Pardon Our Dust: Bringing THWACKcamp to You — SolarWinds TechPod 085

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Get a peek behind the scenes of THWACKcamp, the free virtual learning event for SolarWinds customers. Hosts Chrystal Taylor and Sean Sebring talk to THWACKcamp Executive Producer Matt Murray about the extensive preparation, creativity, and deep knowledge that goes into this year’s “love letter” to the THWACK community.  © 2024 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved RELATED LINKS:
Chrystal Taylor

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Sean Sebring

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We’re Geekbuilt.® Developed by network and systems engineers who know what it takes to manage today's dynamic IT environments, SolarWinds has a deep connection to… Read More

Episode Transcript

Announcement:

Time is running out, THWACKcamp on April 17th and 18th is calling your name. It’s a free two-day virtual extravaganza with insights from IT professionals and thought leaders. You’ll have the opportunity to boost your IT expertise, connect with industry minds, and win big.

 

Chrystal Taylor:

Welcome to SolarWinds TechPod, I’m your host, Chrystal Taylor, and with me as always is my co-host, Sean Sebring. Today, we want to take an inside look at our annual free virtual event, THWACKcamp. To help us illuminate the process, preparation, and work that goes into making this wonderful event a success is Matt Murray, producer of THWACKcamp. Matt, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Matt Murray:

Sure. Hi, thank you for having me. My name’s Matt, I’ve worked for SolarWinds for about 10 years now. In that time, I have worked on producing eight THWACKcamps along the way, so this is my eighth time and this time I’m steering the ship. It’s been an adventure starting from scratch and now learning all about THWACKcamp and SolarWinds and now leading the whole initiative.

Chrystal Taylor:

Now, to give us a little bit of color, for anyone out there who doesn’t know what THWACKcamp is because that’s a word that doesn’t make sense if you don’t know what we’ve got going on, and for clarification, this will be the 11th THWACKcamp, so you having been a part of that many is really significant. You’ve had a hand in it from the beginning, even if you haven’t been fully steering the ship. I think it’s important to illuminate what exactly is THWACKcamp and why is it called that?

Matt Murray:

THWACKcamp is our annual customer event where we focus on learning, so how to get a little bit better at using SolarWinds tools, how to think about the industry and the things that are changing out there, the exciting new stuff that’s coming up. We try to have a lot of fun and try to make it educational and useful at the same time.

Chrystal Taylor:

Yeah, absolutely. For anyone who doesn’t know where THWACK comes from, it is our community platform. Our community site is called THWACK, so THWACKcamp came from the community site. It’s really, as we like to refer to it internally, a love letter to the community. It’s our way of giving back to our community for all of the help that they give each other and to us as well throughout the year. Being able to give a little bit back in the form of education and fun and prizes, because there are prizes too, is something that we love to get to do.

Sean Sebring:

I like to think of it as a con.

Chrystal Taylor:

A con, as in convention, not a con as in…

Sean Sebring:

Okay, touche. Very good clarification there. Thank you. As a convention, con, so your favorite video game company, or in this case, your favorite IT software company. Then you as the consumers of said game, or in this case, the tools that you’re using to support your organizations. You get to go hang out with the developers, with the engineers, the people who build and design, and in this case, support you on that community. It’s a really cool way to just kind of engage with some of the stuff that you work with every day.

Chrystal Taylor:

You brought up the people that you engage with, so there’s quite a lot of people that are involved in making this event happen. Well, let’s start with the ones who are going to be on camera, the people that you’re going to see at THWACKcamp, which by the way is happening April 17th and 18th, 2024.

Matt Murray:

We were lucky enough to get three different customers to come join us and talk about their experience this time. We’re very excited that we got three. We got one customer who is using SolarWinds Service Desk and another customer who’s using our database tools and another one who is actually using SolarWinds Observability Platform. Very excited that we were able to get them on board.

