Techstrong Gang – May 21, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Tuesday. It's Alan Shimel and we've got a lot to go over.

Today we're gonna be talking about a new survey on DevOps. Is it working? Uh, where does your remote worker live?

Let's hope it's not Pyong Yang. And then lastly is A PCA, uh, A-A-I-P-C in your future plus a bonus. What the heck is a tech field day?

Anyway, all of that in war here on Techron Gang. Hey everyone. Welcome back here.

It's Tuesday. As I said in the opening. We've got a, a new gang member actually, to introduce you to today.

Uh, he is one of our brethren coming over from the Futurum Gang. Actually. He is the prior to Techstrong, uh, the Tech Field Day in Gestalt IT team was the latest, uh, addition to the Futurum Group, and he is the leader of Tech Field Day in it gust, Steven Foskett.

Hey, Steven, welcome to Techstrong Inc. Hey, it's good to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me in.

Absolutely. It's our pleasure, actually. So, Steven, we're gonna talk about what exactly a Tech field day is a little later, but you know what, give people a little bit of the Stevens Foss journey, if you don't mind.

Sure, yeah. So, um, you know, um, uh, years ago I was trapped in Alaska and I was attacked bipolar polar bear. No, I, I, that's not my journey at all.

Um, interesting. I was, uh, I was an IT nerd. Um, and then I started writing about IT nerd stuff.

And, uh, you know, kind of got into this backwards through being, you know, writing contributed articles and so on. Never been really a, um, an analyst or a press person by, by trade. But I've sort of found myself in that position.

So about 15 years ago, I started Gestalt IT and Tech Field Day as a way for independent, not quite analysts, not quite press, people like me to get connected with companies. And, uh, still doing it today, as you mentioned, uh, we decided to join Futurum in December, uh, shortly before y'all did. Uh, and, uh, I think that this is, uh, gonna be the start of a beautiful friendship as the guy says in the movie.

Absolutely. Louis. Yeah.

Um, okay, well, welcome and, and thank you. We're welcome, Steven. Looking forward to having you on here often.

And we should also mention a lot of the Gestalt It and Tech Field Day podcast and video broadcast will be, uh, broadcast. Actually, we broadcast the first one last week, and we were really, uh, happy with that. And you'll be able to catch all of the Tech Field Day and, and Geal IT podcast and content right here on Tech Trunk tv.

So that, that's a great thing. Joining Steven and I today, though, is my compadre high up in the Rocky Mountains. Mitch Ashley, our CTO and principal Analyst.

Hey, Mitchell, welcome back. Hope all's good. It's all good.

It's all good. And I wanna do a shout out to Steven and thank him for having us on his events already and participating in Tech Field Day and some podcast things. So, yep, it's a lot of fun to do some different things.

So thanks Steve. Absolutely. We'll be talking about that when we talk about what is a tech field day Mitchell, and I'll be making our debut at, uh, uh, upcoming tech field.

They were very excited later this month, but more about that in a minute. Guys, let's jump into the first block here today, though. You know, I had a chance to catch up with, uh, harness Field, CTO.

Uh, actually, I, I caught up to on text Textron tv, but we met in person at RSA as well. Harness has some new research out, uh, it was commissioned, I think it was the Wakefield group or someone actually did the research, but it, it showed, you know, not all's perfect and the world of CICD and, and deploying software almost, you know, in an automated matter, maybe as much as half of the, of the deployments are failing, the, the rollbacks are often manual. One may say it's far from an all well oiled machine there.

And it calls into question the whole premise of, of DevOps, which is, you know, do more, faster, better. Um, now I'll just start us off by saying, this is coming from A-C-I-C-D vendor who wants you to use their products. Or of course they're saying, you know, it could be better if you, if you maybe perhaps use their product.

But the fact of the matter is, look, this complex stuff we're talking about, right? And, and there are bugs and kinks to be worked out. Mitch, you have a, a career full of, of dealing with this kind of stuff.

What do you think? Well, software has a very long tail, right? Whether, whether it's the technology we use or the techniques that we use, all of that.

I mean, there's, you know, how often do we talk about mainframes and cobal and all that kind of stuff that I started my career on? Long, long go in a, in a galaxy far, far away. So I, I think it's really easy to concentrate on the shiny new stuff and the things that are still kind of in that sort of, uh, the hype cycle, if you will, even if it's passed and kind of, this maybe is the drop of disillusionment in some ways, but really you don't, you don't turn organizations onto a new way of doing things.

