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 talk to author and speaker Sam Newman about how he uses OmniGraffle. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Omni show. My name's Andrew Jay Mason. And today we're honored to hang out with Sam Newman. Sam Newman uses OmniGraffle and he's an author speaker and independent consultant interested in cloud continuous delivery and microservices. Aside from a few other things, he's spoken at a few conferences and literally wrote the book on microservices, including building microservices and monolith to microservices for O'Reilly. Sam, thank you so much for joining us today.

Sam Newman: You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Andrew J. Mason: Oh, it's our honor. And we've asked you on the show because of your work in OmniGraffle to develop the diagrams that show up in your books and we'll get to that. But first talk to us about what are microservices? For everybody that's listening, but not familiar with the term microservices. Could you break that down for us?

Sam Newman: Yeah. Sure. So when you use go to a website, you use a mobile app or whatever, a lot of the time there's a computer on the backend, that's handling all the requests and the functionality that these applications provide. That's normally living on one or more computers that live in a data center or a public cloud provider like AWS or Azure. And so I mostly focus on how you design those backend systems. And microservices is a style of distributed system will be kind of break that backend apart into lots of little services where little carries a lot of weight here, but independent services that can all be worked on and changed independently from one another. So when you go and use a lot of applications, for example, you might actually not realize it, but you're really talking to maybe 10, 50, a 100 different servers and different machines that support the thing you're trying to do, the purchase you're trying to make at Amazon.

Sam Newman: For example, when you enter the Amazon homepage, there are lots of different types of services behind the scenes that kind of create that shopping experience for you. And so that's, my focus has been on this microservices style of service development, which really focuses very much on allowing teams to own a service, make a change and roll that thing out without having to do too much coordination on other things. That's kind of the high level stick for all of it.

Andrew J. Mason: No, that's perfect. that does it for me. And I feel like it gets everybody up to speed. And like we said earlier, you literally wrote the book on microservices. And by that we mean the book building microservices, it's in its second edition with O'Reilly publishing. Talk to us about that.

Sam Newman: Well, it's sort of in the grand scheme of things. It's always better to be lucky than to be good. And I got the first book out on microservices So I'm hands up. I'm not saying it's the best one. It was the first. So I think the first edition came out 2000 and February 2015, but it took me about a year to write and I just finished a second edition that came out towards end of last year. And I sat down and thought, you know what Sam things have changed. You've learnt new things, take that first edition of the book and update it, make it easier to understand, make it more concise, make it the same size. That's really important. Make it the same size. Second edition came out twice the size.

Sam Newman: So I did fail on that regard, but it's... I was fortunate enough to quite enjoy the process of writing and I put it out there because there wasn't a book out there. And because I thought I had things to share from my point of view. And I was quite lucky as I know a lot of people who started the process of writing books, especially tech books, they liked the idea more than the reality. And I actually quite enjoy writing most of the time.

Andrew J. Mason: Okay. So I got to know this is coming across to me. It's not in my notes. It has nothing to do with OmniGraffle, but I've got to ask it. How does somebody get a career path that leads here? I don't believe you probably just woke up one day and was like, "Oh, microservices, that's what I need to do." But at the same time, you talk enough intelligently about it that I know you're, kind of emerging as the voice for it. So lead us along. What got you here? How did you end up in this space where you are career wise?

Sam Newman: Yeah, it's sort of interesting because I'm a real skeptic about them. I feel like I know all the bad things that can happen and I want to help people avoid those challenges. I mean, for me, I'm a means to an end guy, right. That's my job. So I started working at a company called Thoughtworks and it was a consultancy, still is a consultancy. And so I would go out to companies and I sort of accidentally found myself in the role there of a developer sit and write some code and test to a test the code, but then you've got to get the thing actually into production. And so I sort of accidentally fit into the space of helping people get things off their laptop, into production as quickly as possible. And this was happening at the same time. All the ideas behind continued delivery were happening mostly at the time out of the UK in the same office where I was.

