Select Page

The Performance Tour 2022 Episode 09 Summary

by | Oct 13, 2022 | Blogs

The Performance Tour Season 03 (2022) Episode 09 was released on September 09, 2022. If you have not seen it yet, you can check it out here:

The introduction segment (sponsor thanks) was filmed at Bryte Studios in Jacksonville, Florida. 

Chaos Engineering (Darrell Dunn)

The interview was filmed at the Bryte studios in Jacksonville, Florida. I have been wanting to get someone on the show from Gremlin for some time. I had originally scheduled Jason Yee, but over the course of time Jason moved over to Datadog and was not able to be in the studio with me. Then I found out Darrell Dunn had started working at Gremlin, and it was great timing. Not only did Darrell already know each other, he also lives in Florida and was able to make the drive up to the studio for the day. We had a great time catching up at Bono’s BBQ, and I was able to introduce him to James Pulley – who was hanging out for the “More Money Please” skit we did in Episode 08 (filmed on the same day as well). In fact, we hung out with the entire Bryte film crew:

The food and the company was great, so this was a good day. 

Darrell and I go back over 20 years, when we both worked for Deloitte & Touche in the Nashville area. He worked in one area of Quality Assurance and I worked as a performance engineer in another area. We always talked and shared information between teams and attended many QA user groups together. We sat down for the interview and were able to catch up on the last few years as we both had moved from Tennessee to Florida. 

That’s really one of the best things about what I do on the Performance Tour – sit down with people and talk about common interests that I may have known for years. We could have sat and talked for hours about not only chaos engineering, but quality assurance, performance testing, and where to get the best barbeque in Florida.

Darrell had not been with Gremlin for a long time, but he knows the field and knows the business, and I think he did a great job explaining chaos engineering. He also responded well to the video segment we inserted from the Austin Perftour road show where James Pulley was challenging the need for chaos engineering and the maturity level required to do it properly. Darrell had the added pressure of addressing the video with Mr. Pulley himself on the sidelines in the studio listening to the whole conversation. There was a bit of healthy banter between the two that was NOT caught on video that I wish we had captured. It was a lot of fun.

Two 503’s Ain’t Bad (Skit)

I had been thinking about doing this song for several months. I rewrote the lyrics multiple times and the catchphrase was still the original “Two outta three ain’t bad”. I was riding around in my neighborhood going over the song and them I looked at my 503 Server Busy shirt and realized “Two outta three” and “Two 503s” was so close – and the rest of the lyrics came. 

We filmed this skit in Nashville on a soundstage. I had been collecting the outfit items throughout the year. This included the 70’s tuxedo shirt, the black scarf, suspenders, etc. I wasn’t able to find the best wig for it, but we made some slight modifications and did the best we could with it. We tried to get the same look and feel of the original video from the late 70’s, which you can find on YouTube. We tried to match the lighting, piano at the beginning, and the background singers on the stage. I was really pleased with how it came out.

As always, J.R. McNeely came through with an amazing soundtrack and he asked me to sing the vocals for the song. I can’t really sing that well, but there are really amazing and crazy things that you can do with audio these days that make people who cannot sing very well sound awesome. Just ask the most popular singers these days. J.R. and Susanne Gill (you will hear more from her later this year) sang the background vocals that really supported my singing too.

Instead of Meat Loaf, we used the artist name of “Mashed Potatoes and Gravy”.

Lyrics

The lyrics to the parody version of this song are:

Maybe we can test all night
But that ain’t gettin us nowhere
I showed you every graph I possibly can
There’s no good news the share here

And maybe you could code all night
But that’ll never fix the overall times
Technical debt is piling up right now
I wish you wouldn’t make it worse now

I’ve tested stress and I’ve tested load
I’ve tried to show you where the server fails
and all the places that your memory leaks
But your developers are just so bad
all the timings are reported in years

And all I can do is keep on telling you
It looks up, it seems up
But there ain’t no way this app is gonna stay up
Now don’t be sad
‘Cause two 503’s ain’t bad
Now don’t be sad
‘Cause two 503’s ain’t bad

This was a fun episode and I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look.

Links: