Kaizen! Are we holding it wrong?

This is our third Kaizen episode in which Adam, Jerod & Gerhard talk about GitOps the wrong way, ask questions with Honeycomb and realise that they must be holding the CDN wrong, and the effort that has been going into moving all changelog.com static files from regular volumes to an S3-like object store. If you like a good yak shake, listening to this one is a lot more fun than doing it.

Gerhard is most excited about the Ship It Christmas gifts that we have been preparing for you. While GitHub Codespaces is not going to be part of the upcoming Christmas special episode, today’s talk covers why investing in a Codespaces integration is worth it.
Changelog #459 and Backstage #20 are related to this topic.

Discussion

2021-12-18T23:20:44Z ago

I loved this episode!

While all the episodes that you all do are amazing , I’ve never heard such a raw conversation with all the emotional angst/frustration about a main sponsor before! I know you all are only saying those things, because you are all passionate and care plus I’m sure you’re going to work with fastly (to the best of your ability) to try and have the issues remedied. That is just who you all are (a bunch of awesome people), but hearing the raw conversation like that made me feel like I was a team member or something.

Really an amazing episode, and I’m so glad that you all have been able to use Honeycomb to finally debug this issue you’ve been having for so long! 🥳🥳

Kaizen episodes are really awesome, and I really love hearing your lessons learned! ❤️

2021-12-20T11:35:16Z ago

That is too kind Alex, thank you for this stellar feedback. All the hard work has just paid off 💙

2021-12-21T14:23:09Z ago

anytime! thank you all for such novel podcast episodes!
I would’ve never thought that a company would podcast about how they could do things better in the public. People have done blog posts about it and other ways of releasing after action reports (AARs), but with podcasting there is this personal touch that gets applied. So, thank you all (@jerodsanto and @adamstac also always bring awesome perspectives too (saying this because it’s technically @gerhard’s podcast, because they always do on this and other podcasts as well 🙃)) for such an awesome podcast.

Also, I can’t believe I forgot to mention in my last post! I loved that you left in the last part where @jerodsanto and @gerhard were cracking up! Nice try @adamstac for trying to get it back on track, but it was completely derailed by laughter (which I thought was hilarious and is such a human conversation thing to do 😁). I appreciate that unexpected happy detour! 😁

Lastly… @gerhard… 2 fiber connections! That’s amazing 😂 That’s goals right there 🤣

2021-12-21T15:36:59Z ago

That’s right, we make a great team together with @adamstacc & @jerodsanto.

Thank you for being part of Ship It and sharing your enjoyment.

The entire story behind those fiber connections was recorded last week and is expected to ship as episode 35 in mid January 🙌🏻

2021-12-22T00:58:06Z ago

Awesome! I can’t wait to hear the story 😁

2021-12-19T00:00:28Z ago

Also, I noticed on the latest podcast episode that @gerhard stopped saying the stuff about slack, specifically the:

you’ll lose happiness points by leaving

section 😢

Is that no longer going to be part of your outro? 😞
I thought it was pretty funny and kind of a memorable outro 😁

2021-12-20T11:37:46Z ago

I record every outro a few days before the episode airs, so I’ll make sure to get this into episode 33. Knowing that you are listening to the outros, I’m thinking of doing them differently from now on 😉

2021-12-21T14:09:29Z ago

Awesome! I always listen to the end of ever podcast episode, and from @adamstac’s perspective of hearing podcasts is like listening to the art that someone has made (or something like that from this podcast episode ).

I find it interesting to hear podcaster’s personal touch that they can put at the end of episodes, and look forward to whatever you can think of 😁

2021-12-21T15:24:55Z ago

That is spot-on!

I finished recording the outro for episode 33, and I am looking forward to what you think 😉

2021-12-22T00:58:41Z ago

Yay! I look forward to hearing it 😁

2021-12-21T14:28:09Z ago

I just realized (while searching for yak shave in the transcription 😅
That the description for the podcast actually says yak shake, so are all the transcriptions wrong or is the description wrong? 🤔😅

2021-12-21T15:23:32Z ago

While “yak shake” sounds very funny, it was meant to be “yak shave” 😀

2021-12-29T00:51:50Z ago

I think I have an alternate analysis of your CDN issue. Unless I mis-heard you about the image size, IMHO an 18 Mb GIF image is crazy big. Just imagine the visitor on a pay per Mb mobile plan or a slow connection who is paying in money and time to download that high rez GIF. I’m certain very few users care about the visual difference in that 18MB GIF and a lower quality, say, 100kb version. If your images were smaller, the latency for a cache miss will also be much, much lower since the overall payload is orders of magnitude smaller and, therefore, will be delivered that much faster. So even cache misses on the opposite side of the world would be resolved in seconds instead of minutes.

So I’d put this issue in the dev’s hands to look into smaller image file sizes/formats, if nothing else, to reduce the impact on non-1st world visitors. And, as we are all becoming more conscious of, the environmental impact of our tech decisions.

I enjoy your podcast!