THE OMNI SHOW

Andrew J. Mason:
You're listening to the Omni Show, where we connect with the amazing communities surrounding The Omni Group's award-winning products. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we hear how VMware's Frank Spiderman uses OmniGraffle.

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Omni Show. I'm so excited for today. Today we have Frank Denneman, he's the chief technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware, and he focuses on machine learning infrastructure and compute resource management, such as DRS and Numa. He's the author of multiple books, including vSphere 6.5, host, Technical Deep Dive, and the vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive series, and he's the host of the podcast Unexplored Territory. Frank, thank you so much for joining us today.

Frank Denneman:
Well, thank you for having me.

Andrew J. Mason:
Frank, your job title is super interesting. Chief technologist in the office of CTO of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware. I always ask people, did you wake up one day wanting to do this, or did you find yourself winding around a career path that led you there? Talk to people a little bit about how you got to where you are today.

Frank Denneman:
So I started in IT in the help desk, and then worked my way up as a consultant. And throughout my career I learned that communication is key. You communicate by words, you communicate by drawings, diagramming, and eventually that became my trade. And the VMware company picked up on that, because I was writing about their products. They asked, "Can you actually come work for us and do this in a scale-out fashion, so help our customers understand our products?" So I started to work for their technical marketing department, and so that became a profession for me, to help the customer understand what the engineers are building. And because I was doing an outbound job by going on stage and helping the customers understand, I was also talking to the customers and bringing that feedback back to the engineering team. So I was more or less becoming a bridge between those two worlds. I was knowing how to talk engineering, and I knew how to actually translate the engineering talk into language that most people understand.

Andrew J. Mason:
This is cool. It's actually turned into an educational role where you've become ambassador from the nerds and the commoner, basically educating the average person who might not understand how machine virtualization works and saying, "Here's what the value is that the engineers have designed that we can bring to you." And then going back to the engineers and saying, "Here's something extra. Have you considered this?", that may make this a more valuable product.

Frank Denneman:
Yeah, yeah. The nerds... Well, it's just full spectrum, right? Yeah. And that actually moved me into what's called the Office of the CTO, and that's where you start to think about, "Okay, what is next for the products? What are the strategies? Can we think about certain patterns?" But also, you become this person who needs to go on stage and help to sell a vision of, "What are we doing as a company?" And so we have a lot of competitors nowadays.

Our company is what we call a virtualization company, and we basically create a software layer between the hardware at the applications and the guest OS and Windows or Linux. We gave birth to cloud computing, and because of that, competitors arose like Amazon or Microsoft Azure or Google and all that stuff. And so we had new competitors. And so we need to talk about that and how we can bring value to our existing customers and how, actually, some new workloads can exist on existing platforms. And that typically brings a lot of confusion and you need to provide, well, a clear picture in a confusing world.

Andrew J. Mason:
This is so funny, because when I say "machine learning infrastructure" and "compute resource management", I'm going to be honest, I still don't have very much of an idea as to what that is or how it looks in a real-world application. Can you give us maybe a couple of scenarios, real-world, where that expertise is valuable?

Frank Denneman:
Yeah. My expertise is what's called compute resource management, and that means CPUs memory, and nowadays GPUs for machine learning. That typically means that a lot of people think about, "Oh, that existed for many, many years, and so why do we need to have experts? Because everything runs in the cloud and everything is already solved."

Unfortunately, it's not. You can abstract everything away, but when you really need to have something run perfectly and as proper as possible, you need to understand how everything touches the hardware at one point. You really need to dig down deep into systems and how it actually will all work together. What I do is let people understand how particular memory, how data is scheduled in memory, with relationship to CPU and to the course within the CPU and to PCIe devices like a GPU. Because a GPU is typically used for machine learning, because machine learning is used with a lot of parallel horsepower. We are crunching a lot of data, and typically you want to use a GPU because that's machine use for parallel processing, and not necessarily a CPU.And so that combination is very interesting, and I typically talk a lot about it, and I write a lot about it, and of course, I diagram a lot about it.

Andrew J. Mason:
I have just enough video and audio expertise to know kind of at least what a GPU is. And when you hit render, there's some really complex stuff that goes on behind the scenes, just enough knowledge to put the key into the ignition of the car and be able to drive it somewhere, but no idea how the engine completely works. What I love about what you do is that you take things that aren't necessarily even a visual idea, and make them visual. So these are just concepts, these are abstract ideas, and you're able to help transfer meaning by translating into a visual style. What moves you in that direction?

