Speaker 0 | 00:09.608

Well, welcome to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’ve got David Fatesnik. So, David, welcome to the show. And why don’t you tell us a little about your history and what you’ve done?

Speaker 1 | 00:24.164

Thank you, Mike. Thank you for having me on this podcast. It’s the first podcast I’ve been on, so I’m a little nervous and a little excited at the same time. So I appreciate it. So, yeah, I’m the senior IT manager at a startup. We are in the digital license plate space. Nobody in that space. We are the only ones that are really in that space. And so it’s been, I call us, even though we are a startup, I call us a grow-up. And the reason why we’ve been a startup for about 12, 13 years. And so that’s a long time. And people go, why so long? And you call yourself a startup. Well, when you’re starting a whole new industry and it has to do with the government, because digital license plates are a government identification. There’s legislation that has to be done and it’s different for every state. You know, some states have in their code that a plate is metal and has to be reflective and other ones just call it an identification. So states that have, depending on the language, it’s harder to change the law. In most states you have to do a pilot and reassure the DMV that you’re secure, that the product works, that can be scanned by the police. All those good things to make sure that you’re doing the right things and you can create a secure government ID that’s digital.

Speaker 0 | 01:54.584

We’ll have to circle back to that because as you talked about that, I just thought of some of the challenges that we have as a transportation organization. And like tolls and the scanning of plates and things like that if somebody doesn’t have the RFID tag. But. In our earlier talks, you told me a little bit about the organization that you came from before you went to the startup. And so I’m really interested in kind of talking about how you went from a large organization and all of the structure and how everything was set up there to the grow up. And what was the difference between those two environments and what it’s like to run IT in those realms?

Speaker 1 | 02:41.832

Yeah, so in my previous life, I worked for Verifone and I started as a desktop support guy. And I started at the largest distribution center for the company. And so it was a really good opportunity to learn how the company worked. It had processes, it had procedures, you know, it had… It had a lot of control, IT controls, but over the years, definitely by the time I left, it was a full-fledged, large company of 6,000 people that had, you know, took away admin rights, that had a software catalog, had an MDM solution, SCCM, which I did have. And then we introduced even Max, and so JMF became, and so I was… on the team to help develop both of those MDM solutions. So when I left, we had, IT had everything, you know, that a large company would have. And so then when I started working for Reviver, it was a big, huge culture shock for me. You know, cords everywhere, people plugging in whatever they want, people buying software, expensing it. There was no control. So it was hard at first to bring structure because I knew what structure to bring, but there was a lot of rejection. Like, you’re going to slow me down. This is a startup. You can’t control my computer. You can’t lock it down. What do you mean I can’t use this software? So there was no standardization. And so that it was. Luckily, the CIO that brought me in was also from my previous company. And so I did have backing from him. But the rest of the team, it was really difficult to get them to embrace standardization. And so it took some time. And I think one of the first things that I did… create standards for is an onboarding and onboarding process because there it wasn’t any it was it was done all by email it was done i had just one desktop support guy he was a contractor um very skilled and good guy uh but there was uh no order and uh and i noticed that there were a lot of the fault there was a lot of fallout do they have this account set up they needed this why did you not set that up and And so quickly I realized this is not scalable. We got to create. So, you know, I created Microsoft Forms for an onboarding process. I put together, you know, what door access they need, what software do they need, you know, what access membership they should have in Active Directory. And it was a big shock to go from a company that was… you know, that I supported mostly on-prem, you know, having domain controllers at every location. So I managed 12 offices in North America, and we had domain controllers at all of them. Later on, we made some of the domain controllers read-only. But there wasn’t any of that. And so, you know, my first thing was, I got to get some control and get some servers here. And the CIO told me, no, we are a serverless company. We don’t have any servers. We do everything in the cloud. And so I was familiar a little bit with Office 365 because I did help roll that out in our previous company. So I did have about two years worth of experience, but I wasn’t the full administrator doing all the work in Office 365. So here, all of a sudden, I’m at a company and you’re using… At the time, it was about 12, and we’ve grown to about 18 different platforms that are all in the cloud. And so that was a big culture shock for sure.

Speaker 0 | 06:59.701

How many people were you working with at that point? And as you started to try to get this control and setting up the environment, where with a distinct lack of easily controlled… infrastructure, how many people were you working with? Because you just mentioned 12 to 18 platforms.

Speaker 1 | 07:25.273

So at the time when I joined the company, it was about 55. We grew to about 85. And then as a startup, we ran out of money and got back down to about 35 folks. We’ve grown now to about 85 people again. So that was the population, which is quite different than 6,000 people. And I managed, North America was about 1,600. So it was definitely having one person working for me versus 12 people working for me. That was kind of an adjustment as well. Because before I had different people, I could find their strengths and say, okay, so-and-so is really good at this, so I’ll give them that, right? When you have one person, you really don’t have to make that decision. It’s myself doing it or it’s them doing it.

Speaker 0 | 08:22.720

You have to flip a coin, right?

Speaker 1 | 08:24.681

Exactly. So that was definitely a lot of adjustments. Yeah, so go ahead.

Speaker 0 | 08:35.249

Quick question. As you are coming in and you’re dealing with the serverless environment, everybody’s… everybody’s probably avoiding you in the hallway and like you’re dreading you walking into their office because they’re afraid you’re going to want to um set down new controls and and keep them from being able to do their job um what were the things what were the ways that you learned to sell this to them how did i mean they and i’m assuming that the onboarding and offboarding um majorly or majorly wow It had to do with HR mainly, but then you started mentioning the access control, the different services that they had, the accounts that they’re setting up. So without any kind of standard or control around that, these guys must have been spinning up services right and left.

Speaker 1 | 09:31.510

Luckily, our platform was in AWS, and luckily there was really one person, and he was extremely – he’s extremely knowledgeable. So and security in the forefront and cost. We did drive some costs out of control, for example, like telematics in our app at one time just got really out of control. And it was because a developer was paying the API at Google Cloud way too often. Every time you ping that API, you get billed for it. So we got wiser of how we do that without sacrificing the customer’s experience. And we drove a build that got up to like $6,000 down to about $600, so one-tenth of the cost. And so that was done based on how the application was written and how often it actually pulled the API. More of the… More of the challenges were in the end-user services side, which is where I came from, from Verifone. I managed only end-user services, and now being at a startup, I’m managing, I’ll help managing DevOps in AWS and getting up to speed in that. And all our other systems, whether it’s our CRM, our ERP system. All those different systems I’m the administrator for and make sure that the accounts are set up correctly with the roles, separation of duties. And I learned very quickly how to optimize that as we started going through audits. So auditors will teach you, you can’t do that, right?

Speaker 0 | 11:21.453

Yeah, they will.

Speaker 1 | 11:24.495

The other good thing is about four or five months working with Reviver. I was asked by the CIO, you’re going to be the SOC 2 guy. And I’m like, SOCs? Because I understood SOCs from, and I did those SOCs audits at my previous company. But SOCs is more of a financial. And SOC 2, even though it came from the financial industry, it’s really, it embraces IT and security disciplines and all those things. When you get a SOC 2 Type 2, which Reviver is working on getting, you learn. There’s about 180 different things you got to be doing from things like change management, from penetration testing to vulnerability scans, patch management, risk management, risk management of your vendors. So, you know, today when I meet with a vendor, if we’re going to do business with them, I need to see are they SOC 2 certified. If they’re not, what certifications do they have? What mitigation processes do they have? They can’t really supply the services that they’re supposed to supply to us. What is the SLA? All those different things now are in the forefront of my mind when I’m talking to a vendor, not just, oh, what does your product do? It does X, Y, and Z. Oh, that would be very useful for our company. So now picking a vendor. there’s some homework to do and some research to do. And luckily with Google, you can get most, you know, anyone that has any kind of certification, any company, they publish it on the internet. If you want to get the SOC 2 report for Microsoft or Google or Amazon, you can get that yourself and you can just Google it and download it and see where they’re standing at.

Speaker 0 | 13:21.548

Okay. So how much of the cybersecurity did you have while you were at the prior organization compared to now? Because when looking at your profile and everything, it looked like most of that was more with Reviver than it was with Verifone.

Speaker 1 | 13:39.705

Because of being at a startup or I grew up, you wear many hats. So we had a compliance team at Verifone. And I did learn about compliance because of executing things like, you know, taking away an admin rights, making sure, you know, your patch level is right, making sure we have a way to inventory people’s software. I think the most difficult, what would you call it? So Adobe ended up asking Verifone, you know, we want to see. all your machines and if they have Adobe and have you paid for all the licensing, right? Adobe is a tough company. You think of Microsoft, with Microsoft we could just true up, right? You have an EA agreement, oh we’re using more licenses than we reported. Okay, you owe us X amount of money and it was easier to really manage. All those problems went away once we locked machines down and created a service catalog that has application catalog that has all the apps and people didn’t have admin rights, then they couldn’t go and sell software. Like Winzip is a good example. A lot of people had Winzip, which really you need to have a license for. So we moved over to 7-zip and didn’t allow Winzip to be installed on machines. So the key to a lot of the compliance is is don’t allow people to make the wrong choice. Automate it. If you build security into your design of what people can do, then they can’t do something that’s going to validate your licensing or your security. And that’s the best, I think, strategy to really successfully do that.

Speaker 0 | 15:28.554

But all of this sounds like stuff that you had or that there were controls in place for when you were doing the MDM and Jamf. But… But when you moved into the grow-up, none of that infrastructure was there in the beginning, right?

Speaker 1 | 15:44.809

That’s correct. There was none of that was. So it was literally going manually. Luckily, you know, large companies like Adobe are not going to go after a small, you know, there’s an auditor from Adobe to see if you’re valid with your licensing. It’s not going to go after a small company because the payout is the amount of time to do it versus the payout. they go after the large companies because that’s where the big bucks are. And that’s who they want to audit. They’re not really looking at this. So you have a little bit more breathing room, the expectations a little bit lower. But I already had that kind of anxiety from the large company. So it was as manual as walking around to everybody’s computers and seeing what they have. There was no visibility. The first visibility of heartbeat that I had was from our antivirus. you know, being able to have an antivirus console that tells me, oh yeah, that computer is still alive, you know, it’s still, you know, Joe’s computer, and it last time it logged on was, you know, yesterday, and it has the latest definitions, right? But it was at least some sort of heartbeat, so our computer wouldn’t walk away. Because, you know, at the time, a lot of developers were in Russia, and so they would take the computer to Russia. And the way I would have visibility to their machines is through antivirus at first and didn’t have any MDM solution to really lean on. And so I found quickly, hey, I got to stand up something like SCCM for Windows. Luckily, I had that experience about three years of rolling out Jamf and supporting them. And in a barrier, when we were in the barrier. It was about 7% Mac and 30% the PC. Now that we are in the Sacramento Valley, it’s changed. We’re about 60% PC and 40% Mac. So it changed. But I quickly realized, well, let me stand up some sort of solution. So first, the plan was to use… uh now it’s got into and now it’s called endpoint protection manager for microsoft and uh what i found that’s that’s really neat is that i was able to stand up and point protection the manager uh way faster than secm on-prem uh now it doesn’t have as many bills and whistles as easily uh it’s it’s more vanilla But I’ll take vanilla just to know where my machines are. Are they in compliance? What’s their patch level? And being able to control the updates that are coming to those machines.

Speaker 0 | 18:34.054

Do you still have people all over the world? Or is everybody kind of consolidated into the Sacramento area?

Speaker 1 | 18:40.976

Majorities in Sacramento, but we do. We have a sales team that’s all around. They’re heavy Mac users. So I decided with Reviver. I did some research and my son’s a JavaScript developer. And he says, yeah, we’re using this thing called Kaji. And they just shipped me a brand new laptop. I pulled it out of the box and it set itself up. And so I did some research. At the time, I had an intern. And so, you know, he’s going to college for IT right now. And I realized, OK, I need a simple tool I can implement. Jamf is… It’s a little more complex. And doing my research, I found that like Kanji was a very simple MDM for the Apple community to set up. And we were able to set up Kanji within three weeks, you know, build the trust relationship between Apple business manager, being able to pull in the applications, figure out how we can purchase machines. So at the time… None of the machines were purchased under a business account. They were all, you know, one was bought at Best Buy. Another one at the Apple Store. You know, there was somebody wanted the rose gold one. Another person wanted, you know, and so that was another really battle is that people wanted to pick what computer they, no, I want a gaming machine. because I like the keyboard. It glows at night and it clicks. And so I want alien wear. And so very quickly, I set up accounts with Dell, a business account. The company in an Apple business account and we create standards and say, okay, no, no, no. We’re going to only entertain three types of Macs and three types of PCs. If you’re a developer, you get this. If you’re an office person, you get that. And for new people coming in, it was easy because they didn’t know what the standard was. The issue was more with the current folks that were with the startup already prior to me before any rules were laid down. So getting the culture changed there was a little more difficult. I guess the good thing is we had a lot of changeovers. So slowly I was able to… acclimate new employees to the new new rules and they didn’t get early pushback the pushback always came from the the previous folks uh and to this day there’s about four of us left from from uh the bay area and i can say that they’re they’re the folks that says they’re still to this day sometimes push back you know and but i have a good relationship with them and and i i you know, convince them, hey, you need an MDM solution. Well, I don’t like the fact I can’t change my desktop. Why does it have a, I don’t want to look at a reviver plate as my only desktop. I want a picture of my family, right? So we’ve loosened some of the rules and said, okay, well, maybe that’s too stringent. Maybe I’m going too corporate too quick. And so we’ve loosened our MDM for things that people want to do, modify their background. And so we didn’t, we’ve now kind of made it more, you know, palatable for folks to. embrace. So, you know, now we’ve fully rolled out both MDM solutions and we have a lot more control and a lot more protection and visibility.

