BenP (00:01.47)
Hey everyone and welcome to the Tech World Human Skills Podcast. What a treat we have in store for you today. Now, we've done a couple of talks on episodes on storytelling and how you talk to non -technical people. But today, we're gonna think about how you talk to techies. The reality of tech is flipping complicated and it's changing at a lightning pace. So how do you explain?
really complicated things in a compelling way. Now, our guest today spends his life doing that. He's got a background as an architect, consultant and product manager and now hosts the DevOps Toolkit channel on YouTube with over 75 ,000 subscribers and millions of views. So please welcome to the show, Victor Farčić. Victor, it is lovely to have you with
Viktor Farcic (00:57.867)
Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to this.
BenP (01:03.186)
Well, for all of our lovely listeners, I wonder, could you tell us a bit about yourself and introduce yourself?
Viktor Farcic (01:10.303)
first I would need to find out. I don't know really what I do most of the time. So officially I'm a developer advocate at Upbound. I'm involved in a lot in open source. Most of what I do is in publics one way or another, whether that's writing some code, whether that's speaking at conferences, whether that's trying to steer the projects in certain direction.
BenP (01:12.81)
Ha ha ha ha!
Viktor Farcic (01:39.511)
What I do really depends on how I wake up in the morning. I'm not sure. As long as people in my company don't know what I'm doing, I'm fine.
BenP (01:43.69)
Ha ha.
BenP (01:47.914)
Well, so you've got, I guess, your day job and your hobby, as I've heard you refer to it, and your hobby being your YouTube channel and your podcast and that kind of stuff.
Viktor Farcic (01:59.971)
Yes, exactly. I try to keep the separation between my hobbies and company simply because hobbies tend to be longer lasting than my work days or work years in a company. So that's pens companies I work in. yeah, they're separate. It's like a church and state separation. We coexist together, but still are separated somehow.
BenP (02:15.753)
Ha ha
BenP (02:27.954)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so the reason we thought it would be great to talk to you today is from your hobbies perspective really, which is about how you talk about really complicated stuff because you've got this great YouTube channel and if you go and have a look at it and have a look at the videos that are there, what you do really well is every week you create a new video talking about some really deep and complicated topics.
and you do it in a really good way so that it brings it to life. And I guess your audience are techies really. That's kind of who you're explaining all of this kind of stuff to. And so I thought what would be lovely to do would be to just walk through how do you do this? Because you are learning new complicated technology all the time and then turning that into a way to explain it and filming it and producing it and getting thousands and thousands of
to watch all of those videos. And so I wondered if we could sort of walk through how do you do this and what have you learned and most importantly what can we all learn about how we explain complicated things more successfully.
Viktor Farcic (03:40.472)
Yeah, so you know, I'm an old fart that started with software before we had education and all this stuff, right? It's kind of in early 90s when the only way you could actually progress is by just figuring it out yourself, right? And I kind of, I was almost forced to figure out things, right?
having somebody to explain me what to do and how to do it and so on and so forth, right? And then I spent, I don't know, 20 years or something like that doing the typical jobs that people do, you know, developer involved in testing as well, some tech lead, management, this or that. The only difference really me in the past and majority of people is that I could not hold the single position for long. I would kind of get bored and...
Hey, I don't wanna develop anymore. Is there something else I can do, right? And then eventually, I mean, not eventually, I realized that what I really liked the most is that is to switch what they do and change what they do fairly often, And that's, I'm getting back to your question, I promise, right?
BenP (04:58.675)
Yeah.
Viktor Farcic (05:00.673)
So what I'm doing right now, and I feel very privileged for that, is that I am able to invest a tremendous amount of time in exploring almost random things, right? I'm not really looking even for a specific solution for a specific problem. I just, hey, if you right now tell me about the new project, it goes right away on my to -do list. I'm going to check it out. I'm going to try to figure out how it fits into the system.
I'm most likely going to discard it, like three out of four things that I ever touch, they never see the sunlight because, you know, it's not good enough. So most of my time I spend trying to figure out things, right? And how those things fit into other things. Like imagine me being, I don't know, like eight year old and you give me a new toy and I don't know if you have children, right? But if you give, there you go.