Frank Denneman:
The thing is, of course, trying to explain a very complex idea of a complex scenario is by itself very difficult on stage. While you're standing in front of a lot of people is more difficult, especially while I'm not a native English speaker and neither is most of the people in the audience. I typically talk at international shows. So the audience is also not native English. And so what you need is simple diagrams.

And especially when you're talking about machine learning, machine learning is just linear algebra. So how do you actually conceptualize linear algebra across devices? You're trying to conceptualize that into a certain visual language. And you can do that, but it takes some time. What I've learned throughout the years is dive deep into just the essence of things. But the thing is, same with critical thinking, you have to really understand what you're thinking about, and that takes time. But it's also very interesting to sink your teeth in, and I like that.

Andrew J. Mason:
What really gets me about how cool this is, this is a language that is not tied to words. It's being communicated visually. It's stripped down to its very essence. And so multiple people, multiple languages, sitting in an audience, and meaning is successfully transferred because it's being done in this way. I think that's so cool, and I don't know how many levels of abstraction back and forth there needs to happen in order for people to have this common denominator where they can all understand something at the same time, regardless of where they're from or what their background is. But that is cool. Kudos to you. That is really cool.

Frank Denneman:
Well, thank you. And it took a lot of people, a lot of time to actually appreciate it, because typically what you see in a lot of IT diagrams is they throw everything into it, even the kitchen sink. And I just took the complete opposite approach of things like, "No, no, no. Only show what really drives down the point, and what really is necessary to explain the concept of the idea of what we're trying to explain here and what's relevant to the story."

And so a lot of people always thought like, "Hey, but it's really empty, your diagrams." Well, that's the whole point, because I'm only talking about this, because that's the concept that I'm trying to explain here. My diagrams are completely empty and full of white space, while most IT diagrams are not.

Andrew J. Mason:
It reminds me of Blaise Pascal, I think, is the guy that wrote this message saying, "Hey, I'm so sorry, but if I had time, I would've written a shorter letter." It's so easy to kind of do the brain dump, but then to finesse that knowledge in a way that really is elegant, transfers meaning in a simple way, is a skill set that's difficult to do.

Talk to me now, let's switch gears. How did you find out about The Omni Group? How did you find out about OmniGraffle? Was this always on your radar? Is this something that just one day, there it is, and you came across it and decided to engage and interact with it?

Frank Denneman:
Yeah, it was actually born out of necessity, but actually it was a good thing. I had a Windows laptop, so I used Visio, and then when I joined VMware, the standard was Mac. They said, "Well, you can use VMware Fusion and use Visio." And I'm like, "No, I want to use native Mac tools." And so I came across OmniGraffle. I saw people already using it, and I already looked at it and saw clean diagrams and all that stuff, and I'm like, "Oh, this looks nice." And so when I got the Mac, the first thing I did was install OmniGraffle on it. And from that point on, never looked back, really never looked back. And every time when people say, "Oh, nice diagram, you made a visual." No, no, no, that's OmniGraffle. I love it. And it's a great tool, the ease of use and the simple things. I'm a simple user. My diagrams are really simple, so I don't use complex features in it. I barely touch 5% of what you can use with it. But the things like auto-alignment and showing the distance between RBX and all that stuff, that saves so much time for me. That, seriously, is an insane amount of time that saves me. and it feels trivial for most, but just having alignment of different objects and having it consistent across my diagrams is something that makes my diagrams very pleasing. And OmniGraffle allows me to do this in a consistent way and in an easy way. And so the amount of time it saves me is just worth the money, easily.

Andrew J. Mason:
Take a minute and talk to that person who is maybe interested in communicating more visually, but looks at the really complex diagrams out there and says, "That's awesome, but I could never do that. I just don't have the skill set yet, or it's intimidating to me." What's a great first step or first few things for somebody to look at when they're trying to communicate in a more visual way?

Frank Denneman:
Well, people typically don't notice or see this directly, but you have to be consistent with your objects. So if you use block diagrams, make them consistent in shape. Copy them over, duplicate them, all that stuff. If the block diagrams are not equal in shape, if you are doing a repetitive scheme, people notice this, not consciously, but subconsciously. Thank you. Now you notice that I'm not a native English speaker, other than my accent.

