S2E3 - Interview with Pat Patterson, Director of Developer Evangelism at Citrix

Welcome to the Citrix developer solutions podcast by brick bridge consulting. This podcast is dedicated to the design development and implementation of a growing number of Citrix SAS platforms, as well as some topics around their associated virtualization products. I've been using this podcast to discuss their own experiences and challenges with these SAS platforms, as well as meeting interesting people from around the growing Citrix developer community. If you are a developer designer, administrator, customer, or agency that uses Citrix products, and once the most out of your experience or your end users experience, then you're in the right spot. Hit that subscribe button and the bell. If there's one where you are listening to get our latest, if you have already thank you so much for your support. Lastly, we'd love for you to engage with us. If you have a topic solution, challenge, or message, we want to know about it. Reach out to us. We are a company pages on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, that a Tik TOK. I don't know, there's so many, but you can send a message also or Podio chat to service@brickbridgeconsulting.com. I'm excited today because we had a wonderful conversation with pat Patterson, director of developer evangelism there at Citrix. And it's just a wonderful conversation that we had a variety of topics. We had an outline we had to move through. We got stuck a little bit on his history is fascinating. So excited for you all to, to have, uh, uh, listen, uh, for this one again, pat Patterson, a wonderful guy working to build the Citrix developer community had to have him on the podcast. So excited you guys to hear,

All right, I'm here with pat Patterson of Citrix. Wanted to give you an introduction, uh, as the, uh, you're the technically the, the Citrix developer community evangelists, is that right? So that's pretty close. My title is developer evangelism. Okay. I knew the evangelism was in there somewhere. Um, so I wanted to introduce you to our listeners and some of the things that, uh, Citrix is doing to invest in the developer community. Uh, we were talking right before we started, uh, really important that developers are included in these products because they're the ones that expand and implement. And you were saying something very interesting before we started this interview about, uh, how, how they get passed by in marketing a lot of times, just because they're not the direct economic buyer. And I, I wanted to, I know I'd cut you off and we'll get into an introduction, but I wanted you to finish that thought for sure. While we were on. Yeah, yeah. I can go, I can jump straight to there. So yeah. Well, so the lesson has benefit. Uh, yeah, we were just kind of chatting before we started recording and I was, you know, saying how, um, I've been working with developers and I want to say technical communities for gosh, uh, about 17 years now. And you know, this is you can't market to them. So for one thing, developers, uh, have highly evolved. Uh, I dunno how fruits you can language game. I not bad. You go, we're an adult show here. Most of, most of the dental, so, okay. So, so, so developers have highly involved, highly evolved. Um, conventional marketing is just pointless and in fact, conventional marketers are really not even interested in talking to developers because they're not an economic buyer. We know that targeting people way, way up in the organization. But, you know, from my point of view, um, developers are actually an essential part of the equation. Uh, we I've long had, uh, dealings with an analyst company called and they're pretty unusual in, they focus on the developer audience and, uh, you know, they, they, Steven O'Grady one of the Redmond panelists has written a book on this called the, I think it's called the new kingmakers about how developers are critical in technology, technology adoption. You know, I'm sure, you know, everybody's seen this happen that, uh, somebody uses some download some technology, they get it working, they do a little POC and before you know, it, uh, it's in production and the company's relying on. And so, you know, it's an essential part of, uh, the technology landscape. And as an evangelist, you know, I'm not a marketer. So there's two hops to my role. One is as an evangelist, I'm representing the company, its products, its services out in the community. And all I can do is set out the stall and educate people and explain how, uh, you know, we might be able to help them solve their problem. And the flip side, the other side of the street is advocacy in the, I'm an advocate for those developers within the company. So an advocate for the community. So all of those concerns about, you know, an API not working quite right, you know, an SDK, uh, is a bit glitchy. All of those issues that don't necessarily bubble up through support or, you know, stop a sale from happening. I can be an advocate within the company and try and get things fixed and improve that developer expense as a developer on our side, uh, that does a lot of workspace implementations. And a lot of people are familiar with our hackathons. Um, it's so important to have someone like at Citrix on the inside, right? Cause, uh, especially us developers who I think you correctly stated, we don't write a lot of checks, right? We're, we're, we're here to help the customers that are writing checks, but we're not in Citrix, right? Like we're not inside and this not just for Citrix, but many other places. Um, it's sometimes hard to get our concerns addressed a lot of times, right? Like it's, especially there's tends to be a crowd of us. So there's a lot of different asks, right. We all ask for something and we're all dealing with the nitty gritty. Right. Cause we're doing the implementation. So a lot of the asks are very customer specific and Citrix is, you know, it's a large corporation, it's gotta pay attention to many people. My little want for this one little customer. Yeah. It's not priority. Mostly the climate's not right. It's just, it doesn't scale. So it's great to have somebody there that that's, that's able to sort them. Yeah. And the, and it's the really fascinating part of my role is I have a bit more