2024 Wrap

Transcript

Mandi Walls (00:09): Welcome to Page It to The Limit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to run software in production successfully. We cover leading practices used in the software industry to improve the system reliability and the lives of the people supporting those systems. I’m your host, Mandi Walls. Find me at LNXCHK on Twitter.

Welcome back everybody for our final episode of 2024. We like to do a year end wrap up, so going to go over things that have happened. There’s been a lot of stuff happening on our team this year, so we have lots of things to share with you and go over. Yeah, I’m Mandi. I’m going to host for this one, but everybody is here, even some folks we haven’t talked to yet. So we have a couple folks on the team that we haven’t had on the podcast before. So let’s do a brief intro of Miguel and Xenda. Miguel, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do for us at PagerDuty. We’ll start there.

Miguel Lupi (01:07): Yeah, thank you Mandi. So my name is Miguel. I joined PagerDuty five months ago, so I’m a community program manager along with Xenda. We are investing in the new forums. That’s kind of our biggest project that we’ve done so far. We’ve launched it, so it’s a place where the PagerDuty community can ask for free community support, let’s say, and engage in a wide range of conversation. So including some off topics, one like DevOps means and stuff. And yeah, there’s a lot of new things, exciting things coming up next year, so I hope everyone stays along and enjoys it.

Mandi Walls (01:49): Yeah. Xenda, you’ve been with us for a while, but we haven’t had you on the show before. Say hello to the people out there.

Xenda Amici (01:56): Yeah, happy to be here after a bit over one year. Finally, my first time on Page it to the Limit. I’m really happy to be here for this wrap up. It was a very busy year with lot of things. As Miguel said, the new community website, PagerDuty Commons as we are calling it, and a bunch of other web activities and contents. The demo roundups was a huge thing this year, but a little bit about me, I’m from Brazil, I’m talking to you from Brazil right now. I’m really happy to be here because even if I’m living in Portugal for seven years now, passing the holidays when it’s cold weather, it doesn’t make any sense to me. So I’m here right now and I’m really happy.

Mandi Walls (02:52): We’re all jealous that Xenda is where it is warm and it’s cold here on the East Coast. So Kat, let’s chat with you. Happy end of 2024. At the beginning of the year, you were just one of us and now you are a manager, so it’s been an interesting year for you if nothing else.

Kat Gaines (03:14): Yeah, sure has. I’m still just one of us at the end of the day. But yeah, our team looks pretty different than it did at the beginning of this year. We’ve always been a relatively small and scrappy team, but we finally have, I’m looking at five whole people in front of me, and that’s pretty amazing. And we not only have we been for a little while, it was just me and Mandi holding down the fort, kind of doing our best, hanging on. But I’ve gotten to move into the manager role, so I’m now managing our developer relations team, which is made up of our developer advocates, and the folks you just heard from are community managers, Miguel and Xenda, and it’s been a really exciting year. Miguel mentioned that we relaunched our forums. We gave them a very fresh new look and design and layout, so they’re a little easier to navigate, easier for folks to find where they want to chat about things.

Kat Gaines (04:13): Our advocates have been just literally all over the place, myself included. We’ve just been on the far reaches of the globe it feels like all year, just kind of going wherever we can to meet more of our people and chat with folks about what we know and what we want to help you all learn as well. And it’s just been a really exciting one. We’ve done some really good episodes on the podcast. I haven’t done one since earlier in the year, but even the ones I did get to do this year I was really excited about. So I’m stoked about what’s happening next year and the little bit of this year that we have left.

Mandi Walls (04:48): Yeah. Is there any favorite moment you have in 2024?

Kat Gaines (04:53): Oh man. Favorite moments. I am going to be, I guess it’s recent memory, but it really I think is a highlight for me that we got to get most of the team together in person a few weeks ago because as Xenda mentioned, we’re all over the place. We’re in different parts of the US, we’re in Portugal sometimes we’re in Brazil, and so having everyone have a little bit of face time is really nice and really glad that we’re lucky enough to get the opportunity to do that once in a while.

