Please welcome Tom Wilkie, Ivana Huckova, Andrew McCalip, and Brad Fitzpatrick. \[applause\]

**Tom Wilkie:** I just wanna congratulate Mat on his adlibbing whilst we were putting the chairs around. I thought that was a good mention there, Mat, so well done.

**Mat Ryer:** Thanks, mate. I appreciate that. Okay, so we're going to have the music play, and then what we want to do is, as you hear the music, just a nice, big round of applause, and sort of just keep it going, and then we'll fade that down, and then see how it goes. Okay, cue the music. I can't clap in time... Here we go. Okay, one more big round of applause to enter it. Let's go!

Hello, and welcome to season three of Grafana's Big Tent, the award-winning podcast all about the people, community, tools and tech around observability. Today we're coming at you live from GrafanaCon in Seattle. \[applause\] I'm here with my co-host, Tom Wilkie. Hi, Tom.

**Tom Wilkie:** Hi, Mat. How are you doing?

**Mat Ryer:** It's good to see you, co-host and best friend.

**Tom Wilkie:** Best friend. I've been upgraded. I would say it's very nice to see you in person for once.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. We do live near each other, but --

**Tom Wilkie:** We live really close to each other in London, and only see each other at events like this, so... It's a bit sad, actually.

**Mat Ryer:** My choice... We're also joined by Ivana. Ivana, could you introduce yourself, and also, tell us what was the first thing you tinkered with?

**Ivana Huckova:** Yes. So I'm Ivana, I'm from Slovakia... I've been at Grafana for the past five and a half years, and actually, the first thing that I've ever built was during my onboarding. Because I was hired as a frontend engineer, so naturally, the first thing that I built during my onboarding was a little IoT monitoring solution that was part of it. My manager at the time, Dan, he has sent me an ESP32 board in the envelope, with all of the sensors, and it truly sparked my interest. And since then, I've built a bunch of monitoring solutions for my sourdough starter, avocado plant... Once I tried to build a monitoring solution for my dog's happiness, but it failed, so it's the next project that I would like to get back to... And yeah, happy to talk about the IoT and all of the things that we've built.

**Mat Ryer:** \[00:04:27.14\] Yes, great. I've seen some of your projects, some of your talks... They're available on YouTube and stuff, so if people are interested as well, you should check that out. Andrew McCalip is also here. Andrew, you're sending a drone ship around the world like you do, aren't you?

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, so I'm a spacecraft engineer by day, and apparently an amateur boat enthusiast by weekend. So I love any hardware-software combination project... Been building a lot of projects in public recently, and so yes, I'm just trying to have a grand adventure and celebrate hacking.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. And what was the first thing you ever tinkered with, that you remember?

**Andrew McCalip:** Oh, boy... I think it was -- I kind of shocked my parents, and I brought home this old CNC machine when I was 14 years old, and put it in the garage, this 5,000-pound monstrosity... And that was when I was like 14 years old, and so that started off my hardware career. And yes, that was a good project to start with.

**Mat Ryer:** Nice, yeah. We're also joined by Brad Fitzpatrick. Brad, welcome. Please introduce yourself and tell us what was the first thing you ever tinkered with.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I live here in Seattle, I'm Brad Fitzpatrick, I work at Tailscale now for doing networking stuff, and I used to be on the Go team for quite a while, so I wrote a lot of the Go standard library. First tinkering was probably -- we had a bootleg Apple II that my dad had kind of made from stolen parts, and stolen ROM... So he kind of taught me to program when I was really young, like 5, 6... And so I kind of haven't stopped since.

**Mat Ryer:** Oh, that's great. And we do all love tinkering. The live audience here in Seattle are going to ask questions and they're going to be submitting them. So Tom, have we had any questions come in so far?

**Tom Wilkie:** We've mostly still got questions for Andrew, but the top most voted one, and honestly my favorite one is "Why are you running Windows on a MacBook?"

**Andrew McCalip:** Why run Windows on a MacBook?

**Tom Wilkie:** On a MacBook, yeah.

**Andrew McCalip:** I actually don't own any Apple products. So no, I'm all Windows for everything.

**Tom Wilkie:** But you're using a MacBook, though?

**Andrew McCalip:** No. On the boat, it's a Raspberry Pi.

**Tom Wilkie:** Ah...

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's as close as I get to Linux. I'm a mechanical engineer, I'm not a software person.

**Tom Wilkie:** No, no, it's fair enough.

**Andrew McCalip:** The command line is terrifying. I try not to go near it at all.

**Tom Wilkie:** I highly recommend Warp if you struggle with the command line. It's just natural language. It does it from scratch for you. Mat, I feel like it was unfair, because no one asked you what your first tinkering was.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I have a similar story to Brad. My dad was interested in computers very early. So we had like a Spectrum computer at home...

