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InfoQ Podcaster 2020 Year in Review: Challenges, Distributed Working & Looking to the Future

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In this podcast, InfoQ podcast hosts, Wes Reisz, Shane Hastie, Charles Humble and Daniel Bryant, sit down for the 2020 year in review edition of the podcast. Topics discussed included: the technology industry’s response to the change in working habits; the rise of online events; the future of cloud platforms; remote working and leadership; and the need to be kind to yourself and others.

Key Takeaways

  • The technology industry responded swiftly to many of the challenges in 2020 and the associated change in working habits. Tools and platforms such as Zoom, Google Workspaces, and Slack have scaled well to support this rapid trend towards distributed working.
  • Tech conferences and events have moved online. It was great to interact with many of our listeners at our first inaugural QConPlus event that ran in November. We thank everyone involved with making the event a success, including the program committee, track hosts, speakers, sponsors, and attendees.
  • Interesting trends for 2020 included the continued rise of cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud platforms, largely driven by the increasing adoption of Kubernetes. The recent announcement of Docker support deprecation in Kubernetes is not as dramatic as social media may have reported.
  • In these challenging times it is essential for everyone to take time out for themselves, and check in more regularly with family, friends, and teammates. Leaders should make more time for one-on-one sessions with direct reports, and be sure to ask how everyone is doing. Working remotely during a pandemic is not the same as working remotely during normal times. 
  • In 2021 we are looking forward to learning more about remote leadership and coaching, and also getting back to being hands-on with some new tech. Our mantra for this year and the next is “be kind to yourself and others.”

Transcript

00:20 Introductions

00:20 Daniel Bryant: Hello, and welcome to the InfoQ Podcast. I'm Daniel Bryant, news manager here at InfoQ, and director of Dev Rel at Ambassador Labs. For this edition of the podcast, we're doing our traditional end of year review with all of the InfoQ family podcast hosts. I'm privileged to be joined by colleagues Wes Reisz, creator of the InfoQ Architecture Podcast and platform architect of VMware, Charles Humble, a technical leader, freelance writer, and distinguished contributor at InfoQ, and Shane Hastie, creator of the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast, and director of community development at ICAgile. There's no denying this year has been strange and challenging on many levels, so we were keen to reflect back on our experiences in learning. We wanted to discuss the impact of COVID on tech, the challenges of working and leading in a distributed context, and also explore how we all need to take time out to look after ourselves, our teammates, and those around us.

01:06 Daniel Bryant: And from a technical perspective, we were keen to look briefly at the continued rise of cloud platforms, the recent Docker deprecation notice in Kubernetes, and also look back on our first inaugural QCon Plus event that took place over three weeks in November. The next one of these events is scheduled for May, 2021, and you can find out more information at plus.qconferences.com. So welcome everyone to the year in review InfoQ Podcast. Before we get started, can we quickly introduce ourselves please and give an overview of what you've been up to over the last year as well?

01:34 Shane Hastie: Good day folks. I'm Shane Hastie, I'm the lead editor for culture and methods at infoq.com, based in New Zealand and this... What have I been up to the last year? Getting through the insanity that has been 2020. I'm incredibly fortunate to live in New Zealand. We're a society that has exhibited, in many ways, the agile mindset and has adapted to the challenges of the year, I suspect better than some.

02:03 Charles Humble: I'm Charles Humble. I was InfoQ's editor in chief until April of this year. And since then, I've been basically working as a freelancer. I've been working with New Relic, and I've also been doing some work with Container Solutions where I started as a content consultant and I'm now acting as managing editor for some of their educational content on cloud-native. So yeah, that's me. Wes, how about you?

02:25 Wes Reisz: I'm Wes Reisz. Been four years now doing the InfoQ Podcast and also chairing some QCons. Just recently QCon Plus. In my day job I work for VMware, so I'm a platform architect in the modern applications business unit. So that's just the group that works on Spring and K8s, around cloud-native, app modernization, those kinds of things. That's me. Daniel?

