About our guest:

Aicha Laafia Java Software Engineer with a love for coding, a taste for delicious food, and a heart for volunteering. Aicha is also a member of the Moroccan Association of Computing Science, a Women Techmakers and Girls Code ambassador, and an IAmRemarkable facilitator.

Find our guest on:

• Bluesky
• LinkedIn
• LinkTree
• X (formerly Twitter)

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

• KCD Porto
• Ix-chel Ruiz on Geeking Out
• Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB)
• J2EE
• Z Garbage Collector (ZCG)
• Shenandoah Garbage Collector
• Java Lombok Project
• Kotlin
• Devoxx Morocco
• DevBarcelona (DevBcn)
• Java Champions
• Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA)
• Vertical Pod Autoscaling (VPA)
• TAG Environmental Sustainability on CNCF Slack
• Kube-Green
• SQLI

Transcript:
ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada and geeking out with me today, I have Aisha Laafia. Welcome, Aisha.

AICHA: Welcome, Adriana. And welcome everyone.

ADRIANA: So nice to have you on here and for a little bit of background. Oh, so first of all, actually, where are you calling from today?

AICHA: Well, right now I'm from Lyon in France.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. And you know, given that it's afternoon here in, in Canada when we're recording in Toronto, Canada, um, it's evening for you, so I appreciate you taking the time out of your evening, especially because you, you had an event that you were at earlier today that you ducked out of for this recording, so definitely appreciate that. And you know, I wanted to mention to our viewers slash listeners that the way that you and I met was really cool. We met at KCD Porto in Portugal in September of 2024. And yeah, I, I was keynoting there and then you came up to me after my keynote and we started chatting, and it was just so great chatting with you. I had like such an amazing time and, you were telling me your story, so I can't wait to get into that. But first, I have some lightning round slash icebreaker questions for you. Okay, you ready?

AICHA: I'm ready.

ADRIANA: Okay. I swear they're not terrible, they're not painful. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

AICHA: Well, I am a righty.

ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

AICHA: I'm always Android girl.

ADRIANA: All right. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

AICHA: Well, I preferred Linux, but I'm forced to use Windows.

ADRIANA: Oh, that makes me cry. That makes me cry. Do you use Windows subsystem for Linux?

AICHA: That's my hero, literally.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's what saved me too. The last time I had a Windows machine, I'm like, please let them have enabled it. Because that's the other thing. You get a Windows machine and like some companies disable it or don't allow you to like download the VMs, like the whatever Linux VM to run WSL.

AICHA: Well, for me...that's the first thing I ask about is that give me the administration role in my. I have to take control.

ADRIANA: Yes, yes, yes. Good call, good call. And I mean, you do dev work, you should have, you know, some, some sort of administrative access over your, your machine, right?

AICHA: Indeed. And as I am you can say old school. I'm all more like comand type of people. Developers who use command more than like platforms or desktop applications. For me. I like to write things to see logs more than just to click on buttons.

ADRIANA: For sure, for sure. I feel you. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite programming language?

AICHA: It's obviously Java. I don't know like hesitate this question. Of course it's Java.

ADRIANA: Of course. I love it.

AICHA: I love it.

ADRIANA: I think I told you Java was like I spent many years in, in Java, so Java and I were very good friends for a long time. I couldn't tell you what's new in Java anymore though. I'm so out of touch.

AICHA: Well, there's a lot of things indeed. Like Java has been accelerating very, very fast and that's a very good news for us.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. Like what? Okay, so my. I'm of the days of like EJBs and J2EE which I don't even know if that's like a thing anymore. What's, what's something cool in Java like that you're excited about.

AICHA: Like right now it's still a thing, but they're working more like beans or Spring doing its work with more advanced features that's handling the beans. But for Java native, like we have the system that. For example, what I really loved is the ZCG like the garbage collection. Right now it's really advanced. Like for there is ?Shenandoah, for example that it doesn't care about what memory size you have. It's always accelerating, always taking care of your memory handling mechanism. Also like right now we don't have to type a lot of things. That's something that many people complain about Java. There are that there are a lot of new features. You get anonymous classes you can create. You don't have like really to do that big lines. You have like Lombok project that you. We cannot like really right now write all those getters and setters for our instance. You can just enable annotation. Getter. Setter.

ADRIANA: Oh my God, yes. This would have saved me so much time. I remember like painstakingly writing all the getters and setters back in the day and you know like your IDE can like auto generate that stuff and all that if you, if you're nice to it. But yeah, that's, that's nice that annotations can help with that. Yay. Yeah, annotations. I think we're just getting started when I was getting out of Java. So yeah, it's been a while.

AICHA: You missed the fun.

ADRIANA: I know, I know I missed the fun. I missed the fun. I, I gotta ask because, because you're, you're into the Java world. How do you, have you ever played with Kotlin or Groovy?

AICHA: Groovy? Yes. Because I didn't. Well, Groovy. Not that much because most of the projects I worked on they were mainly based on Maven, so but a lot of part we tried to migrate some Groovy there and see to replace it but it didn't work. Yeah. So I'm mainly like Maven. For Kotlin, I didn't have the chance to do it, but it's really my to learn list because I've heard a lot of people saying it's really advanced. Like it takes the basic of Java, it's based on Java, but a lot of you can use it on the mobile, you can use it on desktop, even programs in like it's more light, small. Like in terms of performance. I've heard a lot of good things.

ADRIANA: About Kotlin, so yeah, I, I have as well. So yeah, yeah I, I, that's one I wouldn't mind trying out if, if I had time. I gotta, gotta find that time though to learn. There's like so many cool things to learn, I don't know where to start.

AICHA: Indeed this is, and this is why like Kotlin and Python is on my 2025 like to learn lists.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

AICHA: With the machine in AI right now, every like service we try to integrate AI a lot to automate the things especially that communicate with people and a lot of handling processes we try. So I have to learn Python because even using Java in the machine learning there are some script or some integrated libraries that use Python. So we have to understand. Oh in that the new things about Java, we can handle machine learning with Java too.

ADRIANA: That's cool. That's very cool. It's funny you mentioned Python because Python was like the language I learned after Java and I mean Python's been around for so long. Right. And I have to say like, I hope when you get around to Python I would love to know what your thoughts are. I always, I like Python. I think it's a very pleasant, pleasant language to, to develop in. So yeah. Yeah and yeah it's like so big in, in the machine learning space. It's wild. I love it. I love that it's like it's still alive and kicking.

AICHA: Indeed. Like for me before I started with actually the first time I tried something like coding. It was a Linux script that was like in the middle school. My sister, she was studying a little bit of like tech. It was the tech. So and she was trying some scripting Linux. She was like try this. I. I still remember my first command. It was "ls".

ADRIANA: That was my first Linux command too.

AICHA: I didn't know what does do what does how it works but I tried. But like yeah, that's interesting. And then when I tried to look for like what I want to do. For backup story, I used to dream to be a psychologist.

ADRIANA: Oh cool.

AICHA: I could not find like a really good school there that have the like the domain that I want to study there in Morocco. So it was like I need to something that you can analyze a lot of things that have a lot of logics there. And I found the tech industry especially when I got to know that that's something that we will do it in the future. It's really developing. It's. It will become part of our life. I start to be more passionate, more curious about this and this is where I try. Yeah I will do. I will go to the tech industry but what I will do. I try to look for something. Tried front end, back end when I was a student. B ut I found myself more into backend especially Java. Like I start with the C language at first. I, I create some really interesting like I even built a mini game for 3D using C. Language C. Yeah, I even like in. Then I switch a little bit doing something that like creating the systems more and with Linux like kernel that's. That was my geek in phase there in school.

ADRIANA: That's great.

AICHA: Yeah. And then I was like I, I was introduced to Java and I can call it like falling in love first line of code because I love really the sense of being organized. There is a pattern, it's organized. If you miss something, you know what's going on, what you missed. And it's really mature, it's really robust. Like it's always about mechanism that handling a lot from errors to security and all that. And even like back there there was a lot of code. I was like okay, that's a price I will take. I will code a lot. But it's good for me.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

AICHA: And this is why like I start to fall in love with Java. But what really make me adore it, it's always the community.

ADRIANA: Oh yeah, yeah. I hear lovely things about the Java community. I actually had someone on the podcast earlier, Ix-chel Ruiz, she's based out of, I want to say Basel. Have you met Ix-chel?

AICHA: Actually, thanks to Ix-chel that I did my first technical talk. And thank you a lot because we met back there in the Devoxx Morocco, like in 2022, I think, or 23. And I did the, like, my first real talk. It was on how to organize. I did it tech events, like IT events one to one. And I met her during her talk. By the end of talk, I went to talk to her and I said that I do this talk. Here's what I'm talking about. And she was like, you do Java, Why not do a technical talk? I said, I don't have experience, like no shared experience that you have. We need more women in tech. I even like did a little bit of a little interview, like open mic. That's something I used to do for community there in Morocco. And I met her and a lot of women in tech and it was like, go do it. And the amazing part is that my first, like, on site technical talk on the Barcelona, she was there. I met her.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God.

AICHA: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God. I'm getting like all emotional hearing this.

AICHA: You know, for the fact that I told the community that this is my first real technical, like talk. They all went to to see my talk all in the front. I was like, oh, really? Like the Java champion that were my role model are now attending my talk. That's my.

ADRIANA: Wow, that is such a great and inspiring story. And you know, like the fact that we have a connection back to a previous guest. And I remember actually when Ix-chel was. Was on the podcast, she mentioned that one of the reasons why she got into public speaking is that she wanted to empower other women. And I love hearing the story. Like I, you know, a story where another guest was empowered by her. This is so lovely.

AICHA: Like, I really have to thank her because she did. She said, why not if you're already doing a talk, do the technical one.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. And. And you know, what you said is so important. A lot of people are like, well, but I'm not, you know, I haven't gotten too deep into this. I'm not enough of an expert. And people want to hear that stuff because there's still beginners out there. There. Like, it's very relatable. So relatable. And. And I think it's more relatable coming from a beginner talking from a beginner's point of view than someone being more experienced talking from a beginner's point of view. I think it's a very powerful story that way. I Love, honestly, I love the story. I love that you, you felt empowered by Ix-chel and, and you were lifted up by the rest of the Java community through their support just by being there for your talk. And, and you know, like I, I can. I saw you speak at KCD Porto. You were a great speaker. You gave, was it a lightning talk? I'm trying to remember. It was on sustainability. It was, it was a really great talk on sustainability. I'm so glad that I attended because it was, it was like really informative, you know, to the point, fun. Everything that a talk needs to be.

AICHA: Yeah, for me, as I said, sustainability was, was and is a really topic that I'm interested of and I try to really let people know that we need to consider an impact that we forgot a lot or not being attention to it. We're always talking about protecting the environment, sorting our like our things, making, using like more renewable energy resources. But we never check what our codes do to the environment. And as I said before, our tech industry like contribute to 3% of the global greenhouse gas emissions, and by 2030 it will be more than 13%. And that's a really huge number that we contribute to it as developers. And for us, if you want to really like make impact you need big steps that we go to the data centers, to the other like companies that create the machines that use energy to let them reduce the energy or go for more, we can sell real like energy, renewable energy that's more greener energy resources. But for us that's something that's, for us as a developer, it's really big step that's so hard for. So why not start with baby steps by at least making our application optimized, making our code clean and then going step by step to be a green code.

So first step is that for me you need to. The least thing you can do is that go with the more algorithms that use less time, the less time the less resources to consume. And then the second step is to monitor your application, whatever it's talking about, the energy or the carbon emissions. There are some SDKs that we can use, some tools we can use for monitoring and there's a lot of like big movements and efforts by developers to developers to seek this like this purpose. So please guys, don't just check the financial impact but also the environmental one.

ADRIANA: I totally agree with you on that and I think that's so important because you know, we, we talk, I, I think there's a lot of talk on the impact that our data centers have on the environment. Which is a huge impact, like really making sure that our infrastructure is greener. But then there's also the software that we're running, making sure that that is greener as well. And I think you brought focus on a really important point. It's gotta come from both sides, both the operational standpoint and the development standpoint. The application standpoint. Those, those two things combined can help us make greener software. And it's, it's kind of ironic that like we're in an industry that you know like the, the mere fact that we're, we're working in this industry is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Which personally makes me feel a little bit guilty as I go along because you see all this horrible stuff like all these extreme climate events going on.

AICHA: Indeed. And many when you're discussing about how to really help the environment, you're like oh, we will use like common transportation, we will do this, we will take care of our plants. And I was like, show me your code. Show me your code. Show me your logs. Show me the energy usage that you use. They were like no, the thing is they thought that it will not impact. Then I said check the statistics because our codes use machines and machines needs energy and that energy it's due to some the we can call it like the complexity of our algorithms that's something we write were directly impacted. So as always. And also up, like, besides the code, there is the energy in the resource management and this is why like there in Porto I mentioned like, for Kubernetes, there is horizontal like HPA and VPA. Like you need to check your pods. Don't just overcharge your pod or create more pods that you will not need that consumes more energy.

And also like during your pod, check your nodes too. So it's more like you need to seed balance. Don't create too many pods that will consume more and don't create then few pods that will be overcharged. So it will impact the performance. It's always about balancing the performance with. You can call it like the optimization.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point too and. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

AICHA: No, it's okay. It's okay like for the fun fact is that I don't do DevOps but like it's only on casual things. I do it from time to time with our DevOps like team or engineer doesn't have the time to do it. But when I see a like real impact of our Java native codes I have to say that we need like to containerizations of our application. We need to more focus on the clouds because this is, you can call it temporary solution to like to avoid the machines that the traditional one because it's consume more energy than containers. Than using containers in virtual machines. So you can continue.

ADRIANA: Damn. So it's basically a point for containers.

AICHA: Indeed. CNCF is really working on some amazing projects for sustainability. I just discovered there in KCD Porto and I really loved what they do. They say we working on open source projects where everyone can contribute and right now we are seeing the impact of this we try to do too. So good job, guys.

ADRIANA: Yay. And you're referring to the TAG Sustainability group in CNCF. That's awesome. And speaking of that, what. Is there any specific project in CNCF that that group is working on that like really, really interests you where you're like oh, they're really doing some cool work on sustainability?

AICHA: Well right now I don't remember because I saw a lot of projects but there is one about Kubernetes that handle like really the pods that you are using, if it's not been used, it turned off automatically, something like that. So it's managed like the usage. If there are some heavy usage, it turn on some other pods inactivated and if, if a pod is not activated, is not used, it will be deactivated automatically. That's something about managing. Yeah, I just don't. I forgot the name. I'm having this issue of forgetting names of projects in libraries a lot.

ADRIANA: That's all good.

AICHA: It's Kube-Green. Kube-Green.

ADRIANA: Oh yeah. Kube-Green. Sleep your Pods, reduce your CO2 emissions. Hey, I learned something new today. That's awesome. So Kube-Green is the, is the name of the project. That's, that's super awesome that there's something out there that, that you know is, is monitoring your, your pods. Um, yeah, it, it's funny. And, and you know like this is one of those things where you can tie it back to finance where you're like, well you know, if you're using, if, if you got a bunch of idle pods like it's going to cost you money because not the cloud, the cloud's not free. So I feel like it's a compelling argument to like you know, tie greenhouse gas emissions to financial repercussions as well. Because as we know executives speak in dollars and not CO2 emissions. So it helps to make for a more compelling argument.

AICHA: Yeah, actually this is what I, I'm always saying at the end of my talk. If the stakeholders are not convinced, talk about finance, tell them that you will use less energy, less money.

ADRIANA: Exactly. Perfect. Perfect. That's awesome. I got to ask you like what interested you in this aspect of like sustainability and tech in the first place?

AICHA: Actually I just discovered it out of curiosity. I saw a tweet about something like sustainability. I look for it like sustainability in tech industry. The first thing that comes in the search is was statistics. That's how, how scary it is how big those numbers are. I was like damn, we need to take action and why not start it by myself. What I am doing, what I like to do is to share information. Especially like I start to submit talks. And this is why the first talk I did it was in the Barcelona to talk about the green programming in Java.

ADRIANA: And what you know, I want to. I want to take a. A little step back in. In your. Just rewind on your career stuff. Because when. When you and I met, one of the things that most impressed me about you is you know, just like you had this curiosity to like hey, I just wanted to like learn. Learn about this. You know, the. The environmental impact of tech. I. I was so impressed. I think you told me a story about how like you were thrown into a very unknown situation at one of your previous companies where you basically had to learn DevOps kind of on the fly. If I recall correctly. and correct me if I'm wrong. I was wondering if you could talk about that.

AICHA: I start first as intern there I was in the team with like lots of backend developer and there was a system engineer that handled this. After that it was a decision by the client do not like have any system engineering and we will have to do this. Then when I. When I then like after one year I've been transferred to another team. We were just only two backends and it was a lot of challenging tasks to do. So I started with little things. Thankfully I already have some background. Like I already know Linux. I already know Docker. How to use, how to run containers. It was the basics, but I have to handle a lot of things from Kibana from Logs. Grafana. How to check this. Jenkins. How to handle CI/CD Circle. If there is issue especially like you are talking about Ansible, how to use. Or versioning with Nexus. If some issue with logins or some issue with connection between them how to handle it. It was like a very new world for me. And I was like. The senior that that I have on my second team, it was a really good senior. He was a really good mentor because I said to him listen, you don't have to do all the work just because you are a senior. I'll try to help. Just give me the index what I can learn to do this. And he just gave me we can see the alphabets. Go learn Docker. I said I already have the background. And he was like, if you know Linux, Docker, and keep a little bit of Kubernetes, just take care of the system issues in the server and I will handle the rest. So by second, like on the second team, I only handled system issues. But then after a while I've been transferred to the other team and I was the only backend dev. This is where I have to do all the work. So yes, I start to learn about Ansible, Jenkins, Nexus, Grafana, Kibana, and all geeky stuff. Well, the thing is, first it was a little bit challenging, but I found myself really loving it like to discover. Especially because I start to understand DevOps. It's not only about tools, it's about how to communicate with the team, it's how to operate. Yeah, operate is only about machines about to operate between the teams. What the team needs, you need to talk to them to understand what version they need, what, like which time they will need it so we can schedule it to have the environment ready for them to test or to develop something there. So for me it was a good start. And this is where I become more interested in the cloud too, and DevOps.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so cool.

AICHA: So it was like a best decision from the big head that lead to some really good results for us too.

ADRIANA: That's such an amazing story. And you know, you've touched upon so many things that I think are so important for anyone getting into software, which is like, you know, you were. I think a lot of us who get into software, like the jobs that we start off with when we graduate are not the jobs we end up with years down the line. I mean, technology evolves so much and you have to evolve your learning along the way. You have to evolve your point of view and you have to be willing to take on new stuff. And I love that you have this very positive attitude towards learning because I think if you're not willing to learn new stuff, you're in technology. I don't know, like, I think you're gonna have a very short career. And you took it, you took it in stride and, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you're pretty, like. You're, you're pretty young in your career, right? If, if I recall from our conversations earlier.

AICHA: Actually, yeah. I almost have like with interns all that, three years of experience. Like with the same job I start as intern, like handling small tasks small, fixing bugs. And then I went to my manager and I said, listen, I don't feel like this is the real tech, this is the real development. It's about fixing solutions, fixing problems, finding solutions. I need to understand like the business to fix the issues. It was like, okay, you can start doing some like analyze solution designs. You can start with small ones. This is where I went to the second team and they were, they know this fact. The first ticket that I worked on it, it was like a function ticket they gave me. This is what the like the client needs. I created solution design for it. The architect for it, I discussed with my senior, he validated. Then I start to develop it to implement what I write. And this is like for me my beginning to technical, like writing. So in by that when I start really to do technical talking, I start to write documentation too. Because I found something, some information were missing and was like, I need to write this myself. If it's not for me, it's for like the next generation, the one that will come after me.

ADRIANA: Exactly. And that's, that's such a great attitude because I, you know, it's so easy to sit there and like complain about oh these docs are crappy and then but you can do something about it. You can go and fix it and make it better for everyone.

AICHA: Indeed. Especially because the team that I was working on, it was a big one, but it was like if there is something to upgrade, something to handle, go for it. Because it's really old projects, they try always to make migration to upgrade new services, but for all documentation it was been untouched. So do you say you're welcome, just leave a note why you did this and everything's good.

ADRIANA: That's great, that's great. And I think, you know, I do find like documenting things makes you a better speaker because I think it forces you to like really sit back and like choose your words carefully to be able to explain stuff. And especially for a technical talk, technical documentation, you really have to be able to explain it, explain things clearly in order to be effective at it. Which is I think a very, it's a very hard skill to hone. And you know, considering that like you're so young in your career and you've done all of this amazing stuff, it just blows my mind. Like you, you've got to be like, if I were your manager, I'd be like, can we just clone her a bunch?

AICHA: Actually like the last team there, I was work in SQLI in Morocco. I had manager. He was like, listen, I'm already consider you a senior. You can do it. He never ever like questions my decisions.

ADRIANA: Well, I think you bring in the right attitude too, because so many people like I've worked with, I've managed my fair share of people. And I've, I've, I had, I've had superstars like you. And then I've had the people who are like, tell me what I need to do. And it's like, dude. Just like, show, a little bit of initiative, please.

AICHA: We can do it. Well, yeah, indeed, because I really had a good start. That's, I had a good start. You were like, listen, here we don't make difference between senior or junior. If there is a ticket and you are free, you can do it. You want help, ask for it. We will give you mentoring. And this is why they really spent two years and a half there. It was a really boosting career for me.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

AICHA: So. And then even like I had to make the hard decision to quit that company because I got opportunity to go to live here in France. And for me, because I really like, I want to try new adventure, especially to come to Europe. But we can say mainly because of events, because of community, because here it's more accessible right now. I can travel to events without like checking for visas or other traveling requirements. So I said, why not? I'm still young, I'll try it. And I come here in France with this company. They hire me as like backend software consultants and then they do conferences too. This is where I got opportunity to do talks from in Barcelona, in, in Spain, Barcelona and in Luxembourg too. But as there is a crisis here in like the tech industry, I've been fired, laid off. Yeah. And this is the like a message to everyone who's saying it will not impact you. You never know because. And it's not your fault.

ADRIANA: That's so true. That's so true.

AICHA: Yeah. Because thankful I'm already having like this cheerful mindset. When I, when I got the news, I was like, okay, that's happened. And what's really helped me, to be honest, is that on that period of time there was Paris Olympics, so I had the time, the full time to enjoy it.

ADRIANA: That's true. That's true.

AICHA: Good.

ADRIANA: It's something to distract you while, you know, like from, from a, a very crappy situation. But you know, like, I, I think you, you made a really excellent point, which is like, you know, when, when you're laid off because a company's making cutbacks or whatever, it's. You can't help but take it personally. It's devastating news. It cuts you. It, it really does. And I mean and, and I think it's a perfectly normal reaction to have. I think you have to, you need that time to mourn it. Right?

AICHA: Indeed. Because you start to question yourself, your like competence, your abilities. You keep telling, oh, because I don't have, like, I don't have experience enough that this is why it's happened to me in all that. And then I was like, well, I got. The thing is for me. Or I can give this advice to everyone. If you are facing any difficulty situation, give yourself the time to process it. Accept the fact it's happen. If you want to cry, cry. If you want to scream, scream. Just don't let it inside you. That's really. It will impact more your mental health. Express yourself. Let it go. Let it out of you. It's either if you are more like talking person, talk to someone. If you are doing physical, good. Go for a run or go for a dance. If you are more like party person, just don't, don't just stay like on your house alone thinking or thinking about it. Because the good is that. I already took this lesson from a book that I read. It's about when you start to understand what you can change and what you cannot change and not waste energy on what you cannot change. More on focus on solutions than the problem. You will like optimize, you can say your resources and you will help yourself, your mental self. So please difference between what you can change, what you cannot change.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I, I think that's such an important thing. Such an important point to make is, is, you know, be aware of what you can change. Be aware of you can't, what you can't change because it's very easy to get sucked into that and, and you know, like one negative thought feeds another and, and it can, it can spiral and you know, we've talked about mental health a number of times on, on this podcast and, and getting laid off takes a toll on your mental health. You know, it, I, I'd be surprised if you said it didn't, you know, like, because it is like, it's tough.

AICHA: Yeah, it did. Especially like for me because I never ever had this situation. I was studying and I had like there in Morocco, we have the last six months of ours, like studying in engineering school. We do an internship. And I was recruited during the internship, so directly. I didn't have any process and it was like kind of first time I'm jobless. I have a lot of like especially I have rents to pay. I'll have lots of charge. I need to look for a job ASAP. And it was like during the Olympics. So this stopped the recruitment. They were more focusing on the vacation, Olympics, and all that. So and the fact that by time I didn't find a job, I was like, why this is happen to me and that. I try hard. And then I was like, why? Just looking there in like the Paris region, why not look in France? And this is where I got this job here in Lyon. And the funny fact I really like here, I, I start to see like the impact of me getting laid off. It was a good thing.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

AICHA: Because right now here I'm really with, with the, with the team. That's really encouraging. Giving me all like give your potential. If you want to do something, if you want to suggest something, do it. And like really very, they are very like lovely persons. Like today we have the Christmas party. It was so fun. And for the fact that I don't drink, I was the only one that doesn't drink there. The only one that's eating like halal food.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

AICHA: Like the menu for today it was mainly fish and veggie meals because I cannot eat meat.

ADRIANA: Right, right.

AICHA: Yeah. This is how considerate they are. So for me it's

ADRIANA: Nice that they were so accommodating.

AICHA: Indeed.

ADRIANA: And I was gonna say, you know, there's something to be said when you said you're the only one who, who wasn't drinking there. I was, I was laughing because I was thinking like there's something to be said for being the only sober person in a party full of like tipsy people. And it is really, I, I, I've been that person and it is funny.

AICHA: You know, for the fact they say that even if I don't drink, I don't need to.

ADRIANA: You've got the energy, you don't need alcohol to give you, to give you party energy. Right?

AICHA: Yeah, that's the spirit. And as they said he, right now we are having a party. We forgot about the work. We enjoy yourself. There is a music, there is companies like chatting casually so no need for drinks.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I, I feel you, I feel you. I, I, I will choose bubble tea over alcohol any day. So that's great. Well, we're coming up on time. But this has been such a lovely conversation. Every time I talk to you, I'm more and more inspired by you. I. I see you doing some wonderful, wonderful things in your career. You're just getting started. Now, before we part ways, I was wondering if you could give some parting words of wisdom to our viewers and listeners.

AICHA: There's always a lesson to learn. It's either we win or we learn from our experience. So whatever you have situation, if it was bad, just endure it, accept it and start to look for solutions. And this is for especially for you, the women in tech. Please, please, please start to shine out, start to be presented in communities and events. We need you. We need you a lot because as we are kind of minority, people start to think that there is few women that work intech when you are really having huge impact. So please, this is we can say for women and men, if you have experience, share it. The small details, share it. If you don't like to show off the camera, you can write articles, you can post like on LinkedIn. We are right now talking about Bluesky, our new platforms. Yeah. So choose the platform that you're feeling comfortable with. Start to share your the information that you have because even if you find it like something really simple, but it could help another developer. So please build the community to be like from developers to developers and don't be shy to seek help because we're not only giving information, but we need information too. So all I can say is that pay attention to your mental health, look for more communities in your domain and enjoy your life. That's it.

ADRIANA: I love it. Oh, what a perfect way to end this podcast. Thank you so much, Aisha, for geeking out with me today. Y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

AICHA: Peace out and geek out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all. The socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:

Michael Levan is a seasoned engineer and consultant in the Kubernetes and Platform Engineering space who spends his time working with startups and enterprises around the globe on Kubernetes consulting, training, and content creation. He is a trainer, 4x published author, podcast host, international public speaker, CNCF Ambassador, and was part of the Kubernetes v1.28 and v1.31 Release Team.

Find our guest on:

• LinkedIn
• Bluesky
• X (formerly Twitter)

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

• Windows Phone
• VulnHub
• Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
• Type 1 Hypervisor
• Kali Linux
• Penetration (pen) testing
• Blue team (security)
• Red team (security)
• Microsoft Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates
• Microsoft Bicep
• CompTIA Certifications
• PenTest+ Study Guide (CompTIA)
• Tanya Janca (@SheHacksPurple)
• Alice and Bob Learn Application Security
• Black Hat Python
• Burp Suite
• Metasploit
• Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
• Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP)
• Every Microsoft Employee is Now Being Judged on Security (The Verge)

Transcript:
ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have Michael Levine. Welcome, Michael.

MICHAEL: Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.

ADRIANA: Yeah, really excited to have you on. Where are you calling from today?

MICHAEL: I am in New Jersey.

ADRIANA: Ooh, fellow east coaster. Yay.

MICHAEL: I know. Yeah, I'm. I'm actually. I'm in the process of thinking about getting out of here.

ADRIANA: Oh. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So, yeah, maybe Tampa or Austin. Those have been.

ADRIANA: Oh, so somewhere warm.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah, those have been the two spots that I've been really thinking about lately.

ADRIANA: Cool. I've never been to Austin, but I always hear good things about Austin, especially the food scene.

MICHAEL: Yes. Yeah, I feel like I hear that a lot, especially like podcasts and stuff. Like, I'll be listening to just random podcasts. People will talk. Be talking about how great the food is out there. A lot of barbecue, obviously. 'Murca, and. And all that good stuff. So there's. There's a lot of barbecue and that type of food.

ADRIANA: I am down for the barbecue.

MICHAEL: Exactly.

ADRIANA: Cool. Well, we will be starting off with our lightning round questions. Are you ready?

MICHAEL: I'm ready.

ADRIANA: Hey, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

MICHAEL: Righty.

ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

MICHAEL: I think iPhone, because I've just been using it for so long. But I would argue, though, that will argue with myself that about twice a year I think about switching to Android.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah.

MICHAEL: But it's just. I feel like I'm just so used to the ecosystem at this point, and despite being an engineer, I'm not, like, super interested in consumer technology. I just want stuff that just works. And I feel like, at least back in the day with Android, it was like you had to kind of play around with things to make it work in a particular way. Whereas with iPhone, it's just I open it up and I can use the stuff that I need to use and that's it. So.

ADRIANA: So, yeah, I'm. I'm with you on that as well. I. I do like the. Everything works, Everything's nicely integrated, it plays well. Nice. And, you know, the. The folks who love Android, I think one of the reasons they love it is, oh, you can configure everything.

ADRIANA: And my. My thought is like, but I don't want to.

MICHAEL: Like, no, yeah, I'm doing that 90% of my day. I just don't want to do it in my personal time either.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's not fun to me. It was fun, like, I don't know...

MICHAEL: Years ago.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. When I was younger.

MICHAEL: Exactly. Yeah. Like, I remember, like, I had Android phones and I was jailbreaking them, and then I had like the Windows phones when they were popular for three minutes and then, you know. Yeah. And then it was like, eventually I just had to switch back and just. I just wanted something that just worked, you know?

ADRIANA: Yes, I am with you on that. Okay. Similar vein, do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

MICHAEL: Mac. But there are certain things that are irritating me that I'm thinking about going back to Windows. Like, you know, like, for example, I can't tell you how many times I build a Docker image, then I try to deploy it to a particular place, and I'm like, why isn't this working? And then I'm like, oh, that's right, because I'm building on ARM. Yeah, and then there's. Yeah, and then there's even, like. So I'm really into the security realm and stuff, and there are certain things that I can't do. So for example, there's this website called VulnHub, which is awesome. It's literally just a whole bunch of AMIs that are built with vulnerability.

So let's say you want to test or practice something from a pen testing perspective. You can download these AMIs and then you can spin them up in VMware Player, VirtualBox or whatever you're using for your Type 1 hypervisor. But they're not ARM based.

ADRIANA: Yes.

MICHAEL: Like, I can't use them on my Mac and I have like my Windows box back there, which I can do it on, but I'm like, it's just a pain, you know? Or like, let's say like I'm speaking at a conference or something. It's like, I want to demo something, but I can't because of this. I just. Yeah. So I've been thinking about going back to Mac, which would be the first. Er. Mac Windows, which will be the first time in like six, seven years.

ADRIANA: Oh, damn. Yeah, you make a very good point with the, with the Docker images and ARM. Like, that has caused me so much grief recently.

MICHAEL: It's a pain.

ADRIANA: Like, I can't even tell you. And. And then also, like, I don't know if this is still true. I haven't checked for a while, but I think, like, you can run VirtualBox on M1 Macs.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah. No, you totally can. Yeah. Like, even, like, I have. Yeah. I have VMware Fusion even on it right now because I'll like, I have a Kali VM, but Kali is like a pen testing distro that I'll run locally and stuff because it's not my daily driver. But like I can run those VMs. But if anything is built with AMD base 64 or whatever, it's all about the architecture.

So even whatever the extension is for VMs, right, that AMI. You can exist, you could download it and stuff, but then it'll say, oh, you can't run it because your architecture. And you're like, yeah. Apple should have given an option like go Intel or go ARM. But yeah, so.

ADRIANA: I definitely feel your frustration on that one. Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?

MICHAEL: I'm comfortable and Go, but it depends on the use case. Right. So like programming languages to me are, are really nothing more than a tool to get a job done. Yeah. So like I'll use Go just because I, I enjoy it and I'm comfy in it. But from like a security perspective, a lot of Python and PowerShell, because those are like the two primary like scripting based languages. And from a security perspective, the majority, whether you're doing blue teaming, red teaming, purple AppSec, cloud sec, whatever, the majority of the time writing automation with your code. So it kind of makes sense to go the Python or the PowerShell route. I could do it in Go, but it's like nobody else is really doing it. So then it won't work in certain scenarios or people won't be comfortable with it in certain scenarios, so.

ADRIANA: Oh, cool. That's. That's really interesting.

MICHAEL: Yeah, Yeah, I love Go. I, I started out PowerShell, Python. I moved to Go years ago. I teach like Go training. So like I'll, I'll teach live trainings, teaching people Go. So I'm, I'm super comfy in that realm.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Python or PowerShell, it's pretty much the way to go from a security standpoint.

ADRIANA: Good to know. All right, next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?

MICHAEL: Which one? I don't know. I, I'm, I think because of the way that my brain works, if I had to choose to just do one, it would be development because I'm very logistical, left side of the brain. Like, I like, I like research and I like logistical based jobs. So I think programming gives me more of that and I've done both. Like, I started out my career in systems administration and help desk and all that. Around the middle of my career I moved to software development. And then I just found myself somewhere in the middle. Right. Yeah, whatever you want to call it. Platform, SRE, DevOps, whatever. Whatever title is catchy nowadays. So, like, I've done kind of a little bit of everything and I've played with all different pieces of technology. But what I will say is, like, I don't think I can do one without the other anymore. Like, I wouldn't be a good developer if I didn't understand infrastructure. And I wouldn't be good at infrastructure and systems and networks and containerization and Kubernetes if I didn't understand development. So I. There's. I feel like the, the lines are so blurred in today's world that you really need both. But yeah, if I had to choose, like, what I was going to do, probably, like, writing code.

ADRIANA: Awesome. And, you know, I love what you said there about, like, really the lines blurring and having to understand both. Because I so agree with you. And I've had, I've had arguments with people over this because in the past, like, when I was managing teams and I was hiring folks for my team, like, I was hiring developers for my team, but I needed them to, like, have an understanding also of, like, the infrastructure side of things, like how to containerize your applications. And I was really surprised by the number of, like, resumes that I got or even like, you know, if they made it to the interview process of people who had no experience containerizing their, their own applications. And I'm like. But aren't you, like, remotely curious as to how that works? I don't know.

MICHAEL: That's the problem.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's just so surprising because for me it's like, of course you're going to learn how to do that.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. And it's. That curiosity is drastically important, especially in today's world. So, like, we've. Tech is weird. Like, it has gone from being this, like, really particular career for, for nerdy people. Right.

And then it kind of went mainstream. Like, tech now is very much like, tech is buzzy and it's trendy and it's like, people like it because it's cool and like, I don't know when tech became cool, but it's. It's cool now. But what ended up happening was so many people, so many people got into it because it was cool and because it was trendy and all this stuff. Right. Which is okay. But the problem is, is that those people very rarely are putting in the same amount of work and effort that like, engineers were putting in before it was cool. And trendy and, and the interest isn't there.

And that's why, you know, and hot, hot take. You know, people may be irritated about how to. People may get irritated because I'm saying this, but like, I think that's also a big problem with like why people are having such hard time finding and getting jobs. And look, I'm not, I, I understand there's been like over 300, 000 layoffs between, you know, the large tech companies. I'm not dismissing that. But what I also do know is like, I have friends recently that have gotten laid off and within three to four weeks they had four job offers because they're very, very good at what they do. And, and it's not because they're geniuses, but it's because they are very interested and like, they want to know the way things work and how they work and how they come together. And if you don't have that, it's very difficult to find a job.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I so agree with you because I honestly think that's like the heart and soul of tech is being curious. And curious enough to learn new things because tech moves so fast that if you don't learn new things then you're, you're like outdated.

MICHAEL: One hundred percent. Yeah, yeah. And it, it makes things really weird when you're self employed. Like I'm self employed and you kind of have to like pick a direction. I think at this point where it's like, are you going to be trendy or are you going to be more educational based? Like, my content is very educational based. It's very like, I'm gonna show you how to do a thing. Yeah, I'm it. This is just not my personality. I'm just not the guy that's like putting on the YouTube voice and like doing the camera angles and this.

MICHAEL: It's not me. It's never been me. If I did it, it would be disingenuous.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.

MICHAEL: But in that realm, if you take that route, you know, and you're doing like vendor content and stuff, which I do vendor content. I just don't do that type of vendor content. You could pull in 5, 400, 500,000 a year USD. Like it's very manageable and reasonable to do that. But then you got to take a certain. But then if you do the educational route, like I, I backed off from that and I went the educational route. And you're not making that in the educational route, but that education. The reason why I'm saying all this is because that educational route if you keep that level of engineering mindset, it will make your life easier to get jobs because you'll be curious and because you'll be interested in what you're kind of doing, you know, versus the people that if you're just turning on the camera and just talking about stuff, it's fine and there's a place for that. But it's also going to be very, very difficult to find a job in tech now because of that.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

MICHAEL: Oh, neither. Is that an option?

ADRIANA: I mean, it's an option.

MICHAEL: So I guess.

ADRIANA: Tell me why you like neither.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so I, I guess I would, you know, go with YAML because so in the Kubernetes realm, when I'm like, just so invested in. Embedded in the Kubernetes realm at this point out of the box, you can use JSON and YAML natively with Kubernetes, but you just 1000% of the time you're always going to see examples in YAML. You're never going to see them in JSON, but natively you can use both. I think in, in all seriousness, I think I would choose probably YAML. I think JSON is like, the more you add to it, the more convoluted it is. Hence why, you know, Microsoft switched from ARM templates to Bicep. Because it was just. People were looking at ARM templates and it was like, this is a. There's a lot happening here. And this is, it's really easy to misconfigure. I think that's why I would choose YAML. I think with JSON it's just far easier to misconfigure your environment with JSON as it gets longer than with YAML.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. I find YAML a lot more legible. I know, like, people get really, like annoyed by the spaces thing. I mean, me too. But I. It's so much more legible compared to JSON. It's like just a blob of characters when I look at.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ADRIANA: JASON and I, I, yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah, 100%. It's always funny to like the tabs and spaces thing. I don't know if, like, if you ever, if you watch the show Silicon Valley.

ADRIANA: Oh, yes. Actually, that's my next question.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I love when Richard, like, I forget, I forget the chick that he was dating, but like using space and he's freaks out and has to leave. Oh, so freaking funny.

ADRIANA: Oh yeah, yeah, I love that. Like, that one little, like, you know, scene is Just like, just magic. Magic.

MICHAEL: So funny. So funny.

ADRIANA: And that's perfect because my next question is, do you prefer tabs or spaces?

MICHAEL: You know what I prefer? I prefer clicking option shift F in VS code because it just does it for me. I don't have to like worry about like the tabs and spaces with like the auto formatting and VS code anymore. Um, but yeah, I think spaces. Cause sometimes with YAML it's like. So a tab is four spaces, I think. Right. But with YAML, like, sometimes you. You can only do two, like two spaces. So like, then it like screws up the formatting and. But even if the formatting is messed up anyways, it's just like command shift after or option shift F, whatever it is. And then it like formats everything. So. So it's less of a hassle nowadays. But I think spaces.

