Screaming in the Cloud

While cloud architecture has many forms from container to serverless, the value of open source infrastructure never changes.

Today we talk to Jess Frazelle of Twitter fame about role of GitHub in the cloud and how open source is beneficial to the community. Even though the way the cloud if built might change, open source will always be important to the growth of developers as well as the industry.

Show Notes

About Jess Frazelle

Jessie Frazelle is a computer programmer who has worked at GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Docker and various companies, startups, even design agencies before that. She’s worked on a lot of the open source projects in the container ecosystem, she’s a top abuser of the GitHub api, and runs her own cloud from her apartment and a colo in NYC called jess cloud.

Links Referenced: 

twitter.com/jessfraz
github.com
microsoft.com
google.com
docker.com
contained.af
cncf.io
summerofcode.withgoogle.com
Joe.dev
Soul of a New Machine
github.com/Gazler/githug


What is Screaming in the Cloud?

Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud.

Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host cloud economist, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on this state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

Corey Quinn: This week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud is generously sponsored by Digital Ocean. From where I sit, every cloud platform out there, biases for something, some bias for offering a managed service around every possible need a customer could have, others bias for, "Hey, we heard there's money to be made in the cloud. Maybe give some of that to us."

Digital Ocean from where I sit, biases for simplicity. I've spoken to a number of Digital Ocean customers and they all say the same thing, which distills down to they can get up and running in less than a minute and not have to spend weeks going to cloud school first.

Making things simple and accessible has tremendous value in speeding up your time to market. There's also value in Digital Ocean offering things for a fixed price. You know what this month's bill is going to be, you're not going to have a minor heart issue when the bill comes due and that winds up carrying forward in a number of different ways.

Their services are understandable without spending three months of study first, you don't really have to go stupendously deep just to understand what you're getting into. It's click a button or make an API call and receive a cloud resource.

They also offer very understandable monitoring and alerting. They have a managed database offering. They have an object store, and as of late last year, they offer managed Kubernetes offering that doesn't require a deep understanding of Greek mythology for you to wrap your head around it. For those wondering what I'm talking about, Kubernetes is of course, named after the Greek God of spending money on cloud services.

Lastly, Digital Ocean isn't what I would call small time. There are over 150,000 businesses using them today. Go ahead and give them a try or visit do.co/screaming and it will give you a free hundred dollar credit to try it out. That's do.co/screaming. Thanks again to digital ocean for their support of Screaming in the Cloud.

Corey Quinn: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Cory Quinn. I'm joined this week by Jess Frazelle. Welcome to the show Jesse.

Jess Frazelle: Thanks for having me. Super cool to be here.

Corey Quinn: I'm still vaguely astonished that I'm actually speaking to you. Your one of those. Wow, great luminaries of lights of the space where it just tends to be one of those scenarios where, "Wow, someday I might be cool enough to talk with her." And wow, that happens today. Thank you very much for doing this. Historically, you're a ... well, you define yourself as a computer programmer who's worked at GitHub, Microsoft, Google, Docker, and hey, I filled a bingo card of fun tech companies. Who are you and what do you do?

Jess Frazelle: I guess I am employable by a bunch of different companies. I like to just see their process and then leave. No, I'm kidding. I like to build things and I like solving hard problems and I get bored really easily. If there's not a hard problem to solve, then I'll move on to a different hard problem somewhere else. I mostly am just constantly curious, I guess

Corey Quinn: That's a fantastic problem to have in some ways. Although I remember from my own childhood that tended to get a monkey in a bit of trouble as it went along. You are, I guess, most famous in some respects for being famous on Twitter, which is almost like being famous in real life, except you can go to the convenience store without being worried about Paparazzi. Is that more or less accurate?

Jess Frazelle: Yes, Twitter is so weird because ... I try to be myself on there and I think that I am. Whenever someone says that they follow me on Twitter, I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. Because I say a bunch of dumb stuff, all the time. It just comes out. It's just one of those weird things but I don't really know how that happened.

Corey Quinn: Let's talk a little bit about the current zeitgeist of the cloud, for lack of a better term. The big issue right now that everyone is gearing up to fight is containers versus serverless versus a whole bunch of nonsense where everyone's wrong. Where do you stand on that particular religious war?

Jess Frazelle: When serverless came to be a thing I did not take it seriously mostly because of the name and it annoyed me and I'm pedantic and the fact that there are still servers. I think mostly though it's about the user interfaces that are exposed by all these things. With containers, you have to know what you're doing or understand containers.

