Geeking Out with Adriana Villela

We've heard from GenX-ers and Millennials talking about their views on AI-assisted software development. We've heard separately from GenZ-ers. But we haven't had all three perspectives in the same room together...until now. What advice do GenX-ers and Millennials have for GenZ-ers in the age of AI-assisted coding, and vice-versa? Find out, as we bring back some of our former panelists, Tim Banks (GenX), and Cassidy Williams (Millennial), and Divyasha Pahuja (GenZ) to talk about how all 3 generations can help each other in our new AI reality.

• Everyone wants to join the AI bandwagon because of FOMO...but should they?
• AI skeptics are being treated as Luddites, which is an unfair assessment
• AI helps us build things faster, and helps us get through our otherwise unattended personal projects
• Being a developer in the agentic era means being a manager of agents (less building - more monitoring and observing what's being produced by AI agents)
• Domain knowledge is more appreciated as a developer in the AI era
• Having base knowledge (first principles) is helpful when it comes to troubleshooting/problem solving
• Just as we did with Google, asking "the right questions" and being able to phrase them effectively is extremely helpful for using AI for problem solving/learning concepts
• GenZ doesn't want to be robbed of the experience of troubleshooting.
• Learning from failure is the best way to learn, and because of AI, GenZ is given more room to fail fast.
• One of the side-effects of the AI era is that many folks are unable to handle pushbacks because they're used to AI saying that they're smart.
• Advantages of AI: "Everything feels possible", and AI lets you create content tailored to different learning styles (e.g. neurodivergent kids)
• “Brolulu” - AI has validated a lot of delusions

Cassidy Williams

Cassidy is the Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub! Outside of that fancy title, Cassidy is a startup advisor and investor, open source-er, and meme-maker on the internet. She enjoys building mechanical keyboards, playing music, hanging out with family and friends, and teaching in her free time.

Find Cassidy on:

• LinkedIn
• Bluesky
• GitHub
• Blog
• Newsletter

Tim Banks (they/them)

Tim’s tech career spans over 25 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started in avionics in the US Marine Corps and then into various government contracting roles. After moving to the private sector, Tim worked both in large corporate environments and in small startups, honing his skills in systems administration, automation, architecture, and operations for large cloud-based datastores.

Today, Tim leverages their years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with the open source and cloud computing communities in his current role. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. They are the 2-time American National and is the 5-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in their division.

Find Tim on:

• LinkedIn
• Bluesky
• Instagram

Divyasha Pahuja

Divyasha Pahuja is a GenZ AI engineer, multimodal ML researcher, and four-time peer-reviewed author at ACM/IEEE and Springer — someone whose career started before ChatGPT shipped and accelerated alongside it. She's had quite a journey: software engineer (back when LLMs weren't a household phrase), then back to school, then ML researcher, and now sitting at the cusp of both as an AI engineer.

Off the keyboard, she's spent the last few years with Feeding India leading a digital campaign team, distributing meals, and building recurring partnerships with local NGOs and old age homes.

Outside of all that, she loves playing badminton, is a self-admitted sore loser, has a soft spot for cats, coffee shops and Netflix because who doesn't, and is just starting an AI community at @un__prompted — say hi if you want to be there early.

Find Divyasha on:

• LinkedIn

• All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on adrianavillela.com/socials

00:08 Intro

01:11 Guest intros

03:30 The demo curse

06:18 Live demos at really large tech conferences

09:30 Tape backups & zip drives

14:27 What scares you most about AI?

16:59 People don't know how to have arguments anymore

23:26 Dev work has turned into AI babysitter

25:30 Do you mourn the loss of hand coding?

31:20 Use AI to augment

34:17 GenZ doesn't want to lose the problem solving muscle memory

45:03 What do you need from other generations to help you navigate the AI world?

50:29 Flattening organizations to restructure for the AI world

52:29 Delusions validated by AI ("brolulu")

55:52 What excites you about AI?

57:27 Do we have a reason to fear Skynet?

59:58 Wrap-up

• Geeking Out Live: The One Where We Geek Out on Vibing Like It's 1999, Coding Like It's 2026
• Geeking Out Live: The One Where We Geek Out on Slaying the Vibes
• The Devil Was Never in the Details: Code, AI, and the Rise of the Deep Generalist (Tim Banks, Commit Your Code 2026)
• Fruity Loops (now FL software)
• Skynet (Terminator)
• Cassidy's blog template on GitHub
• Tape backup
• Zip drive

Justin Garrison wasn't one of those kids who grew up in tech. In fact, he loved cars and wanted to fix cars for a living. He didn't own his own computer until university, and literally didn't know what to do with one once he got one. But then he took a job at university fixing computers, and that's when was exposed to Linux. After that, he was hooked. Since then, his career has been fueled by curiosity, a willingness to learn in public, and a love for technology. Join Adriana as she talks to Justin about his career, what inspires his fun tech content, and more.