BenP (05:55.219)
I do, yes.
Viktor Farcic (05:57.344)
How, assuming that they're young, how long does the toy last? Exactly. It's the same thing with me. Kind of like, hey, you give me a new toy, a new project, new product to check out and I'm extremely excited. I like it a lot. And then I would come back to you and say, okay, what now? I'm bored with this already, right? After a couple of days a week, sometimes month, depends, right? So most of my time I spend in that
BenP (06:01.598)
Yeah, not very long.
BenP (06:16.126)
Yeah.
Viktor Farcic (06:25.932)
trying to figure out things. Spend with the invisible things. mean, invisible in terms that nobody really sees the result of that. And then some of those things fit somewhere and then I convert that into stories, right? It could be YouTube, it could be maybe a talk at the conference. Try to figure out how, what is useful first, you know.
I feel as if my job is almost first applying the filters so that you don't have to and then figuring out. Now, I was about to say figuring out how something works, but that's not really my goal. I'm not trying to figure out how something works because anybody can figure it out easily how something works, right? You go to the documentation, that's something you follow the quick start, you know how it works. What I'm really trying to figure out is how does that fit into the system?
Right? It's easy to figure out what is this thing in isolation. What is the challenge? It's a Lego piece. How does that fit into whatever Lego I already have assembled? And eventually that becomes a video or some other form and people watch it or read it or listen to
BenP (07:46.999)
So you spend a lot of time learning. So it sounds like you've got a great love of learning, which I know a lot of people in tech have really. You need to, otherwise you can't thrive, I don't think, in the tech world if you don't like learning stuff. So you're constantly learning and then constantly finding those things that are great and then how they fit in the system. And then...
for your hobby, I guess, what you're then doing is saying, right, this is worth sharing with the world. This is now a topic that I need to share with other people. Is that right?
Viktor Farcic (08:21.132)
Yeah, yeah, I almost feel it exactly. That's the process, right? And I feel almost like my responsibility to do that in terms that, you know, when I was young, junior, then what's not developer, a lot of people helped me. And then now, you know, 30 years later, it's my turn to return the favor in a way, right?
BenP (08:45.288)
Yeah, and pay it forward.
Viktor Farcic (08:47.4)
Exactly, exactly. And then, you know, somebody younger than me is going to benefit from it and then I will retire and then somebody is going to help others, right?
BenP (08:58.258)
Yeah, it's great. I want... How the world should work. So let's start to dig into that a little bit. So you've found something that you think this is brilliant. It fits in the ecosystem. This is something that people may get value from.
Viktor Farcic (09:00.481)
how the world works or how the world should work.
BenP (09:18.698)
What do you do then? How do you go from there to, I've now got something that I am ready to communicate to people in an effective way, and then maybe at the end we'll then talk about how you get that on video and we'll think about maybe the video production. But how do you go from, I've got this thing I wanna talk about that I can now articulate in a really compelling way? What's your process for that?
Viktor Farcic (09:41.526)
My process is code, really. I write code and code in any form you can imagine, whether that's commands, whether that's manifest, whether that's go code or whatever. My brain is really, I'm not trying to write down the story. I'm trying to write down the code that explains the story. then once I figure that out, once I have all the commands and all the scripts and
whatever else I need, then words kind of come easy, right? Once you're confident about something from the code perspective, explaining that something is easy, right? You're just putting words around code, right? So I know that many people like to start with diagrams. They like to start with some bullet points and stuff like that. I skip all that. To me, the code is the only thing that matters. And my job is to explain
that codes to people,
BenP (10:44.01)
Okay, and so is that so typically the things that you're explaining are always gonna be code based because you'll tend to be working in the DevOps world. So it's gonna be code based things that are very linear, very structured that you're gonna be explaining to people.
