Manifold Blogcast 001: Should designers learn container orchestration?
Welcome to episode #1 of our blogcast. A blogcast is the blend of blog + podcast. The blogcast is something new we are trying out, so let us know what you think.
We’re giving you the option on how you want to take in this interview. You can watch our Zoom call on Youtube, just listen on Soundcloud or read about it here on Medium. Find out what goes on behind the fold when it comes to creating these technical posts.
Jelmer is the author of the posts we’re talking about in these interviews. Meg did all the graphics and animations. I’m just here to ask the questions. So onto the interview!
Jelmer: So questions, hey? Go for it.
Meg: Margaret, kick us off.
Margaret: Let’s see how this goes. Okay, so you guys have worked together on two posts now where Meg does the images and Jelmer does the content so I guess we’ll start off by saying what your roles are here at Manifold.
Jelmer: Oh okay, I need to start, right? Oh yeah, cool.
Margaret: Yeah.
Jelmer: Yeah, so I’m an engineer at Manifold. I’m focusing on operations experience at the moment in our squad OX and that involves making integrations for Terraform and Kubernetes, and especially in the past few months, we’ve been focusing hard on Kubernetes integration, making sure people can use their credentials with Kubernetes, but also some exciting new bits that we’ll not talk about in this bit but another time. Yeah, that’s me. How about you, Meg?
Meg: I am a designer at Manifold. I kind of work across product, marketing, and I am responsible for doing a few design activities, so I am designing things inside of the product, both illustrations for the product and actual product design and I also do a lot of illustrations for blog posts and stuff and that’s how I’ve been involved with doing the Kubernetes posts.
Margaret: Cool. So Meg, what did you know about Kubernetes before you started doing graphics for the blog?
Meg: I knew a little bit about it. James had done a lunch and learn on it where I got stuck at a few spots but I understood sort of broadly that it was a container management system and I didn’t really know too much about containers either but I knew sort of very top level what they did and why they were good to use. That’s about it.
Margaret: And Jelmer, what did you know about design?
Jelmer: I know fonts were a thing. I know that there’s Photoshop and stuff like that but my design skills are very poorly — If you go look at the Add Human Jelmer bit I did for Manifold, you can see my designing skills are very, very bad. I had issues drawing a man-stick. That took me three turns, so yeah. Design is not a strong-suit of mine.
Meg: I thought those drawings were really good for the record.
Jelmer: Oh, yeah. The sketches I did for you. Yeah, I enjoyed making those but that’s not really design though, that’s just sketching things out.
Meg: Yeah.
Margaret: So you guys have worked across time-zones and I believe it’s six hours difference. How did you find that?
Jelmer: Yeah, you go first, Meg.
Meg: I think we figured out pretty quickly where the overlap was and it was mostly on me to clarify things with Jelmer. Jelmer drew these really wonderful sketches and I sort of spent time interpreting what they were and then if I had any clarifying questions I would make sure that I’d get them early in the morning because you finish work sometime around noon or one my time and after that, I would be emailing him questions in the evening so I wasn’t bugging him on Slack.
Jelmer: Yeah, I think the reason this worked so well- I mean, Manifold is a distributed company already and we already know how to deal with overlap. Stand-up, for example, in my case, is in the afternoon while for the rest of the company that’s in the morning. Yeah, because Europe is obviously six hours ahead and we’re five hours from Halifax. But yeah, I think that already helped that we were already used to this question. Meg and I also have regular syncs and we chat about things regularly, so we already plan around that as well and I think that helps in general. Meg said as well she would email me instead of Slacking me. I remember an email sent from Meg like, “Don’t look at this until tomorrow,” and stuff like that. Yeah, that’s how we dealt with these kind of things, just async communication right and Slack kind of is that but it’s also kind of hard to maintain that because it is quite direct as well.
Margaret: So Manifold has a really strong brand and having graphics and animations throughout the posts give it a cohesive look. What’s the process that you used to incorporate the graphics throughout the blog post? I guess this is for Meg.
Meg: Yeah. I was going to say, “Jelmer, how do you do it?” We did get that question on Medium. It’s a bit of a tricky question because we do have some sort of design style-guides that sort of were there when I came on but we’re sort of still evolving them so there’s not a lot of sort of more specific instruction on how to maintain that style. I think it was a brand that I was really happy to hop on. When I started interviewing and chatting with Nick about Manifold’s- before I hopped on- It’s already one I really visually, strongly align with anyways. Space and sort of Math themes are very near and dear to my heart so I think intuitively it was pretty fun for me to jump in and learn that and I also work pretty closely with Nick. Everything I do we sort of wind up collaborating on at some point and doing a little check-in or even just generally in the design Slack room so it’s not just me designing in a silo, I do have a pretty good understanding of it but there’s always other eyes on it. There’s always an approval process and usually, I’d be showing Jelmer as well, making sure it was all technically on point so it may be one designer working on it but it’s pretty much a team effort most of the time.
