34: Microsoft Build - Part I

[Music]

And we're back. It's episode number 34 of the Coffee and Code Cast.

Yeah, I think that's well-do and deserved here, buddy.

That's no sound effects. Cheers.

I'm seeing some red here. That's not mean you're a little loud.

Yeah, bring me down a little bit. Cool. Welcome everybody to the Coffee and Code Cast

a live stream tech podcast where we talk about neither coffee or code

although today it might be a little code. A little bit of code today for sure.

Yeah, I'm Kyle Johnson.

And I'm Mike Sheehan.

Thanks for joining us today, guys.

A very exciting episode.

We've taken, took a week off last week.

And this week it's all about build, Microsoft Build 2019 here at the Washington State Convention Center.

And so we've got a lot to talk about.

We're not going to be able to get it all in today, but we're going to cover some of the highlights.

And then we'll have a follow up episode probably next week to get some of the other things in there too.

So thanks for joining.

How you doing, buddy?

I'm great. It's been a heck of a couple of weeks.

It's been kind of crazy in Hectic, hasn't it? Just the work front and personal and everything kind of seems that way.

Yeah, we got a lot of deadlines to hit, especially for my team and we're getting there. We're in reasonably good shape.

A lot of work still to do, but I think we're in a place that we can hit it.

So that's exciting, but it's also very stressful. So I have not had a lot of time to go over the show notes as you've written here,

here, which you did a great job. This is very abnormal for the coffee

code cast here.

Usually it's vice versa, right? Kind of a deal.

Yeah, exactly. So this is a Mike show. And I don't have any research done.

So hopefully you've got a lot of good stuff to talk about.

It'll be very conversational because it's stuff that you already know about.

And it's just kind of like little, little tweaks and new and new tidbits.

So fear not, buddy. You get a step into my world now. This is what I usually do.

I just show up with a couple of beers and I'm like, what are we doing today, man?

What are we doing?

What are we talking about?

And you've got really polished notes.

So yeah, I was very happy to put this together this week

and had the time to do so.

So so many cool things just coming out of the conference.

It would be fun to dive into that.

Polished maybe an awfully strong word.

OK, OK.

I have notes.

Well, you've always been very thorough.

I think that's fair.

I can say that much at least.

I'll take that one.

Yeah, you're very thorough.

So right on, man.

But I think before we get into that,

It is kind of interesting to talk a little bit about what's happening right now because

it has been kind of a sprint at least the last few weeks, especially for you.

I'm helping out, but I'm kind of like, it's a different, you're in a different situation.

So how's it been going?

I know you guys had last Wednesday, you had a big bash.

Yeah.

And we're going to have another one actually coming up this week tomorrow, tomorrow night

actually.

It was a Thursday, maybe it was Thursday, last Thursday.

I think it was last Wednesday or Thursday.

I don't remember the date.

It was Wednesday actually because we were supposed to record, but you were going to be out of

town. That's right. So we went ahead and did a Wednesday, but it went well. And we are doing

another one and we have one scheduled every Thursday up until our date of launch. So the

whole team of almost 10 guys are pretty much going to be staying here after hours. I think

last time we stayed till nearly 830, something like that. That's pretty cool. Pretty long

day. But we got a lot accomplished. So a lot of bug work taken care of. The product came

along, you know, quite a ways in one evening, which is really exciting to see.

And it's a lot of fun.

We sit in this room that we're in right now at the conference table.

We put on some tunes, we brought in some food.

Everybody had a good time and collaborated and got things, got questions

that they needed answered pretty quickly.

So it was a real collaborative environment and it was a lot of fun.

I was jealous to miss that one and also tomorrow because I will be gone as well.

But next week and the weeks following, I'll be here.

And I'm excited for that because that's always a fun thing usually like the end of a deadline is

Met with tons of stress and some negativity may be like oh shit

We're not doing enough and we're not gonna hit the deadline

But it sounds like I saw the chatter on teams and it looked like everybody was kind of enjoying it and getting into it a little bit

I think you're right. I think you're right about that and I was talking to a number of team members today and everybody I

Think feels like we're in a reasonable place. There's tons of bugs to fix still and there's more being found all the time

But nobody feels that it's an insurmountable task, right? It's gonna be kind of a

Right up to the deadline right up to the line finish

But I think it's doable and I think we can make the goal

Everybody has to be focused and kind of button down and do everything they can to get us there

But I think it's definitely possible to make it which makes it exciting too because if it's attainable

You can deal with some of the

short-term pain. I think it's hard when you realize there's no way in hell we're even close to being

done and we don't know when we're going to be done and we don't even know all that we have to do.

That can be a real dark spot of desolation as a developer. I've been there before and I think

this is a way different thing. We're now in momentum going to the finish line, like you said.

It is interesting that you say that because it ebbs and flows. I had last Friday to give you an

example. It was a day where I like got jerked around in a lot of different directions. Fixing a

a lot of problems, helping people get them blocked and that kind of thing.

Mostly what I'm supposed to be doing, but the context switching like that in entire

day is really draining and really taxing.

And it makes you totally lose your focus.

So at the end of the day, I was trying to like fix one particular item and I like sat

there and stared at my screen for 45 minutes or something like that and accomplished nothing.

So at that point, I just kind of gave up and washed my hands and I was like, I got to leave.

But I also was feeling very defeated that day.

I was just like totally overwhelmed.

And so coming in Monday with a new perspective

actually made me feel a lot better.

I kind of like whiteboarded a whole bunch of things

and line itemed everything that we had remaining,

you know, that were big ticket items.

Obviously the bugs in the testing

kind of is a continuing ongoing process,

but put a bunch of stuff up on the whiteboard

and by the time I got done with that

and reviewed the list and had talked with Ali,

who's our project manager,

everything felt a whole lot better.

- Oh, that's awesome.

Sometimes walking away is the best way to do it.

I know, even just fixing bugs,

like in a much smaller dimension,

but I've oftentimes just given up in frustration

and gone to sleep and thought about it

and woke up and boom, I woke up, wake up.

- Woke up.

- I woke up and boom, the answer was there.

So yeah, I remember talking to you a little bit about that

and you were just saying it was kind of a low point.

So I'm glad that things seem to be looking up this week.

- It's good and it's interesting

because like I say that a lot.

That's my next like thing I have to get rid of

is it's interesting.

- It's interesting.

- Yeah, that's kind of my like segue.

(laughing)

- T's gonna jump into that, yep.

- So you kind of go through those ebbs and flows

and but the good news is most of it's been positive.

I've only had like one or two of those days

where it's been kind of in negative doom

and gloom type attitude.

And I try not to show that too much

but generally speaking,

I think everybody's attitude has been really, really positive

which is really cool, given a project of the size

and given the deadlines that have been pushed upon

the project, so I think we're in a good place.

- I have to say, and I'll take this in a little bit

of a different direction, for me personally,

just over the last 18 months, 12 months really,

as you know, like going through divorce

and having to get out and meet people

and be more social, and I really didn't have to before.

I just kind of like showed up and, you know,

like my ex had done a lot of the heavy lifting

and I would just show up to places and do things.

