Chris: 0:15

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Cables to Clouds podcast. My name is Chris Miles at BGP Main on Twitter, Blue Sky, whatever socials we're we're uh promoting today. I don't know which ones are good, which ones are bad. Most of them seem bad today. Um but, anyways, uh with me as always is my good my good friend Tim McConaughey as my co-host. And today we have um uh a fun episode for you. We have uh Alexis Berthoff Berthoff, right?

Alexis: 0:47

Berthoff.

Chris: 0:49

Berthoff. Yeah, I should have asked, but you know, Berthoff. Um, um but yeah, so we wanted to bring Alexis on um and kind of talk about uh the concept of tech evangelism. Um if you are in the networking space and on any kind of social media, you've probably seen some type of content that Alexis has produced. Um she has this um kind of mantra about making networking cool again, um, which I think we can all um we can all definitely benefit from that. So we wanted to bring Alexis on and have a discussion around that and um talk about an up-and-coming event that she is organizing through her employer that Tim and I are both speaking at. So we'll get to that a little later. But uh before that, let's uh let's start with a brief uh intro. Alexis, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Alexis: 1:40

Yeah, absolutely, Chris, and big fan of the show. It's it's great to be here with you and Tim. Um if you guys haven't met me before, my name is Alexis Berthoff. I am currently a technical evangelist at a company called Megaport. Um, prior to that, I was a SE at Cisco or a solutions engineer at Cisco for about five years, um, where I worked in their commercial segment representing all types of customers located around Washington, DC. Um, I create a lot of video content on social media. Um, I've got three different platforms I maintain on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Um, it is all the same content, just peanut butter spread, because I don't have time to maintain three separate platforms with three different levels of content. Um but it's been a journey the past two years. I've really enjoyed getting to know the community a little bit better and and just get involved and meet people. It's made it really fun. So happy to be here.

Chris: 2:36

Yeah, welcome. Thanks for being on the show. Um, so let's let's get right into it. So obviously you're a tech evangelist, right? Um, so let's let's kind of maybe start with a brief definition of what tech evangelism is and what that actually means um to you and and to the broader community.

Alexis: 2:53

Yeah, absolutely. So this is a role I didn't actually know existed. Um a lot of times when I tell people what I do, they go, evangelism. So you tell people about, you know, our savior. And I'm like, uh, kind of, but in a technology sense, right? Um and the thing with technical evangelism is it it means different things at different companies and also to different people. Um, the way that I describe it, in the way that I currently work at Megaport is I sit in between product, so the people designing our solution, marketing, the people who are trying to get in front of our customers, sales, our sales team, the people who actually support our customers, our customers or our community themselves. And I help all four of those functions work better together. So I sit super closely with product, I'm I'm tied into what new releases or features are coming out. I work with marketing, I help them refine their messaging from a technical standpoint to make sure that it's hitting all the right notes from the product team. So doing that in-between translator role. I work with sales, so helping them support customers, taking feedback from the sales team and making sure it's getting heard by product and marketing, and then also working with customers themselves, um, being an active part of the community, doing things like this, participating in podcasts, going to NOGs, public speaking, being active on social media, and really being able to take that hands-on feedback and bring it back to sales marketing and product and just help everyone work a little bit better together.

Tim: 4:33

Yeah, that's really good. Um, so this is interesting. I I've heard tech evangelists, and I agree with you, by the way, that uh it it feels a little different depending on the company that you're at. I I also hear, so I'm a I'm a technical marketing engineer at Cisco now, and what you described is very, very I mean, it's almost it's almost copy paste.

Alexis: 4:52

But it's similar. Same thing. I mean, I've talked to a lot of developer advocates too. A developer advocated or a field CTO. Field CTO was also very similar. And the conclusion that I've came to is whether you're a TME, a tech evangelist, uh field CTO. Even recently, um, I talked to someone who was a demo engineer, and it also sounded like they had the same job.

Tim: 5:20

Yeah, it's interesting. The words that are uh the the role is very similar, but the word that we use to describe it is very different across the industry.