visibility into the technology than you do. So for example, on micro apps, I can actually go and I do a look through the source code. You know, I, if somebody like yourself says, oh, I, you know, I pass this parameter and this doesn't work. Like I think it should. Um, a lot of what I do, and this is not just a Citrix, this goes back into my last role is, you know, just looking at it on my test bed and uh, you know, do the reproduction if you like. And you know, if it, if I get the same result, I can often just, you know, take a quick look at that source code. Even if I'm not on the engineering team, you know, I've been, uh, you know, I was a hands-on full-time developer for, I don't know, a decade and a half before I did any of this evangelism stuff. Um, I can often like look in there and see, oh, you know, that the date format wasn't correctly documented or, you know, there's, there's just some, some weirdness that you need to know about some work around or yeah. That is actually honestly a bug. And then when I file that bug, I can actually use that bit of insight to say, yeah, if you look in this source file in this function, you'll notice that it's not actually doing the right thing. So in that respect, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a fascinating, uh, you know, place to, to occupy. And really for me, you know, my I'm not, I not, uh, my, uh, goals and the key results are not around revenue or anything like that. It's, it's developer success. It's, it's making you, uh, succeed at what you're trying to do Gill. Yeah. It's so important. Again, I'm going to keep beating that drum that there is something like this, again, not just for Citrix, but any of the other softwares that we touch as developers, just speaking as developer at large. I like how that first with Citrix and in your role that you're able to actually get in and get your hands dirty with it. Right. I think that's so important because there's a lot of that functionality, which might be a bug that we actually have found. And then we kind of make that assumption in our development practice. Right. So we kind of, it may not be a bug. It may just be like weird expected behavior, but sometimes we leverage that. We actually use it to our advantage. There's a lot of stuff over in Podio. It's got some quirks, but we've done it for so long that we, we not we'd like it not to be fixed. Right. Cause we've, we've pinned so much stuff against it. Um, that, that it's become a pattern for us. Uh, I don't have any specific examples off the top. I'm sure. And then the kind of thing I'm talking about, so it's like that kind of stuff that, you know, that the dev team would say, Citrix would just fix it, right? Like, oh, that's been on the list for two years now. It's time and fix it. And then it collapses all of our clients solutions. Right. Cause we've, we've made an allowance for that or even use, or even leveraged it in some cases as, as expected functionality. So it's good to have somebody that can, can see both sides of what's going on to, to address that. Uh, just use that as an example, but there's all the things that you said is, is important. What, what what's, uh, what stepped back a little bit. I want you to introduce yourself to the community. I wanted to capture that conversation because I think it was ultra interesting. Let you introduce yourself a little bit more to the community and then what's, I want to dive into what is a Citrix developer, because I know this is somewhat new to Citrix, um, and in some sense and, and what you do. So just who is that person that should be definitely engaging with you? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, uh, as you probably, you know, in, in the, uh, time we've spent chatting over the past few months, Gail, you, you will have realized that I could actually talk all day on this and many other topics. So, so I'm pat Patterson. I, uh, as I mentioned earlier, I'm director of developer evangelism, my roots go back into the, I guess the early nineties, uh, I was developing with, let's see, uh, C on dos and C plus plus, and then 16 bit windows, 32 bit windows, you know, great example of developer resources from, from that era was pet souls, programming windows. That was my Bible. Wow. And, you know, and that was, that was a great, uh, era for evangelism. You know, what, what Microsoft did in the nineties in getting developers switched onto windows and the opportunities there, uh, you know, they set a lot of people up for their careers. Um, but then, you know, Java came around, I kind of moved in that direction. Um, I was in a startup in London that was acquired by sun Microsystems in, at the height of.com madness in January, 2000 now. And I, I tell people, I served a four year sentence in product management. So it was a role that, you know, I was, I felt like a change. You know, I done the engineering stuff up to like leading a team. And I, you know, I felt like, uh, you know, I would try this out and I did it for four years and it turned out to be one of those things where I could do it, but it was really hard work and I didn't really enjoy it. So, you know, I, the opportunity came to, uh, came up to move back into engineering in a very outward facing role. So a son was working with standards organizations, uh, in the area of, uh, single sign-on back then, you know, that was the days of the, the birth of SAML to Datto, which is pretty much ubiquitous now. Um, so I, you know, I went back into engineering and then we took the decision to open source, the single sign on technology. And, uh, the director of engineering said, pat, you're good at talking to people. Um, I want you to be the open source guy. So figure out this open source stuff and be kind of the conscience of the, of the team and make sure we do things right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was definitely a little forward to them for the time. Yeah. Well, this was around the time, you know, sun, uh, acquired my sequel around that time and could see, you know, the benefits and adoption that my sequel had, you know, the, uh, the focus they'd put on enabling, uh, the user. So it was, it was pretty interesting. I mean, this is like, well, nearly 20 years ago and sun doesn't even exist. So, uh, I can, I can share this. So I was