Like I have to say, it's interesting

because it can be very--

in the moment-- this is the draw to what you're

talking about the project-- is that in the moment,

you can feel very defeated.

Or like, my efforts aren't paying off,

or like, this is way too hard, or it's not going to work.

I don't see the end of the light at the end of the tunnel.

And what I've learned in the last year,

just with relationships of any type,

is that you have to just remember to get back up.

And what you're experiencing in the moment

is not a reflection of the effort that you put in.

It's just the roadblock.

And so it's really important not to read that the wrong way

and be like, well, fuck it, we're just

not going to hit this deadline.

We might as well stop.

Or it's like, OK, well, I don't know yet,

but we're going to keep doing the things we've been doing.

And all of a sudden, you start seeing things fall into place.

And then the effort pays off.

And eventually, you come out of the dark, right?

Boom, it happens.

Not too different from solving a problem in the software

development world, right?

You're in the weeds, and you're having trouble,

and you're frustrated, and whatever.

and then you take a step away from the desk,

go on a little walk, come back and boom,

you can solve it in like a few minutes.

That's it.

You get back up and you keep doing what you do.

Yeah.

Right on, man.

Well, that's exciting.

I know you don't have a lot of time left on that.

It's coming to an end here soon.

We are, I think, 14 days away from launching

to the first set of users.

Wow.

A lot of stuff to do in 14 days.

Who's counting?

It's going to be a race, for sure.

Wow.

Well, welcome back, man.

This is, we missed last week, but you know, it's good.

What's good news about missing last week

is that gave me two weeks of time to collect Tesla news.

Oh, fuck, are you kidding me, man?

(laughing)

Oh, of course it did.

Well, there's been a lot in the news,

probably with those guys lately.

Well, I've got some personal news.

So we brought the car in.

Oh, you did?

Yeah, so it's getting repaired now

'cause I had the accident with it, I backed into somebody.

So now it's getting repaired.

So it'll look all nice and shiny again.

So I'm excited for that.

Excellent.

But the other thing that I had is I think a couple of episodes ago I was kind of raving

about the mobile Tesla repair service.

Yeah, the roadside assistance kind of a thing.

Are they come to your house?

Exactly.

They come to your house and do some fixing and they came in and we had a number of different

issues and he was going to address them all and everything was great.

I was really excited about it.

Well, we haven't heard from them since then.

And so he was indicating at the time of the service that it would be done or at least

We would be contacted back probably within a week or two at this point. It's been two months

If I remember correctly too, it was like little odds and ends like the glove box latch or something like that

That's right. So few parts to be to be had but also like one of the things was the phone the mobile app

You're supposed to be able to use their mobile app to open the car

Based on Bluetooth proximity and that sort of thing and and that has never worked

So that was another thing that he was gonna submit a ticket to like their software team

Because they figured that was like a something was fat-fingered as they were

Putting our car into the system or something like that. Yeah, so we were waiting on that and I've never gotten a response on that

It still doesn't work. We've never gotten a response on the parts. None of that stuff has ever been

Followed up on so the other day I went ahead and followed up with Tesla chat on their support on their website

and

They had no record of any of it

I mean they knew that the appointment happened

But they had no record of any notes from the appointment like follow up or items to a drill or parts being ordered or anything

What?

That's kind of jacked up dude. So not not so great there. I'm not I'm giving some bad Tesla news here, but

So she she basically told me you know, you should hear something by midweek

Well what today's Wednesday? I haven't heard anything yet

So still looking forward to hearing about where all that is not that we can do a lot with it

Because our car is gonna be in the shop for two weeks, but

Still bad Tesla news there. Yeah, that's disappointing because they're trying to ramp this thing up to scale

And if and they're not doing really good with some of the small details here

It's yeah, it is disappointing because of the service itself like the guy coming out the appointment itself was great

If the follow-up would have been the same type of follow-through

I guess you might say like then that appointment would have been a knock

You know they would have knocked it out of the park and I wonder if it was just

Irresponsibility on his part like he was supposed to go back and put notes in but didn't or if there was some kind of system failure

Where the notes didn't get uploaded or that's interesting. Yeah, what could have happened there, right?

So we'll go ahead and blow through my other Tesla news here since we're on the topic do it man

Just so they released another software update and this is nothing new, you know most cars have kind of

What would you call it a lane lane change assistance or like keeping you in your lane right or warning you if you're departing your lane

Yes, the thing so they've implemented that now so

You can you can enable this or disable this and it'll basically just warn you if you're deviating from the lane without using a signal

So that's number one.

And then the cooler part is the secondary feature,

which is not enabled, it is enabled by default,

and you can disable it per trip,

but it'll re-enable itself.

And what that feature is, is the same feature,

but if it detects a vehicle in the lane next to you

that you're deviating to,

or if it detects that you're going to crash

into something else,

it's either gonna stop you or steer you back

into your lane automatically

without any kind of engagement from you, right?

So that's pretty cool.

There was that video.

Did you see that, um, uh, collision avoidance that it did the other day?

Is that the one where it like really swerved hard around somebody who has a

pretty stopped?

Yeah.

So I read about that and, and it was interesting because there it is again.

It was interesting.

You'll get it.

Uh, the guy, the, the comments, I think I saw this on Reddit, the comments

were wondering whether or not it was actually the user or the driver that,

that did that or if it was the software and I don't think there was a conclusion.

Although most people said like the instinct of the driver would not be

to swerve into another lane in that scenario.

Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

And the cool thing about that, I just thought was that the car,

if it was definitely automated, the car already had knowledge that it was safe to

go. I think a lot of times if you or I did that,

we might not even have time to look. We would just react and you would go into

somebody else or something could happen.

Yeah. It was very bang bang, right?

he was driving down the road and all of a sudden I don't remember if somebody

peeled out of his way or something and revealed somebody at a total stop.

And so it was either running to the back of that car or deviate lanes.

Uh, and the car pretty heavily swerved.

I'm, I'm kind of surprised about the dramatic swerve effect that it had,

but moved him into the other lane and, and then went around, uh,

and pulled over to the shoulder and, and made it through the collision.

I think he did get rear ended, but, uh, I'll link, I'll link this up in the show

notes.

Yeah, put it in there because the interesting part as well, and I think this is got

standard procedures that the car after that pulls over to the shoulder and stops right and turns on the hazards. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yeah, pretty cool stuff. So pretty neat. More updates

to come. Obviously, there's tests of financials that are not

you know, deemed to be so great right now, but that's that's boring. We don't want to talk about that.

Yeah, the earnings and all that bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I know I still feel very strongly about them, but I understand investors.

There's always been a contingency that have been against them

and shorting the stock and that sort of thing.

And it seems like what I'm hearing is that some of the investors now are just

think he's that he's way too ambitious.

But I would also say this is nothing new.

This has been part of the history of the company since the beginning, right?

Yeah. And you don't ever.

It's a whole like CEO mentality.

You don't ever.

CEOs have to be a little bit crazy.

If you don't, if you're not crazy, you're not coming up with something that's new.

Right. We always have to have a bit of a bit of craziness in you to be a CEO of,

especially if something of that nature where you're disrupting industries that

much. Right.