Alexis: 5:29

Well, it just kind of goes back to where you're getting paid from, right? Like the bean counters need to find a place for your money to come from. And so depending on which company you're at, how they need to justify paying you, um, I think that has a lot to do with where your title comes from and also what organization you report into. Like I've met people who are developer advocates or tech evangelists and they roll up into marketing. Sometimes they roll up into product, sometimes they roll up into sales. Um, I roll up into go to market, which is kind of like product marketing and sales. Right. Um, it just really depends on the the business and nice.

Chris: 6:09

Yeah, no, no disrespect to the bean counters of the world, you know. You guys you guys are very necessary in this world. Um so um kind of going back to something that you've been kind of uh proposing on social media for a while now is this concept of making networking cool again. So I want to kind of get into that a little bit and and maybe before we talk about the you know how to make networking cool, um maybe let's let's take a step back and say why why do we feel or maybe why do we think that uh society, and to you know, to do use the word society, feels that networking is uncool in some way. Is it is there kind of a point at which you we think it fell off or or a reason there?

Alexis: 6:52

Yeah, I mean when you look at most kids today, I'm gonna generalize these kids, I'm 28 now. These damn kids I can do that. These the kids these days, um, they're not really looking at how their devices are connecting to the internet. Right. Even even I when I graduated high school in 2015, and I didn't really care where Google was pulling the information from. I just cared that it was connected and I could get what I needed for my book report or to go on Instagram or TikTok wasn't a thing then, Instagram or Vine or whatever it was for my entertainment. I could talk to my friends. I wasn't really worried about how it was connecting. I was just more concerned with the fact that it was working. And I think it was a big jump because when we look at, and I came to this conclusion talking to Kevin Nance. Kevin is slightly older than me. He makes fun of me every time we talk because I find a way to bring it up in every episode we record together. But Kevin entered the industry at a time when the internet was being born in the early 2000s. We were building out the first networks and, you know, figuring out how to connect all these different data centers and all these different cloud applications. Um, blogs were really prevalent, instant messaging, like aim was really prevalent. And the fact that you could connect to something was super exciting. And having a career in tech to go build out these big global networks, number one, it was a really safe, reliable job. Number two, it was a really exciting job because no one had done it before. And so there was a lot of people, maybe you guys could relate, who were like, oh my God, I'm graduating school. I want to go into networking because I want to build these networks. And now that the groundwork has been laid, I think a lot of people have forgotten or don't care how it works. They just care that it works. And so, especially to a 15-year-old, 16-year-old, 17-year-old who's coming out of school and they're looking at what career should I go into? Well, they want to go into tech because tech makes money. But when you look at Instagram or TikTok or even like top 10 highest paying tech jobs, it's cybersecurity, data analytics, right? Software, computer science. No one's really talking about how all of that works because behind all of those careers, obviously, there's a network that's connecting everything. And I think people have just forgotten.

Tim: 9:18

Yeah, it's interesting. So we talk about this uh quite a bit on the podcast as well. Like networking, well, truthfully, system administration, true, if we're being if we're being honest, right? But like infrastructure generally is like uh water and power, right? It's infrastructure. Like you you turn the water on and you expect the water to come out of the faucet, like nobody figures out how that happens and nobody thinks it's glorious that it happens, right? It's just expected.

Alexis: 9:43

Right. Well, no, 100%. I think I I've heard so many people use that analogy lately, and it's true, right? You walk into a place that doesn't have good cell phone service, and you're like, damn, you didn't stand up free Wi-Fi? I'm supposed to sit here at dinner with my thoughts. What is going on here? Clearly, you don't have cell phone service. Um, uh, and it's just expected at this point. And so I think that's a big part of what we're seeing. And then on the on the other side, you know, I was a Cisco SE for five years. I'm very involved in the community. We have customers who are trying to hire customers, um, companies who are trying to hire for these senior networking roles, and they can't find the right talent. The senior talent is being very, very highly sought after, and the new talent that's trying to come in is having a hard time keeping up or getting jobs, or they don't have the right level of expertise. And I just think there's like a big disconnect that's happening somewhere that we got to figure out how to solve soon.