in a room with the, my SQL folks. And if you remember back in those days, there was my sequel and PostgreSQL. And if you wanted, uh, you know, free, uh, database, you picked one of those two pretty much Han uh, they would admit behind closed doors that Postgres was actually a better data store. And I would argue it remains a better data store, but they had focused on the time from clicking the download button to first selecting data from the database and making that, uh, as within 30 minutes, that was always set target, including download time. So, you know, this effort included, making sure it was in CDN. So you got a quick download and just that initial unboxing experience to get to where you can insert some data and do select star on table, and you see the data coming back and, you know, that's the on-ramp. And that's, that's really what my mission is with every I've touched getting the developer to the point where they recognize the value. So the point where that little light bulb goes on and they're like, wow, I've got this working in whatever 30 minutes, a couple of hours I followed this tutorial. I can see now that this is valuable technology and I can use this. And now I'm willing to go put the effort in and take, you know, maybe a whole day to read through properly and so on, but you've got to get them to that initial point where the light bulb goes on. Because if you, if it's super difficult just to get, as far as getting data out the first time, you're just going to pass it by, right. You're going to say, well, I tried this, I spent half an hour and it couldn't get anything working I'm done. So that's, that's, that's really the core of my role right there. I, I, I could see why you're with the workspace team specifically, um, when it comes to the, the onboarding side, it was, it's been easy for us to get people into Citrix workspace. I know there's other products as well, but I think it, it really hits home for me, this onboarding thing. I'm thinking on my feet about this. And it's, it's, it's so important for both developers and users to be able to get productive quickly. You, you want to give them that goodie as quickly as split that productivity goodie as quickly as possible so that they, they stay on for more, right? Like give them a quick win, you know, and that for free implementations and adoption, that's always important, but I've never thought about it from a, that's a great story. Cause you're like, even the download, like thinking about that whole user experience from them going to a website, clicking the download button that download, you know, thinking of the timeframe, it needs to be efficient, right? Like that was like you said, about 20 years ago. So things took a little longer to download than they do today. Uh, so, you know, trying to build that time in and go look, you can tell your boss within one hour, 30 minutes, whatever it may be, that you've actually accomplished something, right. Or you're doing this at home, it's a hobby, or you're a student you're learning. You need to be able to get to a point of that. You can hang your hat on and say, I did something, anything, right. That would at least I feel productive or I've won something in the sense that I've accomplished a task. Cause you're right. I, I was, as you were saying, I'm thinking back to myself, it's like, man, if I can, if I can't feel like I'm actually accomplishing something in about 30 minutes, I'm going to, I'll probably going to quit. Right. Because it's, so yeah. There's plenty of alternatives to check out. That's the thing, especially nowadays, you know? Yeah. It's especially now, right. It's so easy to stand up software these days that there's going to be like a zillion other competitors that are going to do, even if it's not draft that they do something similar that people will shoe horn stuff into that they can get somewhere in 30 minutes, even, even shoe warning stuff. So yeah. Thank you for that. Cause that was super enlightening and I hope our listeners caught that because probably you should do that with your implementations. Right. Doesn't have to be a whole product, but the way that you make sure people are productive in Podio and workspace and a lot of these other Citrix products quickly, probably even faster for users, right? Like you'll probably want to get them in. You want to kind of, you know, you want that to on-ramp to be like a red carpet, you know, it's just like, there is no doubt about what you have to, and this is, you know, when you look at, uh, you know, the, uh, experience you have getting to grips with the technologies and systems, even as a user, you know, where it's like, you have that kind of introduction of, okay, let's, uh, let's start you by clicking here and, you know, tools like Pendo come to mind in, like, they recognize that it's the first time you've used it. And they highlight areas of the screen that where the important stuff is. And you know, it gets you just to the point where, okay, I see how I can, I can get started and start being productive. People don't want to pay for like, learning to like our clients. Like, Hey, we want you to integrate this software and like, okay, we've never done that because there's a zillion, SAS offers lots of flavors of ice cream and they're like, well, we don't want, we don't want you to charge us for learning it. Right. And that might be reading API documentation or, or in some instances having to go in and play around with the system, everything has like workflows these days, all these different softwares that didn't now do. So, you know, you might want to do some stuff. I'm trying to think of a specific example, but basically they'll have some kind of a pre-work flow inside of it. And then, and then you want to match that up with something that we're either doing and workspace or whatever. So, but we don't know this piece of software, um, example escapes me, but I think most people can relate to, you know, the configuration or, or the workflow creation inside of a software. You've never touched before, but it's going to take it 30 minutes, you know, at best to figure it out. And the client's like, well, I don't want you to, you know, I want to pay for development time, right. Time to value, not, not for one of your employees to sit there and play with