On this episode of the Humans of DevOps, Jason Baum is joined by Mark Peters, Ambassador at DevOps Institute. They discuss getting started in DevOps (with baby steps🎵), cultural transformations, Mark’s time in the military, continuous learning and more!

Mark Peters is an Agile-focused, self-motivated Cybersecurity expert, DevOps integrator focused on melding security into software development and operations, at scale and in time, dedicated to solving tomorrow’s problems today.

He’s the author of Cashing in on Cyberpower (Potomac 2018) on economic cyber-attack analysis, published writer, and polished, professional speaker. Mentor, trainer, and transitional coach.

The lightly edited transcript can be found below.

Narrator 00:02
You’re listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills, knowledge, ideas and learning, or the SKIL framework.

Mark Peters 00:17
Because we’ve made small steps, each small step has gotten us, further along, that path. If we set our goal, and we’re going to look at and say, Hey, we haven’t reached that goal, but we set the small goals that allow us to continue to advance.

Jason Baum 00:33
Hey, everyone, it’s Jason Baum, Director of membership at DevOps Institute. And this is the Humans of DevOps podcast. And I am so excited to be chatting today with Dr. Mark Peters. Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Mark Peters 00:48
Thanks. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here for another chance to talk about DevOps.

Jason Baum 00:52
Yeah. And so Mark is not just a DOI ambassador. He leads up our USA chapter. He is a skillet Day speaker and participant. In addition to that, if that’s not enough for a day job, Mark works for Nevada, as technical lead on several Department of Defense cyber programs in San Antonio, Texas. He’s a self-expressed DevOps junkie, his value stream focuses on integrating teams and automating them away from value wasting repetition. He’s a cybersecurity expert, a full USASF career and now holds multiple industry certifications, including CISSP. He authored cashing in on cyber power, analyzing a decade of cyberattacks from an economic perspective. And in his spare time, he reads things writes and then usually speaks in holds a black belt in Judo, as a DevOps Institute ambassador and USA chapter chair. He enjoys working with individuals across the globe and in unique solutions. And Mark, I’m assuming you don’t sleep.

Mark Peters 02:00
I do sleep I try to sleep.

Jason Baum 02:03
When the creative process,

Mark Peters 02:05
right, so

Jason Baum 02:07
I’m always so curious. Like with volunteer, I work with a lot of volunteers, right? That’s, that’s the role of membership and an association. All I do is work with volunteers. And I’m always so amazed because I tried to volunteer myself, I come from a volunteer family since birth. And I have no idea how you find time to sleep when you’re doing all these things.

Mark Peters 02:28
So Kanban boards are essential, right? When we go back to our DevOps, to have everything carefully structured in line done. I mentioned I’m taking some PhD classes now as well. In my spare time, for a long time, I’ve written a book review. So people publish books, and they send them to me. And I read a review and they publish their review in a journal. So I have that. Unfortunately, with this last slate of PhD classes, my wife came back and she said, All right, we’re not going to do any more book reviews. So we’ll reduce it so. And so I said, well reduce it, some of the next one came in, she said, Okay, based on that deal we made, which I apparently forgot, in line with everything else. You said, Well, now you owe me $100 Smile across stuff for every book review process. So what was another couple cuz there’s another couple of books already in the mail that are headed my way?

Jason Baum 03:14
Yeah, can I get in on that deal? Cuz I have a feeling that’s not happening? Wow, well, I really appreciate your taking the time to do the podcast because it seems like it’s a full slate that you have in front of you. So I just appreciate your being on to talk to us a little bit about yourself and getting human with us. Oh,

Mark Peters 03:35
my pleasure. Like I said, I talk about myself as a DevOps junkie, right? And a junkie being someone who can’t resist and has to go out and have it. And the more conversations I have more discussion I have with DevOps about more people, the more you get this chance to learn and react. There’s a great Rene Descartes quote about that, you know, learning starts with self-doubt. And the way you get that doubt is by talking to others, and it injects doubt into your own processes. So you can kind of get that continual learning to drive back and drive to do new better things along the way.

