Episode 311: Sean Colins

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This week’s transcription is brought to you by Alectrona

Sponsor:
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Tom Bridge:
Hello and welcome to the Mac Admins podcast. I’m your host, Tom Bridge. And Charles, that’s a Defcon shirt. Is it Defcon season again?

Charles Edge:
No, not for a couple months, but close enough.

Tom Bridge:
Okay.

Charles Edge:
I actually think I’m going to… I haven’t submitted a talk in, oh my goodness, 15 years and I think I’m going to submit one this year because I found some stuff and it’s fun to find stuff and then nerd out about it on stage with a few thousand of your, hopefully, not too closest friends.

Tom Bridge:
And you’re not talking about finding the Bitcoin PDF in the middle of the operating system, right?

Charles Edge:
No.

Tom Bridge:
That was the fun news from this week was that the Satoshi Bitcoin white paper is embedded in the system and has been since macOS Mojave.

Charles Edge:
And Richard Stallman’s cookies recipe has been there since OS 10 became OS 10. So…

Tom Bridge:
Yeah.

Charles Edge:
I mean…

Tom Bridge:
Fun little artifacts.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, lots of fun little artifacts all over the operating system.

Marcus Ramson:
Is this why software updates take so long because of all of the cookies that have to be moved, replaced, verified to make sure the cookies still taste the same?

Charles Edge:
Those aren’t the ransomware cookies. You don’t wear… Nevermind. Tom, I think you should tell us, for just a second, you had an Odyssey, like Odysseus style Odyssey to get home, right?

Tom Bridge:
Yeah, it was a little bit of an adventure. I went from Melbourne to Sydney on Tuesday afternoon and had a very nice evening there. Although I will mention that Sydney, apparently, shuts down at 8:30 at night and I had the temerity to arrive at the hotel at 8:45.

Charles Edge:
Not the parts of Sydney I go to.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah. But they’re in the CBD, it was pretty dark. And got up the next morning super early, got down to the airport and got on the plane. And if you’ve ever flown back from Australia to the States, it’s a long flight. It’s 13 and a half hours, there’s no way around it and I just didn’t sleep on the plane. I watched a lot of various and sundry television and movies and things like that.

Charles Edge:
Like nine movies?

Tom Bridge:
Well, I mean, I watched two full seasons of television. There’s just nothing else to do. I read a bunch of books, I mean it was a good time. But land in LA, it’s like 6:30 in the morning and I get through customs and I get my bag, eventually, and I’m like hustling, right? Because we were a little bit late leaving and my layover has shrunk from two and a half hours down to an hour and a half down to an hour and 15 minutes. And I was like, “Oh, am I going to make this?” And then I get the little message pop on my phone that says, “Yeah, sorry, your flight’s been canceled.” And so, got rebooked, had to stand in a really long line and then I went from having the most perfect seat. I went from having a window seat with an open middle next to me in Comfort Plus to sitting in a middle seat in the row behind the exit row. I’m six foot three and so my knees were jammed very gently up against the seat in front of me. And I had to go through Detroit.
And again, layover shrinking because the flight’s getting later and later. It was an odyssey, I think it was 28 hours door to door.

Marcus Ramson:
And when you’re that close to home as well, it’s like all you want to do is walk in the front door, put the bags down, give everyone a hug, and then go and lie down in your own bed. And then…

Tom Bridge:
Yes.

Marcus Ramson:
Every little inconvenience that gets thrown in front of you is like the death of a thousand cuts.

Tom Bridge:
I will say the nice folks at Delta did their dead level best to make it right by those of us who were on that flight that got delayed, or got canceled, rather, entirely. And so, overall, you’ve got to keep your cool when you’re in those kind of situations because you’re in the center of travel, you are out of control, there is nothing that you can do as a passenger in those environments so all you got to do is breathe deep and find your center spot and at the conclusion of that process, you’re going to get there. They’re not going to strand you no matter what the app says.
There were a couple of spots during that period where my ticket had been re-booked, but the app was just saying, “Oh yeah, and by the way, you’re done at Detroit. There’s no next flight for you.” And I was like, there’s no way they’re just going to leave me abandoned in another state and make me get home some other way.

Charles Edge:
Especially Detroit. I mean, really.

Tom Bridge:
I like Detroit just fine. I mean, it’s a great place. You’ve got the Red Wings there, you’ve got Windsor across the border. I mean, I have a fondness for Detroit, generally speaking, that maybe isn’t shared by others. But I’m home now, that’s the really important thing and it was a phenomenal trip overall, aside from just a couple hours of delays on the way home.

Charles Edge:
And Marcus, while Tom may have had an Odysseus style trip, you had more of an Agamemnon trip just on the way home.

Marcus Ramson:
Yeah. I think this is the being able to go back to have conferences in person, walking into the venue for X World and seeing everybody in person again and realizing just how much I’d missed that environment. We had to pay the toll for having that wonderful high. And so my kidney decided, on Sunday, after X World, to point out that it had some very large kidney stones in there. And so I spent last week in hospital. So I think the less said about that, the better. I’m looking forward to… As I’ve been explaining to everyone, the urologist is going to go and play asteroids with my insides on Friday to hopefully get rid of these stones and…

Charles Edge:
Pew, pew, pew.

Marcus Ramson:
Yeah. That’s all I’m imagining is going to be happening. Yeah, and I think there were many people who also had challenges at the end of that conference, but despite that, I think we’re all looking forward to it happening again. And the videos have started to appear online as well. We’ll put the link in the show notes to the AUC website and the YouTube channel so everyone else can experience some of the fun that we had there at the conference. But despite my kidney trying to convince me otherwise, it was really good fun to get back into seeing people with legs again at conferences.

Charles Edge:
That’s so lovely. And since we’ve talked about Odysseus and Agamemnon, we’re going to flash forward a few hundred years in Greek history and talk about Plato for two seconds. He said, “Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.” And there are so many different ways to learn about the Mac Admin field. One that we haven’t covered on the pod is the linda.com courses, now LinkedIn courses, that date back to the era of Mac OS 10 server, Mac OS server, now Mac deployment type of topics.
And today we’ll hear from its creator, Sean Collins, about his courses, how the industry has evolved, how being considered an industry expert helps with building consulting businesses, and even a little bit about his upcoming book called Technically Fit, which gets into more of what Plato was talking about. So thank you so much for agreeing to do this episode with us, Sean. I feel like we met at an ACN event about a million years ago and you were into the Apple stuff before me, maybe, so I don’t think I ever heard how you got into it, but we love to start episodes with a little bit of an origin story. So how’d you find yourself in the Apple ecosystem?