Viktor Farcic (10:57.676)
Yes, exactly. I mean, not necessarily all of this, but let's say 98 % of the cases. I might have a video or some other material twice a year that does not contain code, but those are exceptions rather than the rules. you know, I, I'm, I, so what I do is I try to create material that can be consumed in a way how I like to consume material rather
BenP (11:12.648)
Yeah, and now carry on, carry
Viktor Farcic (11:27.948)
trying to figure out what people really want. Let's start with that kind of like, I'm not chasing views or anything like that kind of, this is how I like to consume things, right? And that's the same way how I produce things. And I personally don't like like, I don't like poor points. don't like people trying to sell me something. And even when they're not trying to sell me something, if
If somebody's, and I'm not talking about tech world, right? If somebody's talking, talking, talking for half an hour without showing me something, to me that sounds like a sell pitch, even though it's not necessarily the case, right? So it's kind of, I need to demonstrate the value of my words through code in a way, to make it real.
BenP (12:07.666)
Yeah, yeah,
BenP (12:17.994)
Okay, yeah, yeah. And no, it's fascinating. And a couple of things come to my mind there. So years and years ago in my past, I used to teach scripting to people when I was working at Microsoft. Years ago, PowerShell was the technology that I used to do a lot with people. And so lots of what I was doing was explaining things like that where it's very linear and very structured.
And it's quite interesting because then if you start talking about stuff that perhaps isn't code based, that perhaps isn't quite as structured as that, actually the coding bit, it forces you to turn it into a linear, you could call it a story, you could call it flow, you could call it a structure, but it starts here and it goes through steps to get to there.
And that's actually the first part, you know, if you're not talking about code that you need to get in your head is what's the process, what's the structure, what's the story, what's the flow? You could call it whatever you want really, that's gonna take you from the beginning to the end.
Viktor Farcic (13:13.438)
Yeah, so, depends how you look at it, right? The end result is very linear, give you that. Getting to that end result is very un -linear, right? Because you go back and forth, kind of like you try this and then that works and then you try something else and that forces you to go back and fix something, so on and so forth. So the process is not linear, but the end result is, right? And...
BenP (13:26.122)
Okay.
Viktor Farcic (13:41.834)
Because the goal is really to make complex things easy. I want people to feel as if I spent 15 minutes of my life on it. Even though I spent days or weeks or months sometimes, right? Now,
BenP (13:56.394)
Can I pause you there, Victor, because that is so important, that is so important, and I think that people don't think about it because it feels like it's so natural, you know, if you go and watch your videos or whatever, because like you said, it feels like, I just spent 15 minutes on this. But in reality, you've thought about it, you've got it wrong, you've messed around, you've broken it, you pulled it apart, you've done all this, you've spent ages on it.
Viktor Farcic (13:59.327)
Sure.
BenP (14:23.722)
And that is what then gives you the ability to sound like you've spent 15 minutes on it because you haven't, you've spent ages on
Viktor Farcic (14:31.986)
Exactly, it's like... Let me find an analogy. Tour de France just finished, right? Pogacar won. And it looks so easy when he drives that bike, kind of like he's not even sweating much. All he did was really sit on that bike and then drive it for an hour or two, kind of like, come on!
It's easy, right? In reality, had to, nobody knows how much he trains every day for how many years and things like that, right? To make that ride relatively easy, right? It's the same thing, right? And now, yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's okay, kind of, it's not supposed to be, you know, it would almost be disrespectful if I now...
BenP (15:04.53)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, lots of hard
Viktor Farcic (15:23.015)
waste your time by you trying to watching me or listening to me figuring it out, right? That would be almost disrespectful to you, right? So you come at the end of the process, which is great. Now, the important note here is that, and this is going to sound strange probably, is that I am not trying to teach anything to anybody. is, teaching is not the goal at
Because there are better ways to learn something than like watch my videos or whichever other type of material I produce. You go to the documentation, you get all the details, everything over there. My goal is rather
to spark the interest in you to learn something. Right? Kind of to spend half an hour listening to me and say, no, this is not for me. Excellent. I just saved you a week getting to that conclusion. hey, this is awesome. Right? Kind of like, I saw the end result. I want that end result. And I'm going to spend now week, month, whatever amount of time is required
to learn that something because you're not going to learn all the details about something from me in half an hour. That's not going to happen. But if I can reach the point that somebody says, this is amazing. I want this. I'm going to, this is worth my travel. This is worth my time. Then I'm a happy person, right? That's usually why very often in videos and other material, you know, you were mentioning earlier how linear it is and it is, but there is one exception is
BenP (16:43.538)
Yeah.