Speaker 0 | 22:11.686

So it just, it strikes me in multiple ways, you know, you’re talking about all of these things and, and I just, I can’t imagine myself going from that structured, well-known, well-defined, all kinds of SOPs, ways of doing things back. to, you know, kind of the wild, wild west. And then, you know, one of the other thoughts that really hit me while you were talking is, what about the intellectual property? How, you know, it’s almost guaranteed that you guys were trying to keep the intellectual property from escaping because you don’t, if you’re a grow-up, you don’t want competitors to just suddenly show up and already have the benefit of all the work that you guys have already gone through. And with having developers, all over the world in a slightly controlled environment and then trying to get things in line and get some of that control. Now, of course, don’t give away any of the things that you’re doing to help protect and keep everything secure, but what were some of the challenges that you ran into in that world in trying to protect this stuff?

Speaker 1 | 23:24.300

Well, I think that was one thing that… was not as difficult as I thought it would be because everything was in a cloud service. So, for example, our code is in GitHub, right? And I think GitHub is kind of well known for that. And so you can really control who has access and read only. If the person leaves the company, we right away offboard them off of GitHub if it’s a developer. So the good thing is we use Confluence. We’re Atlassian shop, so we use Jira and Confluence. So a lot of it in electrical properties in those cloud services. So that made it a lot easier versus a company like Verifone that had a lot of on-prem work. It was an old file server, right? With OneDrive, you have a little bit more control. We now have it where you can only save your data to OneDrive. And therefore, there’s a lot more control that way. And if an employee leaves, we can redirect that data to their manager or replacing an employee. So definitely with cloud services, and if you utilize them correctly, it’s less of a challenge, for sure.

Speaker 0 | 24:40.810

You bring up a point that it was one of the first real benefits that I snapped to as we made our migration from the on-prem. exchange server to Office 365 was when I realized that all of the, I’m trying to remember the name of it, but the infrastructure was all there for all of the different policies, the retention policies, the … what do they call it the document yeah document or data loss prevention everything was already up and running but when you when you had to set it up on prem man you started bare bones from the the steel the bare steel um having to install the dlp server and then start to build all of the policies and and just from scratch where in office 365 all you got to do is figure out which policies i want to use instantiate those and push them out

Speaker 1 | 25:37.450

Yep. Yeah. And so with cloud services, they already have security in mind. And so as you learn what those templates are, you can implement those templates fairly, fairly quickly. On-prem, it was a lot more work and a lot more education to figure out how to configure these things on your own. So definitely, I think that’s why with cloud you can work a lot faster. I know today that if we were still on a firm. if Reviver was an on-prem shop, I would need probably four people working for me to be able to do what I’m doing with one, you know, one IT person and two DevOps people. And you can just tear down and build things in just probably 10 times faster. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 26:27.858

All you got to do is be willing to pay for the resources as you spin them up. And then you got to remember to turn them off.

Speaker 1 | 26:34.721

Yeah. Absolutely. And we’re making more headways as technologies are advancing. Our platform was designed and it’s grown and we’ve modified a lot more constantly. But I think initially when people started spinning things up in the cloud, they did it in the same way as they would build an on-prem solution. Right. OK, if I have a server here with these VMs running, I’m going to. a spin-up EC2 instances in AWS to do the same thing. And so when you build it that way, you get the benefit of being in the cloud and you can do it more quickly. But now with technologies like Docker containers and Kubernetes, you can become a lot more efficient for your workloads. So now you don’t have some EC2 instance that’s running and it’s only utilized for 20% of CPU strength. And now you can look at how much workload you have for what and what services are running on that. And you can combine those in Kubernetes and really get the maximum out of the hardware that’s in the cloud. And you can do all kinds of neat magic. with namespaces. And it’s just amazing what you can do now with the latest technology. And then going serverless, serverless databases that are autoscaling, databases that are able to read from multi-zones. So you can be fault tolerant and create a good disaster recovery environment. It really… Thank you. A lot of these serverless solutions by cloud providers, you don’t have to worry about the patching anymore. Patching is no longer your issue. And a lot of times, patching is a big problem, not necessarily just to apply the patch, but what does the patch break? So a lot of times, you apply a patch and you go, okay, now that doesn’t work. With serverless, that’s less of an issue. So it’s just amazing how quickly technology is progressing. My first computer, when I was 14, my best friend, his parents were schoolteachers. So my parents would ask them, like, hey, we should get our son a computer. I got a Macintosh Plus. And all it did, no, it was three and a half disk. I did have a 386 later on with still the floppy, the five and a half inch, right? But you booted it off the three, three and a half inch in my Macintosh Plus with a black and white screen. And I thought I was like the coolest kid. You know, nobody in my class had a Mac. You know, their parents might have had one, but they didn’t have one themselves. And so, and you look at your iPhone today and that Mac is like, doesn’t have, you know, none of the power of their iPhone.

Speaker 0 | 29:41.018

Right. Another thought hit me. And that is that we’re. so easily interchanging and talking about a multi-cloud environment. And, you know, we’re talking about Office 365, you’re talking about AWS. Have you done anything with the multi-cloud environment so that you’ve got redundancy between the two clouds? Now, obviously, you know, Office 365 is a different piece, but with all of the containers, all of the services that you’re running, the serverless applications for the SQL databases, is… or the databases, it’s not necessarily SQL since it’s the serverless. Have you set up redundancy between the clouds, or are you setting up regional redundancy within the primary cloud that you’re doing all of the DevOps over here, and then the Office and stuff over here? Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 30:41.050

