Show notes
Joe, Matty, Trevor, Bridget and Jessica record the tenth anniversary episode, which is also episode 200, as a decade-end wrap-up. This is a second take, which Joe opens with "Here we go, take 2. Slower, more intense," and Matty notes that "it's not a year-end wrap-up, it's a decade-end wrap-up." The hosts cover how the show started, how each host joined, conference and live-recording stories, guest and download stats, and what each is up to now. The recording ends with a supercut of the show's cold opens, which the episode's existing link also points to. The cold open is Joe's take-two line.
Sponsors and the First Sponsor Deal
Matty tells the story of the show's first sponsor. PagerDuty reached out, and when Matty and Trevor didn't know what a sponsorship costs, they said $50 an episode, and Matty's one smart move was limiting it to a six-episode deal. Later Matty heard PagerDuty's ad on another podcast and learned at a conference bar that the other host had been paid $1,000 an episode for a similar audience. The renewal went to a number between the two. Years later, after Matty worked at PagerDuty, a sponsorship of the show drew lawyers who needed to be sure it wasn't double dipping. Matty adds that some sponsors come for a couple of episodes and some keep returning, and that the long back catalog helps.
How It Started
Arrested DevOps began as a blog Matty never wrote, named by a friend who is a writer. Matty had learned DevOps from podcasts like the Ship Show, DevOps Cafe and Food Fight, and wanted a show for people who didn't know who John Allspaw was, the ones whose boss "read about DevOps in the in-flight magazine." Matty met Trevor at an Azure meetup in Chicago and invited Trevor to co-host, since Matty knew operations and wanted someone with a developer background. The two then got on a Hangout with Nathan Harvey and a fellow podcaster for advice, where the banana stand tagline was coined. Matty also has a lost episode 0, a five-minute recording testing Hangouts. Jessica says the "banana pants" variant came from a first episode where a script-reading panic and a lot of Dora the Explorer produced "in the banana pants."
The first episode with a cold open is 44. Joe picked them, and Joe's rule was: "If there's interesting profanity, that's the cold open." Matty also runs through the guest spiel: make peace with the explicit tag, stop and restart if you slip, and clap loudly if you blow an NDA, which has happened exactly once in ten years.
How the Hosts Joined
Bridget appeared first as a guest on an episode Matty remembers as being about conferences, whose art was a photo of Bridget's badges, published September 23, 2014, and Matty's checking turns up that the first episode Bridget hosted was November 18, 2014, DevOps in the Enterprise. They disagree about whether the invitation came at the DevOpsDays Chicago afterparty. Jessica had been on the show, liked it, and asked to join, after the two met at the first Redeploy conference, where Matty was a fan of Jessica's other podcast, Greater Than Code. Jeff Smith joined as an occasional host, and Joe, who started as the editor, also became a host, with a different editor before Joe. Since Joe went back to full-time work, Matty does the editing, which explains the quality, and the tail of each edit is worse because Matty got tired as an editor.
Live Episodes and GOTO Chicago
Bridget recalls curating a GOTO Chicago track as five live podcast panels in a row, with Matty, to an audience, in a breakout room with an air wall, and a guest loud enough that a proctor asked them to stop yelling. The first of them was Old Geeks Yell at Cloud with Andrew Clay Shafer and Bryan Cantrill. Bridget's takeaway: "If you're going to take on way too much, just have great guests. That'll cover a multitude of sins." Joe's tip for live episodes is to line up the AV crew ahead and pass a single mic, and says live episodes are easier to edit because fewer people talk over each other. The first live one may be eating sushi with Andrew Clay Shafer at DevOpsDays Minneapolis 2015, and Matty adds that the title was aspirational: the sushi took years to happen. Matty also notes that the DevOpsDays site doesn't handle a speaker called ADO well.
Memorable Episodes and Fans
Bridget highlights Who Owns Your Availability from 2016, recorded the day of the left-pad incident, as still current for software supply chain discussions. Matty calls out 2023's three platform engineering episodes (Daniel Bryant, Pete Cheslock and Matt Kuritz) and says "I still think that Pete is right, that platform engineering really is DevOps with better marketing," with the earlier platforms episode with Kelsey Hightower and Andrew Clay Shafer always linked. Jessica picks the one-on-one conversation with an enterprise practitioner, since those stories show real companies struggling and let listeners know they're not alone.
Fan stories: a stranger at KubeCon Chicago told Bridget that a computer science course uses the show. Matty recalls an early fan letter that went unanswered on LinkedIn for years. Matty credits the show for much of a career, since "I owe a fair amount, if not all of my career, to this podcast," and notes how easy it is to be a guest on someone else's show. Matty also mentions using the same pun twice, in database episode titles in 2019 and 2023.
Stats
The most frequent guest is Andrew Clay Shafer with eight episodes, about 4 percent, then Nicole Forsgren and Sasha Rosenbaum with seven each. Matty says downloads stood at 1,911,233 plus about 35,000 on Spotify, since Spotify hosts its own copy and doesn't show in the regular stats, so two million is near. Episode 1 is most downloaded, then episode 92, CI/CD Oh My with Jez Humble. The most viewed YouTube video is Old Geeks Yell at Cloud at about 16,000 views, then Bryan Cantrill's fireside chat at about 8,000, and Matty jokes that the show should have Bryan on more often.
Matty also fixes episode data live and discovers guest entries were lost in migrations: the site started on Jekyll for about seven episodes, moved to WordPress with a custom plugin, then to Hugo. After Bridget found a Google alert for another podcast using the theme, Matty turned it into Castanet, a podcast theme that is now poorly maintained. Jessica's verdict: "our memory is terrible and our data is also crap."
Where Everyone Is Now
Trevor is job hunting, looking at solution architecture or DevRel, and painting miniatures. Jessica is in a second year as engineering manager of developer relations at Honeycomb, is at a conference run by the Linux Foundation that added AI content to a Cassandra event, and would like the show to cover DevOps for LLM integrations. Bridget works in product at Microsoft, which means listening to other people's stories more than telling them. Joe travels for work to hotel ballrooms in Nashville and Cleveland. Matty leads developer relations and growth at Aiven, a Finnish data platform company, did not reach United's top tier this year, pays around $100 a day for dog care when traveling, and runs the team with a social contract about staying off Slack on holiday. Matty adds that because the company's field isn't Matty's expertise, leading the team works better than trying to do the work.
Bridget's closing idea, for anyone tired of telling the same stories: step back, help a colleague prep a talk, and "we can always make room to inspire someone else or to teach someone else or to go to a conference that we're not even speaking at."
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