Shownotes
Alan Gross, Solutions Architect & Tech Lead at Sandia National Laboratories, joins Carolyn to talk about how DevOps is being leveraged to support the Department of Energy's contractor operated research lab. Alan dives into some of the initiatives at Sandia National Laboratories, and how he is applying his personal philosophy around user experience ops, or "UX Ops," to support the mission.
Key Topics
- [01:12] About Sandia National Laboratories
- [03:50] Sandia's role in national security
- [06:25] DevOps versus DevSecOps
- [13:45] Department of Energy and Sandia
- [17:40] Sandia initiatives: a year of climate in a day & Hypersonic weapons
- [21:00] Alan's DevOps journey and advice for developers
- [33:55] Tech Talk questions
Quotable Quotes
Alan on DevOps: " DevOps is about trying to deliver quickly and learn from your mistakes as fast as you can. So shifting left is part of that philosophy. If you have security issues with your software, you want to know about that as quickly as possible, because if you've already deployed to production, it's almost too late." - Alan Gross
On what advice Alan would give to new developers: "It's about failing fast and failing forward...How quickly can you learn new things, get new code and new products out in front of your users, and understand how they engaged with that." - Alan Gross
About Our Guest
Alan works as a full stack developer and technical lead at Sandia National Labs, with six years of experience in web technologies development. He develops within Python, Angular and .NET ecosystems, with a focus on enabling the developer experience at Sandia with novel solutions for the labs’ diverse development, software governance, security and business intelligence needs. Alan leads a team that is committed to reducing technical debt by emphasizing DevSecOps, modern application architecture (such as microservices) and data-driven outcomes.
Episode Links
Transcripts
Carolyn Ford:
Welcome to Tech Transforms, sponsored by Dynatrace. I'm Carolyn Ford. Each week, Mark Senell and I talk with top influencers to explore how the US government is harnessing the power of technology to solve complex challenges and improve our lives. Hi, thanks for joining us on Tech Transforms, I'm Carolyn Ford. And today I get to talk to Alan Gross, solutions architect and tech lead at Sandia National Laboratories. I'm going to just do a full disclosure right now. I was so excited when Alex, our podcast manager, told me that we got to talk to somebody from Sandia, and I was like, "No way. How?" Today we're going to talk to you, Alan, about Sandia's latest developments, but also I want to get your insights on Sandia National Laboratories initiatives and how DevOps, really a lot, how DevOps is helping drive this mission. So welcome to Tech Transforms, Alan.
Alan Gross:
Of course. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Yeah, so let's get into it.
Carolyn Ford:
All right. Well, first off, there might be people in our audience, it's shocking, that don't know what Sandia National Laboratories is, so can you talk about what it is and the role that it plays in national security and technology innovation?
Alan Gross:
Sure. Yeah, there's a group of national labs throughout the country. There's, I believe, two in California, two in New Mexico, and then Oak Ridge and Tennessee, and then there's one in New York, and I'm sure I'm missing some. But Sandia, being one of those labs, it's technically classified as a federally funded R&D center, or FFRDC. We deliver science and technology, not only to solve national security issues, but also to break new ground in industry. I was watching a YouTube video about micro systems, and I saw the T-Bird logo pop up. This is something totally in the public domain, and I was like, "Oh, dang." So Sandia has its mark on a lot of things in different industries.
Carolyn Ford:
So the labs are part of Department of Energy, right?
Alan Gross:
Yes. Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
Sorry, T-Bird logo, is that Sandia's logo?
Alan Gross:
Yeah, the Thunderbird.
Carolyn Ford:
So Mollie is on from Sandia. Tell us the history of the Thunderbird. This is how we do this.
Mollie Rappe:
So I think this dates to the late 50s or early 60s, they sent out a call to the members of the staff saying, "Hey, we want to design a lapel pin for 5 and 10 year anniversary." And the winning design had a little Thunderbird to represent the Southwest on a turquoise background, and that's how the Thunderbird first became part of the Sandia culture. It has shifted in dimensions, and the color of blue has changed a little bit over the decades, but the very beginning of the logo was the Thunderbird
Carolyn Ford:
Nice. Thanks, Mollie. So Mollie is on also with Sandia Labs to make sure that Alan doesn't say anything, like I said, that would get him thrown in a deep dark hole. So Mollie's with PER, is that right, media relations, Mollie.
Mollie Rappe:
Media relations, yes.