so I think… So, like… For example, so we keep them separate. We’re not trying to run our workloads that talk to our digital plates. That’s all done in AWS. And with all the regions that are available and how resilient AWS really is now, there were two outages, and it did impact us a little bit. Luckily, if our plate doesn’t talk to the platform for a little bit because there’s an outage, the user doesn’t know. It might be like… hey, I looked at my app and I didn’t see the last trip I went to. And then two hours later, oh, it came back. That’s probably as bad as it gets. But we are building, as we’re becoming legal in more states and we have a larger driving population, we are now expanding to other regions within AWS to make sure that if the Oregon data center goes down, we can still work in North Virginia. and making it where you have a hot standby. What’s neat now is that we do everything in Terraform, which is really infrastructure as code. So as we’re building out now Kubernetes and redesigning our platform, really, once we have all this configured, you really could have somebody come in and run a couple scripts and build it. everything out in a matter of minutes or hours. So infrastructure as code is now becoming really popular because having a hot standby is expensive, right? If I have to have an EC2 instance or some serverless solution sitting on standby in another data center in AWS, you’re spending money on that. And the chances that you’re actually going to need it is very low. And you’re paying pretty high costs. So, you know, there’s different disaster recovery solutions. But what more and more people are doing is building only the things that take time. So they might have the database already sitting there. But they can spin up all the other things, all their EC2 instances, very quickly. using things like Terraform. So infrastructure as code has really helped disaster recovery where you don’t need hot standbys unless you’re, you know, and I’m not saying every customer or every company doesn’t have justification for hot standbys, but you can do a lot with infrastructure as code where you don’t need hot standbys anymore. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 33:28.856

that infrastructure as a code is really kind of a cool idea of being able to run a script and fire up like a whole infrastructure, not even just setting up a server with the whatever OS or applications that you want on it, but setting up all of the different containers with all of the different services and making sure that they’re all ready, talking to each other, that they’re all configured and just ready to go. We haven’t really made it. We’ve started talking about it and started to set things up like that so that we can have some of that instant launch or instant recovery capabilities like you’re talking about. But, oh, man.

Speaker 1 | 34:13.155

It’s very powerful. It really is. With Kubernetes, it gets a little more complicated. The system’s a little bit more harder to manage, even though it’s much more efficient. So they use something called Helm charts. But the nice thing about them is that they take a long time to build and it takes a really high level skill to build them. But once you have them built, it really helps you with even deploying applications and how you update your application. So we’re releasing new firmware for our place. We’re releasing new iOS apps and Android apps. almost on a bi-weekly basis. And with Kubernetes, a lot of those items are also auto-scaling. So as your demand goes up, Kubernetes is set up where it’ll just spin up. And there’s horizontals and verticals spin-ups. And then you can create entire new clusters. So if you put a lot of work into it up front, you can really have a self-healing environment.

Speaker 0 | 35:30.762

Put a lot of work into it up front. Isn’t that like everything IT? As long as we take the time to figure out what we’re trying to do and we define it first, then we get real good at hitting that target.

Speaker 1 | 35:44.170

You know, when I left Verifilm, there were some things that I built, like a new server for a new camera system. And I was like, okay, this is a stopgap. I mean, they just built this. This is until we implement a new camera system globally and a new door access system. So I lived through three different implementation of door access systems and surveillance. And it’s interesting, you build a kind of a just a mock of something and next thing it becomes production for the next five, six years. So you got to be careful. you got to be careful sometimes you’re like okay this is only for the short term this is not meant you know and the next thing it’s used for years and years so i’ve learned now if if you start using in a production environment uh you build it right because however you build it it’s probably going to stay that way for a long time and probably some other it shmucks going to inherit it later and go what were these people thinking right like this this is like frankenstein and you go well it was never meant to be production

Speaker 0 | 36:47.956

Yeah, it was just a proof of concept, a production proof of concept.

Speaker 1 | 36:53.640

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 36:55.321

I have experienced that all too many times myself. So, yeah, don’t develop in production. Develop in development and keep them separated and don’t give it all the capabilities.

Speaker 1 | 37:07.969

Absolutely. Absolutely. And so… For sure, right? You got to have your lower environments for testing and you got to keep your production very, very separate. And for SOC 2, that’s even more.

Speaker 0 | 37:21.386

All your compliance.

Speaker 1 | 37:23.208

All your compliance, right? How do people come into the production environment? How do you assign roles that who touched what, you know, does it match the change management tickets? when a change was made? Can you go and report to an auditor, okay, I want to see this change management ticket. Okay, I want to actually see how this change was implemented. Who implemented it? At what time? Who approved it? Was it verified? Was there testing done? Do you have a rollback plan? All those things you’ve got to have, especially at a startup, everyone’s a security person that touches anything in the infrastructure.

Speaker 0 | 38:02.543

How do you… How do you train the startup mentality or the startup people, you know, the ones who don’t want you to control them because you’re going to slow them down. You’re going to keep them from being able to do what they were really hired for, which was to make the blinky lights blink. How do you go about getting them to buy in on the SOC 2 compliance? Or is it just part of, is it an easier sell than I think it is?

Speaker 1 | 38:31.430

I think. I think the best way is make them be part of the audit, right? Have them be on the call with an auditor, right? And so, you know, my intern is now, he’s not no longer, I call him an intern, but he’s not, you know, he’s my desktop support guy. During audit, I said, hey, I need help pulling this data, this proof. And he goes, wow, this ticket’s kind of missing the, you know, HR approval. Well, we have it in a chat, but we don’t have it in there. I said, well, go ahead and paste it into the ticket from the chat that shows the proof. He goes, we can’t do this. I’m not going to make changes until HR puts it in the ticket. You know, this is not. And so the real start, they realize the implications, right? Because if you don’t pass that audit, you can’t do bigger business. And you can’t earn the trust of your customers, especially when you have to earn the trust of a state, right? You have to do it right. And so when you start involving your staff in the audits, even if you don’t really need them, then you can do it all yourself. You shouldn’t do it yourself. You should involve them. You should let them taste what what I have to go through an audit. And when they get a taste of it, they start realizing, whoa, this. OK, now I understand why we’re doing this. Sometimes they call it bureaucratic work. Right. Why do I have to do this bureaucratic work? Why can’t I just push the buttons, make it work, and go work on something else? Once you start having to spend time with auditors, they start seeing the reason and why we do these additional steps.

Speaker 0 | 40:14.227

Yeah, those are some awesome points. Get the everyday people involved with the audits. Let them see what the reason is because then they get some ownership of it. They get some better understanding than, oh, they’re off talking to the auditors and now we get to go there. spend more time at the water cooler or get that extra cup of coffee. I’ve had this other idea ringing in my head and, and I just, I, it’s such a, a back and forth idea. Like, you know, I, I started looking at what Reviver does and the electronic plates and I’m thinking, oh man, I could just see this as part of a movie. as somebody gets one of these plates puts it on their car and they hack the plate so that they can change their license plate as they’re driving around um and it i’m sure that it would be great advertising um but i’m also sure that any of the uh state agency people watching that would then start going oh my god we can’t have that absolutely i think that’s one of the most common questions so

Speaker 1 | 41:22.820

I’m a big gym rat and I’m at the gym and a lot of my gym friends go, hey, so can I just like change the number if I’d like to? And I said, no, you can’t change the number. You can modify with our plate in California. You can modify your banner at the bottom. Right. We have pre-approved DMV banners and you can look at the different codes and you can apply and request like, hey, I want this new banner. And then the DMV actually reviews that time to time. They approve it, and we add additional slogans and things to the banner. But absolutely, you know, we have to, on a regular basis, do penetration testing of not just our cloud environment, but also of the plate itself. And so we’ve, you know, done a lot of work to make sure that could not happen. uh if you tamper with our plate it’ll go into detachment so if you if you try to say well you know what i’ll take it apart and i’ll i’ll mess with the circuitry or i’ll uh you know we we thought of everything for that right the second the second you take a plate uh off a car it’s no longer actually a government id it’s now just a display when we when we ship a customer a plate it’s not a government id uh if it was a government id which Originally, we used to provision plates and send them to customers at the very beginning, at least in the system. And we found very quickly, one, you have to insure it. The second a plate actually has a number, you have to lock it under DMV. You have to have three parameters how you lock it away. But when our plate is in a warehouse, it’s not a government ID. It’s just a display, just like a television.