Chrystal Taylor:

That leaves, I think 18 internal speakers, so people like me and Kevin Sparenberg and Sean will be there with all the bells on to talk to people live in the chat as well. Keeping on customer speakers for a moment, I think that what’s really interesting for me that we get to be able to talk to them about how they’re using this every day. We work at SolarWinds, so obviously, we know about the products and we use them on a regular basis, but it’s very different using them in the real world and being able to talk to them and have them showcase what they’re doing and how they’re using things for. Because we sometimes work very inside the box, and so they have more of an idea of like, oh, I needed to figure out a solution for this specific use case and let’s figure out how to do that separately. That happens all the time on THWACK. Being able to share those stories and give them a little bit of visibility is always really nice and it’s genuinely lovely to talk to them.

Matt Murray:

It was cool to meet Jeremy Mayfield who was a THWACK MVP and been a SolarWinds user for a long time and he has gone through the whole journey. Now he’s director of IT. He used to have a whole bunch of on-prem devices that he was managing and now it’s 100% cloud. It was really cool to hear his story.

Sean Sebring:

It’s also cool because it represents the journey of SolarWinds and the different products they’ve offered, and as an organization, I wouldn’t say transitioning, but adopting cloud into the portfolio as well. As part of his journey, he journeyed at the same pace with SolarWinds moving towards, okay, well, obviously, this industry is moving towards cloud, so he is now in an organization that’s adopting cloud only for their technology. It’s great that SolarWinds was able to keep pace with that because if we weren’t heading in that direction, then Jeremy wouldn’t have been able to stick with SolarWinds. It’s just cool to see that our customers are on a journey, and as a software development company, we’re on the same trajectory as them.

Chrystal Taylor:

We’ve talked a bit about the who’s going to be there. Obviously, people who are going to be there are going to be other customers and people who are looking at maybe SolarWinds and don’t know if they want to buy it and they’re looking to learn more about it, and all of those people will be in the chat and the chat is a lively place. If you have not attended a THWACKcamp before, it is a lively, very fun place. Let’s talk about all of the people behind the scenes that it takes to get this thing off the ground because we’ve been working on this now for about six months, and by the time THWACKcamp gets here, it’ll be closer to nine months of us making this thing happen. Tell us a little bit about what kind of effort goes into that and how many teams are involved, really.

Matt Murray:

It’s an enormous effort. We started working on this, I want to say back in August, something like that, and it’s going to finally air in April. I’ve had over a hundred meetings about THWACKcamp along the way. We have 13 sessions, so each session has a discovery phase where you don’t really know what the story is and you go out and you start talking to people and try to figure out what you’re going to talk about. Then once you make it through that discovery phase and okay, I think that we have a good idea, we have a good starting point now. Then there’s a series of script outline sessions where we get into the details a little bit more and then there’s a dry run phase and then there’s the recording phase and all that kind of stuff. I have four producers who work with me on each of these sessions.

Chrystal Taylor:

Well, and the story sometimes changes. We have started with an idea and it was a really good idea and then all the way through until you’re doing recording, something will happen and someone will have a thought while you’re recording and it just takes off into a whole other direction than you were planning to. It’s still a really good story, and I think I noticed that you stopped at recording, but that isn’t where the work stops, so I feel like you have to illuminate a little bit more what happens after recording.

Matt Murray:

There’s a lot of work that goes in post. We like to tighten everything up so that it’s really punchy and the timing works really well for our viewers. Then there’s music and animation and all kinds of stuff that goes into this.

Sean Sebring:

I was going to ask, this is your full-time job, just THWACKcamp. That’s the only thing you’re working on.

Matt Murray:

I also work on product videos and major advertisement campaigns and things like that for the company. I work for the marketing department. We have the privilege to work for a really smart audience, so the people that I’m trying to talk to are trying to solve a specific problem already. I’m not trying to sell anybody anything that they don’t need.