About Justin Garrison:

Justin serves as Head of Product at Sidero Labs and hosts the Fork Around and Find Out podcast. He has been called the Steven Spielberg of Cloud Native and the Bill Nye of tech. His career includes contributions to Oscar-winning films, the Disney+ streaming platform, and Amazon EKS. In his free time, Justin enjoys building modern-retro computers and watching Moana.

Key takeaways:

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Chapters:

00:00 Opening credits

00:26 Guest intro

03:22 Lefty or righty?

06:07 iPhone or Android?

12:38 Being "accidentally offline" for a business trip

17:30 Mac, Linux, or Windows?

20:48 From zero to Linux hero?

23:25 The least offensive major

29:12 Programming == manual work avoidance

33:29 Becoming a Linux sysadmin

36:25 Making tech content relatable and fun

41:30 Everything we learn is a lie

47:20 Working at Disney

54:31 From Disney Animation to Disney+

58:00 Being a Cloud Native Ambassador

01:01:00 From big enterprise, to small startup

01:10:11 Final words of wisdom

01:13:10 Peace out and geek out

When Aakansha Priya was working on her computer science degree, she wasn't even sure she wanted to be in tech. She craved human interaction, and thought that a career in tech couldn't give her that. She soon discovered that that was not the case, and was able to find was to thrive in tech. Learn about Aakansha's career journey, from front-end developer, to DevRel, to Solutions Architect, and how her determination to get into the observability world won over her current employer.

About Aakansha Priya:

Aakansha Priya is a Solution Architect at Dash0 and a CNCF Ambassador. With a journey from frontend developer to DevRel to solution architect, she brings both engineering depth and a strong customer advocate perspective. She loves championing her customers and serving as a bridge between them and engineering, ensuring technology delivers real value. Aakansha has spoken at conferences on DevOps and the human side of tech, and is passionate about helping teams unlock the value of observability with OpenTelemetry. Beyond work, she enjoys painting, singing, reading, and spontaneous travel and you'll often find her at meetups and conferences.

Key takeaways:

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Links:

Chapters:

00:00 Opening credits

00:26 Guest intro

00:43 Icebreaker

00:49 Lefty or righty?

00:55 iPhone or Android?

01:39 Mac, Linux, or Windows?

01:46 Favourite programming language?

02:26 Dev or Ops?

02:59 JSON or YAML?

03:32 Spaces or tabs?

03:48 Video or text?

04:23 What is your superpower?

06:14 How did you start your tech career?

13:24 Aakansha talks about speaking at her first conference

14:52 Becoming a CNCF Ambassador

16:45 Organizing KubeHuddle

19:48 Men supporting women in tech

20:40 Women supporting women

24:23 Dressing up for conferences

28:40 Career transition from DevRel

34:33 The importance of networking at conferences

39:52 Being a Solutions Architect

42:34 Breaking into the observability space

48:21 Parting words of wisdom

GenZ are in a unique position in the Age of AI, because they are coming up "AI native"...or are they? Join us for a special LIVE episode of Geeking Out, in which host Adriana Villela speaks with four GenZ-ers to get their perspectives on how AI is disrupting software development, and their future careers. Featuring Divyasha Pahuja, Stella Gu, Amrithaa Logeswaran, and Rachelle De Man.

Divyasha Pahuja

Divyasha Pahuja is a GenZ AI engineer, multimodal ML researcher, and four-time peer-reviewed author at ACM/IEEE and Springer — someone whose career started before ChatGPT shipped and accelerated alongside it. She's had quite a journey: software engineer (back when LLMs weren't a household phrase), then back to school, then ML researcher, and now sitting at the cusp of both as an AI engineer.

Off the keyboard, she's spent the last few years with Feeding India leading a digital campaign team, distributing meals, and building recurring partnerships with local NGOs and old age homes.

Outside of all that, she loves playing badminton, is a self-admitted sore loser, has a soft spot for cats, coffee shops and Netflix because who doesn't, and is just starting an AI community at @un__prompted — say hi if you want to be there early.