Jason Baum 04:08
I love that I also love it’s kind of like the flip side of it. It’s inspiring to me. You know you find inspiration from doubt to write it gives you motivation. For me, I came in and I talk about this on the podcast frequently. I have no IT background other than I’m really good at fixing stuff with it around my hands. But, you know, I just put in a wireless mesh system. Uh, you know, I have no IT background. I had no DevOps background. I was a psych minor. And I’m learning that there are a lot of similarities with some principles to the psychology minor that I have and some DevOps principles. But I have learned so much from the first I guess this is like, I don’t even know maybe this is the 15th podcast that I’ve done. Hosting I’ve learned so much from everyone that we’ve had on. So that’s one of

Mark Peters 05:03
the great thing is DevOps is not just it, we use it for that it is focused, we use it in a lot of IT environments. But the DevOps piece of it is about the culture. And we use the it to get us through those things and accelerate the value. And since we had the original group of agile practitioners, and we had the original change to kind of that DevOps, it’s made some of the transition, but it’s really about expressing that business value, right? How do I create transparency in the workplace, so that I can get feedback, and then I can get flow. A lot of the times I mentioned, I work with some of the federal systems and you see that they want to do some of these processes, and they want to create the flow, but their administration and the culture they have prevents them from having the transparency. So talking to some of these scripts and saying, all right, if you’re going to do that, it’s got to be on a board, you’ve got to make sure that the work you’re doing is transparent to everyone else. So we can get to that flow. And getting those human changes with the people that they’re comfortable with talking about what they’re doing. I work in security a lot, a lot of security guys like to be back in their own closet, and they don’t like to talk about what it is they’re doing. And they’re like, it’s going to be a vulnerability, and it’s going to be this, it’s like, but if you haven’t talked about it, you haven’t made everyone understand how it’s important, not to the value you have, then you can advance from that place, that you’re working with humans to make the process.

Jason Baum 06:24
You know, the buzzwords like cultural transformation, and all these things are so popular right now. And people talk about culture. And it’s a shift not just that you hear in DevOps, it’s obviously, you know, it’s all over as I think priorities in business are changing. And it’s really because the employee is it’s so hard to find great talent right now. But it’s also very abundant. It’s just the talent is all over. Right, we could work internationally. And remotely, as we’ve learned over the past year. And I think it’s kind of accelerated that processes that were already happening. And I think that DevOps feels so interesting because it’s essential in that process. But it’s, it’s the marrying of, I think it’s the language, right? It’s, it’s,

Mark Peters 07:15
it’s the show me what you do. Yeah, me that your DevOps, right? And they say, Well, we’re DevOps. So well show me. So how should I show you? Well, what are you working on? And people will list a great big deal. And I said, No, no, show me the board that shows everything you have in place that you’re working on, that is clearly visible to all the members of your team that another team can go in and look at the work. And they’re like, well, we don’t do that. So well. How do you make sure that you’re getting flow? You know, talk to me about your retrospective, and I’ve been on retrospectives with teams, and they’re like, Well, we’re a subcontractor. So we don’t want to throw that other part of our team under the bus during the retrospective. So what if you’re not having a blame fleet-free retrospective to get that feedback? What are you doing, if you’re not willing to talk about those changes in your team where the manager comes and says, Well, we don’t want to talk about this one, because this one makes us look bad. Well, then you’re not getting any feedback from that you’re not demonstrating that DevOps culture, no matter how much you might say, you’ve made that cultural transformation, you get a lot of times, it both starts from the bottom right, that somebody advocates it from the bottom from the teams, and you have to have that push that champion up at the management level, that says, I’m willing to let you do these things. And I’m willing to let you make that process. Another good example from the federal space is you get these contracts that come in for the government, the government has these big contracts, and they have all their buzzwords in it because they have to have the buzzwords in contracts. They say We want you to be DevOps, and we want you to be DevOps from the start. And oh, by the way, there’s all this administration stuff you have to do. It’s like, well, that’s not really part of the process, right? That’s that you’re still on that program management side, you’re not on your full DevOps. And if you want DevOps, the first thing you should do is make the team, tell them what they need to do in, leave them alone for three to six months, and see how well they do it. Right and not come in and say, All right, you’ve hit the end of week two, we need a program management report, I need time I need hours. I need the actual functions you’d like we’re doing that it’s getting done. But you’ve got to give us enough time to do it, that we don’t waste time spent for functional deliveries in creating additional paperwork. It’s not transparent from that initial process.