Carolyn Ford:
All right. Well, thank you for that little background. All right. So you told us a little bit of the history of Sandia National Labs, who you guys are. How does Sandia National Labs play into the role of national security?
Alan Gross:
Right. So Sandia has a broad number of missions, so some of those include national and global security. My personal first job at Sandia was in global, chemical, and biological security. So we were making trainings to take abroad and help labs in other countries secure their assets, chem and bio assets that might need to be locked down. But of course, we have the nuclear mission, and we've made major breakthroughs with technology innovation such as microsystems research. There are folks at Sandia as well who do cybersecurity research and share that out with industry. So it really spans the gamut there.
Carolyn Ford:
So let's talk about microservices and serverless architecture, which I think is your expertise now. Yeah?
Alan Gross:
It is, yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
So how does that help support that mission?
Alan Gross:
Well, within the labs, we have a commitment to understanding how to build modern secure information systems. So some folks will leverage that know-how to deliver cybersecurity research to industry. In my case, I work to empower Sandia's developers to do their jobs as best as possible. It means advocating for a shift towards microservice architecture and containerization for a variety of reasons. For instance, because we can scan and deploy containers a lot more easily. Within Sandia that mindset is a little bit new. I think also because we have a lot of our own computing infrastructure, and a lot of other companies out in industry are fully on cloud, they've been on cloud for a long time. But the requirements that a private company has are not the same as a national lab. So for instance, embracing containerization, our speed has been different.
Carolyn Ford:
So you're not fully cloud, are you hybrid, some in the cloud, some not in the cloud? Is-
Alan Gross:
Yeah, we work towards figuring out what we can put in the cloud, but there is still a lot that we do on site as well.
Carolyn Ford:
Okay. What about DevOps? And might I include the buzz phrase, DevSecOps-
Alan Gross:
Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
... is something that you think about on a daily basis?
Alan Gross:
It is, yeah. On my team in particular, we have two dedicated DevOps/DevSecOps engineers. And we built a tool, kind of a homegrown tool that wraps around a existing CICD provider, so that's continuous integration and continuous delivery or continuous deployment. What that really means, and diving into the DevOps philosophy, there are tenants that you can follow, but just high level summary, DevOps is about trying to deliver quickly and learn from your mistakes as fast as you can. So shifting left is part of that philosophy. If you have security issues with your software, you want to know about that as quickly as possible, because if you've already deployed to production, it's almost too late.
Your developers have to go back and do a major amount of rework, and that just slows everything down. You have to go back, you have to redo your requirements, for instance, you have to rewrite code. You might have to pull back in, more than just developers too. So one of the tools that we've developed within Sandia is specifically geared towards how do we take code, awesome code that other people at the labs have written, how do we build it for them, how do we test it for them, how do we run it through a series of scans, security scans, as well as code quality scans, and then go ahead and deploy that to a containerized architecture.
Carolyn Ford:
So is DevSecOps, is it DevSecOps that's just part of the process, or is that a separate ... I don't know if that's even ... that's probably a really dumb question.
Alan Gross:
No, no, no.
Carolyn Ford:
But I know there's DevOps and there's DevSecOps, so do you separate it or you just do DevSecOps?
Alan Gross:
Yeah, the way we've been thinking about it is almost DevSecOps is like DevOps 2.0. It's just putting an EM emphasis on the security portion as well.
Carolyn Ford:
So it's adding the security portion in fairly new, or is it something you've been doing for a while?
Alan Gross:
It's something we've been doing for a while at Sandia. I think cybersecurity has been a big deal for a long time, but I think there's more of a understanding now that it should be part of your DevOps process. For instance, I have an extension in my IDE for instance, that will flag issues in my code as I'm writing it. So it's not quite as like, well, let's just wait until the very end and somebody will come through with a scanner and just do some massive penetration test against this code. At the very end of the day, it's more like, as a developer, I want feedback fast, not just on whether or not my code is working, but also if it's secure. And so that's mainly I think, why this security part of DevSecOps is being included more often now.
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah, it seems like not having the security on the left side of things is like ... this is probably a really bad analogy ... but building a house, you're all finished, and then you're like, oh, crap, we forgot to put the HVAC system in-
Alan Gross:
Right.
Carolyn Ford:
... time to go back in and plumb, or we forgot to put the plumbing in and we got to go back in and figure out how to retrofit this thing.