Sean Sebring:

When you bring up an interesting point that while you work for the marketing department, and we are a sales company, and so when you think marketing, you think targeting to a sales perspective. With a project like this, and this is kind of something you’ll do in addition to your normal marketing role, like you said, making product videos. These are from a different perspective, this is from the perspective of a customer already in the shoe that we tried to sell them. It’s cool, like you said, to be able to be creative and think like the customer thinks and meet them at that level, which is again, what I think is great about THWACK in general is that’s where the user is, is on THWACK, and so we get to make this from their perspective.

Chrystal Taylor:

Certainly, the goal is education not sales like it is for other marketing efforts.

Matt Murray:

Exactly, and that’s why I think that out of all the things that we do, THWACKcamp is the hardest thing to do, but it’s also the best thing. It really is community-based. We’re not trying to sell anybody anything.

Chrystal Taylor:

Matt, as a producer, and I know you said you had a couple of other producers that help out as well. What exactly does a producer do for a THWACKcamp session?

Matt Murray:

It depends on the session. Some of them I guide myself all the way through the recording process, and then sometimes the producer gets involved to put a creative spin on whatever presentation we’re working on, like try to figure out what the next thing is that needs to be done.

Chrystal Taylor:

As a speaker, when we are doing recording and even before we go into recording, the producers add that creative flair or they add in a like, well, is there maybe a way you can say it in a different way because it doesn’t sound quite right or it’s not flowing very well? That effort to make this event engaging and still informative, because we’re technical presenters, so sometimes we get in the weeds a bit and maybe it’s not so engaging anymore or maybe we’re missing a point where we’re needing to tighten it up or whatever the case may be.

Chrystal Taylor:

We only have a certain amount of time, so we need to make sure that we’re getting all of the information possible across. You guys add that in there, and then not to say that we can’t ever be creative, but I think it starts the flow. What you guys are very good at, I think, is bringing the humanism back into the room when you’re trying to record these things. It’s okay, we’ve got a few minutes. That’s the benefit of doing recorded over live as well, is like if you don’t like the way you said a certain thing or you made a mistake or you went too far in your presentation ahead and you have to go back or whatever the case may be, you can make those changes as you go.

Matt Murray:

We try to just give our presenters as much time as they need, encourage them to come out of their shell. Sometimes it takes a little while.

Sean Sebring:

I think it’s funny because you can have somebody that you had the greatest conversation with about a topic, even the one you’re going to have the session on, and then as soon as they see that little red record button, everything mentally changes for them and now they’re struggling or they’re nervous and it’s again, from the producer side, it’s good to be able to remind them that, hey, we’re just having a conversation. It’s just the same conversation we already had. This time, it’s just being stashed in a hard drive somewhere, so no pressure.

Matt Murray:

I like to remind them that there’s a reason that we invited them to present at THWACKcamp and that’s because they’re an expert at this stuff.

Chrystal Taylor:

One of the fun things to see and know that you’ve done this for me as well is when you tease out a little bit more of a story that’s part of that changing storyline as well where something more interesting may come out or something that is needing to be informed in this episode. Like, maybe we didn’t think of it earlier, but it actually is really relevant to the conversation we want to have and we like to say that you’ve probably learned quite a bit about the software by osmosis at this point. You’ve never worked in an IT role, a standard IT role, right?

Matt Murray:

That’s right, but I’ve learned a lot about the products. A lot of the stuff that I’ve learned is actually from THWACKcamp. For a while, I was just kind of an editor and then I was a producer. After a while, I was reviewing all of the other producers’ THWACKcamp episodes, so I would end up watching them four times. What sounds like gibberish whenever you start working here, now all of a sudden, I understand.

Sean Sebring:

What a cool way to have gotten complimentary webinars basically from experts on topics that many people might pay for. Having not been an IT professional, you’ve gained so much IT professional knowledge just through observing it over and over and editing and seeing the different perspectives from different presenters on the same topic. Really, cool perspective.

Matt Murray:

It really is, and some of the people that I get to work with are so incredibly smart.

Sean Sebring:

Thank you.