02:47 Daniel Bryant: Yeah. So this year I've moved more into Dev Rel at Ambassador Labs. I still look after the news at InfoQ as well. That's pretty much it. Lots of focus on Kubernetes, lots of focus on building platforms at the moment, and it's been a strange year, as we've all said, definitely, but lots of opportunity for connecting with folks one-on-one online, and that has been the savior that's kept me going. I've definitely missed the conferences, for example, and the connecting with all yourselves and other folks as well. That's something I'm looking forward to getting back to when we can. 

03:10 What are the most important, interesting trends from 2020?

03:10 Daniel Bryant: On that note, what are the most important, interesting trends from 2020?

03:18 Wes Reisz: You can't start with mentioning 2020 without COVID right, so in my house we celebrate Christmas, so every year we get ornaments to describe the year in summary for us, and I really believe this year, my ornament, I haven't got it yet, but my ornament is going to be a dumpster fire, because I think that's what 2020 truly represents to me. But yeah, COVID has affected everybody in just ways that we can't even begin to imagine. I've seen it in tech, that's kind of come up, how tech's responded. There's some people that we could name, but there's so many people that you could name that have been seriously affected by this and lost their lives or family. I don't think I'll mention any specific names.

03:54 Wes Reisz: But yeah, just COVID, how software's responded, how it's forced us to work from home. At some point, I want to talk a bit about AlphaFold, for example, and how some software's being used to help address COVID. But for me, I think COVID and the response and the work from home is the thing that 2020 really is most definitive in my mind.

04:12 Shane Hastie: I'll pick up on that one. There's the meme for organizations. What has influenced your digital transformation the most and the tick boxes for chief executives, chief technology officer, chief information officer, and the reality is for pretty much every organization today, the thing that's influenced their digital transformation has got to be COVID. The way that organizations have responded, the fact that IT departments were able to allow people to start working from home effectively within a week or two of a lockdown. And these were big organizations for whom the concept of remote work was just not there. And yeah, it was chaotic at the beginning, but the way that the tech support community and the tech community as a whole stepped up to provide the services that we're there for, to support the rest of the world, to enable the economies to continue. Yes, huge impact, but we did continue. We've come through it. The comparisons, thinking about what happened, none of us were there, but what we hear of the 1918 pandemic versus stay home and watch Netflix and be able to stay home and watch Netflix.

05:26 Charles Humble: Very true. And one thing that's been really positive is the way the platforms that we all increasingly rely on have been able to scale and meet this sudden huge surge of demand, which no one was predicting, even in February, March of this year, no one was predicting it. And actually we don't really acknowledge companies like Slack, companies like Zoom, Google Classroom, Khan Academy, all of these different organizations that have in different ways allows people to keep going and they've suddenly had to scale up their infrastructure. And actually I think on the whole, we notice things when they go wrong. And I think it's an enormous advert for the IT industry as a whole, that it's actually equipped itself, I think remarkably well under incredibly difficult circumstances. And on the whole things have kept working. People have been able to carry on doing things. People have been able to switch to working at home and that's a big deal.

06:20 Charles Humble: That's not to say that there aren't problems. That is not to say that there aren't huge challenges for individuals. But I think collectively as an industry, it reminds me a little bit of the year 2K thing, if you're old enough to remember that one, where I think as an industry, we just went in and did our thing and sorted it out, and then everyone went, "Oh, it probably wasn't a big problem anyway." Yeah, it really was. I worked on some of those things, and some of them were not great, but as an industry, we stepped up and fixed it. And this has felt like one of those moments again, where I think we've done pretty well on the very, very challenging circumstances. So yeah, I think it's been good from that point of view.

06:54 Charles Humble: I think as well, it's interesting because it's like a forcing function. You have to adopt these new ways of working and so on. There's not really a lot of stuff that we're doing that we couldn't have been doing two or three years ago, that the innovation, new remote working tools, I imagine will come two or three years hence. But the sudden rapid adoption of all kinds of new things, new ways of working, new ways of thinking, has been quite interesting. And if you take events as an example, we could have been running remote events or online events years ago, but we weren't, and suddenly we are, and it turns out that that actually works quite well, and we were able to do it quite quickly. I long to go back to in-person events, but I think it's interesting that you can make that work in the meantime.