Chris: 10:41

Yeah, I think we've also talked about this on the show quite a bit in that the prevalence of AI and things like that, um, and compounding with people just not looking into this as a career field anymore, probably going to uh, like I said, compound and remove the bottom rungs of the ladder and then potentially, you know, kind of that that talent pool altogether, right? Um, if people aren't learning networking. Um and you know, there's probably a lot of people out there who are like, oh, I can just use AI and some LLM to figure out my you know simple networking issues, and and we've already seen today that that's uh that's not really good in practice. So I th I think I I think the initiative is very good. Um so like with that being said, um obviously you've done a ton of industry events, you've been out talking to customers and um colleagues quite a bit. Um, what would you say your opinion is on kind of the state of networking today with all these new technologies kind of uh coming into the fold as well, like AI, cloud, cybersecurity, etc.? What do you feel is the current state of networking?

Alexis: 11:50

I mean, I think it's still really important. Number one, I think that as these networks are getting more and more complicated, there's going to be even more design considerations coming up, especially when we look at things like AI. Um, I just sat on a session earlier today that was talking about designing networks for AI applications in the cloud. And from latency to bandwidth to the way you're doing uh your traffic routing, like there are to the protocols you're using, there are so many different design considerations that you know you need to keep up with. It's not, again, it's not 2001 anymore. These things are not the applications we're connecting are not basic. And so I think things are just going to continue to get more and more complicated. And like you said, Chris, you can't just rely that AI in the future is going to be able to self-optimize and figure it out on its own.

Tim: 12:44

Yeah. It's funny because we're what we're seeing is uh kind of a moving away from this kind of best and breed thing where, like, you know, all these I guess point solutions, depending on how you say it, right? Best and breed, point solutions, where everybody's trying to was earlier, like, you know, five years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, everybody's trying to find the best application to do the thing that they want to do. And they were fine with having these teams that would run 10 or 12 different solutions or something, as long as it's all best and breed and all worked. And now we're seeing very much the opposite. We're like, you know, we want the simplest possible option. Give us the easiest thing, the fastest thing, the most agile thing, the fewest buttons I have to click, and that's what people are uh are really wanting.

Alexis: 13:28

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, state of networking, I think we're still gonna need network engineers. I think it's still important, obviously. I wouldn't be beating the drum on social media if I didn't.

Chris: 13:39

Yeah.

Alexis: 13:39

And it's still cool. It's still cool.

Chris: 13:41

I I think I think what I think I think you're speaking to two people that still very much think it's very cool, um, or else we would not, we would probably not exist and have any money to our names at all. Um the so I remember kind of talking about that, the concept of the skills gap. Um when, you know, if we if we think about like just a few years ago with this whole like DevOps revolution, right? Where people were moved into these kind of software development type life cycles around infrastructure. Um, you know, there was this constant like thought around, oh, like if you don't adapt, you're going to get left behind. Um and from a market perspective, it feels like it feels like there's a lot of infrastructure people that have moved to that mindset and are operating with those principles. But I don't know. It's as someone that's gone back into kind of more traditional infrastructure and cloud versus just solely cloud, um, in my career, I definitely see people that are not adopting those things and not using DevOps. Um, so like, are you getting the gist from the community that like they are getting left behind in that scenario, or is it did that not come to fruition?

Alexis: 14:50

I think it I think it depends on your business. I mean, automation is never a bad thing, in my opinion, if you can automate something and you have the ability to do it the right way. I think it's great. I don't think every team, every customer out there has the skill set, the bandwidth, the ability to implement those principles. And so there are definitely places that it's not being adopted, not because it shouldn't, but just because is the juice worth the squeeze?

Tim: 15:18

Yeah.

Alexis: 15:18

Right. Would automating the size of their network really make a difference to their business if they have five sites, nothing really changes that much. Now, if you have 300 sites, they're all over the US, you don't have a global team. Maybe automation makes a little more sense. Um, but I think there's levels to where your business is. And like just just because you have a tool doesn't mean you need Yep, 100%.