We still have groups that don't do agile yet. So it, it, it's not like, um, all the sky is falling. I think the real question is, what can we do to make adopting DevOps easier by organizations who are not yet doing that?

And I think part of this survey was, you know, maybe some self-interest here, but I, I believe in the premise too, which is think about a platform approach rather than 20 different tools to do all your tool chain to build your DevOps pipelines on. Um, you end up in the tool business supporting that. So that's a lot of the premise here, but there's some good data here.

You know, we don't release every day into production. Matter of fact, we may only do it monthly or quarterly or twice a year. We do it manually.

'cause it's, it's a challenge to get to the point where you can do things. Automatedly. Steven, one of the, the tech field day that Mitchell and I are gonna be involved in is on app dev.

I'm wondering if an anything you are hearing from audience, vendors, other, uh, participants, maybe sheds any light on, on the subject, right? Is this thing working as well as, as expected? You know, where, where are we going?

Yeah, I would say that, uh, it is not working as well as we expected, but I guess we should have expected that, right? Um, you know, as, as, uh, Mitch says, it's really hard to get teams to, to change and adapt. You know, I came at this from, uh, the IT ops side myself.

Uh, I was, uh, one of those guys freezing in the data center, um, trying to keep this stuff up and running. And before DevOps, you know, I was working at a big, uh, international bank trying to build out an on demand infrastructure so that the investment bankers could, uh, roll out applications incredibly quickly. Uh, that project was a, a complete and total disaster, as you can imagine, because there was no tooling, no infrastructure, no ability for the developers to actually request infrastructure and no ability for them to actually do anything with the infrastructure that they requested.

I think that we've actually moved things, uh, the ball forward on that regard incredibly far. For me, when I look at Kubernetes, I think of Kubernetes as not a, um, specific, uh, management, uh, framework for containers. I look at it as a mindset, uh, as an operations guy.

I look at it as a, a shared, uh, understanding of infrastructure, a shared vocabulary for how to describe infrastructure and a way the then to, uh, formulate that, you know, maybe as a series of, uh, yaml, uh, commands that you can then roll out. Uh, yes, it also has functional aspects that allows us to roll things out. But that being said, uh, developers need, uh, so much more information about the environment in order to roll something out successfully in order to put, uh, new applications in into production.

Um, you know, Mitch and I, uh, you know, uh, we talked about that somewhat last week on the geal. It rundown and, uh, we talked about this on an episode of, um, the, uh, tech Field Day podcast that's actually gonna be airing here soon. And, um, frankly, I'm not sure that DevOps is going to end up being the answer to this question.

I think that we have a lot more work to do in the areas of platform engineering to make these things more repeatable. You know, you look at this, you look at this survey, why aren't they deploying code more efficiently and quicker? I think a lot of it has to do with things that aren't code.

Well, if I can pick up on that, Steven, I was thinking about, I mean, even recently within, you know, a dozen 10 years ago that I had this experience convincing people that it's okay to deploy quicker because we can fail faster and update things in production if we do have an issue. That that is a, that has antithetical to saving my job for many folks, right? I'm not comfortable with taking that risk, right?

I'm not putting my career on the line. So it, it can't be one developer's challenge or a team's challenge. You have to, you have to set up the environment where you can do that, but you know that you can, you know, fail fast or recover when you do have failure.

So, spot on on your, on your, on your comment is it's not just about the technology stack. It is, it's that, it's the infrastructure, it's the methodology, it's the reward structure and support structure for people, right? You could have a greatest tech stack and just say, and say, yeah, and if you screw it up, you're fired.

Okay, well, they're not gonna use it. You, you know, Mitch talking about failing fast. I think that was one of the key findings in this, uh, survey, is that the rollbacks, you know, this is a Walmart putting up a yellow happy smile for a price rollback rolling back to a, the previous version in most instances is not automated.

It's manual and it takes a lot of time and there's a lot of gotchas there. But in, in talking to Nick at harness, you know, the people behind the survey, I'll tell you what, they blame a lot of this on the whole shift left. Let's put everything on the developer's plate.

And look, we've seen this with DevSecOps, we've seen it with testing, and now we're seeing it with the deployment. You know, at some level you ask yourself if the developers are the highest paid, you know, they're the alpha predator, they're the highest paid person on the tree. Yeah, you want to get your money's worth.

But what do developers like to do? Develop? What do coders do?

They code putting, testing, deployment, security, and a host of other, no, no pun intended. And a host of other things on their plate gets them away from what they do best, which is coding. And, you know, that was somehow lost.