Sam Newman: And so I was kind of interested, "Okay, how do I get things to the production as quick as I can?" And that's what my focus is. And I found that this type of architecture was really useful. And so I started focusing on it. There's lots of different ways you can build systems and you can build systems to focus on different characteristics. Some can be really easy to scale. Some can be really simple. I was, "Well, what is it we need to do to make it easy to get software out there." And so that's what I started focusing on in that space, just to help out the clients of the company. And that company was always very good about supporting you if you wanted to go to a conference, because for them, it was good for me because I like presenting and the conferences, but it was also good for the company because it helps their brand.

Sam Newman: And I was very fortunate that Martin Fowler was at the company. Well, was at Thoughtworks, as he still is. And he gave me a lot of help and support as did many other people at the time. And so I just got used to going out there doing his conferences, writing papers here and there. It was partly about the company brand. And I guess I didn't feel it at the time, but I realized in hindsight it was also growing my private brand and I fell into it accidentally. But like I presented at my first conference, I think in about 2006, this is a local thing, did a few user groups and I just kept coming back and doing a bit more every year. And it was really by accident. I quite enjoy sharing ideas really and having conversations and things like that. I try not to come from any particular viewpoint. I'm British. So I'm naturally pessimistic about most things.

Sam Newman: So, and so I tend to have a bit of a negative viewpoint. Sometimes we try and deal with, but what I really kind of enjoy actually enjoy is the wrong word. But what I almost think is my mission is to try and cut through and dispel a lot of hype and confusion out there. I think a lot of people are looking for very simple answers where there aren't simple answers, but there are lots of people willing to sell you simple answers for a price. When I was at Thoughtworks, we were already always vendor agnostic. We had no relationship with a Microsoft or an Amazon or anything like that. So when we could help a client, we did say from a point of view of being as independent as we were able to be given the obvious biases that we all have as humans and as an independent, I've tried to carry that on.

Sam Newman: So although I dabble and do work with tech companies here and there, I'm always completely transparent. I want to be just open and honest about the things that I see and try and maybe cut through an awful lot of the confusion in this space. And keeping up to date with all the technologies that happen in the area where I specialize in, it's exhausting for me. And for me staying on top of it is a full-time job, let alone the developers and the testers and the operations people and the architects that work at these companies who have a full-time job anyway. And they're also expected to keep up with all that stuff. It's just exhausting. So if I can kind of help navigate people through that space a little bit and still find a way to make a living, then I'm doing all right.

Andrew J. Mason: You know Sam, over the last couple of episodes that we've recorded, that happened to have had an OmniGraffle theme. I've noticed this theme emerge of people who do great work in the product, tend to have the ability to think multi-dimensionally or interrelated outcomes in how they affect each other. And just this really beautiful way of systemic thinking. I am a linear thinker. I am next action oriented. It's not my superpower. How do you suppose or propose that somebody acquire this skill? Is this something that you're born with this ability to see things holistically in your related outcomes? Or is this something that you're able to acquire as a skillset?

Sam Newman: I think I'm a bad person to ask because I've always done it in my professional career. And so by doing something, you just get better at it. But I do think I kind of started off being fairly good at it. I have other significant deficiencies I'm quite bad at maths, which would normally mark you out as being a poor choice as a computer programmer at least when you come through the classical route. I'm awful at optimizing algorithms. It turns out that most computing doesn't require to optimize algorithms, but I've never had a problem thinking about kind of things at the bigger level, thinking about the interactions, thinking more holistically that's software is fundamentally a socio technical system anyway, and that helps me a little bit. So I've always found that I gravitate very much towards that kind of thinking by default. So I've worked with people who might say, it's surprising how quickly you grow that, but then they'd take me some code.

Sam Newman: And that was going through some complex algorithm and I'd spend weeks banging my head against it, trying to fight my way through. And I sort of came to realize that there are skills that you can learn, but I've always, actually, it took me a while to realize this, that actually, if I focus on my strengths and mitigate my weaknesses, I tend to do better than trying to push at things I'm not really not that good at. And then what you're trying to do when you create a team and you create a company is realize that people do have different things to offer. And hopefully you just bring a blend. You need some focused linear thinkers to get shit done. Pardon my language there, but I can often because I'm thinking holistically, my mind will drift and I'll go off into certain areas. And, but if you need somebody, that's just going to sit down and focus on one problem and just get it done.