Mandi Walls (05:22): Yeah, absolutely. It is so weird, and I know I’ve mentioned this on the show before, but I joined in 2020 and it was 2022 before I met anybody in person. The only people I knew at PagerDuty were the people I had worked with before who were also at PagerDuty at the time. I had not met our team at all until July of 2022. So it was crazy.

Kat Gaines (05:46): How long were we working together, Mandi, before we even met in person? I feel like it was a while. I feel like a while. A year? Yeah.

Mandi Walls (05:52): Yeah, almost a year I think. Yeah, because we only were doing one onsite a year and we weren’t doing departmental ones. Like last year we got the whole marketing department together in January, so that was a whole bunch of new people, and you’re just like, oh, you exist in three dimensions. This is amazing. You’re taller than I thought you would be. Right. That kind of, you’ve only met people on Zoom and you only know them from the zoom.

Kat Gaines (06:14): I get a lot of, I’m shorter than I thought you would be, so that’s nice. A few of those.

Mandi Walls (06:18): Yeah. Yeah, a few of those for sure. You’re very recognizable with the blue hair, so you definitely stand out when people are like, oh, who’s that? Well, that’s Kat, right? You recognize that, right? Come on. So yeah, that was super fun to actually meet everybody in our bigger department. So yeah, it’s been a super busy year. Like I said, we were just in Lisbon the week before Thanksgiving, so the third full week in November, and before that I was at KubeCon. So highlight for me this year was definitely doing both. I got to speak on a panel in Paris about infrastructure as code, so very thankful to Sharone from DevOpsDays Tel Aviv for hooking that together and plugging us all into that. It was really nice experience. And then going to Salt Lake City for KubeCon for our booth as well. So got to see a lot more Kubernetes folks than I had in the past.

Mandi Walls (07:16): So that was great this year to do all those things. So let’s switch to some of the new people. Sid and Daniel have recently been on the show, but they’re both very new to PagerDuty. As we’re recording this Daniel’s episode hasn’t gone out yet. It’s scheduled for tomorrow, but by the time you hear this, you’ll have met Daniel, but you’ll get a little preview here of him as well. So Daniel, you’ve now been with us six weeks, seven weeks. You’re now old hat at PagerDuty, so how are things been for you the first little bit?

Daniel Afonso (07:54): Yeah, it has been almost a month and a half at this point. It has been definitely a super fun and engaging journey. There’s a lot of stuff to take in and still kind of soaking it in, getting to know everyone around the company, everyone outside of the company as well, because I’ve met some people already in conferences that I did in a conference that I did in person already. So I got even to meet some of our engineers that I hadn’t meet inside through our slacks and our internal conversations. So it has definitely been an interesting and a very fun journey, and it has only been one month and a half. I can’t wait to see what’s going to come up next year when we have this wrap up. It’s going to be crazy because if it only has been one month and a half and so many interesting, exciting stuff has happened, I can’t wait for that. And to put a bit on emphasis on that, I think I was very lucky that as I joined, we got our offsite already, so basically you and Kat were mentioning it took you a year or something to get to meet each other in person. I got here in three weeks or four weeks after I was getting to meet almost all of you in person, getting to chat and getting to swing out. So I feel very lucky for having that opportunity as well. But yeah, that has been me. What about you, Sid?

Mandi Walls (09:20): Yeah, Sid, how are you doing, man?

Sid Verma (09:23): Yeah, I mean, I’ve been here for a little bit longer than Daniel. I think you guys have already heard from me once, but 2024 has, it’s been fun. It’s been a lot of learning for me. It’s been really cool to see how I think the community and how PagerDuty itself has really embraced the automation and AI piece of the tooling and the times I’ve gone out and given talks. I’ve gotten a lot of people really interested to see how we’re actually leveraging AI. I mean, it is the sort of talked about topic of these days, but it’s really cool to see even when we have instance internally, how cool the AI functionality can just summarize things very nicely. So I’ve been super just excited about learning about the product and out hitting the road, talking to people and seeing how they feel about this.