Jason Baum 09:23
Gosh, I feel like that’s a principle that could be applied to anything. It’s like it’s a very basic thing. But we are such deadline-driven. world. Everything is deadline deadline deadline. And sometimes there are deadlines are not created practically.

Mark Peters 09:41
Well, DevOps should have deadlines, but you should have deadlines for the smallest bits of work that you can get accomplished each piece right talking to that that minimal viable product or that that walking skeleton that they had with squirrel and Fredrik in their agile conversations. How do you build something that only gets to the minimum Have what it is you need to be done, and then continue moving on to the next step. So that you’re not saying I’m going to deliver a whole new product. And it’s going to be done by the end of the year, but that I’m making small steps towards getting there. One of the old guys used to work for me one of my deputies when I was in the military, and I kept having to go to him, it’s not a that big change. But it’s the fact that after a year, we need to look back and not be able to see the beginning. Because we’ve made small steps and each small step has gotten us, further along, that path. Now, if we set our goal, then we’re going to look at and say, Hey, we haven’t reached that goal. But we set the small goals that allow us to continue to advance along the way

Jason Baum 10:36
I just think I’m always gonna associate something with a movie quote, or a TV quote, or something or music. And as you’re talking about the thing that comes to my mind is baby steps. And do you remember the movie? What About Bob, with Richard Dreyfuss, which is a fantastic movie, but he his one of the most famous quotes, and the one that I always love, and my dad was a therapist actually, is baby steps. I feel like that’s, we could all use that advice.

Mark Peters 11:07
You see it all the time in fitness stuff, right? You see it in New Year’s resolutions, you see people who say, You know what, I need to lose 30 pounds in 30 pounds is the goal. In the first week, they lose a pound, they’re like, oh, I’m never gonna get there and they fail. I said, Well, I’ll start with, I need to lose it. Start with changing the habits, changing the cultural habits jab, I don’t exercise well, I need to exercise three times a week, I’m gonna do it for 30 minutes, three times a week. Well, if you don’t exercise at all three times a week should be a big lift. You may be I need to exercise once a week, I need to have dedicated and once you’ve done that, then you can take that next baby step to the next, the same thing with DevOps, right? I’m going to do DevOps, I’m gonna have a full CI CD pipeline, we’re going to do delivery, we’re gonna accelerate value, and we’re gonna deliver all the all these great products. Well start where you are, start with that small piece, and find what you can do today, that makes it incrementally better. Aim for a 1% improvement, not 100% improvement as you move forward.

Jason Baum 12:04
Yeah, that’s, that’s fantastic. So, you know, it’s really interesting to me, we haven’t even talked about how you got to where you are today, we’re just kind of diving right in which I love, you know, this is fascinating. You know, I got to speak with Lisa Chan, who’s the head software engineer at DevOps at PETRONAS, Malaysia’s oil, natural gas company, which is fascinating because it’s federally run. And it got a good perspective of, of their federal company and their approach. And so I feel like federal is so different than some of the enterprises that we’re talking to, and how they’re able to roll things out. What do you see as an advantage of working for a federal space? And what are some disadvantages?

Mark Peters 12:58
So the advantages that they’re their contractor, right, so there’s always work because everybody now wants it to do dev SEC ops, and everybody wants their DevOps pipeline. And then each of the federal sectors has kind of a different approach to it, that the Department of Defense, who I usually wind up working for has a different approach than Homeland Security has a different approach than, you know, some of the other government sectors, the fish, and wildlife, or whatever, they all want DevOps stuff, but they’re all getting there a little bit different. So they all kind of have different restrictions. The biggest limitation, one we’ve already touched on, is the administrative paperwork that goes with the DevOps processes that they’re unwilling to let go of how much paperwork, they’re used to getting an acquisition program, how much paperwork, they’re used to getting into contract, at the same time, they want you to move faster. So they want you to move faster without realizing that the blockers are actually talking about how much you’re doing every step of the way, in a different format in a different way. They call me calm. Cedral is contracted delivery requirements lists that are these, you know, 20 and 30-year-old documents that require it in PDF that has to be signed, that has to be approved by every member of the contract before you like, just look at the board, right? You sent a product owner into my team and the product owner approve these deliveries, they’re done. I’m done thinking about them. And I’m on to the next thing. So advantage and disadvantage, right? I think I kind of overlap those two there. Because the disadvantage, the paperwork, the advantages, there’s a lot of work out there. There’s a lot of people that want you to come in and do it and kind of make those steps along the way.