07:36 Daniel Bryant: I think at that point, Charles, it's a good opportunity to shout out QCon Plus as well. Wes, you led the charge on that one and I've thoroughly enjoyed watching it over the last few weeks. We've wrapped up now and everyone was super generous in donating their time, getting involved with a slightly different platform. I'm sure you want to do a big shout out for all the folks that made that possible.

07:52 Did the first QCon Plus virtual event go well? Wes, I’m sure you want to say a big thanks to everyone involved?

07:52 Wes Reisz: Yeah, definitely. So it's the first time we've ran it. 1100 people, I think, was the total number. We had over a hundred speakers. Just a really great experience. Ran over three weeks, formed around the Pacific time zone, so around lunchtime, so we ran for a couple hours. But we ran literally for three weeks. It was a lot of learning that was pitching for you too, Daniel, because you're about to kick off the next one.

08:15 Daniel Bryant: Yeah, I think it's really nice to see everyone, to Charles's point, that everyone come together, like the platform scaling Zoom and Slack. I've been a hundred percent dependent on them. But it was really nice to see others in the community still donating their time. Because let's be honest, we've all got family you want to spend more time with, friends and connecting, and to generously donate some of your working cycles or your non-working cycles to create content, to learn how to present it in a new way, you're talking to a wall, talking to a webcam versus an audience, it's completely different, right? So I'm really grateful for all the folks at QCon Plus, and folks contributing to InfoQ, jumping on podcasts, writing articles for us. That's kept us going over the last nine months. It'd be very easy for folks not to do it, and I really appreciate all the folks that have taken the time to contribute.

08:57 Wes Reisz: Absolutely. I want to come back to this, because all of us have done talks virtually and have helped other people and planned it, and I'm sure we all have some tips and tricks that would help. But you asked the question that was about interesting trends, and obviously COVID is something that we needed to address, but beyond COVID, Daniel, what were you thinking in things that were top trends in 2020?

09:17 Beyond COVID, what are the other top trends for 2020?

09:17 Daniel Bryant: Yeah, interesting, Wes. So for me, I've been doing a little work this year in building cloud platforms. So I've got to give a shout out actually to Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pace. Manual was an editor at InfoQ as well. They're both wrote a fantastic book called Team Topologies. Now I'm bumping into this everywhere I go. Every conference, DevOps focused, be it super tech focus, be it agile, culture methods. It's really interesting way of thinking about structuring your organization to build and offer effective platforms. So for me, that's been the organizational platform aspect, and I think in the client space, Kubernetes is getting even more dominant. I think we mentioned last year Kubernetes being the foundation of many a platform. We're seeing lots of interesting movement around distros. Just a couple of weeks ago Amazon have talked about their EKS version of Kubernetes, EKS-D. They're packaging that as a Kubernetes distro. Rancher were acquired by SUSE. There's a bunch of interesting movement in this space that's saying now the interesting platform work is going on above Kubernetes in addition to Kubernetes. So I think that is super interesting.

10:19 What are your thoughts around the Kubernetes 1.20 notice of Docker Deprecation? Is the sky falling?

10:19 Wes Reisz: I couldn't agree any more than Kubernetes is just the foundation now. It is the defacto standard. And in the same space, there's some interesting news that we might want to take a second and talk a bit about, and that's specifically the news just recently that Kubernetes is going to be deprecating Docker as a runtime in 1.20. What are your thoughts about that? Is the sky falling?

10:40 Daniel Bryant: Yeah, I don't think so, Wes. I know you've got some really good ideas around the tech side. One thing I'll add to the start of the conversation, I saw a great tweet by Gareth Rushgrove who runs DevOps Weekly. We should all follow Gareth for sure on Twitter. And he basically said, "Don't worry, it's 1.20. In reality, that version is not going to be rolled out for 18 months, like the most on premises in the cloud." And even then it's only being deprecated, it's not completely stops overnight. So I think classic social media situation, everyone got a bit excited. I'm guilty of that sometimes as well. You just got to calm down, look through the facts. I think that's my high level takeaway. Wes, I know you've looked into a bit more of the tech behind the scenes.

