Big News!! And an Unboxing!

Hey there, everybody. Happy Friday. I know sometimes I come to you guys live or to you all live on Thursdays, but today is Friday and it's kind of a cool Friday. So I have a couple of things I want to share with you. They're actually intrinsically linked, but I did want to share with you. I don't know what to do first. Should I do the unboxing first? Or should I do the big news first? I feel like I should do the unboxing 'cause it'll lead to the big news, right? So I'm gonna do that. So I got a box in the mail. And I'm totally gonna open it with you guys. I think I know what's in it, but I'm hoping. I love swag, I love stuff. Especially, I mean, most of you know that if I'm wearing it, it's either I got it as a gift or a project, or it's a project that I support or love. I very rarely go and buy things just for the sake of fashion. It's usually to support some cause. I try to be a walking affirmation, as they say. Okay, so I'm gonna try and talk and open, oh my gosh, at the same time. It's a little bit dangerous. Okay, and at the same time, I actually got a standing desk this week. It's the first time throughout the entire pandemic I did not have a standing desk. My life. So if you don't have one, I would heavily encourage you. I went on Amazon, I got one for— it was $100, I think it was $120, maybe $40, and had a $40 coupon, so ended up being like $99. Anyway, amazing. So I'm now standing at my desk and I absolutely love it. All right, are you ready? Oh my gosh, this is so exciting. Okay, I have to kind of check it out and see if any of my Friends, if you are here, say hello. I am broadcasting live across a bunch of channels today. I am on YouTube and LinkedIn. Where else? Facebook. Hi, Facebook family. Hmm, I can't remember the other 3 places. But if you are catching me live, I am so excited that you decided to spend a few minutes with me. I won't take long. I won't take long, but it's super cool. All right, here we go. Let's see what it could be. Oh my gosh, it's a box within a box! I love these. Okay. Oh gosh. Oh my goodness, I should have practiced, but then it wouldn't be a true unboxing. Oh my gosh. Okay. Hey Jim, what's up? Um, hi Warren. Um, okay, here we go. Are you ready? Okay, let's do this. Um, Oh my gosh, it's so beautiful! All right, here it is. Yeah, it's a red hat. So for those of you who don't know— oh my gosh, it's so cool, I love it! All right, we're gonna have to see how this goes. Um, hey Cousin Joanne, what's up? Thank you guys so much for joining me. Um, yeah, I got a red hat, and what this means, for those of you who don't know, is there's a company that I actually, my career somewhat started, and I actually started IBM long time ago, Y2K. And in Y2K, we were trying to really help companies transition from monolithic code bases into microservices. They weren't called that back then. We were calling them services or service-oriented architecture. This was 20 years ago. And I spent a good 10 years teaching software engineers and all sorts of people all about how important it was to break up code. And do any of you remember the Gang of Four book? Like, I held on to that book like it was my best friend. I went all over the place with it. Anyway, so I was preaching, like, who was one of my favorite guys? Martin Fowler. Do you remember? Anyway, some of you might remember these days. But yes, super fun times where we were changing the world through companies that needed better solutions, and they wanted to go away from these big monolithic spaghetti connected systems into these beautiful broken up microservices. And it was great. I then, from IBM, went to Red Hat, and this was in 2008. And in 2008, I went to Red Hat because I really wanted all of the good things that we were doing in microservices, but I the beauty of collaboration and open source and sharing and democratization of content and ideas and software. And so it was really neat because some of the things— uh-oh, it might be frozen on one or more platforms— but some of the things that I learned carried with me throughout my entire career. Right, Andrew? Hey, great to see you. So yeah, some of the things I've done throughout my career, I always went back to that idea of open source. Some of you know, I spent some time at Alexa. I was an early member of the Alexa team. And the cool thing about that experience was that when I built my skills, I put them on GitHub. I made them available. I open sourced them. I wanted people to learn through what I was doing. I told the narrative, I wrote tutorials, I tried to democratize everything I did. Even though some, right, there's two different kind of sides of people's brains. Like some were like, oh my gosh, don't share anything. Like people will steal it. And actually I was, I didn't have that problem. I was very