651: Carolina Code's Barry Jones

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to Coda Radio. As always, it's Mike Dominic, brought to you as always by my company, the Mad Batter. Listen folks, if your boss or you have a project that needs getting done, uh, if you're just tired of fighting with that legacy data or your boss is, you know, breathing down your neck to implement AI, let me know. The summer doldrums are coming and I'm running a few promotions. Biggest uh, one being if you do any of the assessments otherwise legacy data or AI readiness and you choose to go with us for the project, we will refund the assessment fee towards the toss cost of the project. So basically the fee for the assessment goes against the project price. With all that said, yes, a little self advertisement. Let's get into the show. All right, Housekeeping, our favorite part. Uh, Mailbag episode is coming. It will probably be next week. Now, finally, I know you've been waiting. I've been holding your messages. It's terrible. But I had an interview that was too good to delay. Uh, also kind of time sensitive. So it's with Barry Jones, uh, the, I don't even know you call him the guy who runs the Carolina Code conference that is coming up in August that I'll be attending and speaking at. And if anybody is in the area and wants to attend, well, it's easier to know sooner than later. Right. So I figured should air this first. It's a good conversation. Talks a lot about, you know, just how getting these community events together is and uh, you know, obviously Covid played a factor in it. Carolina Code has been around for a while and uh, I will say it's back roaring and stronger than ever. But first WWDC happened. I know there's going to be some of you who don't want to hear about Dub Dub, but we're going to take a quick just a few minutes here. Uh, there's actually some interesting stuff. Number one is going to be Apple containers. Uh, so if you are doing web development or I would say server side development, lots of development types actually you're probably running like something like Mac for Docker or excuse me, Docker for Mac. Mac for Docker would be interesting though. But Docker for Mac, uh, otherwise called this Docker Desktop or one of. There's a few alternatives that basically give you a Mac interface to Docker. There's also the homebrew package. There are reasons a lot of people prefer the official desktop app. I'm not going to get into that. You know who you are, people have preferences. Um, but basically what you're doing is you're containerizing Linux environments.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Well, Apple came out with Apple containers, which it does just that. Uh, it is open source on the hubs of Git, which I think is interesting. It looks really cool. You can just pull it down and kick the tires if you want. Uh, it works with most of your common Linux distributions. Uh, so if you are doing server side or Linux based development on the Mac and you, you know, I mean I don't particularly like the Docker desktop app. Uh, so if you're like me, this is definitely something to look into. Yeah. And I know you Linux desktop folks are probably like oh God, do you really need this? It's yeah, yeah, it's, it's, you know, with the, the Apple Silicon infrastructure, it's just different.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So yeah, I will say, you know, it's another hop. Right. Working on my theolio for this kind of thing is just a lot easier because it's you know, under the hood, the same platform that I'm deploying to. But I also know from the analytics, uh, a lot of you guys are on Mac OS. I know some of you have to use macOS at work and use Linux at home or some of you of course use Windows. Uh, less relevant if you use Windows obviously because it's a Mac thing. But yeah, check it out. Uh, it's also cool that they're developing in the open and it's open source. It's kind of interesting to see, you know, Apple really did embrace open source back in the day, right, with their embrace of Java. Um, they used to open source a ton of their Unix tools and then they kind of tightened up is the polite way to say this. And now they're I think slowly but surely, right starting with Swift a couple years ago, they're kind of coming back around. So that's cool. The other thing I found relevant to the show uh, from Dub Dub was core AI. Now hear me out. I know everybody's got their, their AI pitch, everybody's trying to say their AI platform is better and we all probably have heard and know that Apple's uh, AI is basically a version of Google's Gemini, right? That's the base model. Nothing really wrong with that. But it's good to know what we're talking about. Apple has uh, I guess released or implemented this program where small developers, and they define small, I think it's under $2 million, don't quote me on that, but there's or maybe 200,000, there's a certain amount of money where you're considered a small and it's per app. Uh, get basically free AI usage through core AI now, of course. Well, let's go through the positives first because I can already hear the keyboards clacking with the obvious negative here. Um, core AI does some on device processing and it goes to the cloud. The cloud is basically Apple's trained, uh, version of Gemini. Little bit of ambiguity uh, there on how different is it than straight Gemini. I would guess that it's very, very similar to Gemini because it is Gemini in some significant way. It's uh, based off of it at least. So fair enough if you qualify. And of course they have their nice APIs, right? Their native Swift APIs. If you look through what's been released so far, the development story is of course very nice. Apple's really good at this kind of thing. If you qualify for the small developer category and