Tim: 15:44

Yeah, I think that's I think that's important. The whole uh, you know, when you all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail like type type of uh mindset there. But I couldn't agree more. When you when you have a very mismatched, that's when you you tend to see the automation requirements is gonna be like when you have a very mismatched uh uh control surface, if you will. You have like two people and they're managing 500 devices, yes, absolutely. It's it's obvious that you need automation, whether or not you have the skills and whatnot, those people are just gonna have to learn automation. Um, and the inverse is true, right? If you have one guy and he's managing five routers, obviously, like you know, it's like building Kubernetes for you know to run a web page or something. Like it's the dumbest idea.

Alexis: 16:25

So exactly.

Chris: 16:26

It's like that meme, the guy with the giant spoon. It's like my API-driven workflow, and it's like my WordPress app, and it's like the little bowl of cereal. The little tiny bowl of cereal. Yeah, yeah. Um okay, yeah, I think that's good. Um, so if we like let's get into maybe the cool factor of networking and making it cool, right? So the I think the thing is about networking is a lot of these protocols, you know, there's an RFC specifically calling out this specifically. Not the technology has not changed very much in the last 20 to 30 years, right? There everything kind of is just a version of something older that's been repackaged, and maybe I will say there is automation being put into things now to make it more um, you know, consumable for customers, but ultimately the wheel has not been reinvented in a long time. Um whereas in the application space, maybe something like cloud or um further up the stack that you could probably make the argument that there's been you know bigger gaps of innovation. Um but uh what are some of the things that you see coming into the fold that you think are cool um from a networking perspective?

Alexis: 17:36

I think let me think about that. Chris, you're asking me hard questions.

Chris: 17:40

Sorry.

Tim: 17:42

No, let me let me buy you a little time anyway, actually. So something I learned that I think is actually gonna be really cool. I didn't know I didn't think about this at all. And I just went back to Cisco, became a TME, um, and I learned about the looming death of all VPNs that is uh post-quantum cryptography. So, like, I don't know if you guys have have seen that at all. I hadn't.

Alexis: 18:05

I just had a conversation about it this morning that was really interesting.

Tim: 18:08

Oh really?

Alexis: 18:09

Yeah, crazy. It's like packet by packet encryption. Yeah.

Tim: 18:14

Um, yeah, I mean, so so this idea that we're gonna have uh cryptography or quantum computers, what they call them is crypto uh cryptographic. I'm gonna stumble all over this cryptographically relevant quantum computing. It's one of those things like it might it'll be three to five years or never, like the one of those technologies. So every time you say quantum, you gotta say it that because it's either it is or isn't. But um, this idea that we that within you know three to five years, within a refresh cycle, you're going to have quantum computers that can basically break all current modern asymmetric encryption. So so digital certificates gone, uh VPN, IBSec VPNs gone, like anything that requires asymmetric encryption will just be broken. It'll it'll and it'll be one day it's there, and the next day your encryption is useless. So pretty, pretty interesting. Yeah, that's cool.

Alexis: 19:07

I would call that cool, Tim.

Chris: 19:09

That one's that one's scary because it's like it's it's a time sensitive thing, right? Because the time between now and when we have fully implemented kind of post-quantum safe encryption. Right. Um, but that's that's not to say there's not a problem now, because people if people are collecting encrypted data now, they can just bank it for years until they have the technology to to you know obviously decrypt it. Um so it's uh that's scary. Yeah, it's really scary to think about. I mean the packets right now.

Alexis: 19:44

You know, be you know that people are doing that.

Chris: 19:46

That's 100%.

Tim: 19:48

Oh yeah. Nation states are doing it today.

Chris: 19:50

Nation states, yeah, yep, for sure.

Tim: 19:52

So anyway, yeah, that was that was my contribution. Like, but that stuff like that, I think, is just really cool. It's like the the true nerd knob type stuff that that is that makes technology cool.

Alexis: 20:03

Yeah, I I think the other thing is that especially when I talk to students about it, if you understand networking, you can really pivot anywhere else, like because it's such a foundational technology. I get a lot of questions or DMs from students that are like, I want to be a senior cloud engineer at AWS, what should I do? Or I want to go into cybersecurity, what should I do? Or I want to go into you know, whatever it is. Obviously, I know a lot of people in the field that have those senior positions, and guess where they started?

Tim: 20:32

Networking.