11:16 Wes Reisz: Just to kind of dovetail on what you said it, is with 1.20 that it will be deprecated, but actually targeted for removal I believe it was 1.22, and if you actually read the blog posts that was talking about announcing this, in the very first paragraph, it says it's not as bad as it sounds. But the gist of it is just that Docker makes a lot of things that have great UX enhancements for humans to be able to interact with doing this development work around containers. But those UX enhancements aren't necessarily great for running it packaged inside of Kubernetes. So this human friendly abstraction layer that's there requires that Docker has put in Docker shim into it so that it can really run with things like containerd do, with that container runtime environment.

12:00 Wes Reisz: So this basically is just because Docker isn't that CRI compliant container runtime. So other ones are CRO containerd, So when we get to my new year's resolutions, it's going to be dive into containerd, that'll be one of my new year's resolutions. But I think the long and the short is literally, if you go back to the blog post announcing it, it says it's not as bad as it sounds, it's still some time off, you can still run Docker, it's just because we're trying to make things more standard compliant, and there's a few things out there that do.

12:29 Daniel Bryant: That's good stuff, Wes. Now I'll be sure to link in the show notes all the good blog posts, because I saw Charles tweeting online as well saying, "Often you've got to cut through the noise and find the signal," and we can definitely help folks do that. It's what we do at InfoQ, it's what we do at QCon, so I think that's a really, really good point. 

12:41 What advice can you give everyone listening about working remotely?

12:41 Daniel Bryant: I want to pivot a little bit because the tech is super important, but something I've really benefited from this year is, both Shane and Charles, your knowledge around remote working, remote onboarding. I know, Charles, you worked for ages remote and really led remote, worked as an individual contributor remote. You've done it all. And Shane, you've taught it all. So I've learned a lot from both of you. I wonder if you could give us a high-level overview of what do you think folks should pay attention to, where they should learn, what things they can benefit from?

13:07 Shane Hastie: It's really interesting. Yes, remote work has been a thing, we've been doing it for years, and it's something I think we have to bear in mind is that the remote that we're being throwing into, that the world has been thrown into this year is different. Those of us who've been working remotely for a long time, we'd not release any video, but I've got a separate dedicated office. I think all three of us, all four of us on this call are sitting in spaces that we're not sharing with anyone else in the family. We haven't got the children who are doing homeschooling at the same time. We're not sitting at a dining room table, sharing that table and sharing one computer in the house between two people who are trying to work. So the forced remote is different.

13:51 Shane Hastie: But what it has done is it's showing organizations that remote works, that we can actually do it, that it is an option. And we put news out earlier on talking about the big tech giants moving away from the policy of everyone needs to be in-person to, actually we've seen this remote work. So yeah, you can in the future. Big change that I think is going to come from this is a shift away even from some of the concentration of people in specific areas. So allowing work to happen literally from anywhere. Again, those of us who've done it for a while have known that this works, but now it's visible to the rest of the world.

14:33 Shane Hastie: But with that, and this is something that we looked at in the engineering culture space a lot, was the mental health issues, the psychological safety. How do we set that up to be okay? And when you're not seeing people walking down the passage, you're not seeing their body language, how do you know that they're okay? Really important to be able to change your leadership model and style. And Charles, your thoughts on management and leadership in this space.

15:02 Charles Humble: Yeah, I think that's really interesting. One of the standard responses to why we don't do remote working is because we worry that people won't work as hard or won't work as much when we can't see what they're doing. And it turns out that that's just not true at any level. And actually what tends to happen, if anything, is people work harder. And that's not necessarily a good thing. I think one of the most important things you can be doing as a manager is actually making sure that you're watching out for the email that comes in from your employee at 11 o'clock at night, or the Slack message that comes in late at night or very early in the morning. Those kinds of signals that people are starting to do strange hours and work outside of time. Is that really necessary? Because working hard does not in and of itself necessarily lead to burn out, but it's definitely a danger signal.