Sean Colins:
Well, before I start, I have to just say, I am completely geeking out because I listen to the podcast all the time and I’m just sort of sitting here watching you guys talk, and I feel like I’m just listening to the podcast and it’s just so cool to see all of you and your faces because it’s always audio while I’m driving around. Anyway, so thank you so much for inviting me to come on.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, thanks for joining us.

Sean Colins:
Appreciate it. My origin story goes back to the late nineties, mid nineties actually. I was a theater major in college and I was trying to get into doing show lighting, special effects, that sort of thing, and I got an internship with Disney Imagineering. This is right after the 94 Northridge quake and it was quite a time, it was quite a time. The sprinkler systems had gone off inside of the warehouse where they store all of the lighting equipment and all of the gels and things. And at one point, the head of the show lighting department was like, “Listen, we’ve got this wooden flat file case that got soaked in the earthquake. You go and pull that apart, throw away the ones that are too moldy to use and clean up the other ones.” At the end of that internship, she said that was the worst job she had ever given anybody, but I did it.
While I was in that position, she was like, “Well, what we’re doing is, we’ve got all of these experimental, really expensive light fixtures that we’re testing out for the parks and they’re in this warehouse and we’re tracking them with a clipboard on the wall. And I have to literally get in the car and drive over to the warehouse and look at the clipboard to see what we have in, what we have out, who’s got it out.” She’s like, “I got to have a database. I got to know what’s what and where it is, so there’s a class being taught downstairs. Next week, I want you to go and learn how to do databases.” And that was FileMaker two. And so I started with a class at Disney Imagineering on FileMaker two and learned how to do it, wrote the database, got them up and running and whenever I got out of that internship, it was one of those periods where Disney was going through massive layoffs because they had just finished a couple of parks, and so everybody was getting laid off and there was no opportunity to move from the internship into a regular position.
So my friend was like, “Hey, I like building PCs and you just learned how to do databases. Let’s start a business.” And so we started our first business in the late nineties, was called the Answer Company, and that was how I got started.

Tom Bridge:
That’s awesome. I mean, not the getting laid off part, not the inability to turn that opportunity into something else, but the pivot points in careers are always so interesting to me because that’s very similar to my own situation. I got a job here in DC after college and arrived in DC to find out that the company had gone out of business. And so, you know, you kind of got to pivot, you got to figure out something else to do. I was going to say, as you get to those spots, that’s the make or break moment, right?

Sean Colins:
Yeah, I totally agree. My experience has been, and I’ve been doing this for way too long. But over and over and over again, it’s all about preparation so that when the opportunity arises, you are there and you can say yes. Even if somebody asks you to do something that you’re not a hundred percent sure you can do, you know enough to say yes because you know can figure it out and then that’s a new skill. A mentor of mine once said… I was freaking out. God, this was the second time I met you, Charles, at one of the worldwide developers conferences when we were doing the… I was managing the labs down on L one in Moscone West, and you ran across the floor and you’re like, “Hey.” I’m like, “Hey.” And I remember that was… God, that was my first time when I was trying to learn XN and XN was a tough certification for me.
I was really freaked out about it because I was like, there was a bunch of new work that was coming down the road that was going to be XN related and I wasn’t going to be able to do the work unless I got the certification and I was freaking out. And this mentor of mine, Ernie Mariet, he ran the company that was doing all of the IT outsourcing for that conference and he’s like, “Sean, stop freaking out, man. It’s just another skillset.” And I was like, “Oh God, you’re right.” It is, it really is. This is what we do. We learn what we need to know in order to do the next job and we just sort of go from one thing to the next and we keep pivoting, like you just said.

Tom Bridge:
I always feel like the best answer in most of those situations is, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

Sean Colins:
That’s brilliant. That’s actually something… That was literally going to be printed on a t-shirt because that was what we were trained to say when we were doing those shows. A lot of Apple executives would come to us with questions and whether we knew it or not, we needed to provide the customer service level that meant they were going to get an answer. So if we didn’t know, “I don’t know, but I’m happy to find out for you and I’ll get right back to you,” And then you follow up.

Marcus Ramson:
Apple retail had a really great way of teaching us to say that, which was, “I don’t know, why don’t we find out together?” Which was sort of also setting that understanding that, I don’t know everything, I’m not here to know everything, but between the two of us, we can troll our way through the internet and try and work out what’s going here, which, pretty much, just describes working in tech, ongoing.

Sean Colins:
Absolutely, absolutely. Working with Apple, I remember hearing a lot that they wanted us to surprise and delight the customer. I don’t know if you heard that in retail, but I got that constantly whenever I was doing stuff at trade shows and stuff. And the best way to do that is to do that customer facing, that bedside manner thing where you’re just like… I’m not going to just say I know and make something up because that’s the worst, right? Because plenty of people do that, right? Fries is out of business now, so I suppose we can reference

Tom Bridge:
Oh, ouch. Too soon.

Charles Edge:
RIP.

Sean Colins:
But yet know Apple’s really, really good at doing that thing where we pay attention to people and to communicating and to making sure that we follow through and doing that surprise and delight thing. That’s what I’ve always loved about working with Apple.

Marcus Ramson:
And also a lot of being a systems engineer and in a technical role is the bit where you’re dealing with the computers, which is often the easy bit because there are rules in computers, follow rules, but there’s the bit where you’re also a psychologist where you’re dealing with understanding what the requirement actually is compared to what was actually documented in the scope or was explained to you or not explained to you at all. And I think that’s often the make or break bit, is dealing with that part of things.

Sean Colins:
In a way, we are all Tom Bridge.

Tom Bridge:
I could only be so lucky.

Sean Colins:
Aw.

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Charles Edge:
So, LA’s what? The seventh largest economy in the world? So consulting firms can run there, grow, get big, and anyone outside of LA might not have heard of them. So you started this consulting shop, you did that for a while, and then some of our listeners would know you better as the person who did the linda.com courses on Apple device management and before that, maybe the server stuff. So how did you come to be doing those, going from consulting?