Alan Gross:
Right. Yeah, the house is actually a really good metaphor. So it's funny, I saw a meme on LinkedIn the other week that was exactly that. It was a house that was crumbling and all in disrepair, and there's a contractor standing outside and a customer, and the customer is like, "Well, why can't we add another window?" And the house is basically falling over. It's like, "Well, no, we can't add the window because the foundation is like it's gone." And so that gets into technical debt, where sometimes if you have such extreme fundamental security issues or quality issues in your code, that it's just not fundamentally sound. It's like adding even tiny features can really be a lot harder than it looks.
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah. It's like me with my house, I'm like to my brother who renovates houses, I'm like, "Why can't I just knock this wall out?" And he is like, "Carolyn, because the house will fall down, it's a bearing wall." And I'm like, "Okay, fine." So you said you have an extension that will flag issues in your code, so security issues, any issues, it'll just flag if this piece of code is not quite right, it'll say, "Hey, there's an issue here."
Alan Gross:
Yeah. they tend to be a series of different extensions. Sadly, I have not found one mega extension that will just do it all. And we do have to pass them through our software governance process to make sure, "Hey, is this actually okay to use," because we don't want it sending code off to some remote server. But yeah, in terms of what you might find in those kinds of extensions, some of them do accessibility, so they'll underline things and say, "Hey, you forgot to put alternate text." So somebody with a screen reader who might be visually impaired, when they reach this point in your site, they're not going to be able to engage with this image that you put here because it doesn't have all text.
Carolyn Ford:
Oh, wow.
Alan Gross:
There are extensions like that. There are some that check your HTML and just say, "This is just not good HTML." Others, that if you're coding in C#, for example ... this one might actually be built natively in from Microsoft, I don't remember ... But it will specifically tell you, "Hey, this practice that you're using, it relates to maybe this like CVE or something over here. You shouldn't do this. Don't do it. It's flagged. It's not a good pattern." And it depends on the language you use too. That could be a whole nother tangent about the languages that our team prefers using because of the community that builds up around them. If you're using some esoteric language, this type of tooling is not going to be as robust.
Carolyn Ford:
That's so interesting. I wouldn't have even thought about things needing to make sure that what you're doing can be seen by the visually impaired or the different codes. So my basic understanding of the DOE labs, you all work on different projects, and I'm guessing, even within the labs, you have groups working on different projects, probably pretty contained within your group.
Mollie Rappe:
Right.
Carolyn Ford:
Is that ... okay. So can you talk about what you specifically work on or no, we can't go there?
Alan Gross:
Yeah, I can. Yeah. I've been fortunate enough to get to publish a couple of different papers on what it is that I do. One of them is, I briefly mentioned that DevOps tool, we built that wraps around GitLab. It's called epic, which stands for ... everything's an acronym. It's
Carolyn Ford:
Yes. In the government, yes, it is.
Alan Gross:
Yeah. It's our enterprise pipeline though, basically. So that's one of the projects I work on that's DevSecOps related, but we also-
Carolyn Ford:
So wait, you build the tool for everybody in your lab-
Alan Gross:
Yes.
Carolyn Ford:
... to use as part ... Oh, nice.
Alan Gross:
Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
So you're enabling other teams to bake-in security into their development.
Alan Gross:
Yes, exactly.
Carolyn Ford:
Very nice.
Alan Gross:
And the team that I currently lead, it is called DevEx, is the title. We used to call ourselves the A-team, but I think some folks didn't like that because it was a little ...
Carolyn Ford:
I love that. You should definitely go back to that.
Alan Gross:
A little overconfident maybe. But DevEx stands for developer experience. And so our goal is to empower developers at Sandia, other software engineers to do their jobs as best as possible. So that means we not only build tooling, like DevOps tooling, but we're also constantly pulling a lot of data and doing surveys to try and understand what the needs are at Sandia and in some cases outside of Sandia as well. So that also includes a data sciences mission as part of what we do.
Carolyn Ford:
Do you share what you do from your group to the other labs as well?
Alan Gross:
We try to. There's some growing communities of practice, I think. But I feel like, especially when we all get together at the National Labs IT conference, there's always a lot of talk of, "Hey, what if we could collaborate better in this way or that way?" And I would say the spirit is there.
Carolyn Ford:
How much do you lean into industry to help with the tools that you build?
Alan Gross:
Oh, yeah. All the time. Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
I assume you use a lot of open source.
Alan Gross:
Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
Or is that ... yeah. Okay.