**Tom Wilkie:** A ZX Spectrum.

**Mat Ryer:** And that's where I learned how to code BASIC first. And I just loved it. You could make things happen in this little universe. And I've been hooked on that ever since, too. You didn't get the ZX Spectrum in the States, did you?

**Andrew McCalip:** Maybe we did. I didn't have one.

**Tom Wilkie:** No, it was our Apple II, basically, in Britain. There was some tie-up with the BBC as well, and it was all very kind of state-funded, but... Yeah, my first computer was a ZX Spectrum as well. I built it from a kit, sold it all together... It never worked... But yeah, it was fun.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. And that's kind of like... Yeah, I just love that whole kind of thing. And I sort of miss when tech used to be rubbish. Everything's all like shiny and it just works these days. I'm nostalgic for the time when it used to just be hard, and --

**Tom Wilkie:** \[00:08:02.19\] The only transparency we ever got on the ZX Spectrum was just screen burn-in...

**Mat Ryer:** Yes.

**Tom Wilkie:** ...from leaving the cursor on too long.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah.

**Tom Wilkie:** Now, I had a few questions, I think mostly for you, Brad. I see on your profile you have a 3D printer.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I just got one for Christmas, yeah. My kids wanted one, and then they lost interest about a day later... And so now I have a 3D printer.

**Tom Wilkie:** What have you been using it for?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I don't know, half our house is plastic at this point. A lot of guardrails for baby-proofing sharp corners, and stuff... A little Wi-Fi mount... We had a bathtub in an enclosed shower area... There's this little tiny one-inch gap in the back, and crap always falls back there, whether it's washcloths, or soap, or whatever... And you can't get your hand back there. So I printed this little shelf thing that supports, and they click together, and now there's a nice little thing so crap doesn't fall back there.

**Tom Wilkie:** You're the first person I've asked that question to who's had a serious answer... Most people seem to just print more 3D printers.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Oh, no, I just like -- I love making stuff with CAD, and stuff... It's fun.

**Tom Wilkie:** And have you printed the little boat?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Oh, yeah. That's like the Hello World when you boot it up, it's like print a boat.

**Tom Wilkie:** We're gonna put one of those in the wind tunnel later, to see how it does.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** It doesn't float. I mean, it doesn't stay upright.

**Tom Wilkie:** But Andrew, you have a real 3D printer, or rather a CNC machine, right?

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, yeah. A 3D printer for metal.

**Tom Wilkie:** For metal, yeah.

**Andrew McCalip:** No, I've got a ton of 3D printers as well. I'm curious what brand you ended up going with.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** The X1 Carbon. The Bamboo.

**Andrew McCalip:** Oh, nice. It's so good. It's the only one that actually works that I've found.

**Tom Wilkie:** I will beg to differ. I'm a Prusa fan myself.

**Andrew McCalip:** I have a lot of Creality and Prusas that are sitting there in unworking states... So the Bamboos have been holding up okay. I've been into manufacturing for a long time. I grew up in a machine shop, and so I did that, then went to engineering... And so I've oscillated back and forth between manufacturing, engineering... But yeah, I had a CNC machine... Always had one around from like 14, in a retrofit in the garage, hacking it all together out of, like you said, rubbish... And then had one, brought it out to California with me when I moved out there, and... So I just always kind of had one in the garage.

**Tom Wilkie:** How big is this one?

**Andrew McCalip:** It's like 17,000 pounds.

**Tom Wilkie:** Oh, wow. How do you move that to California?

**Andrew McCalip:** 18 wheelers...

**Tom Wilkie:** Oh, wow.

**Andrew McCalip:** You can pay people to move stuff that big. It's great.

**Tom Wilkie:** Blimey.

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, and... So that's always been with me, and that's just the ability to make things. It's like a matter compiler. The metal goes in, parts come out... It's super-satisfying.

**Tom Wilkie:** A metal compiler... I like that. I'm going to steal that. And it's a Haas CNC machine, right?

**Andrew McCalip:** Yes.

**Tom Wilkie:** So do you get any perks with the Formula One team?

**Andrew McCalip:** No, no... It's one of the only machines that's made in America... We don't make a whole lot of tools here anymore. But that one in particular, I do like them because they are trying to make it here.

**Tom Wilkie:** Oh, nice. So no tariffs on those, then?

**Andrew McCalip:** Not quite.

**Tom Wilkie:** The next question down on here is actually for you, Ivana... Because I think one of your early projects was monitoring sourdough.

**Ivana Huckova:** Yeah.

**Tom Wilkie:** And did you have an SLO around your sourdough? Did you have an error budget and some paging around that?

**Ivana Huckova:** You know what, with the sourdough starter, no. But once I built the avocado monitoring solution - and that's where I've also set up the alerting, so that was first set up. And then I did standing desk monitoring... And I didn't do SLO, but I know that we have a colleague who did SLOs and really followed it.