BenP (16:56.937)
Yeah.
Viktor Farcic (17:07.961)
It goes from the beginning, you know, set up and then something light and then we're complicating things until we get to the end result. But then in my material, when I get to that end result, I put that end result at the very beginning, first couple of minutes. So that you can... I'm very obsessed not wasting anybody's time, right? So if you're going to watch, I'm going to give you three minutes to decide whether half an hour is worth
BenP (17:23.018)
Okay.
Viktor Farcic (17:38.006)
I'm kind of incentivizing people not to watch my videos in a way. This is what will happen. This is the end result. Look at this. Blah, blah, blah. And I see that through statistics. Very often people drop after half a minute, minute, two minutes, three minutes. And that's okay. I'm fine with that. Because hey, actually, if you drop out after three minutes, that means that actually I'm even more successful.
BenP (17:42.898)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
BenP (18:06.718)
Yeah.
Viktor Farcic (18:07.227)
Right, kind of like, I even managed to convince you in smaller amount of time that that might not be for
BenP (18:14.324)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's really good because that's a great human way to do it, isn't it? That's what you wanna do to humans, right? Is this useful for you? No, it's not.
go somewhere else. Yes, it is. I'll do my best to help you. But that's not the way that all the big tech companies reward creators and reward, you know, they, you know, so if you go and look at, you know, how to create tension in a video and how to view, you know, maximise minutes watched, it's the big reveals at separate points as you go, you know, they're thinking about how you keep eyes on your video for as long as possible. Whereas what you're saying is, made
to kind of help people really and make them help them decide whether they want to use this and if they don't and if they don't let's get them off quickly and that those that are there are then committed and will get value from
Viktor Farcic (19:01.553)
Exactly. The major difference is that the things I do as my hobby, like including YouTube, right, they're not my source of income. So I'm not forced in a way to chase all those things so that I maximize the retention and maximize the number of viewers and all those things that would increase my income, right? It's literally a hobby. I'm not, actually I am earning.
I'm earning just enough money from YouTube to pay the costs of editing. Somebody else is editing my videos and things like that. So if I end up on zero, that's the success for me, right? And then I don't have that incentive to make you force you to keep watching, to discover after half an hour of the time, just this is not for you, right?
BenP (19:39.71)
Yeah.
BenP (19:50.706)
Yeah, yeah. I remember, so we had a little chat a couple of weeks ago, just sort of whilst we were, well, we were meeting each other and planning what we might talk about today. And I love what you, one of the things that you said, it was that you're like writing a crime novel. So when you're thinking about one of the, do want to explain to everybody what you mean by you're writing it like a crime novel?
Viktor Farcic (20:12.166)
Yeah, so a bad crime novel would be, and I'm now simplifying it, let's say, and inventing it as I go, right? Let's say that you're presented with the inspector, and inspector is called, and he's walking the streets and stuff. No, the good crime novel starts with a murder, Karov. In the first chapter, in the first couple of pages, there is a murder. Somebody was murdered in a house where there was 10 people. We don't know who is the...
Everybody is a suspect. We don't know who the murderer is. Do you want to read more? Right? And of course you won't. And then it goes either back in time or somewhere else and things like that and it slowly reveals. But you find out immediately the suspense part, right? You have a hook and maybe you can, know, some books are also like that. actually, I'm not interested in the murderer.
BenP (20:47.486)
Yeah. Yeah.
Viktor Farcic (21:09.869)
mystery type of novels, I'm going to read something else. Excellent, right? But if you're interested, it always starts with the murder because that's the interesting part. That's what you want to discover, right? At the end.
BenP (21:21.478)
Yeah, and that's the approach you're going through here is, know, right at the beginning, you're hooking people in saying this might be for you, this might not be for you, here's the murder. And then for the rest of the video, we're going to be talking about the details of how it all plugs together, when you'd use it, when you wouldn't use it, all of that kind of stuff.
Viktor Farcic (21:39.012)
Yeah, the rest of the video is discovering how that person was murdered.