it for an hour or two. And you know, that actually, you know, I mean, we can hang this whole thing around my, you know, my, my bio, uh, you know, at, at sun when we were open sourcing, it took us about a year to get from the decision to open source that project, to having the source code publicly available because you know, this was source code that was never written with that in mind. So you can imagine there was a bit of technical debt to pay down. Uh, there were a number of developers who were keen to go in and resolve certain issues and, uh, you know, and one of the things that it, it gave us space to do was to look at that, you know, that exact experience where beforehand, you know, we'd had some awful installed program that had a bunch of information you had to provide. Half of it seemed redundant because, you know, why do I need to tell you the host name of the machine that you're running on piece of software and stuff like that. And we actually went to, um, you know, back in those days you had your app server and you could drop what was called a war file or web archive. One single, you know, is effectively a zip with a different extension in that contained your applications, uh, data. So you could drop this into, uh, GlassFish or BA uh, app server. And that's what we went to where, you know, instead of running some install program that would run around and drop files all over the file system, we said, okay, put this wall file in the app server directory, it will automatically, you know, decompress as a manifest in there that tells the app server to where to put everything. And then the first time you go to the end point, we are going to ask you the minimum set of questions, which is basically the admin password and some minimal set of information that we absolutely cannot glean from looking at the environment from the pieces and then you're up and going. And that was, that was huge. I mean, it just like completely changed it. And, and you know, that was, and that was going great guns. I, uh, 2000 and, uh, let's see, 17, we had a son had a big community day in New York and I ran a one day unconference just around that, uh, open SSO. It was called open single sign-on, any similarity to open SSL, completely unintentional coincidental. We have little, a little bit of brand recognition there. Uh, but we had the open SSO community day. Um, NYU was one of our open source users and they gave us this wonderful room in Greenwich, Greenwich village in one of their buildings. And, uh, you know, had floor to ceiling windows that looked over out over New York and they gave you the us for it. They're there for sorry. They gave it to us for that internal rate of 200 bucks for the day or whatever. Yeah. It was amazing. And the, and the NYU guy arranged the sandwiches and like we paid for them and it was a great day. Um, and, but then, you know, just, uh, sorry, not 2017. Oh my goodness. 2009. Uh, this was, and cause it was, it was St Patrick's day that's what's sticking in my head. It was March 17th, entirely coincidental that I would be in New York on St. Patrick's day. Uh, and it was like, you know, the machine was firing on all cylinders at that point, you know, and if you're not familiar, but near the audience, aren't familiar with an unconference. You basically, you invite people, you, you know, you post this event, you invite people. Um, but there is no preset agenda. You have topics that you're going to cover. And then the order of the day, the first session is, okay, let's find the agenda for the rest of the day. Who's come with, uh, something they want to talk about sometimes yeah. People come with, you know, and everybody's in the know about how this works. So some people do come with slides and the prepared presentation and, you know, off they go and, you know, it's pretty like a conference session. And then one of the, uh, audience I remember was, well, I'm just getting started with this. I saw this was on last week and I thought I'd come learn. So I'd like to propose a session where I flipped the script. And, you know, I asked you folks, uh, questions about your experience and how to get stuff working. So lots of fun, very dynamic, but, you know, as, as those of us old enough to be an enterprise software at that time, remember the Oracle acquisition happened and sun Microsystems became part of, uh, Oracle. And that was one of the technologies that, uh, was duplicated in Oracle fusion, middleware, and was shelved ultimately picked up by a startup because it was source. And there was a company called forge rock that was founded by a few, uh, sun alumni to take that forward very successfully. But, you know, I took that as an opportunity to go do something different. Um, I spent a year in the wilderness at a wild way, which was doing really interesting stuff, you know, low level kernel, uh, coding on cloud systems, but it wasn't that wasn't really my scene. And I landed after a year at Salesforce. And that's really, you know, where I learned a lot about developer evangelism about, uh, software as a service platform, as a service. And just how, you know, just so many best practices, you know, so, so many parts of the industry, best practices, what would Salesforce do? And I had a five and a half years there. And the funniest thing that was by far the biggest impact I had in five and a half years as a, as an evangelist at Salesforce was born out of what afternoon when I kind of Dreamforce was a, it's a force of nature. It's a huge conference. I think it's the biggest vendor conference now it's, uh, over a hundred thousand. These, yeah, it's, it's, it's grown way beyond the Moscone center in San Francisco. And so this was a huge production and I was part of the team that put together the developer zone. And so we used to get the next week off, you know, off the books, the VP would just say, I don't want to see or hear from you for a week. And so I'm at home, my wife's working, my kids are in school. It's Wednesday. There's all the laundry and vacuuming is done out of the way. Yeah. All on board. And I remember somebody once saying, Hmm, could you integrate Minecraft with Salesforce? Because I've been in bed, building mods for Minecraft, with my kids to, you know, make them new weapons and materials and do fun things within the