ADRIANA: There you go. Hot tip on formatting. Yeah, I actually switched from spaces. Sorry, from tabs to spaces because of that, with the formatting in YAML where I think it defaulted to the tab, as you said, being four spaces. And then I open YAML documents. That was two. I'm like.

MICHAEL: The nice thing too with VS code and pretty much any IDE at this point is when if I'm on a line and if I hit enter, like it will put me where I should be going.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And so. So it's kind of like you really don't have to think about it anymore at this point. Which is nice. Yeah. Because that's. And, and. But it was more important like years ago, like there were languages, like whether you were using garbage collection or not, that it was like spaces would take up more memory once you were compiled. So. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that really. I don't know if it matters anymore. I haven't ran a benchmark against that in like 10 years, so I wouldn't know if it still matter. Yeah. So fun to talk about though.

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. It always, it always provides for some like, very interesting conversation every time.

MICHAEL: 100%.

ADRIANA: Okay, next question. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

MICHAEL: If I'm trying to do something quick video. But I like reading. So one of one of my, you know, mental health things is 30 minutes a day. I. At least 30 minutes a day I carve out to read. And it's always a technical base book. Like I'm always reading something about a new practice or a new something in a language or a certification thing or whatever. Like I'm always reading stuff.

ADRIANA: So what are you currently reading then?

MICHAEL: What am I currently. Let me, Let me. Let me pull up my Kindle app because I'm reading like, four different things at the moment and I want to make sure I have the titles correct. So one thing that I'm reading, because for like, security based contracts, like government based contracts and DoD based contracts, I need certain CompTIA certifications. So Pentest plus by CompTIA, currently going through that. Again, it's needed for, like, DOD contracts and stuff. This is a really awesome book. Tanya Janca, if you're familiar with her, SheHacksPurple. She. She has, like, some really awesome content. She wrote a book called Alice and Bob Learn Application Security. Oh, yeah, It's a really cool one. Yeah. Yeah. And then Black Hat Python is another really good one. But I'm always bouncing back and forth, honestly.

So one thing that I do as well, and I. I do this because I apparently enjoy pain, where I'll read like three to five books at a time and then I'll forget like 70% of it. So then I just keep going back and reading the same thing over and over again. So, yeah, it's fun. So that's a good. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Okay, final question. What is your superpower?

MICHAEL: Oh, God. Getting annoyed? No, I think that I am really. I'm. I'm open to more and more information, and I think that's. That's what I've always been really good at. Like, even, like in the beginning and in the middle of my career, like, I have gone. I've walked into job interviews where I didn't know 90% of what they were talking about, but I let them know, like, I'll figure it out. And they're like, all right, can you figure it out in two weeks before the job starts? And I'm like, yep. And I'll just. I'll sit there and like, throw myself into things for weeks and weeks and weeks to figure out how stuff works again. Maybe it goes back to the enjoyment of pain or just the enjoyment of learning. I don't really know exactly what it is, but, yeah, I'm just. I'm. I'm. I'm not, like, out of the box smart, right? Like, I wasn't, like, an A student in school and stuff. And, you know, I don't have a fancy degree or anything, but I'm just really good at, like, taking a problem and figuring it out. It may take me longer than. Than other times. It may throw me down, you know, a bottle of bourbon. But at some point, I will figure it out because I'll just keep kind of hammering it out until I fully understand what's happening.

ADRIANA: That is such a great superpower, and I think it's such an important one for working in tech is just like the perseverance and, and as you said, like the openness. Because I think one thing that I, I've experienced in the workplace in the past is being on a team and, and folks being asked to, like, do something and they're like, but I don't know how to do that. And, you know, passing the buck to someone else because they didn't want to be bothered rather than, oh, this is like a really cool learning experience and you might get something out of it.

MICHAEL: One hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's this curiosity aspect of it as well, but then there's also like, the life aspect. Like, I, I'm a firm believer that, like, what you've gone through in life will kind of dictate how much pain you're able to take. Right. And that's, and that's why people don't, like, want to go out and learn this and that and this and that. Because they, people like to be comfortable, right? Yeah, they don't like to not be, you know, they don't like to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And that's always been something that I've been able to be decent enough at where, like, I'm okay with being uncomfortable.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's definitely a really good, good skill to have. And it, you know, it makes me think too, to like, especially like in so many organizations when they're doing, you know, digital transformations, agile transformations, DevOps transformations, where you're basically asking your employees to, like, change the way that they work. And you see so much resistance. Like, I, I worked at a bank for many years and I was part of a massive, like, DevOps transformation. And it was funny that we had, I feel like we had the dev part figured out. Like, we had the really good CI/CD pipelines, but the hardest part was actually getting the delivery to really embrace those DevOps principles. So it was more like we got the CI. It was the CD that was really holding us back because the folks who worked in ops were, eh, I don't want to learn this new thing.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ADRIANA: And it was a detriment to them, but also to the organization because they couldn't move forward.

MICHAEL: And that's still how it is. I mean, that's why if you're a good engineer, you can pretty much go and name your price at an organization, you know, like, depending on where you're. Well, I would argue that this shouldn't even matter, but it does. For whatever reason, like depending on where you are in the world, like you should be able to name your price, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Like, if you're like, hey, I should be making 220 a year and you know, you're that good. Yeah, you could go and you can name that price.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: You know, but yeah, I mean I think that's the big. Again going back to what we were talking about before, like, that's the differentiator right between like, are you going to get a job or are you going to be laid off for three, four years?

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, that brings us to the conclusion of our lightning round question. So thank you for playing. And I wanted to get now into, you know, the, the meaty bits and before we, we started recording, we were talking about how you do a bunch of security work, which you alluded to also in the, in the lightning round questions. So first question is, what got you interested in security in the first place?

MICHAEL: Yeah. So I've been really. And for any, anybody that like takes a look at my content or sees what I've been doing over the years, I've been always really focused in the Kubernetes realm. I have written books on Kubernetes, I've spoken at conferences on Kubernetes, hundreds of blogs, hundreds of videos, podcasts, everything. And I kind of reached a point where so the way that my for better force, the way that my brain works is if I feel like I don't have a purpose. And my purpose is always career related. It always has been. Just because the way I was raised and my life and all these different things, if I'm not doing something that's really hard, I'm like drastically depressed.

Like I've had, you know, mental health issues and all these different things and it usually comes back to because I'm not challenged.

ADRIANA: Mm.

MICHAEL: So I chose security because after I like stayed in Kubernetes for years and the thing was in the Kubernetes realm now, like you could give me any topic to talk about to go speak at a conference to write a book on and like I don't really have to do any research. Like I don't really have to do any prep. Like I've walked into conference talks with zero prep. Like, because I just know it. Like I just. Because I was focused in it for so long. So I wanted to. My next challenge I wanted to think about what can I do that's incredibly hard. That not a lot of people can do really well, and that is a constant, growing pain. And I came across security.

ADRIANA: Ah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So I just. I just. I was like, what's the most painful thing I can work on right now? And that's what I came up with, yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah. And then for me, it wasn't even like, let me go blue team or red team. It was like, let me go application security. Because application security is arguably the one that, like, it seems like nobody can get right. So I was like, all right, let's do the thing that nobody can figure out. I'll go down that route. So, yeah.

ADRIANA: There you are.

MICHAEL: Here I am.

ADRIANA: I actually wanted to go back to something that you mentioned because I can so relate to it, where you said not feeling challenged lead led to you having, like, mental health issues. Because it was. And I can so relate because I have found that. So I've gone between manager and IC roles in. In the past, and I realize that every time I'm in a management role, I'm depressed because I feel like I'm not doing something, like, cool and engaging.

MICHAEL: Right.

ADRIANA: And it's so interesting to meet someone else who has experienced something like that and that. It, like, you know, it. It. It's. It's validating in a way. You know, like, it's. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So. It's so I can, you know, I don't know how. How deep you want. You want me to go here with it with these answers, but I've seen a lot of mental health issues, like, throughout my life. Like, I grew up incredibly poor. Both of my parents were drug addicts and alcoholics. You know, we were in apartments with bedbugs. We were in apartments where there were no bedrooms. It was a studio. Like, I. I went through a good, nice chunk of my life where, like, I didn't have my own bedroom. I've. I've. I've been, like, through, like, really bad times. And then I've been to the point where I own my home and I drive the car that I want to drive. And, you know, I'm. I'm. You know, the. The money that I can make is more than I ever even thought possible. Right. I didn't go to college. None of it. Like, I could. College wasn't even an option because I just needed to start working. So, like, I've seen. And I've seen everything that comes with growing up like that.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: You know, I've had a lot of mental health issues where I had a stroke due to depression. Like, a lot of big things. Yeah. So, like, I'VE seen, like, I've gone down the. Down the, the deepest, darkest mental health issues that you could possibly imagine. And the one thing that I found. And I. I did the yoga and the meditation and the medication and the several. Talking to several therapists and psychiatrists, and it's always fun to talk to psychiatrists and therapists when they're like, we don't know what's wrong. And you're like, oh, I. I guess I. I won the game of therapy when you, when you have to. When you stump the therapist. Right.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: So I've done all of this and what I found that brings me out of it. And this is. Again, this is just my personal opinion. This is going through again, everything that I went through in my life, being in such a dark place where my body literally tried to shut itself down.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Medication, therapy, all this stuff. It is. It's great to sprinkle on top.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: But the only thing that's going to actually bring you out of it is figuring out what the underlying issue is. And the majority of the time, the underlying issue is purpose. It's finding purpose in life.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And driving that purpose. That's why you look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and, And Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and whoever, all these people. And look, I'm not. I don't want, you know, that there's the conversation of, well, what about these people's personalities? They suc. I don't care about that. What I'm. What I more care about is, like, how people are and how they move through life and how they navigate. And all these people, you know, and tons of others.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: They're multimillionaires and multi billionaires.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: They don't have to work anymore, nor do the 20 generations after them. What keeps them going is not financial. What keeps them going is purpose. They have a particular purpose in life, and that's what drives them. So I'm a firm believer that purpose in life is what takes you out of dark places. And for me, it's always been career, you know, So I totally understand and agree with you. Where it's like, you can't be in something that you're bored because then you're going to be depressed and you're going to be drinking and you're not going to be working out and you're going to be eating crappy food all the time just because you need some type of escape and it just. It brings you down this, like.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.

MICHAEL: Really bad hole.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree it's like, you. You need to give yourself a mission, a meaningful mission. Like, whenever I feel like I've got, like, okay, I have a goal, I'm like, I'm all in. Even if it sounds, like, ridiculous and, like, I have no idea how I'm gonna achieve it, but I'm like, I think it's achievable. And. And I think that's the other thing. Like, if you think it's achievable, even if it's hard, I think on the most part, it gets achieved.

MICHAEL: One hundred percent. One hundred percent. And I mean that. I think that's the same for anybody. Right?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: So to your point, it's like, if you have a purpose, if you have a dri-...if you have drive, if you have any of these things, you could sleep three hours a night and get up and go. Right. Your life could be however it is. But if you have this thing that you're driving towards, it will be exceptionally better for you than anything else. Any medication, any therapy, any. Anything. And I'm not telling everybody, stop doing all that stuff. What I'm saying is you're not going to find the underlying cause of your. Your issues with that. Right? I didn't. Right. Nobody that I know that's gone through it has. Everybody's got to find purpose. That's. It's such a. It's. It's the most important. And your purpose could be your kids. Your purpose could be making sure you have a clean home. Your purpose could be being a digital nomad. Right. And living in different places every year, every six months. Whatever your per.

MICHAEL: I don't care what it is. Find it. That's going to be the thing that's going to help you in life the most.

ADRIANA: Yeah. It's the thing that gets you out of bed, basically.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ADRIANA: You're, like, excited to tackle the day. Like, I. I find, like, especially when I'm in the midst of solving a gnarly problem, if, like, the previous day I made some sort of breakthrough and, you know, the. The next day I wake up all excited because I'm like, I get to work on this some more. And I'll even, like, wake up before my alarm because, like, I can't stop thinking about it. And it so excites me and it so drives me.

MICHAEL: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And usually it. No, not usually. I mean, 100% of the time, it really. It's no financial gain. It's no. It's nothing external. Right. It's all intrinsic factors that make you get out of bed in the morning and go do what you want to do. And again, it goes back to, you know, that's why all of these millionaires and billionaires, like, they don't have to do anything.

ADRIANA: Yep, yep, anything.

MICHAEL: They could sit there in front of their TV and drink bourbon and eat pizza for the rest of their lives and do it incredibly comfortably.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah.

MICHAEL: In a, in, In a smooth 70 degree house like this, life could be freaking awesome.

ADRIANA: Cushy.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And, but they don't do it like that because, like, they have to have some type of purpose because that's, that's what drives you in life.

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally agree. Now, I wanted to switch gears back to the security topic because there's a couple of things that I want to ask. First of all, you know, you know, you mentioned that you got into application security because as you said, seldom, like, people get it right. What do you like specifically? What is, what is it that you think that people don't usually get right when it comes to application security?

MICHAEL: The number one thing is you don't fully understand the underlying system. So, and I always say this security is pretty easy. Like the act of securing something is relatively straightforward. Right. The hard part is understanding where you're securing. It's the same thing with writing code. I can teach any. I can, I can take anybody off the street and teach them how to write a function and a method and a class. What I can't do is take anybody and teach them how to properly architect an application stack and get it done right and get it deployed right. Same thing with security. I can teach anybody how to go use Burp Suite and how to spin up a Kali Linux box and play around with Metasploit and use code scanning and SAST tools and DAST tools and SCAP tools, and I can teach anybody how to do any of this stuff. But what I can't teach them is, okay, I'm going to go and I'm going to run these tools and I'm going to use these tools. Now what? Oh, I found a vulnerability. Now what? Oh, there's an issue in a library. Now what? What's the fix? How do I implement change? You can't, you can't teach everybody that. And I think that's why.

And even if you go, you, you know, you look on Reddit or you look on other forums, the number one question I would say and like, said the cyber security arena right now is, hey, I just graduated college and I want to go and do cyber security. No, you don't need to know what you're securing, you can't literally by definition you cannot secure what you do not know. And I think that's the hardest part. The hardest part is not security. The hardest part is understanding the underlying system, network, application, container, whatever. So well, yeah, that you know what it, how it works inside and out. That's the really hard part of security.

ADRIANA: Do you think that's one of those things that would come with experience?

MICHAEL: 100%. Yeah. That's why you know, you have like SOC style roles, security operations center. Right. Where pretty much their job is just like, oh, vulnerability come in, came in, let me triage it and send it to where it needs to go. Yeah, you could do stuff like that.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: But anything more defending systems, pen testing, red teaming, application security, like you cannot do this unless you understand what you are securing. So if you have experience like anybody that has 10, 20 years of infrastructure experience can go do system security. Anybody that's been a software engineer for 10, 20 years can go do AppSec. You just need to like learn the tools and the terminology and there's a lot of terminology in security space. I don't know why it's worse than cloud native. There's so much terminology and I'm like, oh, why are we called like, can we just name these five things the way that they are and leave it at that? Yeah, it's so strange to me, but yeah, it's. Yeah. So yeah, like if you, if you know something very, very well, like if you know the underlying platform very, very well, security is, is relatively straightforward.

ADRIANA: Right, right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now another question I want to ask. I remember when the DevOps movement started gaining traction and everyone's like, shift left, shift left and then shift left on security. Do you think that organizations are truly shifting left on security? And if not, why like, why do you suspect that they might not be?

MICHAEL: No, I mean there are so many breaches all the time that like they're clearly not. Even like, you know, like the, the like people only. So it, security is very comparable to life. Right. You only make a change in life if things go wrong.

ADRIANA: Oh my God.

MICHAEL: Nobody, like very rarely do people do like preventative maintenance in life.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, right, like, absolutely.

MICHAEL: If you go to the gym five days a week and you eat decently healthy, where let's say you eat, you know, three meals a day and you know, two to three of those meals per week or just whatever you want, it's pretty good preventative maintenance. Yeah. But the majority of people don't do preventative maintenance in life and they, nor do they insecurity until something goes wrong. That's why like Microsoft now, like Microsoft has been releasing all this stuff where their, their engineers now supposedly, who knows if this is true, but they're not going to be judged just based on like code quality and stuff. Like they're going to be judged based on security posture.

ADRIANA: Oh good.

MICHAEL: That's interesting stuff. Yeah, yeah, really interesting stuff. So I think the shift left. So the shift left thing, right, like if we break this down and because it's so buzzy, but if we, if we break it down, what's application security? What's AppSec? AppSec is securing the entire SDLC process.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: From the thought of this is going to be a thing to the idea, to the libraries we're using, to the language we're using, to the deployment process. Shift left is around this whole DevSecOps thing, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.

MICHAEL: So if you ask somebody what's DevSecOps securing the entire SDLC process. Why do we have three names for this? I have no idea. We have three names for the same exact thing. It's the same. There's no difference. If you take shift left, SDL-, AppSec and DevSecOps, it's literally all the same thing. There's no differentiation between these three things. So we unfortunately like have a lot of buzz because, you know, look, look, I'm. Vendors got to make money, right. They got to make it somehow. Right? And so they got to make stuff up that sounds cool. So they can sell their products. I get it. Yeah, we all, we all got to make money, but it just causes a lot of confusion, I think, unfortunately.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. I, I gotta say I always found the term DevSec Ops a little cringe. Only because my thought is like, isn't security supposed to be baked into DevOps in the first place? So yeah, every time I hear that I'm like, yeah.

MICHAEL: And it's, it's, it's tough too. Right. So it's like you could go and look at my LinkedIn posts and, and, and I always like, I don't, I, I don't know why. This is just society, I suppose. But like I'll create LinkedIn posts that are like really, like have a lot of really good stuff in there. Yeah, yeah, but I'll use terminology that people don't know maybe like perfect timing and pen testing and AppSec and stuff. And they don't, they don't get what I'm saying. So it doesn't it doesn't really go anywhere.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: But then if I throw something and I've, I've, I've, I've tested this out and unfortunately proven it to be true. If I put DevSecOps in.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Gets a lot of traction. So it's the unfortunate reality of, you know, what the, the world that we live in right now because that's just what people know. And, and these aren't people that are just marketing people. Like I talked to really, really solid engineers and they say DevSecOps. And the reason why they say it is because they're hearing it. The reason that they're hearing is because marketing is incredible. In, in today's tech world, it's really good. Like some of these vendors are really solid with their marketing.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MICHAEL: And that's just what people know now. So it's like, you know, you gotta, you gotta do it. It's weird, but is what it is.

ADRIANA: I, I agree.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it is funny. The, the LinkedIn algorithm is always, always an interesting one to wrangle.

MICHAEL: Yeah, it's, and you know what's so funny about it too? Like getting solid content out in the world, it sucks. But it's not about how good you are at something. No, it's really just about how good you are at phrasing things. Um, and, and luckily I've just been a writer for so long now that it's like I've just kind of hit the nail on the head with it. Yeah. But like, I remember when I first became self employed, I was like, I'm a good engineer, everybody's gonna hire me. Yeah. I, I, I found out the, the quick and hard way that that's not the way things work. So yeah, it's, it's really all about, you know, that verbiage for people.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's true. And, and seeming approachable and, and whatnot to folks. The, the other thing, it's funny, I've had a couple conversations with folks, especially around LinkedIn posts. And actually my, so my friend Hazel Weekly and I were talking about like, why is it that when I just, you know, I have these nice thought out LinkedIn posts, like, they get like, so, so traction and then when I post something out of like, you know, emotional rage or shitpost, it gets traction. And then Hazel, like, I think later that day wrote a shitpost about shitposting and, and she's like, I got so much traction on this, more so than the other stuff. And it's like, oh my God. It just like proved what we were discussing.

MICHAEL: I, I so I'll give you an example right as we're, I'll, I'll, I'll take a look at this live. So I'm looking at my LinkedIn post as we speak now. I put something together two hours ago. It literally did not get any likes and any comments. 379 impressions. That is awful. But it was, it was a carousel explaining certain AppSec tools, why you would use them and where to find them. Right. It got no traction. None. But then if I scroll down to where is this one? Oh, here we go. I wrote, "Networking is ridiculously important in Kubernetes. It's one of the core skills that all engineers need. There are a ton of different components. Pod IPs, container IPs, DNS, firewalls, and a lot more. I highly recommend learning these things."

MICHAEL: This is pretty much nothing, right? Like I pretty much just said nothing in my post. 111 likes, 10,000 impressions. It doesn't make any sense.

ADRIANA: Holy crap.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so it's, it's a really like weird world that we live in where it's like you pretty much just say nothing and people are like, "Sick!" and then you say stuff that's important and people are like, don't like that at all.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, it's so bizarre. And then especially like when you have like this lovely, well crafted post and there's like, you know, hardly any impressions, hardly any likes and it's like nobody loves me now. Another question that I wanted to ask you around security is, you know, there's, there's the age old battle between InfoSec and developers. What kind of, what kinds of things are you seeing out in the wild with regards to this? Like do you think it's getting any better or what do you, what do you think think is kind of the main cause of this?

MICHAEL: You know what's so ironic about this question too. I'm so happy that you brought this up because I so oftentimes I argue with myself, right? For better or for worse. I just. Multiple personalities in here and I have a lot of arguments and disagreements with everybody that's in here. And a lot of the developer security issues, right, are really all about this. It's everything that we know. This security person told me I have to change this and it's going to break this and it doesn't work with this. Right? This is the security thing that we all know.

Why does this happen? Well, very straightforward. The security person is running a vulnerability assessment. These vulnerability assessments say this thingy over here is broken. Go fix that thingy and then they throw it over the wall. The reason why the security person is doing that is because, and I'm not trying to sound rude or anything, this is just open honestness. They don't know what they're talking about. If you have any security measure that you are recommending and it is going to break something, that means you do not understand the underlying application, the understand. The underlying libraries, understanding packages, and how this application stack is created. There is no security issue that should ever break a system when it's integrated.

The only time that you may have an issue is when you're doing a vulnerability assessment that has a third, that's scanning a third party package or library that has a security vulnerability inside of it. Because you essentially have three options. You become an open source maintainer for that library package and you fix it. You accept what it is, or you take it out and you find another way to write that piece of your code. That's really the only time that something could break your application stack. But what ends up happening is a lot of security folks, they'll say, this thingy is broken over here, go take out that thingy. Because we have something, something compliance and something something need and something something management and something something something something. But they don't really know the why.

And that really just goes back to what we were talking about before, where it's like you need to understand what you are securing. If you do not understand the way these things work underneath the hood, you will piss everybody off. That's what it comes down to. And again, this isn't like me trying to. I'm just really passionate about this and I'm like this right now because it gets me kind of going. And I'm like, this is why we have so many. And this is why we have problems in tech in general thinking about security. This is, this is why we have so many problems.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, thanks for shedding some light on that. We are coming up on time and I'm sad because I could just keep asking me so many questions around this. But before we go, do you have any either hot takes or words of wisdom that you want to share with folks?

MICHAEL: Yeah, I mean if I could give anybody in tech regard, regardless of what direction you go in engineering help desk, systems administration, virtualization, cloud, DevOps software, whatever it is, just get really good at what you're trying to do. And this is something that's going to take years, but if you're really good at it, if you're really good at one thing. What you you'll learn two things. Number one, you'll be able to name your price at any job. Number two, you're going to begin to understand that a lot of this stuff overlaps. And then you'll realize, oh, because I got really good at this one thing, I think I actually understand a little bit of everything, and it's going to help you tremendously throughout your career.

ADRIANA: Yeah. That is such great advice. Well, that's awesome. Well, thank you so much, Michael, for geeking out with me today. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

MICHAEL: Peace out and geek out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:

Kayla is an engineer on the New Relic Ruby agent team and an active member of the OpenTelemetry Ruby community, where she's a maintainer for opentelemetry-ruby-contrib and an approver for opentelemetry-ruby. Outside of work, she enjoys cycling and tinkering in her garden.

Find our guest on:

• LinkedIn
• GitHub

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

• Apple IIe
• Unisys Icon
• GitHub Codespaces
• OpenTelemetry Ruby (Core)
• OpenTelemetry Ruby (Contrib)

Transcript:
ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. and geeking out with me today, I have Kayla Reopelle of New Relic. Welcome, Kayla.

KAYLA: Hi. Thank you. Happy to be here.

ADRIANA: I'm super excited to have you on. And where are you calling from today?

KAYLA: I'm calling from Portland, Oregon.

ADRIANA: Awesome. I've had a few people from Portland. There's a big tech community in Portland, isn't there?

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. They. At one point it was called the Silicon Forest, but I don't know if it has that same reputation.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. Are you originally from Portland, or...

KAYLA: No, I'm originally from a small town kind of near Mount Rainier in Washington state, but kind of grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so.

ADRIANA: Oh, cool. That's awesome. It's. You know, I always chat with people who, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest and it's such a different vibe from east coast life. Like, it's so much more outdoorsy, focused in the Pacific Northwest, which I absolutely love. Like here, where I live, in Toronto, it's like, it's flat. So, you know, I go out west, I'm like, oh, it's...The mountains are so pretty. I so miss that.

KAYLA: Yeah. Yeah. The times that I've lived other places, I. I miss seeing the mountains on the horizon. For sure.

ADRIANA: Yeah. You cannot beat that. Well, awesome. Are you ready to do our icebreaker questions?

KAYLA: Sure.

ADRIANA: Okay, let's do it. Question number one. Are you a lefty or a righty?

KAYLA: I'm a lefty.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God. I always get so excited when I meet fellow lefties. Yeah. I love learning. I. I love identifying other lefties. I. I've mentioned this multiple times in the show, so if anyone's listening and bored of hearing this. But like, I always, I'm always like watching, you know, what hand people grab things with, and I'm like lefty. And I feel like it's the thing that only lefties will probably notice anyway.

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. Right. We're like a small enough percentage that it. It kind of catches you off guard. It's a little bit exciting.

ADRIANA: Exactly. And I, I don't know if you do this, but like, my coat hangers go like my clothes hang in my coat hangers in a very particular direction compared to like right handed people or even like where I put my knives in the knife bl. In the knife block.

KAYLA: Mm.

ADRIANA: But yeah, that that's from like living in a house of, of right handed people where they outnumber me but I impose my will upon them.

KAYLA: Nice. Nice. Yeah. Growing up there was always like a decent balance because my dad was also left handed. But you know, as an adult, like sharing a house with another with a right handed person, it's like the kitchen set up every time the. Where the cutting board is placed versus where the appliances are placed and the food.

ADRIANA: It's like exactly how you turn, like. The handle for your frying pan. Like what, where it's oriented as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KAYLA: And I've even looked at that sometimes when I've gone to like look at apartments or something. It's like, okay, where is the elbow space for?

ADRIANA: Yes.

KAYLA: Like, will it work?

ADRIANA: Or even like something silly like sitting down to a meal. And if you're sitting next to a right handed person, you need to be on the outside so you're not like butting elbows when you eat, which right-handed people don't think about.

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah, I know it, it like can cause sometimes a little bit of anxiety of like, okay, am I gonna get one of the two correct spots at this table?

ADRIANA: Exactly.

KAYLA: Yep.

ADRIANA: And, and one, one follow up question on, on leftiness. Because I, I find like lefties. Well, I mean already by default, like, lefties hold their pencils like really weird. I hold mine extra weird to the point where, you know, I've had teachers like, you're not supposed to hold it like that. Who cares how I hold it in my writing? Yeah. Do you, Are you an extra weird pencil holder?

KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah, I am. Yeah. Actually, let's see. So I hold mine. Yeah, I just kind of like balance it but have like an extra point.

ADRIANA: Oh, nice, nice. And do you have like an extra callus. Yes. Yeah, the callus.

KAYLA: And so whenever there were like standardized tests, this whole side of my hand would just be.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, the smudge, the smudge. I used to have smudgy paper that I used to like... Under my hand over my notebooks to avoid that. Yeah. I had, for years I had a callus on my, on my left pinky. And it's gone. It's gone now because, I mean, I hardly ever write, but it was, I thought it was never gonna go away. I hold my pencil really funny. I have, I have a banana here that I'm going to use to demonstrate because my, my pens are like far away, but I, I hold. Oops. This is how I hold my pencil is like this. So yeah. Teachers would be like, what the hell, you can't hold it like that. I'm like, watch me, So anyway, well, thank you. Always fun to meet another lefty. Now do you prefer iPhone or Android?

KAYLA: iPhone. Yeah. I grew up using Mac products so I feel like it was just kind of a natural evolution.

ADRIANA: That's so cool that you grew up like that. I did not grow up using Mac products, but I became like a late stage convert.

KAYLA: My parents were both teachers and the school district that they work for got a huge grant from Apple and so they actually got to like take an early computer home.

ADRIANA: Oh my God.

KAYLA: In the summertime. Yeah. So like when it wasn't being used, which was great. So yeah. So back in the like green and black little boxy Mac days.

ADRIANA: I remember those. Yeah. I remember growing up like schools always had the Macs and it was like the, it was the Apple IIe before...pre Mac. And then, and then in my high school they had a, they had a Macintosh lab for like all the graphic design and then for like the computer class we had like a lab of Unisys Icon computers which I don't even know if they make those anymore but they, they ran Windows and yeah, that, that's what we use for computer programming.

KAYLA: Nice, nice.

ADRIANA: That's cool. Now did you get into computers because of your parents bringing home the max in the summer or was that like a later enlightening?

KAYLA: Yeah, that's a good question. I think that that got me curious in them and like I liked, I was like early on the IT person for my family. So it was like learning, learning how to do those things. I had a great computer computers teacher to, in elementary school but I kind of drifted away from it in junior high and high school and was using more like using computers for like creative things like you know, Photoshop or like film editing. But ended up, yeah, circling, circling back much later because I, I was charged at one point with creating like Internet based documentary extras, like different things that you could use to interact with media and archives. And there was so much that I was always just asking this other engineer to do that it got me somewhat curious of like, I wonder if I could do this myself someday. And it wasn't until you know, I was kind of at this point where I was wrapping up a film project that I had been working on for a few years and wasn't sure if I wanted to go looking for a new one or make a career change that a friend of mine who was a software engineer encouraged me to look into that. And so that's kind of how I got into coding and started learning about it and enjoying it.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. So your original background was more on the film end of things?

KAYLA: Yep. Yeah, yeah. Documentary film stuff.

ADRIANA: Oh, wow, that's so cool. I. I have to say, like, you know, having. Not that I'm a great editor or anything, but, like, editing video was something that terrified me, like, even 10 years ago, and now I'm like, okay at it. And I have mad respect for. For people who do video editing, because that is. That's a lot more work than just photo editing. Like, so much work.

ADRIANA: So much work, so.

KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah. Such a skill.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

KAYLA: And it's amazing how you can take the same footage and just edit it in different ways and have completely different films, completely different feelings.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, that's true. It's all about, like, the context, right?

KAYLA: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Cool. That's awesome. All right, next question. I think you've answered it already, but do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah. So I would say, yeah, Mac is definitely where I feel most at home. I think Linux is really interesting, but I haven't had a chance to play around with it. And every time I'm using a Windows computer, it feels like I'm being forced to use my right hand. Like, I just. I can get to it eventually, but it just doesn't click in the same way.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God, I love that.

KAYLA: Last night, I was actually helping my aunt with her laptop, and she wanted to bookmark some websites and things like that, and it just. It took me like, an extra 30 seconds every time to be like, nope, this is where you click on this mouse and. Yeah. How you. How you right click and...

ADRIANA: It's true. It's true. One thing I have to give credit to the Apple folks, like, when I switched from Windows to Mac, is I was surprised by how intuitive the shortcuts were because I'm a huge shortcut person. And I found that I discovered a lot of shortcuts by accident just through, like, I don't know, I'm like, what happens if I do this? And lo and behold, I'm like, what? It does that. Yeah. So mad props on the usability. That's one thing that I really appreciate about Macs, that I don't see that in Windows land yet.

KAYLA: Yeah. One of the things that I like to do as a kid was see how far I could get with using just the commands on the Mac. Only use no mouse. Because Macs didn't really have a lot of games at that point in time, so it was like games to play. But you could get, you could get pretty far with just a keyboard.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. It's actually really impressive. Cool. Okay, next question. What is your favorite programming language?

KAYLA: My favorite programming language is Ruby. Yeah, I, you know, I, it's funny. So I started learning JavaScript first and that, you know, felt it felt more like code like because you had all of these extra characters, you have these curly braces and lots of quotes and things like that. Yeah, yeah. And then I went to a coding boot camp that started, started us out with Ruby. And at first I like remember telling my partner like, man, this programming language sucks. Like it's just like I'm writing words, it doesn't feel like there's any code in there at all. But then as time went on I was like this, this feels quite nice to just think about almost like writing a sentence or how you would explain something to another person, like making the code seem very like story based.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

KAYLA: And you know, I was fortunate that after my coding boot camp I ended up working for a company that specialized in Ruby, Rails and React, which was exactly what I studied. And I've just kept landing myself in these roles so I get a chance to dabble now and then in other languages, but I don't feel nearly as comfortable as I do in Ruby.

ADRIANA: Cool. That's so awesome. And you know, it's funny because there's, I feel like there's always a place for Ruby no matter what. Like there's such a demand for Ruby developers. It's such a, like alive and well community. And you know, I've also mentioned this a bunch of times on the show. I've had a lot of Ruby people come on and the, the common element is, you know, like they love the language so much and it's like such a, everyone talks about the community around it as well that they really love. So.

KAYLA: Yes.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's so great. I've never touched Ruby. I've read Ruby code a couple of times because of a previous job and I have to say I, I'm like, yeah, I can tell what's going on from reading this. So mad props to Ruby.

KAYLA: Yeah. Yes. Oh yeah. I love the community part of it too. Like I think that that made you know, career changing and learning a new language like feel so much more accessible and just like going to a conference that feels like every person you bump into is like extremely friendly and like wants to know who you are as a person and ask good questions. So it feels comfortable.

ADRIANA: That's so great. I, I love that. And you know, I think half, half of what we, you know, half of what being soft a software engineer is about is the community or even in tech in general. It's all about the community, finding the place where you belong, finding your people, basically. And it's nice that I think, like, you can pretty much find your people in any, like, little technique, which is amazing. Awesome. All right, here's. Here's one that may.

ADRIANA: May be controversial, maybe not. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?

KAYLA: I think, I think Dev. I want to feel more comfortable with Ops, but every time. Like it. Yeah, it just feels a little foreign. I find myself often needing to relearn things, but I've. I've recently been working on a project that's had me get to spend more time in Ops and now I'm feeling a little more comfortable in it again. So that's exciting.

ADRIANA: That's exciting. Awesome. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

KAYLA: Ooh, that's really hard. I guess, I guess YAML because I find that I have fewer compiling issues when I'm working with YAML. I'll forget a comma or add a comma somewhere with JSON that I'm not supposed to.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. My, my, my issue with JSON is like all the curly braces and all the quotes everywhere. Because, like, I mean, YAML is like very loosey goosey on the quotes. Like you do or you don't. JSON. I hate that, like the keys have to be in quotes and the values have to be in quotes.

KAYLA: Yeah.

ADRIANA: I mean, if it's a string, where...does it also. If it's a number. I can't remember now.

KAYLA: I don't think so. I think numbers can be just themselves.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's like too many quotes, too many curly braces. It makes my brain want to go.

KAYLA: Right. I'm just trying to like sift through them.

ADRIANA: Let me read it. I can't read it.

KAYLA: Yeah, exactly.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Awesome. Next one. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?

KAYLA: I guess I like, I like the look of a double. Of a double space. But I don't use my space bar to create that. I always use the tab key, so I don't know what that means.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you can configure VSCode to like when you hit tab, it just makes it as a space instead of a tab.

KAYLA: Yep.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I, yeah, I'm with you. I will never use the space bar to like tab my stuff. But I will use tab to create spaces.

KAYLA: Yes, yes.

ADRIANA: Cool. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

KAYLA: Hmm, I think it depends on what it is. Like if I am trying to like learn a new high level concept, I prefer, I mean really almost like audio more than video. Just being able to hear someone explain it to me. But if I'm trying to do like a, like a code along or like solve a specific problem, then I prefer text.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I, I'm with you on that. A few, it's funny, a few people have also mentioned like just the audio aspect, which, you know, like I've mentioned many times on this show. I'm not much of a video person, but I will put on like a YouTube video while I'm doing chores and just listen to the audio because it feels very podcasty to me. Like I'll even like, lately I've been just comfort watching Star Trek the Next Generation and I'll just like, I'll just like do whatever, like be brushing my teeth and listening to an episode while I'm, you know, while I'm listening, I'm not even watching the video.

KAYLA: That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I love to just have some sort of audio content when I'm, when I'm walking my dog and occasionally like if I'm stuck on something or just also like need to take a coding break if I want to feel like I'm still working, I'll listen to something tech related.

ADRIANA: Yes, yes, exactly. That's awesome. Okay, final question. What is your superpower?

KAYLA: Well, I've had, I've had people tell me that I can be really helpful with docs and you know, like make...rewrite things or reword things in, in like READMEs or change logs or something to, to make them more clear. So maybe, maybe that's my superpower.

ADRIANA: That is a great superpower. There is something to be said about effective communication, so I am down for it. Awesome.

KAYLA: I blame it entirely on this experiment they had us do in junior high where we had to write out the steps to make a peanut butter sandwich. I don't know if you've heard of this or have had to do it, but. And in class you'd bring your instructions and the teacher would then try to make a peanut butter sandwich, literally following your instructions. So if you didn't say to open the jar, they would slam the knife through the top of the jar and say, nope, not going to be a peanut butter sandwich.

ADRIANA: Oh my God, that is such a great exercise. And that is such a great way to ingrain that in you. Because I. A personal pet peeve of mine when it comes to documentation for software or. Yeah, yeah, for, for software development, for like learning a new tool or whatever is like the skipped steps. Please include the steps. We don't all know what you're talking about because we're not as smart as you. So please dumb it down for the rest of us peasants.

KAYLA: Yes. Because I think, I don't think I've ever come across a situation where I've been like, oh, I wish you were less specific. Right. Because even if you know the details, you can just skim and keep scrolling. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Not skipping steps is, I think, a true sign of great documentation.

ADRIANA: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I love...the peanut butter sandwich exercises is a really good one. And I feel like more schools should be doing stuff. Stuff like that.

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, maybe try it yourself if you want to practice. Practice with docs or something. See how far you get.

ADRIANA: That's a great idea. And, and actually even. Yeah. On, on a similar vein, not, not just trying the. I'm assuming you were referring to like specifically trying the peanut butter sandwich example, but like also making sure that like when you're writing your own docs, that you can follow your own instructions. Right?

KAYLA: Yes, yeah. Checking. Checking it back afterwards and going step by step.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that says a lot too. Like, especially like when I put out a tutorial or whatever and I want to. I'm like extra paranoid. So I want to make sure that it's like very reproducible. So I've taken to using GitHub Codespaces a lot to be able to reproduce things. And that has helped me so much because it's like a very, like, from scratch environment. So, you know, I haven't. It's not polluted with the other crap that I already have installed. And so it's, it's really great to vet whether or not like, you know, I'll. Whether or not my instructions are they work because of the stuff that I already had installed or do they work because they're actually correct?

KAYLA: Yeah. Oh, that's a great point. I really haven't experimented much with GitHub Codespaces, but I know the OpenTelemetry Ruby repo has them set up. So maybe, maybe this is now the time to start playing around with that.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's awesome. And you know, you've. You've done the perfect segue into like our main topic of conversation because you are, I hope I get this correct. Are you one of the approvers or maintainers of OpenTelemetry Ruby?

KAYLA: So I'm both. So on the OpenTelemetry Ruby repo, the one that holds the SDK and the APIs and such, I'm an approver. And then on the OpenTelemetry Ruby contrib repo, I'm a maintainer.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's awesome. So tell us how you got to, you got into like this whole OpenTelemetry journey like from. Because it's, it's such a, I think it's such an honor and also an accomplishment to you know, become a, become, become an approver, become a maintainer of an open source repo. Especially a project like OpenTelemetry, which for those who are unfamiliar with it, it's the second most contributed open source project of the CNCF. So.