BenP (21:43.772)
Yeah, yeah. Now, one of the other things that you mentioned, you hate PowerPoints and all that kind of stuff. You like to look at the code. You like to look at the actual product when you're explaining it. Do you want to talk to us a bit more about
Viktor Farcic (22:03.254)
Yeah, so actually it is and it isn't like that, right? I like to see what the product does, how it fits into the system. What is the culture that behind the theme of that product? Because if my culture does not fit their culture, then that product will not be for me and so on and so forth. I like.
I think that there are many, many, many things that are important around the project that is not code. But I think that all those things are best explained through code, right? And also figured out through code and so on and so forth. So I don't think that it's all about code, but I think that code explains all of it, right? It's like, because code is like language. Like right now we're speaking English to each other, right?
BenP (22:56.266)
Okay.
Viktor Farcic (23:02.667)
And code is just another language. It's just switching your brain to that language and reading it as if you're reading a novel, right?
BenP (23:10.216)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I must admit, like, I'm quite a, I quite like to understand the big picture first. So I'm quite a visual learner. So I quite like to think about, okay, what are the components that we're gonna be plugging together and roughly how are they all gonna fit together and what's the big picture of what's happening?
And then I love to get into the details. And now I've got every all of those components in my head. Now let's go through and understand it in that next level of depth. So I think I'm perhaps a little different. I like to to be able to visualise it in my mind first.
Viktor Farcic (23:49.058)
I I guess it depends on, I was operating like that before, but now after a certain experience and so on and so forth. So I already have a picture, just to be clear, right? What I'm trying to figure out is how does that new piece fit into it? Right, so the picture is there. Okay, it's cloud, it's Kubernetes, it's serverless, it's this or that kind of, I have a picture in my head.
BenP (24:09.492)
Okay, okay.
Viktor Farcic (24:17.857)
It's just that I'm constantly trying to expand that picture by adding, let's say it's a puzzle, By adding more pieces to it. So I'm now more concerned of, okay, so what can I do to make that picture prettier in a way or more useful or what's not, right? So I'm definitely concerned. you know.
When you speak about people and how they operate, usually they're described that they're people who go into details of something and they're T -shaped people, you know, that try to understand the system. I'm that one. I try to understand the system, right? It's just that I'm not, I feel that for certain types of systems, not all, I already understand the system. So my steps now are okay, but how does this fit into it, right? I don't know what it is.
BenP (24:52.456)
Generic at the top. Yeah.
Viktor Farcic (25:09.602)
It's this. I don't know, what is it? Where do I put it? How do I fit it somewhere, right?
BenP (25:18.306)
So, guess, as I of reflect a little bit, we're sort of thinking you spend a lot of time learning and making sure that you understand everything. And then you like to think about, well, how do I linearly tell that? How do I tell that using the code and code being just another language that you can use to explain things that's quite logical? Any other tips or any other tricks that you use to try and make the complex?
more simple and easy to understand.
Viktor Farcic (25:52.418)
So to begin with, I'm not sure how successful I am in doing that or no. I hope I am, but...
BenP (25:57.674)
Well, you get lots of people that really like what you're doing. So I'm going to say, yes, you are successful. So it'd be great to your opinion.
Viktor Farcic (26:03.893)
Yeah, lots depends kind of You know, it's not really that lots That many to be honest you have Without naming you you have people on YouTube for example in tech world that they're having much more views and things like that Big part because I'm not really concerned with junior. I just finished university. I'm more talking to more experienced people But
BenP (26:29.128)
Yeah,
Viktor Farcic (26:32.417)
Anyways, one of the main rules is that I never assume, or I'm doing my best never to assume prior knowledge of something, right? So a good example would be something I'm working on right now about sick term signals, signals, doesn't matter. And I have to have different pains in my terminal because some things need to happen in parallel
I fire up Zellige, doesn't matter, it's a T -Max, multiplexer, whatever it is, right? And then a minute later I realized, okay, what if somebody doesn't know what it is, right? Did they ever explain it? Can I reference and say, go there, stop watching this, go there to figure this out first and then come back? I didn't do that. So I postponed that material, went back,
and started working around TMAX or multiplexer terminals sessions and so on and so forth. Only so that I can tell people something like, you might know this, cool, continue. You might not know this, but it's not the subject of this material, go there. So I'd never, or rarely if ever assume somebody knows something.