game. You know, Minecraft was written in Java and a whole community had grown up around modding it. Yes. Yeah. And employees here that are Minecraft people. Oh yeah. And that afternoon, I kind of thought, well, I could pull all your accounts and contacts and opportunities out of Salesforce in a single, uh, Sokal query, Salesforce object, query language, no inter nosing and loud sheets SQL, uh, intended I'm sure. And, uh, so get all of your accounts and contacts and opportunities and render them into a dimension in Minecraft. So you could have a whole world where you, I know is influenced in this by, you know, cyberpunk fiction. So Neuromancer by William Gibson, snow crash by Neal Stephenson. Yeah. Having a building in this virtual world, her customer per account with a floor per opportunity. And you go into the building and on the wall of the room, which is your, the deal, the opportunity you're working with them, our leavers for the different states of opportunity. So prospecting negotiating, this is about, uh, six or seven all the way up to closed, won and closed lost. So, and I just hooked it up so that, you know, you call, call the API, get all of this data back, render into Minecraft. And then when you pull a switch in Minecraft, it would send the API call to Salesforce and vice versa. If you change something in Salesforce, it would flip the switch in front of your eyes in Minecraft. And you know, that, remember that I talked about pulling out the contacts, the contacts were villagers wandering around in Minecraft. And when you, if the opportunity was closed, one, one of the villages would appear and drop gold and gems. So the value of that opportunity, and this was just a bit of fun. Yeah. I got the bones of it together in about four or five hours one day. And I showed it to my boss the next week, expecting him to say, oh yeah, fun, fun, good job. You were, you know, that was your time. And he was all over it. I mean, he was like, oh, this just shows the power of the API APIs. You know, you've got to, you've got to make a YouTube recording. You've got a blog. This, you got to tweet it. I put it on YouTube. I, uh, ended up Salesforce has like an annual executive kickoff in Vegas. I ended up in Vegas, you know, doing the demo Dolly thing behind my VP, driving the mouse as he talked through this demo. And, uh, so the two things that came out one is that at the end of his, you know, this is his state of the Salesforce platform segment. And we spent the last three minutes on this and he said, well, I'm not sure you'd want to show this to the CIO and mark Benioff, who has a microphone throughout and interject just lean forward into his mic said, actually, Mike, every CIO should see this. Well, I was like behind like fist pumping. And then, and then what happened next was, uh, Salesforce. So this use this video to my day is on my personal YouTube. It's been sitting there for, what is it channel in case people want to, uh, I'll, I'll give you the link so you can put it in the show notes, but if you search YouTube for, uh, Salesforce, Minecraft, there's about two or three, uh, videos. And one of them is this one called force craft, which was the original six minute video. They actually embedded it into the Salesforce online training in Trailhead. Okay. It's now got something like 350,000 views. Oh my goodness. It's insane. And I, and you know, the next year at Dreamforce, I presented a session on the making of force craft, explaining the API APIs that I'd used and some of the implementation decisions. And so it just blows my mind in all of the work in five and a half years, I spent there of, you know, building content and tutorials and Greenforce and, you know, meetups, it's this dumb Minecraft thing. Remember before. Yeah. That's what you'll be remembered for there, but, but you know, five and a half years, I, I had a blast. I mean, it's a phenomenal place to work. Um, I really would, you know, if anybody gets a chance to work at Salesforce, I had a blast, uh, just such a, such a, you know, they really do walk the walk as well as talking to talk. We used to get, I think, six days a year off to volunteer on the clock. And if you used all those days up, Salesforce would give you a thousand dollars to donate to your non-profit of choice. Not only did they say you can do this, they said, we want you to do this. And we'll insent instead of, well, I just had our run ins with Salesforce. We've we've been on some Salesforce jobs. We haven't won any as a company. We've, we've been basically Citrix in AWS through and through. That's where we caught it. Now we do a lot of SAS softwares, but it's, it's in the name of integration. Yeah. We've done some, some light Salesforce and grays and word, but actually getting our hands in as a, as like a partner for Salesforce or implementation of a full Salesforce, just, just, hasn't been in the stars for us. We also don't actively pursue them. So there's that too. But, um, it's, it's been very interesting, especially with workspace, with intelligence, some of the things that Salesforce can provide that really fits what workspace is trying to do. Now, I know Salesforce a bit of a dirty word around our Podio developer community because they, they, well it's, I think that both of them have their place. And I think there's a wonderful place for them together, especially with the work with workspace. I think that that's really makes those two products certified, even though technically they're competing products. But I think a lot of our Podio Podio listeners, the developers on that side lose some, some bids to Salesforce and jobs. Uh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, kind of problems you can solve with the two, you know, with the two platforms I think together that they make sense when we position Podio, a lot of times, you know, there's an appropriate place for Salesforce and the cost of that. And then there's an inappropriate place for, for Citrix Podio. It, I don't think that they're, they, yes. They're competitive products in the sense that you could do the same thing on both they're vastly different in their costs. So it's it can't say that, um, that they're the, exactly the same, right? Like it'd be like a smart car and a Ferrari it's like, you know, not saying which is why, but