Margaret: And I know you mentioned that Jelmer gave you sketches but are there any other tips on how you guys collaborated together that you’d like to share?
Jelmer: Sorry, can you repeat that? My internet just flaked a little bit.
Margaret: Sure, so I know you guys both mentioned that Jelmer gave you sketches, Meg, but are there any other things you did to collaborate on the diagrams? So you mentioned the emails and the sketches —
Meg: I think there was like a little, intermediary step on the sketches, so Jelmer did some up-front, initial ones and then there was a little bit of back and forth where he would draw like a secondary graphic to clarify something or zoom in on something and luckily Jelmer had an iPad so that was pretty quick and digital and easy to do. I think occasionally I would draw something back and send it to him. I’m definitely a visual person so knowing that sketches are really helpful for me is really useful. Jelmer, what about you?
Jelmer: No, I was going to pick up on that because Meg mentioned early on that she needs those. She is a visual learner and she needs those things so for me it was very interesting because I think it was the first one where I actually added a lot of text to very rough sketches as well but that wasn’t super helpful I think in general and just re-drawing those things and actually going in more detail on my Wacom, not my iPad. I wish I had an iPad. But I think doing that helped both of us and from my perspective that was good to realize that as well for the future, as well, for the second blog post for example. That was pretty good.
Meg: Yeah, and I got to recognize Jelmer’s handwriting by the end [laughter].
Jelmer: Which is quite a feat because I can barely read my own handwriting, and Meg would read things I wrote down and that was like, “Hey, I can’t read that anymore,” so. But yeah.
Margaret: Cool. Meg, what did you use to create the graphics and animations?
Meg: So I used sort of a mix of things. I created the static graphics in Illustrator first. It’s a vector graphics program so it means I can take different elements and scale them up without having any sort of pixelation like you would in Photoshop. And I technically use Animate. I tried to crack open After Effects but it’s such a complex program. I had had experience using what Animate used to be which was Flash and it’s pretty good for doing simple animations and that’s what we were working with, so I created the animations inside of Animate and exported them as gifs and it all worked out.
Jelmer: That actually reminds me of something. You mentioned that you had experience with the previous thing before and I think, because you touched on it earlier as well, that you have experience with the coding and stuff that you do in your free time as well. I think that helped a lot as well. You’re already in that mindset of learning these things, and yeah.
Meg: Yeah, I didn’t mention this before but I am the chapter co-lead in Hamilton for Ladies Learning Code so I have a brain for design and have like a math, science, code brain so that really helps out.
Jelmer: Yeah, because you’re already putting your head in the same mindset I guess. I noticed that, for me, from having to explain these kind of things, that definitely helps and because we could relate to other technical bits for that.
Margaret: That leads to the next question [laughter]. I know you’re quite technical, Meg. I know you’re pretty- like containers or something you haven’t really worked with. How did you find working with something that was foreign to you?
Meg: Certainly a little terrifying at first. It was a bit of challenge to look at this giant, really intimidating, long blog post and go, “I’m about to work with one of the senior engineers on something really deeply technical that I have no clue about. ‘Shit. Where do I start?’” Right? And we kind of wound up breaking it down. Jelmer sent me a bunch of really helpful beginner links. This really adorable cartoon sort of thing that was Kubernetes for kids which I was so in to, and then from there, it was breaking sort of the component parts down into simpler things and understanding them one at a time like, “Here’s a container. Here’s what a container does. Here’s why it works really well,” and once I’d broken down those things it was a little bit easier and that did mean bugging Jelmer from time to time being like, “So remind me again what’s a pod and what does a pod do and where does the load-balancer go again?” So it took me a little while to clarify those things in my mind but it’s sort of dev-ops and networking and that kind of stuff is definitely a weak point of mine so I had to do a bit of work to get there.
Jelmer: It was definitely interesting though because as someone technical who works with these things quite a bit, it’s just very interesting to see- if you have to explain this to someone who’s not very into this field and not very active in this field, how can you put it in a way that makes sense? And it taught me a lot in that perspective as well of doing it and that was pretty cool.