Sam Newman: I remember colleagues I've worked with who are geniuses at that. And you'd always want to mix with those people in the team. So I have no insights to share as to how I do those side of things. I do think a lot of it does come down to the working out how you learn and how you observe the world a little bit. I realized fairly early on that I'm quite a visual thinker and quite a visual learner. When I wrote the most recent issue of the books, I did drive the production folks mad with a number of pitches I drew, and I can compare that to the CTI, I worked with a lot at Thoughtworks, Rebecca Parson. She's still the CTA there now.

Sam Newman: And she's an amazing person. I've Love loads of the work that she's done. She does not do diagrams. That's not the way she thinks. So for diagrams for her, don't help her at all. But she learns in very different ways. For me. I love a diagram, love a diagram. And a lot of the work I do is diagram first. You know, that's kind of a big part of how I think and how I understand the world myself, but also how I share my thoughts with the world.

Andrew J. Mason: Well said. And I think there's just an aesthetic thing too, where you see something that's, that's been designed in OmniGraffle, or just this kind of holistic picture of how things work and the sequential part of me can chunk and zoom in on one single part and see what the interrelated spaces are. But creating that from scratch, there really is an art as well as a science to it. And I picture it just kind of, just in my mind, I picture like this, this beautiful mind thing where there's all these algorithms floating around somebody's head or something like that.

Sam Newman: Its Also, it's also, we live in a messy world and there's always competing forces at play. And often the world I'm working in there isn't one right answer. There's probably about 50 answers that are good enough, 10 of them, that will be disastrous. and you always, you trying to find the least worst option that everyone can get on board with. And so an awful lot of my work is just in saying, well, look, here's the situation we are in. Here's all the factors that are at play this. We can wiggle this down a little bit, but we've still got a kind of, a lot of my work is really about surfacing information. That's kind of already there and then helping a conversation happen as a consultant. I don't live in these systems myself for the next 10 years. So it's important for me that I'm not, I don't have as much skin in the game as the people I work with do so. A lot of it is just about creating a space in which the right conversations can have, and that the people are happy. You thought they're going to do going forward.

Andrew J. Mason: I so appreciate that. Let's zoom over to how you found the Omni group. Is this something you've always been aware of or did you come across them? I know it wasn't recently because you've mentioned using Omni raffle for a long time.

Sam Newman: I Should remember the date almost exactly because there was a big campaign in ThoughtWorks for many years to get max and we weren't allow max wanted max couldn't get max wanted max, we pushed and pushed. I harangued the founder multiple occasions. And we eventually got max on the basis that we have three yearly replacement cycles rather than two yearly replacement cycles for the Dells. And I think probably this must have been around 2006, 2007 ish, that sort of timeframe. And some someone mentioned it in the office. I think it was one of the Americans that had come over to already have their own Mac anyway about that. And it was OmniGraffle straight away. And I just appreciated the kind of simple, intuitive layout. It's weird. although I do a lot of architecture diagrams for me, I've never been one to use the auto layout tools because once I've got a diagram complicated enough that I needed that as auto layout tools for me, a diagram's got too complicated anyway, but I just appreciated that.

Sam Newman: It just was easy to work with and was simple that the autos snapping tools, the layout tools, and I fought against things like Visio before, which was nowhere near as intuitive for me to get to grips with. But also it kind of had that general sort of apathetic of the default looked really nice. A lot of the defaults look pretty good and pretty fancy, and you could go a lot deeper if you really wanted to. And that was it. I think the first version I had to buy myself, but I think subsequently I got the company to pay for licenses and I'm a happy license holder to this day. Now my own company that pays for licenses, but it's been well worth it

Andrew J. Mason: And so OmniGraffle became the preferred diagram maker for the books that you've written. And last we talked as we were kind of corresponding over this episode. You said that you've, you've created hundreds, hundreds of diagrams.