Jason Baum 14:36
Do you find that they’re eager to make those changes? They’re there, that’s something that they’re the federal space is buying into?

Mark Peters 14:43
Yes and no. There are good points and they’re bad points. Mark Schwartz has written a bunch of books on value and security and he came from a position of value in DevOps value and delivering it and he had worked with the Department of Homeland Security for a while, and he talks about how he made his initial transformation. And then they came back and told him, yeah, you said you were going to do all these things. But when we sent the inspector general to review, you weren’t DevOps enough. Right? You said you were going to do it and you said, you’re going to make this change. And then you didn’t make this change. But the reason they didn’t make the change was there was a two-year process that they had to get all the change request into before they were allowed to make that change. So they were blocked by something else. But that got written to the report of how well they were doing DevOps.

Jason Baum 15:27
Yeah, we used to have a term for some of the larger organizations. And I think this applies to federal tune. It’s moving like a cruise ship turning like a cruise ship. So you know, it’s baby steps really are baby steps in some regards with some of the larger corporations or federal space.

Mark Peters 15:48
So I mean, you just look, it was a number of years ago now. But the federal government back in 2015 2016, wanted to put out a report on how they could move faster in acquisitions and how they could speed everything up. And the first step when the Senate passes this bill, of course, is to Commissioner report and commission a study and see what’s being done together and coordinate the teams to coordinate the feedback. And they were three years into it, and then delivered the report on how to move faster. You’re like, we want to implement this now. But we’re still waiting on the report from the top side that tells us what we can do to move faster.

Jason Baum 16:22
Yeah, yeah, that that pretty much summarizes it perfectly.

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Jason Baum 17:18
So, I mean, this is great. I feel like now we’ll work backwards. And tell me about yourself, Mark. So no, I mean, I’m really curious about your background, how did you get to where you are today? So we know where you are today? Did you always know that this was something you wanted to do? I mean, something like this didn’t really exist a few years ago. So how did you know where you go to get to

Mark Peters 17:43
know I didn’t know. I did 22 years in the Air Force as an intelligence guy. So I worked in intelligence operations. I’ve done everything from working with fighters to working with drones, to working for larger agencies and coordinating these different bits through. And all that time, I did a lot of planning. And I did a lot of structures, I realized I was always looking for the smaller pieces of planning, we were trying to break it down so we could deliver. And I hadn’t really heard about DevOps or heard about DevOps as a concept. But when I got out, I wanted to work more in cybersecurity, because I’d done a lot with cybersecurity, I’d worked at large agencies that were doing cybersecurity as the Intel guy, you get responsible in a flying unit for everything that pilots don’t want to do. So I set up the network around the network and manage the network for the things they had to do to go out and fly their mission. So I had kind of that experience with the cyber and the techniques and the it aspects of it. But as I started talking about people about DevOps, I realized it was the same type of thing I was doing in the Intel field of building those things smaller, and then being able to deliver from value to the customer. And that whole kind of you build it, you run it? Well, when you’ve got a guy that’s going out for flying mission when they’re going out for a bombing mission, you deliver the Intel, right, you build up all the processes they need, you understand what they’re going to do as a customer, and you deliver a product to them. And then they go out and they fly the mission, they bring it back feedback, you write up a mission report that talks about the feedback, and you do it better the next time. So you employ that continuous learning. Now, I was a con a DevOps process. But it’s that same kind of process that an Intel structure uses to support operations from a military framework or even from a marketing framework, right? You go out and get intel about a customer you deliver to the guy who’s going to use that Intel to increase their sales. And then they come back and they say, Hey, that worked. That didn’t work. We started up this new thing, and it’s not going the way we want to how do we make it better? The group like you in the membership, get together and say, You know what, our membership has slacked off what can we do to improve membership? And you try something and you put it out there you get there. So I kind of had this DevOps mindset, even when I wasn’t aware that I was doing the demo. So the DevOps has really been a natural fit for me. And I’ve really enjoyed the process in learning about it both from the technical aspect and from that cultural way that we can bring people together to do more while doing smaller while taking those baby steps.