Alan Gross:
Yeah. And I believe you had Dr. Stephen Magill on right, from Sonatype?
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah. I really enjoyed that episode. And he was talking to you about software supply chain type of work.
Alan Gross:
Yeah, exactly. Specifically in the open source.
Carolyn Ford:
Yes. He finally helped me understand how open source is not just an absolute disaster.
Alan Gross:
Right?
Carolyn Ford:
People would tell me, "No, this is how we secure it." And I'm like, "I still don't believe you." But after I talked to Dr. Magill, I was like, "Okay, I got it." So yeah. Okay.
Alan Gross:
And that's part of what we look at too, in terms of Epic, in terms of DevSecOps is trying to understand, "Hey, we're, where did this package come from?" But open source, yeah, it is important to the work we do. And I would say we're engaging industry all the time.
Carolyn Ford:
Okay. So I want to ask you about an initiative that came out of Sandia. Well, it was recently announced in April that Sandia created the first global cloud resolving model to simulate a world's year of climate in a day. So obviously that requires tremendous computing resources to run in a reasonable amount of time. Have you helped with that initiative? I'm guessing your DevOps tools have helped with that initiative. What can you tell me about that?
Alan Gross:
Well, that was done in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and it was their high performance computing resources, I think, that were utilized in that work. And so Sandia solves groundbreaking problems across national security technology and climate science spaces, and I've definitely seen an increased interest in learning from that data. So for instance, we're working on pipelines to leverage our computing resources across on-prem and cloud environments, and doing a lot in terms of data science as well.
Carolyn Ford:
I'd like to also talk to you about an effort that Sandia announced to accelerate hypersonic weapons development by working with hundreds of contractors. First of all, what is a hypersonic weapon?
Mollie Rappe:
Hypersonic's is a weapon that can go faster than Mach 5. And the hypersonic missiles that Sandia is working on are non-nuclear, but they're highly maneuverable. Say a ballistic missile can go faster than Mach 5, but it follows a parabola and if you know your math, you can predict where it's going.
Carolyn Ford:
Okay.
Alan Gross:
That's awesome.
Mollie Rappe:
But hypersonics are far more maneuverable.
Carolyn Ford:
Awesome. Thanks again, Mollie. So there's hundreds of contractors being brought in for this initiative.
Alan Gross:
Right, for the hypersonics initiative.
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah, the hypersonics. Thank you. Has the increase in contractors required any additional architectural or front-end development to sustain the influx of personnel?
Alan Gross:
Yeah, I think so. I know in general, for as long as I've been at Sandia, our workforce has grown a lot. So one thing that I work on is we're constantly thinking about the onboarding experience of these new folks. So in the UX, the user experience realm, that means we've looked at a lot of data about that day one experience. It also means that we've built up more tooling to survey and get feedback. So for instance, we take a look at IT tickets, we want to understand are folks getting the resources that they need in a timely manner? Are they able to connect into Sandia's network, for instance, efficiently and effectively, and things like that.
Carolyn Ford:
Okay. I want to ask you, and I'll give you a second to think about this. In your role of enabling DevOps/DevSecOps, what's the number one or maybe one through three pieces of advice that you would offer when it comes to DevSecOps? What would you tell your developers do, don't do?
Alan Gross:
Oh my gosh. Yeah, let's see. That's an awesome question. So I think it starts with just understanding that you are going to fail. And that's not easy always, especially, I feel like coming from just, in general in our society, it's like you always growing up always wanted that gold star. And so it is a shift in mindset, but a lot of IT, it's about failing fast and failing forward. And the same with DevSecOps, it's about iterations really. How quickly can you get through a cycle to learn new things, to get new code and new products out in front of your users, to understand how they engaged with that. And that even goes into a realm, which we've coined in our group. I actually don't know if anyone in industry is using this term, but UX ops. So basically understanding the operations behind how to build a better user experience, because UX goes beyond just UI.
There's a lot to user experience. It could be even, we talked a little bit about the onboarding experience, that's a user experience too. And so in DevOps, a lot of it is about getting your code as quickly put out there as you can so you can understand your user's experience. I think that's at the core of the issue, but also it is a team effort too. So you have to coordinate, collaborate really well. You have to get it culturally into doing things like code reviews and understanding how to work with the same people day in and day out to read their code, understand what it is that they're doing, have a shared mission to solve problems, and to come together to do that efficiently.