It's the blessing and curse of Elon Musk,

but also SpaceX look where it is today from where it was.

And that didn't happen out of just being normal. Right.

So one other little piece of follow up I had here that I added to the show notes.

I saw this just as a headline. Okay.

As I was scrolling through Twitter in the evening. And, uh,

It says that Samsung, remember we talked about foldable technology?

We talked about the foldable phones.

There's a couple of them out there, Samsung and Huawei or Huawei.

Samsung Fold, right?

That's the one that we talked about in this case.

They are saying they will cancel the Galaxy Fold orders

if it doesn't ship this month.

Really?

And they're the ones, if I'm not mistaken,

that have the screen problems right now.

That's the one that, yeah, that's the one that we commented on.

Yeah, that has the that's been in the news a lot about about the screen problems. Yeah, they're cracking or breaking and

Yeah, it's a Samsung will cancel all orders for the Galaxy Fold if it has not shipped the device by May 31st

Yeah, so there you go

We I was basically one that said that like I don't think this technology is ready to be out there

You even said it was kind of gimmicky at least

Pretty gimmicky for shot for this kind of thing. Yeah, so for the price too. I mean for two grand

And I kind of expect a little bit more.

I just don't know how I feel about spending $2,000

on a foldable device at this point.

Samsung said it will be taking measures

to strengthen the display in light of reported issues.

That's good.

I wonder if that's supposed to be like a gorilla glass.

They working with Corning on that.

I wonder how that's going.

What they're doing.

It is interesting.

You hear about this stuff called foldable glass.

And you're just like, how in the hell does that happen?

Well, I watched a YouTube video that Corning

did on some of their newer versions of the gorilla glass.

And it's fucking incredible, like how much flex they get into

this thing before it actually breaks.

Really cool.

Yeah.

Interesting, man. Okay, well, we'll see what happens.

We'll report back on that.

Yeah, we'll keep an eye on it. It does say that. Nope, that's

just an update about Samsung notifying their customers. No

update. So that's all I got for show follow up show news.

Well, I think we should jump into the main topic.

>> Let's do it.

>> Microsoft Build 2019, Washington State Convention Center, dude.

>> So for those that may not be familiar, what is Build?

>> Well, I don't know if I can answer that correctly

either because there's a few different things that go on.

Like the VS Live, Visual Studio Live,

which is definitely like the coding conference.

Build is a little bit more dynamic than that.

I mean, it covers a lot of different areas, right?

It's still heavily geared towards developers,

but you also have like DevOps, and then you have IoT,

and then have things like there's a lot

of different categories.

- And I think that's true of most of their conferences.

I went to Ignite last year,

I think we talked about it on the show.

Same thing, you know, there was some DevTrack,

some DevOpsTrack, some management type, Business CTrack.

So a little bit of everything at these conferences,

They're trying to make it more widespread than just specifically developers, but I think

this one is more focused generally on the developer.

Yeah.

And I thought there were a few things that were really cool that I liked from the outset.

It's been a while since I've been to a developer conference.

In fact, the last time I was, Visual Studio Live 2012, before I came back to Seattle.

So that's when I saw you.

And that was in Redmond.

And it's changed a lot since then.

I guess that's all I can really say about it.

And it's pretty cool.

Like, there's a new--

one thing that I love is that there's an emphasis now

for students.

And so they have a whole students lab,

or like a whole thing where you can bring students onto the

show onto the conference.

And they're getting kids that are, what, like 12 years old

and up into internet of things and working with hardware

and doing labs to figure out how to build games and write code.

And so there was a lot of that activity,

which was very cool to see.

And I hadn't seen that before.

So I don't know how long they've been doing that,

but it was really encouraging to see that.

- It is crazy to see how young kids can come in

and be productive coders, right?

- Yeah.

- You can get kids that are 13 that have

just as much coding experience in some cases

as guys that have been in the industry for--

- Yeah, they're doing huge things.

I mean, they're coming up with glucose monitors

and all kinds of crazy stuff.

It's just really amazing to me

what people are doing with the new technology.

I mean, the fact of the matter is,

is that there's never been a time before

where you could do so much with what's existing.

Like with the tool sets that are available now,

you couldn't even imagine that 10 years ago

or 15 years ago or before that.

And now with even little to no coding experience,

you can build apps, you can communicate with hardware,

you can make smart devices.

It's just pretty amazing what you can do

with out of the box.

- That's the thing is I think like,

oh, I think that the Azure Cloud being able

to do all the services for you makes it so convenient

and easy for you to be able to stand up anything really, really quickly.

Because you don't have to worry about any infrastructure.

All you got to do is stand up a few services here and there,

and then wire them together in any way that you need to do.

So much of the work that you used to have to do as a developer,

setting up IAS, setting up your server, setting up this and that

and everything else, or finding a service that can handle this piece

of the pie has been taken away and is more or less

like a simple enter a few fields, you know,

give this thing a name, give this thing some,

some permissions and so forth and create it.

And then it's immediately able to be connected to

by any code.

And that's extremely valuable.

And the people that can leverage those types of tools

can build things extremely quickly,

which we've seen even in the projects

that we're working on right now,

like we can stand up things at incredible,

at an incredible pace, assuming there's no, you know,

bottlenecks in the way.

So it's pretty exciting and I think like you said,

like even somebody as young as 13 or something

that understands coding languages

and can spin something up in Azure,

can build something pretty cool pretty quickly.

- Yeah, I have to agree.

It was fun to see what was being presented by students

and it was fun to see what technologies were being unveiled.

There's a real big emphasis right now

on removing pain points from developers.

And so that was pretty evident at this conference

in a lot of different ways.

I've heard the phrase, no code, more times

than I've ever heard before.

If it was a drinking game, I would have been on the floor.

But by lunchtime, it was just every presentation,

everything they talked about was here you

can get into machine learning with no code.

Here you can get into cognitive services with no code.

And here you can learn how to build your first .NET app

with no code.

And so it's super cool just to see what they've done

to really take a lot of the underlying crap out of the way.

because when you and I got started back in dot net two,

the early days back in the mid 2000s there,

and so much time was spent on infrastructure

and configuration that it took you days

just to get a basic application up and running

in a lot of cases.

- Yeah, so I don't know how much time I've spent

configuring IAS, right?

That's the server that Microsoft runs everything through

in terms of web services.

So I don't know how many times I've spent time configuring,

setting up permissions, trying to get directories to work,

trying to get, what did they call those things?

The services that the apps run under,

I can't remember, AppPools.

- AppPools.

- All that kind of stupid shit.

I don't know how much time I spent configuring that

instead of writing code.

So like I said earlier,

like the fact that you don't have to worry

about any of the infrastructure,

you just give it a name and you spin it up

and Azure manages all of that.

that gives you a tremendous advantage.

And yeah, it's interesting though that you say that

everything or everything is no code

because at the Ignite conference,

which was what a year ago, everything was as code, right?

So it's configuration as code, deployments as code.

You know, all this stuff was like a version of code,

but it was kind of pseudo code, I guess you might say.

- Yep.

You know, the big thing we were talking about earlier

before we got interrupted was just the,

how they're bringing in people so much younger now.

So they have all student lab for people that are, you know,

but pre-teen almost now are showing up

and learning how to get their hands on hardware

and learn how to code.

Very cool, just like bringing up the community

from a young, young age.

On top of that, so many opportunities

to do things without code.

And it used to be all about the code.

And now, whether it's AI or machine learning or it's

hardware, there's so many things you can do

without even having to know .NET code.

And so really an exciting time for tech,

exciting time for the community.

I will add on top of that,

like the change since Satya Nadella took over as CEO

has really radically changed the landscape at Microsoft.

And I can't tell you how many people were on here

on Twitter saying, I don't know how to say this,

but Microsoft is cool.

- Well, they started,

they've done a lot of really awesome things.

They started with simple things like creating VS Code,

which is rapidly becoming a really well respected editor

for code.

Huge.

Not only for the Microsoft community,

but for other communities, because they support any language,

really.

Cross language, cross platform, you can install it on your Mac.

You can install it on Linux.

You can install it on Windows.

You can write Python.

You can write Java.

So there's a lot of things you can do with this tool.

I mean, it really is about the people.

And that was the big emphasis that I got from the keynote is that Satya even said like we are people-centric now. It's not about

having a wall around our software and trying to be the best in a box like we're about like

Meeting people where they're at and if it's on a Mac

Then we're gonna be the best experience on the Mac and if it's on Linux

We want to be the best experience on Linux and they're really doing a lot to make that happen

And that's something that I definitely appreciate everything that they've been doing has been more more open ecosystem more cross-platform

availability, putting everything on GitHub, open sourcing everything, adding Linux compatibility

onto the OS.

They had just been opening it up and bringing in everything and embracing everyone.

It's paying off in huge ways.

In fact, I was just talking to some people the other day and I was like, "I don't know

if you were at Microsoft currently, why you would want to leave?"

I mean, I know, obviously, there's inter-company politics and all that kind of thing, but the

company is doing so many things well and doing so many positive, productive things.

I think that the company, it's already become what the first, what was it?

Billion trillion.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Trillion dollar company.

And I don't, I don't see them going anywhere, but continuing up.

Yeah.

They surpassed Apple last month, I believe in terms of total like market cap.

And so they've done very well for themselves.

Um, like I mentioned earlier, like the work they've done on the AI side and the

ML side of things, they're surpassing a Amazon cloud.

And then in Amazon, I had a 10 year start, right?

at least so. It just goes to show like when you get the right people focusing on the right

things like what you can do and there's a lot of momentum right now on the cloud. They're

doing some great things. So really enjoyed it and at a very high level, we talked a little

bit just about how they're trying to reach people where they develop. So many cool things

have come out. I don't even know where to start. I mean, they, I think the open source

pieces the first thing I want to talk about because what's happened is that, you know,

back in Balmer days, it was like, we're not, we're going to be closed source and we're

going to own all of our shit and we're going to build the best software, but you got to

get it through our paywall or whatever and we're not going to share that with you. And

as a result of opening up so many things, like Calculator was like the first app that

was installed on Windows that was open sourced and they've done other things since then, but

Now what's happening is that you've got almost as many community commits and contributions

as you do from people internally.

So you've got an army of people now that are working outside of Microsoft for free to enhance

your products.

And I mean, talk about momentum.

They're able to deliver things quicker than they ever had before.

It's just fun to watch.

I think it's worth elaborating on that a little bit.

So when he says like commits from the community, in terms of software, what that means is that

you're basically committing code to a public repository.

So a public place where you can submit code and say, "Hey Microsoft, I've created this

code that does X, Y, Z. Would you like to incorporate this into your product?"

And they can say, "Sure, I would like to bring that in.

That fixes the problem that we have."

Or that's a cool feature that we would like to add.

They'll incorporate a change from a non-Microsoft employee into software that is a corporate

piece of software, which is pretty amazing on its surface, because anybody can contribute

a bug fix.

It's a pretty cool time to be in the Microsoft technology stack.

Kind of towards that same token, they just acquired GitHub, which is probably the biggest

set of code repositories that there is in the world.

>> Number one, I mean,

number one everybody that does anything with code is using GitHub.

So, yeah, it's a massive repository and they purchased that company.

The really cool announcement that came out of that now too,

is that this is more of a geeky kind of a thing that may not resonate with a lot of folks.

But you can now use your GitHub ID to authenticate onto Azure services.

So they have integrated this thing where,

If you're used to keeping your code over here, but you want to work with Microsoft stuff,

you don't have to have a separate account.

You can just link up and get to work.

So that's super cool too.

Yeah, they talked about it over and over again, just how much the community has really helped

accelerate the development over at Microsoft.

Because now, if you had a product team of maybe, let's just say you had a product team

of whatever the finite resource is, 20 guys, 50 guys, doesn't matter.

you have 50 guys or 100 guys in the community that are contributing to some of these bugs,

now you're freed up to work on new product features. And so you can really release at

a much more rapid cadence than you could before.

I think it's, I'm not going to say it. It's not interesting.

You caught yourself that time.

Yeah. I think a lot of people would think in their minds, especially not in the software

industry is why would I want to contribute to something that I'm not being paid for?

Right? Why wouldn't I go to Microsoft and get paid for this?

But it happens all the time in the software community you run into these issues that that are on platforms that are supported by

Microsoft or by any other company

And let's say they they happen to open source or give this the repose available to anybody to submit code to

You're able to effectively unblock yourself

Whereas whereas before you would wait months years

For a fix from the actual corporation whereas now you can say like well I have this problem

I'm gonna go into the bits of this piece of software that you've written and I'm now gonna go ahead and fix that for you and not wait for the

You know

Release three years down the road or something like that that fixes it. Yeah, exactly you you are empowered now to

Customize build things that you want and share them with the community

And I think it's a little bit of a resume builder

Absolutely because now instead of just trying to if you want to work at Microsoft or if you want to be on a particular team

In the past you had to kind of prove your worth

Well, a lot of these guys now are contributors.

They actually acknowledged, I don't remember what the project was.

It was one of the open source projects, but on the center stage, they had acknowledged

the top three open source contributors.

These guys are well known within Microsoft as being heavy lifters on some of these products.

That's just a pretty cool thing.

Who knows where that could go in the future?

Job offers, networking, that sort of thing.

It's kind of a neat way to build your resume too.

I can tell you from my wife's perspective as a recruiter,

one of the first things she's gonna do

is go pull up your GitHub.

- And see what you got.

- Yep, if you don't contribute,

then you might be frowned upon.

Same thing for me, like these candidates come in

and a lot of times what they'll do

is they'll submit a code sample for us

or we'll have them create a small code project.

What they'll do a lot of times

is submit it to their GitHub account and say,

here you go, you can go download it

and run it from here and it'll work.

So a lot of times what I'll do is I'll go look at that project, great.

But then I'll go look at their account and see what else they've contributed to

and what other code projects they've done.

So I would say you're definitely dead on the money.

Like they, it's, it's very useful in terms of your resume and your job.

Um, and looking for future positions.

That's really cool.