With serverless, from what I've seen, it depends on the products but some user interfaces are really nice and usable and it seems like developers are really catching on to them, and then others seem to be just like a container user interface. Then there's functions as a service too which is different in the fact that it's just one function versus a container running maybe a service.

Most of all, at the end of the day, all these things that are just running your code, they're running on a server and the back ends of a lot of them, from what I've seen are pretty horrifying and a lot of the cloud just in and of itself and these backends, it's all just popsicle sticks and glue put together. I'm just not sure if it's like the greatest thing at the end of the day.

Corey Quinn: I agree with what you said in the context of with containers everyone has to get deep into a whole bunch of different things and trying to figure out how things wind up working and when this first came out and you could successfully give a 45 minute conference talk that was nothing other than Docker repeating for those 45 minutes, that seemed to me at the time to be something that either I didn't get or that no one else got either.

My default assumption is that I'm wrong so I gave a five minute lightning talk making fun of docker called heresy in the Church of Docker. At the end of it, someone came up to me and said, I had a question about your talk and I expected that someone was going to tell me I was completely wrong across the board. Instead they said, "Could you give the full version of that talk at Container Con?" Wow, you want me to give the full version of my 45 minute talk at Container Con first, wait, there's a full version, and secondly, absolutely.

It started resonating in that there were a bunch of things that you didn't understand ... that I didn't understand that didn't solve problems the way that you would have expected them to in a container world. This was a collective shortcoming. Today that talks dated, it doesn't work anymore. You have a bunch of tooling enhancements and the products themselves have gotten better to the point where almost all of my criticisms are no longer there. I wound up skipping the container revolution as it were and skipped straight ahead to serverless, because one, it seemed easier, two less things to manage is always a good thing and three, when you've only been using something for two weeks, it's super easy to be considered an expert in it when the thing itself is only four weeks old.

Jess Frazelle: Totally. I agree with your talk actually mostly because when it comes to containers they are super complex and at the end of the day, the person just wants to run a damn thing and then they don't want to have to manage it. With containers, you get all this complexity and then if you're running it locally, you have to manage that service. I think that a lot of what these products are solving, is all that pain, which is great. It just irks my inner technical nerd when I see the backend and I'm just like, no, this could have been pretty, but it's actually the worst thing ever, but I don't think that's a lot of things that customers really come to care about.

Corey Quinn: My default assumption never having picked underneath the covers of any of these things is that my environment ... when I build out a data center, is a metaphorical and sometimes literal trash fire. When I run something serverlessly, I imagined that everything underneath the hood on that is pristine. It's deployed seamlessly, it resembles the whiteboard architecture diagrams we all look at and envy. If I were to even peek in the data center, the cabling would be immaculate. Everything would wind up being just more or less heaven but on earth.

Given that you've worked for a number of large providers, that's an accurate assessment. Right?

Jess Frazelle: I used to think that too, and I was like, it's just like this nice church of computing. Then it's just like you go to work there and then it's just saddening. The fact that I found myself a lot of the time saying, well we are the cloud. Shouldn't we be better? I mean, I haven't worked at every single cloud provider, so I don't know about all of them, but I would say a lot of them are popsicle sticks and glue and I don't think they would even hide that fact. They would also agree with me.

Corey Quinn: One of the most amazing things I found is that every time there's been a company I sincerely admire who talks about infrastructure at a conference talk or whatnot, I start talking to people who are involved in helping these things run. I have never found an exception to this, but once you get people talking comfortably and being honest, their immediate response is yeah, that's one aspect of it but here's the list of things that make our environment a fire. I've never yet found an exception to that where a company has an amazing architecture, an amazing environment and everything just works seamlessly. Have you?

Jess Frazelle: No, I mean it's computers at the end of the day. GitHub's infrastructure was really cool from everything that I've seen. They have a lot of like X Digital Ocean and X Heroku folks. I think that they took a lot of lessons learned from their past experience and applied it there. Really everything has problems because it's computers at the end of the day so you're going to come across something weird and every single company has their weak points, and then you find that weak point and then it's like, whoa, yes, that's it.

Corey Quinn: Well to that end, what were you doing for a year at Microsoft? Originally Microsoft to me was an example of a has been company that no one really cares about and losing relevance and then magically they started shifting their entire positioning in the market, their reputation changed, they started hiring a tremendous number of very admirable people. Yes. Including you. What were you doing there?

Jess Frazelle: Mostly I did what I like to call annoying people as a service. Actually, so, Chad Fowler was my skip manager and when he joined I was previously there for a while, but I was like, "I'm so sorry if anybody comes to you and they complain about me." Because mostly what I did was I broke a lot of things and then I tell teams about it and it ends up being, because Microsoft is freaking huge, you're crossing organizational boundaries and you're crossing team boundaries and you're ...

Just like whenever there was a bug, I'd go knock on their door and be like, hey there's this thing it's a problem. You've got to fix it. I ran a bunch of performance tests. I gave feedback to teams internally. I'm a pretty candid person so I don't think a lot about how people are going to handle it. I got a lot of feedback from teams that I lacked boundaries and I was like, "Wait, what are they talking about? It's not like I'm standing in your bubble or something." Apparently there was this organizational boundary that you're not supposed to actually go knock on people's door and be like, "Look this thing, it's bad." That was interesting to come to find out and learn.

Corey Quinn: That is a form of a story from my own life that distills down into how I got fired from a company once where I tended to assume because everyone had the same domain in the end of our email addresses that we were all on the same side and I didn't have time or patience for hierarchy. Instead, I was going to go and talk to people in other groups about what was going on, about shaking things out of the trees before they wound up impacting customers.

It turns out in some cultures that's welcomed and appreciated and expected and in others it very quickly turns into a knock knock who's there, not you anymore story. I think it's dependent upon the company and the culture in question, but there was a time I would have heard you make that statement about not respecting boundaries and thought, "Oh, no such thing. Everyone's on the same boat rowing the same direction." Now I'm not as naive anymore. I don't believe that and I think that's one of the biggest single reasons I'm unemployable.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, I mean I definitely had absolutely no idea before that that was not really taken nicely. Now going into a job at GitHub after, I was almost worried about crossing boundaries but then also I know so many people at GitHub I was like, knock knock. But it was not really the same things that I was doing. I was more like, "Oh, I like this thing." It's just interesting to see how that pans out in different cultures. Some teams were totally okay with it and they took me back as a gift and then others were like ... They were not happy at all.

Corey Quinn: Changing gears slightly where we talk about different teams doing different things. I think there's nowhere that does that quite as well as Amazon where everything is a two pizza team, which either means that each team can be fed with two pizzas and no more or, as I tend to think of it, to be on the team, you have to be able to eat two whole pizzas yourself in one single sitting.

You spoke at re:Invent last year and when I saw that on the schedule, I thought that I was going to have a field day with this because Amazon doesn't normally do misprints. Having you from Microsoft at the time, speaking at their conference is the clearest definition of misprint I can find. It wasn't a misprint. How did that happen?

Jess Frazelle: That talk is a fun story. I loved going to re:Invent. It was really cool to see how their conference is. Yes, I was working at Microsoft at the time and it was before the close of the GitHub acquisition but I was doing a lot of traveling back and forth to San Francisco, helping out on the merge of things. One of the things that we had talked about was making sure that we're still ... GitHub is a large part of the external communities. That means showing up to other conferences of competitors like re:Invent or Google Next.

I was like oh this is great. I know Abby Fuller, she's an amazing person. I'll just reach out and be like, "Hey, can I maybe get a talk there?" And I did the schedule was entirely full and everything. She was like, let me see what I can do. She did, what I do, annoy some people internally. Then she got a slot for the talk and it was amazing. It also had Clare Liguori who is an amazing engineer on the Amazon side.

It was this really cool lady power hour is what it boiled down to but it was the most last minute thing. I also was terrified I was going to be fired for this even though I had the backing of the new leadership at GitHub. I emailed Chad, I am so sorry if people come to you and they are like what the hell is Jess doing? Because it went live while I was still a Microsoft employee before I had joined GitHub and the actual talk was my first day at GitHub.

No one I think said anything and I think that it's a great testament to how GitHub is going to be run at Microsoft. I think that as long as they continue doing these things and making sure that they have a bunch of external community engagement, it's just really good. One of the things that I wanted to make sure about, GitHub being a part of Microsoft is that, for every talk and appearance that we give at a Microsoft event, that we have two external appearances at competitors or other external events or people, because it really is important to the community and everyone watching that they know exactly where GitHub stands and how they put the importance of the community above everything else.