Speaker 0 | 43:14.336

buy or anything else it doesn’t have any government uh validation to it so you know i’m thinking of all of these different kinds of things like trying to make it bling and and have the neon lights and having custom little banners across the bottom and stuff like that you know the things that would make it kind of fun and and customizable but but yeah you’re right you know a government id i i can’t get an led version of my my driver’s license and have it light up a room or be able to be a flashlight or you know change my hair color on demand and and things like that so um makes a lot of sense as you speak of it not that way yeah absolutely it’s it’s uh it’s interesting the interesting thing about reviver and i feel you know very lucky that we

Speaker 1 | 44:07.506

touch so many different technologies i i I never knew when I joined Reviver how many different technologies we utilize for something. But I have an app on my phone and I can make my plate the background white or black. I can change the banner message at the very bottom of the plate and the telematics function in our pro, which is the wired plate. There are behind the scenes in our platform, we’re running so many different technologies. It’s amazing. You touch everything, you know, from Spark Apache to Kafka to, you know, load balancers. It’s just it goes on and on and on. I mean, I don’t want to give us, you know, the technologies, but I just threw a few out there. And it’s a lot of different technologies. What people don’t realize is that most of their apps on their phone… are talking to the cloud and those are Linux servers, right? So, you know, in the mid-90s, I thought, oh, Linux is not really going to survive, right? Because Microsoft has such a huge stronghold on the industry. But in fact, they flourished so much that they had to start supporting Linux and Windows 10 because they were losing the developer community because a Mac is already a Linux. It’s running BSD. So you’re already native when you’re talking to a Cisco switch or you’re talking to a Linux server. And with Windows, you were on an island. You’re like, okay, it’s a great office machine, and you can do finance work on it. That’s great for spreadsheets. But it doesn’t talk to, you know, you go on a plane, you watch, you know, well, now they don’t have the TVs anymore. You watch it on your iPad. But, you know, all that software was all Linux run, right? uh our you know smart refrigerators you know all these smart devices they’re really running a modified version of linux the kernel has been modified it’s designed to do a certain purpose and and and so the the linux world in the open source world it

Speaker 0 | 46:24.658

it uh it lives on and it lives on stronger than ever yeah and we bring up an interesting point there i hadn’t even really thought about how much everything is run on that. Especially, I mean, just the whole infrastructure as a code, all of the combined servers, all of the… One of my friends just constantly just bags on the thought or the statement of the cloud. He’s like, it’s just somebody else’s server.

Speaker 1 | 46:59.657

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 47:00.797

But those data centers, those purpose built data centers that are just built … for running of any code and then just the ways that you can it’s a multi-tenant um environment that we get to design whatever we want whatever we can conceptualize um

Speaker 1 | 47:23.597

it’s yeah there’s a lot of linux out there and now like let’s say you want to run just a little bit of code and you go it i only have this one function But do I spin up a whole EC2 instance that’s dedicated for one function? With Lambda functions, you can just run one piece of code, right? For example, you know, we’re looking at Amazon Connect, and I took a two-day workshop on Amazon Connect where we built a hotel booking system, right, all automated, that can identify who you are, ask for a pin, and it recognizes you, compares that in a database, in a SQL database. and runs a certain function, and that’s all it does. And you tell it verbally. They have all these different applications in the cloud where you have voice recognition already built in, right? You don’t have to have recordings. You can tell it how to sound, and you say, I want you to have a Texan newscaster accent, and you can do that. It’s actually in there. And you say, you know what, I want him to talk a little faster, a little slower. And you can do all that right now in the cloud. It’s just at your fingertips. It’s just amazing. So we built this in the two-day workshop, a whole hotel phone system with Amazon Connect to be able to take reservations without any agents. So it’s just amazing what in the cloud has been built. It’s amazing what a little bookstore has done, right? I worked for Hewlett Packard back in like from 97 to 2001. And I remember Carly Farina saying, yeah, we just want to deal with Amazon. We’re going to kick out all the Sun Microsystem servers and we’re going to use HP servers. Right. And I’m like, what’s this little bookstore? Right. And then I kind of looked it up like, oh, wow, I don’t have to go to the library. I can order any. They got every book you could think of. Right. And and I look at it. That was practice for Jeff Bezos to that. Hey, if you can catalog, you know, 10,000, 100,000 items, why can’t you catalog millions of products? Right. It doesn’t have to be a book. And then he realized later on, wait a minute, my servers are only used during the holidays. And then they’re sitting doing nothing. And they’re pretty penny. How can I find a way, a revenue stream, to pay for these servers so I can grow my bookstore without having the bookstore pay for these servers? And so at first it was about designing a product to utilize the idle time of the servers that were sitting around doing nothing. And now I forget how many. It’s like they have 150 different products in the cloud just in AWS. Azure is the same thing. It’s just amazing. what’s available now. I think a lot of IT folks want to buy a lot of products from other vendors. I try to stay vanilla in whatever we implement and not do a lot of customization because the customization is what can cost money in developers, right? Developers are not cheap. And then when you have to upgrade with a certain version, let’s say of Java, is obsolete because it has security vulnerabilities and you build all these customizations uh now you gotta you gotta redesign that’s expensive it’s painful i think that’s one of the reasons i i’m shocked like for example hewlett packard uh they’re a computer company you would think they would have state-of-the-art systems to use internally within themselves they don’t you know uh i i have a family member that that that works for them that It has to still do things over spreadsheets because you can’t get the right information out of it. Because now the information that’s needed is in five different databases, and some of them are 15, 20 years old. So the nice thing of being in the cloud is that you can change vendors really quick. And I’ll give you an example. We use Concur for our expenses. I think it’s kind of archaic. Now, I know it’s kind of the one that’s the most common in the industry, and they’re number one. But I would rather go to a platform that is more modern, you know, that’s written on more modern languages that was built in the cloud by intent. And it wasn’t it’s running on old AS400 mainframes. And then you bolt on a web interface. Right. And you wonder why.