And I, I gotta tell you, I had a fun conversation with a couple of engineers

this morning, uh, in the open source booth.

So they were talking about how calculator was one of the first windows.

um, window, it shipped with windows in its open source.

And the guys were saying, look, you know, we're trying to get more developers

into the open source community.

And they were asking me like, what do you do?

Uh, I said, I, I'm a full stack developer.

I kind of went through the spiel and, and they said, well, have you

gotten into open source?

I said, you know, I've dipped my toe into the water, but I haven't really

been a regular contributor and they were kind of curious.

Why not?

And I think there's a stigma.

I think for some of us, it's, I said one, it's imposter syndrome stuff.

I'm sure, like, that's how I feel is that, like, I'm familiar with the products that

I work on at work, but for me to go into a foreign code base with people that I don't

know is, it's quite intimidating, right?

And I'm not sure that I'm being helpful either.

Like, yeah, I know it looks good to do it, but is it helpful?

And it was fun.

We talked for about 15, 20 minutes and they walked me through some stuff and they said,

"Look, there's a ton of stuff going on here, and we want more people like you to come on

and make contributions."

And it's a very friendly community.

It's a very welcoming community and you're going to get a lot of insights and feedback

when you make a contribution.

So they even had some ideas on what I could try as being a noob in the open source community

to do to make a contribution and then spiral out from there.

So it was really fun to see how much they've shifted and now they embrace and really are

recruiting people to come on and try to help solve problems that they have on these projects.

I think that's awesome.

I'm in the same boat as you.

I'm very apprehensive about trying to submit pull requests in public repositories, especially

for large projects like that.

Same kind of qualms like, "What can I contribute to this?"

That other people, there's so many people out there, there's so many devs.

Kind of the same thing like we talked about in the management thing.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm the best dev there is in the world.

There are so many people that can do so much more than me, so much more quickly.

like, what am I going to be able to contribute here? Right? That's kind of the attitude.

But the fact is, you probably can contribute in some way if you if you really so choose,

it's just a matter of getting over that kind of that hump of being afraid to do so.

Well, the guy I taught you today had a really cool story as well. He said, look, you know,

four years ago, I was brand new at open source, and I was trying to work on some project and I

needed some library, but it was only available on Python. And so I got into I don't know Python,

I'm not a Python coder, but I went over there and I, you know, got into it a little bit and

figured out like I really needed this thing, but it didn't have all the features that I

needed. And so I really wanted to have this like status bar, but it wasn't available. He's

like, so I figured it out. I don't know if it took me a few days or whatever it was,

but he figured out how to do it. And he actually got it working and then submitted it to the

community. And they're like, dude, this is fucking awesome. Like we really needed this

thing for helping us out with that. And here's a guy that was really timid was like, I don't

know if I should even do this, but saw a need, put it together, send it back. And all of

And like now he's been doing it for four years. So it's pretty cool

And now he has a function like a piece of a major piece of software that he can say like I did that

Yeah, I contributed to this project and it's out there and everybody's using it now

Yeah, and that's pretty cool and powerful. Yeah, but you could never do before no wasn't possible before there was a closed wall

And so it's definitely a better together kind of a thing and it's fun to see

Like how much everybody wins when you all come together to work towards the solution

And so I was super encouraged to see what was happening

at the community level at Microsoft,

super encouraged to see what they were doing

to bring students up into the fold.

And then, I mean, we haven't even scratched the surface

and we're almost through the damn thing today.

- So can I take a quick aside here?

- Yeah.

- Just one quick note that I think is,

like if you think of like Apple, right,

who we both love, we have, I don't know how many Apple products,

five Apple products sitting on this table.

- Right.

- Like clearly we love that company,

but talk about a stark contrast, right?

Closed ecosystem, closed code base, closed app system.

Like everything is closed, Waldgarden.

- They're hardware, they're software.

- Yeah, exactly.

And you look at Apple and you don't necessarily see them

doing like crazy, innovative, awesome things.

Yes, the iPhone is great.

Yes, the Apple Watch is great.

Yes, the iPod is great, but they've been great for a while.

- Yeah.

They're not doing some, these crazy new additions,

whereas Microsoft is like pivoting quickly and fast.

And I think we've talked about this before,

but like I have some concerns about Apple.

Like yes, they're cash flush.

Like they make a lot of money,

but they're not innovating at the rate

that they used to innovate.

Yes, I know that there's like the problem of,

they've done a lot of the things already.

So like, where do you go from here?

But the thing is like Microsoft is not only building

hardware now, like my laptop here is a piece of Microsoft hardware.

It's actually a very beautiful laptop, Surface Pro laptop too, I think is what

it's called.

Rivals, you know, probably what the MacBook is, right?

It's a pretty nice piece of hardware and they built it.

So they built the software, they built the hardware, but you know what?

The software is open.

They'll let you install whatever the hell you want.

They don't care, right?

So like they're doing all the right things.

I think they're moving in a very positive direction and they have their own cloud,

which I think is a huge win for them as well.

Apple does not have that.

Or if they do, they don't expose it to other people.

They're not building it to be such a large scale cloud

to support the world as like Google, Apple and Amazon.

And so I think that's gonna become a detriment to them.

And I think Microsoft is in a very positive position,

which is why I was saying earlier,

like the people that work for Microsoft,

I think they have nowhere to go but up.

And I think it's a great place to be at the current moment.

And they've done a total 180 pivot, how quickly?

Like from being walled off, like only our stuff to now,

we embrace everybody's stuff and we want to be

where everybody's at.

They've done that in only a few years.

- I worked for Microsoft when I first met Christina.

So probably eight years.

- That's right.

- Something like that ago.

And that was during the Balmer days.

And it was not exciting, I can tell you that.

It was very stale, very stuffy, very boring.

- Old school kind of mentality.

It felt that way.

I mean, I can't say like I worked there for a long time and I had a lot of experience

and that sort of thing.

But the area that I worked in and the people that I worked with, I guess they were excited

about the particular project that we worked on because it was kind of cool at the time.

But it felt very stuffy, very corporate, very not exciting.

Whereas now I feel like they're just iterating.

They have a lot of very cool, talented people that are interesting to listen to, interesting

to follow.

That was one of the things I think that was interesting about the conference.

it is again. At Ignite was that there was these people that not only are great

personalities, but they're also extremely intelligent and well versed in the

technologies that they're working with and building. So you know you have the

typical people like Scott Gou and Hanselman and all those kind of people

that are there all the time, right? They've been around forever. But now

there's these like new, I think of the DevOps, I can't think of her name, I'll

have to look it up and put it in the show notes, but there's a gal that does

DevOps, she's super tatted up, big cross fitter, like super, like out of the norm for the software

industry, right? And she's up there, like, given all the awesome stuff that you can do with DevOps,

and it's cool to see like fresh blood, different people, and they're doing a lot with diversity

too.

tons. I saw that in the presentations, like to your point, that there was, you know, even

though there was still a majority of men in the in attendance, like when you saw the

presentations I felt like there was more diversity than I've ever seen before and

you had all types all ages it was super cool and and everybody like brought

their A game and and made it really fun and interesting. So we got different

races different genders yeah different ages yeah all represented one conference

all going doing the same things working with the same technologies it's

exciting that's awesome that's what we strive for they've turned it on their on

on its head and it's been really cool to see the evolution happen there I mean

It's very different than what it was just a few years ago.