Chrystal Taylor:

I didn’t want to assume he was talking about us.

Sean Sebring:

Clearly. This year is short so far, but what could you say you’ve learned this year?

Matt Murray:

I guess one of the simple things that I learned is backups, is one of the things that’s super important for databases because they tend to break sometimes and then whenever they break, it’s catastrophic. Everybody’s like, “The application is down, the database is down.” Make sure to practice running backups and know exactly the entire process. Don’t wait until there’s a catastrophe happening to figure out how to back up a database or restore a database. I don’t know if I’ll ever manage a database, but that one stuck with me because it seems like a no-brainer, but I never thought of that.

Sean Sebring:

At least you have a foundational piece of knowledge in case you do, where to start with a backup.

Chrystal Taylor:

I think that advice is good advice no matter really what you’re doing. I think it’s Karen Lopez who says that your backups are only as good as your restores. If you don’t test your restores and the whole process that it takes to recover from that. No matter what you’re doing, let’s say it’s video footage, let’s say it’s your game save files. If the cloud save isn’t working and you don’t have a localized backup, well, you might have lost all your progress, for instance. Your backups are only as good as your restores. If you can’t restore the backup, then you’re in as much trouble as if you didn’t have any backup.

Sean Sebring:

Even in other tools, it’s true. Sometimes you go in to make some configuration changes and if you don’t hit the save button before you close the page or the application, or if the blue screen of death hits, then it makes sense if the database is 90% of what the organization is running off of, then that thing better be backed up.

Chrystal Taylor:

For my part, because I learn something every year too, but for my part this year I learned more in the security session that we have than I’ve learned in any THWACKcamp previously because security is not a thing that I deal with. As a user, I have to deal with security on a regular basis, but from that perspective of what goes into all of these processes and protocols and everything that get rolled out, I think that was the most interesting conversation I have ever been a part of, period, not just this THWACKcamp. I think that was just so interesting to sit there and listen to experts and people who work on this every day about all of what goes into implementing security protocols and changes and all of this stuff in a global company was mind-blowing.

Matt Murray:

That was a really cool conversation. I’m just so glad that I ran into Josh one time. He’s a red team ethical hacker for SolarWinds. We were doing an all-hands meeting. I was part of the crew helping set up cameras and things like that and Josh was going to be a presenter to talk about some security stuff and I was like, “You’re going to be a presenter at THWACKcamp now because this is a cool story right here.” I can just tell right away that he was going to have an interesting perspective on things.

Sean Sebring:

That’s another cool thing about your role is knowing that THWACKcamp will eventually be right around the corner. You can always be just conscious of listening to a cool story and being like, wow, that would actually make a great story to tell at THWACKcamp and just being able to spot recognize. I’m sure I can speak for this personally, the people on the other side of that invitation are very excited that someone was interested in their story. It’s a really cool opportunity to share something that you were passionate about. In theory, everyone in this community is passionate about their IT. It’s just cool to be able to focus on looking at cool stories all the time.

Chrystal Taylor:

It is exciting to be a part of. As a person who’s attended THWACKcamp every year since its inception, when I got to be a part of it the first time, I was way excited. My excitement is still there, but it’s not as crazy as excited as it was the first time, I think.

Matt Murray:

I think that this year is going to be really solid. We had the opportunity to just make it whatever we want. We selected topics and presenters that people will be interested in.

Chrystal Taylor:

Who’s involved in the selection process?

Matt Murray:

The three of us, you, me and Kevin Sparenberg, we were like a three-headed THWACKcamp monster.

Chrystal Taylor:

For Kevin and I, THWACKcamp is an exciting thing that we get to do and we’re super passionate about making sure that the content is going to be something that the community wants to get. It’s very important to us that it is an educational event and we are covering as many bases as possible in the timeframe that we have and we have the best speakers for the job. I was a very big part of getting those customer speakers and it was very exciting for me to be able to say we could have three customer speakers. It’s like you said earlier, we had customer speakers in the past, but usually, we can’t have very many of them. It’s very hard to coordinate schedules because obviously, THWACKcamp is not their full-time job. Sometimes SolarWinds monitoring and observability stuff, it’s not even their full-time job. They have a million other things that they’re doing. This is just one small part of it. Arranging all of that stuff is a bear sometimes, so it’s nice to be able to have three customer speakers this year and be very excited about that.