The second thing is, what I typically say is, be consistent with lines and white space. Just try to space them out and be consistent, not use a dashed line and a straight line and inconsistent with thickness, all that stuff. That thing annoys people. People can't point it out, but it triggers people. And so when you make things easier on the eye, people tend to want to watch and want to look at it longer. That makes it more pleasing. What I typically do, and this sounds really, really nerdy, but I use the Fibonacci sequence for my block objects. I just draw it out in the Fibonacci sequence, and then I just start to stack them, and that makes it so much better.

Andrew J. Mason:
Dig a little bit deeper into that. I've never heard of this. Does it just show up in a more visually pleasing way?

Frank Denneman:
100%. Well, try it. Try it. It will blow your mind.

Andrew J. Mason:
Okay, I'll give it a shot.

Frank Denneman:
It is. That's such a thing. And then, of course, be consistent with colors. And so one of the things that I typically use, there's is website called Coolors.co, "coolors" with double O, and it provides a color scheme. And you can say, "I want to have a color scheme of five colors or a color scheme of three colors" or whatever. And you can actually say, "But it needs to have yellow or orange or black," or whatever. And so that allows you to make a very nice diagram with a set of colors, and don't make it a clown show or "I'm looking at the circus here", but it does give you a pleasant thing that, actually, when I'm looking at this diagram, it actually is balanced in color, white space, in lines. It feels soothing. That starts to become interesting for people.

And then use as little objects on the screen as possible, make it as less confusing. What are you trying to tell me? What is important to understand? And if you can drill it down to the essence, then you hit jackpot.

Andrew J. Mason:
Thank you, Frank. Those are really helpful tips, and I'm curious about the flip side of that, as well. For you, your journey you've taken on developing this skillset of communicating visually, is there anything, any detour that you took where, "Man, don't do it like I did it." It could just be instructional for somebody, like "I wouldn't recommend necessarily doing the things that I did, and maybe you could save some heartache or extra effort" from somebody knowing to avoid these certain spots?

Frank Denneman:
That's a good question. I need to think about that one. I think what I didn't do right, I believe, is I didn't archive my diagrams, and I didn't store them correctly, and I kept on repeating diagrams over and over and over again, doing the same thing, spending so many countless hours doing pretty much the same thing. And I think that's one of the things: don't be afraid to test things out. If you want to draw in an isometric fashion, do it. Try to figure that one out. Do it. Here's the thing: you're going to see that after spending 20 hours on a diagram, hey, it's not what you thought it would be, but don't beat yourself up on it. That's the learning curve, and that's a little bit of an investment to know that, "Nah, maybe isometric is not for me or not for this topic." And sometimes the topic lends itself to a certain view for that.

Overall, maybe one of the biggest mistakes was trying to keep myself to a particular style. Maybe that's one of the things that I was always focused on, trying to keep it to a particular essence and trying to get too much out of it, while maybe some people wanted to see more. Maybe that's the thing. Overall, I'm still learning every single day, every day. And every day you think like, "Okay, this could be done differently, or I could have done this differently", but the moment I have a diagram and it's good, and you sit back and you smile and you're like, "This is art." And maybe this sounds very arrogant, but I just know when it's good. And I sit back and I smile. I'm like, "Yeah, that's it." That's the moment when I publish it or when I use it in a publication or on a blog post or in a presentation.

Andrew J. Mason:
Frank, this has been great. I've gotten value out of our time together. I'm sure our audience has as well. How can folks keep in touch with you or find out more about what you're doing, what you're up to? How can they connect with you?

Frank Denneman:
So you can find me on Twitter, @FrankDenneman, or on LinkedIn, same thing. Frank Denneman. I have a podcast, The Unexplored Territory podcast, and that's about it. Yeah, you can find me when I'm presenting somewhere, but that's typically being said on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

Andrew J. Mason:
That is excellent. Frank, thank you so much for spending time with us.

Frank Denneman:
Thank you for having me.

Andrew J. Mason:
Hey, and thank all of you for listening today, too. As always, you can drop us a line at the Omni Show on Twitter. We'd love to hear from you there. You can also find out everything that's happening with The Omni group at OmniGroup.com/blog.