Sean Colins:
So when I left the Answer company, we sort of wrapped that up, I went and worked for a company called Wieder Publications. They did fitness magazines and stuff, and a guy named Mike Descher was the local AE for Los Angeles, and he and I convinced management at Wieder, when Apple was literally months away from what people thought was going to be bankruptcy, to switch out all of their PCs in editorial over for Macs. And the idea was that we could build efficiencies in the workflows because of all of the automation technologies that were available then and we were using Cork Express and you could automate the heck out of that, and there was all these really cool things that we could do. And so we switched that out at that really unusual time. It was not a time where most companies were going all in on Mac.
He stayed friends forever and eventually he ended up running marketing for linda.com and they were having a problem with an email server and he was like, “Hey, I remember that you did email servers because OS 10 server.” And it was one of those things with the S 10 server, right? You needed to learn, what was it? 156 open source projects all in one… They literally advertised it as that at one point.

Charles Edge:
Spam assassin.

Tom Bridge:
It’s like, how am I supposed to do all this?

Charles Edge:
Oh God.

Sean Colins:
Exactly. You just had to know everything. So I just took a look at their stuff and I gave them some advice and Linda was super gracious and just the sweetest woman. If you’ve never met her, she’s unbelievably cool. She’s just such an artist but also has a technical mind and also has this brilliant business mind. I always really looked up to her. Anyway, she was like, “So thanks for coming out. Let’s go to lunch.” I’m like, “That’s great.” So her and her husband, the CFO, Mike, we all went out and got some food and I’m sitting right across the table from her and we’re just talking and she’s like, “So have you ever considered doing anything with your voice?” And I’m like, “No.” She said, “Could you teach anything at all? I’d really like you to record courses.”
I’m like, “Well, Apple’s coming out with a new operating system soon, Tiger. It’s coming out in four months. I could record something and see what…” She’s like, “Great.” And this is when linda.com was in Ojai and it was, I think, seven, eight employees and they had two recording booths in a makeshift, repurposed office space. It was really cool because it was definitely that early stages startup kind of timeframe. And I remember I got into the booth, I agreed, I was like all that, and they came back up, prepared for the course, got in the booth and she met me at the booth. Later on, that would never happen. There’s hundreds of employees and you’d get a producer and whatever. There’s lots of people in between you and leadership now, but back then, she just walked into the booth and she’s like, “So just have fun and let us know if you have any questions and good luck.” And that was all the prep I got. I was just like, “Okay.”
So I had a couple of guys outside. One of the guys was the editor who edited everything and another guy was sort of the producer who produced everything. And between those two guys and me, we just kind of recorded that first course and everything else just kind of followed along. It was really an amazing experience and it was exactly, Tom, what I was talking about before, where you sort of prepare and then when the opportunity comes, you just make sure that you’re there so that you can say yes and then be sure to do a really good job. Just really, really get it done right.

Tom Bridge:
How has that experience evolved since the LinkedIn acquisition?

Sean Colins:
So that all happened really fast. Linda.com sold to LinkedIn and then it felt like a second passed and then LinkedIn sold to Microsoft.

Tom Bridge:
Sure.

Sean Colins:
And so, that shift went from… Linda.com had been growing and growing and growing and they’d experienced some growing pains in that process. It’s hard to go from that small company, I imagine, where there’s a couple of people producing everything to this larger structure where you’ve got offices in multiple cities and everybody’s coordinating and you’re building a bureaucracy that you have to have in order to scale. So they went through all of that and then sold to LinkedIn. So as I would go through, every couple of years or every year, I’d record a couple more titles, those recording experiences would shift. So that very first one, I was very much on my own and I could go in with an outline and with an idea, and there weren’t a whole lot of people clamoring for booth times so I could go in and be really creative. It was a lot of fun.
I remember with Tiger, this was the first time they had introduced what is now Messages and you could text back and forth with the computer like you could with a phone, and I needed to show it so I worked with one of the other employees and we set up a little network and we had her sitting outside the booth and we made sure that we did everything. This is one of the fun things about linda.com courses was, you had to actually make this stuff work. You couldn’t just go in and say, “Well, this is what it’s supposed to do.” If it didn’t work, you couldn’t show it. You couldn’t edit around something that was broken. Yeah, I mean it definitely changed over time. You ended up, within a few years, getting a producer that would get assigned to you and then later on…
Oh my gosh, whenever it went over to LinkedIn, it got much more structured and instead of being able to go in and be really creative and sort of make things up as you encountered it, which was another creative aspect of creating these titles is, you could go in and you knew how to do what you were going to do, but then as you’re doing it, maybe you’d run into a glitch or something that didn’t work exactly the way that it was supposed to or that you didn’t see before. So rather than calling that a problem, we would incorporate it and we would teach around it.
I remember when we did… It was the first server version with Podcast Producer Server in it, that would’ve been Leopard. We did that course, chapter 17 of that course was Podcast Producer Server, and when we got to recording that, we realized that all of Apple’s documentation was wrong. It was just wrong. If you followed the instructions, they just didn’t work. And instead of scrapping the chapter, we just figured out how to make it work and we recorded the chapter the right way. We were like, “Well, okay. So we went through the…” And we said it right in the course. Like, “Well, we realized that the documentation’s wrong here, here and here, here’s what you have to do to make this work.” And we got it working. It was just so much fun. We haven’t done an OS 10 server course or a Mac OS server course in a really long time for obvious reasons, but I miss it. It was a lot of fun to do those because you had to make everything function right there on screen.

Tom Bridge:
Between XN and podcast producer and Wiki Server and.

Sean Colins:
Oh, Wiki server.

Tom Bridge:
All of these.

Sean Colins:
Don’t forget Wiki Server.

Tom Bridge:
Oh man. Wiki Server and I had a very tight relationship. I, once upon a time, had a customer make their own custom templates for the Wiki service, because you could do that at that time, of course. They only worked in the 10.6 server version. You could not move them to the later Lion and post related. And so that 10.68 server is still on a land someplace because that’s still a repository of knowledge that is required for that organization. I mean, we’ve turned it to static html and done other things with it in the intervening time but I mean that product was so good for that area.

Sean Colins:
It really was. Yeah, there were various points in the server product where it would evolve up to a point of maximum functionality like Snow Leopard Server and then somebody inside of Apple would say, “Let’s reinvent everything.” And it would go back down to like, “Oh God, okay. We’re starting from an obvious from scratch product again.” And then it would kind of improve over time again.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah.

Sean Colins:
Made teaching courses on it a lot of fun. Really interesting.

Charles Edge:
And replacing all of the courseware every time.

Sean Colins:
Oh, yeah.

Charles Edge:
They can do that because that’s a nuke and pave, whether it’s a book or courseware, whatever.

Sean Colins:
Yeah.

Charles Edge:
Yeah.