it's, you know, they're, they're different for different reasons. You would own them for different problem solving. You know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't go spend a quarter of a million dollars on a five person Salesforce implementation, right. That's at a rodeo job it's squarely in the Podio camp where, where, you know, if you got like a 5,000 person company yet Podio, it's, it's much better for that grassroots side or going back to workspace, having Salesforce do a lot of the heavy lifting and have Podio adding kind of the extra music in the background for things that aren't appropriate. You know, maybe it's a Salesforce company, but there's a five person department that needs something ultra specific that needs to go over and Podio cause they don't want to put the budget into Salesforce for these people. Right. So we try to explain that a lot of times. And that's really when it comes to, when we deal with Salesforce, we're using Podio to augment a Salesforce implementation because a lot of business manager wants something. It is not going to provide it if they want, if they want it out, it, you know, like if you want it out of your budget, you can have it. So that means they won't spend a lot of money. So that means we would get them over to a Podio as quickly as possible. Well, not to move us on because we could probably talk about, I know you and I, we always sweat when we talk, we always get into this, but I want to make sure that we're cognizant of time. And there's some cool things I want to talk about. Let's talk about, I'll combine a few of these things what's going on with the Citrix developer community, who, who is someone that should be paying attention to this. Right. And I'll, I'll introduce this by saying that when we started as a quote unquote, Citrix developer back in 2016, and I've, I've used Podio since 2012, that's how that's how far back my Podio experience goes. I was right after the acquisition. It was just a number of months after that I ran into it. I remember the pre, uh, Globee flow or PO Podio workflow automation days before that. Um, so, so it's nice to see Citrix investing in this developer community, not from a, um, again, I'm viewing it from a Podio perspective cause we were kind of a ready-made community, but I think it's so important going forward with, with the Wrike acquisition, uh, where we're share file RightSignature has gone what, obviously with workspace. So just tell us a little bit about what's going on now, what the future holds for the developer community. So yeah, when, so when I came into, I came into Citrix, uh, at the end of June, uh, last year. And so when I was actually, you know, talking to Citrix, uh, before that, you know, interviewing it was that the, the role was very much around the micro apps, uh, you know, workspace with intelligence technology. And, uh, you know, obviously that's a, you know, that's something that it's a low code, no code kind of tool, right? You can, and it has this in common with the Salesforce platform, to a large extent, you can get a lot done without writing a lot of code, you know, just by defining your schema, you know, setting up some workflow, business rules. Um, and you know, we see this, uh, concept of the citizen developer, you know, folks that, you know, if you can put together a reasonably complex Excel spreadsheet, a few formulas and dependencies, you can probably do something with Podio or indeed with Salesforce. You know what one of the common Salesforce use cases is we're passing around, uh, uh, an XML, uh, Excel file, you know, every week to achieve this. Um, we could just put this, you know, we could just define a custom object in Salesforce and get it out, put it, put it in there. So having to, you know, coming to micro apps, it's like, well, you know, here's another low-code no-code technology, you know, you have to absolutely have to have technical knowledge. You have to know the specifics of the API that you're working with. You have to know, you know, how it's expecting you to authenticate. You have to understand concepts like rest and OAuth, but you don't have to write a lot of code to get things working. A lot of the boiler plates been pushed down. So they, uh, the micro app service now a lot of the curly brackets, right. That like curly brackets and semi-colons. Yeah, exactly. But by the time, pretty much at the same time, as you know, I was going through background check and all of that stuff, um, the emphasis was broadening within Citrix, you know, in this group that I'm part of the developer ecosystem team. And pretty much as I arrived, the focus was widening to not just that low code, no code, uh, workspace with intelligence, micro apps technology, but to recognizing the fact that, um, there a bunch of people, whole audience that relies on Citrix API APIs and SDKs of one form or another. And so, you know, and it was kind of like partly driven by it's like the same VP who was in charge of the API gateway as the, uh, you know, the micro apps evangelism. And so we actually took a step back and, you know, asked ourselves this question, what does developer mean in the context of Citrix? And I, you know, I came up with this, uh, idea of coders scripters and builders, and that's something you hear us mentioned quite often. So who does, who does are what most people think of when they hear the word developer, you know, somebody who spends all day in an Ida, maybe coding, uh, Java or C-sharp, and that's their job. They build apps, they build integrations, they just semi-colons and early breakfast, this is their life, but that's actually for Citrix, a very, very small part of our audience now, much bigger, you know, especially when, if you look across the more enterprise, uh, you know, the enterprise, uh, technology is like virtual apps and desktops and app delivery and security are the scripters. So these are people like dev ops engineers, admins, uh, maybe cloud ops where they're writing code, but it might be PowerShell or Python. And it really is a means to an end, rather than end in itself. It's, they've got a bigger problem they're solving. So they need to have repeatable deployments, maybe with infrastructure as code and they're using Terraform or Ansible, or they want to just automate, uh, repetitive