And we had all this cool stuff, and we

haven't even talked about the technology, which is kind of neat.

I'm kind of glad it worked out that way.

I didn't know that we were going to go this route.

But that is the highlight of the show, I think,

is to show that these guys recognize that, hey,

the way that we were doing things

wasn't going to be sustainable.

And we can take the lead on the future.

And they've done a great job with that so far.

This is gonna be a five part series on the build conference, by the way.

It could be. I mean, we could go long. I don't know what we want to do.

Do we want to go long? Do we want to just cap it? I mean, I'm feeling good, but.

Feeling good. Well, then we might have to go get some more beers.

Yeah, we should. We probably should get a couple more beers at some point.

Yeah. Um,

let's move on from the conference, kind of the meta of the conference, right?

Yeah, that's what it was. Yep. Yeah. So what do you want to talk about next here?

There's a lot on this, on the show notes. What are you, what are you most excited

about. When you came out of the conference, oh, I almost knocked my beer over again.

Careful, buddy. When you came out of the conference, if I was to say, "What was the

one thing that sticks in your head and you're really, really excited about, what was it?"

It's really impossible to just pick one thing. I know that's silly to say, but I can't because

there was just so many things. There was a fire hose of things. But I think going along

with what we talked about, one of the interesting things was like two.

I can think of two right now that kind of speak to this.

We want to embrace everybody wherever you're at kind of mentality.

And the one that we all know a little bit about is how Internet Explorer is going to

be no longer.

It's going to be edge on Chromium, which is huge because now you're running Internet

Explorer on a Google platform, which is fucking crazy.

To even think like a few years ago that we'd be saying

that we're gonna be running on Google,

is mind blowing to me.

So for sure that's been the big announcement.

You can run, the next version of Internet Explorer

is gonna run on Mac, it's gonna run on Linux,

it's gonna run on whatever.

- There again, you're like bringing in everybody, right?

You're bringing in third parties,

your writing software to be cross-platform.

- And they wanted to address developer pain points.

Like it was painful as a developer

when you and I were doing this back in 2006

and we had to make sure it worked for Netscape,

well not Netscape, but like--

- Netscape, how old are you man?

- 2001 maybe, 2001, but like, you know, Firefox

and then Internet Explorer, different versions.

Like even IE's like four, five, six, seven, eight,

like all of those had different variations.

- Yeah, IE six was the bane of everybody.

every web developers, well, IE 654, all those versions

were the bane of every developer's existence

'cause they didn't follow proper conventions,

standards that were set forth.

They were violating a lot of them,

not fixing a lot of them,

and that's why everybody moved to Firefox, Chrome, et cetera.

- So they're finally now, I feel like in 2019,

we've gotten to this point,

we're just like, okay, you know what,

we're gonna try to ease the developer pain points

a little bit more here and make it a better world.

And one where, and not only for developers, but for users.

I mean, user experience would suck.

Like there's some healthcare that we are both

entrenched in for a lot of years.

It's very old school and they're very slow

to catch on to new trends.

And so it's not uncommon that maybe Chrome,

a newer version of Chrome is out,

but you can't run your payroll software,

your HR software unless it's on a version of your next

Explorer.

And usually a very dated one.

Very old, insecure, lots of problems.

And so now, moving to Chromium, they've

guaranteed backward compatibility with IE.

There's IE mode.

But you don't have to get a new browser.

You don't have to download another thing

or try to figure out how to make it work.

All you have to do is get the latest browser.

And for those applications, they will work in a compatible mode.

So that was a pretty big deal that got a lot of traction

there as well.

I would imagine got a lot of hand clapping going on

for that particular feature, right?

- Yep.

- You brought that up and the thing

that immediately came to my mind is like,

we work in the insurance industry,

so we work with some pretty big name companies

and the product that I'm working on

that we need to deliver here in 12 or whatever days,

same problem.

We have agencies that require their agents

to use Internet Explorer.

And to be honest with you, I don't know that we've tested it in that.

So I better make a note.

That'll be a follow up before the deployment.

Yeah.

Let's see what happens.

I might have to put you on that in the bug bash a couple of weeks from here.

Well, I'm due.

I owe you some stuff.

So add it to my plate.

I don't care.

All right.

Um, so I'm excited about that.

So the idea is that edge will now become a chromium browser.

So it'll basically be a Microsoft wrapper around kind of the, uh, the

Chrome engine, if you will.

That's right.

Like you have the best people making the best experience in the back end work,

but you have a little bit of a Microsoft flare up front.

So even has like the Explorer icon and it's got some customizations for

Microsoft that are really nice, but it also relies on the best back end browser.

I'll be interested to see how this goes.

Cause the thing is like they have,

they're adding some other features that a lot of people use in Chrome for,

I think they're adding some ad blocking by default. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

So there's some things that, that, uh, I think will be attractive in some ways,

but the, they have an uphill battle.

They've, they've been always perceived as the shitty browser, the, the dated browser,

the, the old crusty browser, right?

So they, they need to get past that.

And that's going to be extremely hard for them to get anywhere close to,

to, to regaining some, um, respect in the browser industry.

Um, so it's going to be very difficult, very hard, very uphill battle.

Uh, I hope they can do it.

I'll give them a shot.

You know, when Firefox released whatever quantum

or whatever their last version was, I gave them a shot.

- Yeah.

- I'm very interested in seeing the next thing,

but the other thing they have to realize too

is it has to have some interplay

with like things that already exist.

So like I have, I use Safari here,

I use Chrome on my desktop at work.

- Okay.

- So I have a mix, but I need things

to be able to like sync across.

So I better be able to have like my bookmarks

like in real time sync across them

for me to like, wanna make the jump, right?

'Cause I'm not gonna guarantee that I'm gonna use Edge

100% of the time.

- Well, I think that's interesting

because I think that's what they want to go for

and they're hoping that maybe you can get to a place

where like there's one browser.

But who knows, Safari's not gonna give up on that promise.

So you're right, you're gonna have to have

this intermediate layer of synchronization

and that sort of thing.

But for sure, you kind of knock one of the big guys out.

And I think, I don't know how it works with Chrome,

but if you have Chrome and you have Edge,

it should be pretty damn seamless.

I don't know if it's intuitive enough

to grab from one or the other,

but now you're running on the same software.

- It would really depend on what Microsoft's

wrapper is doing.

Like in theory, the guts can handle all the same things.

But does Microsoft expose all of those things?

That would be the question.

So I wish them luck.

I think it's exciting.

I think it's a good move for them to try and get back

in the browser business, but I think it's gonna be

a very difficult thing for them to achieve.

There's just such a bad taste in everybody's mouth

from that browser other than people that buy a computer

off the shelf and like that's the thing

that's already on it, so I'll use it, right?

- Correct.

Now I agree with you.

I think there's some concerns there

about the see how it plays out.