Find Divyasha on:

Stella Gu

Stella Gu is an early-career software engineer with past experience at Manulife and Huawei. She has explored a variety of roles within software engineering, including backend systems and data infrastructure. She enjoys working directly with code, turning ideas into meaningful software. Outside of tech, Stella can be found playing sports ⛷️🏐, exploring new food spots, and capturing moments on her phone.

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Amrithaa Logeswaran

Amritha is a second-year Integrated Engineering student at the University of Western Ontario, passionate about building inclusive communities and amplifying student voices. Last year, she served as a First-Year Representative with the Undergraduate Engineering Society (UES), where she discovered how much I love connecting with people and created space for everyone to feel included and supported.

She's realized I’m just as passionate about supporting student life as I am about studying engineering. Whether it’s through leadership roles or one-on-one conversations, she loves building community and helping students feel like they truly belong.

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Rachelle De Man

Rachelle De Man is a young software engineer with experience working at companies like Google, Okta and 1Password. She has an interest in all things web, primarily with accessibility, security, and testing. She’s passionate about hackathons, being a longtime volunteer and attendee. In her off hours, Rachelle enjoys crocheting, games, and photographing nature.

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00:08 Intro

00:08 Intro

00:42 Guest intros

03:15 What was your first programming language?

07:59 IDEs took the mental load out of coding

11:21 AI-assisted coding is ADHD friendly

11:40 What do you despise most about hand coding?

13:34 What's your coder persona?

17:50 How do you feel about trusting AI implicitly to write code in a language you don't know?

23:04 Cassidy rant

28:19 Failure is a teaching aid

33:14 "Awesome Slop"

35:13 AI + domain name purchase side effect

36:49 Vibe coding + startup founders

41:54 Are Gen Z/Gen Alpha better positioned as devs in the AI native era?

45:36 Beware the non-developers with no coding experience'

53:35 Why is the AI writing React for me?

58:25 What's the most important skill a software engineer needs today?

Cassidy Williams

Cassidy is the Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub! Outside of that fancy title, Cassidy is a startup advisor and investor, open source-er, and meme-maker on the internet. She enjoys building mechanical keyboards, playing music, hanging out with family and friends, and teaching in her free time.

Find our guest on:

Tim Banks (they/them)

Tim’s tech career spans over 25 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started in avionics in the US Marine Corps and then into various government contracting roles. After moving to the private sector, Tim worked both in large corporate environments and in small startups, honing his skills in systems administration, automation, architecture, and operations for large cloud-based datastores.

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Jeff Blankenburg

Jeff Blankenburg spent the early part of his career in digital advertising, building websites for Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Ford Motor Company, among others. He also spent 8 years at Microsoft, primarily as an evangelist for any new technology he could get his hands on. He followed his passion to Amazon, where he was the Chief Technical Evangelist for Alexa for 7 years.

Today, he is the Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace, helping developers make cloud native apps easier to build and maintain. Jeff has spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, India, Tokyo, Sydney, and New York, covering topics ranging from software development technologies to soft skill techniques. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek conference.

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Josh Lee

Josh is a Developer Advocate at Altinity, where he applies his observability and engineering background to ClickHouse use cases. He has over 15 years of experience in developing and leading software projects for various clients and industries. Josh is also a speaker and a contributor to the OpenTelemetry and CNCF communities, sharing his insights and best practices on topics such as distributed tracing. He is always eager to learn new things and explore new challenges, and he strives to create elegant and innovative solutions that take into account the nuances and correlations of complex problems.

Find Josh on:

Key takeaways:

About our guest:

Jean-Mark is a builder at heart, driven by a passion for creating sustainable architecture, fostering strong teams, and championing Observability.

He has dedicated his career to building across various disciplines with a keen focus on creating systems that are both fit for purpose and built to last. Jean-Mark’s journey into Observability began from a practical challenge: the difficulty of understanding complex production systems at scale. This sparked a deep passion for designing and implementing solutions that provide clarity and insight into these systems.

A natural leader, Jean-Mark is as invested in people as he is in technology. He has brought many others along on his journey, mentoring and training colleagues in best practices and making countless tooling improvements to enhance system visibility across the organization. This commitment to both technical excellence and people development has made a lasting impact. At his core, Jean-Mark is still a builder who finds great joy in investing in people and engaging in endless conversations about all things Observability.

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00:08 Intro

00:29 Guest intros

06:24 Why is IWD important?

11:20 Name one woman who inspires you

22:24 What can women do to support other women in the workplace?

31:43 Name one man who inspires you

42:55 What can men do to support other men in the workplace

51:48 What are some workplace inequalities that need to be fixed

58:22 What advice do you have for women entering tech?