Alexis: 20:33

Networking, right? And I see them all the time. They'll post every time I make a post about making network engineering cool or whatever, they drop in the comments on my LinkedIn and you can literally see their titles and what they're doing today. And they're like, I remember I started working help desk, and then I got my C CNA, and then I worked in a NOC. And you can see all of their career stories. So many people want to skip ahead. And I can't say anything. I mean, I I did hit a little bit of an accelerator in my own career, right? I uh I was an accelerator program with Cisco out of college. I took my C CNA, CCMP, I was an aerospace engineer, took gotten to Cisco, took my certs, and then a bunch of hands-on training for like a year. I got pushed in front of customers at the age of 23, and it was like, okay, go sell things.

Tim: 21:17

I love CSAP.

Alexis: 21:18

Amazing. It was great. And and don't get me wrong, I had a ton of field support from older engineers, but I missed a lot of foundational hands-on experience of working help desk, working in a knock, feeling like feeling what it was like to work in support or work in my customer's shoes. And then I was told to go sell things. And thank God Cisco had a lot of the resources I could rely on. But even now, working, it's five years later, I'm in a different role. And I feel like I missed a lot of that foundational experience that you can't really go back and get.

Tim: 21:50

Yeah. Yeah. Uh very quick aside because you said something really good there. Um, we were talking with uh, and you haven't seen it because it didn't come out yet, but we were talking with uh Eric Cho about about the AI, like what AI, like some of the things you can't replace by having AI. That's a that's a very good example of something you couldn't replace just by having an LLM answer questions for you, is that foundational experience of of actually doing the thing, the getting in the knock and and fixing problems and all that too. So that's really good.

Alexis: 22:20

I if I could go back and tell my college self one thing, it would go be I know you're an aerospace engineer, go shadow your school's IT department because you're going to wish you you had this later on. And then I would go in CSAP and hit the accelerator track. I can't go back in time. Yeah. Right.

Chris: 22:37

So not to timestamp this recording, but Tim, that episode with Eric Chow is out. And if you are interested, you should go check it out. Anyway, okay. Uh no, I think that's a good thing, is like you kind of talk about you know what it means to be a network operator, and I think that's it's kind of a weird scenario there because it's like there's people. Tim and I probably share the same opinion, is we spent years doing network operations, um, learned some very valuable skills, but probably one of the biggest things we learned is that I will never do fucking operations ever again. Um because it's it's it's very unforgiving and it's always just like an endless thing, right? But I think it's it's a great place to cut your teeth, and it speaks to the point where you meet like I'm I'm good at troubleshooting because of the logic that I built in my mind from learning networking, right? Um and that applies to everything up the stack, like uh regardless of what it is, right? So it's it's you kind of build this very strong foundation of logic. Um, but you know, it's I I kind of do hope people can skip the operations perspective for a while because it's it fucking sucks. But it's it's I guess it comes with the territory, right?

Alexis: 23:52

Yeah, I mean, and I think it's one of those things like you only understand it once you've lived it.

Tim: 23:58

Yeah, it's a it's a look back thing.

Alexis: 24:00

I can sympathize, but I can't sit there and laugh the same as I would be able to if I was actually driving to the data center at 2 a.m. because I pushed a change and the switch didn't reboot, and now I need to go manually config into it. I just haven't done that before. I can relate to the story, I can say I understand how much it sucks, but I didn't personally live it. And sometimes it's just a different level of relatability.

Tim: 24:26

And that's and that's okay though, because like tech evangelism goes so far beyond, you know, oh well, I'm I happen to have done that, and therefore I am somehow more it's not I mean, I guess there are people out there that try to make it about that, but like you have a significant amount of imposter syndrome if you have not picked that up.

Alexis: 24:46

But I am dealing with that in line.

Tim: 24:48

So welcome to the welcome to the club. Well yeah, I was gonna say, I I'm a CCIE and I still have plenty of that, so don't worry about that.