Jason Baum 20:01
So Well, thank you for your service. First of all, you know, I had a great time. Yeah, I mean, I have a great appreciation for everyone in the military air force and armed services. You know, applying those principles, it makes a lot of sense the way you, you’re telling it. Another thing that stood out to me when we were kind of going through your bio, was that you’re a black belt in judo. Tell me about that. Because I feel like, you know, we’ve had another individual on our podcast, who was talking about the principles of martial arts and how they can apply to DevOps. And I’m wondering if you see the same connection,

Mark Peters 20:44
if you talk about how DevOps applies to be a black belt in Judo, I started off and I did some judo when I was a younger kid. And then I went to wrestling, I was actually a college wrestler at the Air Force Academy. So I wrestled division one for four years. And then did a lot of that did some other things. I did some rugby, I did some strong man. And I eventually got this. So

Jason Baum 21:03
the moral of the story is don’t fight mark, don’t get into a fight with Mark, you’re going to lose, sorry.

Mark Peters 21:10
And also over the past three years, so you know, Agent weight had been a nationally ranked Judo competitor in the top three, over those couple years. So I’ve done pretty well when I got fighters, as well, that’s always kind of a nice thing.

Jason Baum 21:22
To take you to a bar the next time I go.

Mark Peters 21:26
It’s kind of that same process of that flow feedback and continuous learning when you get into a sport, right, especially a combat sport, where you have direct directly worked against somebody else, that you’re looking for flow that you’re looking for a smooth transition into, into your attack into your offense. But because you’re working against somebody else, they’re actively countering what you’re trying to do. So you have to get feedback for that. And then you have to adjust and make the learning process to get you on to the next step where you can win the match. Or maybe you lose the match. And you take that away and you take the feedback the next time. A lot of the DevOps practices, I like to go back to Malcolm Gladwell, right and his outliers, he talks about practice, and that you have to do something 500 times to acquire a basic knowledge of what it is a basic proficiency in, you really do the same with DevOps, you have to learn those basics. And you have to really internalize those basics. Now, the problem is, as you start something, you want to learn all the advanced stuff, you want to learn the cool stuff, right, I want to learn the flip back and put the guy up on my foot and toss them over my head. Like that’s so cool, I want to do that it’s like, but it’s the basics that get you places. So you know what all the advanced stuff is. But you really have to concentrate on the basics. And that DevOps mindset should be concentrating on those basics every day, you know how to get to the advanced step, but that flow feedback and continuous learning? Are those basics that you have to continuously re-emphasize. If you don’t, if you start thinking about the technical solutions, if you start thinking about a CI CD pipeline, or what framework can I employ, or what’s the best security analytic tool for my work, then you’re getting away from that flow and feedback, you’ve got to be able to use those tools and bring them back into that feedback, to be able to increase your flow. It’s just like metrics. You talked about DevOps. He talked about the four basic metrics about, you know, deployment, frequency, and change fail rate, time to deploy. And folks look at those and they say, Well, how can I do more advanced, and I always talk back to my seat, I can tell you how to get more advanced. But if you’re still making progress on those basic steps, you don’t need to be more advanced, keep working until that growth starts to slow. I mentioned strongman stuff. That’s a good corollary, right? Exercise is always a good corollary because DevOps is that mental exercise. So when you’re making improvements on your, your exercises, when you’re making your deadlift improvements, and you’re seeing 20 to 30-pound gains a week, a month, you don’t need to change anything, right, just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s only when those start to slow down to that incremental growth that you need to add in some of those extra little tools to maybe concentrate on your form, make sure that you’re doing everything basic Correct. To make the move to the next step.

Jason Baum 24:03
Yeah, I, I think those concepts can be applied to many things. As you’re talking, I’m thinking about I used to play basketball. I mean, you’d have to shoot the ball about a million times before you get your shot. Right, right. I mean, I remember when I was actually playing, and I was practicing, I was good. When I stopped practicing for years, I could probably go out and not hit the side of a barn. You know, and you need to maintain those. You need to maintain it, right? Well,

Mark Peters 24:29
there’s practicing shooting a free throw, and there’s practice, you know, turn it in and post it against somebody and trying to turn into getting the latest right, there’s

Jason Baum 24:36
more layout practice. Yeah, there’s a different

Mark Peters 24:39
set of feedback that comes in and when you apply somebody else into that process, it doesn’t have to be an actual person. We don’t see adversaries and DevOps a lot. But what we see is that friction from that other culture, the friction of the technical difficulty, and making that next step, so we have to account for that friction. It takes that into account as part of our feedback. It’s not just us It’s us in coordination with the team. It’s not an individual success, but it’s a team success.