**Tom Wilkie:** Wow.

**Ivana Huckova:** So yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** Do avocados need monitoring?

**Ivana Huckova:** Sorry?

**Mat Ryer:** Do avocados need monitoring? What are they up to?

**Ivana Huckova:** \[00:11:59.09\] Well, they do if you want to grow them. And I was terrible at taking care of my plants... By the way - yeah, if you want to get better at understanding your plants, I definitely recommend building the plant monitoring... Because you can learn so much about how much water do they need, how much sun do they need... We're talking about sun - I mean... Yeah, you are needing it for the drone shape; I was needing it for growing my plant, and... Yeah, so I learned a lot, and I became a good plant take-carer.

**Mat Ryer:** Nice.

**Ivana Huckova:** Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** Cool.

**Tom Wilkie:** Mat, you were telling me about your ZX Spectrum tinkering, and compared to everyone else, that's relatively minor... So I'm gonna ask you instead, what was your biggest failed project? Because this must be good.

**Mat Ryer:** The biggest failed project? What, what I've tinkered with?

**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** I tried to make a time machine. And honestly, it didn't work. Yeah, genuinely. When I was a kid, I had all the electronics that I could find around the place, wired it all together... I was very interested in Back to the Future, that film.

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, that's a good one.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Is it? Yeah. I love it... And so I was just convinced you could do this as a kid. But it didn't work. So that's that.

**Tom Wilkie:** How do you know it didn't work?

**Mat Ryer:** Well, myself came to me and told me "Forget it. This is the real way to do it." And I'm like "That's too complicated. I'm not doing that."

**Tom Wilkie:** Good. I hope we keep that in.

**Mat Ryer:** I hope they keep that in Episode 1, Season 3, of Grafana's Big Tent, the award-winning podcast.

**Tom Wilkie:** Same question for you, Brad. What was your biggest failure?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** All my projects work... \[laughter\]

**Tom Wilkie:** Memcached is not great, is it?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** No, it got to the point where I was like "It's done", and people are like "No, no, it needs to be a database." I'm like "It's not a database. No, it's done." And then Redis and stuff came about and they're like "We'll add the operations he won't add." I'm like "Okay..." No, I don't know. I can't think of anything that was like an outright failure. I worked on this one project \[unintelligible 00:14:00.29\] for, I don't know, 10-15 years... And it never kind of reached escape velocity. It never took off and is used by everyone... But it was a good learning exercise to flesh out the Go standard library.

**Tom Wilkie:** Nice, nice. I'm going to answer my own question, if that's alright.

**Mat Ryer:** Please.

**Tom Wilkie:** I got really into home automation for a while, and I built a Python home automation system. It was really cool. And I called it Home Awesome-ation.

**Mat Ryer:** Yes...

**Tom Wilkie:** Because -- exactly, Mat gets it. There was only one flaw, which is I started the project on almost exactly the same day as a small little home automation project called Home Assistant. I doubt you've heard of it, it's not very popular... So yeah, I abandoned that one. That was a complete failure... And just moved everything over to Home Assistant now, which is... Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** Good name, though. I think your name's better.

**Tom Wilkie:** Home Awesome-ation. It's now the password for my Wi-Fi. I'm now going to have to change the password for my Wi-Fi, I realize...

**Mat Ryer:** What's your mother's maiden name?

**Tom Wilkie:** Also her married name, which really confuses people. Same question for you, Andrew... Biggest failure.

**Andrew McCalip:** Oh, let's see here... There's a whole folder of failed projects on Google Drive. It's just been accumulating for like a decade. Every time that I try to build a stock trading program -- I do it like every two years, and it never works.

**Tom Wilkie:** Have you tried AI?

**Andrew McCalip:** I haven't tried since AI came out. The first version was in MATLAB, and it was before I knew real programming languages. Yeah, it did not work.

**Tom Wilkie:** We had a stock trading competition at school many, many years ago, and no one was actually checking that you were trading in real time, so I just at the end of the day looked for the stock that grew the most and claimed to have traded that...

**Mat Ryer:** Why don't you do that on the real stock trading?

**Tom Wilkie:** I just need the time machine that you failed to build. Then we can do that, yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** \[00:15:58.11\] I'll keep working on it, yeah. Last one...

**Ivana Huckova:** So once I tried to build candle monitoring... So I was monitoring like how much PM particles goes to the air once you shut it off... And I also wanted to know if the candle is on after I leave house. And then I had an idea that if it's on, I can just shut it down. So it caught on fire, so... I kind of abandoned it.