Sam Newman: Oh yeah. Easily. The first, well I've written three books affected the first edition. I wrote a book Monolith to Microservices, the second edition. And I even think I did a chapter in a pragmatic program anthology where I used it. I think I also used it for another, like kind of small book that I did for a variety years ago. And every single time I've needed to draw a picture. I would use OmniGraffle to do that. Now, a lot of what happens at in publishers is they don't use OmniGraffle. And sometimes you have to give diagrams to the productions folks because they need to tweak it to fit the print and new book formats. But I got better actually at creating diagrams in OmniGraffle that fitted like the O'Reilly style. So they would do a minimal export into whatever Adobe monstrosity that the production folks there used, but I managed to pretty much close the loop on that. So I was creating diagrams that were just completely fit for purpose for the production process coming out of that.

Andrew J. Mason: So as you've had so much experience creating all of these different diagrams, has there ever been anyone that you sit back you're done with it, you do your final mouse click and you kind of lean back and say, I think that was the best one I've ever created for, for whatever reason, whether it might not be complex visually, but just the sense in which I was able to visually communicate something that would've taken me paragraphs and just so much text to write. and this is concise and beautiful. This is what I meant to say with it.

Sam Newman: It's such a great question. And I can't really think of a great example right now. I think for me, it's also, its also kind of how I use diagrams often in the context of if the book is, I will often like there to be some interplay between the diagram and the book. So if I've got a picture and I'm referring to something on that diagram, I will highlight it in some way, I'll make the line a different color or something like that. So for me there, when I'm doing in the book form is a bit of an interconnection between those things. I think there are diagrams I've struggled with, there's certainly diagrams in the most recent book. I look back and think there's going to be a better way for me to do all that draw that I just can't work out what it is right now.

Sam Newman: So for me, there's not one thing that necessarily kind of leaps out at me at the moment. I can point my finger out that says, yes, that that is the one. But what I often found myself was doing a lot of my thinking in the tool, which is kind of a bit weird. Like I'd know, I want to do this sort of thing. I need to explain this concept. So I'd just go into OmniGraffle and I'd throw a few boxes around and then I draw it up and I'd look at it and think, okay. And then I would draw the diagram because I'm now filling in the gaps in my head as to what it means. Okay, great. Then I'd go write the pros to explain the concept. Then I'd look at the pros and go back to diagram and update the diagram so that they will sync together.

Sam Newman: But I would often start that whole, okay. Here's the topic I got to explain with a picture and if I couldn't find the picture, that was the hook for me, I would often find that I struggled to really explain the concept. It's like once I had that sort picture in my head, even at a very high level, I could then kind of do the pros. I don't know if it was the most recent book. I think it was all the way through, but I was aware of it, very visibly that, that connection between those two things was, was kind of important. And I think also part of that experience of spend time working Rebecca also reinforced for me that there are some people phone pictures don't always work out well. And so I couldn't afford to share an idea only through a picture.

Sam Newman: I was also reading them then people would send around emails, and I'd sometimes see emails where some people would send out a bullet point of what was agreed. Other people would write this huge context about why these things were discussed. And I was talking to one of my bosses intern. He said, the thing is that some people just want the answers. Some people in all the context, the best emails to send, if you were trying to reach a large group of people is to do both, because there were some people that resonate with certain types of content, more than others.

Sam Newman: So for me, it was like, I wanted Rebecca to read my book. I don't know, that she needs to read my book. She knows this stuff already, but I wanted the Rebeccas of the world to be able to read my book and get value out of it in the same as I wanted the Sams of the world to read the book and get value out of it. And so that's why i sort of put work into making sure they both stood by themselves, but also would work together. And also of course there are, now in the world of eBooks as well. So you kind of, you sort of have to be prepared for the fact that the pictures aren't going to be there when they listening to it on their iPod. Although quite who listened to my audiobook, I'm not entirely sure.