Jason Baum 25:06
So, I guess, you know, what are you most excited about? For the future of DevOps? I just, that’s a question that comes with a 2000 word, essay due on my desk by

Mark Peters 25:23
I’m excited about learning, I am excited about the variation in the change that is possible with DevOps because you can make those small steps. And not every small step has to be a success, you can make those small steps and start your team in one direction, and get a couple of steps down the path and go what, you know what, this isn’t what we were looking for, this is not the right path. Let’s change it, let’s take that feedback and go someplace else, and move in a different direction. And when you get different teams, different industries, and you talk to different people, they kind of have different steps. I worked for a team that was doing federal stuff, and we did the dev SEC ops delivery. And we made our adjustments and we got it in. And we started delivering once a quarter, once a quarter. Well, that puts you on that bottom tier of DevOps delivery, what do you mean you were doing DevOps, so well, they used to deliver every two years. So us delivering once in a quarter is a huge improvement to their every two year delivery. So we’re still making progress on the path, and we’ve shown good value for the customer moving forward. And you have to be able to recognize it, that’s a good chance, even if my next change is maybe, hey, I want to get out every 11 weeks, we’re still making that incremental, and from 12 weeks to 11 weeks is actually a pretty decent percentage upgrade. When you think about how I’d like to deliver multiple times a day, but it’s not always possible.

Jason Baum 26:43
So what advice do you have for someone like me? Who’s brand new to DevOps, and maybe wants to chart a career? In the field? What advice do you have that you could tell me?

Mark Peters 26:59
So as a career, I always say the same type of things, right, you go back and you read the Phoenix Project, you’re in good shape, the Phoenix Project by Jean kin, right, thigh and a couple of others. And then you go to the DevOps handbook, that Mark Hornbeek who’s a fellow Ambassador wrote DevOps engineering. And if you can get those three books on your stable, you’re a good process for understanding some of the terminology and some of the challenges and some of the ways forward. You have to decide whether you’re going to DevOps from kind of a policy kind of managing teams aren’t going to work it from the IT side, be a developer, in each of those comes with their own industry certifications, I mentioned a CISSP. So I tend to work more from the security side of it. But I still have to be able to understand the fundamentals so as to be continuous learning out there and learning about Kubernetes and GitLab, and cloud native transformations in you know, constantly reading and learning those steps. And the other one, of course, is that DevOps tends to be a fairly friendly community, like with the DevOps Institute, the memberships that you can get out, and you can talk to people can work through the skill of days, and you can work through the functions, and go out and I talk to people from India all the time. And I talk with people in the financial industry, and I talk with people that are doing startups, and they all kind of have a different approach to how they want to get to the process. And they all have kind of their own path. So every path is gonna be individually charted because you take that DevOps mindset, you don’t just apply it to your business, but you apply it to how you’re getting to that career you want. If I want to be a CEO in 10 years, right? That’s a great long-term goal. But I start with those small incremental steps that move me along the path.

Jason Baum 28:35
I have to say, this is one of the most welcoming communities I’ve ever worked with. Everyone’s been so so welcoming, I just have never experienced the openness that everyone has to share. A lot of times you find people within the same industry to be more competitive. And I don’t think this is as it’s not to say that it’s not competitive. But it’s also a there’s a belief, I believe within this field that continuous. Continuing Education doesn’t just mean what you read, but it’s also learning from each other, which is been really interesting to see.