Alexis: 24:55

Well, and and that's the thing too, right? I mean, I'm I'm in a role now um where I am talking about a lot of different technology, and I think it's really cool because I get to bring on all sorts of experts. And even when I was at Cisco and I was making content, like I would make content based off of questions that customers asked me. And I always had a senior engineer look at my script. Even now, I still have contacts throughout the industry. Hey, before I put this out there, what's your take? Even if I, even if I haven't personally experienced something, I do fact-check the content that I put out with people who have 25, 30 years of experience that have personally experienced that pain, that have very professional opinions, whether they're security experts or data center experts or cloud experts. I do fact-check my content with people I trust. Um, but a lot of times, like, have I personally done some of that?

Chris: 25:48

No, I think that's good. It's like you've you've obviously earned your stripes in the sense that you have a very strong sounding board to bounce things off of before you know you kind of put it out into the ether like that. So I think that's um that's valuable because a lot of people that don't fact-check stuff before they put it on the internet, and it's uh it's it's not so great for um the technical folks. Yeah, yeah. Um yeah. So sp speaking of that, kind of uh engaging with, you know, kind of uh colleagues and experts and things like that, let's talk a little bit about um the event that you've been scheduling for Megaport, um, Megaport Connect. Um so tell us a little bit about that and and when it's happening.

Alexis: 26:30

Yeah, absolutely. Uh this is something I'm super excited for. So this was my this is fully my brain child. This was not sponsored by marketing or like pushed upon me by the business. I came to Megaport and I I came from Cisco, right? I route switch, wireless, data center security the whole nine. And working at Megaport was really my first foray into cloud, right? Megaport, what what we're known for, if you aren't familiar with the company, is that we really got our start connecting businesses to the cloud. So a lot of direct connects, express routes, all of that. And at Cisco, I did a lot of, I mean Cisco cloud first or whatever you want to call it, with all the different things they put out. They're a security company and just every other company. I I refer to them like the Walmart of IT, honestly. You can buy anything you want. Um, but I sold a lot of route switch and wireless, and I knew my customers were connecting to the cloud, or Cisco had solutions that were based in the cloud, but I never really cared about how customers were getting there. And then I went to Megaport and it's what we do, right? We're a layer two network provider between data center operators and the cloud. Software defined, provision to on-demand, but at the end of the day, it's all layer two. And so then I got into the world of like, okay, well, what are we connecting to in the cloud? What's a VPC? What's a transit gateway? What's Cloud WAN? You know, how are customers getting from their DCOs to the cloud, middle mile, last mile, all that stuff? How does a customer actually call their telco to get these circuits stood up? Is it similar to when I'm trying to get internet into my apartment? Right. And there's just not a lot out there, right? You can get cloud certifications from AWS, Google, uh, Azure, whoever you want. There's like a million cloud certs. You can get networking certs, uh, NetPlus, C CNA, CCMP. There's like 10 C C N Ps at this point in every flavor and specialty. Guess what? There's not a lot of official stuff out there around cloud networking. And a lot of the customers I talk to, especially when I first came to Megaport and I was doing my research, they're normal network engineers at your everyday businesses. And their CISO or CIO decided that they're cloud first. And now Johnny has to figure out how to connect to Azure or Adelieva. And it's all on them to figure it out. And they've got documentations and some blogs on Reddit. Maybe their sales rep. And so I was like, well, shit, this is what we're really good at. We should do something about this. Hold an event around all things cloud networking where we pull in our cloud providers, our partner community, our customers themselves, the megaport essays, and we are going to give the best damn crash course, one-day crash course on cloud networking that there exists out there. And so that is what we're doing.

Tim: 29:21

I like it so much I might uh I might even speak in it.

Alexis: 29:25

Yeah, I'm really excited. We've got um 30 speakers, um 30 different sessions. I split it up into three tracks. Um, I wanted there to be something for everyone. Obviously, everyone is coming at a different level. So we've got fundamentals, advanced technical, and then an executive track if you want to talk about digital transformation and ROI. Um, but all sorts of stuff, and then everything's gonna be pre recorded. And we're actually kicking off the megaport community, where if you it's meant to be all around cloud networking. I considered calling it the cloud networking community, but I didn't want to make an acronym. And so I just called it the megaport community. But it's about all things cloud networking and to help people continue asking questions and connect with each other after the event.