I mean, part of the DevOps thing, right? Steven, you were the it ops guy was, Hey, you were now working in a cross-functional team. We're all working together, whether you call it a DevOps engineer, which I never was a big fan of, or a platform engineer or whatever.

You are part of this cross-functional team that is responsible to get code from, you know, idea to deployment and beyond and, and just saying, Hey, the developer's going to do that. 'cause we're gonna automate the heck out of it. And, and just shift left.

I think that's where we've run in, you know, we run off the road a little bit. We gotta shift everywhere. I'm sorry.

Go ahead, Steven. Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think that, uh, I'm, I'm hearing a lot of sort of, uh, shift right pushback coming out of the industry as well, where people are saying, wait a second, maybe it doesn't make sense to shift everything to the left.

You know, maybe we need to think about shifting some of the stuff to the right. But again, it all comes down to me to building a, an effective cross platform or, or cross-functional team and cross-functional platform to building standard platforms. That's why I really love this idea of platform engineering.

It's nothing new. You know, again, we talked about this, in fact, the, uh, the episode of the tech field day podcast that we recorded, we talk about this in in great detail. Um, because it's about standardizing the platforms, standardizing the functions.

It, you know, you can't expect developers to be experts on IT security. You can't expect them to be experts on networking. You can't expect them to be experts on storage.

The answer to that is to build appropriate infrastructure, appropriately secured environments, and then let them deploy. But another aspect of this that I'm, I'm curious about is the, um, the testing aspect and the, and the production aspect. Because again, if we look at this survey, uh, two thirds said that they need to wait a week to completely test code.

That's not on me, the ops guy, that's not on the platform engineers, that's on testing methodology and test plans. And I know that there's a huge, um, aspect of that that has to get in as well, because the last thing you wanna do, like, to your point, you, you know, the last thing you wanna do is roll out a new version of the app and, and have it fail. Yeah.

No, that, that's just, I mean, the penalties involved there are just too much. You know, Alan, if, if shift left was the answer, I would've shifted left to the project managers why we kept failing meeting our dates for all, every project, you know, it, it sort of, in a way, it doesn't make sense. It's back to the original sort of overblown mantra of we only need developers anymore.

We don't need all these other people in ops and security and all that crap. Right? We knew at the time that's bs that's not gonna be the case.

Just like pushing it all to the developer doesn't make sense. I, I think a couple things. One is you have to recognize, and I've managed a lot of developers over my career.

They're skilled at different things. There are a few people who really understand kind of systemically, the whole stack that you're running on operating system, Kubernetes, whatever it is, container system, that architecture, the application, the cloud services, third party products that you might be using, that those are unique individuals. You're not gonna teach people every person to be that kind of person who can be the shift everywhere person, right?

And handle all of those things. Just the same thing for security. Some people get it really quickly and others, that's a, like, I, that's not my thing, right?

I wanna focus on other areas. So I think leadership's job is always to, to place people in the position where they can succeed best, where, and also where you have those needs wherever possible. So I, I think the, the mantra of trying to create more silos and DevOps is what we're guilty of.

We don't need a shift left silo. We don't need to security or a testing silo or a whatever, right? It's a flow problem.

That's really what's behind DevOps, is how we create flow across this process that we go through and the people that are involved in it. So it's really easy to get kind of, I'm stuck on where I am in the stack, or I'm stuck on where I am in the workflow and this is my part of it, right? Well, you may do most of your work there, but it's part of a bigger system.

Absolutely. Let me, let me just though, not devil's advocate, but a little counterbalance, a little counterweight here. The idea behind shift left of moving things further left in that left to right pipeline is not necessarily in and of itself a bad idea, right?

Mm-Hmm. Testing for security vulnerabilities and bugs prior to deployment to the left of the deployment point is exponentially cheaper, more efficient, and a better way of doing security testing. No, no doubt about it.

Um, you know, so many things that we, we move left, right? Testing further down the pipeline, right? As, as we've moved to cloud native architectures like Kubernetes and so forth, and we, you know, we start doing, we're, we're looking at testing code right?

In the IDE, right? In the repository, right in Git, right? GI ops and so forth.

The points to direct from the repository, these things have enabled us, you know, we talk about, oh, they're only deploying once a month. Hey, Mitchell, when you and I did still secure, we were lucky if we did two a year and we Were proud of it. We're lucky if our customers could take two a year.

Yeah. And We were proud of it. You know, let, let's not forget where we've been in, in, you know, crapping on where we are.

We, we've, we've come a long way. I think if I can, if I can jump in here, uh, we're always guilty. I'm guilty too, of kind of leaping at the simple answers, right?