It's very exciting.

the pieces I've seen so far look great

and we're moving in the right direction.

Moving on, there's one other one I wanna talk about

because it's kind of the similar theme of working together

and bringing the best people together.

And this got a lot of talk time as well.

And I'm not as familiar with this product line,

but Kubernetes is kind of a big buzzword now,

which is like what container management,

so if you're doing Docker and that sort of thing.

- Right, so if you're not familiar with this,

containers is kind of a way that you can package up code

to be deployed onto multiple systems.

So it doesn't, it's agnostic of what software

you're running it on.

So you could run it on Linux, you could run it on Windows,

or at least that's ideal.

And what Kubernetes is, is Kubernetes is an orchestrator

of those containers.

- So it gets back to what we said earlier

in the beginning of the show of where like back in the day,

a developer would have to go through a lot of steps

just before they could even,

A lot of prerequisite work had to happen

before you could write code.

Well, Kubernetes solves that problem too.

It says, look, you shouldn't have to spend your time

trying to configure servers and tune all these things.

Do it once, and then you have a little template,

and then boom, you can apply that again and again and again.

So the interesting news out of this one

was a collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat,

which is fucking crazy, 'cause that's a Linux group.

- You got competitors, basically.

working together now.

You had Google and Microsoft working together on Edge browser.

And now you've got Red Hat and Microsoft working together

on this, they're calling it KEDA,

which is a acronym for Kubernetes-based event-driven

auto-scaling.

And so it's a mouthful, but essentially what they're trying

to do is make it easier for folks who are using containers

to auto-scale in Kubernetes.

So if you have your code in a container

and you're using Kubernetes and it's a little more

config heavy to get it to work,

let's say you get a big spike in traffic, well shit,

it's gonna be really maybe a little bit more work

to configure how it should scale that out.

This is basically a simplified way

to get your Kubernetes to scale based on certain events.

And I don't understand a lot of the inner workings of this,

but it was a pretty big deal.

Just because of the partnership for one,

and I think two is that it's not just something

that works for Microsoft, it's something that,

because it's a collaboration, you can use this

totally aside from Azure Kubernetes Services,

you can use this on OpenShift,

which is like Red Hat's platform too.

So they're doing a lot of work.

The point of this is that they're doing a lot of work

with other platforms and companies

that are not Microsoft and not PC

to make sure that everybody has a good experience.

- Yeah, it's a little bit of a theme from the conference.

So did they talk a little bit about Helm as well?

Is Helm, 'cause when I was at Ignite,

I remember there being a lot of talk

about the same type of thing, like auto-scaling,

or at least in your Kubernetes cluster saying,

like I can scale up to this many instances

or something like that, and it would handle that.

It seemed like it would handle that pretty easily.

Maybe that was something that Helm took care of.

But I'm curious as to if you got any details about that.

I don't have anything to say about that.

I didn't, I'll say this, I was very biased in which presentations I went to.

So aside from the keynote and some of the big hitters up front, most of my stuff was

more just about general like full stack development and a little bit on the machine learning side.

So I didn't cover much of that.

They may have talked about it.

I didn't get any of that though.

So if you look and see, you can follow up on that.

Fair enough.

Kubernetes, Helm and Docker containers is something that as we embarked on the idea of the

the project that I work on and that I manage,

we were very interested in using,

but unfortunately due to the deadlines

and the pressure that was put upon completion of the project,

we weren't able to kind of go down that road

and really research and invest the time

that was needed to containerize everything.

So maybe post launch,

maybe that's something that I wanna come back and address

'cause I definitely wanna learn that technology

and obviously that's the way the industry is going as a whole,

like everything is Docker, Kubernetes

and containers of some type,

and Kubernetes or some orchestrator to handle that.

So definitely want to get my head around that,

and would love to know more details

about what they were talking about at Build.

Cool.

That's all really good stuff, man.

What do we want to do?

Do we want to go a little bit more?

I don't know how far we should go.

Yeah, I would say give us,

maybe you have one more really cool item.

We can get into maybe one more topic here.

One more release announcement.

- I feel like it's so much in the weeds,

but it's really important stuff for developers to know about.

So I apologize if it's a little dry for our regular listeners

who we talk about more tech news and events,

but there's just so much that came out of this thing.

I think, certainly we could talk about just Azure,

that whole landscape and how much it's growing right now.

There was some really cool stuff with Windows subsystem

for Linux that came out, mobile development, HoloLens.

I mean, I'm really interested kind of in .NET

development a little bit.

I kind of want to talk about that,

but I'm not sure how much that's going to appeal

to our group.

But I think there's some big stuff

that's happening there too.

- Maybe we have another episode

that is specifically to some code related stuff.

Some more technical deep dive.

- Sure.

- If you're interested in that,

we can make that happen.

I think, go ahead.

- Well, I was just gonna say, that's a good point.

And so what I think we could talk about

is maybe some more of the cognitive services

because that's something that I think has mass appeal.

And you don't have to really get into the weeds

to understand what they're trying to do.

And it's pretty cool shit.

- Yeah.

So when we, as a company,

elected to go to the Azure Cloud,

we had competitive offers from Amazon and Microsoft

to lure us, if you will, onto the platforms.

And we ended up electing Microsoft,

not because they were maybe the clear winner in the space,

but because they were growing and growing at a rapid rate.

And obviously because most of our stack

currently was on Microsoft technology.

- Yeah, all the knowledge base that we had at the company

at the time was really in their framework

and their development tools.

So it made sense to stick with that

instead of retrain everybody.

- And so they use that as a crutch, I think,

initially to get people on their platform

and to get people into their cloud.

But I think they're proving to be a very capable cloud,

very, very rapidly.

Like I know some people here might disagree with that,

but generally speaking, in terms of like AWS

being like the gold standard,

they're rapidly catching up.

- Let me tell you about this.

This is very interesting.

So there's a piece of the cognitive services

that Azure offers called LUIS,

Language Understanding Service, basically.

And what that entails,

sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo,

but I'll simplify it for you.

They had a very cool demo where you had Microsoft Word open on eight screens, eight different

computers.

Let's just imagine it's eight people in different parts of the world.

You had someone in China, you had someone in Thailand, you had someone in Mexico and

somebody in the US and a few other places.

All editing the same doc?

Yeah, they're all working together on a collaboration.

Okay.

So the Word doc is open and they're trying to communicate between offices.

And so I'm writing in English, whatever I'm trying to talk about, and I'm typing some

things out.

simultaneously on every other screen. It's translating to that native language in real time.

So it's like, as soon as they change one character or one word, everybody gets the updated word.

It's not like spinning or taking a few minutes. And so this is part of their new AI, the models

that they've built to do language translation in real time. And it's phenomenal what they

can do with the power of the cloud. I mean, you send literally like no latency between

destinations that are thousands of miles away.

And you think about the work that is happening underneath the covers to make that occur.

Because not only does it have to, like, it's not as simple as like, oh, they typed the word,

you know, I don't know, again, right?

Send that to a server somewhere, process what that word is, switch it to some other language.

It's not that simple because it has to be taken in context of the sentence that it's being written against.

Right.

So it has to, it has to do that.

