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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How are you doing today? Um I wanted to talk to you about automation on the show today and there's a couple of reasons that have brought me to this topic today. Um First of all, I covered it uh earlier in the um the week at the Ottawa Public Sector Summit for Aws um highlighting how uh security can really take advantage of automation.
So if you're in a cybersecurity role and you're in a security operation center, um you can really have a huge boost by starting to automate stuff, but really, um you can automate a huge amount of things within your day to day work because we're all working in the digital world.
We're all moving forward. And this is why coding is such a basic and critical skill moving forward. And I'll give you a very personal example this week because I actually get the opportunity to write some more code this week.
And I always love weeks like that when I can sit behind a keyboard and get some coding done. Um One of the most terrifying times of year for me is right now because when I see a video like I did the other day from Jeff Barr that said, hey, 30 days to Aws re invent.
And then I look at the calendar and go, there's even less than that now. And I've got all these different crazy things going on uh before the end of November, uh when uh the biggest conference in cloud happens.
Um and obviously given my role in the VP of cloud research return micro, that's a big event for me. Um So there's a lot of stuff going on and there's a lot of content that I need to build out.
They're uh up leading up to it. There's a lot of stuff that I'll be doing at the show. A lot of videos, a lot of social media, um a lot of teaching that I kind of do on the fly um that there's a lot of grunt work associated with that.
So I'll give you an example related to this show. Um You know, thank you for being a part of the audience. Thank you for following along. Um I record this show um uh because of the construction of the neighborhood, normally I stream it out live and after that, I end up with a video file.
Makes sense, right? I have a video file of the stream. So it's already gone out live to Facebook, to Twitch and to um periscope which is Twitter. Um that's already out there to the audience already getting a number of views based on the live stream and then it sits on those networks for a little while.
Um As a result of that live stream, I have a video file from that video file. I pull the audio out and create a podcast. I also have a thumbnail image that I put a bunch of over on.
So the episode number mornings with Mark the link to mark M dot ca slash mwm, things like that. There's a whole bunch of assets that need to be created after that initial live stream. I automated that a while ago now, I'm tweaking that automation script right now.
But essentially I create a whole bunch of assets. So out of that one live stream comes the youtube video. I put a bumper in front of that with some logos and things like that. I do the same linkedin but with a different thumbnail because linkedin won't let you add a custom thumbnail.
I create a custom thumbnail and then I'm able to post that in the description to the places where I live streamed it. I pull the podcast out of that. I actually have been tweaking the script that does the transcription in order to create a blog post from it.
A whole bunch of assets fall out of this one video which is very useful, very Gary Vork style, but I can't do that all on my own day today. So I've automated that I wrote some code turns out to be pretty basic code to do all that for me, even though it sounds insane as far as complexity and that, I think there's a huge amount of automation wins in almost everybody's job.
There's a lot of stuff that you do repetitively that you could probably automate and there's some great places to start with that. Obviously, I am a huge fan of everybody learning to code. Go to Code Academy, go to Udemy, any number of online training courses, start Googling lots of great books from o'reilly and the Safari library.
There's tons of resources out there to start coding. There's tons of resources out there to start small, like get your kids coding, get them early into it. The great thing for 8 to 12 year olds right now, check out from Cano the new Harry Potter Wand.
They created a Bluetooth wand that you can program from your ipad or your Android tablet to create spells on great physical interaction to get people interested in coding. So there's tons of resources out there girls who code great charity promoting that to increase the number of women in the field.
There's just so many great resources, so many great initiatives. I am excited about that. But today right now you can get started by especially if you're on a Mac. Open up the app called Automator. It's a visual sort of click together some tiles to automate a task on windows.
You can do similar things with powershell there are lots of great tools out there to automate some of these staff start adding keyboard combinations to fire off scripts. You know, there's a whole bunch of things that you can be doing to make your life easier if you can take a breath for a minute and realize that if you do it more than once, it's probably worth automating, even if you've never automated anything before.
Now, for those of you in a cybersecurity role, this is the number one skill you need moving forward is to be able to write some basic code to glue systemss together. The world is getting more and more complicated.
And if you have that as a, you'll be able to stand out and then eventually just keep pace and then it's just required, right? But in all aspects and pretty much everyone I've ever met, being able to automate and write some basic code would improve.
Everybody's workflow would make them more efficient, more productive. And here's the thing, all that stuff I talked about from like this episode from this live stream. It's not fun. I don't like making thumbnails. I don't like, you know, repackaging videos and doing all this stuff.
So when I could automate it, it's great. I literally run, run, run one command and I get everything I need as an output, right? So now I can make sure that this content gets posted across multiple social media channels is archived is maximized, is used to the fullest extent possible with one script running and that's made my life a lot easier.
And that's really what automation coding is all about. It's about making life easier. And that can start with something as simple as you, you don't need to write software for other people to use. You can these little scripts, you can write these little tools to help yourself going.
How have you tackled automation? Have you tackled automation? Has it even crossed your mind? If you're even sitting in an hr job, do you automate things? Is there something you think that you should be automating? But you've had trouble with it.
Let me know. Let's keep this discussion going online at Mark NC in the comments down below for those of you on the vlogs. And as always by email me at Mark N dot Ca, I hope you're set up for a fantastic day.
I'll talk to you online and I'll see you on the show tomorrow.