your specific app qualifies on that revenue per app model, right. You don't pay for the usage up to a certain amount. I know it sounds silly. I know a lot of you working for bigger companies, like, well, whatever, right? We're still not going to do native apps. Yeah, it totally makes sense. But for indie devs, those that are still surviving, especially those that are aspiring, right, Our younger folks in the audience, these AI features, if they truly become more expected by users, um, pose a serious cost, right? Anybody who's been fooling around, like I have a couple internal apps for the madbotter that uses, um, the quad API. Well, those API costs, uh, it's like the early days of aws. If you're not careful, you can go cha ching pretty quickly. So I think this is a huge lowering of what I think would be a pretty significant barrier of entry for smaller indie devs, especially young devs, right? Student devs, devs who are just trying to break in, it's their first app. You know, maybe you're just out of college, maybe you're in college hell, right? Who knows? Um, the big bet here is that these AI features are going to be expected by regular users long term. If that's true, this is a nice option to save money if you're going to be iOS specific. So, yeah, it's an evolving story. Um, let's see how it, you know, because there's a. You just have the developer preview, uh, in terms of like the video and the stuff and the, the uh, you know, the WWC website. I don't know how significant it's going to be long term. I guess that's partially Going to depend on how many people actually adopt core AI. Right. Apple of course has telemetry. If it's a, you know, well used, deeply, uh, embraced API, they're going to give it attention. Right. So yeah, I think this is something interesting for our newer devs. And do ship. Right? Don't be so discouraged by oh if it's, if I can't compete with a multimillion dollar company or a billion dollar company or the world's first trillionaire, I guess uh, just take a shot. Right. Uh, nothing ever succeeds that doesn't ship. So this is another way uh, to knock down a barrier to get you to ship. So the last story, I had a whole thing ready for today on Fable by Anthropic, which is the uh, distilled is probably the wrong word but the derivative model from their Mythos thing or Mythos a la Lovecraft, who knows? It got pulled down as of the time of this recording by a national security letter from uh, the federal government. The U.S. federal government. I have a blog post on this. You know a lot of people are frying the conspiracy bacon on this one. I have ideas but the bottom line is this is going to end the way a lot of these things end. Uh, there's going to be some sort of deal, some sort of either real, but my opinion more likely performative, perfunctory concession by the folks at Anthropic who've been a little spicy. They have their principles that they say they standby and they've certainly been vocal in uh, their disagreement with the US government. That's their right. Everybody can say what they want. Uh, but this is not going to be gone forever. It's also in my opinion the best thing that could have happened to them in terms of their ipo, which is rumored very strongly to be coming up. Folks may not remember, but the Apple Powerbook, uh, excuse me, Apple, uh, G5 tower I believe, or G3 tower. This also happened and Steve Jobs made a big marketing campaign about it where there was like a tank, uh, more modern, more. In my day the uh, PS3 had this export control issue to the point where actually the US Air Force was one of the largest buyers of PS3s. Um, because this is going way back in the paint here, but you could install Yellow Dog Linux on it and basically it was just a very efficient, very fast uh, Linux computer. Networked them together. Bums her uncle. You've got a uh, uh, DIY supercomputer of a sort, right? We're not gonna, you can read lots of papers on that. I'm not gonna go into the details. Uh, it was an interesting moment where people who wanted to play console had to compete with like governments in the Air Force, uh, very briefly. And eventually, uh, Sony locked that down. So when he bought subsequent PS3s. Oh, and actually I think they did it in a software update too. That would no longer be possible for uh, you know, for a normal Joe. So yeah, I mean, you'll probably be getting your Fable back, you know, either kind of you market that your thing is so dangerous. Oh my God. We have to give you this weekend version. And if this happens, it's kind of, it's. It's kind of. I don't know, right. It's. He. You got what you got. Um, but ultimately I think this is going to be a tempest in a teapot. Um, I mean, maybe by the time this comes out, I don't. Who knows, right? Things are moving so quickly right now that uh, I don't know. All right, so we're gonna have a note from our sponsor this week and then we're gonna have our interview. Talk to you later. We're brought to you today by Alderaan Games, the makers of the hit Dinosaur massively multiplayer game that's available on just about every platform. Path of Titans. Check it out. If you like dinosaurs, if you like playing online, that is a hit. They also make a number of other great games. But what they really want to talk about today is their hiring. They are an unreal shops when real experience is preferred, especially preferred if you have anti cheat experience. However, they have multiple positions open and they are willing to entertain junior developers who are keen to learn and ready to rock. Go ahead and reach out to them at Alderaan Games. They're also in the discord if you post yourself in the Looking for work channel. Enjoy. Good luck all. Ah, right, we've got Barry Jones, the. Well, founder, leader, creator of the Carolina Codes conference. Barry, how are you?