KAYLA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I've always been intrigued by the idea of open source. Like I, you know, kind of, when we were talking about the documentary path earlier, I think I was kind of in this like, you know, grassroots vein, like wanting to be a part of community driven things. And I kind of saw that in open source. So that, that felt intriguing to me. And the team that I work on for my day job is New Relics Ruby Agent, which is open source. So there, you know, I'm responsible for maintaining the New Relic RPM Gem along with some other fantastic people. And we will get, we have our, you know, repo on GitHub and will receive issues and pull requests and things like that. But you know, New Relic, like other Observability vendors have noticed that OpenTelemetry is becoming a really important part of the Observability ecosystem and has the power to disrupt, you know, tools like New Relic RPM that have existed for, gosh, I don't even know how long, over 15 years now I think. And so I was tasked with just checking out what the OpenTelemetry Ruby project was like and seeing how it compared with our agent. And so from there, you know, it was initially just kind of comparing code and seeing how that went. But as time went on I also kind of started comparing communities and seeing how there were so many more people contributing to this project and such, like diverse engineers from, you know, people who maybe had Observability experience or people who did not and you know, getting feedback from people who were using the Gem about things that, you know, if you captured a span in this way, we would find it much more meaningful than in the other way. And that kind of feedback I felt like was sorely lacking from the New Relic repo. We will get bug reports, occasionally we'll get feature requests, but they're few and far between. After doing this analysis and seeing that the OpenTelemetry Ruby project was missing two of the major signals, logs and metrics, chatted with my managers and was able to get some time to start working on the OpenTelemetry Ruby project. I had just done some logs work for New Relics to do automatic log forwarding and decided to start there with OTel for Ruby and have just kind of attended the SIGs and submitted PRs and collaborated ever since. I guess that was actually almost a year ago. So.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so cool. Wow, that's awesome. So it was, you know, like you're, it's something that you, you noticed there was this gap and so you, you went to your manager to like ask to fill the gap. That's so great. And you know, how, how, how was it like the initial experience of contributing to the SIG and contributing like your first code, like your first PR?

KAYLA: Yeah, it was educational for sure. I, the first PR that I opened, well, this is not the first PR. At first I opened a docs PR. You know, I was going through some steps and I noticed that something was wrong or didn't work for me and kind of submitted something there. But I'd say the first like major piece of code change was I found an issue where OpenTelemetry had essentially copied New Relic's SQL obfuscation tool and integrated it into their repository. And there was some code duplication amongst the MySQL related Gems and the Postgres Gems. And the ticket was asking to create some type of helper that could be used across all of these Gems. So I was like, easy, great, I will just move this code to a new spot.

Don't even need to really refactor it because it seems identical. Let's just do that. So I did that, submitted my PR, thought everything was looking good and just kind of kept learning about the project as time went on. Whereas New Relic RPM puts everything into one Gem. OpenTelemetry Ruby is extremely modular and every little part is its own Gem. And I don't think Gems are libraries for Ruby that you install. The first move was I put it in this general base Gem, but instead we decided that a new helper Gem would be better for this MySQL work. Then as time went on, this code hasn't been looked at for a while.

Maybe we want to refactor something here or we want something to work better. I think a big lesson learned for me was that instead of encouraging that work to be done in a different PR and maybe creating a separate issue to come back to it later, I kept accepting those recommendations and incorporating them PR until, you know, every time I accepted one of those things, that meant it needed to get reviewed by more people and have more discussion and feedback before going forward. Because it's also, you know, even though it is. Was intended to be just kind of a code relocation, like it was starting to take on a bigger change. And this code is very important to the database instrumentation, to all of the database instrumentation. So we wanted to be really careful about not breaking things for existing users. So. Yeah, so I don't, I don't remember how long it was, but it was, it was quite a few months before that PR actually got moved in, merged in.

I think we had well over 100 comments. But I think it did a great job of teaching me, you know, OpenTelemetry for Ruby standards for code, things that they like to test that are different from the way that New Relic likes to test things and also the way that, you know, they like to organize things and having the opportunity to take code that I was already familiar with and, you know, bring it to life more in an OpenTelemetry vein, I think kind of got me, got me hooked in terms of. Yeah. Trying to see things in this, in this new OpenTelemetry light.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's so exciting too. And it's such a great way to, you know, to get your hands dirty is like, take something familiar. But, you know, you make such an excellent point too of like, letting the PR get too big. Because I almost got caught by this this week where I submitted a PR to the docs to include like, some like, troubleshooting tips for the Target Allocator. And I got emboldened and I'm like, you know what I have, I. Not only am I contributing, like, you know, troubleshooting tips for that, I'm also going to include troubleshooting tips for auto instrumentation for the OTel Operator in the same PR. And Severin, who's one of the maintainers of the docs, he's like, yeah, you should, if you don't mind, could you open a second PR for that? And I'm so grateful that he nudged me in that direction because I'm like, yeah, otherwise that first PR would have just. It would, would have just taken forever to get it merged kind of thing. So things like that like, I. I appreciate when, you know, if you have somebody who, who will nudge you or, or you learn on your own that, like, yeah, maybe, maybe I should split this up. There's definitely something to be said for, for putting. Putting an issue to bed, getting some closure, getting that. That feature incorporated as quickly as possible, as safely as possible as well. That's so great. That's so great.

And how did you, like, what was the path for you from, you know, just like, initial contributor to like, maintainer or I guess contributor, approver or maintainer. Like, how. How does. What's that path look like?

KAYLA: Yeah, so for me, you know, I started. I started attending the SIGs after this database PR, but also kind of like in conjunction with it. I made it clear that I wanted to contribute logs. I wanted to get as far as I could in contributing the log signal that I had the time and the resources and so started writing that and contributing a lot of code in that way. And also just paying attention to what was happening in the repo when even, like, smaller maintenance things were needed. So, like, if dependabot opened a new PR in contrib, like, trying to read it and approve it, even though I didn't have an official green checkmark, like, being able to just become more visible and, you know, hope that I could become a more trusted set of eyes through doing that.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

KAYLA: And the Ruby. The Ruby SIG is pretty small. I think that, you know, it. There are a lot of people who have been super committed to the project and really crucial with it, but I don't think they have the same time to commit that they used to have and so kind of trying to learn from them and help them out as well. So I think that helped build trust over time. And I let them know that I was interested in, you know, gaining, getting more responsibility and going through that path. And so, yeah, I worked with them to make it. Make it there.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. And, you know, I think you touch on a really important point, which is advocating for yourself because sometimes we're too shy and we just hope that someone will notice and maybe someone will notice and you'll. You'll get attention that way. But, like, chances are, like, they're too busy in their own world doing whatever, so if you don't stand up for yourself, you're not gonna. You're definitely not gonna get it. So, you know, kudos to you for doing that. I think that's so amazing.

KAYLA: Thank you. Yeah, I. It took a lot of encouragement. I think OpenTelemetry has been a great opportunity for me to practice advocating for myself, because that's something that's really hard for me to do. And I think, you know, anytime you join a new group or a community, especially one that feels like it's already established, it's kind of. I feel like I want to understand how people like to communicate with each other and what is expected. And, you know, I felt pretty strong when I joined that I wanted to, you know, try to gain more responsibility as an approver or a maintainer, but, you know, didn't want to just say, oh, I'm showing up because this is what. This is what I want.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

KAYLA: And. Yeah. And so, you know, I had a lot of support from other folks inside New Relic who have worked with OpenTelemetry, kind of encouraging and coaching me in ways to advocate for myself. But I'm feeling. Yeah, I'm feeling much more confident in it now. And I'm grateful that OpenTelemetry has given me that opportunity to kind of learn this lesson.

ADRIANA: And it's probably one of the best communities to do that, because I've always said so many times, OpenTelemetry is such an incredibly welcoming community, and I've not yet encountered a situation where someone has made some sort of asshole comment on a PR. Like, everything is very thoughtfully worded because at the end of the day, they want your contribution. I mean, this open source is here because of people like us who are. Who are out there contributing. So you don't want to antagonize or alienate the contributors.

KAYLA: Yes, definitely. And that's been a place where I feel like I've gotten a chance to grow as well, because I think with the New Relic repo, like, our team really wants to cater to customers and make sure that they feel seen and heard and that the product is working for them. Like, if you reach out to us, like, we really want to acknowledge that. And in OpenTelemetry, I think that energy is there too. But I also think that because there are so many different voices and perspectives that are coming into it, kind of the ideas about where the project should be and where it should go are different. So there's, I think, a lot more scrutiny about, like, is this the best way to add to this project? Is this something that we, like, want to take on maintaining or that we can, you know, trust will continue to be supported and. Yeah, so getting. Getting those more. Getting some PRs that fall into that gray area of whether, or not, you know, it's the right solution has been challenging because I really want to encourage more people to contribute, but at the same time, we need the right kinds of contributions. So coaching people in a new way or encouraging people to do something differently and figuring out how to say those things has been kind of a challenge for me.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's funny too, like, contribution, there's like, I guess a couple of different types of contributions because there's the, oh, I see a gap here and I want to fill it. And then there's the. Also, like, you can go through the list of open issues and see if that's something that you would want to take on. And especially believe there's like the great first issue or good first issue label on. On certain issues, which is designed for, you know, people who are new to contributing, as this is like the starter issue that you might want to take on. And it's all about, like, there's no issue. There's no such thing as a small issue to tackle because everything, every little thing, helps to contribute to the community.

KAYLA: Yes. Yeah. It's hard to tell the impact of the change that you make. Even if it's like a single line change, you know, if you're bringing, maybe just changing a key so that it matches a new semantic convention, I mean, that can still have a huge impact as time goes on. Or like one of our good first issues I think we have labeled right now is adding. Adding a spell checker that's used in the opentelemetry.io website on the Ruby repositories. And you know, that, that could make a big difference because, you know, we don't really know how we're spelling things wrong or if we're not matching the style guide in places. And having that consistency, I think just makes for an easier experience. Whereas sometimes if you're reading something and it's misspelled, it can just be a bit of a. A hard stop.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, because then your brain can tend to be very judgy. Oh, they can't spell this. Why should I trust these docs?

KAYLA: Yes.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting you mentioned the, the spell checker and the. Just like maintaining the style guide. Because that, that is definitely one thing. Like having made a bunch of docs contributions in the last couple years, like, they are very stringent on that. And even though it may drive you a little bit crazy as you're like trying to get like all those checks to pass as you're after you push your code for the PR, there is a method to the madness because it really does allow for like a more streamlined experience because everyone has a different way of coding. Everyone has a way of, different way of documenting and it is absolutely annoying to go through like inconsistent, inconsistent code. It just...eugh! So...that people put those checks and balances in place.

There's, there's a reason for it even, even if I might seem a little bit annoying or inconvenient, like it'll save you that extra bit of, of stress in the end. Right?

KAYLA: Definitely.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Another thing that I wanted to switch gears on a little bit is you know, just get your thoughts around like open source communities in general. Like when we were chatting before we started the recording, talking about like these more community sponsored open source projects versus ones that are more like corporate sponsored or like one, you know, primarily one company kind of overseeing the open source project. If you have any thoughts on that.

KAYLA: Yeah, I think, I think my experience like working on these two different projects has been really interesting or types of projects in like the vendor controlled land. There's a level of like wanting the community and I think almost assuming that if you make something open source the community will show up and maybe they will write the code for you. And I think that a lot of places that have open sourced products with that like hope or intention in mind have possibly been let down. I think. I'm not sure if it's because of the way that companies have support that works differently, usually an internal support team or if it's, you know, as a business having stakeholders and a structure that's more corporate and like business driven, that there's maybe less space for creativity outside of the specific goals of the organization. I also wonder too if in the vendor controlled space like you as a customer possibly feels different when you're looking at the code versus a fully like, I guess like maybe like company agnostic open source project because I think as a customer I would be more interested in trying to just get something fixed. Whereas maybe in like a more general open source environment I would feel more empowered to pitch an idea. I don't know if that's true, but that's my hunch.

Yeah, that's one thing that I really, really love about OpenTelemetry is that the vendors and the end users are working together. And I think that there is no single company or organization that is, or I guess I should say company that's responsible for it because the CNCF is the organization responsible for it. It keeps things yeah, more, more creative, more, more volatile. But I think also will, will drive something that might be more More valuable overall.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think OpenTelemetry spends a lot of effort in trying to keep things as vendor neutral as possible. And I say that in the best way possible because really, you know, like one of, for those who aren't aware, you know, I work with Reece Lee, who from New Relic, one of your, one of your co workers, on the OTel End User SIG. And we work for competitors, but like, I don't see it that way. That's maybe what it looks like on the outside, but I don't see it that way. We're all friends in OpenTelemetry, regardless of vendor. Like, we, we don't see each other's competitors. We're all like working towards the same goal.

We all want the same things and we are trying to cater to like, our user base as much as possible. Like, we want something put out that's useful to the people consuming it. So, you know, we don't want to be about it. But also being strict in, in terms of like making sure that not, you know, we're not favoring a vendor over another. And if there's pushback around that, it's for a very like, valid reason because we really don't want it to be like one vendor standing out over the other. We're all friends.

KAYLA: Yes. Yeah, yeah. As you were saying that, I was kind of reminded of the piece of advice that's given that's like always like, don't be afraid to ask a question because someone else in the room may have the same question as you. I think that is really true in OpenTelemetry because often if one user or one vendor runs into a certain problem, it may be something that other people are struggling with as well. And so that contribution in OpenTelemetry is like a tide that raises all boats. I think that's how you say that.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. And you remind me of something that happened to me last week where I was like, I was stuck on this one issue and it was related to the OTel operator and I like popped into the Slack and before I started I was going to ask my question. I'm like, what if I search on this particular keyword to see if someone else has had that issue? And lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. So remembering that oftentimes your issue is not unique. And as you said, having the courage to ask that question benefits not only you, but others who are probably in the dark about that as well. Well, that's so great. We are coming up on time.

So before we go, I was wondering if you had any hot takes or words of wisdom for our audience.

KAYLA: Yeah, let's see. So, I mean, I guess maybe just from our conversation, I think. Yeah. Two big things that I would say if you're participating in any open source project, not just OpenTelemetry, is don't be afraid to ask questions, especially asking questions of the maintainers. I think maintainers are hungry to have people contribute and participate. And the other one would be, you know, even. Even though you may want to participate in some sort of group, like, don't. Don't lose sight of. Of who you are either and what your coding standards are either. I think bringing. Bringing your full self there and being able to ask questions and make statements from what you've learned to be best can usually create a really fruitful discussion so that either you learn something from someone else or perhaps they learn something from you.

ADRIANA: I love that so much. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, really being, like, not being shy about, like, don't under. Don't underestimate, like, how capable you are is really like. Yeah, it's such an important. Such an important thing to bring, I think, to. To any table. Well, thank you so much, Kayla, for. For Geeking Out with me today, y'all. Don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

KAYLA: Peace out and geek out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:

Ix-chel Ruiz has been developing software applications and tools since 2000. Her technical research interests include server side languages like Java, dynamic languages, client-side technologies, testing, automation and observability. Her humanities research interests include personal, professional and organisational development and transformation. Java Champion, Oracle ACE pro, Testcontainers Community Champion, CDF Ambassador, Hackergarten enthusiast, Open Source advocate, public speaker and mentor.

Find our guest on:

• Bluesky
• Mastodon
• LinkedIn
• Twitter (X)
• GitHub
• Sessionize

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

• Apache Groovy (programming language)
• Basel Java User Group (JUG)
• Apache Groovy Committee (aka PMC)
• Jochen Theodorou  (one of the Groovy core contributors)
• edX Online Courses
• Codemotion Conference Madrid 2024
• Pascal (programming language)
• Softimage (company)
• Autodesk Maya
• JavaOne Conference
• QCon Brazil
• JavaLand
• JCrete Un-conference
• JChateau Un-conference
• JAlba Un-conference
• Jalapeño Un-conference
• Baselone Conference
• Devoxx UK Conference
• Jfokus Conference
• Lian Li on Geeking Out talking about un-conferences
• Java Champions

 Additional notes:

• Ix-chel's upcoming conferences/un-conferences: JNation, MAD Summit, DevBcn, JCrete

Transcript:
ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have Ix-chel Ruiz. Welcome, Ix-chel!

IX-CHEL: Thank you for having me. Thank you.

ADRIANA: I'm very excited to have you on and tell folks where you're calling from and where you work.

IX-CHEL: Okay, so I'm calling from Basel, Switzerland, and I work in Karakun. We are small consultancy company here in Switzerland and we also have offices in Germany and India, in several other places around the world. But we're still very, very small. And I still love that.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. Yeah, I love small consulting companies because I feel like the projects are a lot more interesting that way too.

IX-CHEL: Yes. It allows a closer relationship with the people that you work with, the teams that you work, and your clients. So it's. You are there to help them figure out something. And sometimes it's. It's actually systems and sometimes it's a totally different thing.

ADRIANA: It's so true. That's so true. I. So I did consulting early in my career, but I worked at Accenture for four years, so I feel like. So I have the, like the big corporate consulting experience, which was. It was very interesting. It was very challenging. It led to early burnout. But I. I do admire, like, the smaller consultancies and I have a couple of friends who work at smaller consultancies and. And they quite like it. So.

IX-CHEL: I joined that club.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Awesome. Well, before we get started with the meaty bits, I'm going to get you started with some lightning round questions. Lightning round slash icebreaker. We'll see how if they go fast or slow. It's all good either way. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

IX-CHEL: I use both.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. I love that. Okay, do you prefer iPhone or Android?

IX-CHEL: I have to say that I have an iPhone. And at the beginning I had Dell machines, but then at work several years ago, they gave me a Mac and from there on, like, having Mac devices made life easier because everything was synchronized. So now I have four of my own devices. Apple

ADRIANA: Oh, you just answered my next question. If it was Mac, Linux or Windows. That's awesome. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because I think, like, when I got my first iPhone, I was still on a Windows machine and I'm like, oh, my God, what is this nightmarish crap? And then, and then I got like an Apple. Like, I got a Mac with my iPhone and I already had an iPhone. I'm like, magic.

IX-CHEL: Yes. Easy to use. Compatibility, consistency goes along the, like, a long way.

ADRIANA: I completely agree. Yeah, I mean, that, that, that's why I'm part of the Mac cult. I like that everything plays nice together.

IX-CHEL: Exactly.

ADRIANA: Awesome. What is your favorite programming language?

IX-CHEL: Java. I have to say Java, but in between. I mean, at this moment in time, you cannot say that you only love one language because you end up using a lot. So you're a polyglot by almost by definition. So I love Java, but I also like other languages. My second great love is Groovy because at that time, yes, at that time it gave me everything, like, less ceremony, more the dynamic part. So it was. And you could create magic in so little lines of code. So, yes. So Java, Groovy. I also have done a little bit of Go and many of JavaScript, obviously. Obviously. Full Stack developer.

ADRIANA: That's cool. You know, I think you're the first person I've met who's liked Groovy. And, you know, I messed around with Groovy for a bit as well. Like when I first started getting into Jenkins and I wanted to do some more customization stuff. And I remember, like, other people dissing Groovy, but I'm like, but this is like less verbose Java because I was a Java developer for like 15 years and I'm like, this is less verbose Java. This is like super freaking cool. And I'm like, why are people, like, harping on Groovy?

IX-CHEL: No, no, I mean, honestly, I remember. I remember my first session, it was in one Java one. And then this. The speaker was showing how to, for example, open Excel and do crazy stuff all programmatically, all from the Groovy console. And it was so easy. And I was like, oh, my God, I need that. I mean, because I'm coming from the, from the Ubuntu, like, shell and the command line interface, it's my life. So suddenly, like command line interface, but for applications that usually you're like, oh, my God, how many clicks do I have to do here to make things work? So suddenly, no clicks involved, and you were doing something incredible, and I fell in love. The funny part of that story is that my husband entered Groovy first and he was like, I have been trying to convince you of try Groovy. And you got convinced by that speaker and not by me.

ADRIANA: It's always the ones closest to us that we don't want to listen to. It's like, yeah, for sure. They know what they're talking about. That's great. I love that. Oh, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

IX-CHEL: Sorry. It's because. It's because we got into this. I'm hosting one of the core contributors of Groovy in the Basal JUG next month is Jochen Theodorou. He is part of the PMC of Groovy. He has been working on the internals on the compiler. I mean, I still very close to Groovy in my heart and with the people that I work with.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's so awesome. That's so great. Yeah, it's funny because you don't hear too much about Groovy, and I'm very. I'm very pleased to hear that there. It's still like a very thriving community.

IX-CHEL: Yes.

ADRIANA: Awesome. All right, next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?

IX-CHEL: Okay. As I told you, I started with Ubuntu when I was in high school. Like, honestly, I received. I actually was not Ubuntu. Ubuntu was very sophisticated years later. I started with the distribution in a CD-ROM, when you had to go to university to have people. And that time it was the. The university, the main university of Mexico, and they will burn you a CD-ROM and give it to you. That's how you distributed Linux at that time. So I hear. I'm dating myself.

ADRIANA: Like, oh, my God. Yes, yes, yes.

IX-CHEL: I totally.

ADRIANA: Yes, I'm with you there. CD-ROM days.

IX-CHEL: Oh, my God. So CLI, Ops and making to everything, Automate and scripts and everything. That's where I started. That's what pulled me into computers. But then I'm a developer, so you're asking me. For me, there is no separation because probably that's because of my background. So I cannot answer that question. Honestly.

ADRIANA: You know what? I love your answer. And it's funny because I was having a similar discussion with people on this because I like, for me, the thing that attracted me to, like, the whole DevOps movement was the, like, oh, my God, I can use, Like, I like the hardware aspect of it. Like, I like infrastructure, it's cool. But I like coding. And I'm like, oh, you're telling me now I can, like, merge both of them. And the other aspect of it too is, like, as a software engineer, I think, like, for me personally, I think it's shocking when, like, you ask, you ask other software engineers, like, how to build, like, a Docker image of their code, and they're like, I don't know. That's what the DevOps engineer does. And I'm like, In my mind, I find that confusing because for me, DevOps was always meant to be like, no, we're supposed to know how to do this stuff. And now you're telling me that you're like leaving it to someone else, like you've inserted another layer of person to do a thing for you. And I'm like, shouldn't, shouldn't you be like remotely curious as to like how, how you build like the images you're going to deploy?

IX-CHEL: I'm so with you there and let me paint you this image. And I think you are going to be a little bit scared, as I did when somebody make me realize that. He said, have you realized that now most of the people interact with their phones, that is their main interaction with a device. And have you realized that they don't even know how to organize or comprehend the concept of directories and files?

ADRIANA: Oh my God, so true.

IX-CHEL: So because I was telling him that I joined into one of these edX courses about data because I wanted to learn more about managing data, acquiring data and everything like that. And I was, I was complaining a little bit because I told him like the first five sessions it was about how to structure data in directories, like how in the hierarchy. And it was like, do we really need three sessions for this? And when he turns around and he said, like, Ix-chel, do you realize that there is a lot of people, the majority of people that do need this kind of introduction and even more because before we have computers, like most of people had to go to the computers, drag and drop files, create the structure of the directories. And now our main interface is going to be the phone, which doesn't like, obscures all that. So I think we're going getting more tech savvy in some things, but forgetting the fundamentals because they don't realize that there's an operating system, that you need files, that they are organized, that there's a meaning. So it is kind of scary for me.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I experienced this firsthand with my daughter. So my daughter is turning 16 this year. And so first two kind of funny stories. One, so her first, I guess computer was like an iPad or iPhone. And when, when we put her in front of an actual laptop, she started trying to touch the screen and I'm like, oh my God, of course she would. Because like that's, that's her interaction with, with computers. That's, that's what she thinks, how she thinks they work. And then secondly, once she started using a computer more regularly for school like for assignments and stuff. She had no concept of directories as well. And so my husband, who's also in tech, my husband and I had to be like, okay, this is how you organize your documents. This is where you're going to want to put your stuff so that you know, you don't have like your, your stuff for like chemistry in the same place as your stuff for English, for example. And it was just like, for me, like, it. I'm like, oh, of course that wouldn't make sense to her because she's never been exposed to it. But for us, it's like, we grew up with this. Of course it's obvious that you need a directory structure, so. Yeah, it's so wild.

IX-CHEL: Yes, yes. I'm really interested in how we're evolving in that regard.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what other side effects there are going to be. And it's funny because I even find myself like, I'm too lazy sometimes to do stuff on my laptop, which would be like 50 times easier because I'm like, my phone's here with me. I, I don't want to get up and go into the next room, grab my laptop to do whatever. Let's see what I can do on my phone. But then you get my dad who's like, why the hell would you want to do this on your phone? Like, you've got like a perfectly good computer, like it's a bigger screen. And for me I'm like, that's just too inconvenient.

IX-CHEL: I totally understand that one.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Okay, next question. This might be difficult to choose again. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

IX-CHEL: Okay, well, it's not so difficult because honestly, meaningful indentation. I don't like when it's difficult for people to realize that there is a mistake.

ADRIANA: Yes.

IX-CHEL: I mean, linters and validators are getting better, but it is like setting yourself for failure. And this is something I keep telling people. Like, why do we design either formats, tools that are not helping the users to realize best practices and mistakes easier, or why do you make it so easy for people to fail and miserably fail?

ADRIANA: Yeah, fair enough.

IX-CHEL: So JSON is not the best thing ever either. In the other way, because the format was also very limited, but it allows better this. It doesn't set yourself for failure so easy. Still not the best format either.

ADRIANA: But I, I agree it's more forgiving. YAML. YAML is very unforgiving. I, I like YAML because I think it's cleaner to read. I find there's like too many curly braces in, in JSON, it makes my head go boom. But I, I do agree with you. I think JSON is definitely more forgiving. All right, next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs.

IX-CHEL: You know, I'm going to tell the story there. I have heard everything under the sun in terms of like, you code like a girl. This formatting, it's so weird. I prefer tabs, I prefer spaces. If you don't put the spaces between parentheses or like. There are several arguments and some of them are really interesting. I, for example, with people with dyslexia space, if you leave a space between the parentheses, it's going to be easier for them because it reads better. Yeah, but then I love the solution of Go and Go. The people that design go, they agree that they will going to disagree on where we're going to be the best practices or so they created the form, you run that formatter and every single piece of code looks exactly the same. There is consistency. So they didn't agree on we should do this or we should do that, but they agree on having consistency. So I'm missing that from other languages. So honestly, at some point we should say I don't care, but let's agree on something even if we agree on disagreeing and then we try to create the least chaos in the world.

ADRIANA: Yeah, and that's a really good point with, with the Go formatting because that, that's definitely one thing that I appreciate. Like I, I did, I spent a few years doing Python and the thing with Python is that I think compared to Java, I feel like there's like so many different ways to format your Python code, irritatingly so, and I'm very particular about how, how I format it but, and, and of course people have their own way of doing it. But then, but then like if, if we both, you know, commit our code into the repo with our different ways of formatting, it's like, you hate how I formatted. I hate, hate how you formatted. So the go away, as you said, is nice because it's like, yeah, do it your way, but when you save the file, it's going to get formatted the way I like it. So.

IX-CHEL: Ha, ha ha. Exactly, exactly. These discussions are meaningless. So, and then you focus on other things and, and actually it helps you because you find partners faster. If everything looks the same, whatever thing that it's different, it will caught your eye and, and sometimes that's exactly what we need when we are reading code. So I, I will answer. I would, I will hope that we have that consistency and even if I hate it, I will still adopt it because. Sake of sanity and consistency.

ADRIANA: Yes, I totally agree. We need, we need more like automatic formatting with Go in other languages. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, two more questions left. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

IX-CHEL: Depending on the content. But I think I love video. It. It has more, more levels of communication obviously. But sometimes when I really need to focus on the content, then it is better for me audio only.

ADRIANA: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I agree. I, I'll. I've told people this before that like send me a YouTube video. I probably won't watch it, but like I will put it on. Like I'll leave my phone on my table with my AirPods on while I'm like doing errands and I'll listen to the video and then, but then if there's a visual component, be like, crap, where are you? But I, I like it because I can just, you know, do mindless things and listen and be more attentive towards it rather than sitting and watching.

IX-CHEL: Exactly, exactly. Because then you, you can focus. Like honestly focus.

ADRIANA: Exactly. Exactly. Cool. Okay, final question. What is your superpower?

IX-CHEL: Good question. I, I keep telling people that one of my advantages is that I can articulate things in, in a different way. And I always telling people that telling a story is really important. And I think that is something that I appreciate about myself.

ADRIANA: I love it. I love it. Yeah. And I think people, people respond well to stories. It's easier for them to remember the stuff that you're saying when you have a cool story to go with it. Right. Rather than some like blah, blah, blah, blah that no one's gonna.

IX-CHEL: Yeah, I mean, well, I, I like to listen a lot of information. I like to research a lot about human behavior. And for example, that when you tell a story, our brain waves start to synchronize better with the speaker. And we also, because we are kind of guessing what is coming next because we all have this innate idea of what a story looks like. Like the intro, the main part where there is conflict, there may be conflict resolution and then the conclusion. So everybody's have this idea of a story. So they are trying to kind of guess what is happening. So their focus is going to be more into your words. So whatever you are telling them at that moment, it will be well received. Better received that it's only a statement.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's such a great point. And I love that so much. And I think, and I think also like it's such a powerful tool. Especially like when you're giving a talk at a conference. Because like, I don't know about you, but like I have, I have difficulty sitting. I don't know how I made it through university. I have difficulty sitting through and like watching, watching people give a talk, unless it's like a fun talk with a fun story and then you're like, oh my God, yes, as you said, it's like, what are they going to say next? Because this is really like, this is really cool. It's flowing in a, in a really like logical way. Right.

IX-CHEL: Oh, in my last conference I was in Codemotion Madrid last week actually. And in many conferences there's. They are adding this kind of like community space and like a kind of a non conference. So in many conferences they're putting like lightning talks. Like you go and write your name and talk about five minutes about any topic and you can prepare your slides or you cannot prepare a slide, whatever. And for the last two conferences I have done it. I have gone and write my name in a lightning talk and the topic that I really. Because now I really think that it's super important for everybody, for everybody is storytelling.

ADRIANA: Yes.

IX-CHEL: And so I go there. I haven't written or put a slide deck because I want it to be spontaneous. I want to. And it's also a way for me to improve because I want to react to the audience. So the last time in Codemotion I had a full room and it was. They received very well my, my session. But honestly, the feedback of the people that were in the lighting talks, it was much, much better. Like people were like, oh my God, Ix-chel, I really, really enjoyed your...So, storytelling. It's, I think the superpower that we all need to, if not master, at least be mindful that it could be ours.

ADRIANA: Yes, I love that. I'm super down for that. All right, well, you survived the lightning round questions.

IX-CHEL: Yay.

ADRIANA: Congrats. So now let's get into the meaty bits. And I think, you know, before, before we started recording, you were telling me that like, you know, you have done various things throughout your career. So first off, like, you know, how, how did you get started in tech? Like, tell me about your tech journey.

IX-CHEL: Well, as I said, I live in Switzerland, but I also mentioned Mexico because I mentioned the university that I went to get my CD with the first versions of Linux. Well, okay, yes. So I'm from Mexico and at that time, and I was still in high school, but in my high school we shared the buildings with the University. And they had this cool, cool computer lab and I wanted to work there, but I'm still a high school student, so I went through a lot of hoops and I ended up, at that time it was Irix machines. Like it was super big machines and it was amazing. So that's what pulled me from a very, very young age into working with Unix at that time.

ADRIANA: Nice.

IX-CHEL: So that's how I landed. And then machines were easy to understand. Easy. According to me at that time it were. They were easy to understand and easy to command, let's put it like that. So. And yeah, from there on I decided computer science as my career. And my love for UNIX and the command line and programming has been there since I was a teenager, really.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. What was your first programming language?

IX-CHEL: It was Pascal. And then. Yes, yes, yes, Pascal. And then I went to C and then C++. And by the time I was, I was about to graduate, like year and a half before my graduation, Java made a splash. So I joined Java very, very early.

ADRIANA: Nice. That's awesome. Yeah, I got into Java just. I think they were doing Java in my university, in my third year of university. So I got into Java around that time and I mean, it was the hot language at the time, right? It was like, oh my God, we must all do Java.

IX-CHEL: Yes. Forget about pointers.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I know, right? I know you do C, programming, then you get into Java, you're like, ah, we friends again.

IX-CHEL: Oh my God.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

IX-CHEL: So that, that's how I started with computers. I fell in love with this big machines that I actually they were used mostly for effects... CGI at that time because they were using Softimage and Maya and things like that. So I wanted, at the beginning it was like, let's go and do a special effects at movies. But later on, like, no, I want to go deep.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. So, so what was your, what was your first job out of school?

IX-CHEL: My first job out of school. Oh my goodness. Actually, it was something more about like we were creating models for. At that time there was a plugin that had photorealistic details and you could create 3D models on that. It didn't. I mean, the technology died. But at that time people wanted to create like kind of avatars in real life, like clippy, but 3D and with the quality of movies.

ADRIANA: For that time it was like I had it. It was like well ahead of its time.

IX-CHEL: Yes, completely. Completely. That was my first job.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's so neat. That's so neat.

IX-CHEL: Yes.

ADRIANA: And, and I, I seem to remember because we're on a couple panels together and you mentioned this earlier as well, that you've, you've, you've done the DevRel thing. You've, you've. And then you've gone back into the software, back into being a software engineer. So I guess the question is, what got you into DevRel and then what made you switch back?

IX-CHEL: Okay, so first part, I was very. I'm an introvert. I'm an introvert that can have this like, this kind of moments of energy that is super extrovert. If you meet me at a conference, I'm talking, I'm doing, I'm with people. You see me after the conference, doesn't want to speak a word like a week. So I'm an introvert most of the time. So my first, as I said, I started with computers very early. They were my passion, but Ix-chel didn't speak. So as with your husband, he's. My husband is also in tech. He's actually also another PMC of the Groovy language. So you can imagine how deep we are.

ADRIANA: That explains his hardcore into Groovy then.

IX-CHEL: Yes. I told you. He was like, he convinced you and I didn't convince you. Remember that story?

ADRIANA: Oh, damn.

IX-CHEL: So we went to JavaOne and I was with him because he was a speaker at that time. And you know, we went to the speaker's dinners and whatnot. And then you could see the light of the eyes of the people. Like, what do I talk to the spouse? Because they didn't know that I was in technology. And literally they know that I was also in technology and I had same background and the same profile as my husband. So whatever. They talk with Andreas, my husband, they could talk to me.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

IX-CHEL: And in one of the meetings, in one of these dinners, I was talking to the organizers of QCon Brazil. Yes. And he, he was sharing his, his own experience that there were not a lot of women when he was at university. And, and he was telling me like, it's because we don't have enough role models. And I also was telling him my own experience because I have a dual degree. I'm computer science, but I'm also electronics and communication. Like hardcore. I decided computers at the end, but I'm still like designing. I could design circuits that could have been my future, but I decided computer, they were cooler. And I was telling him like, at least in computer science I had more women in school and in the electronics and communication, it was like, no, I. We Were only three women.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God.

IX-CHEL: In my entire generation.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God.

IX-CHEL: So I was telling him that I totally understand his, his, his position. And he said, like, you know, we need more women speakers. And I'm telling you, this is like more than 15 years ago. And I was like, yes, you're right. Like, yes, you're right. And once I explain, like, I have the same profile as my husband, I work in the same project we are actually, etc. Etc. And he's like, oh, my goodness. I mean, why don't you start speaking at conferences? I'm like, no, like that. But he got me thinking, like, that's the problem. We don't have enough role models, so somebody has to do it. Like. And at that time I said to myself, you're not so bad at what you do, and this is important for you because I had some really bad experiences when I was in the university and I hate them. I hate them so much. That that was for. For a time, my fuel.

And I said, I don't want any other woman having this insulting experiences. So I want more women so that we are not like the most strange thing in the room. So I told my husband, you know what, I'm going to start. Like, I want to speak at conferences. I want to show that we are good technically, we can do whatever. Like, it doesn't matter, but it's. This is important. So that's how I started to speak at conferences. And then, and then I started doing that a lot, but while still being a consultant. And I thought it was really important. And then I like it. And I travel and I met a lot of people and everything like that. So people were like, you are a DevRel. I'm like, no, I have deadlines, I have clients, I have projects I need to provide. Like, no, this is. This is part of my passion. This is part of what I do in my free time. And sometimes now I negotiate with my companies telling them, please sponsor 20% of my time to do all this stuff.

ADRIANA: That's awesome.

IX-CHEL: But people thought that I was a DevRel. And then one of my friends that I met at. In this kind of conferences or traveling or tours, he. He changed jobs and he literally knocked at my door and he said, Ix-chel, do you want to try being DevRel? And I thought for long because I said, this is my passion. This is 20% of my time, maybe more. This is 20% of my time paid by the company and almost all my free time.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it takes a lot of effort and energy.

IX-CHEL: Yes. So I said, yes, I'm going to do this. But turns out that for me, one really important part is technology for me is a tool, tool to solve problems, a tool to improve human lives. And being a DevRel, it's fantastic because you have all these interactions with people, you get all these feedback from developers, you are creating stories, you are helping people learn new things. But I was still missing this part of this is a tool to help solve problems. So I was missing a lot being a part of a project, like a steady project. I want my teammates to be not for this podcast, not for this MVP or this POC. I want people that we have meetings for six months, for one year where the project is still building, etc. etc. So that's why I decided it is fantastic being at DevRel. It's fantastic. Me being so introvert made it a little bit hard because being on more time than 20% or 60% or whatever, it was very hard on me. I love it. But I said, let's go back to engineering because you want to solve problems and have deadlines. And I was talking to my friends in Codemotion, my dear friends, and I said, you know what, I hate to say, but I was missing deadlines. I work better under pressure.

ADRIANA: That is hardcore.

IX-CHEL: Let's see how long can I sustain that again? Maybe I will go back to DevRel. No, I, I actually don't know. No, no, I, I'm happy doing what I'm doing right now.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. So how, how long were you a DevRel for before you. Two years. Okay, two years. And then you're like, no, I want to code.

IX-CHEL: Well, you know, DevRel means so many different things for so many different companies. And one, like you can see that I'm the person that research a lot for her talks for whatever. So I started interviewing a lot of DevRel. My friends and I, we got like the list of if you're a part of marketing is one way, if you're part of engineering is other way, if you're part of sales is another way. And the objectives and the guidelines and the type of work that you have to do and the priorities are totally different. Yeah, so my, my, my view on that, it's just one perspective from one company, from one department. So I cannot tell you honestly, like is DevRel what I experienced? It was one experience of DevRel with some perspective.

ADRIANA: And that's a really good point because as you said, depending on where DevRel falls in your organization, it's going to be a completely different experience. It depends on your manager and it depends. Some companies, companies are hung up on like you have to produce like this kind of content this many times a month or whatever. And then that can be like really stressful in its own, in its own way. Like for I. I've been lucky in, in my role where like, I don't have those kinds of constraints, which has been very nice. And my DevRel work is mostly aligned to open source and OpenTelemetry. Um, but I mean, I've seen, I've seen the other side of it where, you know, folks are like beholden to like producing content constantly and all this stuff. And it's really hard sometimes to like produce content because you have to sit down and learn the thing. But you can't learn the thing if you're expected to produce content all the time. So I, I have to say, like, I'm grateful for my current experience where, you know, I have, I have enough autonomy to like do things at a, at a reasonable pace, produce things that make my employer happy. But I know, I know it can also be like, so, so different.

IX-CHEL: Exactly, exactly. And the other thing that is important to understand is that producing video, producing audio, producing text requires different abilities and skills. And you have to be resonate with the task at hand. And if it's a task that you enjoy, it's going to be super fast and it's going to be something that makes you feel better. But if they are sometimes pushing you in a certain direction, then it's not so enjoyable. So the problem with DevRel, I think one of the problems with DevRel is that we are trying to apply hard measurements, that we are trying to apply this qualitative ideas into something that. Quantitative ideas into something that is qualitative and that mismatch. It's a little bit complicated sometimes.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. And I think that's what causes a lot of conflict because companies want, they want metrics. How are we doing? How do we know we're successful? And sometimes I think companies will tend to like mishire as well for dev rel because it's like, oh, this person has a huge like social following. Okay, but social following because of what? Right, you know, like, you can't use that as like your only, you know, measurement for hiring, for hiring someone.