Meg: Do you think that helped you when you went to go do conference talks later? You were like, “I know how to facilitate this information.”
Jelmer: Yeah, definitely. So apart from the two blog posts that Meg actually also helped with sketches for my conference talks and that feels like we already have that relationship of like, “This is how we work,” and, “This is how we do this thing.” We didn’t really have to have a lot of discussion on what I wanted for the talk that you worked on Meg because you already know the concepts of these things and that was pretty easy and that was pretty useful as well I think.
Meg: Cool.
Margaret: What did you find the most challenging aspect of creating the images?
Meg: Is this one for me?
Margaret: Yes. I would say so.
Meg: I think certainly the animating part was the hardest technical part. Kind of the upfront work was understanding what layout was going to work best for kind of displaying things in the blog post and then how do I create a graphic that’s not going to slow down the post and how do I time it out so that somebody’s reading the post, they’re going to stop and watch it for a couple seconds but maybe not longer? How do I communicate what we’re trying to communicate in this? Do I need to break it out into multiple graphics? And I did wind up doing a bit of work and got a little far until we realized it wasn’t quite going to work graphically so I had to pull it back and make some changes, but I learned certainly for the future, when you’re doing animation, storyboard it out, sketch it out, get everybody’s approval, and make sure it’s really working and then hop into the program so certainly something I would pass along to other people. I don’t do a lot of animation work so that was a bit of lesson on my end.
Jelmer: And I think it was for the first post that we did animation. I think that was a big addition to it because instead of having multiple images as well and the way you set that up was pretty interesting because it shows you the flow easier than just static images sometimes and I think that was a very good addition to it.
Margaret: Was there anything unexpected about working on this project?
Jelmer: I’ll let you start with this, Meg.
Meg: I never thought I’d be so interested in dev-ops before. It was something that wound-up being quite cool actually. I didn’t realize there was so much you could do with automation and I think that probably everybody should be working with something like that and I’m not sure that a lot of people do. I sure there’s limitations and everything. It’s certainly something we repeat to learners in Canada Learning Code is that even if you’re not going to be actively working with the technology, learning about technology is really important because it makes you feel empowered, you don’t feel scared by something so I participate sort of locally in a few technical groups and now, when I sort of sit in those groups, I feel a little bit more like I know what people are talking about and a little bit more like I sort of belong in the technological space which is not something that I expected I would get out of this but it kind of created that sense that I’m getting more and I would want to learn more too, even if I’m not going to be using it in my day-to-day job.
Margaret: Were there any themes that popped up?
Jelmer: You mean like themes of discussion themes or — ?
Margaret: I’d say over the two blog posts, you guys probably learned to work together better. Were there things about technical design specifically that popped up that you thought were interesting?
Jelmer: What I found very interesting is just a translation of — I don’t know if this specifies as theme but just seeing how if I say, “This is disruption — “ I remember we talked about these things and then Meg sends me an image and I see that the next day and I’m like, “Well, that’s exactly how I would understand it.” You see the image and for me that maybe goes better with the unexpected bit as well as — For me, it was very interesting to see how Meg could go from just some stupid lines I drew to something that makes sense to other people and even when I saw the images there — So I think the team here has good translation of it, it’s very interesting and just making it accessible. That was quite eye-opening for me, and that’s also very interesting and makes me want to do these things more, so yeah.
Meg: It’s definitely interesting from a designer’s perspective to work with different people, and as Jelmer said earlier, “The more that we work together, the more we understand each other,” and when you start with someone new you kind of have to understand how they learn, understand how they give information to you, how they prefer to be communicated with, and all of those things are really important to kind of come together to create that open working relationship. And it is interesting to see it from the start and to learn more about people and about your colleagues and then get that flow going because it just really — If we ever work together in the future on product stuff, we’ll be able to collaborate pretty quickly. We’ll get up and going really fast and that’s something that I really like doing with everybody on the team. Let’s do some more.
Jelmer: Yeah, I think that is actually a very interesting point as well. I think the most interesting bit, that I feel anyway, that we got out of this is just — we got to know each other pretty well in this area as well. Collaboration is a lot easier now, and additionally with a team — I’ve never met Meg before when we did these things. We actually worked on these things when we had an off-site but that was very interesting of having that “Haven’t spoken to Meg before really until now,” actually doing so much work together and actually understanding each other a lot better, and I think that was a very interesting thing that happened as well.