Sean Colins:
Well, every time we recorded an OS 10 server course, we tried to do it a little differently if the previous version was really similar to the version that was shipping for this new recording, and I started doing that with Mac OS courses too. After the Mac OS server thing kind of went away, I started doing Mac OS admin guides and those were geared towards the administrators, CIS admins, and I realized that the versions of the operating systems that I was doing this on weren’t really changing that much from one iteration to the next. And so I would just cover completely different things in the next course and I’d say, “So, go back and watch the last one. I’m going to cover what changed in this one, but here’s a whole bunch of new stuff that you didn’t see before because we didn’t put it in,” Because there’s an infinite amount of stuff you can cover, so it’s not like you want for any amount of contact and it’s easy to throw content at…

Marcus Ramson:
And is that around the same time that things went from being sort of specifically and uniquely Mac OS server management then to broadening out to general device management where you might not necessarily be using just Mac OS server and it’s more about sort of ongoing management, MDM, things like that coming in. So how did you handle that change to the Apple ecosystem?

Sean Colins:
Yeah, I mean one of the things you have to think about here is, these things take a really long time, and so it’s not like you have to pivot on a dime. It’s a year or a year and a half. And with Worldwide Developers Conference, you’ve got a whole bunch of lead time, so you know what’s going to be coming, you’ve got that beta period where you can develop your courseware, you can do the research research, you can figure out what works, what doesn’t work, you can get an idea of what you want to present. And then when it hits the Golden Master, when it hits what it’s likely going to be when it gets released, that’s when you can start actually recording content because you can be pretty sure that the gooeys at a feature lock… Of course sometimes that doesn’t work out that well. CSH disappeared at a beta stage at one point, and then…

Charles Edge:
I had to pull out 15 pages out of a book once because of that specific incident. Yep.

Sean Colins:
Right. Right, exactly. So you can’t always like, oh, okay, Worldwide Developers Conference comes, you get the pre beta, you’ve got everything in June, July, and then just record everything then and then release it in October. There’s like a three or four month lead time for editors and so forth. It’s not like software development where you can have zero day training availability. You kind of have to figure out what actually shipped first and then record to that, especially because of the recording function.

Marcus Ramson:
There’s no minimum viable product for a training course is there? It’s sort of all or nothing.

Sean Colins:
It really is. It’s all or nothing because if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work and you can’t show it. Actually, this is a somewhat embarrassing, but it’s actually true. There’s a course that was supposed to be on linda.com, before LinkedIn Learning bought it, that never showed up, and it was a whole course on podcast producer server. It had gone through enough iterations after that chapter 17 thing I just described, that it had changed, right? Of course, because you go through enough dot revs and stuff changes, and I had gone in and everything I had prepared suddenly didn’t work. And for about two and a half days, I struggled in the studio with trying to make the things work that I knew should work and they weren’t.
And my producer came in and he’s like, “Listen man, I’m really sorry, but we have to call this. If it’s causing you this much trouble, there’s no way we can trust that an audience or a student would be able to make this work even following your instructions because if the product is changing this much during dot releases, you go two dot releases forward and it’ll be completely different and then the course is useless.” So we pulled it, we just never published it.

Charles Edge:
And the product did change that way. Although, I do have to say…

Sean Colins:
Yeah.

Charles Edge:
One of the podcast producer systems that I set up is still running today, and if you don’t touch it… It’s like a house of cards. If you don’t touch it, it just is great. But if you walk by it and have too much wind, all the cards fall down. Never will they be assembled again properly. Kerberos, X grid, all that stuff. I don’t miss that product at all.

Sean Colins:
No, I mean it was fun to be the expert in things that a lot of people were scared to death of because it meant it was pretty easy to get jobs in that sector. If somebody needed that, there were only so many people that you could call because most people were just like, “No. Get out the garlic and the cross… We’re not doing this.” So that part I miss because I think… Marcus, to your question, how did things pivot? They kind of pivoted, like I said, slowly, over time, but out of necessity, things moved, as Mac OS server was no longer a viable product for doing Profile Manager. Apple kind of never recommended Profile Manager to be deployed anywhere in the field. It was a reference product. Plenty of people decided to do it.
Even if you talk to an Apple engineer, they’d be like, “Oh yeah, no, no. Don’t actually put that in the field.”

Charles Edge:
Friends still let friends use Profile Manager.

Sean Colins:
Right. No, I mean, that’s the thing, right? Is it did work well enough to use under certain circumstances, but if you got into a larger organization or if you wanted something to work reliably from one year to the next, you’d go to Jamf, for example.

Marcus Ramson:
I think the best description I ever heard from an Apple SE was that yes, there are some scenarios where it’s the right tool to use in production. If you’re someone that likes staring at a database that’s corrupt and has no possible recovery path, then it’s absolutely the right solution for you.

Sean Colins:
Yeah.

Marcus Ramson:
But for, using as an example, for training where you could, from Apple’s perspective, show people the intent of MDM without having to hitch their wagon to a particular MDM, which can always cause political problems and technical problems, it gave them that opportunity and the fact that it was easily available for people to mess around with in their home lab or anything like that made it a really good… That’s what it was designed for, was to be able to…

Sean Colins:
It was a great learning tool. Yeah.

Marcus Ramson:
Sometimes…

Sean Colins:
Yeah, I totally agree.

Marcus Ramson:
For learning what not to do in production, but yes, a good learning tool.

Sean Colins:
Yeah. So one thing that I’ve always struggled with personally, just because there’s so many options and my head starts spinning, is building up a recipe of MDM settings for any specific type of deployment. There’s so many possible combinations of MDM settings that could be thrown out there, and Profile Manager was a great way of seeing, okay, well, so what is Apple saying actually exists? What is supported? What should work? And so you could screw around with that and you could learn it, and then those same lessons would apply to other MDMs and that helps a lot. But over time, I had to… One of the most recent Mac OS admin guides, I spooled up a sandbox in Jamf and I just had a whole chapter on Jamf. It was just like, you know what? This is where we’re going to go. This is what we’re going to do. Because it just made more sense.

Charles Edge:
And I feel like I watched the same, with whatever content we were creating and whatever venue, and even since this podcast started, we’ve watched that market shift from servers to device management and, I guess, in relation to device management specifically, it is really interesting to look at old outlines and be like, well, this is what mattered then and this is what matters now. So how would you say that the technical bits have changed since you started?