Colleen Coll

"Allow myself to introduce...myself." - Austin Powers

Ever feel like you're juggling flaming torches planning events—trying to keep all the details in the air while something’s always about to catch fire? Yep, she's been there. Events have a way of throwing curveballs, and when tech and tools aren’t playing nice, chaos can easily take over.

That’s where Colleen Coll comes in. She love turning event madness into magic. Whether it’s on-site event coverage using digital media, live reporting, or behind-the-scenes management, she makes sure everything runs like clockwork. She's also a huge fan of using There.App, which simplifies on-location event management by keeping everyone in sync and streamlining the entire process, so no detail gets lost in the shuffle.

From tech conferences to startup launches, I capture the moments that matter and keep things smooth, whether it's happening live or behind the scenes. And when she's not on the ground, she's writing—blogs, articles, and ghostwriting for tech leaders to tell the bigger story behind the event, brand, or mission.

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Reese Lee

Reese Lee (she/her) is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, where she enables users on open source technologies such as OpenTelemetry. She has spoken on various topics related to OpenTelemetry, and maintains and creates community resources aimed at OTel end users. She is super into anything paranormal, and enjoys sci-fi and traveling.

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Imma Valls

Imma is a Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs. She loves simplifying and sharing knowledge on Observability, OpenTelemetry, and Cloud Native accessible. Her mission is to create high-value technical content while driving the adoption of best practices within the community. As a community organizer and ally, she's passionate about building inclusive communities and events where underrepresented people in tech can confidently share their stories and knowledge. Knowledge isn't static; it's an asset that multiplies when shared.

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Josh Lee

Josh is a Developer Advocate at Altinity, where he applies his observability and engineering background to ClickHouse use cases. He has over 15 years of experience in developing and leading software projects for various clients and industries. Josh is also a speaker and a contributor to the OpenTelemetry and CNCF communities, sharing his insights and best practices on topics such as distributed tracing. He is always eager to learn new things and explore new challenges, and he strives to create elegant and innovative solutions that take into account the nuances and correlations of complex problems.

Find Josh on:

Key takeaways:

• Diana took the "failure" of being downgraded in her PhD program as a wakeup call.
• Although being downgraded in her PhD program was a shock for Diana and made her extremely angry, she found the strength to finish her studies, and reinvented herself through a career in tech.
• Learning from failure is an important part of personal growth.
• Don't spend your time ruminating on the negative from years ago, because there are other, more important things that come up in life that we have to deal with.
• Find humility in your failure and move on.
• Diana's early experience in tech working at a call centre, and then in customer support prepared her for a later role as an SRE.
• Diana's call centre work taught her how to: Push past her introversion and phone anxiety; Manage her emotions; Filter; Have empathy; Listen
• Diana's work doing tech support in AWS, Azure, etc, introduced her into the cloud native space, and naturally primed her for a role as an SRE, and eventually as a developer advocate in the Observability space.
• Working in tech support meant being on-call, which prepared Diana for on-call work of SRE
• As a working mom in tech, it's hard to fully excel at work and at family life. It's a balancing act, and you do your best to manage.
• Nobody gives you an award for being a mom. You just do it.
• Updating docs, either to clarify a concept or to provide translation into another language is a great way to start contributing to cloud native projects.
• Having translation of OTel docs in different languages makes it accessible to those who aren't fluent in English.

About our guest:

Diana is a Developer Experience Engineer at VictoriaMetrics. She has worked as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Observability. She is an active member of the OpenTelemetry CNCF open source project, co-organizer of Cloud Native Days Romania, co-lead of neurodiversity working group (part of CNCF initiative merge-forward) and supports underrepresented groups in tech.

Find Diana on:

• LinkedIn
• Bluesky
• GitHub

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela

Links:

• Erasmus Scholarship
• Geeking Out Live: Working Moms in Tech, featuring Diana as one of the panelists
• Cloud Native Days Romania 2026 (web site)
• Cloud Native Days Romania 2026 on Instagram
• Cloud Native Days Romania 2026 on LinkedIn

Key takeaways:

About our guest:

Scott Hanselman is a programmer, teacher, and speaker. He works out of his home office in Portland, Oregon for Microsoft as the Vice President of Developer Community. He works on .NET, Open Source, and the Azure Cloud Developer Experience. He blogs about technology, culture, gadgets, inclusion, code, the web, where we're going and where we've been. He's excited about community, social equity, media, entrepreneurship and above all, the open web.

He has a number of fun podcasts and a YouTube channel. 

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