Margaret: Did this project change your perspective on your work domain? So whoever wants to start —
Jelmer: I’ll go. It didn’t change my view on the domain. It just made me realize that, especially with my link to public speaking as well, you have to make sure that- you can’t assume that people know these things and even if you think you made it more accessible, your assumption is wrong until you actually put it in front of someone who doesn’t have the knowledge that you have, and it’s the same the other way around. I remember we had a discussion about fonts. That was with Nick as well. I didn’t realize there was different types of things but for designers, that’s a very obvious thing that there is but for me that’s not the case, and I think that’s how my perspective changed. Even if you think you’re making it accessible, you’ve got to make it even more accessible.
Meg: I guess for my part, I think I went into this expecting that- or that the expectation was that I was just going to make Jelmer’s graphics more solid and be a part of a blog post, and when I got into it and I started looking at it I kind of had this “Oh shit” moment because I realized, “This is a bigger job. I’m going to have to learn a lot more,” and it all worked out and it came together, and it kind of made me realize a designer’s job — I think a lot of people misinterpret what designers do and a lot of people will sort of use the phrase “Make it pretty,” and certainly a designer’s touch helps with that aspect but it’s much more than that. It’s about facilitating visual communication which Jelmer sort of said, “Oh, Meg took my sketches and when it came back I really understood the concept,” and that’s kind of my favorite part of my job is making sure that other people understand what they’re supposed to be doing in a piece of product or if it’s a technical diagram they understand sort of what we’re trying to get across, and it just reminded me that’s such a big part of my job and that’s what I really enjoy.
Margaret: Okay, cool. So why do you think it’s so important to invest so much time in creating this content?
Meg: I think Jelmer should speak to this one.
Jelmer: So from a technical point of view, together with the design aspects. Again, if someone’s new to these concepts- So Kubernetes has been on the rise for like a while now. Everyone’s speaking about it. Especially if you look at conferences, Kubernetes is the new big thing but a lot of people aren’t familiar with it yet and there’s actually been a very interesting chat about it that Joe Beda did about this. Kubernetes is actually a very, very complex system and it’s the upfront investment that you have to put in this system to actually get benefit out of it is quite high compared to making your own organic system that grows over time. The complexity will be higher eventually but with Kubernetes, you see that upfront cost. But the cool thing with Kubernetes is that you also spread it. You can take this to any company that you want and it will be the same. Once you’ve learned Kubernetes, it’s the same across the board, and I think people are very scared about these things, very scared about this upfront cost, and in the first blog post we did is we actually explain the reasons why we migrated. One of the big things is we cut down a lot of costs. The other big thing is we actually improved our deployment and that’s very much a selling point for people to go to their boss and say, “Look, we can actually deliver these things if you give us time to learn these things,” and where the design aspect of these things —
Jelmer: In these blog posts, we speak about general concepts as well like RAFT Concensus, like high-availability, networking, and stuff like that and a lot of people don’t realize that it can be- that’s all that’s involved in this kind of setup and I think that’s what Meg did very good is showing those concepts in a very abstract way and how that ties into it with Kubernetes and the other part there is as well is what, I think, we kind of explain in the blog post as well. It’s fine that you can’t deliver the perfect scenario. We still have some things that we’re like, “Well, we wish this was better in our case but there’s some limitations that we have with our setup that just didn’t allow for this,” and I think a lot of people, when they’re thinking about migrating to Kubernetes, they’re like, “Oh, we need to go from what we have at the moment to this perfect IPO, Kubernetes world where everything is the best of the best,” but that’s not the case. What we did is we had a look at our current situation and then we looked at like, “Well, Kubernetes can make this so much better but to do that we need to invest a lot of time,” so what we’ll do first is actually just use Kubernetes that matches exactly same, like we have, and then once we have Kubernetes, we can actually improve on that then. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that they can actually do these things incrementally as well. And I think from a technical standpoint, that’s a very big motivator to actually write these things. And from a business point of view, I think you could actually add to that better, Margaret, marketing-wise. That’s the technical side of things.
Margaret: Yeah, so I guess I can talk to why this type of content matters to us and it’s because it’s the kind of content that developers actually want to read and spend time going through and understanding and to spend so much time in being so careful and thoughtful in explaining it through words and through graphics I think really adds to that and shows that we really do care, so I think Meg can talk a little bit more on to why the images are so important, but it’s the type of content we’d like to continue creating and we want people to want to read our blog and we know people are super interested in Kubernetes, and Jelmer has large knowledge on that topic so it just makes a lot of sense.
