The KubeCon Drone Demo, CFP Reviewing at Scale, and the Agentic AI Foundation, with Lin Sun

Whitney (0:00)

Coté, you speak at conferences often, yes?

Coté (0:05)

Yes.

Whitney (0:05)

Do you do like live demos?

Coté (0:08)

Oh, no.

Whitney (0:10)

Never?

Coté (0:11)

No, because I don't really do anything in the terminal anymore. And, you know, so I think, did I ever do a live demo? No, I don't, I don't, no.

Whitney (0:20)

Do you do any like risky thing on stage? Like something you don't know how it's gonna turn out?

Coté (0:29)

Sometimes. I mean, I guess, I guess the risky things I will do are things that I haven't like rehearsed or said before. Like, like, for example, one time, you know, I did, I did some video series that was like the Business Bullshit Dictionary, where I was like, when someone says parking lot, here's what they mean. And here's, here's like what if you work for an American manager, here's a very important thing to listen to, you know. So I had a talk I was giving and I, and I thought I needed to, this is always a problem. You think the talk's going to be too short. And I thought I needed to fill time. So it's like, I'm going to interject these into here between slides.

And I didn't actually time it out. And it was way too long. So I had to, I don't know. So I'll do stuff like that where I'm like, even if I've given this talk before, like I'm going to do something different and just see what happens. And that's, I guess I would say, I know that's risky because oftentimes while I'm doing it, I'm listening to myself, I'll be like, this is stupid.

Whitney (1:26)

But. When have you seen someone do something risky?

Coté (1:35)

I guess, I mean, to over overthink it, I guess it's always risky when you do something, people just succeed at it sometimes. But I think, I don't know if it's risky. I mean, there's all the answers of like, I'm going to use this thing that depends on conference WiFi that goes to whatever. And like, I mean, the riskiest is like, if you're not using a public cloud and you've got to like tail scale or VPN into some thing of your own, that's, you know, on the other side of the world, that's just not wise. But there was, I remember a couple of years ago, Adam Jacobs, you know, of Chef and System Initiative Fame and other stuff, he's one of these people, for better or worse, who you can tell worked on his presentation on the Plane Over.

And not only does he do that, but he had decided that he wasn't going to give his presentation. So he just like went through a mirror board of ideas that he had. And normally, as when he was doing it, I was like, look at this Joker with his mirror board stuff. And but I think he did all right. I think that was a big risk of like, I just got the mirror board out and I just like went mind map, post it note crazy and let's see what happens. And I think he figured out because the, you do choose your own adventure stuff, but a little behind the curtains, very structured, right? Like you've mapped it out and you know what's going to happen. Whereas with that, I think the dude just like put a bunch of shit in a mirror board and like glided around it and it worked.

Whitney (3:14)

I don't enjoy when people don't prep because I feel like my time is very valuable and I want them to treat my time as valuable. As a presenter, I do a lot of prep because I want to respect my audience members' time. But on the flip side, I do enjoy very much when people don't use slides at all. Like even, it doesn't have to be a live demo. It could just be like, hey, now I'm on the website of the, you know, I'm in the documentation highlighting certain words or now I've jumped into the get repo and I'm going over it.

Yeah. Or the Miro board example.

Coté (3:45)

I'm sure, I'm sure you've seen this, lots of people do, but you know, our friend, Josh Long, he does that great where even his bio slide is actually just a terminal window where you see a markdown file that he's, he's like lest or whatever. But I guess the other, the final, like risky thing that comes to mind is like, I don't know if this is a bit like showy or arrogant, but you know, when you've got to do like a, like an interview or a panel and you've spent like, I don't know, 20 hours on prep going over like things with, and like the questions they're going to ask and everything. And like, I think that's risky in the sense that it could be hella boring, right? Like if people just go through like, you're like, I call on this person, then it's C, then it's D, and the follow up, and it's just like, it's like not good.