15:55 Charles Humble: And I think it's something that it's very, very tempting when you're just, "Oh, I'll just quickly do that email, and I'll just quickly debug that bit of code. I'll just quickly upload that thing to AWS," whatever it is. I think it's a pattern that's very common and very dangerous. So oddly enough, I think one of the things as a leader, or as a manager you need to be doing is not worrying about are my employees working enough, but rather worrying about are my employees working too much, which is quite counter intuitive. The other thing I think is the absolutely vitalness of feedback and one-on-one meetings and all these things that we know are good practices, in physical offices are good practice. But they are absolutely essential when you're working remotely. Have a one-on-one meeting with everybody who reports to you and make space in that one-on-one to have a conversation about, "Well, how are you? No, how are you really?" And get deep into that stuff.

16:50 Charles Humble: Because again, particularly with a background of a pandemic and the world is on fire and everything is awful, a lot of people are frankly not doing very well for all kinds of reasons. Your extrovert friends who haven't been able to go out for months and see people are not having a good time right now. Any of them. That sort of stuff I think is really, really important. And for companies that have done remote working forever, most of them end up with some sort of thing that revolves around an in-person event. So C4Media, which have the QCons also has an all hands meeting where everybody gets together and suddenly all of that has gone. And I think for some companies that have done remote work forever, that loss of personal connected time is something that's very easy to miss and not realize it's a problem. But it really is, and you really need to make space for some online offsite. Can you have an online offsite? You know what I mean.

17:42 Wes Reisz: That's a huge thing to tease out. What we're doing right now is not what we were doing a year ago when we worked from home, and a lot of people, a lot of the things that I've seen on Twitter that pushed back against it, that are calling out some of the problems, I think it's really important to recognize this is work from home during a pandemic, and there are things that, as you just mentioned, Charles, like when you and I worked together for three, four years, several times a year, we got together. I saw you more than I saw many people in my family. Not my household, but in my family.

18:13 What tips can you share in this time of working remotely during a pandemic?

18:13 Wes Reisz: So even though we were working from home or working remote, we had those defined check-in points where there were the interaction. That's gone. I haven't seen any of us in person since March. So that real interaction is missing, and I think that is a weight that is on all of us, and that goes back to that question Daniel kicked off with, with what are the trends of the year, and that's 2020 for me, the dumpster fire, the weight that is on us. So in this thread, let's do a round robin of just a tip. What are some tips for working effectively from home? Daniel, what kind of tips do you have?

18:45 Daniel Bryant: Yeah, one thing I've actually done this year, Wes, and it was even pre pandemic, but I'm so glad I did, was invest in a sit-stand desk. Simple as that may sound, but I'm quite an active person. I love running for example, but I did find sitting down for eight hours a day in a lot of meetings and so forth was getting a bit tiring and in terms of musculoskeletal as well. So for me, investing in a quality workspace. I know Shane touched on this. I'm very lucky I've got like a home office. But investing in quality lights, investing in quality recording equipment so you can see each other when you're chatting on Zoom and so forth. That is definitely a recommendation from me.

19:18 Wes Reisz: What about you, Shane?

19:19 Shane Hastie: We've touched on it. If you're a leader, check in with your people. Take the extra time to take care. And also for yourself as a leader, but also for yourself as a worker, as a contributor in a team, cut yourself some slack. There is no way that in these current circumstances you can be as effective and efficient as you were. Allow yourself to... Okay, take that little bit of time out. We're coming up to a holiday season. You won't be going anywhere necessarily, but take the time to turn off from as much of the external pressure as you can, and really mindfulness meditation, self-care. These things do really, really matter, and there's stuff that many of us might not have necessarily wanted to embrace previously, but that become really, really important. And they have always been important, but now it's becoming clear and obvious, and there's a lot of resources in that mindfulness space that is worth getting your hands on and looking at.