Corey Quinn: I think the idea of having the cloud vendors ... I guess on the one hand, they're absolutely competing with one another for market share, et Cetera. GitHub is a bit of a strange animal in this context in that they tend not to really be directly competing with vendors themselves. GitHub is different in that in some respects it's not competing directly against large cloud providers, but I've always been a bit of an advocate of the idea that right now the big competition is not between different cloud providers so much as it is not going to cloud at all.

I think that more cooperation between some of these large folks means that there's a bigger pie for everyone to get a piece from rather than trying to smash each other into the ground. I'd love to see less hostility between various providers. I think there would be a fantastically different world if that were the case. That's also probably hopelessly naive.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, actually I super agree. I really am of the belief that since a lot of my friends ... I live in New York, a lot of my friends work at financial tech firms or hedge funds and stuff like that. A lot of people that I know do not use the cloud. They have their own data centers. GitHub has their own data center. It is more of a cloud versus not cloud thing to me. I almost feel like there is a market for disrupting the not cloud.

Corey Quinn: So, changing gears slightly, if I go to your Twitter bio page, there's a link there to contained.af and we'll throw a link to that in the show notes. What is that?

Jess Frazelle: That was a site that I made in a day and it ended up being very useful. One of the reasons why I made it was containers are super complex. There's a lot of knobs that you can turn on them to make them either more secure or less secure and either less aware of their host environment or more aware of their host environment. I wanted to show a completely locked down scenario and then also ask people about this environment that they were in to teach them a little bit about the internals of containers.

Another main reason why I did it was that, I had been giving talks about Docker for a long time and a lot of the fear, uncertainty and doubt about containers is that they're insecure and it's more like they're insecure with nuance. You can make them secure if you try hard or they can just be wildly insecure if you just run them in a privileged mode or something like that. I was mostly like, all these people don't really understand the nuance when they come to me and they say this, so I'm going to give them a test.

Whenever people would bring that up to me, I was like, look have you broken out of this thing? Because the site has this terminal where it shoves you into a container and if you break out, you have to capture this flag and then I would be like, "Oh Whoa, you actually found a container escape. No one's done it. It's great. Whenever people come to me and they're like, containers are insecure. I'm like, look, break out of this site but they haven't.

Corey Quinn: I love the idea of having a learning tool that distills down into a ... Here's a thing, play around with it and see if you can wind up getting to X or to Y or to Z. I don't know if I'm weird or this is more common than the market would have you believe but sitting down and reading a textbook or taking a class isn't a great way for me to learn something. Instead, here's a project or a problem you need to solve and learn how this stuff works. That's something that resonates with me and that's why I love things like this.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, for sure. I actually think all the terminal based learning sites for containers are the ones that really helped adoption. No one reads a docs page. I mean it's just a wall of text, but really playing with something is way better.

Corey Quinn: On a somewhat related note, have you ever heard of a ruby gem called Githug? Not hub, hug as in to put your arms around something?

Jess Frazelle: No, that sounds cool.

Corey Quinn: It was one of those things where first, before I knew anything else. It was, wow, I love that name and I wish I'd come up with it, but what it is is somehow even better than that. It's a 40 something level experiment where you run this gem and it winds up from there giving you a challenge when you cd into a directory. Level one, make an initial Git commit, level two, revert the commit, and so on and so forth. It's a step by step. This is what Git is, this is how it works and by the end of it you're doing partial re bases you're using Git bisect. It goes from what is Git all the way to the end of the line where you can do more than most people have to do, career wise, with Git and it only takes a couple of hours to run through, start to finish for most people.

Jess Frazelle: That's really cool. I need to check that out. That sounds awesome.

Corey Quinn: I love that this is happening and one thing that I find revelatory is that when I first learned Git, well when I first learned Git back in 2010, GitHub, sent a trainer on site for two days and all of engineering would sit there, we went up one side, down the other and no disrespect to the trainer in question or GitHub, I was more confused by the end of that training than I was at the beginning.

Now Git seems like something you can get someone up to speed in a number of hours. Is that because Git has gotten that much better or is that because we're better now at explaining it to people from a variety of different ways.

Jess Frazelle: I don't think the Git has gotten better. I think it's just, yes, people are getting better at explaining it and maybe we're only using a specific subset of the features of Git and so that adoption has hit the peak of how to say, how to use it, because the tool itself is still the exact same.