Carolyn Ford:
I love that. And I have never heard that term UX ops, so you just invented it and we're going to get it out there. So you said something about people, and this comes up often, whenever I talk to thought leaders about innovation, the people, the culture, working with people always comes up. And it made me wonder how accepting are the development teams of the tools that you build them? Are they using them or do you find resistance?
Alan Gross:
Yeah, I think it's important that you understand what it is that folks are actually asking for. This happens a lot even in interpersonal relationships. They say when dealing with friends and family, the five love languages. And if you try and give something to somebody that they don't actually want and say, "Well, here it is, I'm like doing you a favor," and it might just build resentment. It is the same in enterprise IT, where it's trying our best to understand what it is that other developers at Sandia need. That means we need to go talk to them. And a lot of times in government, you're dealing with inherently siloed organizations. That can be hard to do and it's important that we survey them, or even we have efforts at Sandia to sort of inner source code.
So that's the idea of open source, but within the organization, how do you take a piece of code, and among Sandia's 15,000 approximately employees, how do you float it around and say, "Well, anybody is welcome to make this better." And in that way, people can take ownership over what it is that they're being asked to use, so that there's not just some far off voice in a tower saying, "You will do this." So I think having that sort of grassroots connection is really important.
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah, finding out what they want, what they need, rather than, like you said, just shoving something onto them saying, "This is going to help you." Because that really resonated with me. I'm like, yeah, I've had people do that and I've tried to do that.
Alan Gross:
This will help you and also there's some requirements saying that you have to do it, in which case it's not really, at that point ... I could see how that would not feel amazing to be pushed into using tooling like that.
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah. What's been the biggest challenge that you've faced in your career? It doesn't have to be at Sandia, but ...
Alan Gross:
Yeah. Sometimes I feel like my life is eerily similar to the Phoenix Project. That is a very well known book in DevOps.
Carolyn Ford:
Is Kim Gene's book?
Alan Gross:
It is. Yep.
Carolyn Ford:
Gene Kim. I'm getting it wrong. Yeah. Okay.
Alan Gross:
But yeah, especially as a team lead, learning to manage that tornado of work that's inherent in the tech industry, that's probably the biggest challenge I face right now. Everything from how do we manage our logging systems better so that we can make sense of the thousand alerts that we get per day, to understanding unplanned work and how to triage that. There's, I think, constantly a lot for me to learn and just a lot for me to share with the team in because everybody has their own sort of focus of, what would you call it, window of control, I guess, area of control.
Carolyn Ford:
Their own perspective.
Alan Gross:
Their own perspective, sharing those perspectives and just trying to make sure," Hey, is our DevOps engineer feeling overwhelmed today because of this unplanned outage or whatnot?"
Carolyn Ford:
What has been your funnest product? Have you ever had to fight, what's the thing from Stranger Things, a Demogorgon?
Alan Gross:
Yeah, a Demogorgon, I think. Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah, have you ever had to fight one of them?
Alan Gross:
I can't say I have. I don't really have a extensive enough collection of keyboards to use as a weapon. I just have the one. But yeah, the coolest project though, especially when I was more in hacker mode, when I was coding almost all day, I really enjoyed figuring out how to do operations asynchronously. So that would be, especially when you're trying to handle events going on that you just don't know when they'll happen. So for instance, that could be a user interacting with your product. So you don't know when a user will take a certain action on your page, so you have to handle that in a certain way. And you might have to make requests out to different servers and do different things, and you're putting together ... it's almost like a ballet.
I've always felt like good code, it is almost like, especially when you're doing asynchronous stuff, it feels like you're doing a dance of sorts. But also, good code should read almost more like prose, I think. And we had a developer book club, and we were reading Clean Code by, he goes by Uncle Bob, I don't actually remember his full name, but Uncle Bob. And that was some advice. He was like, "Well, you want to be able to sit down and have fun in a way, reading code."
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah.
Alan Gross:
I had a lot of fun doing that.
Carolyn Ford:
Wow. I would love to go inside your brain. I don't want to take over your body, I just want to go inside your brain and watch the way it works for a minute. Because I'm like, "Poe does prose. Interesting. I never would've thought that.
Alan Gross:
Yeah. Well, we have a Last Of Us reference there now too, in terms of not taking over my body. I appreciate that.
Carolyn Ford:
There we go. Yeah, no cordyceps. Okay. I'm with you.