20:25 Daniel Bryant: Yeah, a big plus on the mindfulness, Shane. I really got into this and meditation when I was at university and it has paid dividends this year. I really try hard to meditate each morning, and also I take some time out during a lunch break that I schedule on my calendar every day, too.

20:36 Charles Humble: I would add to that, have a routine that involves us, A, taking regular breaks during the day. If your current local laws allow, get outside for a walk, do something that's not sitting in your house. And the other thing which I started doing this year, which I hadn't done before, and I hugely hugely recommend it, is I effectively have a computer and phone ban from about six o'clock in the evening onwards, which is quite early. So at about six o'clock, I sit down with the family and we have a meal together, and then once I've got my children into bed, if I want to do something, I'll read a book. But I won't pick up my telephone and start messing around with Twitter or whatever, which I used to do all the time. And for me personally that's been a big and worthwhile change. It requires a bit of discipline, but I think that general point of making time for yourself, take breaks during the day. Don't spend all day, every day in the same room, staring at a screen, I think is all really good and really important. Wes, how about you?

21:34 Wes Reisz: Mine goes back even pre-COVID. So this one comes all the way back and I know I've said it before. I don't know if I've ever said it on the podcast, but Dave Copeland, at the time he was at Stitch Fix, he's at a startup now, but he did a talk on remote working probably two years ago. And the one thing that I remember from his talk still to this day was assume good intent. It's so easy to just... You don't have the facial recognition, the body language, that nonverbal communication that we have when you're in an office setting, so you just have to read an email, maybe it's a short, terse response, and I can get my feelings hurt and I cannot assume good intent. So one of the mantras that I continually say when I read emails is assume good intent. How should I be reading this, and rather than taking offense, I try to do that.

22:18 Charles Humble: It's a slightly ironic thing for someone who's spent the last six years basically working on written content, but as a medium for communication, written content is terrible. Particularly things like Slack and Twitter and instant messaging things. Email as well, because you don't hear inflection. You don't see body language. It's so easy to misinterpret or misunderstand. Think how often you've seen people get cross with each other on Slack and you get them in a Zoom call, in a room, effectively, and magically the whole problem just goes away. It's so important. So yeah, assume good intent is really good one, I think.

22:54 What are all of your new year’s resolutions?

22:54 Wes Reisz: So we are coming up on some hard stops here for us. So maybe new year's resolutions, looking forward 2020, what we should focus on. What do you think, Daniel? You want to kick it off?

23:03 Daniel Bryant: Yeah, sure thing. I think the irony this year is I'm saying I want to do more travel. I think a lot of us last year was saying let's do less travel. And we got our wish.

23:10 Charles Humble: Some would be nice, yeah.

23:13 Wes Reisz: At least you met your new year's resolution, Daniel. You said you wanted to do less travel. You got it.

23:17 Daniel Bryant: There's a first time for everything, Wes, right?

23:21 Charles Humble: A bit more brutal than we intended, but that worked.

23:25 Daniel Bryant: There we go... It's a common theme we've all been saying here. It's the connecting with the people. I am an introvert at heart. I love my technology, but I love the people as well. I love the community. It's why I do it these days. So for me, it's all about connecting with people, connecting with the communities again, and definitely looking forward to actually building on my learning around communities and leadership next year, I think, as I'm changing roles slightly as well. Yeah that's my, I think, tip for the year. Charles, how about yourself?

23:49 Charles Humble: One of the things that I'm trying to do, which is kind of personal, is I'm trying to spend more time writing music. So as soon as I'm actually allowed to get together with my music buddies again... I've missed that probably more than anything else in the last year. So I'm going to record another album next year. That's my one major ambition, which was supposed to happen this year, but obviously the issues meant that that didn't happen. So that's my one big thing really for me for next year, on the personal level. Wes, how about you?

