They Have listening problems. They don't have hearing problems.

Yes, there's a lot of jokes, but ask my wife, I'm gonna stay away from that. So, So Go ahead, trace. So for me, that was, you know, that, that affected impacted my life.

And as you all know, who've watched the Gang, and I've been on, and we talk about ai, I always say AI sucks until it makes my life easier. And technology kind of is the same way for me. I want something that makes my life easier.

I wanna create software that makes somebody else's life easier. And that was a huge change. I mean, so many, uh, you know, I would love to, if I had some extra money this year, I would buy a bunch of, uh, bunch of air pods and take 'em to a, a, a retirement home where people didn't think they could afford them and don't drink.

Great. The other thing it does is it makes it okay to wear them, because it's part of our st it's Part our culture. Culture.

Now, people bo into the music, right? Put them on and just go like this and you're good. Yes.

Right? And people won always. Either they're on the phone.

That's, I though I think of what's happening in ai. It's today's AI products are tomorrow's features, right? We, we just have such a pace of new things coming out.

I'm just writing some analysis on AI and development and coming out with this new feature. All of the, all of the, uh, whether it's GitHub and Microsoft and AWS and Google, they're sort of all racing down the same path. And one introduces this.

The other ones do and charge for it today. Maybe it's an extra 10 bucks tomorrow, it'll be free as we up, up and up the AI bar, uh, we're in this kind of, uh, arms race for ai, who's gonna dominate what. But right now we're kind of creating AI commodities that I think will be just a free part of where we work.

More things will get bundled into your Google Copilot subscription or into your Microsoft 365 copilot or whatever. Maybe someday you don't even pay for that. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we can. C Cs is coming up next week, so we should be seeing around. It should be interesting to see what's there.

So, so this goes back, if you go back to predict 2024, we've got Predict 2025 coming up January 9th. Don't miss it. We've got some great stuff going on that day.

But you go back to predict 2024, we are, we were talking about ai then it was, it was the story Predict 2024 was about ai. It was an AI future. And the, I remember my session from Predict 2024, it was about we're techies, all five of us aren't here, are techies.

So Mitchell's talking about AI and development, you know, and, and how it's gonna affect the tech world. And I said in 20, at Predict 2024, that in my lifetime, I've seen a lot of tech revolutions, you know, really big technology events, the cloud, DevOps, um, windows back in the day, right? Windows we moved from like command line interfaces to graphical interfaces.

Um, you know, think about some of the great tech things that have so blown up our little tech world. But then there are things that go beyond. Then there's tech that goes beyond tech.

There's tech that is civilization changing the internet. Think of life before the internet. A lot of people alive today can't, can't think of, of life before the internet, right?

One of the reasons I love doing this show is everyone on here seems to be of an age. We don't, I think you gotta have an a a RP card to get in. But, um, but think about life before the internet, right?

Think about life before your cell phone. Could you imagine people couldn't get ahold of you for most of the time. You gotta wait till he comes home.

I'll leave him a message. I frankly don't remember how we arranged to do anything. I mean, I know we did.

Yeah. We used to go to movies with my friends. I dunno, that stuff I didn't, I'll confess to being a little nostalgic for those days sometimes.

Okay, yeah, me too, me too. But, so, you know, these are things that change the fabric of human life. And I thought in 2024 that AI is one of those things.

It transcends just the technology bubble we live in and is going to change human life. Now, we did a little segment on Friday show. It was about an article I think John Schwartz wrote You, Tracy, uh, guy you weren't on, was an article.

John Schwartz wrote about, uh, an AI Santa, right? They've got Santa now that's in ai that'll talk to kids like real. And we took it to another level about an article I had come across, and I sent to Mike Ard about ai, loved ones who've passed away.

There's a company that will take a thousand questions over three sessions and spend a couple of hours letting you answer these questions. They record it all, they record your video, they, they record your voice. And when you are gone, that AI lives on, it's, it's, it's you, it's you talking.

It's the, your voice. And it's, the answers it gives is based upon the LLM that it created from you answering those thousand questions. I went home yesterday and spoke to Bonnie, my wife about it.

And I don't often do that, Mitchell, you say, Jodi, you can't wait to, I don't tell Bonnie go watch this, because, you know, she just thinks all my friends are nerdy, geeky people and, and she doesn't know what we're talking about. Uh, and we are. But, but that being said, we spent two hours talking about this last night.