successful, not only in growing developers, but also in building my own brand and building my own software. I mean, my applications that deploy to Alexa, I have over 100 of them. That I had built during that, over a million unique users. So fast forward through the pandemic, right? I, as you have followed me, have had quite an interesting journey over the last year and a half, trying to figure out like, how can I serve with my, you know, experience? How can I serve in the best way? What can I use my skills to do and how can I use them Like, in the best way. I've had an extremely amazing career so far. And I was approached and really got to know Red Hat again in this new season, in this season of OpenShift, and in the season of really a lot of the struggles that every company I've talked to has had, has really been around, like, how do we deploy this? How do we deploy applications and make them real, specifically AI and machine learning? But it really is true for anything, React,, right? Full-stack apps, like, it doesn't really matter anything. How do we— the only way to really make a difference is to deploy more apps and deploy them successfully into production and have more people use them. And so the message at Red Hat aligned with that completely, and so that's why I joined. So I am now a, a hat-carrying member of Red Hat. I am so excited, uh, to be here. You'll see, I'll start updating, um, but so many cool things I feel like I could do in this new role. I'm just excited that they found me, excited that they encouraged me to join the team, and it's great to be back. I'm what they call a boomerang, when you boomerang back or go back to a company that you were with once. Um, and it's really cool because I'm— we have the same philosophy, the same ideals, um, and just a different era. Uh, it's now— if you don't know, Red Hat was acquired by IBM, so it's part of IBM, but it is still very much Red Hat. And so getting my hat today, it's so cool. Thank you. It's really awesome. Hey, Oscar, so great to see you. Alfredo, all my friends are here. Thank you so much for joining me. It's a really quick one, but I just wanted to show you my cool hat. You'll see it hanging up behind me from now on when I do my lives. I was thinking that I might do I don't know, maybe a video a day, like 3-minute video every day for 30 days and just see what I could share with you all. It's part of, you know, what, what can we do to like push ourselves and grow and do things we never thought we would do and, you know, and try and ultimately teach people what's in our heads. Every single one of you has experiences that I know I personally would love to hear about, right? Would love to hear about your journey and your stories. And sometimes the things we don't think are very interesting are super interesting to those in our networks. So that's what this stuff is all about. Anyway, I haven't been on long, about 10 minutes, but thank you so much to all of you who joined and all of you who commented. It has been really great. I'm excited. Red Hat, here I come. This is going to be amazing. Oh, really quick. I don't know if you all remember all— did I bring it? No, but you can go and look me up on GitHub, Unity Girl on GitHub, and you'll see my logo from 2008. I created a persona, a brand back then called JBoss Girl. And it was all about middleware, open source middleware. And it's just so cool to now be back and kind of doing the next evolutionary step for digital transformation with companies. It's just really cool. I'm excited, right? Isn't it nice? Thank you so much, Joanne. So awesome. Anyway, I love you guys. I think you're amazing. This is part of who I am as a brand. It's not, you know, what we do should align with who we are and we should be proud of what we do and who we work with.. And I couldn't be more excited about this journey I'm about to start on. It's been a crazy year and a half. And I'm very much ready to be on the other side. So I recently got vaccinated. My family is getting vaccinated. If that's a choice you guys decide to take or not, I just wish you the very best. I wish you all the health and abundance in the world. And I'm just really grateful that you decided to come spend a few minutes with me and celebrate. 'Cause this is a great day. All right, I'll talk to you all soon. Thank you so much. Happy Friday. Go celebrate this day and have a great, peaceful weekend. Okay, I'll talk to you all later. Bye. I know, Alfredo, I met you in Chile. I loved my friends in Latin America. That was such a fun tour. Anyway, if you catch this on the replay, all of my friends in India, I did an amazing tour in India, an amazing tour in Latin America. Ah, some of my best buddies. I can't wait till we get back on the road. Um, talk to you all soon. Have a great weekend. Okay, talk to you later. Bye.