Andrew J. Mason: You know, that just made me think of a different episode where we interviewed it was Dave budge and he was the head of John motors. It was a separate OmniGraffle episode. And he talked about how the design process was actually this kind of call and response thing, where he designed something in the software and then go back out on the floor and start making some wiring changes, and then realize that would then inform the design process. Again, there was almost this, this cyclical call and response thing where one medium would start to inform the other until he, he just had this moment where he knew that, okay, we're done. This sounds so similar to that.

Sam Newman: Yeah, I mean, I'm a mad comics fan, not mad, but I have a problem. And you know, I've got a huge quantity of, I'm just peering over the book of my, my large collections of peer Gill en trade paperbacks, right? It's sitting out there like in the graphic novel kind of space, you have to have this connection. And it's interesting seeing how some writers in that space, they write the pros, but they've got the pictures in their head and they have close associations with the people who write, who draw the pictures and do the pencils and do the inks and everything else. And other places you get artists that become writers. And, and it's sort of interesting to me that I'm nowhere near that level of trying to connect those two things, but there is something which is, you are almost experiencing, you can tell stories with the words.

Sam Newman: You can tell stories with the pictures and in some mediums, it's more words than pictures than others. It's more pictures than words. I think the book stuff is more towards the words. I mean, I think the one aspect of this whole space, which I wish I could find a way to do better is almost to add movement. And I know what the answer is here. Thinking about how you draw attention to people singing, you think about the diagram or whatever, right? You've got position, you've got size, shape, color, and all of these are things you can use in different ways to draw people's attention, visually the different parts of what you're doing beyond the other sort of cultural conventions of left to right, right. To left and things like that. And when I'm doing my presentations, I sort of in a limited fashion, I'm able to, in something like keynote will add animation and movement, we're not talking about the, David brent style transitions, where everything's like a star wipe or a big, awesome flame.

Sam Newman: But if I'm describing a change to say an architecture, I'll want to, while I'm speaking, have that thing move, because then it reinforces, it kind of links those two things together. And so in many ways, when I do presentations that word and picture stuff becomes even more closely aligned than it does in the book form because I'm able to sequence it. So I can just wave a hand, I click a button and the transition happens. And so that is a kind of experience that I'm somewhat able to create. When I do a talk, I don't really know how to do it outside of that, even on a webpage, that's not an easy thing to pull off and I know people have attempted it. So that remain like an untapped potential for sharing content in a way that unlocking how that would work.

Andrew J. Mason: You see this blows my mind, the idea that something like animation or the passage of time in order to control somebody's focus or kind of focus their attention in a certain spot on the, on a given diagram. and how that just one layer of abstraction, just saying, from my brain to this diagram, I'm able to transfer meaning and communicate something very complex, distinct to somebody else. It just blows my mind, this process of using things like time, passage of time, how things are grouped together, their color, just all of that is used to transfer meaning from one individual to another.

Sam Newman: That is also really most developers is what our jobs are, is attractions. That's our job. There's a great quote, which is that developers turn caffeine into abstractions. That's kind of, we are almost instilled within us whether or not we realize it, or whenever we quantify in that way, if you are somebody who writes code for living or in my case used to write code for living, you spend a lot of your time creating abstractions in code form that make your programs kind of easy to work with are able to handle more powerful concepts. And so when we get into that visual or verbal abstractions, when I write my pros or I'm speaking, a lot of the abstractions I come up with are analogies. You are explaining a software even to people that know the actual underlying thing. Like I was explaining how virtual machines work to some techies.

Sam Newman: And I described it like a sock draw, right? Imagine a draw in your dresser. And it's all jumbled up where you could put dividers into it. And that makes the space more organized, but you actually have less volume because the dividers take up space. That's actually kind like how virtual machines work in these ways. It's an abstraction, you're hiding the truth. And also, its analogs, you are sort of hiding the kind of concepts, but it is all the same thing, but you're presenting in different ways in the world of software. There have been lots of attempts to almost codify the different abstraction levels of pictures. So you've got, you've had numerous attempts to do things, got things like select then became Select SSADM Then you had, UML the unified modeling language done by Grady Booch and others, where they were like to standardize.