Speaker A: I'm, um, doing good. Thanks for having me on, Michael.

Speaker B: Awesome. So what is Carolina Codes?

Speaker A: So it's the Carolina Code Conference. It's a polyglot and cybersecurity conference for all who code in Greenville, South Carolina. And uh, the next one's coming up this August on August 14th and 15th. It's a Friday Saturday. Conference was actually started back in uh, 2018 by a guy named Joel Taddy. And uh, he ran it in 2018, 2019, and then Covid shut it down like did most things. And in 2023 I ended up taking it back over at that point.

Speaker B: Nice. Nice.

Speaker A: And uh, so I've been running it ever since and it's a lot of work but it's a lot of fun.

Speaker B: Nice. Yeah, so it's gonna be my first time attending. I'm also going to be speaking Plug, plug, plug. If you guys, you guys should go to my talk. Lightning talk. Nice and quick for my New Jersey, uh, fast talking. I thought it was pretty interesting how, you know, I hadn't heard of it and then just in the last year or two it really, it's been all over my LinkedIn feed is covered with it. It's all over my Twitter feed, which I refuse to call X. I mean is that been a conscious effort on your part and the team's part to promote it or is it organic? How does that happen?

Speaker A: Uh, it's a little bit of both. So when I took this over in 2023, one of the things that I kind of found was that I had to learn how to promote the conference. Taking it over and trying to keep it true to its original spirit as a Polyglot conference is a little bit more complicated than I would have expected to start with because you know, if you like Ruby and you find a Ruby conference, it's really easy to just get everybody who goes to the Ruby events in your area to go there. If you have a Python conference, it's, it's a little bit easier to kind of make that sell. Uh, it's a little bit tougher with a polyglot and with the Polyglot event you basically have to make sure that you are covering a wide array of topics that in different languages where the lessons really carry from language to language. And the cybersecurity lesson, um, across that as well. That, that was sort of a later addition really since 2023. To try to make sure that we'll pulling in the cybersecurity communities and the developer communities to communicate with each other and to cohabitate a little bit more I guess is the way I would put it. That came ah, largely from um, some personal experiences, uh, with seeing a lot of people who were either in cybersecurity or in software having almost an adversary relationship with each other in a workplace when it comes to a penetration test or something like that. Whereas, you know, you'd have somebody come in and perform a penetration test. And me personally, I love getting a penetration test because it gives me a list of prioritized things that I've probably wanted to fix for a long time that now all of a sudden we have to fix. Well, you meet other people and they get really defensive about them.

Speaker B: Yeah. You know, it can cut both ways though. Right? Because the cybersecurity folks, I love that too, when they basically give you the hammer to get budget for fixes that, you know, have been needed. But it can also, I mean, I think there's issues with this perspective, but there's. I understand the folks who are like, listen, I pulled two all nighters, I missed my kid's baseball game to ship this feature that somebody said was so important. Then you stopped the train because of some pen test. I mean, I can see the short term frustration, long term you definitely want the pen test, but you, uh, get a little empathy for those folks.