IX-CHEL: And, and you can also not measure really easy the impact that you have when you are targeting different audiences. Yes, I think, honestly, I think that the position is really important. I will never say that this is like a costing center because people usually some management managers, and let me tell you that this is what I'm saying. It's not because of my experience at my previous company. No, I lucked out. My boss was the best boss ever. He got it right. He understood. Like, let's talk to the audience, let's talk to the developers. It's not, it's not a sales pitch. You are actually telling them what is the problem. You're telling them what is the solution. And this solution is not your product. It, like, it can be your product, but the solution is this and that. You're explaining the solution. And if your product happens to solve the issue in a more eloquent way or with less impedance or less mismatch or less pain, well, that's an advantage. But you have to provide something to your audience. Either it's a better understanding of the problem, a better understanding of the solution, or just knowledge for them to make the right decisions. So my boss knew all of this, but I also, because I told you, when I joined DevRel, I didn't know what this was about. So I started interviewing all my friends. Like, what do you do? What does your day look like? What is your goal? What makes you happy? What makes you unhappy? What do you call success? What do you call a failure? So I got all these stories about what DevRel meant to them and their companies. So I started having this very distorted picture and I was like, oh my goodness. So it was, it was an interesting experience and I have a lot of a broader perspective on what it does, it means. And so that's why I'm telling you what I think it's wrong between the appreciation of the role, the role in itself, and its actual impact on the, on the community. So. But this is not...talking about my own experience.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's. That's some really good insight. And, and I think you, you've got it spot on. Well, another thing that I wanted to talk about, just switching gears a little bit because in, in our pre chat, you mentioned that you have organized some conferences and unconferences and I. Why don't you, why don't you talk more about that?

IX-CHEL: Well, the one that I'm going to mention is the smallest one, it's Basel one, but I love it because I'm the head of the content committee. So that happens in Basel. And I said it's a small one because we. Last year we have 300 attendees, but we have an amazing speaker lineup. So I was very, very happy about that. The other one that I help organize as part of the program committee, is Javaland, which is one of the largest in the German speaking area.

ADRIANA: Oh, cool.

IX-CHEL: Yes. Yes, that. That is one of my also favorite ones because it used to happen in one amusement park. Now we change it to race car. Yes, very famous. But anyway and probably we in the future we will change again to amusement park. The other conferences that un-conferences that I help organize is for example JCrete. JCrete is one that happens in Crete. So really nice. That is an awesome conference...un-conference. So we call ourselves the disorganizers. And for example we. There has been a sister conferences from un-conferences from this one one at the early in February of this year was, for example JChateau, which happens in France. And you can guess what we do is go to Chateaus, wine tasting, and amazing French cuisine.

ADRIANA: So that sounds amazing.

IX-CHEL: If you are into Java, you want to do un-conferences, go either JCrete, JAlba, JChateau. We will have Jalapeño in Mexico, in the beach, in hotels, all inclusive. So I'm also involved in. In those kind of un-conferences.

ADRIANA: Clearly I'm not going to the fun conferences because these un-conferences sound amazing.

IX-CHEL: They are. Honestly, at this point I prefer. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm in love with JavaOne. I'm in love with BaselOne. I also help or I was in the program committee of Devoxx UK. I have been working in the past in Jfokus, one of the largest in Scandinavia. So I love conferences and there's very special conferences because of how do they create the program, how do they organize the space, the topics, etc, etc. But for me un-conferences are like super special because you don't have speakers, everybody's a speaker and you don't have a program. So we encourage people to share their questions or their knowledge or we try to figure out like these conversations that have created amazing opportunities. There have been completely new companies born, for example from JCrete because it's the magic of the right people at the right moment, in the right environment.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. It's funny you mentioned un-conferences because one of my past guests, Lian Li, she talked about how she started into speaking, got into like public speaking. It was after like attending an un-conference. And she said that I guess her. Her topic got chosen and so that was like her first time getting to. To speak in front of an audience in that way. And she said then it led to other speaking opportunities. So it's so cool to have that sort of like organic, you know, like entry into.

ADRIANA: Into speaking. It's like low pressure but high reward.

IX-CHEL: Yes and honestly the community also helps a lot. For example Javaland it's organized by more than 40 different Java user groups around Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland. And for example the ones in different parts of Germany we have in Javaland attracted that it's the newcomers track where we actually help people to speak for the first time at a conference. So people that have never had a speaking experience, we ask them if they need mentors to develop the content or to develop whatever help they need. We can provide that. For example and in the JUG meetings we also have these sessions for new speakers and it's important because we provide the feedback at two levels. One is in terms of the topic and the other one in terms of how do we help you be more effective as a speaker. The other one that has been interesting because I also part of the Java Champions group and we always talking about how do we help the next generation of speakers how do we help people do this jump? Because technology is interesting but you also need the human factor, somebody that helps you learn and helps you grow.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. That's so important. And a question for you on in comparing organizing and un-conference compared to a conference, is it easier to organize an unconference or is it just a different kind of challenge?

IX-CHEL: I mean even organizing conferences is totally different because of culture, because of the size. I for example, I joke with people like, Javaland. Javaland requires meetings from entire days, like eight hours. We sit down in a room and we try to figure out stuff. Yeah but that's one way of organizing. Other conferences like everything is asynchronous. We only meet one time, we have a one hour conversation and that's it. We have a program. So I can tell you that the same thing happens with un-conferences. There was one time in JCrete we were almost 200 people, a little bit above 200. So the logistics of that was a nightmare because you still need to help them with the accommodation help them like figure out all the details like an un-conference of this of JCrete we don't have a sponsorship so everybody almost paid its own way. So there's a lot of questions we try. I mean it's also Crete which is, means that it happens during summer, so we're competing with a lot of tourists to rent cars. We are competing with hotels. So sometimes it's a nightmare. Yeah you can imagine But I think, I think that un-conferences require a little bit more coordination. Coordination doesn't mean more time to organize just more coordination.

ADRIANA: Right? Gotcha. Gotcha. That's awesome. Well, we are coming up on time. I mean, I can keep on talking forever and ever. There's like so many, so many cool topics to dig into, but unfortunately our time is coming to a close. But before we wrap up, is there any piece of advice or hot take you would like to share with our audience?

IX-CHEL: So many. But the first of the first one is learn. Learn something, even if you don't think that you need it. Like, be curious. Go read a page, even random sometimes, like something caughts your eye. Go to the next level. Be curious. You never know when that knowledge is going to be helpful. It usually creates small threads in our brains and you can pull them out later on. And sometimes you realize you know things that you don't realize that you know. And that is amazing feeling. So be curious. Always ask why. Don't be afraid of asking why. Having philosophical questions about everything. Life is philosophy. So curiosity, asking questions. That's my advice.

ADRIANA: Awesome. That is amazing advice. I live by that myself, so. And I can definitely attest that it makes for, you know, magical things come out of being curious and asking why. So definitely great advice to. To end off on. Well, thank you so much, Ix-chel, for geeking out with me today. Y'all don't forget to subscribe and check us out on our socials. You can check out our show notes as well. And until next time...

IX-CHEL: Peace out and geek out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villella. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:

Abdel Sghiouar is a senior Cloud Developer Advocate @Google Cloud. A co-host of the Kubernetes Podcast by Google and a CNCF Ambassador. His focused areas are GKE/Kubernetes, Service Mesh, and Serverless. Abdel started his career in data centers and infrastructure in Morocco, where he is originally from, before moving to Google's largest EU data center in Belgium. Then in Sweden, he joined Google Cloud Professional Services and spent five years working with Google Cloud customers on architecting and designing large-scale distributed systems before turning to advocacy and community work.

Find our guest on:

• Bluesky
• LinkedIn
• Twitter (X)

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

• All Things Open
• Google Pixel 9 Fold
• Samsung Galaxy Flip
• Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)
• Blue Screen of Death T-shirt
• Silicon Valley - Tabs vs. Spaces
• SIG Boba
• Leigh Capili
• The Kubernetes Podcast from Google
• Kaslin Fields (co-host of The Kubernetes Podcast)
• On-Call Me Maybe Podcast
• KubeHuddle
• Humans of OpenTelemetry
• Licence-master (LMD)
• Nagios
• Simple network management protocol (SNMP)
• Apache Mesos
• OpenStack
• DEVOXX Conference (Morocco)

Additional notes:

• Adriana's blog post on OpenStack

Transcript:
ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And Geeking Out with me today, I have Abdel Sghiouar. Welcome, Abdel.

ABDEL: Hello. I should have. I should have known so I could brought my American accent. So, hey, y'all.

ADRIANA: Hey, y'all.

ABDEL: Hey, y'all. I'll try. I'll try.

ADRIANA: It's funny because the first time I heard y'all. So my husband worked in Jacksonville, Florida for a couple of years. He. He's in consulting. And one time I came down to Florida with him for. For the weekend because he had some work stuff to do. And we stop off at a gas station and they're. They're like, how y'all doing? I was like. I started. I. I think I started laughing because I'd never heard, like, "y'all" in real life.

ABDEL: Yeah.

ADRIANA: And I'm like, this is the most glorious thing ever. And I now just love saying "y'all". And my daughter bugs me about saying "y'all". She's like, don't say y'all. I'm like, "it's so much fun to say.

ABDEL: It is. It is. I love it. So. So, yes.

ADRIANA: A little sidebar. So where are you calling from today?

ABDEL: I mean, I'm home, surprisingly, because each time I talk to somebody, they're like, you're home. You're always on the road. I'm in Stockholm, Sweden. So that's where I'm based. But, yeah, usually I am somewhere.

ADRIANA: I know every time I see you on, like, on Twitter, I'm like, it's always a different city. You are definitely globetrotting.

ABDEL: Yeah, I am doing the way I say it is. I'm doing DevRel the hard way.

ADRIANA: Yeah, no kidding. But, you know, I have to say, like, we met in person last year at All Things Open. And I remember it was like, just before. It was definitely before KubeCon EU. And you were, like, giving me tips on. On, like, places to. To stay in. In Paris. You're like, don't stay too close to the conference venue, because then it's like, it's kind of a boring area. You want something that's a little bit further out so that it's closer to the cooler, touristy stuff. And I'm like, yes. So that was such great advice.

ABDEL: And I think we ended up being in the same hotel now.

ADRIANA: We did. We did. Yeah. Yeah. You recommended. You recommended a hotel to me, I'm like, that looks like a good spot.

ABDEL: Yeah, I remember that we shared like a. We shared like a walk and we had some croissant on the way to. To KubeCon at some point.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's right. That's right. On one of the days we. We ran into each other. I'm like, ah, staying at the same hotel and running into each other. What are, what are the odds? Right?

ABDEL: Yeah, no, that's. That was fun. KubeCon Paris was fun.

ADRIANA: That was. I'm looking forward to the next KubeCon. Are you going to be. Are you going to be in Salt Lake City?

ABDEL: I am trying, but yes, most probably, yes, because I got accepted. I have a talk. Accepted. So finally. Thank you.

ADRIANA: Congrats.

ABDEL: Thank you. And yeah, so hopefully, hopefully I'll. I'll be there. It's going to be fun. We are planning some stuff for the podcast and me and, yeah, me and the colleague were accepted and then Kaslin is going to be there. So it'll be fun.

ADRIANA: Yay. That's awesome. Cool. I have many questions, but before. Before we get started, I'm going to start with the. With the lightning round slash icebreaker questions.

ABDEL: Sure.

ADRIANA: Okay. You ready?

ABDEL: Sure. Go for it.

ADRIANA: First question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

ABDEL: I am a righty.

ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

ABDEL: iPhone. I've been experimenting with the Pixel 9 recently, the Fold one. Because I'm getting old and I need big screens and I do have to admit I like it, but I am not ready to convert yet.

ADRIANA: Yeah, so the folding one, that's cool.

ABDEL: Yeah, Nine Fold. The new model. The. Yeah, the big one, that is cool.

ADRIANA: You know, like, I actually miss my flip phone. As much as I love my smartphone, there is something so satisfying about, like, flipping.

ABDEL: Yes.

ADRIANA: Flipping your phone off, flipping your phone up to talk and then just closing to hang up and. Yeah, I miss those days.

ABDEL: Yeah. Unfortunately, the Fold doesn't open that way. Right. It opens like a book, but it's still.

ADRIANA: Oh, it's that kind of a fool.

ABDEL: Yeah. Yeah. So I think. I think that the one that you're talking about, the only model that exists is the Samsung Flip, they call it.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's what I was thinking.

ABDEL: But yeah, the Fold is like basically a big phone, but double because when you unfold it, it's like. Yeah, just a large. A small tablet, essentially.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I was going to say it sounds like a small tablet.

ABDEL: Exactly.

ADRIANA: Thing. I'd be curious to see one in real life. I don't think it'll make me convert from my iPhone, but I would still be curious to see it in real life.

ABDEL: I am still on iPhone just because it's just so easy when you have everything Apple and so, yeah, we'll see. We'll see if I get. If I ever convert.

ADRIANA: Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay, well, that leads to my next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?

ABDEL: I'm both a Mac and the Linux user. I've been a Linux user forever, since my start of my career. Like, I started with Mandrake, which then became Mandriva, and then eventually Fedora and Ubuntu and Debian, and then eventually a few years ago converted to Mac just because it's easier for work. But I still have a Linux laptop and I still use Linux daily. So Windows, I have never used Windows in my life.

ADRIANA: Really? No way.

ABDEL: If you put me in front of a Windows computer, I wouldn't know what to do.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God. Lucky you.

ABDEL: Well, I don't know. Yeah, sure. Lucky me. Thank you. I guess.

ADRIANA: I'm sorry to the Windows people out there. No, I don't know. I've told a few people, I'm like, I have a bit of Windows PTSD. I grew up on DOS and then Windows 3.1 and the succession of the Windows. And then I discovered Ubuntu in the. I don't know, early. I want to say early 2000s. I had it running as a VM. I discovered Ubuntu and VMS at the same time. I'm like, "whoa".

ABDEL: Yeah, you could run a VM? Yeah. If somebody gets offended, I have three words to remind you. Blue screen of death. Or that's more like four words.

ADRIANA: You know, I have a blue screen of death T-shirt that I wear to conferences sometimes. And it's great when people are like, oh my God, that's so cool. I'm like, these, these are my people who recognize the blue screen of death, of course, and can relate.

ABDEL: Yes, yes, exactly.

ADRIANA: Absolutely. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite programming language? And if so, what is it?

ABDEL: Um, I'm a Python developer. Always been a Python developer for a very long time. I picked up Go a few years ago. I am learning Rust, and if you would have asked me this question six months ago, I would probably not even mention Rust because Rust has this like, learning cycle where you are fighting Rust and Rust is fighting you for a few months. And once you get the heck that, like the heck out of it, it becomes actually enjoy, enjoyable to write code in it. So in order of if in in order, I would say Python, my preferred language, go, obviously, I love Go. And right now I'm really having a good time actually learning and coding stuff with Rust.

ADRIANA: Right on. Yeah, I've heard, like, people who like Rust like Rust, but I always hear the learning curve is just outrageous. Yeah. I have not dipped my toes into Rust-land. I'm with you on the Python thing. I love Python. I came up in the Java world, did Java for a really long time, 15, 16 years. And then a friend introduced me to Python. I'm like, how could I be introduced to Python in such like a late stage of my career? But it's all good. And then I'm like, I've fallen in love with Python. It's like such. I don't know, it's like a nice. I. I think it's a pleasurable language to code in.

ABDEL: You know, there is one thing I, I really like. There is one thing that I really appreciate about Java, which existing go that makes me appreciate Go even more, is chaining functions. Like, you can chain functions like, you know, in Java with the way. Chain functions with the...

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, the dot. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah.

ABDEL: And that exists in Go, and that's really amazing. It makes code so easy to read instead of like having to use variables to capture the output of one function to feed into another function. It's just one long line. It's just super amazing. Well, long, no pun intended for Java, but you get the point, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true. I do agree. That's nice. I think it's fun from a writing perspective, but if you're reading someone else's code, you're like, what the fuck is happening here?

ABDEL: That's true. Then with that comes the challenge of learning how to debug code and how to use breakpoints to debug code so you understand what's going on. But yeah, it's. It's both a blessing and a curse sometimes, I would say.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree with you on that. Cool. All right, next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?

ABDEL: Oh, that's a very good question. You know, it's funny, I studied software engineering, so I'm by training or by degree, if degree matters in this context. I am a software engineer. Yeah, I never really wanted or liked the idea of just doing pure developments as main occupation, just because I always liked the interaction with hardware and the automation parts and all that stuff. When people ask me a lot of time about my career, I always tell them I used to do DevOps before DevOps was cool because I was always in this intersection of how do you use software to automate infrastructure? Right. And that's. That's at the base of it, what DevOps is all about. Right. So I would say in between, I never really was in a job that, that required me to write applications, like purely, like just backends. And I never was in a job where I did just system administration kind of, kind of work. So I was always between the two.

ADRIANA: Ooh, that's awesome.

ABDEL: So, yeah, I love that.

ADRIANA: I love that. Yeah. It's funny, the way that you describe it is. That's what I love so much about DevOps too, is you get the software stuff, but you're getting to automate infrastructure and I don't know, it's so neat.

ABDEL: Yes. You get to understand how things actually work after they are developed.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. It's funny, I went through a period in my career, I had left tech for a bit, and then when I returned, you know, someone asked me, like, what do you want to do? What do you want to do, like, with. With your career now that you're back? And. And I'm like, I really like the infrastructure side of things. I really like writing code. I wish there was a way to marry the two. And this was like before, you know, DevOps had become like, you know, like a household name. And then, and then, like, I learned about DevOps, I'm like, what? Where have you been all my life? You know?

ABDEL: Yes. And I mean, putting aside all the, you know, the how to say all the things that people have to say about DevOps, because people have opinions about it, of course, but like, just not going too much into what people think DevOps is or it should be, I think at the most basic idea of what it is, that's what I enjoy. It's anything that is intersection between the two worlds.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I love that. Okay, next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

ABDEL: Oh, that's a very good question. I saw somebody today asking this question of like, what's your preferred programming language? What's your preferred configuration language that is not YAML. And don't tell me TOML.

ADRIANA: I saw that. I have to agree. I don't like TOML.

ABDEL: All right. I had to do something. Have you ever had to configure Containerd before? No, I haven't, because Containerd is TOML-based and it's horrendous. I would say configuration YAML for coding, JSON data exchange, JSON configuration, YAML.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes sense. I have to agree with you on that.

ABDEL: Cool.

ADRIANA: Next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?

ABDEL: Aren't they fundamentally the same thing? Aren't tabs just a combination? I mean, I'm just remembering, like, I have flashbacks to Silicon Valley right now, so.

ADRIANA: Exactly. Well, honestly, that's why I ask the question. I'm like, it's either going to be very polarizing. Polarizing where people have opinions, or some people are just going to be like, meh?

ABDEL: Doesn't matter. Right. What was that. What was that phrase? Like? At the end of the day, the compiler treat them the same way. So it doesn't really matter. Technically, I'd say I'm a tabs person. Yeah, Tabs is probably my most used. One of my most used keys on the keyboard.

ADRIANA: All right, two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

ABDEL: Oh, definitely video. Yeah. I hate reading. I mean, if it's short text, yes, but long text, no video, for sure.

ADRIANA: My daughter's the same way. She, like, she refuses to. She's like, I don't want to read books. And. And she learns all this, like, ridiculous stuff on YouTube. It's so cool. Like, she'll be like, today I learned about financial planning and today I learned about, like, you know, amputations. Like, not a joke. These are like real life examples. And I'm like, what?

ABDEL: It's like a wide spectrum of topics that she is interested in.

ADRIANA: I know the most random stuff, but, like, she learned some really cool stuff. I'm like, I am not going to interfere. Like, I'm not one of those parents who's like, you, you don't read, therefore there's something wrong with you. I'm like, no. Like, this is how you learn. And it's like, it's glorious. I love it so much.

ABDEL: So, you know, I. I like, since we're geeking out here, in my. One of my internships, I had to build an app for a person who is a PhD. Like a....doc...like a doctorate, right. Doing. Doing some research. And the research was in pedagogy. So the way you teach people. And there is this, like, I don't know if it exists all over the world, but in at least where I'm from, Morocco, it's like a methodology for teaching kids, which essentially is based on the research from the 1950s, I guess, or something. Some dude at some point came up with this like 44 questions questionnaire or survey that you can ask people and based on their answers, you can classify them in either visual learner, auditive learners, you know, like, do you learn by text, you learn by audio, do you learn by reading, do you learn by Applied, etc. Etc. Right. And which at the time, it was so cool because I had to build an app which was like a survey app. So I was learning was pretty cool. But then later I learned that this was actually bullshit. That research is BS. It has been debunked over, over and over because, like, no one is one style of learning where all multitudes, like, we're all multi. Multi, to use a term which is very popular these days, we're all multimodal. Like, we learn using multiple ways. So the reason why I'm saying this whole, this entire long story is what's interesting about, for example, video. YouTube. Right. You would assume that people watch YouTube, but I am quite sure that there are people now that just listen to YouTube. As in you launch YouTube in the background and they're listening to it.

ADRIANA: Yeah, like a podcast.

ABDEL: Yeah, that's hilarious to me because, like, like, okay, so let's say, for example, you are listening, listening to a video which explains how jet engines work. Did you actually learn how jet engine. Like, did you look at the animations that explains how it works or did you just, like, hear about it?

ADRIANA: Yeah, and that. That's the shortcoming of it because, like, my dad loves to send me YouTube videos. And I'm like, if you send me a YouTube video, chances are I'm not going to watch it because I don't have the patience to, like, sit there and watch a video. But then I'm like, if I just put it on while I'm, you know, like, doing dishes or whatever. And so that worked fine. He sent me this video about, like, I don't know, something to do with, like, the Moon's orbit and how it's, like, moving further from. From the Earth, I think something to that. Something to that effect. And so it was. It was all good until, like, they got into a part where they're showing diagrams. I'm like, goddammit. Now I have to, like, I have to pull out my phone and look at what they're showing in the animation.

ABDEL: Yeah, it's. It's actually pretty interesting. Yeah, it's. It's pretty interesting how people are actually consuming content in YouTube these days.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. And. And then don't forget the YouTube shorts. Like, my daughter watches so many YouTube shorts, like, constant. I'm. It's like in either Instagram short, what are they called? Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts. And. And that. That's how she does her Learning, Sure.

ABDEL: Whatever works for your daughter, I guess.

ADRIANA: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's. That's cool. Okay, final question. What is your superpower?

ABDEL: Oh, I don't get asked this question quite a lot. I think I know how to be sarcastic. Like, I know how to use sarcasm in. In a way that is, like, makes a point without being hurtful. Sometimes people get hurt, but, like, you cannot. You cannot. You cannot accommodate everybody's feelings, I guess. But I can use sarcasm in a very good way, I guess. I guess that would be one of my superpowers.

ADRIANA: That's great.

ABDEL: So, yeah, otherwise, I cook very well. I'm a really good cook. They just. Yeah, the simple superpower. Like, if. If the world goes south, I am going to be fine.

ADRIANA: Okay, so I got to ask, what kind of stuff do you cook?

ABDEL: A lot of Moroccan food, since I am from Morocco, but I experiment quite a lot. I like to try out all sorts of cuisines from. From different parts of the world. So probably second to Moroccan would be Mediterranean food in general. A big fan of Asian food. Korean, specifically, a lot of Korean food. But, yeah, generally speaking, just whatever. I like experimenting. I like, you know, blending and mixing stuff together. And probably a big part of my money wasted, if that's such a. If that's a correct term to use, goes into, like, kitchen stuff.

ADRIANA: I mean, come on. Kitchen gadgets are so much fun.

ABDEL: They are, yes. But, like, how many knives do you need when you are a home cook? Right. Probably not 10. So. So. So, no, it's. It's. It's. It's fun. I don't know. I feel like it allows me to get out of the. Like, do something with your hands. Like, be kind of tactile in a way.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

ABDEL: So. So, yeah, So I have cooked for big parties before. My biggest party is, like, 40 people.

ADRIANA: Oh, wow. Does that include dessert?

ABDEL: No, I don't do desserts just because I don't eat sugar. I avoid sugar, generally speaking. So usually I don't. Or if I invite people, I ask them to bring dessert, but I can cook for big groups.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's very cool.

ABDEL: Yeah.

ADRIANA: All right, so party coming soon, your way.

ABDEL: Yes. Oh, my God.

ADRIANA: There should be, like, KubeCooking or something.

ABDEL: Yeah, we should probably do something like that. You know, there is, like, a boba. There is a SIG Boba now.

ADRIANA: That's right.

ABDEL: Yeah.

ADRIANA: I love SIG Boba. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I've got my bubble tea right here.

ABDEL: Yeah. We like to claim that SIG Boba started with the Kubernetes podcast because it literally started with an interview on the podcast.

ADRIANA: No way.

ABDEL: Yeah. It was, I think, Leigh Capili, if I remember correctly, interviewed during one of the KubeCons, and Leigh was talking about the fact that we need parties without alcohol. And it was Kaslin who was interviewing, and they were like, boba and then a SIG Boba and then another, like, a KubeCon after. It was like, a thing.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

ABDEL: So.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God.

ABDEL: So we like to claim that we originated the idea.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's so great. And this is actually a great segue into one of the things that I want to ask you about, which is like, your podcast.

ABDEL: Yes. Yeah. So I'm a co-host of the Kubernetes podcast. Me and Kaslin Fields. Been doing it for almost two years now. Slightly more than two years. And, yeah, it's a lot of fun. You get to talk to a lot of interesting people. It's a challenge. I mean, as you understood, you know, keeping something running is a challenge. And we do have, like, help and producers, and we only do audio and where we're gonna start doing videos soon. So, yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun.

ADRIANA: That's great. Yeah, it. It's. It's funny. Podcasting is so much work. Like, when in my previous podcast On-Call Me maybe, we had a producer, so she would edit everything and she would do audiograms, send stuff out for transcription. But this podcast is, like, everything me.

ABDEL: Yes.

ADRIANA: And the. That. The extent of the help I get is, like, my daughter edits the videos, but, like, everything else is me. So I have to, like, I have. I have to send stuff out for transcription. I have, like, an AI tool that I use for that, but I still have to check to make sure that it's, you know, not spewing crap. So I still go through the script and, like, you know, sometimes it misinterprets words, especially OpenTelemetry. When someone says "OTel", it thinks it's "hotel" constantly. So, yeah, it's. But it's fun. It's such a great way. A great way to. To meet, like, really cool people is through podcasting.

ABDEL: Yeah. And I don't know, I feel like podcasts are one of these things where you can actually get access to a lot of people. I feel like people like just sitting and discussing for some time, so we can get pretty much anybody we want on the show. So it's pretty cool. Pretty nice.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. And did you. Is this a podcast that you inherited, or is that a podcast that you started?

ABDEL: We inherited It. So there used some. There was somebody else before us, and we took it over, like, 22 years ago. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Oh, cool.

ABDEL: And we've been. I mean, we changed a little bit. Some stuff. We reduced the schedule, like, the frequency, and we started doing some stuff. So one of them is the whole story behind the SIG Boba is we started doing interviews during KubeCon. So we go to KubeCon and we interview people, right? Oh, and, yeah, and then we produce an episode about. And then we do every KubeCon. So. So that's. That's, like, one of the things we do. And then we do a bunch of other things. It's. It's. It's fun to experiment also with different kind of contents to try to, like, try to attract different people. So. Yeah, no, it's pretty cool. It's a lot of fun.

ADRIANA: That's great. So when you. When you do the KubeCon episodes, like, do you find, like, a room where you record? Are you, like, on the floor, and just, like, chase people down with a mic and record?

ABDEL: We record on the floor, actually. So you have the background noise.

ADRIANA: That is impressive.

ABDEL: Yeah. So. And. And we are. One of our plans is to start doing video as well. I think that's going to be fun to just, like, stop people randomly and ask them, but not, like, I have a bunch of, like, fun things that I want to experiment with, so we'll see how that goes. But, like, yeah, I'm looking forward. It's going to be fun.

ADRIANA: That's cool. Yeah. I have to say, like, when. So my previous podcast, On-Call Me Maybe was audio only. And so when I started this podcast, I'm like, I want to do audio and video because I know there's some people who love podcasts, and there are other people who are like, I hate podcasts, but they'll watch video. So I offer it in both formats. And also, like, the fun thing about doing it, doing the video is, like, first of all, you can see some really cool office setups. Sometimes you can see some, like, awesome outfits and hairdos that you just don't get to experience if you're just recording the audio. So that's been. That's been kind of fun to experience. Experience as well.

ABDEL: Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's definitely. Yeah, that's. That's part of the plan. The other. Also part of the plan is to. I mean, if you have a phone, you can literally record anywhere. Yeah. So if you can, since I travel so much, it would be fun to be able to, like, try like travel and record in different parts of the world and just have, you know, some fun background or. I'm. I'm mostly interested in recording outdoors I think.

ADRIANA: Oh yeah, yeah.

ABDEL: Depending on the weather. So. So it be. It'll be fun. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's great. I, I did my last season of, of this podcast. I ended up with two episodes that I recorded during KubeHuddle and I recorded those like on site, outside and that was fun. It was like I'd never done an on site recording, but there was like a couple my, my two guests that I had on there. I've been trying to chase them down, like trying to align schedules. I'm like, we're going to be in the same place. I'm going to sit you down, we're going to record.

ABDEL: I've been, I've been to an event in Berlin a few weeks ago and during this event they had a podcast studio that anybody could use and that was actually a lot like, I really like the idea. I mean that's like most more professional. So that's was kind of triggered this idea of doing video because. Doing video on the go because then you can have different backgrounds and you can have, I mean maybe the quality of the video is not as important as far. As long as you can get the audio right and then you can get like people visible on camera, that's. That's all it matters.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. I would definitely say like invest in a decent mic because I did last KubeCon North America in Chicago. I did a series called Humans of OTel, like for OpenTelemetry and I had these like really crappy Amazon mics that I had gotten. Like these, I guess they were, they were crappy lavalier mics and oh my God, like some of the sound quality was so bad. I, I had to like cut out a couple videos because I couldn't make out what the people were saying. And then, and then the next KubeCon, one of the OTel guys, Henrik Rexed said, he, he messages me. He's like, you know, I have some really nice recording equipment that we could use for the next KubeCon. I'm like, I'm like, oh, he's being so polite. Basically saying like, my audio quality was not that great. Please let me help you. And I'm like, I am happy to take the help. And his setup, like when we did the Humans of OTel for, for KubeCon in Paris was so sweet. Like he knows his shit, so...

ABDEL: Yeah, I saw, I saw, I remember, I saw the setup. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember like, yeah, So I, I used to. We used to record for the KubeCon episodes with the Rode Wireless 2. And I recently got a pair of the DJI DJI wireless microphones.

ADRIANA: Oh, nice.

ABDEL: Just because I like them, because they come in like a very nice case with both the receiver and the transmitters. But the case also double up as a charging case.

ADRIANA: Oh yeah.

ABDEL: And I did some experiments and the audio quality is pretty good. So I'm looking forward to start using that one and see how it comes out.

ADRIANA: Ooh, fun. New toys.

ABDEL: Yeah, of course. It's always a good time to use new toys, right?

ADRIANA: I know when people are like, oh, you have to get this mic. I'm like, okay.

ABDEL: They're not very expensive, so.

ADRIANA: No, they're not too bad. Yeah. I, I also like, after. After that incident at the. That first KubeCon in Chicago with Humans of OTel, I'm like, I need better mics and I need to obviously pay more than 50 bucks for. For my wireless mic. So yeah, it's definitely a worthwhile investment to get a decent set of lavalier mics.

ABDEL: Definitely.

ADRIANA: Definitely. The other thing that I wanted to ask is, you know, you mentioned that like you had studied. You said you studied software engineering in school, right?

ABDEL: Yes.

ADRIANA: But you now work and you found your way into the DevOps space. You work as a developer advocate currently, right?

ABDEL: Correct. Yes.

ADRIANA: In the Google Cloud space, right?

ABDEL: Yes.

ADRIANA: Yeah. So can you talk about how you found yourself in this role?

ABDEL: It's. Oh, it's long story. Okay. I'll try to make it short. So a little bit of background. So I studied in Morocco. Right. So I am originally from there. I was born and raised there. I studied my master's degree in software engineering in one of the schools we have in Morocco. Morocco, for those who doesn't know, we follow the same. The same system as the rest of Europe. So that's basically high school bachelor, masters. Right? That's. I think that's the American version. But we say licence-master. It doesn't matter. Like three years you get a bachelor, five years get a master's. Right. So I got my masters in software engineering and my first job. And this is where things started being interesting for me in my career. My first job was actually in a data center.

ADRIANA: Ooh.

ABDEL: Yeah. Like an actual physical data center.

ADRIANA: Oh, damn.

ABDEL: Like, yeah. Yes, pretty much.

ADRIANA: So you were cold all the time?

ABDEL: Actually, it's a very interesting point. A lot of people think that you need to run data centers at sub zero temperature. You don't hardware, like data center grade Hardware is made to sustain very high temperatures.

ADRIANA: Oh, good, Cool.

ABDEL: We definitely had customers that wanted us to run their server rooms at like 10 degrees, 10 degrees C. I don't know how much is that in Freedom units.

ADRIANA: I'm a Celsius girl, so.

ABDEL: Okay, from the right part of the world. So. Which is too cold. It's cold even for humans. Right. So that's just. Yeah, but no, we run our. I mean, of course, the colder you want your data center to be, the more energy you're going to spend or waste. Right. So yeah, but yeah, I joined this company that was looking for. Initially they were actually looking for somebody to help them set up their internal systems because the data center was new. So you have, you know, your ticketing system and your CRM and all your tools that you need to actually make the thing operational. Your monitoring systems and all this stuff. And by monitoring, I'm talking back the days, Nagios time and you know, SNMP and old school before it became cool and we started calling it Observability, I guess. So I started there and yeah, that role was little bit of software engineering, little bit of automation, so kind of DevOps, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

ABDEL: And then through that role, I got contacted by Google and they actually hired me to work in their data center in Belgium. So that's how I joined Google. Yeah, we have data centers obviously all over the place, so Belgium is one of the biggest ones in Europe. So I joined that team and continued doing same thing. So a little bit of, you know, a little bit of automation, a little bit of system administration. Then a few years later, cloud started becoming a thing, at least for us. I mean, I guess it existed all over for other companies. But Google started being kind of more serious about it. And in 2017 they wanted me or they hired me to join a consulting team, an internal consulting team. So it's a team that basically works with external customers and help them architect, migrate, whatever, whatever that needs to happen to get stuff from where they are to Google Cloud. Right. So I joined that team initially to work on infrastructure because that's my background.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

ABDEL: But like very quickly I started working with Kubernetes. This is Kubernetes in 2017. So it was not as complex, I guess, as it is today, and I started learning it. I had no idea what containerization was. I had no idea what I. I think the only experience I had before was Mesos. But Mesos is like it's an orchestration system, which is similar to Kubernetes, but it's orchestrates virtual machines and not containers. Right. And I did work a little bit on OpenStack before. So conceptually it's the same idea. You are still orchestrating workloads. It just had different levels of the stack. Right. And yeah. And then just started learning Kubernetes and somehow became an. I'm putting air codes, SME, subjects matter, experts.

So, so then. And then parallel to this and back in the days when I was still living in Morocco, I was all. I was very active in the Ubuntu community because I started with Linux, right. So I was a member of the local user group. So that's like, yeah, the user group for, for Ubuntu. And we were doing Linux parties events, you know, install parties. We just go to university and people come with a laptop and we will help them deploy Ubuntu, help them sort out drivers, you know, give them like functional environments where they can like, you know, play with Linux. And then in my role as a consultant, I started actually doing conferences and my first conference was back home.

So there is a conference in Morocco called DEVOXX. It's a large conference and in 2017 they invited me and 2018 I joined the committee and I am in the committee since that 2018. So I was like, damn, I like this idea of like, you know, presenting public speaking, talking to developers, understanding what people are trying to solve. More understanding what people are trying to solve than actually talking to them. Really. Yeah. And yeah. And then in 2022, I basically, five years in consulting, I was like, I'm looking for something new.

And I talked to the DevRel manager for eme. I was like, hey, I would like to give DevRel a go. And he was like, we don't have anybody in cloud native, so why not? And that's how I became joined DevRel.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's so great. Wow.

ABDEL: Yeah, it's a pretty, I think it's a pretty interesting transition in the sense of. The way I like to describe it is that I've been over time going up the abstraction layers from the hardware all the way into containers.

ADRIANA: It's so cool to see like basically everything in your life had been building up to that moment, right?

ABDEL: I guess, yes. Yeah.

ADRIANA: So then you were like, by the time you became a DevRel, it was like, it felt like a natural fit too for you.

ABDEL: Yes, yes, in a way. And also because I've always been comfortable talking in public, I guess I like, it always came natural to me. I think when I was actually back in my university time, I was doing tutoring for my colleagues in, like, in my class. So I would like, help people, you know, understand concepts, like after. After the actual class. And it always came natural that I think it's more. More coming from the fact that you just like to help people, not really wanting to talk at people. It's more like, hey, if I explain something and you understand it, I'm happy. Right?

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's such a satisfying feeling. Like, you know, you get it and now they get it.

ABDEL: Exactly.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Compared to like, I don't know if you had this experience in university. I had professors who, you know, were too smart for their own good and couldn't explain anything.

ABDEL: Oh, of course. Oh, yeah.

ADRIANA: You know, I. One of my memorable moments was I had. I had this midterm and I go to the professor during his office hours and I'm like, can you explain, like, why I got this wrong? And he's like, well, it's easy. Obviously, if you don't understand the question, then I can't explain it to you. I'm like, what just happened here?

ABDEL: Sounds like a Karen.

ADRIANA: I'm like, all right, well, thanks for nothing, buddy.

ABDEL: Yeah, I think that that's. That's probably. I mean, it's interesting, like the, the academic. I have friends in academia right now, like, we're in Sweden. I have. We have a lot of friends who are like researchers and, you know, postdocs and stuff like that. And, and they're like young and our age, and they had to all suffer through some of what you're describing eventually. Right. At some point. And I think that the. Probably one of the reasons is because when you are studying to become a professor, you have to build up so much knowledge that you end up not having to apply all of it. So you feel you are like, better than everybody else. Like, you obviously know more than your average students, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

ABDEL: And so I have a friend who is a bio. Biochemist. She's like post doc and she does research and stuff and she has to teach. So she has one semester every year that she has to teach.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

ABDEL: And she. Sometimes she starts complaining about these kids, they don't understand anything. And I'm always like, remember when you were in their shoes, you also did not understand much. Right. So.

ADRIANA: Yeah, so true.

ABDEL: So I think that that's. Yeah, I had to experiment. I had to go through that as well. So. Yeah, whatever.

ADRIANA: I mean, I think we come back more resilient and I think then, you know, for. For people like us, where it's like part of our job to explain how things work in an accessible manner. I feel like you almost tap into that feeling of helplessness, of like, oh my God, it was horrible when I didn't understand this concept and I was so lost. And then, you know, the whole. The whole thing just got away from under me. Right. Versus, like, having someone who can explain things in a. In a way that's accessible, where, like, you're like, oh my God, I finally understand how this works. Like, it makes such a difference. Having that aha moment and seeing people get it, I think is so satisfying.

ABDEL: And that's exactly what happened to me six months later after I started learning Rust, right? So the aha moment, they're like, oh, now I know. Now I get it!

ADRIANA: This gives me hope. This gives me hope if I ever want to touch Rust.

ABDEL: I mean, you know how it works. Like, you start learning something and you go like through hello world, and it works and then it stops working and you don't understand what's going on. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm stupid. Oh my God, I'm stupid. Oh my God, I'm stupid. And you build up the stupidity and they're like, oh, no. I know, it's so true.

ADRIANA: It's like, you know, it. It's almost like if your program works the first time around, like, first of all, when that happens, I'm like, I'm shocked. Why? But then also, yeah, right? Like, are you sure? Yeah. Are you sure? But, but the other thing too, in some ways, it's like, it's almost like you're robbed of the experience of. Of the failure, which leads to, like, so much more insights into the problem compared to like, getting it right the first time. Like when you fail so hard that you've broken your system and I can't tell you how many times I've broken things beyond repair. And then you kind of have to like, just start building it from scratch, one thing at a time, and then you finally understand, oh, this is where it broke. Like, I feel like that is such a validating experience. Even though I, you know, I spent the last, like four hours, like in panic mode. Like, why isn't this working?

ABDEL: Yeah, yeah, that's true. I think learning to through failure is valuable. But also, like, you don't always have. And that's actually, I think you can relate to this. Like, in DevRel, you don't always have that luxury, right? Yeah, just sometimes you just. So I think my favorite thing that I would do in my current role is actually go on Stack Overflow. I am spending quite a lot of time there because I find that that's a really good resource for understanding what people are struggling with and trying to replicate the error and then walk my way back from that to try to figure out what was the intention of the user to start with. And then how can we solve this for the user, but how can we solve it for everybody else? Right? And that's like, that's so much. I get so much joy from that. Right. But that's something you can do. You can control your time, you can take time, you can do it, you have time to do it. You don't have pressure, you don't always have that. And the downside, I think, of DevRel is that you live in. I mean, I hate using this word, but you live in the cutting edge of the technology, that sometimes you are required to build stuff. And by stuff, I mean content about things that no one knows how to use yet.

