The increase in conferences

Geertjan Wielenga: Don't you also get the feeling that maybe five years ago, even, there weren't as many conferences as there are now?

Kirk Pepperdine: Yes, I think a few more have popped up. If you look at what's going on in Poland, that's pretty amazing. Poland seems to have a very active community and there are a lot of conferences. There are a couple of conferences that are back to back in Krakow. They both draw 3,000 people. I can't spend my entire time speaking because I need to pay the bills and speaking, unfortunately, doesn't really pay the bills.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you find that as a result of being at conferences and networking, it helps your business?

Kirk Pepperdine: I haven't been able to correlate attendance at a conference with my business. Now, I know there's a correlation but nothing is ever immediate. Everyone thinks that you go to a conference and you walk away with 10 new clients. That doesn't happen.

You might walk away with one client or two clients, but you won't get that one client or two clients until maybe a year and a half after you've attended the conference. There's a huge lag, especially for what I do, between speaking at a conference and someone seeing you and saying, "Hey, we might like this guy to come into our company."

They have to wait for a budget cycle and the right conditions. All of a sudden, they'll call you and you'll get an engagement out of it. Meanwhile, you might have just spoken to 600 people, maybe more. I had one customer who said, "Oh, we saw you speak three years ago." They decided to call me because of the talk. That is a crazy long time to remember somebody!

Geertjan Wielenga: You mainly focus on performance tuning. So, when somebody calls you up, do they basically have an application that's dead on the table and it has to be released tomorrow, for example?

Kirk Pepperdine: It actually gets worse than that. I've been called in to projects that had already been cancelled and this was the last-ditch effort to see if I could revive them or get them uncanceled.

It's quite a strange situation because I'm just a goofy guy walking into a company. The company's about to tank, or has already tanked, the project and everybody's highly stressed. I just come in and I'm in beach surf vacation mode. You're really in this juxtaposed mood condition.

When I said that I don't always read about tech, I meant that you have to read about the other things. You have to recognize that most of the time, the problem isn't tech. Yes, there's a technical problem there that needs to be solved, but there's also this human problem that needs to be looked after.

A company has had their best people looking at this problem for months and I'm supposed to come in and change the world in three or four days. I know nothing about what they're doing when I walk through the door.

Somebody's had to go through a hard sell to say, "Let's get someone who's completely clueless about what we do and just call them in randomly and they're magically going to make our problem go away."

There's this human aspect of the problem that you actually have to manage, as I say, and that becomes more important than the tech in some sense. One time, we had members of the board wandering around the developer pit. We had the phones completely ringing off the hook. The system they had deployed was just falling over very badly.

These guys were really good developers, but they had made one mistake. Before I could find it, I had to somehow calm everybody down. I used this technique I use to implement some tactical hack: I had to go off and start killing things in the system.

It did mean that the people who were doing the important work at the time could work uninterrupted and the phones stopped ringing. The board members all went back to their offices to look at something else. You could just feel the tension completely drain out of the room when the phones stopped ringing. Then, everybody's brain turned on.

After that, I could say, "Okay, what did you guys do here?" These guys explained the problem to me and all I had to do was tell them what they told me. Then they knew what the problem was and they went off and fixed it. I didn't do anything; I just found a pressure relief valve.

Geertjan Wielenga: You're like a psychologist more than anything else, then?