Speaker A: Yeah, I get that. And that's probably an organizational implementation thing more than anything else. But I also have gotten to work with some people who have gone through these programs that weren't available whenever I was in school. But I worked with a guy who's a Penn State grad and he went through their computer science and cybersecurity program. And the perspective that he brought, having both backgrounds to everything that we do from an architectural perspective, I thought was really, really valuable. And so I've always found it helpful to just try to cross pollinate the communities a little bit there. And so we've got a commitment to having, uh, you know, at least, you know, 20% of the talks will be related to cybersecurity in some way, shape or form. And I've kind of, I've kind of diverted from, from where you went here in terms of, you know, how this, this happened, how the, the organic advertising happened. Mostly it's just that we try to make sure it's a really fun event, it's very high paced. Um, I've been to a lot of conferences over the years. We've tried to kind of pull in some different lessons from, from other conferences, both positive and negative experiences and react to them in a different way. Like, so I've been, I've spoken at a bunch of conferences over the years and one of the things that I, uh, there's one experience that I always talk about as a speaker when I was working for uh, demartian, I got to go and speak on DMARC and email security at a conference in Tennessee. And it was a big infosec conference in Tennessee and there was like 3,000 people there and. But it was an eight track conference. And so as a speaker, when you get into a conference, you know, you're excited to be selected, but then when you see how many tracks are involved, you also realize you have to win your time slot. And sad news for anybody in the field, but if you have a talk on email security in an eight track conference, nobody's coming to your talk.

Speaker B: That's a tough sell.

Speaker A: Yeah, Uh, I had a room that would have held 200 people and there were five people there for the talk. Um, and then two weeks later I went to a different conference in Denver and gave the same talk to a room with about 200 people, but it was a single track event and I got to go early on. I had tons of engagement from the room. Speakers I got to reference, speakers that came before me and topics that they mentioned. Speakers that came after me, got to reference my talk. It created a much better dialogue and the sort of common experience with all of it. And so the reason that you're in a lightning talk spot is that we've got 30 speakers over two days, but it's a single track event. And so to do that we alternate time slots. We'll have, we've got about four, I think we've got four keynotes this year. That'll be 45 to 60 minute talks. That's, you know, to open the day and close the day, uh, both Friday and Saturday. And then between that, we alternate between these talks that are 20 to 30 minutes or lightning talks. Just kind of alternating the schedule just to. We keep the pace going.

Speaker B: Yeah. And not burn the audience out. You know, it can be. I've been to conferences where it's a 30 minute talk and then a 45 minute. That another. It's like, wow, I, you know, at some point you just get tired of sitting, frankly.

Speaker A: Yeah. And we tell everybody that as well. We let everyone know, like, look, all these talks are being recorded. Uh, it is back to back to back with, um, you know. Well, there will be breaks when people finish early and we have breaks around lightning talks. We actually schedule lightning talks for a 15 minute slot, even though we actually only give you up to 10 minutes. And that's to have that built in break and transition. But we let everybody know right at the beginning of the event, all these talks are being recorded. It's back to back. If you need to get up and walk around speakers, know it. They're not going to have their feelings hurt. If you need to step up, you can have a conversation. There's a whole room over here with sponsors and everything. You can go and have any conversations that you want to have. And it's good. It ends up being. It Ends up being a lot of fun. We've got networking events, uh, each night of the event. So we'll have a, uh, welcome event the night before. We'll have a big event the Friday night between Friday and Saturday. And then usually uh, we end up going and closing down at uh, uh, a very popular local brewery. And just relax with 300 of your new friends for a while. It's been a really solid experience uh, for everyone involved. As far as I can tell. Everyone seems very engaged. We get a lot of repeats and we're trying to branch out heavily to the tech communities within a three hour window of Greenville. And so for those of you who don't know it that well, you know, within three hours of Greenville you've got uh, Atlanta, Charlotte, Knoxville, Tennessee, Asheville, North Carolina, Athens, Georgia, Augusta, Georgia which is a big cybersecurity hub. You've got Columbia, uh, South Carolina. If you drive fast enough, you can swing in Charleston. And every year we also pull a decent crowd from Raleigh, from the Research Triangle area of North Carolina as well. But it's been good and positive. And we specifically advertise two tech meetup groups. That is where we go. I've got a little promo video inviting people, uh, people who run meetup groups can show the video and I'll give them a discount code. But we go out of our way to try to reach these different meetup groups in different um, areas within that window, uh, to do that. Because the people who are going to those meetup groups are typically the ones really involved in their local tech communities.

Speaker B: Right, right. To go to a meetup group you have to be pretty engaged. I mean you're taking time, time out of your, your what would have been leisure time.

Speaker A: Right, exactly.

Speaker B: So interesting. So what is, I guess what is the. You said you're targeting these meetup groups. Is it, are you looking at specific ones or is it any tech meetup group in that geographic ring? Uh, how does that work?

Speaker A: Any technique of grouping that geographic ring?