Mandi Walls (10:09): Awesome. Yeah, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for that in 2025. Things are setting up to be super busy again next year. So we’re hoping to see folks out on the road wherever we are, wherever you are. If you hear about a show that you think would fit for us and you’d like us to come to your town, give us a shout. You can always reach us at community-team@pagerduty.com. We look for lists and suggestions and all kinds of interesting things, but we don’t know where everything is either. So if you’ve got a meetup or a user group or anything else that you’d like to see us at, we would love to maybe help you out with that. So it gives us a shout.

So yeah, the big news, of course, of 2024 we’ve talked about a little bit is the new forums. So if you were with us at the beginning of the year, we were on a different product. We had some interesting times with that we’ll say. And we’re now on a new platform and we’ve got a new design. We have a whole new branding, which is very flash. It’s very nice. And so Miguel and Xenda have put a lot of work into the new platform, so I’ll turn it over to them. What can folks find on the platform? What do you hope they’ll engage with? Where can folks hang out there and do things with us?

Xenda Amici (11:25): Yes. Well, Mandi, we are really excited with the new website, PagerDuty Commons. It was launched mid September. It really feels like a lifetime ago because so much have happened since then. And I was just talking to Kat the other day. I was like, it is just been like three months ago. What is this? So we are learning a lot with this community PD Commons. It’s a whole concept, not only the branding that is exclusive not only to the website, but a little bit of sneak peek here. We’ll have our own swag and we want folks to come up in the comments and ask questions and learn and share knowledge and perhaps post a meme and just laugh it out. Miguel’s been posting so many cool things every Friday, so I can just go there and give a little laugh. So apart from, of course, this product led experience, we have our own events going on.

Xenda Amici (12:43): So if you go to Commons, you will see our upcoming events, all the calendars. We are always updating things. And I would also like to highlight that we have a section now for groups. So the intention is to get folks that live in the same area, in the same city together, that they can organize their own events there. Or you can just say, Hey, I’m here. Let’s meet up for coffee, let’s talk about automation, incident management, or talk about life. So it’s a good opportunity. I think it’s all about the sense of this commons room in a university campus. I think that was the idea behind the name. So I just want people to hang out and we want everyone to know that it’s a hub for all things digital operations. So come on in, make yourself at home and chat with folks about your best things page of duty or not.

Mandi Walls (13:56): Miguel, anything to add? I just noticed the group thing, so I just signed up for the USA group. So anybody out there, make sure you’re signed up. Miguel, anything to add?

Miguel Lupi (14:05): Yeah, for sure. So Xenda covered most of what you can do right now in the community forum. So if you want to engage with us, please go to community.pagerduty.com. It’s actually where you find them and you can engage with us. One thing that you can expect next year is to expand on all of the things that we’ve been doing so far. So it’s mostly around community support and having people openly asking questions about how to use the products and how to engage with a PagerDuty suite of products. But you can expect all of conversation around use cases and around most of the things, plugins, integrations. So most of the things that exist around PagerDuty. Also around the events, you can most likely see all of the events happening online and offline to be actually posted in the community forums. So if you follow us including these podcasts, of course. So if you follow us in that capacity, if you don’t want to miss out on any events that we are doing webinars where we are going to be offline, our own events or other events that we might attend, just go there and engage. We’ll be more than welcome.

Kat Gaines (15:28): And if I can just add one little thing to that, we mentioned a lot, go ask questions and those types of things in the forums. Also just go share what you’re doing. I know sometimes your incident management and you’re on-call stuff, it maybe isn’t the most exciting thing you’re doing every day. Let’s be realistic. I’ll admit that. But I’ve been at PagerDuty for a really long time and one of the things that originally drew me to this company was the really cool stuff people do with our product and the things they think of that we don’t even think of at the company and really neat things people do with our API, that type of stuff. Other people deserve to benefit from that. If it’s helping you and it’s helping your team, it is absolutely going to help someone else. So please, if you have something like that that you’re working on or something kind of different that you’re doing, whether it’s with the product or even just in your practices in your organization that you think other people might benefit from, go share that in comments because other people do want to hear about that.

