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Episode #48: Serverless Developer Culture with Linda Nichols
About Linda Nichols:
Linda Nichols is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. In addition to creating software solutions, she has a passion for community involvement and education. She is a co-founder of Norfolk.js, NodeBots Norfolk, and RevolutionConf. She also enjoys teaching local classes and workshops.
- Twitter: twitter.com/lynnaloo
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lynnaloo/
- GitHub: github.com/lynnaloo
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e5oFSIMuvcM
Transcript:
Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Linda Nichols. Hey, Linda, thanks for being here.
Linda: Hello.
Jeremy: So you are a cloud native technical specialist, and a member of the global black belt team at Microsoft. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about your background and what you do at Microsoft.
Linda: Sure, sure. So first of all, I have like the most awesome title at Microsoft. And most people don't understand, but it sounds great. Especially you join a call with a customer and they're like, the global black belt is here. But, essentially, we're problem solvers. If someone has a problem, or they want to know how to build something, or they want to have a conversation about maybe like, something that's out of the norm, like, it's not your typical service that a lot of the cloud architects within Microsoft know, or it's something more in the open-source side, something that's heavier into serverless or Kubernetes, or just something that's maybe out in the community. There's a lot of open-source tools and things that we talk about, we could be just the open-source blackbelt team. And my background is development. I was thinking about this today. Like, I'm not afraid to say I'm in my early 40s. And so now, half my life has been developing.
I've had a professional job as a developer for half my life. So it's really like kind of ingrained in me being a developer, even if I'm not coding every single day now, because I'm on the phone a lot, just like chatting with people, but I still, like really enjoy kind of hacking at things and thinking about methodologies. And, that's part of what we do too on our team I mean, maybe someone calls us up and says, I just can't get this working and we help them through it. But also, maybe we just kind of talk about, like why are you doing this this way? And, what you think about this? And how about these tools? And that sort of thing.
Jeremy: Awesome. Alright. So I've seen you give a number of presentations actually in a lot of the presentations that you give are around DevOps and serverless, right? And kind of how those things connect. And speaking about being in your early 40s, one of the things I love about your presentation, I'm in my early 40s, as well, I love your, like 80s and 90s References because I get all of them and it is absolutely amazing. So, but your talks usually are around DevOps and how it kind of intersects with serverless. And a lot of times about the serverless developer themselves. And I remember back at Serverlessconf, it was like serverless developers are developers or something like that and it was great talk. So I kind of want to talk to you today, though, about the culture, right? Like this culture around the serverless developer. Because, if you look at people using things like Amplify, there's this whole new thing like a full-stack serverless developer.
And then you've got some people who are kind of focused more on the, I guess, on the infrastructure side of serverless, which is maybe a bit of an oxymoron, but maybe understanding at least how some of these configurations work. So maybe you just give us a quick overview like, what is the overall culture look like for serverless developers?
Linda: Sure, sure. Well, first of all, you threw like an AWS term at me. And I was like, Amplify, which one is that? But, yeah, I mean, I think what I keep trying to kind of drill in, is it like, yeah, serverless developers are developers. And I keep saying too, serverless was made for us, right? I mean, serverless wasn't really it didn't come out and become popular because ops people were like, "No we don't really want to do our jobs." Like we hate infrastructure. No, no, they love it, they've been skeptical this whole time. They're like," Oh, so the developers are going to push to production now. Okay, have fun with that." so I mean, it's essentially for us, so we shouldn't be the ones that are distrustful, we should be the ones that are saying, okay, here's our process, which is what we love to do. These are the things that we've done to be really successful at development all these years. And now we're carrying it over into this ecosystem where we have a little bit more control, but also less control kind of. I mean, we're not having to hand as much over to the ops people. But we don't have to worry about things.
Like, I think there was a period of time there for a while, where I started to have to care about Docker containers more than I wanted to for a while in development. And I mean, I'm at the point now, where I kind of, I understand the process a lot more, because I've just been in cloud for so long at this point. But there was a point where I just, I really, I had a lot of strong opinions about my development environment and like and libraries and tools, and then suddenly I'm like, Okay, well, I'm just going to push to, whatever past service and then the ops people are like, okay, but like, we're going to need you to like, put a Docker file in there. And I'm like, "Hmmmm." And then there's suddenly there's all these troubleshooting steps. So when serverless kind of took hold, I was like, oh, okay, everyone, this is now the way forward. Because I don't have to care as much, I'm just using some command line tools. And just as simple as I push to GitHub, I push to the cloud.
And I really got on board with a lot of tools like serverless framework especially, too that even abstracted some other things away. Now, I think we're at the point where like, you can use different IDEs, and push different cloud platforms and be really successful too.
Jeremy: Right. And that's actually one of the things I want to ask you about, too, is that again, I've been developing for 20 some-odd years, I think I started in 1996, or something like that. So, this idea of having your tools, right? Your IDEs, I mean, I remember way, way back when using Eclipse and things like that, and some of those other ones. Obviously, there are a lot more now. But what are those tools that the developers were using in the past and are still, or can they still use those now?
Linda: Yeah, well, it's funny, I was talking to my husband yesterday, so my husband works for GCP so we're like a multi cloud household anyway. But we have a very similar background in that we were both Java developers, and we moved to kind of...
Jeremy: I'm sorry to hear that. I sorry to hear that.
Linda: Imagine that. I still love Java. I don't know .NET at all, which is funny. I always like, I'll tell customers, I'm like, "Hey, Microsoft hires traitors like me too." like, I don't know anything about .NET. But I can look at it and say, like, okay, this is enough like Java that I can figure things out. But, so we still talk about kind of development culture a lot. And we're both in cloud now. And so we were just talking a...