Alan Gross:
Yeah. Well, because there's a lot of diversity, I think in the software engineering realm, and not everybody comes from necessarily, a hard computer science background. I'm always super appreciative of the people on my team who do have that background, but I don't, for instance. My undergraduate degree was in technical communication and my graduate degree was in information systems, and I've been on a hunt to find my niche. User experience has actually worked out really well, especially doing development within user experience because I like to code, and then I also get to go out and do some human factors work and try and understand how people engage with software. And I personally find that very fulfilling. But because of that, the ability to have that diversity, I think you get a lot of different perspectives on code. And even earlier I mentioned something about esoteric programming languages, those are usually languages that people just write for fun just because they want to make something weird. And so there's-
Carolyn Ford:
Like fan fiction for coders.
Alan Gross:
Yeah, exactly. And there's one I think where you write code in Shakespearean terms, so it's almost like you're supposed to be sounding like Shakespeare as you're coding.
Carolyn Ford:
Okay.
Alan Gross:
Yeah. You can find all sorts of weird programming languages out there. I think the point is to express that solving problems can be artistic. I don't know, even painters have to solve problems all the time, it's not necessarily doing just math all the time.
Carolyn Ford:
Well, back to your UX ops.
Alan Gross:
Sure.
Carolyn Ford:
When we hear user experience, most people will immediately go to the end user, to me, what am I experiencing? But I always ask people to clarify. "Okay, when you say user experience, define that for me." Are you talking about system users? Are you talking about me, the end user?
Alan Gross:
Right.
Carolyn Ford:
What are you talking about? And I love when you think about it, you are thinking about your developers. That's a new angle for me. And the truth is, if you're thinking about your developer's user experience, it's going to make my user experience what it should be.
Alan Gross:
Right.
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah. It has to be looked at from all the different angles.
Alan Gross:
Right. Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
That's exciting. I love that.
Alan Gross:
And that's a good insight about looking at it from all the different angles, because I think a lot of times in software, you have to obsess over the details to get it just right. It is not always good enough to say, "Well, okay, 90% of the time this is good enough." It's like, well, that 10% of the time might still encapsulate the frustration that thousands of people will feel with your product. Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah, man, I totally agree. All right. I'm going to take us to our tech talk questions, which are meant to just be fun, quick answers. So my first question for you, and you kind of touched on this a second ago, but if someone were to write a book about you, what do you think the title would be?
Alan Gross:
Yeah, probably something along the lines of Learning to Fail. There was especially a lot of that-
Carolyn Ford:
A Greatest Failure, that would be the title.
Alan Gross:
Yeah, that would be a good one. Yeah, I know my old mentor and team lead used to joke that a book about his life would be ... yeah, I'm assuming you've seen The Office and-
Carolyn Ford:
Oh, yeah.
Alan Gross:
... and Michael Scott wrote, I think he wrote a book called, Somehow I Manage. And he was like, "Yeah, that would be the one for me."
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah. Okay. Okay. I like the failure theme. I also feel like we got to have something in there about the UX ops. That is such a fresh angle for me at least. I really like that. All right. You mentioned that you've written a couple of papers. Do you want to be an author? You are an author, you've written papers, would you want to lean into that more?
Alan Gross (:I definitely want to. It runs in the family. My sister wrote an entire book when she was like 22 and published it. For me though, personally, I would just like to work on my technical writing skills some more. Again, that was sort of what I focused on in undergrad. And I do feel like I'm sitting on a fair amount of content that I just want to get out there and post on Medium or something like that. But at the moment I'm like, dang, there's a lot of commitment in doing that and getting on Medium, and you have to play the game and be publishing in a certain way and at a certain speed. But I did really appreciate the opportunity to publish what I have. The last paper I worked on was specifically about trying to detect outages using user analytics data. And to me, that was just so cool. It was cool to write about and-
Carolyn Ford:
Interesting. Where can we find this paper?
Alan Gross:
It's called, let's see. You can find it out there on, I don't know, Research Gate or something. It's called Pattern and Anomaly Detection in UX, or PADUX for sure. Because again, everything has to be an acronym, but yea.
Carolyn Ford:
Pattern and Anomaly detection in UX.
Alan Gross:
Yep.
Carolyn Ford:
I like it. Okay. Last, well, maybe not the last question. What's your favorite productivity hack?
Alan Gross:
I try and keep it simple. I just put my phone somewhere else.