Sean Colins:
It is wildly different. You’re absolutely right, and I mean, you guys know this better than I do, honestly. From a course creation perspective, what changed the most and what was the biggest challenge to teach was the shift from server-based to cloud-based, because there was still, at the beginning, really, it was kind of all local, it was all a server in the server room. I mean, I don’t even call server rooms, server rooms anymore. I call them network rooms because local servers are honestly getting kind of hard to find in small businesses. There’s just not much of a reason for them. People are using cloud-based services sort of everywhere, and the best practice has definitely turned from local, standalone servers doing MDM or some kind of systems management to the cloud-based options. So back then, that’s definitely where that, technically, changed. But I mean… God, now, I mean, we’re talking about completely different MDM structures and everything works very differently. We need a new course, for sure.

Charles Edge:
The MDM structure itself is changing right this second. I’d expect a spring release to… Anyways, Tom, you can talk about that when spring comes.

Speaker 7:
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Charles Edge:
So the technology evolves, but a vendor like Linda or LinkedIn, now, might not be interested in every iteration, and you mentioned it’s time to rev the course or whatever. For any listeners who might be interested in doing one of these or just out of sheer curiosity, how is a course pitched, outlined, scripted, recorded and handed off?

Sean Colins:
Oh yeah, great. That’s a great question. So it’s changed a lot over the years. Years ago, you would have sort of a contact inside of the company. They didn’t necessarily have a specific role that was just acquisitions, it would be somebody that was doing a lot of different stuff. And you’d go to a person and you’d be like… Somebody your buddies with, “I have this course idea. I think it would be great.” And if you could pitch it well enough, they’d say yes and they’d accept it, and then you’d get time in the booth and you’d go do it. And that was really the entire structure back in the wild, wild west. It was just very easy, or very hard. If somebody didn’t get the concept of a course, there was just no way you were going to get it done. There was nowhere else to go because there weren’t that many people in the company.
As the company grew, it got more structured and that structure made it easier to figure out who you’re supposed to pitch to as long as you’re already inside the system, but harder to get things accepted. So now you’ve got content managers and producers, and you’ve got an entire graphics department, you’ve got an entire editing department, you’ve got an enormous amount of just people that they throw at production and all of the pre-production stuff where they’re acquiring and they’re preparing things. Now you’re required to do a script. The script is required to be written in a format that’s very much like a television script. Back, God, I’d say 10 years ago, if I would do a course, I would never have a script. Everything would be screen captured, and I would walk through it. I’d have a bullet list of things that I didn’t want to forget to talk about, but I’d go through exactly what to do and I would talk through everything I was doing as I was doing it, make sure that I was explaining what I was clicking on, what I was typing, because it’s not always clear on screen what you’re typing because somebody might be looking at a smaller screen or whatever.
But nowadays, it’s all scripted. There’s a lot of slides and a lot less screen capture, there’s a lot of live action where they want you on camera. They want you to be talking with your hands and smiling and be a personality and be engaging, and longform went short form big time. Back in the day, we could make these long, long movies where it was really clear to somebody because especially with Mac OS server, you’d have an 11 minute long movie, a 15 minute long movie to explain how something works from end to end. They won’t let you do a movie that’s more than two and a half minutes now. Two, maybe three minutes, because people just don’t have the attention span.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, I definitely remember your original clicking through them. It was like 15 or 20 chapters, and each one was 10, 15, 20 minutes, and I felt like even the very first version, the production quality was pretty high. I haven’t seen any of the latest ones. I would be interested to see how you do things differently with a script versus ad lib. Like scripted, you’re reading content, and unless you’re a professional voiceover actor, it’s pretty obvious that you’re reading content. As opposed to, you’re up there, you’re trying to be engaging, but also reading content. I’ll have to check it out because I haven’t gotten a chance.

Sean Colins:
It’s a real juggling act now. It’s not the same thing at all. I really enjoyed the freeform ad lib because it’s natural. I mean, it’s just conversational, and I felt like that was more engaging, and I got a lot of feedback from students saying that that was more engaging. The scripted thing allows you to be much more controlled. It allows you to be way more concise, so it’s better in that regard, but I also kind of feel like it’s flat. It’s a little dead.

Charles Edge:
I mean, personally…

Sean Colins:
That’s my own feeling.

Charles Edge:
We see that in blog posts. We see that in everything. Like, a paragraph is now three sentences, preferably with no commas unless there’s a list. But that might just be spun off into a listicle and a chapter. It’s just a different style of writing today than… And there’s nothing better or worse, it’s just different.

Sean Colins:
Well, the whole industry has evolved. I mean, technical book writing has evolved, the online courses, screen capture has changed a lot. People’s expectations change, and as the expectations change, you’ve got to roll with that. I mean, back when we first started doing this, Instagram wasn’t really a thing, and you certainly didn’t have TikTok. I mean, there were no reels. People weren’t expecting these short, 15 second blurbs where you somehow communicate content in that short period of time. It’s just really different now.

Marcus Ramson:
It’s also interesting to see higher education starting to look at pivoting to the idea of micro credentials where, rather than studying a three or four year undergraduate postgraduate course, you’ll just have this grab bag of…

Charles Edge:
Certifications.

Marcus Ramson:
Individual skills. Yeah, skills and certifications, and then take those out into the world and apply them to getting a job rather than needing a BA or an MBA or something like that. It’s really about the individuals. And it’s interesting to see universities that are really based entirely on what’s required to get a particular piece of paper, try to understand how they can do that in a more modern and, I guess, relevant way.

Charles Edge:
I think the danger is losing nuance. If you don’t have the nuance, and this could be technical, like, “Oh, if you click that button over there or run that command with that switch…” It’s not part of the golden path. But if you do that, then there are dragons and you should know that, and this is why that exists, because it all exists for a reason. As opposed to short form content where, yeah, I can nail a golden path, even podcast producer, I could have probably made a five minute video, “Here’s how to set it up,” Boom, boom, boom. But to your point earlier, if you have these nine scenarios, this is what you need to know.
And maybe if you can break each one of those scenarios off into two minute drills… I mean, I don’t think that people read the 900 pages of the book [inaudible 00:47:15] and I just did, end to end. They look for the chapters that they need, if that. Maybe they actually just grab the PDF and search for things or peruse the outline and say, “Oh, this project. I’ll read a little bit here and there.” And I think over time, we’re all going to just have to pivot our content to new ways that people engage with it.