Speaker 0 | 52:16.097

That’s my world.

Speaker 1 | 52:18.059

I’ll give you a current like what I’m dealing with today. Our controller goes, hey, people are having problems submitting expenses. It’s convoluted with what they are. Under auto, they might do a rental car. They might do gas. And so we want to just change the descriptions to be simple for people where they can’t make a mistake. It’s very intuitive. You can’t do that in that space. You have to have the developer do it. I can’t, as an administrator, change those things. So we’re looking at things like Expensify and some of these newer systems. that are much more fluid and you can modify things yourself. And you don’t need to create a ticket and wait two weeks for it to be done. And you can just on the fly make the modification done and go on with your business.

Speaker 0 | 53:01.344

Right. And that’s one of the beauties of, I keep talking to different vendors and I’m telling them, you know, what I want is to work with companies that use modern technology and modern methodologies and the ability to just spin up. a like service. And as long as you make sure that you accept the same inputs and provide the outputs that you want or the same outputs, you can change the code around however you want in the middle of it. And then as long as the data, you just snap that new piece in place or you get a copy of the data or the data stream, then spin up that new service. test it make sure that everything works great and then when you’re ready you just shut down one snap the other piece into place fire it up and then you’re running on the new one um and so many people they just they’re like wait what spin

Speaker 1 | 54:01.876

up a new one what do you mean even some of the geeks like us yeah it’s it’s amazing you know i do some consulting work uh on the side and uh there’s a pest control company that I was working with and said we can’t be compliant right and uh I looked and they were you know running access databases on-prem that are you know 1997. We’re like yeah but we have all these customization and I said you could do all this in the cloud I recommend keep your system there’s no I wouldn’t touch to upgrade it uh I would I would create a whole new environment in the cloud uh you know the test environment, test all of it, and then just do a cutover to the whole new environment. Don’t use any of the old tools you use.

Speaker 0 | 54:51.314

If anything, grab all of the data and just put it in a new home and then go.

Speaker 1 | 54:56.679

Yeah. You can do it, and now it’s like instead of your iPad talking to an Access database, you can be much more effective of doing it in the cloud.

Speaker 0 | 55:08.566

So let me take a completely different tack than any of the stuff that this has been a great conversation. I’m really enjoying it. What are the differences that you’ve experienced and the challenges with dealing with the management and going from Verifone, from the 6,000 people person company down to the 55, 85, 35, 85? to the the grow up and um you know like like i know that you spent a lot of time talking to the ceo the other day and so um that that one-on-one conversation that you get to have with the ceo compared to what it was like dealing with management at verifone what tell me a little about those experiences and what have you learned going from the the large back down to the small and what What are some of the hard-learned lessons that you’re willing to share to those that are coming up behind us and the ones that are trying to learn, well, I want to do stuff with technology, but I have no idea where to go. But startups sound great because I’m going to make lots of money there. Any tips, tricks, thoughts?

Speaker 1 | 56:28.584

So I’m fortunate enough that our CEO was an IT guy in his past life. He’s extremely intelligent. So now there’s also, I think there’s been, you know, at first, because he’s the second CEO that I’ve had at Reviver. You know, I think at first, because he’s got a vast knowledge in IT, there was, you know, he questioned some of the things of how they were implemented. And I told him, well, It’s done differently in the cloud. I’ll give you an example. Lockscreen. Hey, we need to implement a lockscreen, right? And this is before we had Import Protection Manager to do it, right? Well, in the on-prem world, and he knew how to do this because he did this in his past life. He’s like, no, just go to the domain controller, add the policy to the right OU, and you’re done. Like, this is like, why is this taking so long? Why are you waiting for an MDM solution? I go, you can’t do that. Unless you run a hybrid domain control between Azure AD, and you can do that, AD Connect, and we don’t want to go that complicated because I’m trying to keep things simple. So if I hire somebody that’s going to college, they can manage it, right? I don’t need an Active Directory expert that you got to pay a lot more money for just for Active Directory when you’re a small shop. And so at first there was, you know, there was a lot of questioning of, I feel like you’re overcomplicating it. But I believe over time I got his trust and we have lock screen, but now it’s done through our MDM solution, right? It’s done through Microsoft Endpoint Protection Manager. So some of the things that were done on-prem were done differently and it took time to convince him with results, right? So I think, you know, gaining the trust of… of your executive team, uh, it, it takes time. You, you have to prove yourself. And I think it doesn’t matter with you if you’re in a large company or a small company, you have to prove that, uh, that, uh, your suggestions, uh, are effective. And then you got to show that result that it was effective.

Speaker 0 | 58:49.456

Build trust through results.

Speaker 1 | 58:51.657

Build trust through results. Yes. Uh, uh, I know one of the things that I have an issue with is that, uh, I’m a little bit uh i i describe too much i give too much flavor and color to a to a story and you know executives don’t have time for that they’re like okay what’s the bottom line i want to know the bottom line and so i’m learning now that you almost want to give them the bottom line and they’re going to ask you questions of how you got to that bottom line i have the tendency and i’ve been changing it is is that uh I want to explain to them how I got to the bottom line, right? But they don’t have time for that. They don’t want to hear, you know, well, this is the reason we picked this. You can’t do this. And here’s how it works. They want to hear the bottom line. And you want to make it almost where the bottom line is almost bland enough where they go, okay, I don’t understand the bottom line. And they start asking you questions, right? And you already have the answers for it. And then you only give them the answer that they’re asking. And now you don’t have to have this colorful description of your solution.

Speaker 0 | 60:03.589

And you don’t have to watch their eyes roll back. You don’t have to see them get that blank look. You know, my CFO told me a long time ago, he’s like, Mike, just tell me what time it is. Quit building me a watch and tell me what fucking time it is. Yes. And now my kids tell me, Dad, quit mansplaining.

Speaker 1 | 60:23.303

Yeah. You know, my desktop support analyst, he goes, you have the most colorful stories. I go, well, you know, since I’m your boss, I guess you have to listen to him, right? But. But with executives, it isn’t that way because they are busy, right? They’re dealing with finance issues. They’re dealing with personnel issues, with growth, you know, with marketing. I mean, they’re dealing with so many different aspects that they can’t just be focused on IT. And let’s face it, in IT, when we’re doing a good job, nobody says anything. They only think about IT when something’s broke. Right. Then all of a sudden they’re like, oh, yeah, we have we have an IT department. This isn’t working. I better, you know, create a ticket or give them a call or. But nobody says, hey, today I had no issues. Every system worked perfectly. I was able to do my job. Hey, thank you for for the good job you did to keep our systems running. And that doesn’t happen in the IT world. And we just have to. Good.