Sean Sebring:

I don’t know if I can say what I learned this year, but I’m going to do it anyway. It’s not necessarily something I learned this year, it’s kind of an appreciation. The THWACK missions, man, and the reason this is echoing for me right now is because the way we just talked about Matt’s exposure to so much IT knowledge just through osmosis, but this is a THWACK community. It’s a free community and you can just show up there, participate in THWACK missions, observe experts have problems, and then other experts help solve those problems. What a wealth of knowledge, man. Again, this is a gift back to the community because those missions are something that we develop and we put out there. While you don’t get a certificate you can put on your desk, you learned something from that mission, completing a THWACK mission, and you got points.

Sean Sebring:

It’s just such a cool thing putting out there, a gamification in the community to help drive education. I just think that that’s so cool. I know Chrystal, you’re so big into education and I’m like, man, what a cool thing that is free. It’s just out there in the community. Go talk to other nerds like yourself and talk about products and learn about a new product that you don’t touch today but you think you might be interested in messing with, if that’s the direction of your career path. It’s just really cool. Again, since Matt came from non-IT, he’s exposed to all this stuff. I’m like, anybody can just start learning if they wanted to.

Chrystal Taylor:

You should always be learning, that’s my philosophy, always be learning something. I’m going to switch gears a little bit. What is going to be live versus what is prerecorded and what does that mean for the audience?

Matt Murray:

Sure. Hopefully, we’ll have you and Kevin in the studio live. We have a video studio there at SolarWinds and a switcher so we can send out a live stream. We’re going to chat live with the audience and then we’ll have live gift giveaways and like session recaps and fun stuff like that to interact with the audience. The last session on day two, we’re talking about community.

Chrystal Taylor:

We are going to be talking about the community in that session and it will be live. Kevin and I will have a good time and we’ll probably make some mistakes because that’s what happens when you’re live, is you flub sometimes and that’s okay. We’re there to have a good time. I think that it’s really important to me to emphasize that our speakers, our presenters, are going to be active in the chat during their sessions and some of them even the whole time during the event. If you have questions come up, those are the people to ask the questions about their session. They’re going to be there and we’re going to have other experts on as well. I think it’s really important, and I’m sure our MVP community will also show up in force like they always do to help answer questions in the chat.

Chrystal Taylor:

When we’re doing our live session, I’m not going to be able to answer any questions in the chat during the session or during the live breaks, that’s not going to be a thing that I can do. That’s a benefit to doing the prerecorded. Other than the other benefits we already mentioned of being able to edit out mistakes and flubs and make sure it’s engaging, and aside from that, any other thing that you’re doing like if you have to wait for it to finish, I know we’re going to be showcasing some product features and that might include adding something in. We can’t show things like passwords and all of those things that you can’t show if we were doing it live would be a much bigger challenge, I think then it would be a lot of cutaways to camera I guess when you can’t show things.

Sean Sebring:

In these sessions, since we’re trying to squeeze in as much education as we can, there’s just a lot of benefit to some of the stuff being prerecorded. I think Matt said something previously, and you can expand on this, Matt, that we get to just focus on getting you what you want versus if we tangentially veer off in a live, we can’t just say, whoops, that conversation didn’t go where we thought it was going to go.

Matt Murray:

At the same time, there’s value in just being open to exploring new ideas that you didn’t really think about. There’s a little bit of both, like having that structure and idea what you want to accomplish. Then sometimes just depending on your presenter, they might go this way and that’s fine as long as what they’re talking about is still in the spirit of THWACKcamp and that’s great, I love it. Maybe we can get back on topic at some point, but maybe not and maybe that’s okay.