They might or they might not. And if they don't, I need to be capable of redirecting them. Telling them, you know, the same thing what I said before, telling them, okay, stop this video. I know that YouTube is going to punish me. And not recommended, but stop it. Stop watching right now. Go there.
BenP (28:17.724)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I'm looking at the clock and time is zipping through. What I also would love to just understand. So you've created this content, you've got a great narrative and you're talking, you you've got this great way to explain stuff just about the production of the videos. you'll produce it because I think more and more video on demand is a great way for us to talk to people.
whether that be customers, whether that be internal colleagues, whoever it is, because it's accessible anytime and it's a really good way to explain stuff. Have you got any tips on how to create these good videos that you've got on YouTube that we could learn from?
Viktor Farcic (29:01.717)
So I I'll ask, I'll give you two answers, right? How somebody should start with videos and what I'm doing right now, which is very, very different from when I was starting, right? Starting is easy. Just put away that fear that, and forget about the idea of not having equipment and all that stuff. That's all silly because whatever you do, you're going to look at it year later and you say, you're going to say this is crap and that's okay.
Because if you get to the point to say, and this is not for videos, for anything, to say this is crap what I did last year, that means that you improved. It's great, right? And the only way to improve it is by just by doing it over and over and over and over again, right? And I get that question often, kind of, what should I start with? Which equipment should I buy? No, buy a cheap mic. You have iPhone, yes, cool, that's it. Kind
put some lights around, get some lights from around your house, put it on and then just do it, right? It's going to be horrible, absolutely horrible. But that horrible is better than not doing it, right?
BenP (30:03.252)
Yeah.
BenP (30:08.296)
Yeah, yeah. And it's going to have some substance to it, right? Because you're talking about something that is of value. So you've got all of that stuff that's in your brain that would be great to share with other people.
Viktor Farcic (30:19.229)
Exactly. It's the same like anything else. You know, if I look at the code I wrote in 90s, I'm ashamed of it. It's horrible, right? Of course, I'm ashamed of it because I feel that I write better code now. That's the only reason, not because it was really bad. But today I have a slightly more complicated setup. So I, until not long ago,
I was actually not having a manuscript. I was just speaking from top of my head after I have the code. Now, code is important, just kind of putting words. Afterwards, I started using an editor because this many people don't understand that, but it takes probably a full day of work to edit a 30 minutes video, at least the way how I publish it, right? So eventually I got an editor and that person freaked out kind of like, hey,
You're showing me code and then you're speaking about that code and I'm supposed to match it somehow and edit it. I don't know how I cannot do it. This is completely, you could have written it in Chinese, right? So I was forced in a way to write the manuscript. Now I have a manuscript kind of like the text I'm saying more or less, stuff like that. So that I can simplify the life of the editing process, right? That is done by somebody else. And then I record.
Audio, talking head and screen, they are recorded separately. With screen being recorded in a different time frame than talking head and audio and then all that comes together in a post -production kind of. Because, you know, if I, I'm also very cautious not to lose anybody's time. So if I talk while I type,
There will be times that I'm waiting for something to happen. There will be times that I'm focused on what I'm doing instead of explaining it to you and so on and so forth. So it's, I feel it's better, much more complicated for me or for the editor, but hey, record what you're doing, screen, record your talk, and then match it all together so that you can speed it up, slow it down and things like
BenP (32:34.536)
Yeah, I must admit, so I do. So in my technical storytelling program, which is all about helping people, you know, how they they communicate these sorts of things for all the videos that I do video on demand, I moved to a teleprompter. So like you're saying, you know, and then having a script and writing that script.
So it's how I sound so that it's a natural sounding script and not that I'm reading an email that sounds differently. And that vastly sped up and improved the quality of the stuff that I was doing. I thought that was a great skill to learn and a great investment.