You know, I told him Mike Ard had a visceral reaction that no, that, that's just interferes with the grieving process. It's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong. That's all he wanted to, that's, that was my Lisa Martin said, I haven't heard my dad's voice in so long.

I'd do anything to do that, John. Or maybe it was, Mitch said, wouldn't it be great if you had your ancestors like this? So you go back to your grandpa or your great grandpa and say, why'd, why did you move to Houston from the Bronx?

Why, why'd you come to America? Mm-hmm. What was, you know, and get these kinds of things you're talking about living beyond the, your life.

Now, it's not you, it's an AI representation of you. But those, these are the kinds of things that freak me the heck out, right? These are the kinds of things where I'm like, you know, because I I, I had very mixed emotions because I, I have trouble dealing with loss and stuff like that.

Um, but if this thing were to become norm, if these kinds of things were to become norm, what does that, what's that mean for us? Who's right? I think that is the coolest thing I've heard.

I wanna do it. Do. There you go.

Here's The, here's here's another shoot. Look, hold on. Electric sw we to look, we love to look through photographs when somebody has passed away.

You know, it's our, it's our way of re remembering them. And I, I go through that every year when my nieces and nephews come over, I like to sit down with them, with the, with the books and go through the pictures. If we have, uh, home videos, home movies, I show those.

Yeah, me too. So this is just a modern way, this is just a modern way of having Memories. But this takes it to a whole nother level.

It takes it to an amazing level. I I think it's an amazing, um, application and yay, that's my favorite AI to, uh, tool or AI solution so far this year. I love that.

That's Good for you, Mike. So here's the issue, right? My father, the person he was in 1975, is not nearly the same person he was in 1990.

And if I only have a 1990 representation of him, and I start asking him questions about things in the year 2020 or 25 or 27, that representation doesn't grow and evolve in the time, right? It's just him stuck in a, in a, in a time window. So, you know, it's not really Well engaged.

Well, I don't know that. So let me, let me play devil's advocate. Mm-hmm.

Let's say you start doing it the day your first child's born, and every year you do an update, or every three years you do an update and remember the, the stuff that you put in. It's like any other, uh, re or, or, or SLM, it could still pull Then it's no longer him. It's some extension of him.

Well, that and that, and maybe, and maybe that's, maybe that's what people want. I don't know. I don't know.

But I'm telling you that this concept ignited me. We had such a, a debate and discussion about Ivan and Bonnie and I last night that it really, and I'm like, look, this is one small example of what we can do with ai, but man, there this things we're gonna do here that I know, I don't, I don't think this whole, I don't think this whole 2024 retrospective should be about ai, but it should probably be mostly about ai. And, and you're reminding me of one of the, one of the, the, the, um, critical experiences for me this year related to ai, which was Google Cloud next.

Mm-hmm. Google. And the reason being that, um, I mean, I've been working on and talking about and, and writing about AI for, for a very long time.

And, um, you know, I, uh, I knew what a large language model was. 5, like everybody else. What I did not realize, what I did not fully realize to Google Cloud next was the extent to which simulated continuation of input data, which is what generative AI would be, was so pervasive and helpful in so many ways.

It's far beyond the lar large language model. And I'm not talking about code because going into Google, Google has done a phenomenal job in, uh, code generation, the co-generation type of generative ai. I'm talking about managing Google Cloud storage, which might, you might think of as a recommendation engine, but really as a large language, not a large sort, uh, generative AI model applied to a set of data inputs that have nothing to do with language whatsoever, or creative or imagery or any of that sort of thing.

And that it was like the scale spell for my eyes. And I was like, wow, any sufficiently large data set can be used to train the simulation of a, of, of new data from a stream of old data. And once you abstract your way out of it being language or art or music or any of that sort of thing, then you're like, I, the, the, you know, the world's your oyster in terms of applications of it.

Yeah. And That's Mike, this point guy. Yeah.

I I mean, that's what you're dealing with. I don't know. Yeah.

I'm calling my lawyer right after this and adding a little clause to the will that says, do not AI resuscitate, Don't laugh. You might That was A joke. That was a joke.

The AI be reality in a couple of years. That's gonna be something that the state lawyers are gonna be talking to clients about. Are you Not my, like that was Litigated.

Yeah. Like, okay. Before we, before We run out of time, I have to say what impacted me the most this year?

Go ahead. You know, I don't, don't think I ever have, I have not yet gotten over the lampshades At, at Black Hat from Palo Alto. I have not gotten over Personally.

That Was probably the biggest, I have not gotten over it. That was shocking. That was like, Who are You thinking?