Sam Newman: These are the boxes that you will use. These are the arrows that you will use. These are diagrams you use at different levels to impart meaning. And it was a way of maybe giving people hints about the types of diagrams that might be useful to people that couldn't otherwise didn't even otherwise get it. It always felt, I always found those things. The fact that became a little bit overly complicated. They also, this is going to come across as really, up myself when I say this. And they also just lost any kind of sense of, being nice looking diagrams. I don't think there's anything wrong with having something that's also aesthetically pleasing there isn't like white space bugs me. Can you send to that text in the box, please? Its little things, but it's jarring when you start looking and when you see those things.

Andrew J. Mason: So the sense in which standardization kind of leads to sterilization?

Sam Newman: Yes. A good friend of mine, Simon brown has done a much more simplified way of trying to help people explore architecture diagrams. So he would literally go into different. He literally had.....Well, that's what he does. He goes into companies and he actually helps techies draw better diagrams. And, he said, even on a whiteboard, right, let's get better at doing it.

Sam Newman: And so he's come up with this model called the C4 model. Again, it's a simplified form, but he is trying to say, these are probably the four levels of abstraction we want. And these are the kinds of pictures you on a show, his diagrams look awful to my eye, but then again, he's doing some things in a very, very different way. He's actually generating those diagrams often from code. And I completely understand why he's doing that, but there is even, the work that he does a sense of, there are kind of different views that different people need. And I think that is an important understanding is that you do have different consumers of whatever it is you're trying to share. So working out how to get whatever information it is into the right people's heads in the right way, does require maybe a bit of flexibility in how you share things.

Andrew J. Mason: Sam, do you have any go-to tips, tricks, first steps, anything that you can give somebody who maybe is listening to this conversation, maybe they're feeling inspired. Maybe they've not cracked open OmniGraffle yet, or, or they have and gotten, I just don't know what my next step is. Somebody that says, I love what I hear you saying that you're able to do. I want to be able to do it too at one point, where do you lead people? What do you, what do you say is a good next step for them?

Sam Newman: Yeah, I would always say when you drawing, when you doing a picture, don't try and put into that picture. What you know, try and put into that picture. You want, you want people to take away. And that's a very simple thing, but I would often find same when I wrote same when I presented, I would find myself wanting to almost splurge knowledge onto the page. And so instead it's like, well, what am I trying to indicate in this picture? And how many things can I possibly indicate in that picture for it to actually kind of make any sense. There are books out there about drawing better diagrams. I must say I never really, they never really, gave very much. A lot of the, well, I think the most useful book I read about visual thinking was a book called information dashboard design, I think by Steven few, which I think the second edition wasn't quite as good, but the third edition, although it was talking about dashboards, which is quite a boring topic, he talked about things like, well, actually you often want to engage with information in different ways.

Sam Newman: You've got the look up, display the, look across the look down, you'll drill down to show you different things. He talked about color positions size. I spent a lot of time, early days doing web development. People used to pay me for that amazingly. And you know, you are reading through like the web style guide from it might be Yale or MIT or something and learning about layout and things and how people read pros I found was kind of useful. But I think these are all just sort of information.

Sam Newman: I think when it comes down to is when you are drawing a picture, you are trying to communicate some kind of concept. What is it? What is it you want to communicate with this diagram? And if you're trying to communicate too many things with that diagram, well then maybe you need other one diagram. So something I'll often do is I'll have one diagram and I'll highlight different parts of it over a period of time. But just that simple model of what am I trying to say with this, put yourself in somebody else's shoes. And actually, if you can just get feedback on things or if something to do, of course, there's always just get people to look at it and see what they think.

Andrew J. Mason: That's excellent. I love that's a design principle or a way of thinking versus, click on this stencil click, over here, it's a way of thinking that kind of cascades down into other decisions that they make in the future. Do you have anything that you've encountered on your journey that you would classify as a mistake or a failure might seem like a harsh terminology, but just you look back on it and you say that I would do that differently.