The simple answers. Have the developers do it. That's not, that's not right.

That's not dev Shift. Left was about shift left is not even just adjust to your point. It is about, but not only about doing things earlier in the process, right?

Building tests that doing it, doing it earlier also improves code quality, quality of your application as well as security. But I think, I think thinking about it systemically, it's, well, how do you design insecurity, right? It, it's one thing to test for a really crappy design that doesn't have very security very well baked into it, versus testing something that's was well thought out, or at least, you know, partially well thought out.

You know, I like to say, you know, you don't think about, let's put some bumpers on that car that just rolled off the assembly line. Alright, well, let's add some, remember. Yeah.

Let's put some airbags in that. Yeah, that'll be one crappy car. That's why we do it.

It's about the whole process and thinking about all the flow along the way. Where are things that really influence, not everywhere, but where are the things that really influence the outcome of security code, quality, speed, whatever it is. I mean, that's the DevOps way.

Absolutely. And if I can suggest that, uh, the original intent, in my understanding at least, uh, the original intent of shift left testing way back in 2001 when this was suggested, was not to shift expertise left, but to shift testing earlier and to have continuous testing as part of, you know, continuous QA as part of the development software development process. And you know what?

I think that makes a heck of a lot of sense. I think maybe what we need to shift left is we need to shift some of the expertise left along with the people that have that expertise. And it's about bringing those people into the software development process earlier.

Instead of just saying, you know, Hey, developers, guess what? You gotta be security experts now say adjusters. Yeah, exactly.

And you gotta write your own test plan and you gotta run that stuff all the time. How about we try to integrate that stuff earlier and integrate it continuously in the software development process. And I think that that's probably the ideal way to do CICD.

If only we could achieve that. Absolutely. We'll keep working at it, but we're gonna not, we're not, probably not gonna solve it today.

We're gonna take a break here at Techstrong Gang. We'll be back, you know, it's 10 o'clock that you know where your remote workers are. All right, back here I text Joe and gang with Stephen Foskett and Mitchell Ashley.

So guys, interesting article over on Security Boulevard. Uh, the North Koreans who are, you know, they're kind of the Rube Goldbergs of the hacking world in some ways, right? They, they tend to do low low tech, uh, you know, but, but nevertheless, effective, right?

And, and I've read stories where perhaps 25% of North Korea's, GDP, this is before they sold arms to the Russians, uh, 25% of North Korea's GDP come from hacking activities, ransomware and financial hacking. But a new, a new wrinkle is that they're having their hackers masquerade and take remote jobs at American companies in it. Which is, I don't, you know, it's fraught with all kinds of crazy possibilities there.

But, um, you gotta give them credit. You know, you gotta give 'em credit. What, what do you guys think?

I'm gonna jump in and say, I think, I think North Korea is the, the Rodney Dangerfield of hacking, right? Just don't get no respect. Respect.

Uh, so, you know, my reaction to this article was, duh Yeah, of course. They're, and this isn't new. This didn't happen at the release of this article.

How long have has espionage and counterintelligence and all of those things been happening in that world, but also in our hacking world, that's been going on for a long time. And we've known China does that as well. So it's not, it's not a new thing.

It's maybe just, oh, it, by the way, it's hacking in Korea and Korea, North Korea, in this case, the article, which is definitely check it out. It's really interesting. You know, there's a laptop farm in, uh, I think it was Nevada, if I remember right, where these people were connecting into to look like they're working from, you know, us, uh, home soil or something close to that.

You know, this is, this is a sock puppet workforce, just like we have sock puppet email accounts, right? It's, it's people that are masquerading to be something that they aren't. We had this with the XE open source project, right?

Where someone infra traded after a couple of years, low and slow. Uh, those are the, you know, the advanced persistent threat kind of attacks. Now it's just people doing it.

Yeah. It's, it's wild, isn't it? That, um, you know, every time you come up with a new, uh, I don't know, new mousetrap, somebody figures out a new way to spring it, don't they?

Um, and, and, and it's, uh, it's, it's crazy because yeah, absolutely. This is related to Covid and work from home. Yeah, absolutely.

It's related to the corporate outsourcing trend overall. You know? Absolutely.

It's related to, well, the DevOps, you know, mentality. And, and yet of course, it's not caused by those things. I don't think it's fair to, to lay the blame for this on, oh, well, if people just worked in offices anymore, then all of this would be solved.

Would this not be possible in an office? Well, probably not, you know, but that's not really the cause, right? I mean, the cause of this is that criminals done a criminal.