24:15 Wes Reisz: Just to underscore Daniel's comments, we've been away from so many people, so definitely reinforcing some relationships and making sure that we all get this vaccine and can get back out there and can connect to people and really just be present in those moments and not take them for granted like we maybe did in years past, or like I maybe did. On the technology front, I'm probably going to do a bit more in just getting back to basics personally. I've been working at higher levels of late, so I want to just really dive back in and get down dirty again with Java and Spring, for example. Go the next level, particularly in security aspect when it comes to Kubernetes. that recent security certification for example is of interest to me for Kubernetes. So I'd probably do that. Obviously I already mentioned containerd. I'm going to spend some more time looking at some of the container runtimes and diving down deep. That's probably what I'll be doing. Shane?

25:03 Shane Hastie: Well, one, just looking forward to getting together with people in person at some point. QCon Plus was fantastic. QCon in-person is going to be more fun still. For me personally next year, I'm hoping to be in a time of growing in understanding people better. I've signed up for a professional coaching training course where I'm going to work towards one of the International Coach Federation certifications. I feel that these are competencies that will help me help others more effectively. So that's where I want to go and be there to help others more effectively.

25:39 So, wrapping up, could we all share a final thought or tip for 2021 please?

25:39 Daniel Bryant: So, wrapping up, could we all share a final thought or tip for 2021 please?

25:44 Wes Reisz: Yeah, I think that the trend here is decidedly different than we've had on these wrap-ups. We didn't really talk very much about technology. We talked about people and we talked about giving yourself permission to just recognize this indescribable stress that we're all under and give your space just permission to realize it. My final thought is in that space. It's to remember that relationships are important, work hard to mature those, even if it's in a virtual way, have those virtual one-on-ones, coffees. Have one-on-ones with your colleagues. Just make that time for the personal connection that we're losing because of this COVID. Have empathy for people by assuming good intent. You don't know what kind of stress they're under, and you don't know any of these things because you just have this little window, this two dimensional window that we're all operating on. So yeah, my one piece of advice is assume good intent, and I guess two pieces of advice, and give yourself permission to realize this is just an unprecedented time. Shane?

26:38 Shane Hastie: The technology is almost easy compared to the people stuff. And if there's one piece of advice, building on what Wes said, it's be kind. Be kind to yourself and be kind to others. This is a time when we need kindness in the world. Charles.

26:56 Charles Humble: I think that's a tremendous sentiment, to be honest. I completely agree with that. And the only other thing I would say is, as soon as you're offered a vaccine, go and get the vaccine. Vaccines are awesome. They work. And the sooner we all get one, the sooner life can start returning, hopefully to normal. So yeah, get vaccinated as soon as you're allowed. Daniel?

27:14 Daniel Bryant: Yeah, so I'll conclude by saying a big thank you of course to all three of you. It's been a lot of fun over the last year. Big thanks to all the awesome InfoQ staff behind the scenes, at all our guests that have joined us over the last year. And of course a big thanks to all the listeners. We couldn't do without you. I'll also mention if listeners are looking for a deep dive into more of the technical trends we've seen in 2020, we are publishing a lot of related content at infoq.com in December and January. We're doing a 2020 year view eMag, and a couple of new articles and some other things as well. So do pop over to infoq.com.

27:41 Wes Reisz: Yeah, so just from me personally to all of you, thank you for joining us on the InfoQ Podcast this year and the InfoQ Culture Podcast this year. Speaking for all four of us, if I deign to, this is an amazing privilege and honor to be able to do these and chat with people that we all deeply admire and respect, and that wouldn't be possible without all of you out there listening, stopping us in the hallways when we can meet in person or virtually in the chat rooms when we're online and just talking about the podcast. So thank you for giving us all the opportunity. And to the three of you, thank you. It's a privilege and an honor to work with you all and even be mentioned in the same breath. So I hope you have a good remaining 2020, if that's even possible, and I look forward to forgetting about 2020 and having an amazing 2021.

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You can keep up-to-date with the podcasts via our RSS Feed, and they are available via SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and the Google Podcast. From this page you also have access to our recorded show notes. They all have clickable links that will take you directly to that part of the audio.

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