Viktor Farcic (33:12.929)
That's what you just said is critical. If you write it in a way that people can read it, you will not be able to read it. I mean, to convert it into talking head, right? Because it's a very different, it's a very different, the way how we speak and the way how we read is very, different. So either you're forced to make readable script,
that is going to sound as rubbish as when you read it, because it will sound like you're reading newspaper, or as you mentioned, you're going to write it the way how you speak. And if you publish that as a text, it's going to be horrible, right? But it's going to be much better when you read it in a video or podcast or whatever it is. Now the challenge is, and that takes a lot of time,
BenP (33:53.064)
Yeah,
BenP (33:57.31)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Viktor Farcic (34:10.428)
I feel to master is how to read things. Once you master how to write things in a way how you speak, how to read things without looking like you're reading, right? A good example is conferences. I'm now switching subject just a little bit, right? Whenever somebody asks me, I always recommend never write speaker notes. Never, ever, ever write speaker notes. I mean, you will do that later. It's fine.
But if you write speaker notes and you go on a stage, it's so clear that you're reading speaker notes. And I know that you know it. I know that you know the story. I know that you can tell a story. But basically, your storytelling degrades with speaker notes. Unless, and this is critical, with sufficient practice, you learn how to do it. I feel that I can now read text from a teleprompter. You're never figuring out that I'm reading.
BenP (34:45.192)
Yeah.
BenP (34:53.64)
Yep, yep, yep.
Viktor Farcic (35:07.283)
That takes time. I suggest people starting to just not read from the teleprompter right away. Or even better, put bullet points so that you have a reminder, I need to talk about that. And then you talk,
BenP (35:22.57)
and then you can riff around just that little bullet point, but you've still got that structure. You know you need to talk about these three things and you've got a minute or two on each of those bullet points and you can riff around it as opposed to just a wandering, monotonous noodling that it can be. If you've got no bullets, no script, no teleprompter and a console in front of you, it can be pretty low quality and take a long time to get to any value.
Viktor Farcic (35:47.946)
yeah. Yeah, but that's also OK. Kind of low quality is inevitable when you start.
BenP (35:54.386)
Yeah, yeah. Well, big tell, I've just looked at the time and time has sadly escaped us. It's been a brilliant conversation and I could have carried on this conversation for hours. So thank you so much for everything that you've been through. Just as we start to wrap up, any key takeaways that you would like people to remember from the things that you've been telling us?
Viktor Farcic (36:19.168)
I feel that it's very beneficial to do some public work. And I'm now not referencing only YouTube. Open source, documentation, contributions to the project and so on and so forth. Whenever I get the question of, what can I do to improve my career? That's my only answer always, right? Because especially if it's open source, right?
I put it all in the same bucket as public. Do the public work. You will get recognized for it. You will have much easier time moving wherever you want to move.
BenP (37:00.138)
Yeah, no, that is a great takeaway. Great takeaway. For me, when I think about the things that you've been going through, you know, I love your, your approach. Just try some of this stuff. You know, don't be scared. Get over the fear and have a go. And of course, it's not going to be as good as it might be in 10 years time when you've done it. But don't take that first step. You know, I love that. I also love the idea that you're sort of giving of when you're talking about this stuff, treat it like a crime novel, you know, so hit us between the eyes with the murder, you know, hook us in with the murder.
do we want to commit to this now unraveling of the murder or do you not? You know I really love that idea so those two things have really gone into my brain so thank you so much. Now if people have loved listening to you and want to get more of you on YouTube or your podcast can you tell us where do we find your YouTube and where do we find your podcast?
Viktor Farcic (37:54.972)
I'm everywhere. if you Google my name, you'll find me in a of places. So there is a YouTube channel, DevOps Toolkit. Then there is podcast, is on many platforms, DevOps Paradox. If you're in, I'm likely going to be in the conference in your city, wherever that is, whenever that is. I'm going to a lot of those as well.
BenP (38:24.393)
Yeah, brilliant.
Viktor Farcic (38:24.538)
And just Google
BenP (38:27.358)
Google it. And I'll pop a couple of links in the show notes if you want. So I'll put a link to the podcast, a link to YouTube, and I'll pop your LinkedIn in there so that everybody can find you and get in touch if they want to. So I guess the final thing for me to say is Victor, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been lovely to have you with us.
Viktor Farcic (38:46.56)
Thank you for having me. This was brilliant.