That's kind of what they do. And then as you say, you know, that that's their, uh, that's the, the North Koreans, uh, you know, they're kind of backed into a corner, a geopolitical corner, and they're gonna figure out ways of exploiting that corner, whether it's, uh, you know, crypto coin scams or whether it's, it's this thing. But that being said, boy, this is crazy.

I mean, do you guys remember a few years ago when, um, some people were posting on, on, uh, hacker News, how clever they were because they had outsourced their own job. Do you remember this? This, yes.

This whole story. Mm-Hmm. I outsourced my job to India.

All I do is submit outsourced stuff and, and work an hour a week and go to the, you know, go to the meeting and show them, you know, go the code review and say, yep, I, I did all this stuff. And then there was another story on Hacker News. I remember again, a few years ago, um, I outsourced my job, and then I got more jobs Yeah.

So that I could have multiple outsourced jobs. And, and everybody was like, yeah, smart. You're, you're, you're so sharp.

Yeah. Nice job, man. Well, guess what?

Sometimes those clever ideas come home a roost. Absolutely. I, I've got two thoughts on this.

So first of all, you know, Steven, you're dead on this, this to me is a covid outsourced, you know, remote work kind of thing. And that's what, not that it wasn't going on before, maybe in small scales, but this, this just made it too damn easy, right? This really lowered the bar in, into allowing this kind of thing to happen.

I, uh, secondly, I, I remember receiving a call from a friend of mine's son who I've kind of mentored a little bit along the way. He, he's a DevOps guy, does CICD. And he called me and, you know, uncle Allen, I got a little situation.

I said, what's the situation? He said, well, I had, I had two jobs, two full-time jobs at the same time, and one of them found out, and they, but they want me to stay. They just want me to quit my other job.

And so this is how desperate employers are, right? That they catch someone doing this, and they're like, it's okay. Just get rid of that other job.

Me, I would've fired his ass in a second. But anyway, um, I said, well, I would probably quit the other job though, and, and just make sure you know, that this doesn't show up anywhere and, and move along. Um, and he did the College professor that, you know, catches a student cheating and says, well, that really shows initiative, Right?

Just don't cheat. Exactly. Don't cheat anymore, but stay good things about me.

So, I mean, this is, this is the state of the job market today, right? People are desperate for people with skills, I guess. But then I started thinking to myself, how do we, how do we prevent this without doing like racial profiling or something like that?

Then I started thinking, well, it ai, I could come to a Zoom meeting and, and I could look like Steven, right? I could be sitting somewhere in, in North Korea, right? And who the heck, who's gonna know the difference?

Who's gonna know how we, how do you really, you know, how do you really stop this? I I don't because it's only going to get worse with ai. Well, I, I, I really feel like the answer to this, and so many things is people basically relationships.

You know, building relationships, building real relationships. Again, I, I don't wanna blame anybody for this problem, but I will say, you know, the reaction of some of the people to, to your story, uh, that I saw was basically, well, it's your own damn fault. How do you have a job and never talk to an employee?

How do you have an employee who's working, working for you that that never actually collaborates? That's just submitting code. I mean, it, that's not a good way to run a business, you know?

And I think that, that, you know, like so many things when it comes to ai, and, and honestly, this is gonna be something we're gonna talk about, I think in the next segment, too. Um, AI is a useful tool, but I think that people get enamored of their pretty little tools, and they don't use their brain, and they don't say, you know what? You just like work from anywhere is a useful tool.

Um, you know, CICD is a useful tool, but people don't use their brain and they don't say, well, we gotta just not play with this one tool. We gotta do all the things. And that means, you know, you gotta have regular conversations with your employees.

You've gotta have, you build meaningful relationships between people. There's no way somebody can maintain multiple jobs or sock puppet jobs with a, a laptop farm in Arizona if you actually expect them to participate in the life of the company and the, and the, and the community of developers and so on. Because it's just not possible, even with deep fakes.

I think it would be just too far of a stretch to, and, and too much of a hassle for that person to do it. It reminds me a lot of that old security idiom, right? You don't have to be completely secure.

You just have to be more secure than your neighbor. Well, it's the same thing here, right? If you expect your employees to participate in the life of the company, could they deep fake that?

Yeah, they probably could, or at least they probably will be in a, in a few more years, but it would be probably too much of a hassle for them to bother, and they'll move on to the next one, right? Mm-Hmm. It's, it's about building real relationships with people.

Yeah. I can't help but think of catfishing and stuff like this, right? You're gonna build a real relationship with, with, you know, your buddy who you think is, is in Henderson, Nevada, and, and, and your buddy is not your buddy.