Sean Sebring:

I have an analogy and story real quick for that, because the way we’re describing it now, it just clicked for me, is theater versus film. I was a theater kid in my school years and if something happened veering from the script, you can’t really just pause when you’re on stage. You don’t have that option. We were performing, me and my best friends, we happened to be some lead roles in a play together, and my best friend was Snidely Whiplash, I think was his name. This was like a Dudley Do-Right play, and it was called Tied to the Tracks. He was the villain and I’m the hero, Sheriff Billy Bold.

Sean Sebring:

I’m the hero with a cowboy hat and a vest on, and he’s the snake oil-selling, mustache-twirling bad guy. In the last scene of the play when we’re in our fight, I throw my fake punch at him and the glue holding his fake twirly mustache comes off, and so his mustache is dangling in front of his mouth. To keep the show going and keep it entertaining for the audience, he just ripped it off and threw it on the ground to make a scene of, how dare you punch my mustache off, and then we continued our brawl. It was just a really good interpretation of exactly what you said, which is sometimes you didn’t know that that funny punchline should have been there, but it was really funny.

Chrystal Taylor:

I should have you talk to my son, Sean. He’s doing a group project called Odyssey of the Mind, and part of it is an eight-minute performance that they have to do. Watching these 13-, 14-year-olds struggle, it’s an effort. They’re learning that process of like, you can’t just stop, you have to keep going. That is the hardest thing for me. If I say it live, it might haunt me forever. I have a thing that does that and every time I have to present live, I think don’t say that, that was dumb.

Chrystal Taylor:

That time that you did it, it was real dumb and it sticks in my head ever since. I talked to someone about it not that long ago and they were like, “You know, probably no one else remembers that you said that thing.” I’m like, “Yeah, I know.” In my head, I’m like, “Don’t ever say something that dumb again.” Every time I have to present, I think of this one time that I said something real dumb and it was live and it was a technical presentation and I was just like, oh, great. That’s in my head forever. It’s going to bother me forever.

Sean Sebring:

Yeah, here’s the kicker, was the live session recorded?

Chrystal Taylor:

It was, but no one has ever mentioned it. It only bothered me.

Sean Sebring:

No, it’s still permanently out there. It’ll haunt you forever, Chrystal. The end.

Chrystal Taylor:

Yeah. We have hinted at a little bit that we have fun and there’s some creativity that goes into this event. Can you give us a little bit of a preview of some of the fun creative elements that we’re going to see at THWACKcamp this year?

Matt Murray:

We have a guest presenter on THWACKcamp this year named Homer, doubles as Killa DBA, is his alias, and he writes rap songs about databases. They’re both hilarious and informative and awesome and cheesy. We got Homer to write a custom theme song for THWACKcamp for us this year. As well as being a presenter in a session, I’m super excited about that.

Chrystal Taylor:

I know we normally do, if anyone who has attended THWACKcamp in the past, we have breaks besides the live breaks, there’s a coffee break and that kind of thing during. Usually, in the past, we have played some of our fun videos that are usually very short and were used for social media for something or another, and we have lots of those. In which case, for most people that don’t know, our multimedia team often is featured in these videos. Now that I know people behind the scenes nowadays, I’m like, I see a video that I’ve seen before a million times, and I’ll be like, “I know that person.” Those little fun, creative bits, and they’re highly requested every year, I’m sure will make another appearance because they can. I think there’s even a playlist out there on our YouTube channel if you wanted to experience those little fun videos.

Matt Murray:

There’s hundreds of silly videos. Also, we always get so many comments about the music playlist. In the run-up to the show starting, we usually run 30 minutes of silly songs. They’re amazing.

Sean Sebring:

If it’s a really good playlist, that’s memorable, but if it’s a terrible playlist, that’s even more memorable. I know people who will remember a terrible playlist and that means that the knowledge probably stuck with them more too because they just remember that session and how terrible the song was beforehand. It’s an important element to putting a camp like this together.