New features, new stuff come out and you are expected to teach people how to use it. But, like, you don't necessarily understand how it works. Right. And we live in this space right now. Right, like AI. So it's definitely a very interesting kind of role to be in. And knowing how to balance these two things is quite challenging, but quite good to learn from, I guess.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, it is exciting. And you make a really good point about, like, being on the cutting edge means that you're probably one of the few people who is tackling this problem, which therefore makes you one of the few experts, even if you're not an expert in that at the time, which is a little bit terrifying. And I've definitely found myself in. In that position. Like, even. There was something in OpenTelemetry the other day where they had, like, they had updated the API for something, the OpenTelemetry Operator. So I was like updating my YAML manifests for it and I'm like, unfortunately, the documentation in the readme was not up to date, so I had to chase down the answer by going. It was a combination of going into the code, but also...Googl...not Googling...searching through Slack messages to find my answer.

ABDEL: What changed?

ADRIANA: And then I'm like, yeah, yeah, exactly. What changed? And then, and then once I got it working, I'm like, okay, now I'm going to go back to the readme and fix this. Because, like, if. If I was confused, someone else is going to be confused.

ABDEL: Yeah, yeah. And like, a lot of times when that happens to me, the same thing around GKE, which is our product, I mean our Kubernetes product. It's usually some change log that just slipped through the cracks that like that change happened somewhere. There is a comment, but it was not in the release notes. Right. The talk is not up to date. You know, different lab, but like to a large extent, I don't, I always think that that's something that would happen to anybody. Like any developer would eventually be faced with that kind of problems.

ADRIANA: Yeah, definitely.

ABDEL: And it is definitely part of your job as a DevRel to figure that out and figure out how that could be improved going forward. Right. Because like a lot of times people see DevRel as, oh, we just like travel and talk to conferences. No, no, no, no. There's a lot of time spent talking to engineering teams.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true.

ABDEL: And telling them like this is how, this is how things are supposed to work. I know that you don't think so, but let me tell you so it's a lot of, it's a, it's a two ways role. You talk to people outside your company, but you also talk to people inside the company.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which makes it a very, a very sort of unique role. You're, you're, you're basically bridging, bridging the gap, right? So that you're, you're, you're like telling the engineers like this is how people are actually using it.

ABDEL: So you better listen to me.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. Which sometimes is hard like you know, putting yourself in the shoes of the engineer and getting that feedback where you're like, you kind of, you know, it's your baby. You've invested your time into like writing it a certain way and being told like that's not how people are using it. You have to sort of put, put your feelings aside. You know, I, I have this, the, this mantra that I try to live by. I don't always succeed, but I, I try to live by like never fall in love with your code because you know, you just, you never know like someone's gonna come along and, and do it better and, and you have to be open minded enough to be like, yeah, this is a better solution. I gotta let go of, of you know, what, what I wrote and not be so, so possessive about it, so.

ABDEL: Exactly. Exactly.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Cool. Well, we are coming up on time, but before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you if you have any pieces of advice or hot takes that you want to share with our audience.

ABDEL: Does AI count as a hot take?

ADRIANA: Oh, sure.

ABDEL: Uh, it's actually interesting. I am in the process of. I'm. I'm involved in some startup programs that are AI startups where we're supposed to review what the startup product is all about. And my hot take is the following. Not AI is not. Is not gonna solve all the problems that people think they are gonna solve. I feel like people are trying to shove AI like in places where it shouldn't, and it comes out very obvious. A lot of times when you look at something and they're like, but can't you just solve this in a different way? Why do you need to put AI everywhere? But, yeah, I know.

And my other hot take is Kubernetes is here to stick around. I think that a lot of people think that it's a faded technology. It's not. It's going to be around for a while. So just, I guess the more people learn to live with this and accept it, the better it's going to be for everyone.

ADRIANA: What are some quickly, some things that you kind of look forward to seeing in Kubernetes in the next little while?

ABDEL: Maturity, for sure. There is quite a lot of interesting. I mean, again, in the AI space, there is quite a lot of improvements happening in Kubernetes itself that are happening for AI, but I see use cases for them beyond just AI. Right. Like the community is definitely shifting and adapting to accommodate kind of AI workloads, AI and ML workloads. But the ramification of this is going to go beyond. Beyond the beyond. I mean, speaking of observability, just in the last version of Kubernetes, they have added quite a lot of things around device observability.

So if you have a GPU attached or a TPU, how can you expose metrics through the node and how can you monitor those? And that's pretty cool. But there are use cases where you have to attach all sorts of hardware to a node and monitor how that hardware is performing, and that's going to help solve other types of problems. And yeah, it's evolving and maturing at a very slow-ish pace, but it's at a very steady pace and I'm very excited to see what the future brings. And also there is a lot of things happening in networking space because that's kind of one of my areas of focus and I'm really excited to see how that goes.

ADRIANA: That's great. Looking forward to seeing more cool things come out of Kubernetes in the next little while. Yeah, well, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Abdel, for geeking out with me today. Y'all don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

ABDEL: Peace out and geek out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:

Riaan has worked for Multi-National companies in Portugal, Germany, China, United States, South Africa and Australia.

• Certified Hashicorp Terraform Instructor
• HashiCorp Ambassador 2021, 2022, 2023
• Creator of Hashiqube - The best DevOps Lab running all the Hashicorp products
• HashiCorp Vault and Terraform Certified
• Certified Hashicorp Vault Implementation Partner
• 10+ years relevant DevOps experience with a strong focus on Automation and Infrastructure / Configuration in Code.

Find our guest on:

• X (Twitter)
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• GitHub
• Blog

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show Links:

• Versent
• Telstra
• Ubuntu Linux
• Installing Ubuntu on Macbook Pro
• Mark Shuttleworth
• VSCode Dev Containers
• HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL)
• AWS Cloudformation
• Puppet
• Magento%20and%20Symfony.)
• systemd
• HashiQube
• 12 Rule for Life, by Jordan Peterson
• Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within, by David Goggins
• NSW Maritime and Road Services
• HashiCorp Ambassador
• Wipro
• HashiTalks 2024
• Vagrant
• Terraform
• Vault
• RedHat Ansible Tower
• Apache Airflow with DBT
• Servian
• Vault Associate
• Terraform AWS EKS Blueprints
• HashiCorp Core Contributor
• Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp co-founder)
• Armon Dadgar (HashiCorp co-founder)
• HashiCorp BUSL
• HashiTalks Deploy 2023
• Terragrunt
• OpenTofu
• Azure Bicep
• Hira
• (HashiCorp) Boundary
• (HashiCorp) Waypoint
• (Windows) NT 4
• Gentoo Linux
• Vagrant Docker Provider
• Ansible AWX

Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela. Coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today is Riaan Nolan.

RIAAN: Good morning, Adriana. How are you? It's good to see you. Happy Australia day. It's Australia day in Australia, so happy Australia day. At the moment, I'm working for a consultancy in Australia called Versent, and they've recently been bought by Australia's biggest telco, Telstra. So I'm a consultant for them. I do DevOps and HashiCorp stuff.

ADRIANA: Amazing. So you said you're calling from Australia? Where in Australia are you calling from?

RIAAN: I'm on the east coast in Brisbane. Brisbane, Australia, in Queensland. The state is called Queensland.

ADRIANA: Awesome. And significantly hotter than the crappy rainy weather of Toronto today. We are at a balmy 3C. And you are at what temperature right now?

RIAAN: Oh, my goodness. I'll tell you right now, weather. It's 25 degrees C right now...26 degrees C. It's 7:00 in the morning and it is going to go up to 30 degrees C today.

ADRIANA: Oh, wow. Hey, my kind of weather, it's lovely.

RIAAN: I tell you, it is so beautiful. We've got so many birds here, and thankfully I've got a pool here where I rent this property.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's nice.

RIAAN: If it gets too hot, I just jump in the pool.

ADRIANA: That is very nice. Super jelly. Super jelly. That's cool. Well, are you ready for our lightning round questions?

RIAAN: Yeah, sure. Let's see what you got.

ADRIANA: All right. Yes. This is a get to know you better icebreaker sort of thing. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

RIAAN: I'm right handed.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

RIAAN: I am on Android. I prefer Android.

ADRIANA: All right. And do you prefer Mac, Linux or windows?

RIAAN: Strangely, I'm the type of guy that used to run Linux on a Mac on my MacBook air. Yeah, Ubuntu.

ADRIANA: Nice.

RIAAN: Made by Mark Shuttleworth, who's from South Africa. But it just became a little bit difficult with all the changes. Work takes over. And so I've recently, well, not recently, about five years ago, switched to MacOS on a Mac.

ADRIANA: Oh, nice. So you were running like Ubuntu natively on a Mac. It wasn't a VM, it was like...actually...

RIAAN: I can't sometimes with the new stuff that doesn't work. But my old little MacBook Air that I got from Germany runs Ubuntu dual boot.

ADRIANA: Oh my God, how cool is that. That's amazing.

RIAAN: Because KDE is just such a great desktop. And it's got so many customizations and Windows gestures that it just makes your day to day and your working incredibly easy.

ADRIANA: Very cool. And now you're like, no, now it's MacOS on the Mac.

RIAAN: Now I've become not lazy, but when something breaks on my Mac because I work as a consultant, so I get a company PC and then sometimes I'm on Windows, sometimes I'm on Linux, sometimes on a cloud thing. So now I'm just the default OS with dev containers. So I use VSCode's dev containers, which means I just need VSCode and Docker and the rest I do inside of the container.

ADRIANA: Nice.

RIAAN: I really keep it so simple and so easy nowadays.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. Hey, that is the way to do it. To keep it simple. We overcomplicate our lives. So, awesome.

RIAAN: Yes.

ADRIANA: Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?

RIAAN: Listen man, I must come from systems administration. So I like Python and I like Bash and scripting. And then of course HCL is my favorite. And I used to start off with PHP back in the day on PHP, but I've since moved away from it. I used to do a little bit of PHP in Magento, but I'm just really in love with the infrastructure stuff and the DevOps. So I don't even know if you can call YAML and Cloudformation and HCL programming languages. You probably can't. So I'm a script kitty. Let's call me a script kitty, you know.

ADRIANA: All right, I love it. Okay, next question. Related. Do you prefer dev or ops?

RIAAN: I love both. And I really like the synergy. I used to do Puppet stuff, and when I discovered Puppet, I was like, wow, this is incredible. And then along came Cloudformation and I could just code something in Cloudformation and in the user data, pass it off to Puppet, and then do all of my stuff in Puppet. And that was the "Aha!" moment. We have finally arrived.

ADRIANA: Nice.

RIAAN: I like. What's that cake? A red velvet cake. It's a mix between the two and white chocolate, vanilla and chocolate. I love it so much.

ADRIANA: Awesome! I love it! Okay, another one. And I think I have an inkling of what your preference is. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

RIAAN: To tell you the truth, I hated JSON when I started with Cloudformation, but it didn't support YAML. So I wrote so much cloudformation that I loved JSON. I started loving it. But what's more readable and easier for the users. I mean, I do like YAML. It is just so beautiful and simplistic and easy to read. So it's like your kids. Let's say I've got two kids. I love them both equally. The JSON is the kid with red hair and YAML is a beautiful dark brunette kid with hazel eyes. I love them both equally.

ADRIANA: I love that. I love that. Now, what if you threw HCL into the mix...as a Hashi guy?

RIAAN: I love HCL. It's the fastest growing programming language and you can use it everywhere and it's just so flexible and just so forgiving. The shorthand if else. It's just such a great. That's probably what I'm going to start my son off. He's almost ready to start learning something and I think I'll start him off with that because it's really powerful if you can write a little bit of HCL and deploy it, and there you've got ten virtual machines. Yeah, that will just be the thing I'm going to start him off with.

ADRIANA: That's very cool. Speaking of programming languages, so my daughter is like a perpetual artist. Like, she's just born artsy and my husband and I are both in tech. And she was like, "I'm not learning how to code." And I'm like, "But you're a great problem solver. You would be a great coder." But I'm like, "I won't push it on you because you do you." And then she took like, I don't know why, but she took a computer class in school this year and learned Python.

And she's like, and she's like, "Mom, I hate to admit it, but I love coding." And she's just wrapping up her semester and she's like, "I'm going to be so sad that there's no coding next semester because I really enjoy the daily coding challenges." And I'm like, that's vindicating.

RIAAN: People always say, oh, well, you get the creativity kind and then you get the. But I really think that programming and DevOps stuff is a very creative art so much. It's not the boring essay type of stuff. And even the typing is also a creativity outlet. I really think there is a place for it.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah. And honestly, I think software engineering is such a creative profession. It's just creative in a very different way than. You're not painting on a canvas, a traditional canvas, but the IDE is your canvas.

RIAAN: Yes. And you have to use your imagination when you run into a bug, you have to kind of walk it through and I wonder, what is it now? Yesterday I got a bug where HashiQube wouldn't start and I was like, is it the new Vagrant version? And then I'm like, what could it be? Could it be Docker? It turns out it's the Docker. The new Docker at 25.0 doesn't let Vagrant start. And you have to be creative. Where should I start looking now?

ADRIANA: Oh my God. As a sidebar, let me tell you, every time there's a Docker update, I am like shaking in my booties because I feel like every Docker update causes my system to melt down and I can't run an update. I have to actually nuke Docker and then reinstall it and pray that other stuff that was relying on Docker is still working.

RIAAN: And then yesterday with that bug, I go read the Docker change log and they had some problems with the systemd update. So the Docker developers must be like, every time there's a systemd update and I can't even just update it, I have to nuke my whole thing. It's amazing how dependent we are on each other's work. It's like this ecosystem.

ADRIANA: Oh my God. Yes.

RIAAN: It relies on other components.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, next question from our series. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?

RIAAN: I like spaces. I love spaces. Tabs give me that feeling where somebody walked over your grave. When I see it, I'm just like..."Ugh!"

ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's such a great description. Okay, second last question. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

RIAAN: That is funny. I'll tell you, I like video. I'm in two minds of what do we learn easier? I think text is too slow to make us humans learn. I love reading my book. I'm reading at the moment is Jordan Peterson's "Twelve Rules for Life". But I've been trying this out now. So while I'm reading it, I'm listening to the audiobook on Spotify and I don't know yet whether this is going to make it stick, but now I'm using my ears, my mind, and my reading, and I'm just now busy checking it out. What is going to be the best way to get content through your thick skull?

ADRIANA: That is very cool.

RIAAN: Learn it quicker. So I don't know, but I do like videos. I do love it when they give a link in the video to a GitHub repository. Yes, because it's like copying code from a picture. Copying code from a picture. I'm like,

ADRIANA: Yeah, I know, right? Yeah. It's like, oh, I have to type this out.

RIAAN: Anyway, that's where I am at the moment. Let's go with video with a link to a GitHub repo.

ADRIANA: Awesome. I love it. You mentioned something interesting, which is like you're reading the book but also listening to the audiobook on Spotify. And I've done something similar. So I don't have too many physical books just because they take up too much space. But what I've done is I would buy the Kindle book but also get the Audible add on. So then if I was out for a run, I could listen to the book, and then if I was at home and in the mood to read, then I could open up the Kindle book and it would be in the exact spot where I left off in the Audible. And I'm like, oh, my God, this was like the best way to consume content, right? So for me, I thought it was so cool.

RIAAN: Yeah. Follows actually your audio.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Because they're tied the same. It's the same account, like the Audible account, uses my Kindle credentials. My Amazon account.

RIAAN: Incredible. Yeah. I still have to have a little bookmark in the book.

ADRIANA: Right.

RIAAN: To keep it kind of in sync. Incredible. Wow. That's a good tip. I love physical books, but I might just switch now. I don't know. I'll let you know.

ADRIANA: Yeah. My sister has a bunch of physical books, so she'll lend me one every so often. And I love the touch of a physical book. And there's something so satisfying about carrying a book around the house. But the convenience of the ebook is like, I can be like waiting at a doctor's office, open the iPhone and read my book.

RIAAN: Yes, I do like it. I do like the physical mean. I've got a couple of them. Another great one is this one from David Goggins, and I was fortunate enough to meet him in person in Brisbane. And the other one I read before that was this thing. So weird, man. I mean, you know, after COVID, just as I was reading it, I was just keep on thinking how lucky and how thankful we are to be out of this COVID thing because they were going to pass rules from the World Health Organization and mandate us locally to countries and not all countries are the same. And I don't know, it was creating a sticky situation.

So after this, I was just reading that book and every second page I was like, oh, thank God. I don't think I could have handled that one. So, yeah, I do like the physical books and stuff, but the Kindle is just so convenient.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. All right, final question. What is your superpower?

RIAAN: My superpower is probably, I'm curious and I'm quite patient. I can stick with a problem for a very long time. I might let it go for a little bit, but I would always come back to it and revisit it. And persistence is absolutely key. So I think that would be my superpower. I always say I'm not actually clever. My problem is that I'm curious. So through my curiosity, I just discover and I happen to learn stuff.

RIAAN: I suppose. That's my superpower.

ADRIANA: I love it. That's so great. Well, you've survived the lightning round questions. Awesome. Well, there's so many things I want to talk to you about, but one of the things, because you and I met when I was starting on my Hashi journey, where a coworker of mine found HashiQube, which you've created. And it is like whenever I have a chance, I will promote HashiQube to people, to Hashi folks, because I think it's such a great tool. To be able to basically mimic a data center setup of Hashi tools on your laptop, I think is incredible. And that it pretty much ports to your data center setup afterwards is super incredible and has saved my ass so many times, especially in my previous job when I was working with a Hashi stack.

So it was such a great way to learn how to use it, to have a setup that could mimic what we would have in real life without me having to figure it out. I appreciate that you figured all that stuff out. If you could talk a little bit about HashiQube and what inspired you to start it, where it started. And now, what are some of the new capabilities?

RIAAN: I totally hear your sentiment about being able to test something and mimic it in production because it's just so valuable. But really, where it started is when in South Africa, I was director of DevOps for Mage Mojo, a company that used to run Magento e-commerce stores on Kubernetes. But I really was looking for a visa, and I came to Australia and I was applying for so many jobs. I mean, if you can imagine applying from South Africa for remote jobs. I found it quite challenging at that stage, and I got a job as a consultant, and I was off the tools, mostly off the tools as the director of DevOps. But then being as a consultant, as you can imagine, your hands on the tools and that stage. I was working for Maritime Road Services. It's a government agency here in Australia and New South Wales.

And I was subcontracting for a company called Wipro. And the stack we were working on was Jenkins as the CI/CD, Ansible Tower as the configuration management, getting secrets from Vault, and then Vault maintaining these secrets and everything orchestrated with Terraform. So Terraform would install Vault and Terraform Enterprise at that stage and maintain the stack. So at that stage I was living in the central coast and my train ride was about 1 hour, 50 minutes, 2 hours. And I was new to Vault and I was new to Terraform and I was just like, oh, I need to get this stuff in my head. But then as I go through the central coast, there's this river where there's no mobile connection and it was just difficult to get Internet and download stuff. So I thought, I know I must do something different. And Vagrant, I used Vagrant before for developer environments, vagrant.

And then I put Vagrant with Vault and some Terraform in there with local stack so that I can learn how to code Terraform but not having a cloud account. And then when I get to work, I would try get access from Ansible Tower to this Vault and it just doesn't work. And I would go to the vault administrator and say, look, I think there's something wrong with this policy. And they were like, no, no, it's working. I was like, okay, well, now I'm going to test it on my local. I'm like, you see, if I remove this star, I don't get down the secrets, I don't get access to it, but if I add it, it works. So I used to go to the Vault guy and say, look here, this is my lab. This is where I'm testing it.

I think the problem is here. And lo and behold, the problem was there. And since then, as a consultant, you work on Kubernetes with Helm. And then I would quickly need to test some Helm Charts or Docker builds and DBT with Airflow. And this is really where HashiQube started and I needed a place to store my configs and this is where HashiQube came about, where I could just text and store my configs and that's the start of it.

ADRIANA: That is so cool. That's amazing. Yeah. And I can't say enough good things about HashiQube, because it's got all things. I want to go back to something that you said earlier. So you said that you used to be a director of DevOps and then when you moved to Australia, it sounds like you got into more hands-on stuff as a consultant. How was that transition like going from a director where you're not hands-on, to getting nitty gritty into the hands-on? How did that feel? What prompted the career pivot?

RIAAN: First of all, it was insane. I was so overwhelmed, I had impostor syndrome on steroids. The people that I worked at that consultancy, Servian, were extremely professional, and even just the way they looked. And when I came to Australia, the accent was quite thick. So I would sit in a meeting and they would speak English, but I wouldn't understand a word. They would use abbreviations. And so I felt completely overwhelmed, but I would just be consistent. Look, you've hit some goals in the past.

It's not like that. You don't know anything. But it was incredibly overwhelming because I used to use AWS and Cloudformation very successfully. Now, I don't know one line of Terraform and the Hashi stack with Vault, and it was just so overwhelming. But I must tell you, having a lab creates confidence. Having a place to test something out of the public eye, you can make stupid mistakes totally. It just gives you that place where you can figure something out and also break it slowly but surely. I decided, well, I don't know a line of Terraform yet, but I'm going to keep at this until I feel that I'm proficient and confident in Terraform.

And I just kept at it. I started with the associate exam. I then started trying to give courses on Terraform. And then I became a Certified Terraform Instructor. I did my Vault Associate Exam. And then lately, I'm a Vault Implementation Partner, certified. And so, you know, it really starts off very organically. And so where I started and why I wanted to come to Australia is before that, I was for four years in Berlin, and my son was born in Berlin.

But I really wanted him to know his parents and his grandparents and my brother and his kids. And you can't do that from the other side of the world. So we moved back to South Africa. You know, the situation there, I was retrenched four times in South Africa, and the place is a little bit, due to the corruption in government, there are quite high crime and murder rate, and you just feel unsafe. You have to look over your shoulder. As a man, you can handle it pretty easily. But my wife was always getting nightmares and stuff.

And I just thought, like, I can't live like this, man. My kid is five years old. I need to give him a better future. I can always go back. I've still got some family there. But then I started looking around and as director of DevOps, my visa to the US didn't quite work out. It was dragging its feet. And so the guy said, well, you can go work in Ukraine with our Ukraine colleagues.

So I had the visa stamped in my passport. But then this job from Australia came about and I was just like, oh, the language transition, the weather is more up my alley. Yeah, I'm just going to go for this. And I had the chance of staying director of DevOps, but I also had the chance of learning something new and doing something new. And I always kind of take, I wouldn't say the hard way out, but I take the uncommon, charted...that way. And so I'm so happy looking back at it, that I did come to Australia. That's the whole story. So now, hopefully by April, we'll be applying for Australian citizenship and that will conclude our five year journey.

ADRIANA: Oh, wow.

RIAAN: Citizenship in another country. I tell you what incredible last five years.

ADRIANA: That is such an adventure. I mean, you're not only pivoting your job, but you're also moving to a totally different country, starting fresh. Like, so many changes, and just making it work.

RIAAN: Yeah, I tell you, it was just absolutely incredible. But Australia is such a welcoming country. It's truly the rainbow nation with all of these nationalities. I mean, I go to my kids' school and I see Chinese and Filipinos and Indians there and know, and Kiwis from New Zealand and Africans and us from South Africa and all these kids play soccer together. And when I have my South African accent and the Indian parents have their accent, but all the kids sound Aussie. Yeah, mate. How are you doing, mate? And I thought always just. It is just so beautiful. I'm always astonished at how incredibly beautiful it is.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so cool. Wow, that is such an awesome story. Thank you for sharing.

RIAAN: My pleasure, my pleasure. It's such a feel-good story for me. I often look back at it and I'm just like, wow, it's so funny. Sometimes you look back at things you did two years ago and how this is now playing a role in your current day and age, but two years ago, you didn't know that what you were doing was actually going to, but you stick with it and you feed and it grows and. Yeah, that's so funny how life is.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally know what you mean. I always tell people, everything that we've done in the past prepares us for this point in time, right in the present. And as you said, you don't necessarily know that it's going to lead you here. But it feels like it's been kind of in the works, right?

RIAAN: Yes.

ADRIANA: Or maybe because it happened.

RIAAN: Yes. And if it feels good, do it. I liked your episode with Kelsey Hightower. I mean, he's also quite emotionally intelligent, and I would think quite a hyper aware individual to spot your podcast and ask the question. And, I mean, I really just am inspired by people. Like, I mean, well done, Kelsey. I mean, you've also inspired me. So hats off to you, mate.

ADRIANA: Thank you.

RIAAN: And I love your podcast and all the stuff you do. You're talking at HashiTalks now around the corner. Yeah, that's right.

ADRIANA: HashiTalks. Yeah. And you've got a talk as well, right, for Hashi talks?

RIAAN: Yes, I do. Everyone teaches you how to write Terraform code, but no one teaches you the scaffolding surrounding it, like dev containers, managing Terraform versions, scanning your code, doing the linting having environment, and everyone is like, oh, you must have micro repos. Mono repos is so bad. But this whole development lifecycle, just try to commit to three repositories with other maintainers and make prs and then wait and see how long you can get that code merged in. It is incredible. And so I'm going to give a talk a little bit about that to just help people get started and accelerate their Terraform development. So I'm looking quite forward to that.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's awesome. That sounds like such a great topic.

RIAAN: Yes. There's so much stuff that goes on behind the scenes that writing Terraform code is becoming the easy part.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's funny because I think, like many things, getting started withTterraform is easy. And then when you actually go to apply it for real life scenarios or know, I think a year ago, I was doing some work in terraform, and I want to clean up my code, and I'm like, I want to use modules. And I had everything working without using modules. And then I go to use modules, I'm like, crap, it's broken. You go to prettify your code, and it's like, another roadblock. But this is the cost of beautiful code. But these are the things that you don't realize as you go and evolve your code, right?

RIAAN: Yes. And making your modules usable. So now you need to write modules and patterns. And I don't know if you've ever seen the Terraform EKS Blueprints repository. If you Google "Terraform EKS Blueprints", that is just such an amazing little project. So it's deploying EKS, but in there, they've got patterns and these patterns are just so well written. And if you look at the multitenancy with teams, one, I've used it at great success in my consulting gig last year.

And I just want to say, hats off to those maintainers and developers. They've really done a good job. And if you ever want to see how to write...what good looks like, that would certainly be the repository to visit.

ADRIANA: That's good to know. Thank you. Yeah, I just checked it out, as you mentioned, that it looks very well organized.

RIAAN: It's incredibly well organized. It's really incredibly well...and when you start using it, you will see, oh, wow, there's been a great deal of thought that went into this thing.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so cool. I always appreciate when folks put in that effort, especially in the open source world, because it's like extra work, right? And that someone was cared enough to just make it easily consumable for me is so nice.

RIAAN: It's so selfless and I appreciate that little bit of it. I always think that people who contribute to open source projects, their glass is really overflowing because you have your personal life. I mean, you have kids and a family and a career, and yet you can still...and some people when they open up tickets, they're like, this doesn't work. Fix it. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay. And then you have to be nice. And I mean, it's really like helping a parent with their Internet problems. Right?

ADRIANA: I know, right? Oh my God, so true. Yeah. And especially, as you said, the ticket is, "This doesn't work." And it's like, "Okay, can you tell me what isn't working?"

RIAAN: Sounds so funny. But I always think back, our parents taught us how to tie our shoes and not to be cringey or anything, but they taught us how to wipe our bums. And really they had to have this insane amount of patience with us and try and try and try again. And I was trying to remind myself, especially when I've got a kid now nine years old, before that, I was kind of oblivious to the fact. But now that you've got a kid, sometimes you just have to stand back and laugh at the situation because it's just so funny. This development thing takes time.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true. That's a perfect way to describe it. Because when you have a kid, you're seeing your kid experience things for the first time, things that you take for granted, right? Like learning how to walk, learning how to crawl, or them, like when they're babies and they discovered that they have feet and they stick their feet in their mouths and you're like, oh, that is so cool, right? And these are things that you don't think about because it's like, yeah, I know where my feet are.

RIAAN: I forgot what it feels like. Or what it tastes like to have your big toe in your mouth.

ADRIANA: Right?

RIAAN: I don't know what a big toe tastes like anymore.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

RIAAN: But I love the open source thing and also try to make things easy and consumable for people. I think that's the ultimate goal.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. So much work goes into open source and I think I'm heavily involved with OpenTelemetry and I'm trying as a personal thing that I am trying to live by, which is like recently I was developing some content around OpenTelemetry and then I was going through the docs and realizing, oh, it's missing some stuff. And so I'd write a blog post about it to clarify it. But then I thought, well, that's nice, but it's missing stuff from the OpenTelemetry docs. Let's be a good citizen and contribute back to the OpenTelemetry docs, right? If there's something that you can contribute, even something so simple like documentation, clarifying documentation, I think it's so important if you're able to take the time and make that pull request to make somebody's life a little bit easier, right? Because oftentimes the developer docs for an open source project tend to be your first point...where...your one stop shop, hopefully...They're definitely your original landing point, right? So let's as a community try to make these docs better, right?

RIAAN: 100% agreed. 100% agreed.

ADRIANA: Now, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but still on the Hashi train of thought, you are wearing a Core Contributor t-shirt for HashiCorp. I was wondering if you could explain what that's all about. Like what does a HashiCorp core contributor do and what led you to there?

RIAAN: I got this last year in the post and I was just so happy to get mean. The Credley page says, "HashiCorp core contributors are individuals who are committed to the spirit of open source. They actively contribute to HashiCorp open source tools through submissions of pull request issues and bugs and contributor to documentation while advocating and adhering to the HashiCorp principles." And I've done a few pull requests and I help test stuff. I contribute to bugs and if anything, I just validate it and say, I've run this, I've tested this, it does work, whatever. I've got this problem here. And that got me this t-shirt, and I was just incredibly thankful. HashiCorp is quite a stunning community, and the individuals that make up this, I mean, you know, from the Ambassadors, they're a fun bunch.

They...the you, they...the me, they...the other people in the community. And I do think that they've got a certain gravitas to attract these certain individuals, like looks for like, and I feel welcome there, and I like contributing there. And just because it's such a nice stack. I mean, Mitchell, Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, they really made something really mean. I do know they went through this BUSL license change, but I mean, it was kind of expected, right? It's a company. It needs to make money. We live in a material world. We all need to make money.

I understand it. To me, just the logical evolution of this next step. But that said, the contribution that they've made to open source and to helping people like me learn and the stuff they give us for free is just incredible. So I'll be forever thankful for that.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. And I love that you're being rewarded for your contributions with this designation. I think it's so awesome.

RIAAN: I do appreciate it as well. I contributed such a small contribution, and still they recognized that, and I was just thankful and appreciative. It's beautiful. It feels good to get a little gift or something.

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. It's nice to know that the community appreciates. And on the same vein, like you mentioned, you and I are both HashiCorp Ambassadors. And actually you're the one who nominated me initially for the HashiCorp Ambassadorship. So I definitely appreciate that.

RIAAN: You know, because I always say, like, I meet a lot of people in my work, and this is not to be bashful or anything, but a lot of people are...If you can imagine a heart monitor and you see a blip on that monitor and I see blips, and I think that those blips should be recognized and called out. I think we should be the type of person that say, wow, you look good today, or, this is inspirational. I read your blog post, and I was actually surprised when I saw that you wrote all of these blog posts using HashiQube. I was like, wow, this thing has been out in the wild. And this is the first time I see it, and I was blown away. I contacted you, I think, over Medium.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's right.

RIAAN: Because you were not only using HashiQube, but also writing about it and using it in different ways. And I was incredible. And that's exactly why I nominated you because I think these type of people should be called out and should be celebrated. And you were certainly inspiring to me. And if you were inspiring to me, I bet you you're inspiring to many others out there. And that's the next wave of Ambassadors coming up in the world.

ADRIANA: Yeah, for sure. It's been a great program so far. I think I've been an Ambassador for two years. When did you become an Ambassador?

RIAAN: 2021.

ADRIANA: Oh, awesome.

RIAAN: So this year I'll be an Ambassador again. You have to put in the work and the street cred and stay active in the community and stuff. But while you can, you should. If you can.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. I put in an application again for this year, so fingers crossed I get it again. Fingers crossed. Yeah, it's been great through the Ambassadorship program. They invited me last fall to MC HashiTalks Deploy in December. So that was fun. That was so fun.

I'd never MCed before, so I was super nervous. But they were very organized. They're like, this is how it's going to go and this is the order. And here's a table of who the speaker is. You just need to fill out this stuff as prepare a script for yourself. So it was like, okay, because I was full on panicking when I agreed to become an MC. I'm like, okay, that'll be easy. And then there was like all this process.

I'm like, oh my God. It is very overwhelming.

RIAAN: But they do make it easy for you, but they do support you in pulling it off. Easy is definitely the wrong choice of words, but they do very much support you in getting this thing across the line. And then in the end you look back at it and you're like, wow, that was fun.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it was a great experience and I'm so grateful for the opportunity that I was afforded because of being an Ambassador. So it's nice to have these little things here and there.

RIAAN: I love it.

ADRIANA: Now, one thing that I wanted to ask...you're very involved in...you do a lot of Terraform work. Have you played around with the now competitor OpenTofu?

RIAAN: That's a good question. And no, I have not. I mean I did use Terragrunt before and I actually quite like Terragrunt. And to be honest with you, I don't think that that was nice to make OpenTofu. I'm an open source guy, man. I've been using Ubuntu Linux since 2008 and I started using RedHat in 2000, actually RedHat 6.2. And there's always a way to go about things. And I believe in having diplomacy. Someone created it.

And now you're kind of like taking ownership of this and you're taking it. And that's also against the spirit of open source. So I have not tried using OpenTofu. I actually cringe when I hear that name. Sorry to say it, I know what they did with OpenTofu. I mean, I did think about it. It's Open TF Tofu and whatever, but I won't be using it. I'm just so know, it just feels weird to me.

It just feels wrong to me. And so I like Terraform. And in the same breath, I also haven't tried Bicep from Azure. I'm a ashicle guy, I'm a terraform guy. So I have not delved into that. And I wish them luck on their journey and stuff. But when I see that name, it's just worthy to me. So I've unfortunately not tested it out or anything.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Now, going back to one thing that you mentioned earlier, which was Terragrunt. Can you explain to folks who aren't familiar with Terragrunt what that's all about?

RIAAN: I mean, I do like Terragrunt. Just touching on the topic. I wish that they could have just played nice because it could have really benefited this ecosystem so much more. And the companies...there is enough money in the world for everyone. Trust me, there's no reason why...there's enough money. There's billions and trillions and gazillions. So there's always an amicable way to do something.

But getting back to Terragrunt is very. I like what the Yevgeni Smirnoff did. You write your module? Everything driven through variables. And so your module should be completely flexible, very dynamic. And then what Terragrant is, is they add a Terragrunt HCL file and then you can make your folders names, variables. So you can imagine if you've got an environments folder and you've got Dev, Prod, UAT, Low, Production, whatever, Non-prod in there, you can turn this folder name into a variable. So you can then define this thing at the very top-level and benefit from this in your modules. So you can say module name and you can use module name in your tags.

So when you do apply this Terragrunt stack, these Terraforms, you can benefit from all of this modules that you define in the top and top down. So for those who's ever used Puppet and Hira, it's very similar to Hira. So in Hira, you've got a common file and this common file can be used down in your hierarchy. But let's say you want to overwrite a key name down in a couple of folders, let's say environment. Then you've got dev, and then in dev you've got your availability zones or your regions and then further down you've got availability zones that you stack support. And then lastly you've got your Terraform module and you just want to override a key on a module somewhere down you just overwrite this key. And so what, Terragrunt was quite nice as they defined everything in YAML, so you can have complete very complex YAML code structures that you can then pass to many, very many Terraform modules.

And these things all get executed in parallel. And so you can bring up complex infrastructure environments quite quickly. And because your code is DRY, your Terraform modules can be used many times over and you just pass parameters to it which is defined in your YAML files. And this is how Terragrunt comes about. It's actually beautiful the way they've done it. It's really nice. It becomes a little bit complex when you debug yourself because if you can imagine you've got ten Terraform threads now running all at once and if one breaks, the rest of them also stops and it's like quite an avalanche of output. But as far as if you get to use it and you use it properly, then you can accomplish quite a lot very quickly.

ADRIANA: Cool. And on a similar vein, maybe not so much Terragrunt, but in general for Terraform, how do you test Terraform code?

RIAAN: So my Terraform code, what I do is I have an examples directory or a patterns directory next to my modules. So if you can imagine I would have in my top gun Terraform developer environment I would have Terraform and then AWS, GCP and Azure and custom. And inside those I'd have modules folders and inside of those I'd have our Terraform modules. Then next to the modules folders I would have patterns and the pattern would be Linux server behind load balancer. And that Linux server behind load balancer would just be a main and a variables and outputs that then reference these modules with the source stanza inside of these modules. And then I just build them or I run them and I apply them. I normally just do a plan and I see if it works. But I do run them through an init and if I want to test it all at once, I actually drop a Terragrunt HCL file in there and I use "terragrant run" or "plan" to test all of these things.

I use Terraform in conjunction with this and then I plan all of these modules quite quickly. And if my plan works, I leave it out there and then I wait till I run into it again or someone needs an update or something. And then I look at this again.

ADRIANA: Cool, that's so awesome. Well, thanks for sharing. We are just about at time, but before we wrap up, I actually have two questions. One, what is your favorite HashiCorp tool?

RIAAN: My favorite HashiCorp tool would really be Terraform at the moment. There's a few. There's Vagrant. I love vagrant.

ADRIANA: Vagrant is great. I really love it. It was my first Hashi tool.

RIAAN: It's incredibly powerful. I mean, I really must take a shout out to vagrant. I mean, thank you, Mitchell and Armon for writing this thing. I use it every day, still. It's incredibly powerful. So I love Vagrant. I dig Terraform because that's my staple. I eat that thing every day for breakfast.

I love Nomad. I run Nomad jobs quite a lot. And so nomad is just so easy. You just drop it on a server and there could be still PHP and Apache sites running on there, but there's Nomad with containerized jobs and you can just migrate it and it's so cost effective and so easy to test it. And I've also liked Waypoint at the moment.

ADRIANA: Oh, Waypoint, yeah, I haven't played with Waypoint for a while. Yeah, I need to play with it. Because I think when I played with Waypoint, it was very early days and I can early days. I'm so curious to see how it's evolved since then.

RIAAN: It's got a lot of potential, and then Boundary is the next thing I really need to sink my teeth in and get a couple of examples into HashiQube. Just get people started and that's on my to do list to do. But yeah, there are so many.

ADRIANA: So many awesome tools.

RIAAN: You know what I mean? To pick a favorite. I mean, it's even difficult to pick a favorite cloud because all of these things just enable you to do stuff. So mean. GCP has got its way of working and Azure has got its way of working and AWS works in its ways, but they all help me on my day to day and I'm just so thankful we've got cloud computing. I mean, holy moly, can you imagine? Still back in the day.

ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah, it's wild to see how much software has evolved in the last 20 years. Holy cow. Mind blowing.

RIAAN: Mind blowing coming from NT4 and A+ where I started with chips and RAM and stuff. I mean, it's incredible to see how it's evolved.

ADRIANA: I totally agree. I totally agree. I mean, there was no cloud when I started my career.

RIAAN: No, just think back fondly. I mean, I used to use Gentoo and compiling stuff and running my own postfix mail servers and pure FTP servers and. Oh my goodness. Incredible.

ADRIANA: And now look, the world is at our fingertips with cloud. That's pretty mind blowing. Well, before we wrap up, do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience?

RIAAN: Well, maybe if you want to check out hashicube. I always plug that little thing. It's just so incredible to see a little docker container running more docker containers.

ADRIANA: Oh my God, it's like mind blowing sometimes.

RIAAN: Just think back and how lucky I was to get that to work. It is just incredible. And so easy to POC stuff and get stuff up. So, I mean, if you want to check out HashiQube, if you want to learn or play around with, that's my DevOps lab from now on going forward. Yeah, so cool.

ADRIANA: It's a great lab.

RIAAN: And that's the only plug. And see you guys at HashiTalks in a couple of days.