Sam Newman: It took me a while to realize that not everybody interprets an arrow in the same way that I do. so there's a bit of a joke in computer architecture, that's all boxes and arrows. So you've got a box arrow box. That's saying that this box has some relationship with the other box. And in my head that meant that A uses B to do something. And I found out there's a whole, I think probably not the half of the world, but a big chunk of the world effectively thinks the inverse, that means that the information is going from A to B because B wants something. And it's a very simple little click, but when all of my diagrams are mostly boxes and arrows, or specifically hexagons and arrows for kind of fairly odd reasons that turns out to be quite important. So now literally the beginning of every presentation, if I introduce Microsoft very, very briefly, I'll spend 10 seconds to say, here's a diagram and here's an arrow.

Sam Newman: And that says that this is doing this. I have to just feel like I need to say what that arrow. And it's a very small thing, and it's not necessarily a mistake as much as it is an assumption that I made because in my head, of course that's all that means, of course that's what that means this is, but again, half of my life is spent drawing diagrams. When I'm at the computer really been beat in an autograph for books or keynote presentations or scribbling things in, whatever online diagramming tour my clients is using. It becomes quite important just to get a few ground rules. Right. And I really underestimated that at the beginning,

Andrew J. Mason: Sam, this has been such an enjoyable time for me, not, not just the OmniGraffle slice of this, but being able to just kind of hear, and interact how you think there's just such a presence of clear thinking there. I really do appreciate.

Sam Newman: Oh, thank you.

Andrew J. Mason: I also want to give you an opportunity. Anything you'd like to share with about how people can connect with your next steps to interact with what you're up to.

Sam Newman: Yeah, a couple things. So my website is Sam Newman IO. There's a load of my presentations are available there free, there you go to my talks page. You can go watch me on YouTube, if you really want to. There's a selection of questionable shirts being warned throughout my presentation career. And yes, there are some shirts I've worn more than once, but I'm sure you can deal with that. You can also find links to my books there. If you want to just read my books, then if you know a bit about microservices and your technologist, if you actually just go to, you can click on my, on the book page for building microservices, you can go go to Oreilly.com and you can just sign out for a free trial and you can read the book for free. I mean, you'll have to read quick if you want to read all of it in a week, but go read chapter one.

Sam Newman: So if I want to read my stuff without paying any money, that's, that's the way to do it. Otherwise, they're available from kind of all good bookshops, but yeah, just Sam Newman do IO. I'm mostly just here doing my stuff. You know, I do consulting work for people, work with a few startups and I've got one side, I've got some quite small startups and I in, they've got some big enterprise orgs I'm working with and I'm having a bit of a pause on the writing front, but I've got a couple of projects I'm surfing around.

Sam Newman: Then if one of the ones I've got planned will be even more visual than anything I've done before. So I'm just going to have to wait to see, but I might be made to use a different product, but we're not going to mention it in polite company, but yeah, it's going to be interesting. But the moment on I'm taking a bit of a breath it's, as you'll see, that was a big book and I still kind of feel the weight of getting off my shoulders. So looking to enjoy the summer, there's also an ebook version available and I've got translations for a bunch of the books available as well, but yeah, go to Oreilly.com and now you'll, you'll find your way there.

Andrew J. Mason: That's awesome. Sam, thank you for joining us. I've I've really enjoyed this time.

Sam Newman: Thank you so much. I say, I'm a big fan of autograph on the tours. I was a fan of OmniGraffle. Oh, I still, I used OmniGraffle for a bit, which, which it was kind of really so useful, right. And it's like, I remember having not used it for about a year. I Wanted to use it again. It's like, it's not, there... oh God. I had to go back and do all that stuff again by hand, like some kind of, you know....anyway, big fan of products and I hope you keep on rocking.

Andrew J. Mason: Thank you, Sam. Hey and thank all of you for listening today too. As always, you can drop us line at @theOmnishow on Twitter. We'd love to hear from you there. You can also find out everything that's happening with the Omnigroup@omnigroup.com/blog.