I am still feeling angry about? It's the biggest to this day. I'm still p****d off at them.

Yes. I cannot get over it. I cannot forgive them that, that, and it's bothering me that I can't let it go.

That was, I would give them the biggest loser of the year for that one. Let me tell, tell you what else I think was a big loser this year. And Tracy, you're gonna be upset with me.

Open source. Oh yeah. I think this has been a crappy year for open source for a lot of reasons.

Number one, I think the percept, again, perception versus reality. The perception is, is that open source is inherently insecure that all these open source tools, if we're not riding hurt over them, there's all kinds of problems. You know, security issues with open source, it's full of malware, it's full of bugs, no one's checking it.

We just can't edit it in. And, and so the whole software, supply chain security thing, and open source, open source software supply chain has taken a huge hit. Number two, as a result of economic conditions and cutbacks and everything else, chase, you know, this organizations like the Linux Foundation and the CD Foundation, everyone except even the CNCF is, is taking the hit, companies are cutting back their budgets to support these open source foundations.

And it's not cheap running open source foundations and not-for-profits like that, right? And, and so they're making do with less, they're making do with less, they're making some hard decisions on what they can do and can't do with open source. Um, so you, you know, there has been some good things.

The, the concept of like paying maintainers has sort of gone mainstream, if you will. But companies are pulling back from their licenses and saying, wait a second, I don't want everyone using my stuff and I'm not getting paid for it. Competitors are using it against me, so I'm changing my licenses.

We've seen it numerous times this year more than in years past. Um, just when it seemed that open source had reached the pinnacle, and maybe it did, it reached the pinnacle and there's nowhere to go but down. But open source not as bad as the lampshade incident, it Black hat.

Um, but open source has had a tough year. I, I would mark it. It has Alan.

I would agree a hundred percent. It has had a very hard year. You know what else has had a hard year is Dere.

Yeah. Oh yeah. That's Dere.

Lot of companies have laid off a lot of dere, and I feel like it goes hand in hand with open source because a lot of those Devereux folks would do outreach to the open source communities. And the, one of the problems with the open source that they have seen over the years is that fewer just global committers. Like our Orillia community.

We are, we're a truly an open source community. Deploy Up doesn't pay anybody to be part of, of Orillia. We just built that community.

But if you look at, uh, some of the other projects, they always have a big company behind them. It's an IBM or an Apple or a CloudBees, and it's, it's not really truly open source. And so you lose the heart of it.

So that's another reason why it suffered. But I do believe that if open source got us into this problem, open source in the security realm can get us out of this problem. And the more that we focus on solving the security issues around open source, the more we'll get back to being at our pinnacle again.

But on that note, according to Gartner, we're gonna have a triple, the number of vulnerabilities from 2021. And I think 2021 had around 400, 500,000 vulnerabilities. So we could have over a million vulnerabilities that we're trying, and that could even erode, uh, faith and trust in open source more.

Yeah. So I think in 2025, open source is gonna have to solve this problem. What does Garman do?

I think, I think maybe AI helps solve this problem. 'cause we can go back in and find those issues and patch them and maybe it becomes more reasonable. We'll see.

We could resurrect old, old dead security researchers to help us with ai. Yeah. Nevermind that.

How about the programmer? We wrote the thing in the first list. Yeah.

That Maybe not, maybe not. Anyway. Hey guys, we're about outta time here.

This was gonna be a, a quick half hour turned into 45 minutes. But we could, we could reflect on this year, I think, oh, until 2026. And we'd still be reflecting on 2024.

I think it is going to go down as a, uh, a watershed year for many, many reasons. Um, you know what, all to all of you, not just Guy and, and, and Trace, and Mitch and Michael are here with us today, but to John Schwartz and Lisa and all of our gang members, thank you all for everything you did. Thank you all out here for watching us every day.

Wherever you watch us on, whether it's LinkedIn or our sites, or YouTube or Facebook or whatever Twitter's called today, um, or anywhere else in 2025, you will be able to watch us on Roku tv, apple TV, and Amazon Fire Stick, as well as new mobile apps for Android and iOS. Thanks to the tech strong K Crack, Jack Tech strong IT team. Um, but for now, hey man, have a merry, merry, merry Christmas and a great happy, happy New Year.

We'll, we'll be back on, I wanna say Monday, January 6th. And we are ready, eager be beavers to jump into 2025. On behalf of everyone, this is Alan Shimel.

We're out.