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. The other thing I want to mention on that same vein is I think you getting vVgrant to work with the Docker provider is probably one of the best running examples of Vagrant with the Docker provider, because I don't think there's a lot of documentation around that. So thank you for that. Hats off to you because, yeah, I think getting that to work, which you did, to be able to run HashiQube on the M processor, Macs, that's why you needed to get that running, right.

RIAAN: I so like it because it is just so light and if you do Vagrant SSH, it's very difficult to say you're in a Docker container now.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I know. You would never know. You would never know.

RIAAN: And it's incredible. I can really see things going that way. It's the way I do stuff at the moment. I no longer do VMS, so even when I run HashiQube on an EC2, or when I want to run Ansible AWX Tower on an ec two, I just HashiQube and "vagrant up".

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's the way to do it. I love it. Well, thank you so much.

RIAAN: Thank you for having me on your show. It's so good to see you. And shout out to your daughter, who I believe is doing your editing for your videos and job well done. I take my hat off. Thank you so much for your time and it's so good to see you again.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it was great to see you as well. And thank you, Riaan, for geeking out with me today. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe. Be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

RIAAN: Peace out and geek out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:

Edith is a Tech Evangelist at Percona, a company known for its work with open source databases. She used to work as a DevOps engineer, helping IT companies and startups set up and use DevOps. After taking a break for two years, Edith started working with Open Source, which helped her get back into the job market. She has made valuable contributions to the Apache Airflow project during her time with Outreachy and is working on translating the Kubernetes website into Spanish. Edith is also an ambassador for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, focusing on creating content, and is recognized as a Docker captain. She has taken part in tech programs like Stanford's Code in Place and studied at 42, a coding school in California. Recently, Edith moved to the United Kingdom on a Global Talent Visa, which was a big step forward in her life.

Find our guest on:

• X (Twitter)
• LinkedIn
• YouTube

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show Links:

• Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
• Outreachy
• Apache Airflow
• Kubernetes Community Days (KCD)
• Liz Rice
• KCD Peru - July 20th, 2024
• KubeHuddle Toronto 2024

Additional Links:

• Docker Captains program
• Code in Place (Stanford University)
• 42 Silicon Valley (coding school)

Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. Geeking out with me today. I have Edith Puklia. And where are you calling from today?

EDITH: Yeah, I am calling from UK. London, UK.

ADRIANA: Awesome. I've had a few people on the show that have called in from London. I think you're like the third person from London. I had Abby Bangser, who I think it was Abby who introduced. Right? Abby is the ultimate connector of people. So thank you, Abby, for introducing us.

Yes, I had Abby and then Jennifer Riggins, who is a tech journalist. You probably saw a bunch of her pieces on The New Stack. And then you. So you are my three London, UK people. Very exciting.

EDITH: Thank you.

ADRIANA: And we share a South American connection as well, right?

EDITH: Yes. You are from Brazil, right? Peru here.

ADRIANA: Yay. Home of the llamas.

EDITH: We love llamas. We love them.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, you have the awesome mug. Yeah. I was telling you earlier before we started recording that llamas and capybaras are like my two favorite animals in the world, so I always get excited when I see either one of them. Cool. Well, let's start with the lightning round questions. Are you ready?

EDITH: Yes.

ADRIANA: Okay. Are you left-handed or right-handed?

EDITH: Right.

ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

EDITH: iPhone.

ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer to use Mac, Linux or Windows?

EDITH: Linux. I love Linux.

ADRIANA: All right. Hardcore. I love it. What is your favorite programming language?

EDITH: Okay, there are many. Now my favorite right now I can say that it's Rust.

ADRIANA: Very cool, very cool. I hear that it's great. But also very complicated to get into.

EDITH: Yes. I mean, I don't code like a deep programming. I am just starting, just learning, but I was fascinated for what you can do with it.

ADRIANA: Cool. I'm curious as a sidebar, what got you interested in learning Rust?

EDITH: Because how you can easily integrate with other technologies. For example, with Docker I was trying to play, I was able to do fast with Rust. And using Chat, GPT is also a great tool to learn,.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Very cool. Okay, next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?

EDITH: Hard question here. Yeah, I prefer Ops.

ADRIANA: Okay, cool. Next one. Do you like JSON or YAML better?

EDITH: YAML. I feel that I can read it.

ADRIANA: Yes. Yeah, that's my thing with YAML too. I think it's easier to read. Okay, next one may be controversial spaces or tabs? Which one do you like better?

EDITH: Spaces or tabs? I use spaces.

ADRIANA: All right.

EDITH: Yeah. You?

ADRIANA: Okay. So I used to be a big fan of tabs, but then I started using spaces, especially when working with YAML, because it felt a little bit more organic for me. Yeah. So I used to be very adamant, like, no, it's got to be tabs. But now I'm like, I'm open right now. I'm down for spaces. So, yeah.

EDITH: Okay.

ADRIANA: Also, kudos to you for turning the question back on me.

EDITH: But I am curious about you too. Why you too?

ADRIANA: I love it. Very awesome. Okay, two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

EDITH: Okay. I love videos. I have a hard moment reading a lot of text, but videos is more easy for me to consume for you. I can imagine that too, because you do videos a lot also, right?

ADRIANA: No, it's mostly text for me. It's funny, though. I was talking to my dad yesterday, so my dad does not...he was like, I do not like podcasts. I'm like, but my podcast is on video, too. He's like, it's just boring to see people's heads on video, but he's more of a video guy because he likes the visual stuff. He refuses to do podcasts. And my daughter loves, loves, loves videos. She's always learning things on Instagram or YouTube.

EDITH: And you have a lot of articles.

ADRIANA: Definitely. Like, I prefer writing. I think I've embraced video a little bit more. I used to be very scared of editing video, and I feel like nowadays the tools have made it easier to do video edits so that it looks like I'm not fumbling around. So I feel a lot more comfortable doing video editing compared to, like, ten years ago when it felt impossibly hard.

EDITH: With writing. I feel really hard writing. Long time ago, I was not able to write a single article that take me too long to write. But now I feel I'm more comfortable because I am trying to do constantly.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's awesome.

EDITH: Yay.

ADRIANA: I love to hear stuff like that. Final question. What is your superpower?

EDITH: Patience.

ADRIANA: Patience. I love it.

EDITH: Yeah. You?

ADRIANA: Oh, jeez. My superpower. I think I'm really good at connecting people together. I find myself in situations where I'll have a conversation with someone and then they'll ask me a question. I'm like, I know a person that you can talk to. Yeah.

EDITH: You have a lot of people in your mind.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. At least remember people who should be talking to each other.

EDITH: That's a superpower.

ADRIANA: All right, cool. Well, that was it for the lightning round questions. You survived! Yay.

EDITH: Thank you.

ADRIANA: Okay, so now for the fun stuff. As I mentioned before, we got connected through Abby, and then it turns out we have another connection in common, which is we're both CNCF Ambassadors from the spring 2023 group. So, very exciting. I guess our first year of ambassadorship is coming to a close, and I guess they're renewing applications end of this month. So my question to you is, how has it been this last almost year as a CNCF Ambassador?

EDITH: Almost a year because we started at March. I think the last year. I was here in London, too. Then I go back to Peru. And how I feel this year being CNCF Ambassador, I think it doesn't cost to me too much make things for being Ambassador because I was in the category. If you see there are several categories, right? Run events or you go many, you can choose whatever you want. I choose the part of content creations which I love. So when I inspire it, I just create a video. I just make a flyer or a pdf of anything which I do in my free time. And I love it because editing videos and making that things require a lot of patience.

ADRIANA: Yes. There's your superpower.

EDITH: That's my superpower. And I can do that. I feel really excited. I feel like I'm going to apply again. For the last month, I was not just involving in content creation, I was also involving in organizing events. We are organizing Kubernetes Community Days. Lima, Peru is the first time we are running these events in Peru with other members of the community and also being members of CFP proposals reviewers, for example. I was involved in many other things.

No just content creation. A lot of things to learn. A lot of things that I never did in the past, but I never thought to do it. But I am doing. Wow, this is amazing. It's hard sometimes because it costs to learn, but it's very interesting and I like.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I have to say, I really enjoyed being a CNCF Ambassador because of the different opportunities that it's opened up, like just making new connections and being given opportunities to review CFPs and being given speaking opportunities that you necessarily wouldn't have had otherwise.

EDITH: Yeah. I feel in the same way, just to tell you that the first trip that I did in my life outside Peru was for CNCF because I won a scholarship. So I didn't speak English, just my name. And I got to Seattle and saw a different experience. Just being in the KubeCon in Seattle, it was just amazing. And things that made me think, wow, there is doors here that I should start open. It's here I should go. I saw a lot of opportunities, and since then I go to that side of CNCF and all those communities my career start to doing that. I think the support for women in tech is also very valuable what we are doing as a community.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do want to go back to your earlier comment on your first trip out of Peru, and you said you didn't know English at the time. How long ago was that?

EDITH: I'm sorry? It was 2018. Yes. I mean, I study English. Yes, I talk basic English, but outside you is different.

ADRIANA: It's different, yeah. It's so true. Because it's the slang, it's the technical terms. It's funny, because I was thinking back...as you mentioned, I'm from Brazil, but I grew up most of...I've been in Canada since I was ten. I've been in Canada for, like, almost 35 years. So I am bilingual. I'm even trilingual.

I speak French, too, but I have to say my Portuguese has degraded in the time that I've been here, even though I speak to my parents in Portuguese, but I lack some of the technical terminology and I even lack some of the slang. So I actually started joining...following people on Instagram for Portuguese language school so that I can up my game to just get back into some of the slang terms and just be a little bit more conversational than I am, because I've lost some of that from not being around that many Portuguese speakers.

EDITH: Yeah, I understand that. I have been here speaking English not too long time, but I already start to forgetting how to write things in Spanish, and I brought it wrong. And my father is always correcting me asterisk.

ADRIANA: I know my dad's always correcting me as well, because sometimes I'll do a translation...what seems to be a direct translation of the English word to Portuguese, and he's like, yeah, that's not the same word. It means something totally different. I'm like, oh, my God, I feel so embarrassed.

EDITH: You are not alone.

ADRIANA: But then I remember something that I've read, like, being able to speak more than one language and making the effort to converse in more than one language is putting yourself out there. It's a sign of bravery, because, holy crap, it is so scary to attempt to communicate it in a language that you're not necessarily familiar with or super comfortable speaking in. Before we met today to record this, I recorded a podcast episode in Portuguese, and it was my second time recording a podcast episode in Portuguese. And I was so scared because I'm like, I don't know technical terminology in Portuguese. And so some of the advice that I got from a few of my Brazilian friends who live here in Toronto, they're like, "Don't worry if you don't know the word. Just use the English word, but give it a bit of a Portuguese accent." Yeah. I mean, like, you know, even though, like, something like that completely scared the shit out of me. At the same time, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to force myself to do this because the more I do it, the more comfortable I will get.

EDITH: Yes. I don't know why we are like that. I mean, we are really afraid. We jump and we start to doing. Then it pass and we said we did it. Yeah. Before that start to feel like the fear, the hands start to with everything, that scary moment. Then you use go, but then you jump to another thing.

EDITH: To start to jump to a ring and another ring. The same motions.

ADRIANA: Exactly. It actually reminds me of, like, I was having this conversation last week with someone where I'm like, oh, my God. When I first learned about cloud and cloud native, I'm like, it's this terrifying, scary thing. So I was like, I don't want to do it. I don't know. I don't think I can do it. And then I did my first thing in the cloud and I'm like, oh, okay. It was okay.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it wasn't scary.

EDITH: You are complete. Nothing happened. It's weird how we can be afraid of things that also involve human beings, like communications, like speaking, we are afraid. I don't know what we are afraid. What is the fear that we feel to be exposed, to see that others look at us and we are trying to embarrass. I think we all are humans and we all have the mistakes.

ADRIANA: Yeah. And I think we judge ourselves a lot more than others judge us. When I'm having a conversation with someone in Portuguese, especially like, with my family in Brazil, and thankfully know Google translate to help me when I'm on WhatsApp, but I'm like, oh, my God, they're going to look at me and they're going to make fun of my grammar, whatever, or use the wrong word. But then I also have to remind myself they have better things to do than to nit-pick on your grammar. They have their own lives. Get over yourself. It's not all about you.

EDITH: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Okay, so I want to switch gears again and talk a little bit about your career, like how you got into...and I know you do a lot of work around Kubernetes and containers. What got you in it?

EDITH: Yeah. Okay. I was in the field of tech for almost ten years. I can say I work it as a DevOps, also as a developer for big companies in Peru. For companies where I started from scratch, things. Was really hard. For example, when DevOps was not big tendency. Right now we are starting from scratch. I started from scratch alone.

Trying to start servers, make all that stuff was really hard, but challenge. And after that I decided to quit my job in 2018, I think...2019. Because of healthy problems, emotional problems, healthy problems, back problems, and with family problems, everything like when you have one and everything start to make a big thing. And I decided to take a moment. I take two years. I never thought it will take me too much, but I took two years. Okay. But these two years was really amazing for me. It was amazing because I give me this time to know me better.

Things that I never did in the past. Because I was always running, running, piecing the car. I don't know how to say the accelerator of the car and trying to gas in that life. But then when everything happened, I just. No plan. Nothing for that future, for the future, just that. Just myself, my thoughts and my body. And thinking what made me happy, what will make me happy for the future.

It's how I invest the time in two years. So not just thinking, but also doing. Because I wanted to improve English, I wanted to improve also my technical skills. And I realized that tech made me happy. It's one of the things also make me happy. Okay. I'm also geek.

ADRIANA: I love it.

EDITH: Yeah. Between several things, tech also made me happy. And I start to improve my skills. I start to learning English, which was really challenged for me. Now I can communicate how I want. I think I need to improve, but it's good for me. So I started to apply for jobs after having an internship in Outreachy. Did you hear about Outreachy?

ADRIANA: Yes, yes. I have heard of Outreachy. For folks who have not heard of Outreachy...

EDITH: Yes. Outreachy is a program, open source program. In three months you can have a mentor. It is also paid. So you learn a lot of things because you put your hands in real open source projects. I put my hands in Apache Airflow, where I start to code. I start to make things that I had never thought to do it. It was really amazing. And I wasn't with Oyo, but they give me a pay.

So it was enough to me to survive and to learn English and improve some soft skills and also technical skills. Then I started to apply a job. I set a goal for me, for myself, to apply for an international company where I can speak English. Have that opportunity to speak English. So applied maybe to 200 jobs in two months. I applied the most I can.

ADRIANA: Wow.

EDITH: Sweden, Germany, USA. I send my CVs a lot. So one of the companies was Percona, and after the process and everything, I was hired by Percona and now I'm working as a technology evangelist in Percona, which is an open source company.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. And I have to say, it so resonated with me when you said that as part of your time of really digging into who you are and what you love, that you decided that you love tech. Because I felt like I went through a similar thing in my career as well. I was working at a bank and I had quit my job at the bank to become a professional full time photographer. And I was like, this is it. I'm done. I don't want to work in tech. I want to do photography.

This is my passion. And I did it for a year, and then I came to this moment in my life where I was like, so it's really hard. And if I really want to make this work, I can probably give it another year or two and probably finally start seeing growth. Because at the time, it was like I wasn't really right then I thought, but do I want to invest this extra time to grow my photography business? What do I actually like doing? Then I realized I had more fun tinkering around, like doing my newsletters and tinkering around with my website, and I was using WordPress and I bought this plugin that wasn't working. And I'm like, let's go into the PHP code to see what's wrong. And I'm like, oh, I think I like that more. So I ended up like. I'm like, you know what? I want to go back to tech.

It took a year of me not being in tech to realize that I actually enjoyed tech. So, anyway, yeah, your story so much resonated with me, and I think it's so awesome and so important to take the time in our careers to figure out what makes us happy because, I don't know, we're at work for most of our lives and it better be something that we enjoy, right?

EDITH: Yeah. And it's different and it's unique history. I can say yours, for example, is totally different than mine, but it's very unique. It has the meaning for you, and that is the good thing, the very important thing that maybe nobody's going to understand. But we are going to understand, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

EDITH: We are the only one who understand that special moment. Yes.

ADRIANA: It's so true. Very deep thoughts. I love it. So philosophical. So great. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, because how did you get into doing Kubernetes work?

EDITH: Kubernetes in Peru, we started to hear about Docker, for example, we started to see the whale everywhere. What is the doll? And that was the curiosity, the doll with a terminal. The terminal to Docker and containers and all that stuff. The same, I think happened with Kubernetes. In Peru, we started to listen about Kubernetes as a technology, as a standard things, but just listening. So I started to follow. What is this Kubernetes thing that people talk? And I start to follow people on social media, like Liz Rice, for example. The first person, people that I was following was Kelsey [Hightower].

You interview Kelsey. Kelsey, Liz. That's big people there. So I was really fascinated for the keynote that they did. So I started to investigate about KubeCon, and it's how I got the scholarship to go. And once I go there, I see, wow, Kubernetes is the thing. So I started doing some demos at home with Google Cloud because I had free credits. So I start to play because it's what I want to. I love to do, to play with technology.

Do it, destroy it, create it, destroy it. Mac, Linux, Windows, destroy it again. I don't know. But I found it funny. Funny, yes. Funny. Enjoyable? What is the word? Okay.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Fun.

EDITH: Yes.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. It's so cool. And I especially love what you said about creating and destroying. And I think that's honestly some of the most fun stuff about playing with Kubernetes clusters is like, you do a bunch of stuff, you mess it up. Okay, time to start over again.

EDITH: We are not in production, so you can destroy.

ADRIANA: Right, exactly. Yeah, definitely don't do that with your production cluster. So you mentioned playing around with Google Cloud. Have you played around with any other cloud providers?

EDITH: Yes, I had the opportunity to play with Red Hat, with Amazon, with Google Cloud and Azure. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Cool. And which one's your favorite of the ones you've played with?

EDITH: Google is my favorite. I don't know. I feel like interface, the graphical user interface, was more, for me, easy to do it, easy to create, to understand. For me, I feel that in that time, I feel that Amazon has a lot of things. Maybe that I didn't get too much distracted. But anyway, I use in the same time the three cloud providers.

ADRIANA: Cool. That's awesome. So switching gears a bit, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of your community work.

EDITH: Thank you for that question and community. I started in community participating as all of us just going to the events and see people talking and watch. But then I say, okay, there is another weight because you are in a certain level I can say you advance a little bit in your career and you say, okay, there is people who did a lot for you. They give time, they prepare. So you learn. So let's make it something for that too. And it's the mindset of the community, right? Get back this kind of things. So now we started with creating communities.

I say we because it's not just me, we always work with people in communities and we created communities in the city where I was living. There was where I was living lacks of community techs. There is no much communities in tech. So it's where I wanted to start. I'm going to create communities with many people. So Docker was one of the companies that helped me to make it with sponsoring some events. So we start to create events for per year. For example, we celebrate the anniversary of Docker. Like, the 10th anniversary which was a lot of people going to that event and they are learning about the technology and that is one of the work that we are working until now.

I like of that and I feel proud about that because we are doing something small but maybe could be impactful and give this opportunity to people that don't have the opportunity to make in that city without leaving the city. Yeah, this is one of the things that we are doing and the other is CNCF. I love this. So we had this big opportunity also because CNCF sponsor it. We have all the support of CNCF to make it possible a Kubernetes Community Days in my country in Peru. So we as a team because we are several people working in that we are creating this community for this year, for July. So I hope we can see it and we can repeat it over the year. So this will be impact also and generate more opportunities for people in our country.

ADRIANA: That's amazing. Now how much work goes into putting together a Kubernetes Community Day> But actually before I get you to answer that, maybe it would be helpful to explain to our audience what is a Kubernetes Community Day? What's the purpose of having something like that?

EDITH: Yeah, these are spaces where we give people the opportunity to share about the expertise they have about the Kubernetes and the CNCF ecosystem that exists. So a Kubernetes community days is an event. Could be in person, online or both, two days or one day. We choose that. And where several experts or people who want to share about ecosystem of Kubernetes go and start to talk about that. Could be not just talk, could be workshop, could be several things lightning talks, open forum, things like that. And sometimes it's free, sometimes it requires some payment. It depends on the organization, but it's a big opportunity to join a lot of experts, beginners, enthusiasts, members of communities between all this ecosystem. Kubernetes ecosystem.

ADRIANA: That's amazing. So it's basically like a little mini conference.

EDITH: Yeah.

ADRIANA: It mini though? It sounds like. It sounds like a lot of work.

EDITH: We compare it with KubeCon, could be mini, but to be honest, it's not like to be mini. Not mini like I saw 500 people in some of the Kubernetes Community Days in Europe, I think.

ADRIANA: Holy cow. Damn.

EDITH: We are targeting in Peru for the Kubernetes Community Days in Peru, we are targeting also 500 people. Yeah. Attendees.

ADRIANA: Amazing. That's so cool. And so for organizing Kubernetes Community Day or KCD, what type of support do you get from the CNCF? As a CNCF Ambassador I would imagine that you get a little extra boost of support from the CNCF? So if you could talk a little bit about that?

EDITH: Yeah. What we have is support from members of the CNCF, people who work there. So they help us organize and we have synchronization meetings sometimes to see how is our progress. Also they try to support us the most they can. For example providing us the logos and designer people who can also help us. They also sign a budget for coupons, courses, coupons and some budget. I don't remember the amount of the budget to start the event. That will help us to pay some things and what more? I'm not sure about that but they give the opportunity also to travel to the KubeCon I think.

But maybe I am wrong. I'm not sure about that but I think there is many opportunities. Once you are in the ecosystem and once you are doing things there are many opportunities. Networking is also a big opportunity because in an event you can contact with several people who also are organizing. This is my first time organizing so I don't have precise response how much that will take me because it's the first time that I am running it. Let's see how it goes.

ADRIANA: So does the CNCF provide then the overall funding for running a KCD or do they provide some funding? Do you need sponsorships? How does that work?

EDITH: Yeah, we need a sponsorship. Each team tried to find a sponsorship in the country or outside the country. So with that budget is how they estimate how many attendees we will have and how we are going to assign it. In some cases, this is free and the budget that you need is maybe less, right? It depends, to be honest, of the country and of the city of the country, because the governance community is now is for city. So let's give the opportunity to have more in a country.

ADRIANA: Cool. That's awesome.

EDITH: Did you think to organize an event? Did you think to participate?

ADRIANA: So I'm actually helping to organize an event in Toronto called KubeHuddle, which is like...I think the first KubeHuddle took place in the UK, I want to say a few years ago. And then there was a KubeHuddle in Toronto last year that I attended as a speaker. So then the organizer of KubeHuddle, Marino, he asked me at the end of last one, he's like, "Do you want to help organize the 2024 one? I'm like, okay, yeah." So I am involved in that...because I have so many things on my plate, like, I'm trying to take on what I can without being overwhelmed, but still making sure that I help out. So this is my first experience with that. And KubeHuddle is taking place on May the 7th in Toronto. So this year it's going to be a one-day conference. Last year it was a two-day conference. This year it's a one day single-track conference. So yeah, very exciting. So is KCD Peru? Is it a one-day or two-day conference?

EDITH: One-day conference.

ADRIANA: One day. And is it multiple tracks or is it single track?

EDITH: Multiple. We are thinking multiple.

ADRIANA: Okay, cool. Awesome. Very exciting. I'm super stoked for you. I hope it all goes well. Now we are coming up on time, but before we finish off, do you have any parting words of wisdom for our audience?

EDITH: If I can say something, it's enjoy life.

ADRIANA: I love that. That is perfect.

EDITH: See the sun. Look at that and enjoy it. It's very nice. Sometimes. If you have sun.

ADRIANA: Except on cold days.

EDITH: It's really cold. There is no sun.

ADRIANA: I don't know...What's the temperature like in London today, because here it's a warm -4C.

EDITH: Today there was a sun, but once you put the finger outside, it freezes. But the sun was lining.

ADRIANA: That makes it better. Yesterday it was like -15C in Toronto and I went for a walk and I had to go into different stores to warm up. So I didn't freeze. But yes, I absolutely love your parting words of wisdom. I think we get so caught up in our work lives that we forget to also just take a break, reset, enjoy life. Enjoy the non-work time. Well, this was awesome. Thank you so much, Edith, for geeking out with me today. Y'all don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

EDITH: Peace out, and geek out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Vilella. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:

Jennifer Riggins is a culture side of tech storyteller, journalist, writer, and event and podcast host, helping to share the stories where culture and technology collide and to translate the impact of the tech we are building. She has been a working writer since 2003, and is currently based in London.

Find our guest on:

• X (Twitter)
• LinkedIn
• Mastodon
• Bluesky

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show Links:

• The New Stack
• LeadDev
• At QCon: Why Generative AI Is Harmful to Earth and Society
• E-lance
• Kelsey Hightower at Civo Navigate
• Abby Bangser
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
• David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)
• 37signals (formerly Basecamp)
• GitHub Copilot
• Backstage (CNCF Project donated by Spotify)
• Divya Mohan (Kubernetes Maintainer)
• Octoverse: The state of open source and rise of AI in 2023
• The AI Revolution Is Just Getting Started: Leslie Miley Bids Us to Act Now against Its Bias and CO2
• Consequence Scanning – an agile event for responsible teams

Additional Links:

• Developer Empowerment Via Platform Engineering, Self-Service Tooling
• tag-environmental-sustainability Slack Channel (CNCF Slack)

Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery. DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host Adriana Villela. Coming to you from Toronto, Canada, and geeking out with me today is Jennifer Riggins. Welcome, Jennifer.

JENNIFER: Hi, thank you so much for having me on.

ADRIANA: I'm super excited to have you join me. And where are you calling from today?

JENNIFER: London.

ADRIANA: Awesome. What I'll do is we'll start with some lightning round questions and then I'll get you to talk a little bit about yourself and then we'll go from there. Sound good?

JENNIFER: Great, yeah, sure.

ADRIANA: All right, let's do this. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

JENNIFER: Righty.

ADRIANA: All right, do you prefer iPhone or Android?

JENNIFER: iPhone. Just because it's what I have and it's seamless. It's not a moral choice, but it's a convenience choice.

ADRIANA: That's fair. Next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?

JENNIFER: Mac. Same. Convenience.

ADRIANA: Convenience is always very important. Okay, next question. As a tech journalist, do you lean towards Dev or Ops?

JENNIFER: Oh, Dev. Well, no, that's hard. No, I would say either side. Yeah, because Platform Engineering is all about bridging that gap, isn't it?

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's very true. Exactly. Okay, next question. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

JENNIFER: Text for sure. Or audio more than anything. Podcast.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I love me a good podcast. I have like way too many in my queue that I have to get through. Okay, final question. What is your superpower?

JENNIFER: Connecting people, introducing different people that can help people figure out their next step or their next job or people should just know. People. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Awesome. I love that. I think it's so important. I think people really underestimate the power of connection. All right, so we are on to the main event, the meaty bits, if you will. So why don't you share with our audience what you do with TheNewStack?

JENNIFER: Okay. I have been a working writer since uni. I am not a trained journalist. I went for political science and I've been in the tech niche for 12 or 13 years. That includes both the marketing side and journalism side. I'm just a naturally good writer and good at explaining complex topics so that everyone understands, which is good because I'm geek by association, I am nerdy by nature, but I am not technical. So it helps me then help other people understand because everyone should be involved in understanding the future and how it's being built, especially as it gets more pervasive in our bodies. In our homes and our cars and then AI thinking for our behalf, on our behalf, et cetera.

JENNIFER: And I have been writing for various as a freelancer, but with The New Stack for over eight years now, so pretty much their first year. And also I write for LeadDev and other blogs and then have software customers, things like that, helping them do their case studies or explain. I am not interested in funding, not interested in who's appointed CEO, not interested in crypto, not interested in technology precisely. I'm much more interested in the cultural impact of technology and what it's done. So I won't typically write about a new feature unless something extraordinary is about it. But I will write about once that feature is used and how it impacts people's lives, or more feature-driven like thought leadership, things like that.

ADRIANA: Cool. That's awesome. So you mentioned that in university you did not come from a journalism background. So how did you find yourself writing for a living? Like you said, it came naturally. What gave you the first opportunity?

JENNIFER: I've always been a natural writer, but I'm good at writing in that side. "Soy de letras," as you would say in Spanish. Math is how you would say it in English. And I was actually editor of my school newspaper and all, at university, so I was always involved in some way in writing and in helping other people write better things like that. So it's just a natural thing for me. I've always been able to fall back on writing.

ADRIANA: And then how did you find yourself, like writing about technology then?

JENNIFER: What else is there to write about? I think role was through Elance, or whatever it's called now. One of those Upwork, one of those freelance websites, and from there it spiraled. Something I'm good at explaining complicated concepts.

ADRIANA: I think there's not enough emphasis on really being able to distill things in a very approachable manner, right? Especially a lot of docs out there, technical docs are so.

JENNIFER: Complicated and incomplete at the same time.

I think it's the most important thing. Critical thinking and being able to talk across that chasm or chasm between technology and business will be the greatest skill set and is so important, especially in this time of AI, because you need to be able to distinguish the bullshit that the AI we know is giving what, 52% of code generated by Chat GPT is wrong, but Chat GPT is very convincing because it was trained by tech bros, which have great sense of confidence and to sell bullshit. So it doesn't have to tell you when it's wrong. So in this time when we're entering AI and all this productivity mentality and everything, we need to be able to understand, be suspicious of what is working or not. And we also need to understand the business impact. So either side of it, whether it's business needing to understand that wildly expensive cost center of engineering and cloud, or engineering being able to explain and feel connected to that business impact and to understand, so everyone's going to have to explain to themselves. And Kelsey Hightower said at Civo Navigate, an event...he said, we have this weird, maybe it's a corporate throwback, where in tech we're like, I have this great idea, but I'm not done my slides yet, I'm not done my PowerPoint presentation yet. We'll wait to talk about it.

But that's not how things work. People are storytellers. People need to be able to have conversations, even if it's expressing yourself in writing. I don't think it's necessarily very inclusive at all that everyone has to speak on stage or speak, but one-on-one conversations is still going to be a very important thing. And being able to write, even in Slack and be concise, so that's not my strong suit because I write very long features and things like that. But being able to express yourself in a way that everyone understands, because especially with AI, as we get into this interstitial age of prompt engineering, the next maybe two years, it's going to be the subject matter experts that are really important. So you won't need necessarily for everything, a coder. But if it's like building management or security in a building, maybe you need someone that actually has experience in that, who can work and partner with the developer to build something that's actually useful in AI.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

JENNIFER: So they need to talk to each other. And the people that may be deciding, especially with a chat bot, customer support and all, may have zero coding capabilities. So you need to be able to talk and communicate with them. And that's where the benefit from AI will come about. And it's honestly where we're going right now.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I think the interesting thing is AI, in a way, keeps us on our toes because you almost have to be smarter than the AI to be able to pick out the bullshit, right? Because the minute you start trusting the AI and what it produces, that's what gets you in trouble, right?

JENNIFER: Absolutely. And it's just different. We forget Chat GPT specifically is a large research project. It's not a tool. You are part of a research project. The tool is when you pay for like a private version of any of the AI tools that are trained on your context, your documentation, your processes. That's where the value comes. So if it's free, you should probably distrust it.

JENNIFER: And also think about how bad that is for the earth.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. Now, on the same vein of Chat GPT, I've heard initiatives from various companies where they want to replace a chunk of their written content with AI-generated content. What are your thoughts around that?

JENNIFER: Okay, so in the world of documentation and things, I think it's very interesting. I think that is...documentation writers are super important, but there's also a lot of companies relying on developers to create docs. And in the 12, 13 years I've been in the industry, I started out a lot in the API space. Number one complaint was that there was not enough documentation. Yes, the number one thing developers don't want to do is write documentation. So having documentation embedded next to the code and somewhat AI-generated I think is very valuable. Human-generated media, things like that. There was a rumor 95% of media will be generated by AI by 2025 and all.

I think we're having a real backlash about that. I know AI can't do what I can do, and I don't use it that much. I don't really use it. But my understanding, when other people use it and all, it's for the low value content. Have a proper conversation with someone to distill from someone that maybe isn't as easily expressing themselves because maybe they've got a very technical mindset. It can't have that conversation and draw out of them the true value of their product and then translate it?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

JENNIFER: Could it be useful if someone wrote an article themselves and then wanted to from that article spew out a bunch of social posts or something? It could probably be very interesting for that. Just very suspicious and controlling. You have to be anyway. But when you go through all of that, I don't feel my job is going to be in trouble. The people whose jobs are going to be in trouble are people whose lives live in Excel. Things that can and should be automated. The point is that we work on real problems. Boring, low level-coding problems will be automated, like repetitions.

Creative work should get more creative, more problem solving. But then the boring stuff, I don't know what I could automate. I'd love to automate. Like invoicing, because I tend to procrastinate that because again, soy des letras. I'm not good at math, but then I don't trust the systems to throw that private information in there.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

JENNIFER: Also, we cannot forget that there's this unbelievable inequality that's being caused by data centers. It is causing a huge environmental impact. In west London alone, affordable housing cannot be built. There can be no new affordable housing in one of the largest cities in the world, one of the alpha cities, because too much power is being taken by data centers.

ADRIANA: Wow.

JENNIFER: To cool them down, et cetera. They're super polluting. Like, it's really bad. Note that I said affordable housing. So rich people who are leaving these plots empty and funneling money, because London's like a huge money laundering area, those are still being built and left empty. But people that truly need homes cannot get homes in west London because, specifically data center power. So I think we need to think about how we're impacting the environment. There's very interesting things going on for FinOps and optimizing your Kubernetes clusters, not getting in this habit of being double the amount of cloud just in case, but having things.

And this is where AI is very interesting too, because AI can be a solution to help. It's always better to have the tool manage it than a human manage that, because if a human is responsible, they're always going to give more, just in case. They'll never give less, but they'll always more. So that's where AI can be a solution or part of the solution. But we should be putting far more pressure on anything we're paying for. We should be putting pressure as a customer that they are putting on data centers that are sustainable.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I think we have to sort of move away from this mentality, as you alluded to earlier, of just more and more and more throw more at it, because it's like infinite resources. First of all, it costs money. If that doesn't deter you, which it should, then think about the environmental impact, which is just absolutely mind blowing.

JENNIFER: And then that leads to another impact that disproportionately negatively affects people from underrepresented groups. Whether it's pollution in Virginia, which has a very underprivileged community, very impoverished community in Virginia that are directly...have hearing problems, have asthma problems, these are all problems. So yeah, I think we need to consider, in everything we do as tech storytellers, we need to consider the implication beyond the stereotypical developer, but we need to help them think about who will most likely be harmed by this and who will be more likely to be excluded or what being near.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I completely agree. When you're writing an article, what inspires you? How do you decide what to write about?

JENNIFER: It's 50/50 now because I've been writing so much about developer productivity and Platform Engineering, and, before DEI, but no one cares in 2023 about DEI. See the numbers. Sadly, diversity, equity, and inclusion is not a priority, so you have to do it surreptitiously, like by who you interview and stuff. Can't just write directly about it. I get reached out to a lot. I also see people's talks or use LinkedIn a lot. So there's all that.

ADRIANA: And then the other thing I want to ask. You said that you do a lot of writing on Platform Engineering. What got you interested in Platform Engineering in the first place?

JENNIFER: Oh, it's really a simplistic thing. I've been writing about and working in the Agile and DevOps space for a really long time. I write about culture side of tech, and like I said, in 2023, I see it in the data, I see it in traffic and all. Tech isn't even trying to pretend they care about diversity, equity and inclusion anymore. But you know what? Look at it while women, and that's probably the most privileged, minority or minoritized group in tech. While women make up about between 22 and 24% of the industry, there were 69% of layoffs. Black startups are not getting funding. I mean, it went from abysmal to 0.0002 abysmal percentage.

ADRIANA: Wow.

JENNIFER: People like Elon Musk and DHH from BaseCamp, they've made it cool publicly to not give a fuck about diversity, equity, inclusion. That means before it was informative...sorry...that means, before it was performative, but now they're not even trying to be performative. So there's that. And there's been a ton of cuts and layoffs. I see those cuts because there's two things. There's the last hired, first fired. So if they only started caring about diversity in the last two years, well, those people are going to be first cut. They also tend to be in roles like DEI, which were cut across the board.

Accessibility cut across the board. Marketing, at least perennially, is cut when there's cutbacks, but tend to be more people from minoritized groups. But on the other hand, what's 2023 been about? A lot about tech layoffs, which means a lot of trying to do more with less. And then on top of that, the code is just getting more and more complex. The cognitive load is more and more extreme. And I think while we...we, not me.

But the tech industry in general, doesn't seem to care about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility as much anymore, sadly, it does still understand, and I don't know that we can go back to, they've tried to return to office so many times and guess what? People are not happy, they're not productive, they're going to leave. Yes, the hand is more of an employer's market, but is still an employee's market across the board. And there's all these things where companies are realizing what statistics and data and journalism has said for years, that happy workers are more productive. And that doesn't mean massages and ping pong tables or foosball tables. That means actually finding purpose in your work, having visibility, not having even logically, from a nutty corporate standpoint, not having so many distractions and all the meetings blew up. So there's all of that. So there's this push for developer productivity because budgets are tighter, people need to make more money, staff is still bigger than it was a year, maybe two years ago. There was this irresponsible, cannibalistic growth for a while there, and it's kind of a correction, but the code has grown in the meantime too.

The cloud native landscape is obscenely complex. So there's this idea we need to work on developer productivity, which is where Platform Engineering comes in. Instead of being a platform that we've had for... since codes exist. Like Cisco was making platforms back in the '70s. It was, you do this, you control this, which for some security stuff is not a bad idea for role-based access control and all that should not be optional. But the majority of the idea of Platform Engineering is that your customers are your developers and you are building a platform as a product where you are getting feedback from them constantly and you're building just what they need to get better. And then also it comes back to that whole docs problem. What is a huge problem? Who is breaking that developer flow, that getting in the zone is not being able to find things, googling it, going to Stack Overflow, asking a question on Reddit. Instead you've got this...we haven't even mentioned Copilot yet, but I think that for the developer audience has the most potential, because it's in with where 85% of repos are...in GitHub. So it's about them not context-switching as much and meetings actually having value, not having Agile.

And then Covid just led to this multiplication of meetings for meeting. So Abby Bangser from Syntasso has my favorite definition of what Platform Engineering is, which it's almost like a physical platform you're supporting people on that takes care of the not differential but not unimportant work. So with DevOps, we went through this idea that you build, you test, you maintain, you do all of that, all the way to the cloud, all the way to release and all. But cloud is not differential to the average programmer, specifically to their audience, which would tend to be external users or customers. Security, very important, not differential testing. Very important, not differential repetitive work. Now it just should just be automated. So it doesn't matter anyway.

And it's about...Spotify calls it Golden Pathway. I like calling it the Yellow Brick Road because if your developers wander off, they may go in a poppy field and go down a Reddit rabbit hole. But if Dorothy and them had stayed on the Yellow Brick Road, they would have been a lot faster. If Gandalf had given the eagles from the start, the book would have been a lot shorter. So why don't we do that? Guess what? If you had asked what Frodo would like? Oh, that's a new nerdy euphemism I'm coming up with right now, metaphor. But I think it works. Would have been a lot shorter movie, a lot shorter movie series, book series, and probably a lot more people wouldn't have died.

So just ask your developers what is frustrating them and then start there.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. And there are so many things that frustrate developers.

JENNIFER: And [inaudible] and searchability are always at the top of that list. They want to know who does what in a company, which again, comes down to collaboration and knowing people across the business. It's a positive thing to learn.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. And there's another one. I think it came about from a question that you asked on one of the socials, which was something around, what are some of the developer frustrations? And I was thinking back to so many jobs where I started off...and onboarding and setting up a new environment on your machine is like the most fucking irritating experience ever. It's like, why do we have to keep doing the same thing over and over and over again? Why don't we have a streamlined process for setting up our dev environments when we start a new job?

JENNIFER: Why would. Yeah, why would you even need to, why is setting up an environment useful for you to be doing? It's not helping the customer, it's not driving value. So Spotify, being like one of know, they created Backstage and outsourced it because they thought it was that important to standardize it in the community, which I like. But by them using Backstage, they got their developer onboarding time, which I believe they count as ten pull requests. Like that is when you consider productive. They went from 110 days to 20 days, pull requests because you just get people up and running. You give them what they need. You wouldn't give them a laptop and have them install Windows or install Linux or install whatever you want on your laptop. Give them the tool.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

JENNIFER: So just do that for all of the cloud because, and then you still give them the option. There will still be your 5% that want to engineer their way around a problem. And that's why you build it with APIs and you let people do their own thing. But maybe you don't need to support their work. They're at their own risk. They're on that poppy field, they're doing their own thing. But you'll support that 95% and that's okay.