**Tom Wilkie:** Whilst you were out of the house?

**Ivana Huckova:** Luckily, no. There was a testing phase. But yeah, because I had like a wooden lid that was trying --

**Tom Wilkie:** Wooden?

**Ivana Huckova:** Yeah, yeah.

**Tom Wilkie:** Right.

**Mat Ryer:** What did we learn?

**Ivana Huckova:** Well --

**Tom Wilkie:** Please don't tell me it was balsa wood. Lightly flammable.

**Ivana Huckova:** No, I learned that don't mess with fire when you are outside of your apartment.

**Tom Wilkie:** My laser cutter is in my garage for that reason, not in my office. Also, it gives off the most terrible smell.

**Ivana Huckova:** Okay...

**Tom Wilkie:** Laser cutting is --

**Ivana Huckova:** Have you thought about having like a monitoring for how much air pollution, PM particles --

**Tom Wilkie:** I have five 3D printers in my office. I dread to monitor the air in there. I am made of microplastics now.

**Ivana Huckova:** It would be interesting data, though. \[unintelligible 00:17:13.25\]

**Tom Wilkie:** Microplastics are fine, right? They're healthy.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. I think it's better to have microplastics inside you than macroplastics. That would be really uncomfortable, it feels like.

**Tom Wilkie:** Why do you give me the tablet with the questions? So the top voted question is "If you did have a time machine, where would you --" That would be a space machine, right? Where.

**Mat Ryer:** Right.

**Tom Wilkie:** That's like a car.

**Mat Ryer:** Space time is one thing, so I think we're good.

**Tom Wilkie:** If you did have a time machine, when would you go to?

**Mat Ryer:** I once screwed up a piece of paper, and kicked it, and it rolled along my shelf, and bounced on a couple of surfaces, and then went in the bin. And no one believed me. My family were like "No, it didn't."

**Tom Wilkie:** I still don't believe you. I remember you phoned me immediately afterwards and said "Tom...!"

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. "I've done it. I've finally done it." No, so I'd go back and film that. Yeah.

**Tom Wilkie:** And you don't think that would scare you at the time?

**Mat Ryer:** Actually, what I would do really is go back to before my granddad died... Because he owed me 10 pounds. \[laughter\] \[unintelligible 00:18:24.07\] he dies and then you're like "Oh, cool. I suppose I'll just take that hit then. Thanks, gramps..." It's hard being your co-host sometimes, Mat...

**Mat Ryer:** Try being me.

**Tom Wilkie:** Good. So we've done that one, we've done that one... I've got a few -- I've got lots of questions about your ocean talk that you gave... Background for the listeners, Andrew gave the talk about his ocean-dwelling autonomous drone ship before this podcast, and... I want to know, how are you going to handle terrible weather? In particular, what happens when it capsizes inevitably?

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, good question. So back to the buoyancy point that you made, if you're not careful, things don't tend to stay upright in the ocean. So we've got a really deep keel... So we did all the maths and all that and figured out how deep the keel needs to be, and put a big lead ballast. So if it does flip over, you can't really see it in the pictures --

**Tom Wilkie:** Oh, it will self-right.

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, it will self-right.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Have you tested that in the water?

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, we tested it a couple times, and it works great. Buoyancy is pretty predictable. We wrote a whole Python script to do the hydrodynamics of the whole shape, and it got really complicated... We could have probably just done it in the water, but we tend to overthink things occasionally. But yeah, so that worked... That worked great, because I went to YouTube and watched a bunch of videos... I just googled "giant waves in the Southern Ocean", and it's terrifying out there. Nature is super-scary.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Did you model the keel breaking, and stuff like that?

**Andrew McCalip:** \[00:20:02.21\] Well, so like I said, we have two models... We have the strong keel and the fast keel. So yeah, but that was concern number one, not being software people, being mechanical people, "Make sure it doesn't flip over." And then concern number two is turning it off and back on again. And so we've addressed those two problems, so I think we're good on the flipping over part.

**Tom Wilkie:** Do you have like a secondary backup control system for it then?

**Andrew McCalip:** No. No backup. There was a huge philosophical debate... In my industry there's this huge debate about redundancy, and - is it ever truly redundant? Can you ever have a single-fault tolerance in the system? And this is like borderline philosophy. This is the lunchtime discussions that elicit these really strong opinions. And so we opted for -- you know, the easiest way to add redundancy is to make a second boat. That solved all the design philosophy debates... Just make another one.

**Tom Wilkie:** But like NASA-esque, it's programmed by and designed by a completely different team, so there's not like common design flaws.

**Andrew McCalip:** Well, this one is really designed by one person. There's tons of design flaws everywhere... But yeah, no redundancy. We just test, test, test, and find all the bugs, and do our best and ship it out.

**Tom Wilkie:** And when it does fail in the ocean, how are you going to get to it to reset it?

**Andrew McCalip:** Well, we're not. We're going to say "Hey, Twitter, it was last seen at this latitude/longitude. If anybody sees it, please let us know, and maybe tow it back to Los Angeles." But yeah, it's going to be floating out there for quite a while, if and when it fails to reboot.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Do you have a note on the top saying "If found, do not destroy this thing. It's not a weapon."