Marcus Ramson:
Which can be a shame because I think in the short form content, you get the how to do something, but in the long form, I feel like I got a little bit more of the why you’re doing it this way. So you’ll learn about… Like in Mac OS server, you’ll learn about particular areas of configuration that you may never need, but they may help you understand [inaudible 00:48:01] and overall things are configured in the way they are or things that are due for deprecation, that you understand the journey that they’ve been on to get somewhere. And I think education can also be about illumination rather than just specific fulfilling needs and short term goals. So it’ll be really interesting to see how we can still maintain that in this short form way of doing it. Maybe it’s the TikTok algorithm working out what to provide us to sit there ingesting on our phone. That’s not just about the topics we want, but the additional context that we need to provide around it.

Sean Colins:
That editorial control that you’re talking about, Marcus, is exactly why I’ve kind of pivoted away from doing the LinkedIn learning courses. I’ve spooled up YouTube channel and I’ve started to produce stuff on my own just because I want to be able to put things out there that are more creative and things that are more the way that I want to teach. I don’t know. I also think, to your point, Charles, about the electronic form of the book and searchability, especially with these long technical books or even books that are there to prepare you for certifications, searchability is so important. And while I love the feel of paper, being able to type in a keyword and pull up, “Oh God, that’s on page 536,” Rather than hunt and peck for it forever and waste time, I think that’s so valuable. And the other thing that I think is really missing that I’m going to try to do, I haven’t done one yet, but I really want to play around with audiobooks for technical books.
I’ve been wanting to record one for a really long time. And so that’s on my to-do list. I really am looking forward to doing something like that. Actually, whenever I’m in the middle of a revision on Technically Fit, but as soon as I’m done with that revision, I’m going to be recording an audiobook version of that.

Charles Edge:
And, I guess, you made these courses, and I think when you’re in consulting, or at least this was true for me, these things feed each other. I don’t think you run into the breadth of scenarios if you’re doing one day job. You might not get as hyper focused and as deep in a given topic if you’re consulting, unless you’re consulting on that topic, but when you’re covering a whole lot of different things, you see things that maybe other people aren’t seeing and that feeds the courses and then the courses feed maybe the consulting side of the business, I want to say, but it’s probably two different “businesses”. So, I guess, how did all that impact the Linda stuff, your consulting side?

Sean Colins:
Yeah. Right. One example comes to mind. There was a Worldwide Developer’s Conference where I was tasked with setting up a Mac OS 10 server, it was still Mac OS 10 server back at that point, lab. And I kind of went into it and they were like, “Yeah, we just want you to basically image a bunch of systems and have server on a bunch of computers and put them up on the network and be done with it.” And I’m thinking about it, I’m like, “That’s a really bad idea. There’s a DHCP server that could be turned on there.” And I just start spooling in my head of like, okay, so this problem could come up and this problem… All the different things that could go horribly, horribly wrong if somebody turned on X, Y, Z services.
And so I ended up pitching them this idea and they accepted it, where we put an OS 10 server under a table and we put two client systems on the table, and you could administer the server, you could turn on services, but then you could use the two client systems to use the services so that you could see what sharing the different services would do. And then whenever you were finished, obviously, that server’s completely hosed because somebody’s been playing with it for a while. So I trained all the SEs that were going through the lab and monitoring it. It would just basically kick off a script on the two client systems and on the server, and it would all just refresh. 20 minutes later, boom, brand new lab, and every table was its own little mini lab, and we segregated those off so that they were all on their own individual little networks so that they were completely protected.
That totally gave me the idea to do the courses on server for Linda, where we would show server, but realized, well, it’s completely useless to just show server without showing the client using the services. So there’s always something about that. Like where you were saying, if you consult across a wide array of different types of clients, you’re going to run into a lot of different scenarios, and those scenarios are going to inform what you then teach because that’s what experienced, it’s what you’ve encountered. And so as teachers, this is how we decide on what we want to share. You kind of get amped about something, you’re like, “Ooh, that was really cool. I got to show the world how to do that.” And so you put that into a book or you put it into a course or you do a talk at a conference about it because you’re just like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to share this with people.”

Charles Edge:
Love it. And, I guess, some of these projects don’t just kind of happen in a vacuum. What kind of collaboration were you able to have with some of your peers in the industry

Sean Colins:
Consulting or on courses? Well, courses, there was a lot of collaboration with vendors. I would travel up to Apple and I would talk to people who were product managers or whatever to discuss what features of the operating system or of different products that they thought would be valuable to teach. When I first started back with that Tiger course, I was literally just going off of the new features list. I was like, “I’m going to teach all the new features. Easy.” But as time went on and as that kind of evolved, I found that I had better relationships with people inside of Apple, and those folks are good about talking about some things and not about others because there’s things that they can’t share, but that was really valuable. Those relationships were super valuable with Apple. I developed relationships with people at Jamf and other companies where those relationships helped to guide what the content would be, really, and that was really helpful.
I did an MDM course that was very much a, like, “So hey, you’re an executive, you know nothing about computers, but you need to know what MDM is. Here’s this course.” And I did it partnership with one of my employees, John Wells. He wrote some of the movies. I recorded all of them, but he wrote some of them and gave him credit on the course for it. I really enjoy collaborating with people to get projects done. I find that working by myself, in a vacuum, makes it less creative. I love having someone to bounce ideas off of to create a course. It’s one of the things that I like the most about having a producer whenever I’m doing a course for linda.com, LinkedIn Learning is, usually, those producers, if any of them are listening, you guys are all brilliant, they’re really smart people and they’re really curious, and because they’re sitting in a recording booth across from a different person every week, they’ve got so much knowledge.
They have just been there, they’ve been present to hear and learn every… I mean, it’s incredible breadth of content. So they’re incredibly fascinating people to talk to because they just know the most unusual things. Yeah, collaboration’s great.

Charles Edge:
And, I guess, going back to our Plato quote from the beginning, it’s really easy when we’re banging out content, when we’re working full-time jobs on top of that, because it’s worth mentioning, this is a second job, effectively. It’s really easy to just not do anything but work and when your work is sitting behind a keyboard, we can get somewhat lethargic. So you have a new book out for engineers, why don’t you just tell us all about it?