Speaker 0 | 61:33.024

I was going to say one of the things that we’ve run into and thank God we’re in this position is it’s instead of it just being they think of us when things are broken. They also think of us when things are tough or when when they want to go faster. So they’re coming to us going, hey, help me find a solution. Help me create a way to do this. And so now instead of it, you know, for the longest time, it was exactly what you’re talking about. The best day was the day that everybody forgot you were there. but now now it’s um everybody needing our help and needing us to help them move faster do more um achieve more build more you know just the improvements that we can offer that it offers itself just innately um technology offers it when leveraged correctly yeah i i you know and i uh

Speaker 1 | 62:29.152

Previous CEO, we had the last CEO, you know, told me, hey, Dave, you don’t need to explain to a customer service person, let’s say, how a system works in the back end. They just need to know how to use it. Right. I like telling people how it works. And the reason why is because if you know how things work under the hood and you don’t need to go maybe in all the detail, but just kind of a high level how it works, because then they know how to use a system better. or they can report the problem better, right? It’s broken. When you get a ticket and it says, it’s broke, and you go, I need more information. I need a screenshot. What were you doing during that time? What’s the error, right? And so if you teach them kind of how the things work from a high level, they do a better job of reporting problems too. And I also want, you know, there’s a lot of room for automation. And a lot of times people are doing the same thing every single day. Right. And they’re like, I have to work 10 hours a day just to keep up with business. Right. And I love to have that time with them and say, can I see what you’re doing, you know, 10 hours a day? Or is there anything you’re doing that that we could offload from you? And they go, what do you mean? Like, give it to another person? No, no, no, no. Offloaded like, you know, like no person has to do it.

Speaker 0 | 63:50.945

Make the computer do the work.

Speaker 1 | 63:52.766

Yeah. And you’ll get the same result because. If Johnny comes in hungover and decides to press the wrong buttons, you don’t have to deal with that because the computer is going to do it the same way every time. Once you get it to work and you got the automation in place, it’s scalable. You can grow now. And as you get more and more customers on board, it’s still manageable. Scalability is really the key. And so you have to have it in the forefront of your mind. Is it scalable? If it’s not, we’re doing something wrong.

Speaker 0 | 64:27.581

then the implementation is not right. Yeah, yeah. If you can only spin up so many resources and you’re going to peak at that point, is it worth doing? Sometimes it is. But sometimes if you can figure out that way to make it where you can go to the next level, even much further than the person that’s immediately asking for the solution today, if you can see how we can get to a scale of 10 for tomorrow, that’s…

Speaker 1 | 64:57.765

I do find we have some young people that were interns and then became, and a lot of them are, you know, in other departments, you know, sales or, you know, uh, customer success, but they’re hungry for knowledge. And I love mentoring, working with people and teaching them. And it’s amazing. You get them to say, you don’t have to do that. You know, this part power automate, you can actually submit that form automatically and add it to a spreadsheet and you don’t have to go and cut and paste that email and put it in a spreadsheet and like this, like you’re going to be doing this all the time. And as we get more customers, you’re going to be doing more. And I give them access to the tools and I, you know, I guide them on how to implement it. Also, they come to work and they’re learning something that’s going to benefit the company and it’s going to benefit their personal growth too. And that makes collecting a paycheck a lot better when you have that purpose, mentorship. I really feel that our country, compared to some of the other countries, is really lacking internships and colleges. Germany is a good example of a… strong internship country. You can’t graduate and get a bachelor’s degree without doing an internship in whatever, you know, degree you’re getting. You have to work, you know, for a company, for not, you know, for almost for free or for, you know, low pay, but you have to get that experience or you can’t graduate. And I think we need to have the same thing in this country to make our young people, you know, cutting edge. It’s really in the mentorship. It’s our job as the more experienced IT people to teach our younger people, you know, how to embrace IT and leverage it.

Speaker 0 | 66:44.607

We have a guy that just started with us. He just graduated back in May. And what’s it been? That’s the fifth month. It’s the ninth month. In three months, he says that we’ve taught him more in three months than he learned in four years of college. Because. because he’s actually doing it. And it’s not just the concept. Yes, he got some of the concepts and they gave him a foundation layer that he’s relied on with what he’s doing for us. But the practical application of what he’s doing has opened up his eyes in ways that the classes never did. And I found that to be true myself. Unfortunately, I didn’t do much for internships while I was working on my bachelor’s. And when I started looking for a job, that was it was a killer. It made it so I couldn’t find a job. Well, have you done anything besides bartend and go to school for computers?

Speaker 1 | 67:45.516

Absolutely. I actually had in my previous company a guy that had a master’s degree and I had to let him go four months later because he didn’t have the troubleshooting skills. You have a problem, you cut it in half. Where’s the problem now? you know process of elimination right and you can that’s not just an it thing that’s if you’re troubleshooting an electrical problem at your house a car problem it doesn’t matter you know a health problem you know okay i take these things out of my diet am i still having you know acid reflux okay i’m going to add one thing back in right all these basic kind of troubleshooting 101 principles that you that that uh some people have it you And some people don’t. I think you can teach it to everybody, but some people embrace it very quickly. And when the light bulb comes on, oh, I get it. This is how I troubleshoot. And I love troubleshooting and finding problems. That’s one of my favorite things in IT, right? And there’s been times I’ve spent, you know, late nights banging my head on something. But I guarantee you, when I solve that problem and I spend six hours on it, even if I have that problem 10 years later, I remember exactly what the solution is.

Speaker 0 | 68:55.302

In there, and yes, definitely. Like, for me, it’s always the problem solving or the puzzle solving. You know what? There’s got to be a way that I can do this. There’s got to be a way. So, yeah, that troubleshooting mentality, that seemed to be one of those gifts that I had. You know, just that innate talent of being able to find something that’s not working and track it down. You know, okay, well, it’s not the inputs. All of the inputs are solid. So, what’s coming out? Okay. Where is it? Where’s it change? And just, yeah, the different troubleshooting techniques to bring it down to where is the problem? And then once you can find out where the problem is, now you can try to figure out what the problem is.

Speaker 1 | 69:40.096

Yeah. I mean, learning how to parse log files, right, and go through and see. When we were rolling SCCM in the last company, you know, SCCM has a parser. And you have to learn how the parser works. When the last part of the log is highlighted in red, that’s actually not the problem. It’s something right before it, before the failure. And you learn through experience how to interpret these. Then as I was teaching other desktop support guys… They were they’re like, how do you know this? And you go, it’s time. It takes time. Right. It just takes practice and time, just like anything else, learning a language or learning anything is then you know where to look for what and how to look at it and how to filter it correctly and get all the noise out and see where the issue is. And it’s really a lot of it is just putting the time and trial and error. But mentorships, working with somebody that’s more senior level already has those skills. That’s something that in a school lab, you won’t really learn like you do in real life.