And then other languages treat those types of things differently.

So like there's a ton of work that happens behind the scenes during that thing.

But to you, it's like so damn fast that it, it seems like it's in real time.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

It's insane.

What's going on behind the scenes to make that happen.

I would say also there was another cool thing that they demonstrated there too,

which was some of their speech services.

They have a new, um, some new releases there with a neural speech to text and

text to speech.

And so this is very good for transcription, right?

You can think of like, how this used to be

a very manual process, even in the medical field.

Like if you had to transcribe doctor's notes,

a lot of times you'd call a service

and somebody would like be hand typing these things.

Now you can go to Azure Speech Services

and you can speak over the phone

and have a computer transcript the entire conversation

for you and package it up.

And it can do that in 14 different locales.

So that's phenomenal as well.

And that's also in real time.

Pretty cool stuff.

I've seen some similar things for, we use the product Microsoft Teams, which is

equivalent to Slack, if you're familiar with Slack or any other chat tool.

But in a very group setting.

So like, let's say we have in a meeting with, uh, you know, I don't know, 30 people

and they might, you know, there might be 10 here, there might be 10 over in India.

And there might be, you know, a few over in, in, I don't know, somewhere else.

And as you were talking in real time, it's giving you closed caption information.

based on your location.

- Yeah, it's not a person translating this.

This is all done through the computer.

- Yeah, and it's accurate.

I've seen demos of this being done

and it does incredibly well.

So really, really cool stuff and incredibly powerful.

And it's only gonna get better.

Like the more and more machine learning grows and develops,

like that stuff is only gonna get more and more

feature complete and more accurate.

And it's gonna become second nature.

You're just gonna be like,

"Why the hell didn't we have this before?"

Yeah, or you'll get some software

doesn't have it and you'll be like, "Wow, this is ancient."

I'll segue this and this will be the wrap up here, but I want to talk a little bit just

about how they're using this in a practical way.

It sounds kind of cheesy because I think when you look at the world's problems to solve,

you think coffee is not one of them probably.

It's a very cool practical example of what they're doing with Starbucks right now.

They have this thing called Deep Brew.

Deep Brew is kind of the code name behind this artificial intelligence at Starbucks.

They have a project called Purple Fish.

And if you're a Starbucks fan, aficionado,

you're going to see this in your Starbucks app

sooner than later.

It's in testing right now.

It's going to be released very soon.

And what I can tell you is that they're

using these models to determine, based on your location,

based on the weather conditions, and based on your order

history, what drinks and food to recommend to you.

For example, before this technology,

if you were a vegetarian, they would recommend to you

maybe the most popular product, which would be like,

I don't know, some kind of, if we're talking food,

it might be a wrap, like, you know, the spinach feta wrap,

but maybe it would be like the sausage, egg, cheese sandwich,

which I'm vegetarian, I can't eat that, if you, you know.

But it was a very naive thing, it would just say, look,

like based on what all of our customers like,

we're gonna suggest that to everybody.

And I didn't really find the edge cases.

They didn't find people that are vegetarian

or didn't like hot drink.

And so what happens now is that

through Microsoft artificial intelligence,

what they can do is collect all this data

on your preferences and they can say,

"Look, I know that when Kyle is in Seattle

"and the weather is like this,

"he's going to get a blonde espresso with extra cream."

- Oh, you nailed it.

- Boom, that's what I get.

I get a quad.

But they'll suggest that to me, and they'll suggest food items

that are similar along those lines.

And if it's warm outside, they might just--

I used to get the isospreso.

So that would be a suggestion.

Super cool now how it's very targeted to you,

and not just what everybody wants.

They're really trying to dial into user preference

and find ways to cater to what you specifically enjoy

and what you would like to eat or drink.

And get the nuance out of there, right?

Like before we would create these kind of,

I guess you might call them algorithms, really they're not,

but basic logic flows where you're like,

oh, if he orders something in the morning

at this particular location, usually he gets this, right?

Now you're trying to factor in all these different scenarios

like whether or, you know,

oh, maybe during this set of months,

he suddenly changes his pattern and he does this.

So you're doing pattern recognition instead of--

- Exactly right.

- Yeah, instead of this like, oh, well,

kind of this binary on/off type check.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

If you know that it's 105 degrees in baton rouge,

then you're not going to want to get the hot espresso.

We're going to recommend this instead.

And so it's using a lot of different variables

behind the scenes to make smart recommendations.

And this is a coffee example.

It's what they're doing at Starbucks.

But they're doing this across the board

in other verticals too.

So you're going to see this in health care.

You can see this in clothing and all kinds of other things

where it's not just a dumb guess about what you might like.

But it's like, no, we really understand this person

and this demographic.

And we're going to make sure that we're giving you

tailored selections that you really like.

And so I think that's a positive for everybody

because it's going to remove a lot of the shit

that you see in advertisements and in the apps

and all that kind of stuff.

It'll give you a much more targeted and approachable set

of ads instead of a very binary--

like we said, binary.

"Oh, you looked at, you know, baby stuff.

You must be having a baby."

Well, no, I didn't.

Or I looked at it,

that was because of somebody else's having a baby,

not because I was,

whereas maybe this would be smart enough to figure that out

or use some other kind of mechanism to figure out

that maybe that's not the case

and give you some better suggestions.

So I think that's really exciting.

I think there's a ton of use cases.

I'm excited really to see where it is

that we can use this kind of technology in our projects here.

Obviously with our selling platform,

that's a pretty valuable tool,

but I think we can use it in other places.

There's some value.

There were some good use cases with our texting platform

that's going to be starting up here in July,

and I think that's going to be really cool too.

Like we can automate responses based on what people say to us.

So if they say, yeah, I want an insurance quote,

then we can direct them the proper way.

And if they say, piss off, we know that we don't want to call them again.

So that's all done in the back end,

handled automatically by Azure and their cognitive services.

So it's very cool.

Well, I think something that you've already brought up

that's been pretty cool is you get the disposition of the text message as it's returned to you. So if

somebody's like, "Fuck you, you, blah blah blah blah blah, you know, oh well these guys, we're

probably not pretty happy, so maybe we should remove them." Whereas, if somebody replies in kind of a

positive way, you can record that as well and enact upon it. So I think that's pretty valuable too.

And that's based on just pure text. Obviously, you have no idea what the person is actually feeling.

Yeah.

But cognitive services can figure that out based on details of the message itself, which

is really, really exciting.

I agree.

It's super exciting.

And I want to say too, we geek out about it as tech people, but it's also going to

benefit everyone because they're going to get a better quality product.

They're going to get tailored results that they want, and not all this crap that you

don't really care about.

Yeah.

Well, good show today.

We didn't get through a whole lot of it.

I think we're gonna have some possibly some new new functionality here. We might have some video. We're going video next week

We're gonna be in 3d, baby. We're gonna do this. Alright. Well as always the coffee code cast is recorded live from Seattle, Washington

Every Wednesday at 9 p.m. Eastern 6 p.m. Pacific join us at www.coffeecodecast.com slash live

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And we'll see everybody next week.

- Thanks guys, have a good week.

We'll talk to you soon, bye.

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