Chris: 30:10

Beautiful. Yeah, as uh as two folks that kind of started a podcast around uh cloud networking and hybrid cloud, I think that's uh very prevalent to our interest. Um so yeah, that's that's awesome. Um, you know, we we kind of scheduled this on the heels of of you reaching out to Tim and I to speak at the event, um, which we were very honored to uh to receive that. So thank you. Um and uh I think Tim, have you recorded yours yet? Or by the time you're seeing this, yes. It will be recorded. There you go. So everything's recorded. Um everything's good to go. Um and this is a virtual summit, right? So it'll all be um uh you can attend what time zones, things like that. How does that work?

Alexis: 30:53

Um it's playing in East Coast, so it kicks off at I believe 9 15, uh October 23rd in East Coast time. Um but it is all pre-recorded or will be recorded and released afterwards, so you can tune in anytime and go back and look at the sessions. Again, what we were excuse me, what we were really trying to do is just create a resource um that people could use so it exists and the sessions are out there and people can find them and learn from them and join the community to continue asking questions and just help support each other.

Tim: 31:24

Now, if this is uh super uh successful, and I don't know what we're actually I'm kind of curious now, but I'll uh I'm curious what the the metrics of we're counting the metrics for success for this. But if it is super successful, uh are you gonna uh do another one?

Alexis: 31:40

Uh well it is already super successful and we haven't even launched the event yet. So there you go. Perfect. We have um 2,000 people registered right now. Um we're recording this on October 1st, and the the summit is on October 23rd. So we've still got almost a full month to advertise. Awesome. And it is three times the size of Megaport's biggest webinar ever. So by those stats, it is already considered a huge success, and we haven't even actually launched. So I'm assuming that yes, we will be doing this again. Um, if anyone has feedback, if you're listening to this, please attend the summit and fill out all of the feedback surveys about what you think so that we can make it even better next time. Um, but yeah, the hope is just to continue supporting the community and and give people a place to have friends and continue learning.

Chris: 32:26

Yeah, amazing. Yeah, so if you're if you're listening to this, the um I think this is going to post just a few days before the summit actually takes place. So um please check the show notes. We'll have a link in there to register. Um, like we said, it's virtual, so um, you know, just uh be a little cheeky. Maybe take some time off from work, block your calendar, uh, attend the sessions, it will be there.

Alexis: 32:49

Someone asked me if they should take time off from work, and I was like, What? You're gonna take time off from work to go to a work thing?

Chris: 32:57

They they obviously haven't uh played the game before, you know. That's fine. They'll they'll learn. Um, but yeah, we'll put all the details in the show notes. So if you want to register, um highly recommend hopping on there. And uh with that, I think we'll we'll wrap up. But um, Alexis, thank you so much for coming on today. Do you have anything else that you want to plug? Maybe a podcast of your own that you do or anything else?

Alexis: 33:21

I mean, there's so many things I could plug. Um, let's see, megaport number one, join the summit, buy some ports. Uh no. Um, if you enjoy listening to my voice, uh, you can follow me on social media. Like I said, I've got three platforms. I try to post as frequently as I can on uh TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can find me at digital.byte. Um and then Kevin Nans and I also recently launched a podcast called Life in Uptime. Uh, we interview people about their careers in technology. Um, what we found is that similar to what we were saying earlier, is that a lot of people started in networking and they have all these crazy jobs, or they got into leadership, or maybe they made a total career pivot into a different side of technology. And so we wanted to start a podcast basically interviewing people to show where they started and where they can go to help give people ideas of where they could take their career in tech and expose them to new opportunities. Um, so if you enjoy listening to my voice, hopefully my microphone sounds better today. Um, you could find us at Life at Uptime too.

unknown: 34:22

Awesome.

Tim: 34:23

Amazing. Make sure to get everything in the uh everything in the notes, all links to everything. 100%.

Chris: 34:28

All right. Um, well, again, thank you for listening. If you made it this far, um, it seems you probably enjoyed this. So we greatly appreciate that. And we uh we highly recommend subscribing um and hopefully sharing this with a friend. And uh with that, we'll take it away and we will see you in a couple weeks. Bye bye.