Carolyn Ford:
Smart.
Alan Gross:
d Deep Work by Cal Newport in:Carolyn Ford:
So I'm reading a book called Stolen Focus, and it addresses the myth of multitaskers, basically, it just says it's not real. And every time we switched tasks ... so there was a study done, and I'm probably going to get this wrong, but task switching. And when a bunch of task switches happening, and then they would do a simple IQ test after they had them do a bunch of multitasking task switch kind of things. And they found that the IQ dropped to the level of somebody smoking pot. So I'm like, "Okay, so we can either multitask or smoke pot while we work." I'm just kidding. So to your point, just going back and forth opening that app multiple times rather than just, if you're going to do it, then go all in and focus and then be done with it.
Alan Gross:
Right.
Carolyn Ford:
Okay. My last question for you is, do you have any good recommendations for our audience as far as podcasts, TV, books, movies? What do you like to do in your downtime?
Alan Gross:
Well, yeah, we've already touched on the Last Of Us. I just finished watching through that. I loved that. I love that show. Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
Are you a gamer? Did you play the game when it came out?
Alan Gross:
No, I didn't play the game.
Carolyn Ford:
Okay.
Alan Gross:
I still appreciate it anyway. I got really into The Witcher as well, even though I-
Carolyn Ford:
My gosh, I had the whole entire book set of The Witcher. But Henry Cavill's not going to do it after the sixth season.
Alan Gross:
I know. I know. It'll be hard to stick on after that loss.
Carolyn Ford:
Yeah.
Alan Gross:
But yeah, podcasts, I love listening to Adam Grant's podcast as well as Simon Shinik.
Carolyn Ford:
He's fantastic.
Alan Gross:
Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
His book, oh, okay, it's called Think Again.
Alan Gross:
Okay.
Carolyn Ford:
And it looks like it is his most recent. Think again, the Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. It is really good.
Alan Gross:
Yeah. So books, yeah, I guess I haven't mentioned books yet. I just discovered a book called How to Speak Whale, which is-
Carolyn Ford:
Oh.
Alan Gross:
Yeah, it's about using-
Carolyn Ford:
What is that? Is it really how to speak whale?
Alan Gross:
It is actually there. There's-
Carolyn Ford:
What.
Alan Gross:
There's a work out there called Project Ceti, which is, if it sounds familiar, I think it's supposed to be the original search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but it's with a C, which it stands for ... oh my gosh, what is the, I'm not a biologist.
Carolyn Ford:
Mollie knows
Mollie Rappe:
Cetacean.
Alan Gross:
Cetacean. There you go.
Carolyn Ford:
Okay.
Mollie Rappe:
I think that's the family, but it could be the order.
Alan Gross:
And so they're using AI to try and decode patterns of whale vocalization. So part of that includes pulling just a ton of different recordings of whales just talking to each other. So that's somebody's job is to record all of those snippets of well vocalization and then they're going to apply AI to try and make sense of that unstructured data and-
Carolyn Ford:
And decode their language?
Alan Gross:
Yeah. And if you get enough of it, like Rosetta Stone, so to speak, if you get enough data of whale vocalization, you can still start to find patterns.
Carolyn Ford:
Wow. Super cool. So I just heard that they're making headway with reading our minds. I know that's super sensational, but I heard a story on NPR last week where they're hooking people up to FMRIs, watching the way their brains work when they hear a story and then having them ... now I need to go back and read the article because I can't remember if they were having them say the story out loud or just think it in their mind. But using some GPT technology, hooking them up to these sensors, the GPT technology could spit the story out almost like perfectly.
Alan Gross:
That's freaky.
Carolyn Ford:
Not totally reading our minds yet, but we're getting there. It's scary, right?
Alan Gross:
Yeah.
Carolyn Ford:
All right. Well, Alan, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been super fun hour for me.
Alan Gross:
Sure. Yeah. Thank you for having me on once again. It's been a pleasure to be here.
Carolyn Ford:
Well, and Mollie, I've really enjoyed having you pop in and out too. Thanks for being with us.
Mollie Rappe:
I did want to add, not for this, but I was wrong about ballistic missiles. They don't follow a parabola, they follow a ballistic trajectory, which is a modified parabola.
Carolyn Ford:
All right, good. Thank you for that correction. So, all right. And thank you to our listeners for joining us. Make sure you smash that like button and share this episode. And we will talk to you next week on Tech Transforms.
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