Um, and Oh my gosh. And that's the problem right there too, because if you've got a particularly high valuable target, I mean, let's get back to this story. If so, so what do the North Koreans really want?

They want money. That's what their com, that's what their country needs. And how are they gonna get that?

They're gonna build back doors and root kits into financial institutions, into institutions that they can do, uh, ransomware. And by the way, I'm not trying to accuse them of anything that hasn't already been proven in law. And, and in other cases, right?

That's their goal. And, and in, and this is gonna be a high profile thing, right? They're gonna go after these things just like spear fishers and catfishers go after people.

Mm-Hmm. And it's gonna be awful hard to stop that. Yeah.

I, I don't, I don't know what the answer here is, but it, it is it, and it's only gonna get worse. And, uh, I have a suggestion. I have a suggestion for an answer.

So just like, uh, everything I learned about predicting the future, I learned in Star Trek, the original Star Trek, right? Mm-Hmm. Um, you know, in Amos original robot series, right?

Was Elijah Bailey was the detective that was partnered with the humanoid, uh, Android, Daniel, Uh, Daniel. Yes. Daniel.

And they would go and solve these mysteries. I, I mean, it seems to me that's one of our cottage industries of just like, was this created with AI was like, to your point earlier, Alan, was this created by Mitch, or is this Mitch in his network of, uh, you know, minions that are across the world? And when you detect something strange, like, that's odd, why Mitch was never equipped to do something like that, or that's a different strange behavior, that's when Elijah Bailey and the whatever AI robot come in and say, I think we have an hr.

Yeah. Well, in, in the absence of all of the possible, you have to look at impossible, Mr. Spock, But there you go.

But Here, go ahead, Steven. I'll Give you guys another science fiction reference that should, uh, probably scare us. All right?

Uh, what do we need to do? Well, clearly to detect this kind of activity, we need to develop an AI bot that, that, that, that searches this stuff out. And then, then we need to have the AI bot not know that it's an AI bot.

And suddenly we live in Blade Runner. Mm-Hmm. Yeah, there we go.

Absolutely. That is, that's right. Outta Blade.

Actually, that was on, I think it's on Apple this month, on Apple tv. Mm-Hmm. The new one.

That up the new one. It's a little old now, but the second one, the Series. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, the second one. There's a new series coming out too.

Very good. Bladerunner series. But look, it, it's, it's definitely something.

This is why I, even our remote workers, I like to bring them here to the office a couple times a year. 'cause I, I don't think anything takes the place of, in-person face-to-face. Exactly.

Mm-Hmm. Exactly. Yeah.

Because the thing is, it's all about people. It's all about relationships, ultimately. Absolutely.

Hey, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back to the gang. We're gonna talk about a I PCs, but before we do, I really wanna solve this.

What the heck is a tech field day? We're gonna hear about it. Be back in a minute.

I'm Bonnie Schneider, sustainability contributor to the Techron Group. I'm excited to introduce you to a groundbreaking new initiative from Techron Research, the sustainability pulse meter. The pulse meter offers valuable insights into how environmental responsibility factors into tech purchasing decisions for key players in the industry.

Position your company as a leader in the industry and differentiate from your competitors with a sustainability pulse meter offered exclusively from Techstrong Research. You know, we've got Steven Foskett, as I mentioned, the top of the show. It's his first appearance here on Textron Gang.

I've got two things for you, Steve. First of all, you're gonna kick off our, you know, the AI PC discussion, but before we do, and, and I don't mean to embarrass you or you know, it's hard to self-promote, but tell us, tech Field Day, what's it about? Well, it's all about the people, man, just like we were talking about a minute ago.

Um, so my belief is that the way to fix a lot of these problems is through people, right? So, and Green. So what we need to do is we need to have real people engaging with companies, with content, et cetera.

Situations like this, I mean, you know, the three of us, you know, we kind of know each other. We're here live, well, it's the same thing with Tech Field Day. So basically for 15 years now, I've been inviting a crew of a dozen, uh, people like me who love to blah, blah about enterprise tech.

I invite 'em to California. Uh, we have companies come and present to the group. Uh, they'll do a demo, they'll do a presentation, et cetera.

And the goal, the, the job of those people around the table, we call 'em delegates because their job is to be part of the show. I like to say it's like the price is right. You know, you call some people up from the audience, they guess how much the can of soup cost.

Well, in this case, you know, we call people like yourselves up from the audience, and your job is to say, well, hold on there, Google. Um, you know, what about this? What about that?