ADRIANA: Yeah. I really love your analogy of the Yellow Brick Road, because it really is all about like, these are your guardrails. It's there to protect you from yourself. Because we like to deviate. Sometimes we're not necessarily aware that that's not a great thing to do.

JENNIFER: And you can still deviate. That's why you, as a Platform Engineer have to make something they want to use. And again, it comes all the way back to that tech storytelling, those early wins, the examples. Just the proof of good work is you need to make something they want to use. And then you have your customers who happen to be internal, probably more annoying, but you have a much tighter feedback loop. So you're going to get more direct feedback all the time. It's a good thing. It can just be probably a bit awkward for some people.

Also, there's the problem that Platform Engineers are engineers, so they think they know best, which is not the point. And you just build something that they want to use, make it easy for them to stay on the path. So even the guardrails, I picture that car cannot really go past those guardrails. Follow the lines.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's like this is the path with some flexibility in mind, but you only have...

JENNIFER: Fall off the cliff, and that is all you.

ADRIANA: I think that's a perfect analogy. I love that. And the final thing that I wanted to touch upon, and you brought it up a few times, and I think it's actually a very important subject, which is DEI, which, as you pointed out, is the conversation around it has changed a lot, but the problem still remains. And it's kind of interesting because...

I've had a number of conversations with people over the years, and after you pointed it out, I'm like, yeah, I guess it's kind of unfashionable to like, oh, let's have the panels of underrepresented groups talking about being underrepresented. Then it's like, well, as you said, we have to do it in a sneaky manner. But I think we do have to call it out for what it is because you go to tech conferences and I was a speaker at Observability Day, the co-located event for KubeCon North America, and there were three of us female speakers for all of Observability Day. And I was like, what the hell?

JENNIFER: Could probably guess two of them just by knowing the handful of females or women that have access to that space and who are doing amazing work. But yeah, we don't need VIP bathrooms at tech events, we need representation. It's the only time we would be very happy to queue at bathrooms. Please, tech events.

But like anything in the. When we're talking about open source, 3% out of what, 20 speakers or something for co-located day, it's actually not a bad percentage for open source because open source around 4% women and non-binary because it's toxic, because it's based on free work, which we do the brunt of anyway.

ADRIANA: So true.

JENNIFER: Women and people of color are far more likely to be doing free voluntary work and they don't have time for it. But then you lose the benefits of public code samples, of working with companies that actually are really big companies, like a Google or a Spotify or Atlassian, all these companies that support a lot of open source or access Amazon Web Services. These are companies that provide a lot of open source. But then if you can't go to these events, you can't work on these projects because you can't do free work. Open source is a huge problem. So it's always going to be worse. Which open source should I believe that open source should be free code, but I don't think believe in free labor, and I think that's a huge problem.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely.

JENNIFER: You are a company benefiting from an open source project. You should be investing.

Either find a way to sponsor that project or hire a staffer that contributes to that project as their deal, as their job, and just also focused on both technical and nontechnical contributions. Because again, we're back to documentation, we're back to the other big barrier to entry in open source diversity is that everything's in English. So you need people translate. Another use case that in probably 18 months will be very valuable from AI.

ADRIANA: Yes, we take it for granted that we're English speakers, so we're like, yeah, of course, no problem. But I do remember, I think it was someone at KubeCon who was saying that they felt so shy about contributing to stuff because English wasn't their native language and they know incredibly smart, but they just didn't feel confident contributing to open source. And it just. Oh, my God.

JENNIFER: Even in other languages, you need to know English too, to be a translator because it's the de facto language to translate to. But for example, Kubernetes, which Divya Mohan runs with someone else. I forget their name, sorry, but has organized for years the documentation translation, and it's across like 18 languages, or will be soon. Zero are in Africa. Are African languages zero?

ADRIANA: Oh, wow.

JENNIFER: Only about 2%, maybe 3%, depending on what you see of open source contributors and users are from Africa, which is about 19% of the world population and likely the geographic area that would most benefit from free and open and secure software, because typically open source is also more secure, more eyeballs, more people involved, et cetera. So it would benefit everyone, like, at an exponential GDP level, but because it's just in English...

ADRIANA: Yeah. And it occurs to me also that even our programming languages...the syntax is in English!

JENNIFER: And doesn't seem like that's going to change. Yeah, no, that is where AI, I think, will be interesting.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it'll be definitely very interesting to see where it goes. Now, as we wrap things up, do you have any final thoughts on where you see this industry, our tech industry, going in the next, say, year?

JENNIFER: That's it. It's a year, year and a half tops, because we're in this transition period where AI is still nascent, but it will very quickly advance and it will be much more useful because it will be context-specific, and I hope it won't be companies like...Telephonica in Spain fired, like, a huge chunk of its customer support reps because it's like, we can just use a chat AI. It's not great. I'm an HSBC customer, and I'm always like, give me human, give me human.

ADRIANA: Yes.

JENNIFER: It's not working. The Moby whatever, the chat bot thing, they. It's. It's not for me. I know a lot of people would rather talk to a bot, definitely, than stay on hold, but it's just not there yet. So we need humans in the loop now more than ever who have that subject matter expertise. We're not there yet, but we then need real humans in the loop feeding back into the AI, whatever it is, explaining to it, because people are still really nascent. But that's also part of the problem.

A lot of companies...this was in my Spanish class. If I started taking Spanish class for the first time, at the YMCA. And that was our topic, Chat GPT. And I'm like, no, I don't use it. Other people are like, "Yeah, I use it for this and this." But then the Spanish teacher who's quite...kind of identifies as a Luddite, he says he pays for Chat GPT because then he gets the license, then he gets the right to his own content that he could one day sell. And I was like, "I didn't think about that." I thought about it more because a lot of companies don't have generative AI policies yet, which is ridiculous.

Look what happened to Samsung. We're recording this in early December, I think in September, a coder didn't think about it and checked like a whole code base live in the public, free Chat GPT feeding like a bunch of private information in. And now Samsung's like, no more, no more generative AI, we're done.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

JENNIFER: [inaudible] behind, instead of every company needs like law firms. People are using it for stuff at consultancies. But if you don't tell people, like, do not put public information in here, do not put IP in here, or just pay the $20 a month for Chat GPT. I think it's five a month for Copilot and it's just a much better experience anyway. So pay for your tools and advise people how to use them. So I think just super important because I just think it's clear that AI is just going to be a part of our lives.

ADRIANA: It is, yeah. And we have to be more mindful of how we're integrating it in our lives.

JENNIFER: Because what is it? Copilot went GA early June [2023]. It's early December now...maybe mid June. By the time of the Octoverse Report, which I think was early November, late October, 92% of developers in the US were using generative AI.

ADRIANA: Damn.

JENNIFER: We're testing out. Like you can't take this away. They are finding value from, yeah, you can't take this away anymore, but you really have to have a policy. And it's shocking how few do in California or GDPR in Europe. I'm shocked we haven't had a big problem. I'm shocked it hasn't been big yet.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's been sort of...as companies realize that it's important, they'll implement it into their policies, but there's like, no...

JENNIFER: [inaudible] And putting really wild stuff. I have someone I know in the journalist space who is much more technologically advanced than I am and not a native English speaker. So they had put a very nascent new technology...had written like a really deep dive article, evaluating it, explaining tutorial. They had thrown it into public Chat GPT to clean it up. Then they delivered the client. Three weeks later, their exact article showed up on one of those clickbait sites.

ADRIANA: Oh my God.

JENNIFER: They can't contact an editor, because...they can't contact a human being, because it's a fake human being, because it's like a clickbait site. But that site had found that this new technology was trending and they trained that site in it. They trained Chat GPT in it. And then it just took out their article.

ADRIANA: Damn.

JENNIFER: Don't put stuff that's not published or public in a public AI, whether Bard, it's Bing, whether it's Chat GPT, you don't know what's going to happen. Pay for it. If you want to play around with it, maybe. But even playing for fun, it still has an environmental impact that no one seems to care about.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I'm so glad that you're bringing that up, because the more we talk about it, I hope the more it gets into people's brains that we cannot take for granted the things that we use. I mean, even Google, right? The fact that you're googling stuff, I mean, there are servers running things somewhere.

JENNIFER: Google tends towards green energy more than the largest one, AWS. Leslie Miley, who was speaking as himself, but does work at Microsoft, at QCon, gave this wonderful in his keynote, just a really impactful talk. And he analogized the growth in AI to the US and maybe one of the world's largest infrastructure projects, which was the interstate road system, which specifically created red lines, which specifically was like, strategically kept people of color from being able to use buses to enter New York City and work, which still to this day in San Francisco or that area, the Bay Area, where we have all this, I assume is the most inequitable place in the world, where kids are three times more likely to have asthma, severe asthma, by six years old because of where these roads were built. So this idea, and it's happening again with the access to electricity, the access to data, the pollution, the access to clean water, because that's what's used...water is being used to cool data centers and it's happening around the same lines and stuff. It has this ability to create this great inequity and without diverse people and thought on your teams, people aren't considering it. And we know, again, one of those statistics, just like happy developers are more productive ones, more diverse teams are more innovative and profitable, but we've got our masks over our eyes again and not thinking. And that's where we are.

So sorry to end on a bummer of a note, but let's think of the...I'm always back to there's a wonderful, Agile practice called Consequence Scanning from Emily Webber and Sam Brown. And I just recommend just doing a consequence scanning sometimes. Thinking about it's just simple questions like if this scaled, who wouldn't be able to use it? What are the good intentions we weren't thinking about? And what are some negative intentions or consequences that could happen because of this tool? This is one of those things with open source that even more because if you're being truly open source, your code could be used, I don't know, making another Kiwi Farms or another hate site. Hate farm, that's the consequence of open source. You need to think early on, "Okay, what if someone used this for evil?"

ADRIANA: Yeah.

JENNIFER: Negative consequences or what are the environmental consequences?

ADRIANA: Absolutely. And I think that's really great food for thought. And I hope folks who are listening to this really take this to heart. And next time they use a tool like Chat GPT, they think about the environmental impact or even when they're using resources on the cloud, think about these things because it's so important and we've only got the one planet and time is ticking.

JENNIFER: And don't trust the news. Like, these jobs like mine as a tech storyteller are not going away. We need more people. We need more people explaining in different ways, in different languages and different jargon so everyone understands what is being built and why and what the consequences are. Because a lot of people are just using.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer, for geeking out with me today. Y'all don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

JENNIFER: Peace out and geek out, y'all.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Vilella. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:

Charity is an ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of O'Reilly's Database Reliability Engineering and Observability Engineering, and loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.

Find our guest on:

• X (Twitter)
• LinkedIn

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show Links:

• Honeycomb.io
• The Four Tendencies, by Gretchen Rubin
• Choose Boring Culture, by Charity Majors (blog)
• Helicopter Management, by Charity Majors (blog)
• Choose Boring Technology, by Dan McKinley (blog)
• The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni
• Questionable Advice: "My Boss Says We Don't Need Any Engineering Managers. Is He Right?" by Charity Majors (blog)
• Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)
• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum, by Charity Majors (blog)
• The Hierarchy is Bullshit, by Charity Majors (blog)
• Okta
• Charity's Calendly for career advice
• Parse, Inc.
• Honeycomb Pollinators Slack
• DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)
• OpenTelemetry specification has gone GA

Additional Links:

• Observability Engineering (book)
• Database Engineering (book)

Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to Geeking Out. The podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery. DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today...I am so excited to have Charity Majors of Honeycomb on! Welcome, Charity.

CHARITY: Yay! Thank you for having me, Adriana.

ADRIANA: I'm so excited. And where are you calling in from today, Charity?

CHARITY: San Francisco. I just got home. I was in Charlottesville, Virginia, with my little sister over Christmas, and so I am newly home again, looking forward to a very quiet week between Christmas and New Year's.

ADRIANA: That is always the best week for chillaxing, right?

CHARITY: Nothing going on. This is why at honeycomb, we just give everyone the week off. Obviously, some people have to be on call, but why pretend you're getting stuff done if you aren't?

ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah, I fully support that. I totally agree. I think more companies should embrace that.

CHARITY: Yeah. I don't feel like anyone should have to be performing that they're excited to be at work or like, we don't make people have a set number of vacation days or anything, but...That's the worst. If you're like, well, it wouldn't really be working, but do I spend one of my precious vacation days? Yeah, fuck it.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. Honestly, I get so much anxiety over vacation days, like, having to meticulously plan them and, like, oh, where do I spend them? And maximize vacation with family and school holidays. And there's, like, so many school holidays, right?

CHARITY: Seriously, there's no perfect system. Like, if you do the unlimited holiday thing, people are like, well, but then you're not treating it like real comp. And people have stress about, are they hitting the right number of days or not? And people won't take it. But then if you have specific number of vacation days, then it's where do I spend it? And everything. So I guess if there's one thing that being a CEO CTO of a company has taught me, it's that people are going to complain no matter what. All you can try and do is pick what is genuinely best for your people that will really help you get as much work as possible done without asking people to fake it and do a bunch of. So, we've gone the infinite vacation route, because, all things considered, I think you kind of want to have a mandatory minimum. Like, you have to take two weeks off, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

CHARITY: And above and beyond that, it's like, are you getting your work done here? It's a standard. The company standard is about three weeks a year, but nobody's looking over your shoulder and policing you.

ADRIANA: Yeah. See, I appreciate those policies, especially at companies where they fully respect autonomy, because there's the companies where it's like, well, it's unlimited, but we really only expect you to take like three weeks or four weeks or whatever, and it's like, so it's not really unlimited. Right. And that's disingenuous and annoying and very stressful. I don't know. I bust my ass and I need the time to chill.

CHARITY: Yeah. But I will say some people will start taking five weeks, six weeks. But then the question that you have to ask them is, you're taking too much time. It's like, well, are you really getting your job done? And what's the impact on the people around you? Really?

ADRIANA: Yes.

CHARITY: Because, yeah, it isn't actually fair if you take eight weeks off. Anyone would understand if you have a health issue or if someone in your family is. We've had those situations. But if you're working at a startup with some intensity, we have VC money that's burning in the bank. You kind of can't get your job done, really, if you're not there for two months out of the year.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah.

CHARITY: I think always trying to steer it back to the impact. Right. Can you get your job done and are you letting down the people around you, or are you being a real functional member of a high performing team? Those are the terms to have this debate on not how many days you're here or not. The other thing, unlimited time, is that it removes the aspect of scorekeeping and time keeping and quibbling about hours, because some people don't really care, but some people get really concerned about, well, am I taking 2 hours off here and 3 hours there? If I take 4 hours of that a day or not? And those are brain cells that I would really rather you just devote to solving the problems that we're paying you to solve, not to bookkeeping around your own anxiety or your projected expectation of someone else's anxiety about the hours that you're spending on your job.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. I have to admit, the timekeeping stuff is so stressful, and I've been lucky the last three years. I have not had to fill out any timesheets, which has been like, oh, my God, my first job out of college was, like, consulting. So all of your fucking hours are accounted for.

CHARITY: Oh...

ADRIANA: So everything and even your downtime, right? If you're in between projects, you got to charge it to internal thing. And it was like, yeah, I lasted four years.

CHARITY: Oh, honey. I don't know how! One of our company values is we hire adults. And I actually think about that. It's as much about us as it is about the people we hire. It's like, are we treating people like adults? Do we expect them to manage their own time or not? And of course, the difficult points come. I think as an industry, we're just terrible at figuring out how to really take people on as apprentices and turn them into fully-fledged employees. I mean, there's that middle section that takes, even for a fresh college grad or someone entering...It takes five to seven years, I think, for you, really, to bring someone on and bring them up to a level of senior engineer and teach them all these things.

But you can interpret it, our value as you're on your own. You better come fully baked because we're not going to help you, which is not what we're trying to project or do. But it's challenging, no?

ADRIANA: Yeah. It's so challenging, like coming out of school, right? Trying to figure out where you fit in. And it's also kind of, for me, it was like a bit of a mind fuck because I was like the goody goody. Like, I will do all the assignments. And marks were everything. And then you go out into the real world and it's like, yeah, bye bye. That did not apply. For me, it was a massive adjustment and I kind of sucked fresh out of school, like my first couple of years in the work world trying to figure out, what do I do? What do I do? There's like, no marks. Not in the standard sense, right?

CHARITY: No, of course not. You must be an upholder type. Do you get a lot of satisfaction out of checklists? Like your own checklists and the checklists that people do?

ADRIANA: I do, I do. My own checklist. My whiteboard next to me. It's mostly clean now because of the holidays, but it had my to-dos...but I've had to learn to roll with it. I had to be a lot less uptight than I was in school, because I think you just have to, in the work world.

CHARITY: Well, because you learn eventually that if you want to be successful, it's not actually about checklists, it's about figuring out what matters to you and what matters to other people and then figuring out how to creatively achieve those goals. And the checklists are there as a tool, right? I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I completely agree. And I think that's a lesson that comes so much more easily for some than others for sure. Especially. I've hired a couple of interns in my past life and trying to steer them in the direction of, like, chill. Let's relax. Let's just focus on getting the work done and learning cool shit.

CHARITY: In a lot of ways, though, I would argue that the upholder is the easiest type of person to onboard because they're motivated by everything.

ADRIANA: True.

CHARITY: So when I use the term upholder, I don't know if you've read the book, "The Four Tendencies"? It's this book that it's super cheesy and I don't want to get anybody's expectations up, but it was actually really pivotal for me and Christine [CEO of Honeycomb] and finding a way through our relationship because she's an upholder. I'm the opposite. I'm a rebel. Which means that I reject all of your checklists and my own too, called checklist. Basically, it's about motivation. And there's only four possible types.

It's a two by two, right? It's like your own motivation, like what motivates you and the goals that you set for yourself and then the goals that other people have for you. And you can either be super motivated by both or you can be what's called a questioner type, which you can't really give a fuck about other people's expectations. But if you care about something, then you can hit that goal every time. And then there's the type that needs a gym buddy because you struggle to do the things that you set for yourself, but you respond really well to external structure. And then there's the type that rejects all of the structures. And that's my type. And this was really helpful to us in just like, sort of because Christine and me are just such polar opposites that she was just like, who the fuck are you? How does your brain work? Why is it that I give you this perfectly formed challenge and you're like, "Fuck all your challenges." And I'm just like, "Why are you telling me what the fuck to do? Don't you know that's the easiest way to demotivate me, is to tell me what to do?"

And so it was really helpful because this book actually has these almost, like, examples of, if you're this type in a relationship with this type, here are some conflicts and conversations that you might have if you're in a working relationship and you're this type paired with this type. And it was just like, oh, my God. Some conversations that I had had with my partner, like almost word for word, some conflicts Christine and I had had, almost word for word. It was just like, here are some tools for getting around them. So I really like it.

ADRIANA: That is so helpful. It's funny, because I think the way you describe yourself is how I would describe my daughter, too, to a certain extent, because when she was in preschool, her teacher could not teach her, and she realized that the way to teach her was not to teach her, but to teach her friends. And then it would cause Hannah to go over, oh, that looks interesting. So she's like, don't tell me what the fuck to do. I'm from Brazil. And I'm like, oh, it'd be so cool if you learned Portuguese. She's like, "No." What did she do? She learned German.

CHARITY: That is how you deal with rebels. You have to rely on them to find their own intrinsic motivation, because if it becomes part of their identity and part of who they say that they are, then you can't stop them.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I'm like, you know what? You do you. I embrace that. And I think she's happier for it. I'm happier for it.

CHARITY: Everyone should be happier for it. As a manager, part of what you have to do is, I feel like, as a manager, in the beginning, we try to give our reports the experience that we wish we had had. For upholders and for...I can never remember...the obligers. Obligers are the ones that need the external structure. You're really giving them a gift. If you give them a structure or if you give them regular check ins and you let them know what the expectations are, you're giving them a huge gift, and they will rise to the occasion and they'll thank you for it. And if you do that for rebels or questioners, you're insulting them.

That sort of versatility. And it's not just managers, of course. It's anyone who's, like, in a senior plus position, where what you need to do depends a lot in influencing others. Just sort of having a mental map of how other people respond to sort of motivations is super helpful.

ADRIANA: Yeah. I actually remember reading one of your blog posts on, like, I think you're talking, like, being manager and trying to make everybody happy, but it's not also about being their buddy and making everybody happy, but also, you do have company goals to fulfill. And so to what extent do you protect your team, but then don't end up doing the things that need to be done, which I think is such a common pitfall for new managers, because for me, certainly when I first got into a management role. I'm like, this happened to me.

ADRIANA: I'm not going to let that happen to my direct reports. I am going to be the best manager that I can possibly be. Right. It can kind of blow up in your face if you're not careful. Like, I wanted to be friends with my direct reports. That did not work out in the long run. Initially, it was like, yaaaay. But afterwards, it was like, no.

CHARITY: We're always overcompensating for our own experience.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. And in the end, I think we learn, right?

CHARITY: Yeah, exactly. Eventually, hopefully, we find a happy medium. I think about that so often when thinking about diversity issues in the industry or about management or that it's natural for there to be like, this is a young industry. This is a very young profession. For as old as some of us feel like we are, we're still like, there's been... When I was coming up, we didn't talk about women in tech. There was a few of us that were just, like, quietly there, wearing men's clothes and just sort of pretending we were straight white dudes. And so there was a lash, right? And then there was a backlash.

And it swings. I'm not going to say too much about how sensitive I think some people are, but I understand why they are. I understand why they are. And also, that's not where we have to end. That can't be where we end up. We have to end up in a place that is less reactionary on all sides.

ADRIANA: Absolutely.

CHARITY: The goal of our businesses and our companies, this is something I've been thinking about a lot. The few times that I feel like the honeycomb culture has gone off the rails a little bit, is when we've kind of lost sight of the fact that we are here to serve our customers. We are not here to have the most diverse company in the world. We're not here to give people the best work life balance. We aren't even here to give everyone the best employment experience of their lives, which early in our, when it seems for so many years like we were going to fail, Christine and I would console each other. We'd be, you know, if we go under tomorrow, as we think we probably will, at least I think we've done a good job of giving a lot of people an experience that will set the know so they won't accept shitty jobs for the rest of their life. But now that we're hoping to be around for a long time, we can't forget that we are here to serve our customers. The decisions that we happen to think that a lot of these things go in harmony.

Treating people really well means we treat our customers well. Having people who are happy at work. We believe in having healthy businesses, which is a lot of people's complaints. They see symptoms, but what they'reacting to is the fact that the business is not healthy. The way people are relating to each other is not healthy. I wrote this other blog post a while ago, I don't know if you saw it about, "Choose Boring Culture"?

ADRIANA: That sounds vaguely familiar.

CHARITY: You know, because Dan McKinley wrote that blog post that was hugely influential on me about choose boring technology where he's like, you know, as a startup you get three innovation tokens. Choose wisely. And I feel know the same is true for culture and businesses. And like, we stand on the shoulders of...you know, a lot of people, a lot of really smart people have figured out things about how to make companies work well. There's this great book by Pat Lancioni called the Advantage, which I think of as like the James Madison of business and organizational structure. He's incredibly innovative thinker and he makes things very simple. But he's like, the advantage increasingly in corporations is not your widgets. Because everybody's widgets are getting so good. It's how healthy is your organization, which means how much of your people's creativity are you really taking advantage of? How much of their creativity do you feel free to bring to work? Is your organization equipped to absorb it and to change from it and to react to it? Are you able to keep people who are passionate about their work? Do you let people go who are detracting from the culture? And he's like, it is amazing how poorly most organizations are run to this day.

So choose boring culture. I think in a lot of ways, companies don't have to make their companies interesting and fun because people will do that. People have so much fun, creative energy in themselves. You just have to create a boring place for them to work where they can do their best work and they'll come up with all the fun stuff.

ADRIANA: Oh, I love that. That's so cool. You touched upon something that I am a huge proponent of, which is like, letting go of people who are not adding to your corporate culture. Because I think there's this tendency, I think, in our industry to hire rock stars and kind of ignore the shittiness and their personality because, oh my God, they're the best of the best at blah. Right? And I've personally experienced a couple of incidents in my life where if you have somebody who is constantly just being negative on your team, no matter how good the rest of your team is if they're like, poo pooing everything, it sullies the culture. It's like a poison pill. And it's not like, oh, I'm going to fire your ass. It's like, well, perhaps this team might not be the best for what you want to achieve. Perhaps I can help you find a position in another team in the company. Because it's just poison.

CHARITY: I think it starts with not having kid gloves on. I don't think you jump straight to firing. I don't even think you jump straight to moving. A lot of these people have never really been told no in their lives. And some of them can take it, some of them can. But I think you owe it to them to figure it out, right? To start giving feedback consistently and regularly working with the person. And this is something that I think can be really frustrating to people who are. When it looks like management is doing nothing right, because it looks like, I know that people at Honeycomb have felt this way at times, because it looks like they're just kind of being shitty and they get better and then they don't.

And it's always a judgment call. And I would actually agree that we always probably wait a little too long in general, but we waited a little too long with everyone. And I would take that over being a little too fast to fire people, because I think that that even more trust. But, yeah, I agree. If they can't bend, if they can't change, if they can't understand that the smallest unit of software ownership is the team, it's not the person. It doesn't matter how great one person is, because one person can't own software. It's all about, are you contributing to the overall greatness of this team? You can bend your rockstar talents to that, but if you're not willing to, or if you can't, then there's no place here for you. I'm sure you can get paid a lot more money somewhere else.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely true. Absolutely.

CHARITY: Sorry, go ahead. I didn't mean to cut you off.

ADRIANA: Oh, no, I was just saying I agree with you, but I think that.

CHARITY: Letting go of people is hard, and I think that it comes in all forms. I think that it's really discouraging to people who are on a high performance, who want to be on a high performing team, when someone isn't really showing up and who consistently isn't showing. The person who's like, consistently taking six weeks of vacation when everyone else is taking three or four, or the person who is kind of half asking it. And all of us half ass it sometimes, right? But people can tell you work on a team for a while, you get a real good sense of how hard everyone is working, how much they're trying. Sometimes it comes in form of, this is almost some of the most heartbreaking ones of when you've got someone who's very junior who just isn't working hard enough. And it's like we kind of don't have the language to tell them that. Because on this pendulum, we're so far over to the side of, you shouldn't be like, work crush code. It's almost like we've kind of lost the ability to tell people, no, really, you're probably not going to make it if you don't put in a few more hours and if you don't have a little bit more grit.

And some people don't want to work that hard, and that's fine, but you aren't automatically granted a job based on however hard you do or don't want to work.

ADRIANA: Yeah. And it's such a tough conversation to have. I had someone in a previous team that I hired on as a senior person, and then she was, like, scamming on my. She was scamming on everyone else. She would just pretend that she was doing work by, like, oh, let me attend meetings with so and so. And meanwhile, I'd hired this junior person who was working like she was working at the senior level. And it was so frustrating. I was trying to have the conversations with the senior person saying, listen, I want to help you. How can we work together? But she got offended. And these conversations are so hard to have because we all perceive differently how we're doing. And in her mind, she was doing just fine. How have you had those conversations in the past with people?

CHARITY: Oh, it's really hard. There's no version of this that isn't hard if you care about people.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

CHARITY: My most recent blog post was about why anyone should go into engineering management. Because it's a hard fucking job. And the answer is, because we need them. Because we need them desperately. Like a team with a great engineering manager builds circles around teams without one. And the other reason in my piece, I said is that it changes you as a person, and it gives you these skills that a lot of us didn't learn when we were growing up about how to be honest and how to have hard conversations and all these things. But as to your question, how do you go into this? The number one thing I think is no review should be a surprise. You should be having this conversation consistently, which is a hard thing to do because it makes people feel demotivated and frustrated.

But sometimes they have to feel that way. We've instituted a rule at honeycomb that if you're thinking of putting someone on a PIP, if you're thinking of, you have to literally say the words, your job is at risk because it's so tempting when you're face to face with someone who you really want to succeed, to soft pedal it or for them to feel upset and for you to kind of walk it back, or for you just to use words that let them walk away thinking something that is not what you want. And there are tools you can use to make sure. You can write up an email afterwards to be like, just to be clear, this is what I saw. This is what I'm saying. This is what you're hearing. But I really do think that one of the most important tools we have is just being explicit because they can file it away. We all have such infinite creativity when it comes to explaining away things that we don't want to hear.

And we can be like, oh, my manager is kind of a bitch. Oh, they're just in a bad mood. Oh, they're just kind of riding me lately. Oh, it's because of this thing. But this will be over. And I feel like if something really isn't trending, well, we have a responsibility to be more of a dick. We have to be the ones who kind of put our bodies in the breach and be like...and just sit there and deal with their reactions, which are going...They're going to have negative feelings. And it's really hard to sit with someone else's negative feelings who you are the proximate cause of. It's really hard, but you have to do it. It is the best thing for them to do it, to let them know this isn't just a small thing. This isn't just a flash in the pan. You are not succeeding. You are not on a path to succeeding here. You are on a path to, your job is at risk. Honestly, that's the kindest thing you can do for someone.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes so much sense. And you're right. It's so hard to get those words out. Like, "Your job is at risk." Yeah. And I've worked in organizations, too, where pussyfooting around the topic was like kind of the cultural norm, and so things wouldn't get said that should have been said, and you don't have the favorable outcomes in the end.

CHARITY: Yeah. And then people feel stabbed in the back, understandably. I would, too. They go...walk away going, "If they had just told me, if I had only known." And that is the worst outcome. That is the thing that I always remind myself of when I'm just like, I love this person. I don't want to be mean to them, but I cannot take it if they walk away feeling like I didn't tell them, like I stabbed them in the back by not making it perfectly clear that they're not performing and their job is at risk.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's definitely something that I wish that I had done more of in the past, and I try to remind myself of it, but, yeah, I think that is absolutely the right thing.

CHARITY: And to your point earlier about being people's friends, you can absolutely be friends with your direct report, but there's a line there. There's a boundary there, and there's a point at which you're not their friend. It's just like being someone's parent, right? When things are going great, yeah, you act like friends, but they have to know that when it's time for you to be parent, you're going to be parent.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Because otherwise they will take advantage of you.

CHARITY: Right. They will completely take advantage of you. It's human nature.

ADRIANA: Exactly. And you will let your guard down, too, right? Because they're like, oh, "I don't want to hurt so and so's feelings, otherwise they won't love me." And it's like, you kind of have to get over that as a manager. And it's hard.

CHARITY: It's really hard. It's really hard. And it's always a matter of judgment. It's always a judgment call. And you have to know that after you've had that hard conversation, chances are they're going to go tell other teammates a version of it that makes you look bad and them look great. And you can't do fuck all about it. You have to sit there and take it and hope that the relationships and the trust that you have built up are enough that people aren't going to just automatically believe that other person. That is the hardest thing about being a manager to me.

CHARITY: That right there, knowing...is when I know I can't say anything.

ADRIANA: Yeah. And risking, as you said, having people say, well, management doesn't know what they're doing. Oh, my God. Because as an IC in the past, I was like, management clearly doesn't know what they're doing, and then...

CHARITY: Clearly doesn't know shit.

ADRIANA: The first time it happened to me, oh, my God, I want to go cry. Like I'm trying everything to make you happy.

CHARITY: Yeah. This is why I feel like my dream vision for the future of engineering management is that more people do it. But people don't do it. They don't do it as a career. They do it as a tour of duty, because I feel like having ex managers on the team, it's like a game-changer, because whenever the dynamic is ICS versus managers, which always happens. Comes and goes, but it always happens. It's so helpful to have an ex-manager there on the IC side who could go, okay, kids, it might be this. It might be this. It might be this. Do we trust this manager in general? Okay, well, let's not jump to the automatic conclusion that they're just an idiot or they're just, like, being manipulated by the upper or whatever. They're the only voice in the room who can talk people down off a cliff and remind them whether to have some trust. And it's such a game changer. It is so wonderful.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that is so true. And it makes so much sense. I even find myself in positions after I've been a manager, and then being now an IC...whenever I get comments...

CHARITY: It's nice!

ADRIANA: Yeah, it is nice! And sometimes I have my manager apologize, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Blah, blah, blah." I'm like, "Dude, I totally get it." "It's fine. No worries."

CHARITY: You're able to give so much better support and understanding to your manager than you ever could have without that experience.

ADRIANA: Exactly.

CHARITY: It's so grounding and validating for them to have someone who sees them.

ADRIANA: Yeah. And especially, also when you have that nice rapport with your manager where you have that ultimate trust, where, okay, it might seem like they're riding you hard, but then you're like, oh, my ex-manager brain has said, okay, "I have a good reason to trust them. Take a step back. Let's look at the big picture." And, yeah, it's cathartic and it's eye opening.

CHARITY: Everyone wins.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. No, sorry. Go ahead. No, please.

CHARITY: I often hear people who are first-time managers who are, like, anxious or like, if I go back to being an IC, will I ever get the chance again to be a manager? And I'm just like, "Oh, grasshopper, they can smell it on you. You will be fighting off manager opportunities for the rest of your career." Have you found this to be true? I expect you have.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I have. And it was funny because after I read it in one of your blog posts, I was like, oh, yeah, so true.

CHARITY: Yeah.

ADRIANA: I mean, it's on your resume. Yeah.

CHARITY: Just the way you come across. I've also said that the fastest way to mint like, a shiny new staff engineer is to take a senior engineer and put them in management for a couple of years. Because the way you present yourself at work, the way you approach problems, you have such a better sense of the business, even if it wasn't on your resume. This is why some people get to be managers early and often, because for whatever reason, they already have some of those skills. But once you've been a manager, it's written all over your face that you understand.

ADRIANA: Yeah, very true. Now, here's a question for you. What's your take on folks who have gone into management at a really early point in their career, becoming a technical manager for a technical team when they don't have that many years of actual technical experience?

CHARITY: I think they are not well-served by this. I often see this happen to women, especially, and I think it's often intended as a compliment and by people who genuinely are trying to do they want to help the industry. They know that there needs to be more women in leadership and management. And so they're like, here's this person who has social skills and also some engineering skills. So we'll just...I think everyone has the best of intentions, and I think it really does not serve them because it's often a one-way...it's a one way-ticket, right? Because you don't have the skills to be able to go back and pick up coding easily in a couple of years. I think you also don't really have the skills to be a great manager.

Honestly, my recommendation to them would be get back to coding as quickly as you can or climb the ladder. If you choose to climb the ladder, then those skills are less relevant. But I wouldn't be in a rush. If you're 25 and you're a manager getting offered a director position, I would look at that cross-eyed. I would be like, because, yes, it is probably a compliment, but is it the right thing for you? I don't know. I mean, if you play out over the course of your career, you've got a 30, 40 year career. There's no rush. And the people who really excel in those senior leadership positions tend to be ones with deep roots, not just a very shallow.

And there's so much to learn, right? This is not to say that there's not anyone out there who's climbed the ladder in a hurry and not regretted it, because there probably is. But the people that I know who have done it have, by and large, profoundly regretted it. You know, I wrote about my friend Molly, who's an engineer at Honeycomb now, and she was one of those people. She super bright, straight out of college, became an engineer, became a manager, became a director. Shot up. You know she was a VP, she was a director, she was an EP. And she came to Honeycomb to be our head of...VP of customer success or something like that. And she was so unhappy.

And she would make all these wistful comments about how she wished she could be a software engineer. She wished she had done that. Eventually, her husband, he was an early member at Okta and Okta IPOed. And so suddenly she was like, "Wow, I can do anything I want with my life. I want to be a software engineer." And so she became a support engineer for us, and she just started writing code on the side. She started picking up some PRs. Now she's a software engineer on the team, and it's been hard.

She's never been happier, though. And I'm proud that Honeycomb is the kind of place that can support someone in doing that, because I think the opportunities to do something like that are few and far between. There are not many places we'll take a flyer on someone who's middle-aged and wants to go back to software engineering. But if you think of your career as a long game, you don't want to amass a bunch of titles, especially titles that are kind of empty because you're not getting a...I would...I would venture to guess that you're not getting a really high quality offer to be a director or a VP at age 27. It's really mostly the title. You want to amass yourself a solid base of experiences and skills, and you want to have shit to draw on as you climb that ladder so that you can help people better.

So the thing that I do want to guard against when I'm talking about this, I'm speaking to people who are early in their career, who are facing these questions. I don't want to make it sound like it's too late and you're screwed if you're already in this position. In fact, if you're in that position, if you'd like someone to talk it through, reach out to me. I have a Calendly link, calendly.com/charitym/advice, and I'm always happy to talk through interesting and tough career conversations with people. You have skills, you have assets. It might not be a super sexy path, but you can find places that will take advantage of the skills you have to offer while you kind of work your way up from the bottom again, if that's what you want to do. I'm sure you can do it, but it's easier if you do it right the first way and become a solidly senior engineer. Seven years really is the minimum, I think, before you become a manager.

And if you really want to be able to manage other senior engineers, you need to at least be able to speak the language and be able to roll back on it.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I fully agree with you on that. I was thinking back to my own career. My first job out of school was as a consultant at Accenture, and the career path was basically like, you must pay your dues as a developer, and you shall be rewarded with a management position. Right? Yeah. Right. So we're all kind of brainwashed to think, oh, my God, if I'm not a manager, by 27, 28, I have failed at life. Right? And I hit this crossroads in my life where I was being groomed to be a manager. I didn't have the manager title, but they threw me on some engagement where I was managing three teams at once. I was doing a shitty job, and I'm like, I was miserable, and I'm like, what do I want to do with my life? And so I decided...I left consulting. I took on a job as a software engineer. It was a lateral move, but I was so happy, and it was the best thing for me because my thought was, how can I manage these people if I don't know enough? I just didn't feel right for me, so I'm happy I did that.

CHARITY: Good for you for listening to your gut. I think all too often we talk about impostor syndrome, and we try to talk people out of it. I often think if your gut is really eating at you, that something is wrong. You should listen to that. You shouldn't just go, oh, everybody, there's impostor syndrome, and then there's just, like, the feeling in your stomach that you're not really setting your future self up for success or that you aren't really equipped to do the kind of job that you want to be able to do in this role. And I think that is not something to be brushed aside lightly.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I definitely agree. Listen to your gut, because it's telling you something. One thing that I wanted to ask was, when you were building Honeycomb from the ground up, did you have sort of lofty aspirations of how you wanted things to be?

CHARITY: Ha!

ADRIANA: How was...the initial thoughts versus how it turned out?

CHARITY: I 100,000% expected us to fail like the plan was to fail. So I was never one of those kids who was like, I'm going to start a company. Because I always kind of low key hate those people. It's like, "Oh, you're too good to work for someone else." I'm not too good to work for someone else. I was a serial dropout. I'm the opposite of you, right? I didn't collect all the awards. I didn't check anything off.

I dropped out and I dropped out again. I dropped out again. And so I never had a pedigree. Nobody was ever going to give me money. Then I was leaving Facebook, and the first time in my life, I kind of had a pedigree. And so I was like, well, I can't waste, like, on behalf of all women and queers and dropouts everywhere, I have to take it and run with it and do something. But I was super burned out. And I was like, well, I guess I have an idea, but I'll go heads down the corner, write code for a couple of years, and then we'll fail.

And I'll open source it. Then I'll have my tool to use. Hee haw! That was really the grand vision. And I would say Honeycomb has been around for eight years as of January 1, but we had many near-death experiences. Now, we hit our $40 million ARR mark this month, which is exciting. We're hoping to get on a path towards an IPO. But for the first five years, I think we wobbled around between 5 people, 12 people, 30 people. We did layoffs down to 15 people again. We were a skeleton crew wandering in the wilderness. In retrospect, I realized that we were creating a category and we were writing the database and all this stuff, but it just felt brutal. It just felt like failure was around every corner. And most of those corners were right. We did fail most of those corners. There are several just, like, near-death experiences that we had, and we made it through.

And now I, for the first time, am not thinking we're going to fail. But no, there was no grand vision. There was no grand vision at all. There was just, like putting 1 foot in front of the other and feeling like I was failing the people that I loved most almost every single day. It was brutal. I will say, though, that Christine and I, a little bit older than your average tech founders, especially me, and turns out we have very strong opinions. And we learned a lot of lessons at previous startups. We were at, like, at Parse, which I loved working at Parse.