tasks. And so they might spend, you know, an hour or two writing some PowerShell or Python in a day and then just move on to other things. Well, and it was to be honest, they're doing that because they want to make their lives easier. Right. Right. And, you know, it's, it's born out of laziness, a good kind of laziness. Right, right, right. But the third time you do something, you should be thinking, how can I avoid having to do this again? And, and, but the side effect is that you get to a place where you've got a repeatable process that you can know you can, uh, put into version control and parameterize, and you're saving much more than time. You know, you're, you're getting some, uh, improvements in quality there. So those are your scripters okay. That there you're a guy, leach is a great example, is like how a shell Maven, um, and you know, knows more about virtual apps and desktops than I ever will. And then, you know, rounding out the picture of the builders. So that's, you know, spoken before this is your Podio micro apps. You can produce something that, to the, you know, to the end users, I is indistinguishable from something that was maybe written in C sharp or Java, but, you know, you're drawing boxes, you know, you're drawing lines in a builder or dragging things around and setting up points. And, you know, there just, isn't a lot of actual code there. And, you know, it's, it's usually the case that you can hop out to a script when you need to. So Microsoft scripting is a great example. You can drop in some Java script to do that weird business logic thing that you need to do, but on the whole, you know, you doing, there's a lot of, um, boilerplate there that the, the, um, uh, platforms doing for you in terms of like running an OAuth authentication and, you know, adding that token to every call in the right way and all of that, it's all the stuff that doesn't really add required. Uh, you know, security is absolutely necessary, but it doesn't add in the business value, especially when you like with a builder, you might be a non-technical person. Yeah. Right. So why do they care about OAuth? They're they're literally like, look, I got to do this report on day and I'm tired of, you know, it takes me two hours and tired of doing it. Exactly. And, and so that's, you know, that's the segmentation, yeah. Know, use a marketing term, that's the segmentation. And, and, you know, when you're talking to those three different personas, so more marketing jargon, but, you know, I think we can infer what I'm talking about. You have to have to talk in different language and use different, you know, different messages to appeal to them, even different iconography. You know, you don't want to use propeller caps and get gear symbols with, uh, with builders that are, you know, they're much more, uh, you know, focused on the problem they're solving rather than the technology they're using to solve it with right now. And I think that this is something, let me, let me throw this out at you. I think as the technologies, there's just general populous literacy when it comes to computing and even what programming is, right. That there's going to be more and more builders that, and, and, and building kind of gets people into scripting, which kind of gets some people, you know, a portion of those people move on to actual switching over to coding, right. Actual development. So it's, for us, it's been interesting because we have almost, everyone comes either through college or high school to, to hear at brick bridge and they're taking these classes and it's nothing but semi-colons and curly brackets and they hate it. Right. It's like trying to learn English or, or learning a language right. For the first time, but studying APA style or Chicago style rule, right. Like why don't you just have fun and write a paper before we start having to figure out what the MLA format is? And what we found is using Podio and workspace with intelligence, and now writing, it's been wonderful to put these in front of people that aspiring to be, but let's be honest, they're builders first. Right. You know, and it's, it's cool because they get interested in the scripting and then the full on coding because they get results from building, right. Because you can, you put the builder in front of them. And as we talked about earlier, within a half hour, they can, they can have a text message send out using Podio and audio workflow automation. And they're like, that's really cool. I was like, okay, well, what's make the problem a little harder. Now you have to do a little scripting. Right. You gotta use a little JavaScript or something. Then you make the problem a little bit harder. Okay. Now they're going to dive in the C sharp. And then we get into the semi-colons and curly brackets later. Right. Instead of starting out with it, when I took, I took C plus plus, uh, back in 1999, 2008 myself a little bit, um, at turbo Pascal, before that, that was my first kind of programming language. Uh, anybody I knew we were the last class that they taught of that because it was well dead when they were teaching us turbo. Um, anyway, you know, we started directly with the semi-colons and, you know, half the class classes lost right. Were 18, 17, 18 year olds, this, uh, high school. And it's just like, no one, no, 1999, 2000, like nobody knows what the stuff is. Right. And they're just going straight at it. And it took me the entire school year to come up with something that actually worked correctly. And it was just excruciating, I quit development because of that, because was just so excruciating to get through the syntax. I just, I got into website development because I could click and drag the Wiziwig editors. Right. And I could get results in a half hour. So I, I did HTML development for a very long time. Yeah. I mean, my kids did a scratch, you know, just dragging those boxes around too. And you learn loops and Confort control flow and all of that just, and it's easy to visualize what's happening and you're making the little cat dance around and it's, you know, the problem you're solving has to be relevant to you to actually make the investment of effort to progress. And I think, you know, you're onto something there with, you know, starting people with, you know, okay, let's, let's