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, yeah. Definitely not smuggling drugs...

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Yeah, definitely not. \[laughter\]

**Andrew McCalip:** Research vessel...

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** You've got to fund the project somehow...

**Tom Wilkie:** That's what he would say if he were smuggling drugs.

**Andrew McCalip:** These are all like the reference designs of like the semi-submersible boats that you see smuggling in the oceans... The Coast Guard is great at picking these things off. But we're going the other direction. We're leaving the United States.

We're not coming in. So no one will be suspecting us. But yeah, it's going to be an interesting conversation with the Coast Guard one day, of like "We've recovered this thing, it had your Twitter handle on it... Obviously belongs to you... Please explain yourself."

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, that'll be exciting. If it does work, do you think like Airbnb?

**Andrew McCalip:** Do I think what?

**Mat Ryer:** You put it on Airbnb for people, so they can rent it and just go to sleep for ages and go around the world.

**Andrew McCalip:** Well, it's not very luxurious. So it doesn't really have any accommodations. One of the engineers did ride it through the marina, but I wouldn't recommend like staying on it.

**Mat Ryer:** Can they get inside it or no?

**Andrew McCalip:** No, no, no. There's no inside.

**Mat Ryer:** There's no inside?

**Andrew McCalip:** No, it's not really --

**Mat Ryer:** What kind of shape is it?

**Tom Wilkie:** Another philosophical question...

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. \[laughter\] Is it an impossible shape?

**Andrew McCalip:** Oh, it's filled with foam. So it's just like a giant surfboard. So no real inside as much, because there's no people. So... Just room for the Starlink, and the Raspberry Pi, and 50 kilos of batteries...

**Tom Wilkie:** Wow. That's amazing.

**Andrew McCalip:** You don't like the metric system?

**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, but you switched between pounds and kilos in that, so I'm just --

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** You do one boat in imperial, one boat in metric. See which one wins, finally.

**Tom Wilkie:** One of them will fail to land on the surface of Mars, right?

**Mat Ryer:** \[00:23:56.17\] Yeah.

**Tom Wilkie:** You mentioned the dog happiness... I know we're jumping around a bit, I'm trying to just get to the most popular question. You mentioned the dog happiness system didn't work.

**Ivana Huckova:** Yeah.

**Tom Wilkie:** What was the feedback from the dog?

**Ivana Huckova:** So I don't think it was my fault. I think it was the dog's fault. \[laughter\]

**Tom Wilkie:** Is the dog just depressed?

**Ivana Huckova:** So the issue is my dog is very hairy.

**Tom Wilkie:** Very?

**Ivana Huckova:** Hairy. Long hair.

**Tom Wilkie:** Aren't all dogs hairy? I'm not an expert, sorry.

**Ivana Huckova:** He has a very long hair, and a lot of hair... And so I wanted to set up a heart rate monitor. And if you put a heart rate monitor on a lot of hair, it is not very reliable. And the second thing - he is like medium, but quite short, so I wanted to set up a camera on him, and every time his heart rate goes up, it will take a picture. But it was just a picture of hair, and the feet, and like the pavement. So I need to figure out how to do the better heart rate monitor, and maybe have a camera slightly higher up.

**Tom Wilkie:** Shave a patch on his chest...

**Ivana Huckova:** Yeah, but -- so the thing is he's double-coated, and you are not supposed to do that. So... I was thinking about it, but --

**Tom Wilkie:** Do they make dog heart rate monitors, or...?

**Ivana Huckova:** So I've seen that -- no, no, no. So yeah, I was just using \[unintelligible 00:25:16.27\]

**Mat Ryer:** Ivana, can't you just put an Apple watch on his paw?

**Ivana Huckova:** But he has very hairy paws as well.

**Tom Wilkie:** Or an Aura ring on its toe.

**Mat Ryer:** Oh, yeah.

**Ivana Huckova:** Maybe. So I was saying, I don't plan to abandon this idea. There is still a plan for version two. So maybe one next Grafana hackathon.

**Tom Wilkie:** Have you tried just asking it if it's happy?

**Ivana Huckova:** I did, but I don't speak dog... But going to bird monitoring, maybe in a couple of years with AI we will be. So...

**Tom Wilkie:** I'm pretty sure the Grafana assistant could solve that problem. That's what it does, isn't it, Mat?

**Mat Ryer:** Can't speak bird... It can tweet for you.

**Tom Wilkie:** Can it?

**Mat Ryer:** Well, if you put the MCP server in, yeah.

**Tom Wilkie:** Have you tried doing it for other animals, instead of dogs? Like maybe a cat happiness... Because that would just be permanently no.