Sean Colins:
Okay. So just a little bit of personal history about… Oh God, seven years ago, I just kind of went to my doctor and I was like, “I’m sick of this. I’ve been overweight for way too long.” I was the guy who would get on the treadmill. I had an incline treadmill in the garage and I’d spend two hours a night on it and never lost a pound. Nothing worked. I was just so frustrated. And I had spent my high school swimming, college, did some weight lifting. I was in great shape. It wasn’t until I chose this career that things started to go downhill slowly over time and eventually I ended up being 50 pounds overweight, which, I’m like five nine and a half. I’m not tall enough to be 50 pounds overweight. So I lost it all. I started off with the doctor, and the doctor gave me some advice, and then I kind of plateaued and I started to research things and found a lot of different diets and different exercise plans, and I started to learn more.
Eventually, I landed on a system that really worked for me, and it worked fast and it worked reliably, and it stuck. And I was like, “Ah, this is fantastic.” And so I’d go back to conferences, I’d go and see people and they’d be like, “Oh my God, you lost a lot of weight. What did you do?” And I’d tell them and they’d be like, “Oh my God, that’s actually really easy. I could probably do that.” I was like, “Yeah, you probably could.” But I didn’t really understand why what I did worked, you know what I mean? I did it and it worked, but I kind of didn’t understand the science behind it. And I got really into bio-hacking and mind hacking and all of this stuff around that same time. And I finally just did the research and figured it out, and there’s all these studies out there. NIH has a website of studies that is incredibly deep.
So I wrote this book because over the years, and I know here in the Los Angeles area, we’ve got the local Apple Consultants network, and that’s been a worldwide organization for a long time. But 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I’ve had friends that were overweight to the point of, it either gave them some serious severe health problems or I had a couple of friends who died and it’s just, I don’t know. I got to the point where I was like, I have to share this. It’s like what we were talking about before where you find a cool new trick, like you can script something that shaves off a bunch of time from your workday and you’re like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to share this thing.” And I just started feeling like I needed to share this. I wanted to get this out and I wanted to explain how I did it and how somebody else could do it, and then the rest of the process because after the weight loss, I had some other personal things that happened that led me into therapy, and then that led me into yoga, ended up doing hot yoga, and then it went from being just less heavy to being stronger and more flexible than I’d been in my entire life, including high school as a swimmer and all that.
And it’s just been a really amazing path for me. I would not be the same person without hot yoga. It’s just an incredible workout but it’s also a great way to get flexibility and strength and meditation all in one dose. And if you do it daily, it’s just an incredible thing to look forward to at the end of a day or at the beginning of your day or whatever. So yeah, this book is a love letter to all of the systems administrators out there who would like to not be in pain getting in and out of the car, or not have a hard time getting out of the bathtub. It’s for all of us.

Tom Bridge:
Love that. Thanks for sharing that story

Speaker 7:
Here at the Mac Admins podcast. We want to say a special thank you to all of our Patreon backers. The following people are to be recognized for their incredible generosity. Stu Baka, thank you. Adam Selby, thank you. Nate Walk, thank you. Michael Tsai, thank you. Rick Goody, thank you. Mike Boylan, you know it, thank you. Melvin Vives, thank you. Bill Stites, thank you. Anoush d’Orville, thank you. Jeffrey Compton, M. Marsh, Stu McDonald, Hamlin Krewson, Adam Burg, thank you. AJ Potrebka, thank you. James Stracey, Tim Perfitt of Two Canoes, thank you. Nate Sinal, Will O’Neill, Seb Nash, the folks at Command Control Power, Stephen Weinstein, Chad Swarthout, Daniel MacLaughlin, Justin Holt, Will Smith and Weldon Dodd. Thank you all so much. And remember that you can back us if you just head on out to patreon.com/mac ADM podcast. Thanks everybody.

Tom Bridge:
So one of the things that we love here on the Mac Admins podcast is to have a bonus question. So since we were just talking about yoga a little… All right, we got to talk about it. Favorite yoga pose?

Sean Colins:
Okay, so I am a big fan of something called pigeon pose. I absolutely love this pose. God, how do I even explain this? You sort of lay out flat on your yoga mat and you pull your shin and your knee up underneath your chest and your other leg, and you always do both sides equally so that you’re balanced. So you start off with the right, and then you finish that, and then you do the same thing on the left, but you pull the leg up underneath your chest, your shin is supposed to be parallel with the top of your mat, and then your back leg goes all the way back straight, and you sort of want to look over the same shoulder as the leg that’s going back to make sure that it’s straight. And you just stand up tall with your body. You sort of put your hands down and you straighten your back up and you kind of extend your head so that it feels like you’ve got a string pulling from the top of your head straight through the ceiling.
And then you slowly walk down with your hands until you are laying as flat as you can over that. And what you get from that is this glute stretch and a hip stretch that is insane. The first time you do it, you won’t be able to do it, but it’s one of those poses… Well, all of the poses are like this, but this is one of those ones that’s on the floor, doesn’t require balance, builds flexibility and over time, you can really tell the difference. If you do it three times a week, every week for six months, by the time you’re six months in, you are hitting a completely different level that is just mind-blowingly different and it loosens things up that you just didn’t even know were tight. It’s an incredible pose.

Tom Bridge:
That’s awesome. Charles, do you spend a lot of time in the studio anymore? I mean, has your practice continued after you’ve left California?

Charles Edge:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I never taught, I got certified to do so, but I am a sucker for inversions. Any inversion…

Tom Bridge:
Yes.

Charles Edge:
I like to feel the blood rush to my face. So whether it’s trying to get into scorpion tripods… I can’t do the handstand handstands, but if I put my arms down, I can usually balance on the bottoms of my arms.

Tom Bridge:
Can you do feet against the wall? Handstand against the wall?

Charles Edge:
Yeah. If I have something to borrow…

Tom Bridge:
Yeah.

Charles Edge:
For the balance.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah, exactly.

Charles Edge:
But yeah, I did have to stop August. Surgeries will do that. One thing that’s always really concerning about yoga specifically is, if your body mechanics are off, especially in inversion poses, you can really mess up other muscles. When you overstress something so… I haven’t been in there for a while, but now that the feeling’s mostly back, I think, in my back, I’ll probably be back soon. How about you guys? Marcus?