Speaker B: Okay, so, yeah, right. If they're close enough where travel wouldn't be a hardship. Yeah, that's kind of. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: The, the conference itself, I mean as a polyglot and cybersecurity conference. We're a big tent conference. We cover topics all, all across the board. Um, we've uh, we're happy to have anything.

Speaker B: I should leave my iPhone wi fi open.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: For the cybersecurity part of it and see what happens.

Speaker A: That includes references to uh, to language, to architecture, to hardware and the programming that goes on with, with the hardware. There's a computer vision talk coming in this year. We've got, we've got a gone to database Meetup groups, to SQL Server meetup groups, to um, and to the various cybersecurity groups like the local DEFCON groups that are in different areas. Whatever we can do to, to advertise to those groups and we're trying to find more of them. At some point I need to put together a, um, a little bit of a directory of the ones that we found just to uh, deal with discovery because it seemed like it used to be that everyone was on meetup. And over the last couple years there seems to have been sort of a branching out where people.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've noticed, I've noticed that as well. Down here in Tampa. Not, not a lot of the groups are using, or shouldn't say not a lot. But some of them are no longer using meetup where it used to be, uh, Universal, right?

Speaker A: Yep. I can't really speak to any reasons for that, but 1m of the ways that we're trying to really reach out to these groups too is uh, last year created an award called the uh, Jimmy C Award. It's named after a guy who was really active in our local community here for years, refused to take any credit for anything, but was really um, sort of the big driver of getting these groups together and helping the community around here to thrive. And when you talk to people from these other different tech communities around different areas, you find out that every one of these areas has these types of people who are core to the entire thing operating. So we created uh, an award, we backfilled it for previous years of the conference, um, and now we've got nominations out, um, right on our website where you can nominate somebody and we've got a committee of former winners who are actually going to be um, deciding who wins the award in future years. And we're just trying to really honor people who have uh, for the service that they have led in their tech communities.

Speaker B: That's awesome. That's really cool. So Barry, we always wrap up at uh, the same question, frankly. It's what is one tool that you do not create or any employers don't create that you can't live without? Now past picks have been everything from uh, AI tools to E bikes to a whole lot of coffee making stuff. So don't think of tools strictly as something you would use, you know, to host a conference or for development or anything like that. Think of it as anything you want.

Speaker A: I'm gonna say the most valuable tool for me, the one that I feel odd, uh, on a daily basis, if I do not have it with me is, uh, is my Leatherman Skeletool.

Speaker B: What is that?

Speaker A: It is a. It is kind of like a Swiss army knife, but it's designed so you have a more functional, uh, knife with a, uh, with a screwdriver that can switch out to four different heads for different sizes of Phillips and flatheads. Uh, it's got, uh, wire cutters and, uh, needle nose pliers on it as well. I have it with me at all times, and I find myself using it multiple times a day. After the last few years, it's. It's the best pocket knife I've ever had.

Speaker B: That's actually a really good idea. That's very practical. I've never heard of those.

Speaker A: Yep. A friend of mine who actually runs a data center told me about it about, uh, maybe three or four years ago, and I've been attached to one ever since.

Speaker B: Nice. Well, Barry, I appreciate you coming on and looking forward to meeting you up at the conference.

Speaker A: Uh, can't wait to have you. It's going to be a great talk. I'm looking forward to, uh, seeing your talk. Let's, let's plug that one real quick. Yeah. I'm doing this year is. Let me find it. Thought I had it with me. AI at the edge. What we learn. Building an open source industrial IoT stack in Ruby. That's going to be fantastic.

Speaker B: Ah, it should be a lot of fun. I'll try to keep the Jar Jar Binks references to a minimum.

Speaker A: This is a group that will like it. Our transition between talks is actually different. Members of our team coming out and telling the most deadpan dad jokes you've ever heard.

Speaker B: Love it.

Speaker A: And we measure our success and the amount of groans that we get from different people in the audience.

Speaker B: Uh, it's kind of like the show. That's my metrics. How irritated was the audience with the dad jokes and Char Jar references?

Speaker A: Perfect.

Speaker B: All right, Barry, well, hope to have you on soon and I'll see you in about two months. We're going to put links to everything in the show notes, get your tickets while you can. Price goes up in July, so may as well save some money.

Speaker A: Yep, exactly.

Speaker B: All right, thanks for coming on.

Speaker A: Thank you, Michael.