You know, hold on there, Broadcom, uh, I've got a question about this. What if you click over there in the demo, right? It elevates and transforms everything that happens.

It's like a, a webinar that doesn't suck, as my colleague Tom Hollingsworth likes to say. Um, and the truth is that, uh, we, the, it works, and we've been doing this for a long time. My favorite comments that I get on our YouTube channel, um, because we have literally tens of thousands of these Tech Field day presentations out there.

My favorite comment is, I feel like I was there. I feel like you're my people. I feel like you're asking the questions that I would've asked.

And that's really the goal. And that's why I'm so excited to have Tech Field Day. I don't want this to sound like an ad, but I'm so excited to, to have it here on, uh, tech Strong.

com to have your audience Live Tech Field Day through, literally through you who are there participating, you know, joining the conversation. It is absolutely transformative. And the coolest thing that happens are the things that happen off camera, the relationships you build, the information you get, the, the realness of the whole thing.

Uh, just super excited to do it. And I'm so glad that you guys can join us for the first ever app Dev Field day, because we couldn't do this until we were part of futurum. I just didn't have the resource, I didn't have the knowledge with Futurum, I've got you guys.

I've got Paul nti, I've got Sam Hoe, I've got all these other great people who can help make these things happen in other topics. So we're doing app dev. Heck, we're doing Mainframe Field day.

Uh, that's gonna be insane. So I'm just super excited. Watch Textron tv.

You'll see it. This is, um, this is on Wednesday and Thursday this week, so you can watch it on Textron tv. You'll see broadcast, you'll see Live Stream and you'll Wednesday app dev is Wednesday, Thursday.

Next week. Yeah, Next week. Thursday.

Yeah, the 29th and 30th. 29th And 30th. Thank you.

Okay. People Wanting to get more information on like the company's presenting and so forth. com or does each one have their own URL?

com is sort of the, uh, catalog of all the events. Um, I've, uh, since I started this, uh, I've been keeping track of every presenter, every delegate, uh, even even the coverage that comes out of it. So if, if, if Mitch writes an article, uh, we're gonna share it on the tech field day social media, and we'll catalog it on the website so that people can find it.

The whole point is transparency. And again, that's another thing that I think is important, well, I know is important to you guys, but it would've been a deal killer for me if it wasn't important to futurum is wide open, transparent access to information. No fricking paywalls and hiding things.

And oh, you're gonna have to subscribe in order to learn. Nope, this stuff is wide open. And, um, and we try to promote these things and, and, and get these things out there as, as wide as possible.

Cool. Alright, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about AI PCs coming to a desktop near you, maybe Steven, what do you think? Well, I gotta say, um, I am both skeptical and enthusiastic.

So as a nerd, I am enthusiastic because I see the rapid rollout of NPUs and Matrix acceleration instructions. Uh, and it, uh, but so I, I hosted an AI podcast, and so I could get real deeper into this tech. I see these things coming.

And as, you know, being exposed to the analysts, to futurum and, and, and all the companies that present and talk to them and so on, there's a lot coming down the pike. So we just had Apple introduce the M four in the new iPad Pro, which I have. Um, of course I'm a nerd.

I had to get one, right? Um, we've got, uh, you know, and, and Apple's got five generations of NPUs and, and, uh, acceleration instructions on their M series chips. We've got Qualcomm coming out with an absolutely smoking, uh, chip for Windows PCs.

Uh, we've got Nvidia, we've got a MD, we've got Intel. Everybody's putting these things in there. So to say that the AI PC is all hype or vaporware or something is absolutely not true because every PC's gonna come with this stuff in it hardware wise.

But the skeptic in me says, that's great. What are you gonna do with that hardware? And that's, I think, where the rubber's gonna meet the road, frankly.

I think that's where Apple has an advantage, because Apple owns the software too. Yeah, go ahead Mitch. No, I was just going to kind of add to that.

It's, it's, um, you hope that there is an equal, uh, if not even more progress on the developer tool side, the SDKs. So whatever, whatever tools are necessary to leverage all that stuff, that's how you really get the advantage out of it. And that's the stickiness of it, right?

Like, I can't be on something else. 'cause I love this Intel ai, PC and all the great things that it does. Well, Intel's been sharp.

They have something called one API that is a extensible API for accessing these advanced instructions and accelerators. Uh, assuming that one API is able to continue the traction that it's already building. I think that that opens the door not just for Intel, but for everybody else, because of course, Intel is the challenger.