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By Jeremy Daly & Rebecca Marshburn
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About Linda Nichols:
Linda Nichols is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. In addition to creating software solutions, she has a passion for community involvement and education. She is a co-founder of Norfolk.js, NodeBots Norfolk, and RevolutionConf. She also enjoys teaching local classes and workshops.
- Twitter: twitter.com/lynnaloo
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lynnaloo/
- GitHub: github.com/lynnaloo
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/e5oFSIMuvcM
Transcript:
Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Linda Nichols. Hey, Linda, thanks for being here.
Linda: Hello.
Jeremy: So you are a cloud native technical specialist, and a member of the global black belt team at Microsoft. So why don't you tell listeners a little bit about your background and what you do at Microsoft.
Linda: Sure, sure. So first of all, I have like the most awesome title at Microsoft. And most people don't understand, but it sounds great. Especially you join a call with a customer and they're like, the global black belt is here. But, essentially, we're problem solvers. If someone has a problem, or they want to know how to build something, or they want to have a conversation about maybe like, something that's out of the norm, like, it's not your typical service that a lot of the cloud architects within Microsoft know, or it's something more in the open-source side, something that's heavier into serverless or Kubernetes, or just something that's maybe out in the community. There's a lot of open-source tools and things that we talk about, we could be just the open-source blackbelt team. And my background is development. I was thinking about this today. Like, I'm not afraid to say I'm in my early 40s. And so now, half my life has been developing.
I've had a professional job as a developer for half my life. So it's really like kind of ingrained in me being a developer, even if I'm not coding every single day now, because I'm on the phone a lot, just like chatting with people, but I still, like really enjoy kind of hacking at things and thinking about methodologies. And, that's part of what we do too on our team I mean, maybe someone calls us up and says, I just can't get this working and we help them through it. But also, maybe we just kind of talk about, like why are you doing this this way? And, what you think about this? And how about these tools? And that sort of thing.
Jeremy: Awesome. Alright. So I've seen you give a number of presentations actually in a lot of the presentations that you give are around DevOps and serverless, right? And kind of how those things connect. And speaking about being in your early 40s, one of the things I love about your presentation, I'm in my early 40s, as well, I love your, like 80s and 90s References because I get all of them and it is absolutely amazing. So, but your talks usually are around DevOps and how it kind of intersects with serverless. And a lot of times about the serverless developer themselves. And I remember back at Serverlessconf, it was like serverless developers are developers or something like that and it was great talk. So I kind of want to talk to you today, though, about the culture, right? Like this culture around the serverless developer. Because, if you look at people using things like Amplify, there's this whole new thing like a full-stack serverless developer.
And then you've got some people who are kind of focused more on the, I guess, on the infrastructure side of serverless, which is maybe a bit of an oxymoron, but maybe understanding at least how some of these configurations work. So maybe you just give us a quick overview like, what is the overall culture look like for serverless developers?
Linda: Sure, sure. Well, first of all, you threw like an AWS term at me. And I was like, Amplify, which one is that? But, yeah, I mean, I think what I keep trying to kind of drill in, is it like, yeah, serverless developers are developers. And I keep saying too, serverless was made for us, right? I mean, serverless wasn't really it didn't come out and become popular because ops people were like, "No we don't really want to do our jobs." Like we hate infrastructure. No, no, they love it, they've been skeptical this whole time. They're like," Oh, so the developers are going to push to production now. Okay, have fun with that." so I mean, it's essentially for us, so we shouldn't be the ones that are distrustful, we should be the ones that are saying, okay, here's our process, which is what we love to do. These are the things that we've done to be really successful at development all these years. And now we're carrying it over into this ecosystem where we have a little bit more control, but also less control kind of. I mean, we're not having to hand as much over to the ops people. But we don't have to worry about things.
Like, I think there was a period of time there for a while, where I started to have to care about Docker containers more than I wanted to for a while in development. And I mean, I'm at the point now, where I kind of, I understand the process a lot more, because I've just been in cloud for so long at this point. But there was a point where I just, I really, I had a lot of strong opinions about my development environment and like and libraries and tools, and then suddenly I'm like, Okay, well, I'm just going to push to, whatever past service and then the ops people are like, okay, but like, we're going to need you to like, put a Docker file in there. And I'm like, "Hmmmm." And then there's suddenly there's all these troubleshooting steps. So when serverless kind of took hold, I was like, oh, okay, everyone, this is now the way forward. Because I don't have to care as much, I'm just using some command line tools. And just as simple as I push to GitHub, I push to the cloud.
And I really got on board with a lot of tools like serverless framework especially, too that even abstracted some other things away. Now, I think we're at the point where like, you can use different IDEs, and push different cloud platforms and be really successful too.
Jeremy: Right. And that's actually one of the things I want to ask you about, too, is that again, I've been developing for 20 some-odd years, I think I started in 1996, or something like that. So, this idea of having your tools, right? Your IDEs, I mean, I remember way, way back when using Eclipse and things like that, and some of those other ones. Obviously, there are a lot more now. But what are those tools that the developers were using in the past and are still, or can they still use those now?
Linda: Yeah, well, it's funny, I was talking to my husband yesterday, so my husband works for GCP so we're like a multi cloud household anyway. But we have a very similar background in that we were both Java developers, and we moved to kind of...
Jeremy: I'm sorry to hear that. I sorry to hear that.
Linda: Imagine that. I still love Java. I don't know .NET at all, which is funny. I always like, I'll tell customers, I'm like, "Hey, Microsoft hires traitors like me too." like, I don't know anything about .NET. But I can look at it and say, like, okay, this is enough like Java that I can figure things out. But, so we still talk about kind of development culture a lot. And we're both in cloud now. And so we were just talking a...