Chrystal Taylor:

It’s great. I think it has a lot of 80s influence in the tracks that will play up. Usually, they’re kind of 80s influenced songs, but they’re very fun. All right, well, then I’ll ask the last question, which is a fun question. Which session are we each most excited for?

Matt Murray:

Silos Are for Grain is a fantastic session, it gets quite technical. I really like that whenever we get deep into the demo and stuff like that. Then BLOOP. Oh Great, Another #$@!% Alert! That one’s awesome because of the evolution of the functionality, talking about anomaly detection and alert reduction and things like that. Both of those are I think great super interesting sessions.

Chrystal Taylor:

I haven’t seen it yet, but the Silos Are for Grain one, I imagine is going to be great because it’s Cheryl and Kevin. For those out there, Cheryl Nomanson is one of our SolarWinds Academy trainers, so she is an excellent candidate for teaching you things about our products. It’s her whole job and she’s wonderful at it, and I think that that session probably is going to be really good.

Sean Sebring:

Well, my favorite session is going to be Homer’s rap song. I just found out about it today, decided it’s going to be my favorite session and can’t wait to hear it. My creative side is heavily influenced by others’ creativity, and I’m like, “Man, I bet I could make a fun song or rap or even a limerick now that I’m here in Ireland about ITSM.” I’m like, that’s just such a fun spin to put on it and make it so much more entertaining to be relatable, making it into a song. I’m super-pumped for that. I can’t wait to hear it.

Chrystal Taylor:

Well, I’m now waiting for your release to happen, so I’ll be expecting that. My favorite session, as Matt mentioned, is the Playing 4D Chess: a Modern IT Security Story. I hinted at it earlier talking with Josh Vanhoose and Noel Barbee about implementing security controls company-wide and all the process it takes to do that. It’s super interesting. It’s not really something that we’ve done before where we got to have this broader security conversation. I really enjoyed talking to them and getting to hear about their day-to-day work and what that looks like and what it looks like for our company. Also, there’s a layer of interest there because they work for SolarWinds. Me, being able to hear about how they’ve implemented controls that I do know, I experienced working with the teams to implement those things as a user and hearing the whole process. Those guys are great. I like talking to them anytime I get a chance to. They’re wonderful. They’re very gregarious, but they clearly are very passionate about the work that they do and lifting up others in the IT department here, and I applaud that all day every day.

Sean Sebring:

Now, I have a favorite line from this that included gregarious, love a cool fun word thrown in there, thank you, Chrystal.

Chrystal Taylor:

That’s what I’m here for.

Sean Sebring:

Matt, this was awesome. Even working for SolarWinds and being part of the THWACK community myself, these things feel like they just happen and clearly, they don’t. There’s so much work into it. There’s even a joke in there about this being your baby that took nine months to come to fruition, as we’ve mentioned throughout the episode. A ton of work, a ton of things to consider. A lot of effort put into it, and I think it’s actually one of the coolest things that it’s both live and recorded. The day of, you can think about all the anticipation that the folks that are in the recorded session that they have waiting for their session to air so that they can chat with the community about it. Then as well as our amazing hosts, Chrystal and Kevin, to be there live to kick off the event for us. It’s been really great gathering some insights from you, Matt, and I appreciate it.

Matt Murray:

Thank you, Sean. It’s great to have you. I’m excited about your session as well. I think there’s a couple of things that I want to pick your brain about on that session, so I’ll get in touch with you.

Sean Sebring:

Good. I’ll be there.

Chrystal Taylor:

Always continuing learning. Well, if you’d like to join us live for this event, it’s April 17th and 18th, and you can register now at thwackcamp.com. Thank you, listeners, for joining us on another episode of SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Chrystal Taylor, joined by fellow host, Sean Sebring. If you haven’t yet, make sure to subscribe and follow for more TechPod content. Thanks for tuning in.