Marcus Ramson:
Well, it’s funny. I’ve never been a yoga person. And Tanya Dastris, who I used to work with, who’s been on the podcast a couple of times, is somebody who swears by hot yoga and was always trying to get me to try and do it. But it’s interesting hearing you talk about this sort of health journey. That’s something that I’ve started trying to do about six months ago and saw this amazing connection between my body and my mind where getting healthy, actually getting off my arse and doing a little bit. So for me, it was doing Pilates to try and help resolve a back issue and a little bit of high intensity training. And that ability to be able to move my body in ways that I was never able to before and had never even really attempted to before was incredibly surprising and confronting that I’m able to do things with my body, able to get remotely close to touching my toes that I was never able to before, and be able to keep up particular poses or stretches or exercises for amounts of time I was never able to before.
But then seeing the impact that had on me psychologically and emotionally, and realizing that my physical health and mental health were connected. So maybe Tanya will get me into trying some hot yoga at some stage, and I’ll get to experience some of these, but it’s also the setback I’ve had this week with a stent in my kidney at the moment and the urologist is saying, “No, no, no, no, no, you’re not allowed to do any of that exercise.” And for me, it’s this real problem where it’s like, that was what was keeping me going, having the routine of going and doing this exercise and stopping work at 5:30 to go to classes and then making sure I can try and keep something up, but at the same time going, I don’t want to go and do a particular stretch and break the end off the stent and be back in emergency because that’s bad.

Sean Colins:
No, no. Yeah. It is really important to never go into any diet or any exercise program without first talking to your primary care physician. They know the best thing for you, and everybody’s very different. So that’s the first step. I say it like a thousand times in the book. The other thing is, the people that I really, really want to talk to with this book are the people who think they can’t, or the people who think they don’t want to. I think that both of those audiences… God, they’re exactly the ones that I would love to convert.

Tom Bridge:
Here’s the challenge. So as a lifelong struggler back and forth, and again, former swimmer, former weight rat, all of those things, it is a case of, you have to want to do it, and you have to figure out how to do it. And so, I think about the time that I spend now, out… My friend, Dan, calls it taking a stupid walk for a stupid mental health. You start with, “Hey, I’m just walking the stupid out. It’s fine. I’ll be back in 30 minutes. I’ll be back in 45 minutes, but I’m going to walk the stupid out and I’ll see you in a little bit.” But you have to come up with the wanting to do that thing. And so…

Sean Colins:
Totally.

Tom Bridge:
I was going to say, the challenge there is obviously getting people to see it that way.

Marcus Ramson:
And not just being…

Sean Colins:
You got to want the results.

Marcus Ramson:
And not just wanting to do it.

Sean Colins:
Yeah, go ahead.

Marcus Ramson:
I found I’d wanted to do it for a while but it actually took me several years of wanting to do it to actually be ready, and that’s hard.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. I…

Sean Colins:
Circumstances have to be there, for sure.

Charles Edge:
I think one of the takeaways from your book was that it comes down to routine sometimes, and getting into that routine. And that might be, oh, the kids going to a different school, that might be… There are certain events that alter our routines whether we want them to or not, and when those occur, we have options for what we put into those buckets of the routine or how we can go about it. Sometimes there are just things outside of our control. There’s no way I can go do that thing and so you’re looking for alternatives and…

Marcus Ramson:
Well, global pandemics can annihilate routines that you had.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. I had to buy a walking treadmill. I had never had one before that.

Marcus Ramson:
Look, it was interesting…

Charles Edge:
The pandemic changed a lot of things.

Marcus Ramson:
I found, as well as the physical benefits of doing exercise, I feel that the routine of doing it as well has been enormously beneficial for me. And just having something that I’m doing regularly. There are lots of things I could do myself. Oh, we’ve got Apple Fitness, we’ve got YouTube. I’d start a lot of those things and never finish them or persevere with them, but actually going somewhere and being accountable for it.

Charles Edge:
That was a biggie for me. I mean, doing yoga by myself in the basement is not exactly very fun for me. Even though you don’t talk to people and you try to keep your eyes on your own mat, which, when I was teaching, it’s like, “Oh, keep your eyes on your mat. Don’t look at other people,” Not, “Don’t look at other people,” But don’t judge yourself by their litmus. But when I go down to the basement, I just don’t feel the fire. I can bang out 15 minutes, but there’s nothing like going to a hot yoga class for an hour. I personally don’t love hot yoga, I prefer cold. I live in Minnesota, I guess I like cold, but…

Sean Colins:
Polar plunge yoga.

Charles Edge:
Hey, now. I do love the polar plunge. There’s nothing like…

Sean Colins:
There’s way more in the book that I could possibly get into with you guys here, but I will say this, Tom. First of all, I’m sending all of you guys a copy of the book. I mean, you can buy this thing on Amazon, but anybody who wants it, if they can’t afford it, I will send it to anyone for free. So if anybody wants to reach out to me, I will totally send them a digital copy for free.
Tom, I would love to work with you on this, personally. I think that would be amazing. One of the things that I mention in the book is that I’m hoping that this spawns a community of people who all want to do this together, because I think that that kind of mutual support is something that is very common in our field. We are people who support each other, right? Mac Admins specifically, but I think CIS admins in general, we love to support each other. And this is a level that I haven’t seen happen before and I would love for that to happen. So all of that, I look forward to talking to you more, Tom, about that. Yeah.

Tom Bridge:
Well, thanks so much for coming on this week. It’s been a pleasure talking with you about all of the things that we talked about today, fitness, all the way back to history of Apple operating systems through to some topics near and dear to all of our hearts, which is to say training and making ourselves better and learning those things, so thank you so much. Where can folks find more about your work, about more about these classes, or more about just generally speaking your work?

Sean Colins:
I think the best place for people to go, honestly, is Instagram. I’m Sean underscore M, underscore Colins with one L. I go there first to post things. I’m not huge on social media. Like I said, I’m doing the YouTube thing, but I’m going to have links in my bio on Instagram to anything I’m doing at any given time. I want to give people one place to go. That’s probably the best place. There’s other places you can go, but that’s a good place to start.

Tom Bridge:
Awesome. Thank you so much. And we’ll have all of those links in the show notes here today. So please go open up your podcast player of choice and take a look at some of those links because that’s always super valuable. Thanks so much to all of our great sponsors this week. That is our friends at Kandji and Kolide and Alectrona, specifically around Alectrona Patch. And thanks everybody. We’ll see you next time.

Marcus Ramson:
See you later.

Sean Colins:
Thanks guys.

Tom Bridge:
The Mac Admins podcast as a production of Mac Admins Podcast LLC. Our producer is Tom Bridge. Our sound editor and mixing engineer is James Smith. Our theme music was produced by Adam Kodiga, the first time he opened Garage Band. Sponsorship for the Mac Admins podcast is provided by the Mac Admins.org Slack, where you can join thousands of Mac Admins in a free Slack instance, visit mac admins.org. And also by Technolutionary LLC, technically, we can help. For more information about this podcast and other broadcasts like it, please visit podcast.mac admins.org.
Since we’ve converted this podcast to APFS, the funny metadata joke is at the end.