Meg: Yeah, and I think to speak further to what you said about sort of the design of it, I think when you’re introducing kind of a foreign concept or maybe one that’s a little intimidating to people or new, the images certainly help sort of facilitate the delivery of that information. Jelmer said the animation provides a lot of context because you’re actually seeing a failure and how Kubernetes handles that. And I think too it’s sort of an interesting opportunity for me at least because there are a lot of technical people already out there making content but perhaps their graphics might be improved by having a bit of a design-eye looking at it. I think design kind of adds like a little bit of a critical eye to things seeing, “Oh, maybe this could be pushed a bit more,” or, “Maybe this could be a little bit better,” and I think that’s kind of what I added to it I guess.
Jelmer: I think on that note as well is if you look at these things from a designer’s view, sometimes for us something doesn’t really seem that important or it just seems so natural and if someone like a designer looks at it then who’s not very into Kubernetes- I can’t really think of an example, but I’m pretty sure there were scenarios where you were like, “Oh, how about this and it actually turned out to be very big part of the image,” where at first I was like, “Oh, yeah but that’s very obvious,” and I think that’s a very important step and if you want to teach people about these things- because again, not everyone has that knowledge. I think that’s where the design really plays a big part in these things, to be very critical about these things.
Meg: I remember what it was. It was kind of creating a consistent visual language across the diagrams to make sure that if you were using a certain color for a failure, it wasn’t replicated later as something else, or if we’re using a dotted line for a region then using a dotted line somewhere else might mean something different and that helped clarify the concepts for me as well, making sure I understood the meaning of each piece.
Jelmer: Yeah, yeah. I remember the natural stuff now or the region stuff.
Margaret: And so our last question is kind of an open question so it’s if you want to share something interesting or something that you’ve learned or something that you might want them to walk away from this with, what would that be?
Jelmer: Mine is don’t be afraid to ask the designers their opinion [laughter]. Again, I think I started realizing that more when we did our talks or my talk that worked on, Meg. That’s what they’re good at. Just ask them and if they don’t have time or they can’t help you they’ll tell you but just do it. It will make your blog post, your talk, your whatever it is you’re working- it will make it so much better. So yeah, go ask your design team basically.
Meg: Yeah, we don’t bite. I don’t know what the misconception is. The interesting thing for me was just I think I had had like a bit of a comfort zone with technology before and I was very comfortable on the front-end and not really kind of getting past that, and I would encourage people to push your comfort zone and try to learn something every once in a while that makes absolutely no sense and get a better understanding of it because the more of a learning mindset you have, the more likely you are to be able to pick up on new things. I would say also another interesting thing that we do in the company that really helps with this — Jelmer had said when we started working together, we didn’t really know each other. Jelmer lives in Belgium, I live in Hamilton. We started doing kind of more random one-on-ones through our remotes channel on Slack just to chat with other people, the friendship bot that we have in Slack really helps because you just wind up talking to somebody random who lives in a completely different place from you who has a completely different experience and works on an entirely different part of the product maybe, and I found whenever I do a one-on-one with Tim or Luiz who are situated pretty firmly in the CLI, I always learn something new too. I think for people who have to collaborate so closely, it’s really important to also just make sure that you’re not only learning new things but meeting new people constantly and trying to talk to them and get their perspective.
Margaret: Do you want to just explain what the friendship bot is a little bit more?
Meg: Yeah. It’s awesome. It’s this little Slack integration that will message people who are sort of opted into it every two weeks to go, “Hey, you’re paired with this person this week. You need to book a one-on-one with them.” Well, it’s not that prescriptive. You don’t need to but, hey, you signed up for this. And so you just get to talk to a random person from the company for half an hour every two weeks, and I’ve learned the most interesting things about people that way and it’s been really cool.
Jelmer: Now that I think of it, that was actually the first time we ever spoke, the friendship bot. I think we had one with Nick, the other designer. We had like a chat with three people. I think that was the first time we actually chatted.
Meg: Yeah.
Jelmer: I like friendship bot. It’s pretty good.
Meg: It’s definitely something for anybody who’s part of a remote team. I would recommend. When I first started working for Manifold, it was my first remote job. I am an introverted worker but I’m also social. I like talking to other people and that was one part I had to kind of get used to and the friendship bot was really cool for that and the remotes channel too. You can generally talk about things that are pertinent to remote workers and kind of randomly just poke people in there and say, “Hey, do you just want to have a chat this week?” And it all works out.
Margaret: Cool. I think that’s a wrap.
