Slinging CDK Knowledge with Matt Coulter

About Matt

Matt is an AWS DevTools Hero, Serverless Architect, Author and conference speaker. 

He is focused on creating the right environment for empowered teams to rapidly deliver business value in a well-architected, sustainable and serverless-first way.

You can usually find him sharing reusable, well architected, serverless patterns over at cdkpatterns.com or behind the scenes bringing CDK Day to life.

Links:

• AWS CDK Patterns: https://cdkpatterns.com
• The CDK Book: https://thecdkbook.com
• CDK Day: https://www.cdkday.com

Transcript

Announcer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.

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Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. I’m joined today by Matt Coulter, who is a Technical Architect at Liberty Mutual. You may have had the privilege of seeing him on the keynote stage at re:Invent last year—in Las Vegas or remotely—that last year of course being 2021. But if you make better choices than the two of us did, and found yourself not there, take the chance to go and watch that keynote. It’s really worth seeing.

Matt, first, thank you for joining me. I’m sorry, I don’t have 20,000 people here in the audience to clap this time. They’re here, but they’re all remote as opposed to sitting in the room behind me because you know, social distancing.

Matt: And this left earphone, I just have some applause going, just permanently, just to keep me going. [laugh].

Corey: That’s sort of my own internal laugh track going on. It’s basically whatever I say is hilarious, to that. So yeah, doesn’t really matter what I say, how I say it, my jokes are all for me. It’s fine. So, what was it like being on stage in front of that many people? It’s always been a wild experience to watch and for folks who haven’t spent time on the speaking circuit, I don’t think that there’s any real conception of what that’s like. Is this like giving a talk at work, where I just walk on stage randomly, whatever I happened to be wearing? And, oh, here’s a microphone, I’m going to say words. What is the process there?

Matt: It’s completely different. For context for everyone, before the pandemic, I would have pretty regularly talked in front of, I don’t know, maybe one, two hundred people in Liberty, in Belfast. So, I used to be able to just, sort of, walk in front of them, and lean against the pillar, and use my clicker, and click through, but the process for actually presenting something as big as a keynote and re:Invent is so different. For starters, you think that when you walk onto the stage, you’ll actually be able to see the audience, but the way the lights are set up, you can pretty much see about one row of people, and they’re not the front row, so anybody I knew, I couldn’t actually see.

And yeah, you can only see, sort of like, the from the void, and then you have your screens, so you’ve six sets of screens that tell you your notes as well as what slides you’re on, you know, so you can pivot. But other than that, I mean, it feels like you’re just talking to yourself outside of whenever people, thankfully, applause. It’s such a long process to get there.

Corey: I’ve always said that there are a few different transition stages as the audience size increases, but for me, the final stage is more or less anything above 750 people. Because as you say, you aren’t able to see that many beyond that point, and it doesn’t really change anything meaningfully. The most common example that you see in the wild is jokes that work super well with a small group of people fall completely flat to large audiences. It’s why so much corporate numerous cheesy because yeah, everyone in the rehearsals is sitting there laughing and the joke kills, but now you’ve got 5000 people sitting in a room and that joke just sounds strained and forced because there’s no longer a conversation, and no one has the shared context that—the humor has to change. So, in some cases when you’re telling a story about what you’re going to say on stage, during a rehearsal, they’re going to say, “Well, that joke sounds really corny and lame.” It’s, “Yeah, wait until you see it in front of an audience. It will land very differently.” And I’m usually right on that.

I would also advise, you know, doing what you do and having something important and useful to say, as opposed to just going up there to tell jokes the whole time. I wanted to talk about that because you talked about how you’re using various CDK and other serverless style patterns in your work at Liberty Mutual.

Matt: Yeah. So, we’ve been using CDK pretty extensively since it was, sort ...