Mandi Walls (16:22): Yeah, absolutely. We love to hear all that stuff. Anything that you have, whatever weird little scripts and other little tools that you have, we love to see that stuff. It’s great just to know that you’re thinking about the product and how it works for you and how you add to your workflow in a customized way because people come up with things that we maybe didn’t think about or things that don’t work at scale. Sometimes that stuff pops up too, but it’s useful for individual accounts even if we can’t really implement it for the scale that we have. So there’s lots of interesting things that we would love to hear from you. The good part, if you were in community before, it’s still at the same URL. We’re still community.pagerduty.com. So come on over, create an account, get yourself signed in, take a look around. It’s beautiful compared to the old platform. So it’s very lovely and we will absolutely try and get all your questions answered.

Xenda Amici (17:22): On that. I think I have two really cool use cases this year that stand out right now where we talk about this. We had a Ben coming with his laundry duty project, and it was really just Ben coming to Commons and posting about his project to stand it out, of course, and we reached out to him and turned out to be a live streaming. It was really cool. You can of course see it, it’s in comments so you can watch the recording. And also Andrea, who just sent a push request for Rundeck, and we catched his comment in comments and we invited him to share his use of Rundeck in one of our meetups. So be like Ben and Andrea this next year, right? It is just a small, simple comment that can turn out it just so much great content and you can participate and showcase your project. That’s what we are here for, to make you a star with whatever you’re doing with our project. Yeah, absolutely.

Mandi Walls (18:37): Yeah, that’s a good point too. The Rundeck folks that definitely have a lot of open source opportunities, we’ll say as part of their product is open source and we’ve been talking with them on their live streams about participating in their product as well. So there’s lots of stuff going on over here in PagerDuty land if you’re into open source and sharing, and we hope that you are. So yeah, yeah, 2024, busy, busy, busy. The plans for 2025 also look busy, busy, busy. So you will definitely out there hear from us again many, many times. Is there anything anybody else would like to share as we close the year? Hope that everybody has a nice, quiet, peaceful holiday season. If you are on call, if you’re not on call, hope everybody has enjoyable time.

Xenda Amici (19:34): Sorry, is this a wrap up? We are wrapping up for the final considerations.

Mandi Walls (19:39): Yeah, if you have anything else you want to share with anybody, that’d be great. Otherwise, we’ll wish everybody an uneventful day. We’ll be back in the new year with new episodes. As always, if you would like to join us on the podcast, please drop us a line. We are always community-team@pagerduty.com. You can also reach out to us on social media. LinkedIn is probably the best place to find most of us, now. We all have host pages on the show and you can find our contact information there. I’m also on Blue Sky these days. That seems to be where things are gaining more traction. I know Daniel’s over there and Kat’s over there. But yeah, reach out any way you’d like. We’d love to hear from you. We’d like to share your stories, whether it’s some code that you wrote or a fun thing that you have put together with PagerDuty or anything we haven’t covered before. So we’re always open to hearing from you, our community out there. Yeah, so happy 2024 everybody. We will see you again. You’ll hear from us again in 2025. We’ll wish everybody an uneventful holiday season and we’ll talk to you again in January.

Mandi Walls (21:01): That does it for another installment of Pager to the Limit. We’d like to thank our sponsor, PagerDuty for making this podcast possible. Remember to subscribe to this podcast. If you like what you’ve heard. You can find our show notes at pager to the limit.com and you can reach us on Twitter at page it to the limit using the number two. Thank you so much for joining us, and remember, uneventful days are beautiful days.