send a text, you know, I can, I can send it to my own phone and see it happening. And it seems pretty cool. I'm doing that, you know, from here rather than typing it out on another phone and kind of work up from there. And it's, you know, I talk a lot about this, um, you know, building bridges from where people are to where you want them to be. You know, everybody is on that little islands of what they know, and you can't just say, Hey, I'm over on this cool island over here doing magic stuff with rest, APA API is in the cloud and you can't expect people over on the, you know, still filling in boxes, in a configuration form from a runbook PDF to come over and join you. You've got to actually go to the effort of making that bridge and then leading them across to say, okay, I see what you're doing now. Let's do like a little simple example, just like, does that thing you do every day, but, uh, you know, on a schedule, so you don't have to go do it. You can't start from, okay, let's talk about endpoints. Let's talk about URL. It doesn't lose you. You tend to lose people. We like it. So when, when they do client work for us here, uh, these are brand new. Sometimes, you know, this is their, it's almost always their first job in technology with our, like our high school team. It was the very first time that they even looked at code outside of just messing around with what they did at the house. Right. I just, and these are 16, 17, 18 year olds. That hobby hobbyist would be a really high, but what we do is we give them these no code, low code tools, and then just amplify the problem. So they get results, but every single time, okay, great. You got results on that. Let's move the problem up a notch. And then it gets them. Then they get to the point. Cause we already have Jude who is on our recent hackathon entry. He's doing C-sharp workforce already. And I knew a little bit, he dabbled just a little bit just to be under understood, but we've been able to increase the intensity of the problem first workspace, and then into Podio a little bit. We usually, we do Podio first, but just because of the hackathon, that kind of the way that it worked out and now he's into C-sharp because it's important for him to understand the intensity of the problem that's going forward. So one of the single that we flow and then he's, he's moved on from there. So it's, it's a really nice flight path because he can understand why the curly braces and the semicolons matter. Right. But still get results before you have to go through that intensity. And you know, he'll also be able to have a better idea of how to pick the appropriate tool for the job rather than, you know, having a hammer and seeing every problem as a neighbor. Yes. Well, I know that we could go on forever and I know we both have a hard stop here, so I want you to take the time to talk about what you got a couple events coming up. I want to make sure that you get a plug for that, and we will have links and more things in the show notes. We always fill those out. So, uh, w what's wrapped with this, w we gotta have you back on what you and I can go for. My pleasure. Absolutely. I could. Yeah, I could all day long. Have you talked to Jordan Fleming? Have you been, have you seen his podcast? Not yet, but I am writing his name down, right? Yeah. So it's him and I do our, the, uh, I should say his company and brokerage bridge here, but we're, we're the two hosts. Um, I think you would love talking with him as well. Him and I get going like this. Well, so let's give a plug and, uh, we'll wrap it from here. Okay. So yeah, we've got actually two events coming up, uh, in the world of Citrix developers. So, uh, on the 22nd of July, we are running our sec, second Citrix developer focus. So this is a half day event. Uh, so three technical sessions we'll run, uh, some kind of hackathon there. We're still figuring that out, but, uh, it's aimed at the Americas. So it starts at 1:00 PM. Eastern time goes on till 5:00 PM. And like I said, there'll be a bit of an intro three. Uh, I think we're talking about some[inaudible] topics we're talking about. We actually having a brick bridge to talk about the Spotify. What is it going to pat her on back, but we will be, we're going to talk about Spotify. And then, uh, we have, I think Joe shank from the Citrix CTP community, talking about, uh, Ansible and networking. So, you know, getting pretty in the weeds there. So, uh, yeah, you'll find the link in the show notes there. And then the, the big one will be, uh, October 26th to 28th, and that will be Citrix converge. So we're actually going to open up the call for proposals, uh, I think next week. So yeah, pay attention. I'll, uh, I'll give Gil the, uh, all the links to our Twitter and LinkedIn. So you can keep up with everything we're talking about, and there will be plenty of workspace with intelligence, micro apps, Podio, Wrike content converts. In fact, there'll be an entire conference track dedicated work solutions technology. Fantastic. Well, I'll tell you what we might try to catch up with you closer to convert so that we can, perhaps anytime you're like, girl, this is, I literally, I get paid for doing this kind of thing. It's fantastic. Well, thank you so much, pat. Uh, it's been an absolute pleasure and, uh, we'll talk again here shortly. Likewise, I'm looking forward to it. Thanks Gill. Thank you. Have a good one. Cheers. Thank

You so much for listening to today's interview. I hope that the guest that we had was engaging. We'd love to have you on listener. Please reach out to us. You can reach out to us through any of our social media properties, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, many others. You can also hit us back with a email or message Podio chat service@brickbridgeconsulting.com. Love to have you on. We were all years on interesting topics that, uh, anything that is Citrix, uh, and not just their SAS offerings, got some episodes coming up that are going to be related to virtualization in the future. We also have our webinar. That's coming up on July 29th. If you're listening to this in 2021, that's July 29th, 2021. Love to see you all there. You can register at brick B R I C K, bridge B R D G. consulting.com. Thanks again for your listen. Hope to see you back on our next episode.