**Ivana Huckova:** I don't have a cat, but that's a good idea.

**Tom Wilkie:** Because one of your other projects that you're showing in the science fair is a bird tweeting. Twittering. No, wait. I'm getting this wrong. What sounds do birds make?

**Mat Ryer:** \[bird sounds?\]

**Tom Wilkie:** Thank you...

**Ivana Huckova:** Did someone make that?

**Mat Ryer:** I did that. I thought everyone could make a bird sound.

**Tom Wilkie:** We're now going to do an episode of gardener's question time, with Mat Ryer as the bird.

**Mat Ryer:** Have I got to be up in a tree, though?

**Tom Wilkie:** Have you tried doing that into the bird song monitoring system?

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, of course.

**Tom Wilkie:** What did you get identified as?

**Mat Ryer:** Error. And annoying.

**Ivana Huckova:** No, but seriously, in science fair we have a microphone where people can try to mimic bird sounds. So far, no one was successful, so if someone here thinks that they would be successful, just come to science fair and try it out.

**Tom Wilkie:** Have you and Andrew thought of a collaboration where you put the bird song monitoring on his boat, so we can do ocean bird song?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Do you have a microphone on that?

**Andrew McCalip:** There is a microphone... And I'm actually scared of the birds, because I have a bunch of solar panels and it's going to be the only thing in like a thousand miles... So I definitely anticipate that the birds are just going to congregate on it, and it's not going to end up well for my solar panels.

**Tom Wilkie:** What do birds do when they congregate?

**Andrew McCalip:** It's not good... Not good. I'm hoping the waves wash it all off, but... Yeah, we should get some audio off of it.

**Tom Wilkie:** A friend of mine rode across the Atlantic Ocean with a few of his friends. He's a bit weird... It wasn't Mat, don't worry. I have more than one weird friend. And he told me that one of the biggest problems was the salt gathering on the hull was slowing them down, so they had to periodically clean the salt off.

**Andrew McCalip:** \[00:28:09.14\] Yeah, it's the salt, and the barnacles...

**Tom Wilkie:** And the barnacles, yeah.

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, yeah. I've been told, because I'm not a boat person... I get seasick out there. Like, I got seasick in the testing trials, so I'm not meant to go out there. But I've been told by people that the barnacles will be a problem.

**Tom Wilkie:** Do you have like a boat Roomba, to automatically clean it?

**Andrew McCalip:** No, that's like moving parts. That's scope creep. We're just trying to get the thing out there. But there is an underwater camera... So I can see the barnacles build up and be able to do nothing about it. It'll be drag, and we'll just deal with it. So if the barnacles slow us down, that's fine. At least it will still be working.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Does the air horn count as a moving part? Can you use an air horn to scare the birds away?

**Andrew McCalip:** That's actually a really good idea.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** That's for free. You don't have to pay.

**Andrew McCalip:** I like that one. That's good.

**Mat Ryer:** Andrew, why haven't you said any of my ideas are good ideas?

**Tom Wilkie:** Funny enough, that's the next question on here as well.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I sent it. "Ask Andrew if he likes me."

**Tom Wilkie:** Are you asking these questions now?

**Mat Ryer:** No, the audience have been trolling me all day on that thing.

**Tom Wilkie:** Have they?

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, it's probably just more of that.

**Tom Wilkie:** I'm trying to skip over them when they're just clearly trolling Mat. I'm just saving them for later when we're in the pub.

**Andrew McCalip:** I can see why he has the iPad and not you.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, exactly.

**Tom Wilkie:** I think most of the questions are still about the boat, I'm afraid... Does it have a name? And why is it not Boaty McBoatface?

**Andrew McCalip:** Boaty McBoatface was a strong contender for the name, definitely. But it's already kind of in use. So it's Bob because of Bobiverse, the classic sci-fi book. It's where a sentient spacecraft goes out into the universe and it's the self-replicating story, where they upload the consciousness of a human into the craft, and then civilization destroys itself... And so it is responsible for making copies of itself, and exploring the universe. So it's kind of poetic, and it's also a pun.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, it's good. I think for copyright reasons, just to be safe, you should spell it backwards. Otherwise you could get sued.

**Andrew McCalip:** Do you write his jokes for him?

**Tom Wilkie:** No, they're far too bad for me to ever take any credit for them.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, sorry, does this sound written? \[laughter\]

**Andrew McCalip:** Fair, fair.

**Mat Ryer:** I've got a question for Brad, because I saw you posted recently that you needed something in your house, and then you asked AI to generate it.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Yeah, my daughter has this little sandbox that's like kinetic sand, which is like sand with oil in it, basically, that's like really clumpy... So it doesn't go through like a normal strainer sieve thing... So I wanted like a really big, chonky one, with really big gaps. So I just busted on my phone and I dictated to ChatGPT, "Write me some OpenSCAD for this.", and I kind of described it. And a bunch of code went out, and I looked at it, it looked right, and I said "Print." And like 40 minutes later, we had the sand toy. It's kind of like tea earl grey hot sort of thing going on.