Corey Quinn: Absolutely, there are so many different flags and options and people really only tend to use five or six. You can also start convincingly bluffing people as far as things that don't actually exist. Oh yes, there's a tool that does that just run, Git unchained melody and it'll wind up solving your problem perfectly.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, I'm pretty sure that there's all these tools built on top of Git, like Git wrappers that do absolutely everything. I have 40 bash scripts that probably do random things.

Corey Quinn: Git's a great segway. While we're talking about things that makes everyone sad, let's talk about the cloud native computing foundation and the relationship with open source sustainability. Where do you stand on that?

Jess Frazelle: I am just mostly disappointed in the cloud native computing foundation when it comes to helping open source projects. I think a lot of people agree on that. A lot disagree as well and it seems to be a contentious point. But, from my point of view, I know how much money they have from vendors. I had heard about it through someone who's on the board at some point and I won't repeat the number because I don't think it's supposed to be said, but they have a ton of money and they don't have much impact for having so much money. Especially impact on projects itself.

If you were to look at something like Google Summer of Code that has huge impact, they get interns from all over the world to apply to help out on these projects and then they have a task for a project and then they get it done over the summer. Sometimes they do more than one task. They do a bunch of things or it's just one big task over the course of a few months. That kind of impact is crazy huge because it helps the project and it also helps the person who has the task. They get paid and they get this thing on the resume. They get, public commits showing their work, which helps them get jobs.

The whole thing is this really great way to help people and projects. But CNCF, I cannot say anything that they have that is even immensely close to what Google Summer of Code does. Google Summer of Code does that on a very small percentage of the funds that CNCF has. That's just super sad to me. Then there's also what GitHub is now working on in this space for helping open source sustainability.

They hired Devin Zuegel who lives in San Francisco and she is super awesome, Nat hired her and she has been interviewing maintainers and talking to a bunch of people in the space to understand all the problems. It's going to be super interesting to see what she does but I have 100% faith that the solution that she comes to help with, these problems of helping projects succeed sustainably will be 100% more impactful than anything that the CNCF will come up to with.

Mostly because they don't care. From my standpoint, I don't see any care being put into it and from the standpoint of Devin and Nat and all of GitHub, they deeply care about the community and fixing problems. It will be really interesting to see what happens there. But CNCF, no, I'm not a fan.

Corey Quinn: I don't really have a strong opinion on CNCF because I don't really encounter them in what I do. Now let's unpack that a second. I run the Screaming in the Cloud podcast. Surprise, I'm recording this conversation and I also write a newsletter every week. It rounds up a giant pile of cloud news, mostly around AWS and aggregates that and then publishes a fraction of that. I also have a consulting business where I go into very large cloud environments and help them, not only save money on their bill, but work on governance, work on some cases tooling, work on process flows that makes sense.

Effectively my entire life, in one way or another right now, is cloud and I go back to the beginning of this diatribe of mine. I don't have an opinion on the CNCF because I don't encounter them in the wild hardly ever. That alone tells me that whatever their stated goal is, I don't get the distinct impression that it's aimed at problems that I am dealing with, problems I am experiencing, problems that my clients are focusing on or problems that resonate in the larger community. I don't know how to judge what they're doing because I don't know what they're doing and that in itself is a problem.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, that's a totally different perspective than mine. That's super interesting to me because if they aren't doing anything, from my perspective, the open source community perspective, they aren't doing anything from the cloud perspective, it's like what are they doing? It's very weird.

Corey Quinn: To be very clear. This could be a complete misunderstanding on my part and I will have to wind up back walking everything I just said, conducting apologies, et Cetera. If this is being played right now in a meeting at the CNCF and you have a nuanced and detailed critique of how everything I just said was completely wrong. Terrific. Great. Please reach out. I am thrilled to have that discussion on a future episode of this podcast. Please tell me how I'm wrong. I would love to be wrong. My biggest fear right now is that I'm right.

Jess Frazelle: Yes. I mean if they're listening to this, it's like, "Hi, I'm just your biggest fan. They already know."

Corey Quinn: It tends to be a hard problem as well. I think that GitHub historically has been a fantastic source for the community to focus on solving interesting problems, writing infrastructure for projects that otherwise no one would have ever heard of and doing something like that even as a for profit company has demonstrably had impact.

You mentioned Google Summer of Code program. Every time I've worked with someone as a part of that program, I've come away first profoundly impressed by what they're able to achieve over the course of the summer. Secondly, I find myself keeping in touch with those people over a period of years and watching their careers evolve. It is hands down from everything I can tell, orders of magnitude more beneficial to someone's long term prospects than a degree.

