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Perftour 2023 – Behind the Show Episode 04

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The Performance Tour Season 2023 Episode 04 on Security and Performance was released on May 17, 2023. If you have not seen it yet, you can check it out here:

Security AND Performance

In this episode, I wanted to talk about the similarities in performance engineering tasks in the software development lifecycle and security testing field (including DevSecOps). These two disciplines have similar approaches to solve problems and they can both work together to bring about better user experiences while reducing the risk of deploying applications. Think about the way most load testing tools automate business processes by recording a browser session. At the network layer, this is simply putting a proxy server between the recording browser and the load test tool so it can intercept the calls made. It then translates that into automation code or steps within the load test tool GUI. Security penetration testing uses proxy servers as well. There are many other examples of this. 

Interview with Dennis Hurst

It seems that those in the security community face some of the same challenges as those of us in the performance testing community when it comes to making our work easy to maintain, easy to make continuous, and work well within a DevOps culture. Dennis gets it and understands both sides, where Operational requirements (not Non-functional and some may call them) are concerned. I really enjoyed talking with Dennis about all of this and could have talked a lot longer. 

Shotgun Willies BBQ

After a video shoot in Nashville for the “Firewall” song parody, the team decided to go to this BBQ place to end our workday. Although in Tennessee, this place has a Texas-theme and style to it. They were gracious enough to let us check out the smokers as well.

Firewall

This was a very cool video to make. It contains people from all periods of my life, including

Matt DePoister – performance engineer who I trained and worked with me at companies LoadTester and Northway Solutions Group. I have known him since my early college years in 1990.

Brian Copeland – global director of presales at TekSystems Global Services – recently retired. Brian taught me the ways of QA in the early 2000’s when I worked for him at Deloitte and we have been friends ever since – working with each other in various capacities for decades.

Terry Murphy – Database Administrator at Deloitte. I’ve known Terry since 1997. He is also a fellow guitar player and genuinely nice guy!

Ron Foster – you have seen Ron in several videos playing drums. We met in 2000 and had common interests in music. Ron was one of the first employees of Loadtester and worked many performance testing engagements with me there. He is now a senior security consultant at Saltworks Security.

Dennis Hurst – Dennis is the founder of Saltworks Security and the main interview for Episode 04, so this video theme was right in his sweet spot. I assure you, he was really acting when he had these routers and cables around him seemingly clueless. He was one of the founders of SPI Dynamics back in the day and he knows his stuff!

Matt Parker – you have seen Matt in many of my music videos. He is an up and coming rock star based out of Nashville who can sing and play many instruments. You should check out his music on TikTok and many other places. https://www.tiktok.com/@parkerthebandit 

and then there is my brother-in-law Marcus Beebe who I have known for over 31 years.

When I first saw the resulting video, it seemed almost too serious and artistic to be funny. But I think those who know what the lyrics are saying will find them pretty amusing. Luke Taylor (our filming partner) went above and beyond to recreate the style of the video from the original Oasis song “Wonderwall” and this is one of the best videos we have ever done. Of course, J.R. McNeely redid the song from the ground up in his studio, recorded my vocals and figured out how to make it sound like I can sing on key, then mixed it all together to produce a great sounding song version.

Those of you with good eyes may notice that this filming location looks a lot like the one in “Friday, My Site’s Down” and that is in fact the same building. It worked well for both videos.

Can’t wait to see what adventures await us for the next episode. I hope you are enjoying the journey as much as I am.

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