Mark Peters 29:13
Well, cultural transformation is hard. I can tell you 100 times what you need to do to get your culture transformed. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to do it. When we go back to that sports analogy, right? Your coach comes out there and says, Look this how you should have free throws, he shoots 10 in a row. No problem. It says this is where you put your hands, this is where you put your feet. And then you go do it. And you miss nine out of 10 and you’re like what’s going on? I did exactly what you told me to say well, but you don’t have the muscle memory. You haven’t made the commitment to do the transition to get the practice in place. That you’re committed to doing those things. And getting the learning from every you know, every shot every setup every move forward. As you go. Yeah,

Jason Baum 29:53
that’s a lot like when I felt like when I was learning I self-taught myself guitar and everyone wants to go out They’re and start, you know, they want to be Jimmy Page. But you start out and you’re playing power chords. And, you know, but the more you do it right, anything practice makes perfect. Like you said the muscle memory. So yeah, I think it’s it’s, I mean it could be applied to anything. You think

Mark Peters 30:16
about playing guitar when you start out playing guitar like it hurts like you’re convinced you’re gonna do two hours a day, right? You’re gonna do it and you find out that you can only do 15 or 20 minutes and your fingers are rough and your fingers are bleeding and you don’t have the right tools in place. So you’ve got to take that feedback and figure out how much it is you can really do. Maybe it’s 10 minutes three times a day instead of 30 minutes once a day. That gets you to where you want to be.

Jason Baum 30:39
Baby steps. Richard Dreyfus is going to sponsor this episode. I think that’s what we’re gonna this episode title is definitely going to be baby steps. Yeah, so I mean, this has been great. Mark, I really appreciate your taking the time. I’m going to ask you one of our last questions that I always like to pose on to our guests, which is a thinker i Maybe what’s one unique thing that no one knows about you that you have never shared? An in a public space.

Mark Peters 31:16
never shared less frequently share, right as we picked up a set of that’s fine pop. Great Dane puppies last October. And they are growing. And we meant to only pick up one. We went out there and looked at the puppies and they were so cute. My Wife Swap out too. They’ll play with each other. It’ll be great. My cat, right? How bad can it be? Well, they’re nine months in and they’re both about 120 130 pounds.

Jason Baum 31:39
Gosh, how tall are they? They’re very big.

Mark Peters 31:42
Yeah, they’re both about hip level. Yeah. And they both like to swim so they occupy the pool all the time. So the pool has to be blacked out. Because if you let them out by themselves, so go out go swimming in Texas, right and they’ll do laps on their own. So those take up a good deal of time as well. But they’re great puppies and they help us move.

Jason Baum 32:03
So you’re a dog owner and of course, they’re a great thing. What else do you have so much that you have on your plate?

Mark Peters 32:11
I said book reviews. Right? Oh, yeah, book reviews. I you know, everybody’s always come through for good speeches. I do about one or two a month for different.

Jason Baum 32:19
Do you hike in the Himalayas? By any chance? Okay, all right. 30 years,

Mark Peters 32:27
all those years of wrestling in judo, right? These aren’t quite as good shape as they are. Yeah.

Jason Baum 32:31
Oh, yeah. As a basketball player, I can relate. I’m sorry, guys.

Mark Peters 32:37
The nice one, Texas has a nice river that you can follow through right so you can get on paddleboard and lay down in the cold water for an hour or two. When you get out from that you’re doing just great.

Jason Baum 32:46
What is the one thing that you do to like escape more than anything? Do you turn to like music movies?

Mark Peters 32:53
I actually use my Judo workouts.

Jason Baum 32:56
Yeah. It’s like it’s great for concentration, right? Yeah.

Mark Peters 33:02
Yeah, I people. We’ve got a great coach. The coach has been coached the US Olympic team for women for a number of years. Wow. He’s got great people in there. And he’s always got good feedback for me.

Jason Baum 33:13
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, thank you again for being on the podcast. It was great catching up and getting to meet you. And like I said, Now I always tell my guests now I have a friend in San Antonio, Texas. So next time I’m in the area, I’m going to be giving you a call and we’re going to go somewhere where you can beat someone up for me.

Mark Peters 33:35
Yeah, we should get some good barbecue and some good max. Yeah, go out and relax on the river. We’ll be in good shape

Jason Baum 33:40
I want those fried pickles. That’s what I always get when I go down to Texas, anything. Chicken Fried are always the best. Well, thanks again. All right, this, this has been another episode of the humans of DevOps podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I’m going to end this one the same way that I always do encourage you to become a premium member of the DevOps Institute to get access to even more great resources just like this one. And until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and most of all, stay human Live long and prosper.

Narrator 34:15
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