I think the sheer fact that I was a GSOC intern that someone can claim that it automatically merits further scrutiny because people in every environment I've ever seen do not mess around.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, I'm a huge fan of that program. It's really great. I would love to see it emulated in other ways to really help people and just the same amount of impact.

Corey Quinn: Do you have anything you'd like to mention or drive people to pay attention to if they've gotten this far in the episode and haven't hurled the whatever it is they're listening to a aside in a fit of rage because I just insulted something that they love.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, I would say definitely watch this space where GitHub is working on open source sustainability because that will be really interesting to see play out. They also just keeps shipping really awesome features that help the community, which is cool. A book that I recently read also that I got as a recommendation from Brian Cantrell, was called the soul of a new machine and it really was a moving experience for me.

Mostly because the book is about data general when they made a computer and it goes over the team that built the computer and it's just a really great story about a team doing something that seems impossible like putting together an entire machine and how they put parts of themselves in the way that they work and the way that they write documentation or really care about the microcode and stuff like that into the machine. If you're just like a huge nerd and love stuff like that, I would definitely say pick up that book because it's awesome.

Corey Quinn: Terrific. I'll throw a link to that in the show notes. If people want to follow you. You blog at jess.dev which I absolutely want to talk to you about for a minute. You made some noise on Twitter back when the .dev domains opened up, about having spent entirely too much money on a domain. But now it's yours. Tell me that story please.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, this is all Joe Bedas fault. He bought joe.dev and we are just chatting in DMs and he was going ...

Corey Quinn: You do realize that right now he is dancing somewhere because someone just said it's all Joe Bedas fault and for the first time in history they weren't talking about Kubernetes.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, we're just chatting in DMs and he says that he's going to get joe.dev. I was like, "Oh, I'll get jess.dev." I ended up buying mine before his and he was like, "Oh, you just did it, then I'll do it." I was like, oh my God, I didn't realize that he hadn't done it yet, but we bought it on the first day, which made it ridiculously expensive. I'm also unemployed and I didn't just have an acquisition by VM ware.

This was a weird decision but it really goes to show what I value, which is overpriced domains. I gave a few people some domains that are also named Jess and if a Jess is listening to this podcast, you can reach me on Twitter and tell me that you want CNAME redirected to a subdomain. I really like it though. I just think it's a forever domain. It will work as long as Google keeps it up.

Corey Quinn: That is the giant open ended question. It's easy to make fun of Google for turning things off that people care about, but it is hard to imagine that they would wind up turning off something as big .dev. That's a global TLD. That's about as likely as them deprecating their goo.gl URL shortener which they announced was being deprecated last year.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, I mean reader. I still have feelings about reader. It was really great.

Corey Quinn: I think we all do. I'm also going to call it out right now. I'm sorry. I think that registering the .dev TLD could have been a fantastic thing that Google could have done for the community and then automatically routed the public response to local host for every wildcard query against it, but no, now they wind up giving the domains away or selling them or whatever you want to categorize that as and suddenly every company in the world, historically going back 40 years who uses a .dev fake domain for internal testing purposes, has a security problem in the event that something winds up going where they don't expect it to.

Jess Frazelle: Wow, yes, that's super true and actually makes me also want to squat on some of these for that reason. That's interesting.

Corey Quinn: Yes. It's one of those areas where it becomes either extremely lucrative. If you have no sense of personal ethics, it becomes hilarious if you want to make a few very large companies look terrible, but largely it feels like this solves a problem that didn't historically exist. I'd really like to have a separate domain for testing, but you know, we just can't find one that's publicly available, so we're going to make up our own TLD. I'm sure no one will ever turn that into something that resolves on the public internet. It was short sided and it also turns into a story of a large company trying to avoid spending $12 a year on a test domain.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, totally.

Corey Quinn: We've referenced Twitter a couple of times. Who are you on the twitters in the event that people have been trapped under a burning couch for the last 12 years and have no idea where to find you?

Jess Frazelle: I'm @jessfraz, and I am sorry for all of the weird tweets,

Corey Quinn: Frankly, the weird tweets are sometimes the best tweets. Jess, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I appreciate it.

Jess Frazelle: Yes, thanks for having me. This was awesome.

Corey Quinn: Jess Frazelle, computer programmer to the stars and Twitter famous. I'm Cory Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud.

Speaker: This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at screaminginthecloud.com or wherever fine snark is sold.

This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.