**Mat Ryer:** Tea earl grey hot indeed.

**Tom Wilkie:** And then three hours later, you get a lukewarm...

**Mat Ryer:** "Can you check on the 3D printer, Mr. Wolf? Make sure it's still going. Check the candles as well."

**Tom Wilkie:** "Can you change the filament for me, please?"

**Mat Ryer:** Mr. Wolf's like "Yes, captain." But he really wants to just be focused on security. He keeps getting given these little side tasks. It's fine, it's fan fiction I'm working on. Don't worry. It's not for now.

**Tom Wilkie:** \[00:31:59.08\] You should work with an AI to refine that idea, Mat. Because... Yeah. I've been told to be nice, so I'm not going to continue my sentence. So one of the regular segments I want to introduce on the podcast is like if you had a magic wand, what would you want to see in Grafana? So what do you think to that idea? That sort of segment on the podcast.

**Mat Ryer:** I like that. What's the magic wand for? Because you code with it. What's the magic wand for?

**Tom Wilkie:** I think it's just a turn of phrase, Mat.

**Mat Ryer:** Okay, so you've got a magic wand, and you can make any feature happen in Grafana.

**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah. Like Cursor, for instance, \[unintelligible 00:32:38.17\] the magic wand in this. So Brad, if you had a magic wand, what would you like to see in Grafana?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I mean, I saw your little AI demo thing today... If that thing actually worked and made me spend less time in Grafana, that would be nice. Whenever I'm in Grafana, it's like something went wrong, right? So it's like, I kind of associate it with a bad day. So I would like to spend less time in Grafana. If I could be in there and being like "Why the hell is everything falling over?", and it'd be like "Oh, that's the actual reason, not--", you know...

**Tom Wilkie:** Have you tried the light theme for Grafana? Maybe that'd make it feel less like a bad day when you use it.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** No...

**Tom Wilkie:** I prefer the light theme. Internally, we call it the manager theme. And my team trolled me because I like the light theme. I think the AI thing might actually work, though. Like, I'm quite confident.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** One day...

**Tom Wilkie:** One day. We're working on it. Trying.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. No, it's brilliant. I'll set you up with a private preview.

**Tom Wilkie:** Same question for you, Andrew. Magic wand, Grafana - what would you like to see?

**Andrew McCalip:** Can you skip me and come back? I've got to think about this one.

**Ivana Huckova:** I wanted to use that as well.

**Tom Wilkie:** I mean, you actually work on Grafana. You are the magic wander.

**Ivana Huckova:** So I think that the whole AI assistant is basically the magic wand... Because you kind of can tell it to do anything. Like, "Tell me how to reshape data", or "Use this visualization." "Change the colors", and so on. So I'm very excited about the AI assistant and to be using it.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Let me know, I'll get you in the private preview.

**Ivana Huckova:** Oh, thank you.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. I would have a button in Grafana where when you click it, all your dreams come true. I'd have that feature.

**Tom Wilkie:** You're really leaning on the magic part of the magic wand bit there...

**Mat Ryer:** Sorry, so you can't just have anything you want with this wand?

**Tom Wilkie:** I mean, ideally something that's relevant to observability, or Grafana, or something like that.

**Mat Ryer:** Alright. I'll have a think then. Come back to me after Andrew.

**Tom Wilkie:** This question went really well... Andrew, it's now or never.

**Andrew McCalip:** Okay, can I run code in one of the panels? Can I just execute Python arbitrarily in one of the panels? You let me do HTML, but give me some other languages. Give me a whole runtime inside the panel. Let's do it.

**Tom Wilkie:** Can we boot Windows 95 in a VM inside a panel?

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do that.

**Tom Wilkie:** I think we can probably do something along those lines. I'm sure WebASM will help solve this problem. It's got to have a meaning to exist.

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Wasm. We did a hackathon project.

**Tom Wilkie:** Did I say it wrong? I don't think I've ever said it out loud.

**Mat Ryer:** Oh, Wasm.

**Tom Wilkie:** Wasm.

**Mat Ryer:** Is that how I say it, isn't that? That's right, isn't it? You say Wasm, Brad?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Wait, what's the alternative?

**Mat Ryer:** Wasuum.

**Tom Wilkie:** I said WebASM.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** That's just really long.

**Mat Ryer:** Do you say gif or jif?

**Tom Wilkie:** Ooh, ooh. I think I say gif.

**Mat Ryer:** Good, yeah. Ivana?

**Ivana Huckova:** Gif as well.

**Mat Ryer:** Gif.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Sorry, jif. It was like written in the spec, the pronunciation.

**Mat Ryer:** I know, but...

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Gotta follow the spec. \[laughter\]

**Mat Ryer:** To be fair, Brad did a lot of work on the Go standard library, so we've got to respect the "Follow the spec", I think.

**Tom Wilkie:** Golang, you mean?

**Mat Ryer:** Golang, yeah, sure.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Is there another one...?

**Tom Wilkie:** Because you're not supposed to say Golang, you're just supposed to type it into Google, because otherwise...

**Mat Ryer:** \[00:36:09.19\] Can you say it?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Go.

**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** It's Go.

**Tom Wilkie:** Good.

**Mat Ryer:** Yup. It's a good episode, this, so far, I think. The next question is not really a question, but really just a big thank you for creating LiveJournal.

**Mat Ryer:** Good.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** It was a fun waste of time, yes. It was a fun distraction.

**Tom Wilkie:** What is LiveJournal?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** It was like Twitter in 1998.

**Tom Wilkie:** Oh, wow.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** It was like microblogging, but originally it was like a -- there was only a downloadable client, and it was like a Windows app that had a bar across the bottom of your screen above your start bar, and there was only the text input widget, and you typed, and you hit Enter, and it posted. There wasn't like a button -- so you couldn't do paragraphs or anything like that, because once you hit Enter for a new line, it just posted.

**Tom Wilkie:** And how did people read this?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Oh, there were like millions of people. 14, 15...

**Tom Wilkie:** No, no, how did you read it if you could only enter text?

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Oh, I don't know, some people were popular, and some people weren't...

**Tom Wilkie:** That's cool.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** So it got popular. It was at the very beginning of the -- what was that Facebook movie called? I don't remember. But in the very opening scene of that Facebook movie, the actor playing Zuckerberg is on LiveJournal, so...

**Tom Wilkie:** I don't think any software I've ever written has appeared in a movie.

**Mat Ryer:** No.

**Tom Wilkie:** No. That's pretty cool.

**Mat Ryer:** That is cool.

**Tom Wilkie:** Any more thoughts or questions from you, Mat? Or should I carry the rest of the podcast?

**Mat Ryer:** Please, yeah.

**Tom Wilkie:** Okay, good. So back to the boat... Lots of questions about the boat, Andrew.

**Andrew McCalip:** Alright.

**Tom Wilkie:** Have you considered a rotor sail? I don't know what a rotor sail is.

**Andrew McCalip:** A what?

**Tom Wilkie:** A rotor, R-O-T-O-R. A rotor sail. I think it's a sail that rotates.

**Andrew McCalip:** Oh, yeah.

**Tom Wilkie:** I assume it generates electricity more.

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a -- actually, that was the number one rule of the project that I laid down, was no sailing. There was no using the wind, no attempts at all. The whole idea of like moving parts just freaked me out. I watched too many of those wave videos on the Southern Ocean... So the sails -- I banned all the sails. No rigid sails, no rotors, nothing like that. So yeah, sorry about that, but... It's hard enough to make sure it didn't tip over.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** So how many moving parts are there?

**Andrew McCalip:** None.

**Tom Wilkie:** Doesn't it have a propeller?

**Andrew McCalip:** Aside from the propeller, yeah. Yeah, it's just flat panels, bolted to an unsinkable surfboard.

**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Is there just one propeller?

**Andrew McCalip:** Yes.

**Tom Wilkie:** Because nothing unsinkable has ever sunk, has it?

**Andrew McCalip:** I mean, I would -- yeah, yeah, yeah. It may be tempting fate a little bit to call it unsinkable, but... I mean, I would challenge nature to do its worst. It's going to wash up on some island --

**Tom Wilkie:** I like your attitude.

**Andrew McCalip:** ...in like five years. So...

**Tom Wilkie:** Is the other one called the Mauritania, was it? The second boat? \[laughter\]

**Andrew McCalip:** No, no. We're not very creative. It's like Bob 1 and Bob 2. But we've already gone out of order --

**Tom Wilkie:** It should be Alice and Bob, come on.

**Andrew McCalip:** Oh, that's -- I get that joke.

**Mat Ryer:** That's what you want in reply to a joke. Someone saying "I get that. I recognize that as a joke." So congratulations.

**Tom Wilkie:** Almost as good as "That's funny."

**Andrew McCalip:** Yeah.

**Mat Ryer:** Well, I'll tell you what's funny... How fast this has gone. I'm afraid that is all the time we have for today.

**Tom Wilkie:** It didn't feel like it on stage.

**Mat Ryer:** It did, it certainly did. So thank you, Tom. This was good.

**Tom Wilkie:** I look forward to AI replacing this podcast, replacing you and I, Mat. Let's face it, if the AI assistant is anything to go by, it can do a better job than we can. \[laughter\]

**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. I mean, God bless the editors, really. Ivana, thank you very much for joining us. Andrew and Brad... And we'll see you next time on Grafana's Big Tent. \[applause\] Thank you very much. No, thanks. You can take that.