They're not used to being the challenger, but they're actually doing things right as the challenger, which is to develop open flexible APIs and ways of, of leveraging a variety of different hardware as opposed to Nvidia as the, the market leader, their job, their primary job, their only job is lock you out. So they have to make you love cuda and they have to make everybody else not have Cuda because then they maintain their dominance. And so that's really, to me, the, the perspective of what's going on here.

But you're totally right. It all comes down to software and whether developers are gonna leverage these things, whether they're actually gonna deploy these things or not. You know, my, my, I've been in tech 30, 30 plus years.

Um, my experience is like, you know how nature AB bores a vacuum software, ab bores, hardware capability not being utilized, and if you put it in the hardware, some software guys somewhere is going to do something that takes advantage of it. And so if, if, you know, if you build it, they'll come and, and I think that's what we're going to see here. Now, what's that going to mean?

I mean, sky's the limit. We probably haven't even thought of the real, you know, potential possibilities here. And I'll mention something else.

You got M four chips on iPads, you know, the next Gen iPhone, I don't even know, I I don't know if that's MDM four or not in it, but I, I don't think ai, personal ai, if we could call it that, is not just gonna be on your pc. I think it's gonna be on every computing device you use. And Google gave us a preview of that at io Last Yes, they did.

Last week. We, we spoke about that, yes. On yesterday's, uh, Textron gag, right?

It's AI everywhere with Google. It's, you know, it's a, a linchpin of their entire, uh, product line. So this is gonna be a very, I mean, you know, we, we sit here and look, the three of us are of an age, right?

And we've all been around a bit. But yeah, it's, it's an exciting time coming up, you know, and it, this next five years, I can't wait to see what comes out of it. It's, it's, it's that exciting.

I thought Steven was 25. You're you're older than that. Okay.

All right. Well, he started the tech, the tech field day 15 years ago. It would've been a tough, tough gig at Ted.

But, you know, not Impossible was a smart kid. What can I say? I was precocious.

Yeah, exactly. Hey, you know, these days, uh, hey, for all we know Steven GI in North Korea, uh, anyway, he's looking behind the for, uh, what's his name? The great, So I think to your point though, there's, there's a good thing.

So, so my background's in storage and I have coined a law of storage. I've coined a couple of them, but one of them is that storage expands to fill all the available capacity. You know, you'll always use all the available capacity.

Mm-Hmm. But on the AI hardware, there's actually a wrinkle here, and I'm gonna use Apple as the example of that. So Apple has been shipping NPUs since the A 11 almost, what is it?

Five or six years ago? Maybe even longer than that. Um, apple has actually, they have, uh, these advanced matrix instructions, a MX in their, in their cores.

Um, they are walled off and private, their secret so far, nobody uses the NPU on Apple hardware for anything including Apple. Well, an asterisk, yeah, there's a couple of little things, but if you look at the use of that hardware so far, it's, it's, it's, it's given Apple basically zero benefit. So I think there is a situation in which companies roll out hardware that doesn't get used.

And I think Apple is the greatest example of that, because frankly, if you don't allow your developers to know about it, you don't expose it, they won't use it full stop. It would be interesting and, you know, who knows what we'll get to it, but what Apple's thoughts were behind doing that and why they have it, you know, opened it up And we're gonna find out. So Apple's, uh, ww DC is coming up here on June 10th.

Yeah, I am off let's, you know, nothing is ever certain, but I am certain that Apple's keynote is going to say the word AI 500 times. Oh yeah. Unless they come up with a stupid Apple name for it.

That's different than ai, but you know what I mean. I'm certain that there's gonna be LLMs running locally on your iPhone and your iPad and your MacBook. No doubt.

And I'm also certain that those things are gonna run great on not just the latest generation stuff, but the previous generation and the generation before that. Because Apple has been quietly building this hardware support out there for a long time, that's gonna give them a real advantage, assuming that this is what they do at WW DC, which I just don't see a situation that they don't do that. No, I, to me the question is, are they do, how close in bed are they with open ai, given the Microsoft connection to open ai, right.

Apple and Microsoft together. Steve Jobs, his turtleneck is folding over. Anyway, guys, we gotta call it a, a, a, uh, a wrap on this Textron gang.

Um, Steven, thank you for being here for the first time. We appreciate you. We want to, hopefully we'll have you back really soon and we'll see you next week out in Silicon Valley.

Mitchell, you'll be on our next one, I assume we'll talk soon. You bet. Um, hey guys.

Textron gang, isn't all we do here on Textron tv? Stay tuned. 'cause we have a full day of programming ahead of you.

Check it out then. But until, uh, Thursday, well, we'll be back with a fresh tech, strong gang. This is Alan Shimel.

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