The Performance Tour Season 2022 Episode 12 was released on December 19, 2022. If you have not seen it yet, you can check it out here:
AIOps – How does that work?
I originally met Heath Newburn through a mutual connection on social media. After a brief conversation with him on the phone, I discovered he had a lot of experience on the topic and I had him on my weekly podcast as an introduction to the topic. But I knew I wanted to cover this in more detail on the Performance Tour show. I went back out to Austin and we met at the (now old) Tricentis building for the interview.
Heath has an immense background and amount of experience. You’ll have to watch the unedited version of the interview to fully appreciate it all. A lot of people hear the term “AIOps” and it really isn’t much more than a buzzword. I wanted to try to get through some of the smoke and mirrors around the term. It was important to address the concern of many in the software testing and engineering space about AI algorithms “taking over their jobs”. I really don’t think that should be a concern – at least not now. I think we successfully addressed these topics on the episode.
Sitefail
The cinematic trailer for Sitefail was about a year in the making. I started out by studying the actual trailer for Skyfall and found a video that mixed scenes from the movie with the wonderful theme song sung by Adele. I rewrote the lyrics to be more about a website failing and they just fell into place. J.R. McNeely (the musical magician) recreated the entire track from scratch (including the horns and strings), and worked with Susanne Gill to do the vocals – who did a phenomenal job. Many of you may not know, but many of the musicians and people who work on the music for the show are professional Nashville based musicians and Grammy winning artists. That’s just the way we roll here.
The next part was recording the video of the singer (the Adele part). We filmed this on a soundstage in Nashville in September of 2022 – the same time we recorded the “Test It” and “Two 503’s Ain’t bad”. The singer in the video is actually my sister, Christie Kennedy. She isn’t singing the song (Susanne Gill did that , remember). When I could not find someone to be my “Adele”, she stepped up to help big brother, and she did it perfectly.
We still needed the “trailer” part. For that, I special ordered the same (or similar knockoff) 007 tuxedo suit that was used in the Skyfall movie. I’m no Daniel Craig, but it was too late to back out now. I went to Jacksonville, Florida and worked with Lawrence Lanier and Bryte Payment Solutions production department to record the remaining scenes. We filmed in downtown Jacksonville for the skyline / water scenes, and near the library center square for the clock and walking out of the big “mouth” scenes. We also stopped by Bono’s BBQ to enjoy those BBQ ribs. The final scene was filmed at the Bryte Corporate office in a hallway, and I had one remaining BBQ rib left to eat.
Special thanks to Bethany Bryan-Shultz for adding the green screen “Get me agent 503. Now!”. Also, thanks to my performance buddies Leandro Melendez and Henrik Rexed for providing the “News Reporter” footage at the beginning. My main video editor, Luke Taylor mixed a little bit of stock footage with what we had created and put the whole trailer together. The background music in the beginning was audio from Soundstripe. Ironically, this is where J.R. McNeely works and he actually did the mixing on that stock audio as well. We didn’t know that at the time we selected it. I hired someone to do the movie poster, after I lost about 30 pounds. LOL.
Overall, this is one of the best things I’ve been a part of and was so much fun. I don’t know how I am going to outdo it. But I have some new ideas for 2023!
Final Thoughts
This was the last episode being sponsored by QA Consultants, and I wanted to say a special “thank you” to Brian Bernknopf and all fo the team at QAC for supporting the tour this year. With James Pulley as their Chief Performance Officer, and still the main voice of Perfbytes – I don’t think it is the last time you will see him on the show. Looking forward to what’s ahead in 2023.