Speaker 0 | 70:52.705

Yeah, for sure. The real world experience. You know, there was one of the other things that you said earlier that I really kind of love. And I think I’m going to bring it to my team meeting tomorrow, as a matter of fact. And that is, you know, cut to the bottom line, leave them with enough questions to start asking. Or leave them with enough mystery to start asking the questions and let them discover what they need to know about what you’re trying to give to them. Because I get caught in that same trap of trying to explain it or come up with the correct metaphor or a metaphor that somewhat results or appears like what the problem is. And I’ve got one of my… System admins, man, he comes up with these metaphors and there’s times where I’m just like, no. I wish I could come up with one right now to tell you the stories that he comes up with, but the analogies he uses sometimes, I’m just like, we can’t explain it to them like that.

Speaker 1 | 72:03.457

Well, I think Albert Einstein says if you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it.

Speaker 0 | 72:08.680

Well, and I can’t tell you how many times that. Like I’m trying to troubleshoot some code that I wrote. And as I’m trying to explain it to somebody, it becomes obvious what my problem was. But while I’m sitting there trying to think it through, I cannot see it. But as soon as I try to verbalize it, it opens up different pathways. And then suddenly, right there, there’s the problem.

Speaker 1 | 72:32.130

So a lot of times, if you can make it sound simple, people have more confidence in you that you actually get what you’re… what your solution is or what you’re presenting. If you start, even though you might have all those inputs and everything you’re saying is valid, it kind of shows that you’re not totally confident in the solution. When you can simplify the solution, and then when they ask questions, the questions line up, right? The questions will point back. Especially, you know… There’s some executives that are not that savvy, and some are. I know that our CEO can kind of smell BS pretty easily. And so there’s times where I have an approach, and then he’ll ask me questions. I’m like, oh, man, he’s got even a better approach. I already know where he’s going with this. I’m like, crap. I mean, because there’s not just one solution to things. Sometimes there’s… There’s the more complex solution is the simpler solution.

Speaker 0 | 73:39.711

Yeah, man. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked in there. I need help with this. Or I just come to it with one approach. And then exactly like you’re talking about, they start to ask questions. And it’s just like, oh,

Speaker 1 | 73:54.858

crap.

Speaker 0 | 73:57.800

All right. I see where you’re going. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 74:01.501

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 74:02.282

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for showing me why you’re there and I’m over here.

Speaker 1 | 74:09.944

But those are all learning experiences, right?

Speaker 0 | 74:11.784

Yeah, they are. You got to take them. You got to learn from them. You got to grow from them and you embrace them. And just grow with it.

Speaker 1 | 74:21.507

My favorite is learning from other people’s mistakes more than my own mistakes. Right. Because I’ve been enough – so some of the projects I’m managing right now, some of the gotchas I’m looking for, it’s not because I’m some intelligent person that just woke up in the middle and said, oh, I need to make sure I’m covering this. It’s a milestone-based project. Make sure that we got – everything’s in the sow correctly, that there’s contingencies if it doesn’t go right, all those things built in. And that has happened and evolved from being on projects that went south right being on projects that a lot of money and effort got invested into and the result was not that satisfactory or or or we didn’t even get to the end game right and then so then you analyze that and go where did we go wrong Well, you know what? We didn’t do a good discovery before we even started the project. A lot of times people want to start and they haven’t really done a discovery. How does the old legacy system work? Why does it do certain things, right? What’s the goal? Yeah, what’s the goal and result? And so when you start learning that, hey, every project needs to have a really good, strong discovery. Really good planning. If I think that you spend more time in discovery and planning than actually executing.

Speaker 0 | 75:55.134

You should. You definitely should.

Speaker 1 | 75:59.055

It’s the same thing like, you know, if you have four developers but 10 QA people, maybe there’s something wrong with your developers. Right? Because, again, if you develop code properly. You should have test routines in your development. So, you know, my son, he’s a JavaScript developer for a realtor company at 29 years old and very successful at it. And his big mantra is, I don’t write code without writing a test process first. So he’ll write the test process before he really writes the code. He’ll write code for the test before he actually writes the code. And he’s really big into that, so then he can run things through, and he knows exactly what piece of his code has issues and needs attention.

Speaker 0 | 76:52.047

Interesting.

Speaker 1 | 76:52.468

And this is a pretty different way of doing it, right? But he had an internship putting together a JavaScript plug-in for Twitter and worked with a few people that taught him this discipline, and he’s done very well with it.

Speaker 0 | 77:12.548

Yeah, that’s a really interesting way of approaching it. And I honestly hadn’t heard that yet, but it makes sense. So we’re getting to that point, David. Is there anything that you want to bring up, anything that you want to promote, bring out to the world or show off? Any personal achievements? You got a website that you’re doing on the side? You got a side hustle that’s making you some money?

Speaker 1 | 77:41.924

Oh, it’s a little funny, but I haven’t started it. It’s just a concept. And now somebody’s going to take it. And that’s okay if they do it. And it’s more of a joke than anything else with my wife. But I want to build an app that you talk into, that a man talks into, and it translates it to the best outcome that your wife or a female could take. And I, you know, and I. probably will charge like $3.99 in the app store for it. It’ll be like Siri, but it’s going to convert it into the best way that a female could embrace the message that a man has.

Speaker 0 | 78:27.931

Oh man, I could get in a lot of trouble just coming up with answers for that one right away. One of my daughters walks by right now.

Speaker 1 | 78:37.776

But I just think that, you know, an application like that, it would be a great gag gift, right? But if you actually made it where it was a decent application, right, and now with everything in the cloud, you can do that with voice recognition, with artificial intelligence, with machine learning. You could actually build something like that, right? And who knows where that could get us.

Speaker 0 | 79:02.503

You’d have to give it some way of voting so that… I could let you know how much trouble it got me in with that answer.

Speaker 1 | 79:09.646

Or maybe you could use it on a date, you know, you go on your first date and you want to say all the right things. And so you say it in there and say, ah, you don’t say it that way. That’ll be perceived the wrong way.

Speaker 0 | 79:22.691

Oh man. Hold on one second. Hey, there’s the name of the app. I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 79:34.376

There you go. I like that.

Speaker 0 | 79:36.437

Awesome. Well, Dave, this has been great. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. I hope everybody else has enjoyed it. And I hope you too enjoyed it. And that now that you’re basically done with your first podcast, that you had fun.

Speaker 1 | 79:49.383

Yes, I did. Thank you, Mike. And I appreciate you inviting me on the podcast. It was a pleasure.

Speaker 0 | 79:55.525

Yeah, truly appreciate your patience with us and coming out and talking with us. Have a wonderful day.

Speaker 1 | 80:02.665

Thank you so much, Mike. Have a good night.