Parse is where I learned about the importance of design, about marketing. People loved that product and I loved working on it. Before Parse, I was like, I'm just a backend engineer. I don't care what the product's about. I'll work on anything. Parse is where I learned that, of course, that was never true. But Parse never really had a shot because the founders never really tried to build a business. They tried to build a great product, and they did. But then around series B, they had a marketing person and a couple salespeople.

We weren't bringing any revenue. They had to sell. Their destiny got taken out of their hands because they had no other choice. And so Christine and I, from the very beginning were like, we want to build a business. We want to build a business. We want to build a product that people want to pay money for. We're not building freebies. We're going to try and monetize on the other end of the pipe.

We are building a product. We're building a business. And I had a lot of just, like, very strong opinions about the kind of culture we wanted to build, just about how...in the beginning, when we were interviewing engineers, if anyone talked, not even dismissingly, about go to market functions like sales or marketing, even just sort of, like, almost alienated, just like, "Oh, well, that's them. We're us. We don't understand that." Those weren't our engineers, because we don't need to hire engineers who wanted to build a business with us and who weren't going to create that us versus them dynamic that makes all great business people in the valley feel like second-class citizens. So, yeah, I would say we discovered the grand vision along the way. It really wasn't there from the beginning.

ADRIANA: And as a follow-up, you know, one of the things that I admire so much about Honeycomb is you build such a lovely community around your product. Your customers truly, truly love it. And we met because I was asking so many questions in the Honeycomb Pollinators Slack. At the time, I was exploring Honeycomb as a potential product that the company I was working for might switch over to. And everyone was just so genuinely nice in helping me understand this Observability thing that was so nebulous. How do you build that thoughtful community? Was it something that you sought out to do from the get-go? Is it something that organically grew?

CHARITY: If you ask any founder, they'd say they're trying to build that, right? So I think the questions were like, "Why were we more successful than many others?" I think a lot of it has to do with just...and if you had asked me if I would be talking about values and shit, like a year ago or a few years ago, I'd be, like, rolling my eyes, because I've always hated when people are like, "Values," because most businesses are just like. I don't know. I get really cynical about it, but I feel like we are our customers, and our customers are us. We built this product to solve a real problem that we are having. And it is more important to us that these problems get solved than that Honeycomb is successful. I think I can say that about everyone there.

We would love to be successful. We'd love to make lots of money and all this stuff. But we see the pain that so many teams are in, and we know that we have a way to fix a lot of that pain, because we've seen our customers do this over and over, and we hear what they say about how no one else could do this. And we had the advantage of designing and building this 25 years after metrics began dominating the landscape. So we build on the shoulders of giants, like I said earlier. So I feel like it's easy to be a true believer, because we're not just trying to sell something. We're really building something that really changes people's lives. And it's easy to get starry-eyed about that.

It's easy to be a believer when you're all on the same page about fixing problems, not just about trying to tweak your messaging or your marketing or your sales or something. I think people, Honeycomb, are generally very passionate about solving the problem, and it's very exciting to see them. I mean, the product does what it says on the sticker, which is very exciting, because almost no products do. Most products are hyped. If anything, Honeycomb is underhyped. It does so much more than we've been able to explain to people, which is why our churn is like nothing. We win, like, 80% of our tech evals, which the industry standard is, like 30 or 35%. Once people see it on their data, you cannot pry it out of their cold, dead hands.

One of our best sources of leads is when engineers change jobs and they bring us with them, because once they've tried developing with Honeycomb, they can't go back to not having honeycomb. And this is all stuff that it's hard to explain to people in words, but once they see it, it clicks. And so, really, our core challenge, over the next year, we've built the product. Our core challenge is figure out how to get more people to click with it faster, because we know that once they've seen it. The deal is done, but it's still a very hard problem.

ADRIANA: Yeah. The other thing that I think is very interesting about Honeycomb is it's not only are you building a product that people are excited about, but you've also really turned the whole area of Observability on its head. I'd like to think that it was Honeycomb that sort of gave Observability...Observability became what it is because of what Honeycomb has done. I mean, you've spent a lot of time talking about Observability. I mean, honestly, that's how I got dialed into what Observability was in the first place, was catching your Tweets. Yeah, if you could say a little bit more about that.

CHARITY: Yeah. Like, Christine and I are not marketing people. It turns out what we were doing was category creation. All I knew was that we were trying to build something based on an experience we had had that had changed us as engineers, and we knew that it wasn't monitoring. And I spent months just sort of, like, testing language, trying various things. And one point, it was July in 2016 that I Googled the term "Observability", and I read the control theory definition, and I was like, "Oh, shit. This is what we're trying to do. We're trying to build something to let engineers understand the inner workings of a system, no matter what's happening, just by observing its outputs."

So, like, working backwards from that, what do you need? Like, you need the high cardinality, you need the high dimensionality and all this stuff. And I feel like that definition really took hold for about three years. In 2019, 2020, maybe 2021, all of the money started rushing into the space, and suddenly, anyone who was doing anything with telemetry was like, cool. We do Observability, too, which, on the one hand, is like, it's a good problem to have. It means that what we were talking about really resonates with people. And at the time, I was naïve enough to think that, oh, well, they're co-opting our marketing language, but surely they're building the same technology under the hood. It's just a matter of time until they release it. I don't believe that anymore.

I think all they did was steal the marketing language, and I don't think they actually have any plans to. I think that, like, Datadog in particular, their business model is centered around having all these different SKUs, right? A different product for metrics, for logs, for tracing, for profiling, for security, and they've got too much money invested in. The problem is that the experience degrades for everyone if nothing connects all these data sources. People are paying to store their data again and again and again and again, but nothing connects it except the engineer who's sitting in the middle just trying to visualize or visually correlate. If that spike is the same as that one, it's fucking broken. My hope is that there will be new startups that are entering the space. So I've kind of given up like, okay, Observability now means, and this makes sense, I'm actually completely on board.

Observability, instead of having a strict technical falsifiable definition, Observability is a property of systems, right? A system can be more less observable if you add some metrics, great, you're more observable. But what we're seeing in the field is that there's a real huge step function difference between, let's call it Observability 1.0, which is about metrics, three pillars, right? And Observability 2.0, which is based on this single source of truth. And it's not just the technology, because o11y 1.0 is very much about MTDR, MTTD reliability, uptime. It's a checkmark before you send your code to production to make sure that it's observable. And Observability 2.0 is about, it's the foundation of the software development lifecycle. It defines your velocity, how fast you can ship, how well you can ship, the quality of what you ship, your ability to iterate quickly, your ability to identify what your customers are actually doing and why, and build on that. It's your ability to see what's happening in the wild and make decisions based on real data and then feed them. Because this is all about feedback loops, right? And it's about learning to be a developer where you're developing with fast feedback loops.

And it's like the difference, o11y 1.0 is about, okay, this is something that you tack onto a product...2.0 is about, this is how you build the product, right? So many teams are stuck in 1.0 land and they're happy with the tools that they have, but the teams that are going to win are the ones that not only adopt 2.0 tooling, but also adopt the 2.0 mindset of this is how we build software. It's like putting your glasses on before you drive down the highway. You can drive a lot faster, you can make better decisions much more quickly. So I feel like right now, the big problem that Honeycomb has from a business perspective is that far too few engineering leaders even understand that 2.0 is possible because you can have a 2.0 mindset. But if you've only ever seen 1.0 tools, it's janky. It's real hard to like...you can only do so much, right? You really need to see 2.0 tooling in order to really...

But it clicks so fast when you do. So that's really our job. For a long time, I was really disappointed that there are still Observability startups starting. They come up, ping, pong, like here and there, everywhere, but they're all 1.0 tools. They're still doing the multiple storage places. My hope is, and I get why, it's because you have to build an entirely different storage layer from the ground up. And very few VCs have the patience for you to do that. They want you to get right to product, market fit and all this stuff. Now that there are more columnar storage engines out there like Snowflake, I don't know...

I'm optimistic, but I'm optimistic over the long run, our model of Observability will win. Even if Honeycomb completely fucks up in the end state is the complexity of our systems is increasingly demanding it. The complexity of people's systems is skyrocketing. You look at the DORA metrics, and I was always kind of like, dude, it's so weird. Like high performing teams, okay, that takes an hour to a day to restore service. But for the bottom like 80% of teams, it takes them a day to a week to restore service from an outage. How? It's because they don't have Observability.

It's because they can't actually see what's going on. They rely on a few people's brains, people who've been there for a long time, who pack a lot of context into their heads, who can try and reason about it using the very limited data sources that they have. That's why it takes so long over and over. Part of the reason we win so many of our POCs is because over and over, our sales engineers, we help you roll it out, and they'll be like, is this an outage over here? We're seeing something wrong. And people will be like, what? Ten minutes later they get paged and they're like, oh, it's just like once you have this feedback loop, you get used to being constant conversation with your code instead of just like shipping and waiting for someone to get paged. At some point in the next hour two year, right. It's all about hooking up this feedback eventually, even if it's ten years from now, the model that we're talking about is the shape that's going to win whether it's us or not because our systems simply demand it. There's no other way to build software at that kind of velocity and scale.

ADRIANA: I completely agree and I think having that conversation where Observability is considered...is baked into like...you're shifting left on Observability basically, right? Were it's like...

CHARITY: Exactly.

ADRIANA: No, it's not the thing that's tacked on at the end per usual. It's the thing that your developers are considering in the beginning that your QAs are using to troubleshoot shit and write trace based tests and that now your SREs are like, "Oh, I've got the information to solve the problem!"

CHARITY: So many of the promises of Agile development and all these SREs and all of these cultural movements, they've never really lived up to their full promise. And I feel like the reason is because it's not just a cultural thing. You have to have the tools that actually make hard problems easy as well. And the feedback loops with metrics and logs are just painful and arduous and relies on so much on manual cross-correlation and heroes jumping into the break. But when you have the right tools, you can just glance at it and see the answer. And it's what unlocks the ability of teams to just be constantly...When I think about modern software development, I think about feature flags which help you separate releases from deploy so you can be deploying small changes constantly.

CHARITY: I think about future flags, I think about Observability, just the ability to see what the fuck is going on at any point. I think about testing in production and I think about, well, canarying. There was one other thing that was on my mind. There's really just a four thing and they all reinforce each other, right? One of them alone is okay, but you get all of them together. And it's a completely different profession than it is in software development, which is kind of still from the shrink wrap era. It's like you're building, if your world while you're building software is your IDE and your tests, that's shrink wrap days. Your world should be production and telemetry. You should spend more time in your production windows than in your IDE windows. That's what modern software development is like I think.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. And the final point that I wanted to touch upon is you mentioning...having...the data that correlates right? Where you're not just having to figure out how it's stitched together. And tools like open telemetry definitely enable that. But then I guess part of the irony though, is that open telemetry allows you to correlate traces and logs and metrics. But then if your Observability backend doesn't have a way to show that correlation, then you're kind of up a creek too.

CHARITY: So I am so glad that OTel came out when it did so that I think we were able to have a lot of influence on how the data is gathered. You're absolutely right. Part of observability is the presentation of the information. If you don't have the ability to slice and dice, if you don't have the ability to combine, if you don't have that single sort of truth, then you can't really reap the rewards of Observability, even if you captured it. But capturing it the right way is the first step, for sure.

ADRIANA: Yes, absolutely. And so glad that OpenTelemetry has gone officially GA. The specification has gone GA end of 2023. Long time coming. I'm super stoked for that.

CHARITY: It's a big moment in our industry.

ADRIANA: Yeah, and I'm so glad also that so many of the vendors have come together to rally behind it. And it's really not someone trying to flex their muscles over everyone else. It's such a lovely community.

CHARITY: The only lagger is Datadog. People need to keep putting a little bit of shame and pressure on them because they're the only ones who are not playing nice, but everyone else is, which is a tremendous achievement. Huge kudos to Splunk, who's got like 30 engineers working on integrations every day. We would not be where we are without Splunk.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so great. It's so great seeing all these innovations, collaborations, and people really genuinely caring for the project.

CHARITY: It's great.

ADRIANA: And on that note, we have come up on time. And thank you so much Charity for coming on geeking out with me today. This was awesome. One item off the podcasting bucket list for me. Always a pleasure to chat with you. And everyone, please don't forget to subscribe, be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources, and connect with us and our guests on social media.

CHARITY: Until next time, peace out and geek out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Vileela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout. My wonderful editor daughter will edit out any, any stuff. I pay her good money.

CHARITY: How old is your kid?

ADRIANA: She's 15.

CHARITY: Nice.

ADRIANA: That's a good age. Yeah. And she sports right now...she's sporting some really rad pink hair. Last year, she had gone purple, and I just took her to get a cartilage piercing, which I'm like, hey, I have no issue taking you. No issue taking you. I'll look away while it happens. Yeah, it's super fun. Super fun.

CHARITY: I went to college when I was 15, and I felt very adult at the time. And now I look back and I'm like. I was a child. What was I doing?

ADRIANA: You feel so old when you're in high school or like, when you're 15. I remember when I graduated college and I'm like, everyone looks like a baby.

CHARITY: Yeah. Time of rapid change.

ADRIANA: Yeah, for real.

About our guest:

Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration.

Find our guest on:

• X (Twitter)
• Mastodon

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show Links:

• CompTIA A+ Certification
• Rube Goldberg Machine
• Heroku
• KornShell
• Capistrano
• Cloud Foundry
• Spring Boot
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS)
• HashiConf
• Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp co-founder)
• Armon Dadgar (HashiCorp co-founder)
• Borg whitepaper
• Sidecar (Kubernetes)
• Nomad on Kubernetes (GitHub)
• Hashinetes Talk (HashiConf 2017)
• From Community to Customers (KubeCon EU Amsterdam 2023)
• Confd
• FOSSDEM (conference)
• Apache License, version 2.0
• RAID
• Westworld Loop

Additional Links:

• Kubernetes the Hard Way (GitHub)

Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And today I have the pleasure of geeking out with me, Kelsey Hightower. Welcome, Kelsey.

KELSEY: Happy to be here.

ADRIANA: And where are you calling in from today?

KELSEY: I'm in Washington state, so on the border of Portland, Oregon, and Washington.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Well, let us get to it with the warm up questions. Are you ready?

KELSEY: I am.

ADRIANA: Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

KELSEY: Right handed.

ADRIANA: All right. iPhone or Android?

KELSEY: iPhone forever. And I've tried android. Given that I've worked at Google for almost eight years, I've tried, but I'm an iPhone person.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I'm an iPhone person too. I never tried android. I went straight from BlackBerry to iPhone.

KELSEY: I think BlackBerry was definitely...I was a BlackBerry person. I was also a Nokia person. But I think once iPhone really dialed in the ability to have third party apps in the App Store, iPhone all day.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I'm the same way. That was like one big sticking point. And for us in Canada, when the iPhone first came out, we didn't even have access to the App Store. So if you wanted any apps, you had to jailbreak your iPhone until it finally became available...because we get everything a little bit late here.

KELSEY: Awesome.

ADRIANA: Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?

KELSEY: The one that I can get things done in. So, at one point it was Bash, then it was Python, then it was Ruby when I worked at Puppet Labs, and then it's been Goblin, probably for the last ten years.

ADRIANA: Cool. Awesome. And Mac, Linux, or Windows?

KELSEY: Mac on my desktop. Linux on the server.

ADRIANA: All right, next question. Dev or Ops?

KELSEY: They're one and the same.

ADRIANA: I love it. Okay. JSON or YAML?

KELSEY: JSON. If I had to program against it, YAML if I had to write it.

ADRIANA: By oh, yeah, I definitely agree. I do find, like, manipulating JSON in Python is nicer, but YAML is more readable.

KELSEY: Yeah. To all the people that are like, JSON over YAML, let me watch you write it and see how fast you change your opinion.

ADRIANA: Yes, I totally agree with you there. Okay, this one's a little more controversial, and you can thank one of my previous guests for hinting at it. Spaces or tabs?

KELSEY: I don't care. I actually don't care if Python makes me uses Spaces and my IDE does the right thing. I'm totally fine, actually.

ADRIANA: I'm down for that. Okay, two more questions. Do you prefer to consume video or text when you're consuming content?

KELSEY: It depends. If I'm trying to learn, I need to read it, I need to see it, I need to be able to kind of backscan read it twice. But I do like video in terms of when people are really good at the human side of it. Right? Like, if they're expressing or showing me something, like, I want to see the code run. I want to see where they click. I want to see how they start. But when it's like learning something in the programming world, I need text. People are pretty bad at video and programming lessons.

KELSEY: Like, oh, just write these three lines of code. I'm like, can you please scroll up so I can see what you imported to make this work? So when it comes to seeing code, I want to see no snippets. I want to see as much as possible, but if I'm just going through for the first time to get the flow, video.

ADRIANA: I totally agree with you. And you landed on one of my big pet peeves. When consuming content for learning stuff, which is the code snippets, because I have been and I'm sorry, Hashi people, but this is a crime on the Hashi docs that I see all the time is that I get code snippets, and I don't get to see a full example on the site, and it drives me bananas. And I'm like, what does this apply to? Give me a full fledged code example? Link me to a GitHub repo at some point.

KELSEY: I'm always asking, why are people writing docs out there giving me hints to a murder mystery?

ADRIANA: Yes.

KELSEY: Show me the whole thing. I don't need it to be cute. I don't need it to fit perfectly in your style guide. I just need to see the whole thing and what's going on. So I think people do it out of style. There's really no substance when I'm trying to learn.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I completely agree. I do find it very frustrating. That's why, for me personally, whenever I do technical docs, I give excruciating detail. All right, final question. What is your superpower?

KELSEY: My superpower? I think one thing that I've learned over the years when it comes to mentoring, specifically, I used to be all about sharing my expertise, my background, my learning. And I've noticed that I changed my approach to holding up a mirror in front of other people and convincing them to like what they see and the number of people who actually like what they end up seeing and follow up with me. I really felt like that is a superpower, that you can actually have that impact on people. So that would be my superpower.

ADRIANA: That is such an incredible superpower. And I think it's so relevant to our industry, too, because we have a lot of smart people who suffer from impostor syndrome. And I think showing people that you are actually as good as you think you are is such a huge thing. Right? I mean, we've got some amazing stuff happening. I have some coworkers who are brilliant, and they're like, oh, my God, I feel like I'm just a hack. I'm like, Are you kidding me? I can't even keep up with some of the stuff that you're telling me right now.

KELSEY: Yeah. And I try to get people to understand that sometimes you aren't as good as you want to be. And that's okay too, right? I think there's okay with making progress, entering to new domains, and just helping people just relieve the pressure. Ideally, if you're any good at this thing, you're going to always feel this way forever because you're humble enough to keep learning, so you shouldn't feel so bad about it.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true. That's a very excellent point. So let's get into the meaty bits. One of the things that I wanted to share with our audience was how you came to be on the podcast. We met at KubeCon North America in Chicago this year, and you were doing a book signing. And I came, stood in line, the long line. It was totally worth it. And I was wearing this mask that had the sticker for the podcast, Geeking Out, and you said, "Oh, what is that?" And I said, "Oh, that's my podcast."

ADRIANA: And you said, "Oh, I could be on your podcast." So I am so stoked that you were able to join. And yeah, I mean, I've admired your work from afar for many years. I find your approach to Kubernetes very accessible, especially because it's such a complex subject matter. So I wanted to start off with how did you get into this field in the first place? Where did you find your calling to make things technical things, gnarly technical things so accessible to folks?

KELSEY: I want to answer that question, but I want to address this advice that I give to my former self and to people that I run into all the time. And they say, how do you put in the effort to make sure good things happen to you in your career and in your life in general? And so you at that book signing with the podcast on your mask. You're advertising to the world, this is my podcast, this is what I'm doing, and you're advertising what needs to happen next. And so for someone like me, I can see that clearly. I understand in that limited interaction that there is this opportunity that I could actually be on your podcast, because now I know you have one. I think a lot of people really confuse luck and that kind of effort, right? When you put that kind of effort forward, you tend to make things happen. And so I just want to highlight that part of you having that as part of your strategy of going to KubeCon, making the best use of your time and every human interaction. So kudos to you for doing that.

KELSEY: But it's a perfect example of how people kind of design their own careers and create the world that they want. So that's perfect. Now to your question about this whole idea of explaining things simply to other people. When I was getting into tech, a lot of people come from various backgrounds I come from the...fast food was my only job background, and I didn't go to college. And so for me, learning technology was like a pivotal life-making decision. I need to get into this field. I admire people that are in this field.

KELSEY: I don't know anyone that's in this field. And so I would go get all the books and just flip through them. I remember the first book I think I bought was the A+ certification guide. I was like, I'll start there. And you just go through all of this stuff and you look at all your notes, right? You're trying to simplify all the information to truly demonstrate that you understand it. And everyone knows that feeling of the A-ha! moment where you take something that is complex to you and you finally understand it, and your confidence level just goes up. It immediately goes up. And so that feeling, I've always enjoyed having that feeling because it felt so empowering.

KELSEY: So whenever I had the opportunity to speak at a meetup, I've noticed that some people at meetups or conferences, they speak, and it's just like, overwhelming. Hey, here's this computer science diagram. Here's this map that you cannot understand what's happening, and they are happy with just leaving it as a mystery to everyone. And you're like, what the hell was that? You had this opportunity to let me have my light bulb moment, but you chose not to. You chose to try to overwhelm me with your vast understanding of things that I don't. And so I've tried to say, what if I can make people feel like I felt whenever I learned a new subject? So this is why I've always said, hey, now that I understand this thing, I want to show it to you as well. But before I can, I have to give you context where I came from, my understanding beforehand, and then what led me to that understanding. And then let me show it to you.

KELSEY: And I try to use analogies and simple terms, and you can see the light bulb moment go off for people in the audience, and then it becomes a game changer for their own career. So for me, I think I got addicted to that. Like, hey, I don't want to talk. I don't want to write a tutorial if it doesn't have that impact on people.

ADRIANA: I absolutely love that because I can completely relate to that feeling, the euphoria, the high that you get from solving a problem, especially something where you've had to really put on the detective skills hat and try extra, extra hard to solve it. So that is so wonderful. I love that so much, and I think it's so important because making learning accessible to people, I think, makes it fun too, because I agree with you. Like those gnarly architecture diagrams that just look overly complicated, and then your brain starts to wander, and then you miss some important thing, and then that's it your opportunity for learning. That thing is gone if you're watching that lecture, because it's just, like, way over your head. So I think that's so great. Such an awesome approach to really disseminating information across the industry, especially these are not easy topics to unravel, right? So, Kubernetes, for example, how did you come upon doing your work with Kubernetes?

KELSEY: You know how you walk in on someone watching some hit TV show, they're on season six, right? And you ask them, what's going on? Why is this person not like this other person? They're like, I got to recap season three for you to understand what's going on on the screen right now. And so I think for a lot of people, Kubernetes was my season six, right? I had always been in tech trying to share information. If you would have caught me 15 years ago, you would have saw me at a Python conference teaching people about packaging Python applications. If you saw me maybe six years after that, I was at Puppet Labs trying to contribute to configuration management tools using Ruby. And so when I get to Kubernetes, there's a whole career behind me of trying to build similar systems without the terminology or the experience. You just know that there has to be a better way of doing things. So when I saw Kubernetes for the first time and really got hands on time with it, there was an a-ha! moment. I was like, you know what? All the scripts, tools, philosophies, techniques, it has now been serialized into this one checkpoint, and the industry has finally given it a name.

KELSEY: And so when I got that feeling, you know what was next, right? It was like, hey, I can't wait to go to a meetup to show people this thing. And I think the reason why I was able to resonate with so many people is because I had that previous background of doing things manually, trying different automation tools. And so I was just so excited. Like, I think we finally found the thing we've been all trying to build, and it looks like this. And so I think a lot of people got to see that season. It was like, oh, he's the Kubernetes guy. But there's so much historical context that goes into why I was ready to have that conversation, make those contributions at that time.

ADRIANA: That's basically the classic case of, like, everything you've done up until that point has led you to that moment, and now you're ready to take on that thing. Right?

KELSEY: I became a better speaker than I had ever been prior. I became a better engineer than I had ever been prior. And I've gone through all of that experience, and I was able to really articulate what was important. And I think for a lot of people who have been on this DevOps journey for a decade, nothing is working. We're doing all of the things: CI/CD pipeline, infrastructure-as-code. We're missing something here. And I think the industry had overly focused on automation and not abstraction. And Kubernetes was that final thing that you could touch to say, there is a difference between automation and abstraction.

KELSEY: And I think when people saw those new APIs, in many ways, I told people Kubernetes was like this type system to infrastructure. It was like a standard library that we'd never had. It's not like a thing that if you just install, it solves all your problems. But it's definitely a much better checkpoint than what people were doing before.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of those things where I feel like it's a bit of a love hate relationship with Kubernetes. Right. Because in some ways, it makes life so much easier, and then in other ways, it's like, oh, my God, this thing is so complex to try to unravel in your mind. Right.

KELSEY: I want to address that a lot, because there are some people that think I am the biggest Kubernetes fan in the world, and I am not. I actually spent the last four years working on replacements. I spent so much time at Google Cloud working on serverless just to make Kubernetes go away. I learned everything about it because I think the best people that will replace it are the people who understand it the most. And the way I look at Kubernetes is very different. People look at it as a tool that is competing with their other favorite tool or some alternative ways of doing things. To me, Kubernetes is just another word in the dictionary, and my focus has always been, what does it mean? And as a contributor, what should it mean? And when I think about it as an aggregation of the previous ten year set of techniques, and you push them all together, you get this thing. And I study that thing for, like, wow, we've come a long way since those days.

KELSEY: Also, you can see what's missing. And I think that part is where, for me, that's inspiring. Oh, this is what's missing. So this is where the opportunity space is. Go work there and solve that problem. But I think a lot of people get into, oh, this thing is too complex. And I always ask them, but do you understand it? If you don't understand it and you say it's complex, then I think that's a mislabeling of the situation. You can just say, I don't understand it, therefore, I don't know why I would use it.

KELSEY: And I think that's a fair way to start the conversation. I think a lot of people are just dismissing it because it's complex, and I can do something much simpler, and then they tell me what they're doing. I'm like, that sounds like a Rube Goldberg machine. You just named 25 pieces of custom tooling so you can avoid using Kubernetes. I don't know if that adds up.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think it makes sense too, like what you said earlier about looking for something that could potentially replace Kubernetes, because I also think that we tend to get into this sort of rut where we think, well, it all ends with Kubernetes. But we all know that software has evolved so much in the last 20 years. Even everyone was talking about Heroku is this awesome thing, and now, yeah, Heroku is still in the picture, but other things have come and kind of taken our attention. So where are we moving towards then in this space?

KELSEY: I think in some ways things haven't changed very much in 20 years. You write code, you build the code, and you try to do some process to get it on the server so people can use the code. About 20 years, people have been doing exactly that thing. Now, how people have gone about doing that thing, that's changed at different speeds. Some people are still writing KornShell scripts right now as we speak, deploying apps at their company, and it probably works well. Then you have some people that are still using tools like Capistrano because they want to use something that's written in their favorite programming language, in that case, Ruby. And so they just want to keep everything within their problem domain. And then you have some people who prefer platforms like Heroku, Cloud Foundry, you name it.

KELSEY: I think the challenge has been is lots of people have been looking for that one solution for everything. I remember when Cloud Foundry, like the Heroku competitor that you could run yourself, it was like, look, twelve factor apps are the way to go, and you can write everything as long as you use Java and Spring Boot. You do that, you're done, you're great. And then it's like, okay, that's fine. What about my batch jobs? Where do I run those? Not there. What about my databases? Where do I run those? Not there? And then what happens is you end up having to bring in a second or third platform. And that's where the harsh reality of all of this stuff is, is that whenever we don't have one solution to solve everything, you end up having to complicate your infrastructure. And I think complicated infrastructure just the actual norm at this point.

KELSEY: What the world wants in terms of if you have a public facing website, you're probably going to have a cache, you're going to have Cloudflare DDoS protection. Various security concerns that Kubernetes versus Heroku is such a small part of the decision making process that even if you got that layer right, it is such a small part of the equation that thinking that's where the complexity is, ignores the big picture, where I think things like Kubernetes are 1/100th of the equation.

ADRIANA: Right. That makes a lot of sense. Now, on a similar vein of Kubernetes like product, you've also done some work with HashiCorp Nomad, right? How would you compare Kubernetes to Nomad for folks who aren't familiar with both?

KELSEY: Respect to everyone that contributes. Because I've written lots of code myself, and you do the best you can. So we just got to make sure we get that out of the way. We're not attacking people here. So if you have a HashiCorp logo tattooed on your body or Kubernetes logo tattooed on your body, this is not about you at all. When I first saw Nomad, I remember, is when they announced it in Portland at one of the smaller first HashiConfs. And I was scheduled to give a talk about Kubernetes, and I changed the talk the night before to do Nomad versus Kubernetes. And I remember Mitchell, Armon and so many people from HashiCorp standing there watching the talk. Everyone's crowded in to watch the talk.

KELSEY: And look, I'm not a mean person, so I'm not someone that's naively attack a project that I'm not working on. Doesn't make any sense. But I did learn it, got it installed. And the things I liked about Nomad, you got this single binary written in Golang. You just put it on the server and it's almost immediately ready to go, starting getting value, right? That part around, just go get a binary and just have it run on the server. It really, really made that easy. The part that wasn't great, though, is the API. You look at it and it's like, what is this thing? Right? I think I get it.

KELSEY: And it felt like, oh, you're trying to copy the Borg white paper about what a task is, but you haven't used Borg enough to know that this is not what you want to copy. And so it was a good serialization of that knowledge that was out there. They built a very high performance fast scheduler. They optimized for scheduling, speed, and performance. But the thing I think that they missed was the ecosystem. This space now is about collaboration. So you have lots of people who want to build infrastructure, automation, tools. And the one problem we've had over time, in my opinion, is that you have to glue them all back together.

KELSEY: And scripting only gets you so far when you have to glue together all these various APIs. So Kubernetes takes a different approach. Kubernetes says these things are all related. Your load balancer and your app and your IPs, and your storage, your secrets, all of it is related. And they depend on each other. And so Kubernetes felt like it lived a life where the maintainers or the people of that project had been using Borg for a decade or two and said, what would we fix? And they come into a popular ecosystem like Docker and all these pieces, and they aggregate them. And when you look at the API, you can see the experience peek through. Right here is a pod.

KELSEY: A pod has to have multiple containers because most apps that people deploy in reality, need things like NGINX or sidecars or logging daemons. And so I felt like Kubernetes had so much more experience baked into it than just being a faster, easier to manage system for deploying things. So given that, it was really nice to see over time that both communities kind of learn from each other. I remember when Nomad started adding things like volumes, sidecars, or other things that you would typically see in Kubernetes. So I think some people like Nomad because of its simplicity. I kind of lean towards the simplicity side of the house, so I kind of resonate with the whole Nomad thing. But watching people kind of glue together, like vault console, and all these other pieces to try to get a whole system, I'm like, man, at this point, now Kubernetes starts to look a little better.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I definitely agree. I worked at a job where so I had come from a Kubernetes background and worked at a job where it was a Hashi shop, and they're like, oh, we're using Nomad. So I'm like, oh, my God. How do I translate this? And when I learned that Nomad is not fully equal to Kubernetes, that you have to still stitch these other pieces together, I'm like, oh, okay, that complicates things. But I definitely agree with you. One of the things that I do appreciate about Nomad is that certain things seem a little bit simpler. And I did find the learning curve not too bad. Maybe it was because I also knew Kubernetes at the time, so maybe that helped and it allowed me to translate.

ADRIANA: But there's definitely a lot of stuff that I appreciate about Nomad, and I'm glad that I've had exposure to both ways of doing things, because I think that's really cool. And like what you were saying, both communities learning from each other rather than, like, let's hoard our secrets, because that way you can end up with better products overall, right?

KELSEY: 100%.

ADRIANA: Now, one thing that I wanted to ask you about was your famous Hashinetes tutorial. What motivated you to put this together? And also, if you can just share with folks what this Hashinetes thing is.

KELSEY: I remember the Hashinetes talk, because that was the year I was like, okay, all of these tools have been out for a while. Vault is out. Consul is out. Nomad is out. Kubernetes is out. Now what? How do you think about all these things? What do you even do with them? And I remember that year I wanted to have fun, right? Previous years, it's more about, what are these things? And then maybe years after that, it's like, it's in production. But I was like, you know what? I want to have a irresponsible talk. I remember starting to talk off: "Today we're going to be irresponsible."

KELSEY: "Do not do this in production." "Do not go to work and say Kelsey said anything." This is just having fun. Okay, and so I remember having a Kubernetes cluster or maybe even Nomad, and said, all right, we're going to install Nomad as an app to see how it works. And I just started adding different layers and components one by one. Number one, teaching people how all of these things actually fit together and how another scheduler could actually arrange them and put them into place. And then I think people had so much fun with the talk. It's like, wow, look how powerful these tools are that they can actually deploy and manage each other if you really wanted to.

KELSEY: And look how they're similar in some ways. And I think a lot of people were like, oh, these are just you need to pick one or the other. And at that time, there was a blog post of a company using Kubernetes for some stuff and then using Nomad for some of their batch jobs that would benefit from the Nomad way of doing things. I thought that was just, like, the right way to think about it. So that talk Hashinetes is like, what happens if you push Kubernetes and all the HashiCorp tools together, like using Vault for secrets instead of the thing that was built into Kubernetes, because I think Vault was a far superior secrets management product and API. And then what if you were to use Consul instead of Kubernetes built-in service-discovery? What would you get? And then let's just say you really do like Nomad. What if you were to run that inside of Nubernetes, too, and let that become the scheduler instead of Kubernetes doing the scheduling? And I think when people kind of saw that talk, they understood how to really fairly evaluate those tools. So we just had a bunch of fun.

ADRIANA: What do you think was the biggest learning from putting this talk together for yourself?

KELSEY: I think, honestly, if you just live 100% in Kubernetes land, all you know is config, maps, secrets, and you have an idea in your mind that there's no other way of thinking about these problems. Right? Everything must be a CRD. Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes. But I think people forget I was a contributor to Kubernetes. I knew how some of the inner workings worked. And so it's like, how do you get Vault to work nicely inside of Kubernetes? Then you have to rethink the APIs, and you start, oh, the Kubernetes secret management API isn't that great at all? And so when you bring in Vault and you have to stitch it in and bake it into the whole process, you really do gain empathy for gluing all of these parts together yourself. So I think the biggest learning for me is that, number one, you can do it. There are situations where it does make sense.

KELSEY: Think about it. If you have multiple clusters and you want to have multi cluster service discovery, you cannot do that with Kubernetes alone. When you add something like Consul, you can have Consul be the place that takes over DNS. And guess what? Voilà, you can now address multiple clusters using one service discovery tool. And so it's like, oh, okay. So even though Kubernetes hasn't solved all the problems, it doesn't mean that you can't bring in all these alternative tools to step in and fill that gap.

ADRIANA: And it's nice to see that everything plays nice in that little ecosystem and that you can, I guess, take advantage of each tool superpowers, right, to sort of give that boost to Kubernetes Awesome. Now, on the Hashi front, I also wanted to talk to you briefly about a talk that you gave at KubeCon EU, "From Community to Customers". And I attended that talk, and I really enjoyed the talk. I thought it was very interesting how you were talking about this fine line of what to keep open source versus what not to keep open source. One example that you cited was HashiCorp, and then shortly thereafter, HashiCorp changed their licensing. So what are your thoughts around that?

KELSEY: Yeah, I actually had this question come up a few times, and I always tell people from a place of empathy, I had a project, Confd. It became a little popular. I remember going to FOSSDEM on the other side of the world in Europe, and watching someone give a talk about using Confd, this miniature configuration management tool, and how they were using it and why they thought it was one of the greatest projects ever. Like, as a maintainer of an open source project, you'd love to see a community form around the thing you've built. But as a solo maintainer, you also know how hard it is to say no. And you wake up on, like, a Saturday morning and it's like, hey, I work at a huge company that makes tons of profit, and I get paid really well to do my job. I would like you to work for free and add this feature that we really, really need to make even more money. And you're like, no, this is not my priority.

KELSEY: Number one, you're not paying me anything. And then two, you know what? You're going to have to prioritize that itself and maybe step up and do some contributions. And so when you think about it that way, and as someone who's also contributed code to HashiCorp products in the past, I did those contributions to scratch my own itch. And I understand that once I deliver those changes, it's on the HashiCorp team to maintain them forever. And so I understand the relationship here is me contributing code is not the end of the story. And so when they make that licensing change, I put myself in their shoes of trying to run a business and remember, they're a public traded company. So a lot of these decisions are not in fully their control anymore. The market wants to see profit growth.

KELSEY: I don't know if you've ever worked at a profitable company, people listening to this. But having stagnant revenue year over year is a fast way to get shareholders to leave investing in your stock. So now they have this added pressure of no longer just making the open source community happy. The people that they kind of started their careers off of, now they have to try to make the market happy. And there you get into different behaviors. So now you got to figure out where to get revenue from. And if you ask someone, Where do you get revenue from something that is given away 100% for free? Last I checked, most people do not pay for things unless they have to pay for things. And so you got to draw the line somewhere.

KELSEY: And I think the big controversy is, where do you draw the line? Do you draw the line on the core of the product? NGINX tried to do things like that. It didn't work out well over time, do we draw the line on, like, enterprise features and Web UIs? Right? That could be a fair place to draw the line. And so I think for a lot of people, HashiCorp decided to draw the line at commercial competition. If you take our software and start competing against us, using our name, likeness, whatever we say now in our new license, the business source license, that you can't do that. And so if you're being honest, as a user, don't really care. Like, I don't plan to start a business competing against terror. If you're being honest, I literally don't care.

KELSEY: And most people don't really exercise all their open source freedoms anyway. I'm not saying that's not a good reason not to have them, but a lot of these licenses like Apache 2 to me to fully realize the benefits of them. I think you do need to become a contributor to really understand what the code base does, be willing to step up to fork a project when the time comes and having the skills to maintain it. A lot of people don't understand that's the other part of this deal. And so when they change that license, I think people got a wake up call. They own that project. It is not our project. Even those with that HashiCorp logo somewhere tattooed on their body, it's not your project.

KELSEY: It belongs to HashiCorp. And so now I think there's a rethink. And a lot of people forget HashiCorp predates the CNCF, right? So they're not a part of a foundation, even though a lot of their technologies are foundational, TerraForm, Vault, those things belong to HashiCorp, a private company doing what they have to do. And so for me, I look at that business license change and says, great, they made their stake in the sand. From a business perspective, this will be good for HashiCorp. Now they can say no. And now their terms are a bit clear and no longer vague. Now, for the community that is upset,

KELSEY: now it's time to exercise those open source rights we've all been talking about for so long. You get to fork the project, you get to maintain the project, bug, fixes security, fixes new features and then ask the question how compatible should you remain going forward with the thing in which you branch from? That's what's on the table. So those are my thoughts on it. It's very pragmatic. I think it's one of ownership and responsibility and no matter how you feel about it, you're going to have to take on ownership and responsibility going forward.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. It makes so much sense and I think you hit on a very important thing when it comes to maintaining an open source project, which is maintaining it. It is a lot of freaking work and especially if it's something that you do on the side for funsies. You can only expect so much, especially if you're the solo maintainer. So also hats off to anyone who is a solo maintainer of an open source project or works with a very small team because it's a lot of work. It's a labor of love at that point, right?

KELSEY: I want to make sure people understand. A lot of people may have an ops background. That's definitely where I come from. And people think dev is easy and there's the same stress that you have in operations, right. For example, if you replace a hard drive in a server with a bad hard drive, you worry the first couple of days like, is that RAID configuration going to actually rebuild on time and the hard drive is going to stop being slow before traffic comes. You worry about these things and this is why we started doing things like on-call. And when you are maintained of open source project, you know that anything you merge in will make its way to someone's production, someone you probably don't know and you're going to feel responsible and accountable for doing that. And so there's a lot of this added pressure of like, hey, I got to be able to say no and make the right decisions to make sure that no one is going to be negatively impacted by these projects.

KELSEY: I think a lot of people forget that when we start to ask and I don't like the way this person runs this open source project, there is so much pressure that goes into it. So just know that there's humans behind these projects. There's a lot at stake. So if they say no to your new feature or they have to make a business license change or stop accepting pull requests for a while while they go tend to other matters, you just have to understand that just what comes with the territory.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. There are humans behind those repos right at the end of the day. Well, we are coming up on time, but before we wrap up, I was wondering if there are any parting words of wisdom that you would like to share with our audience?

KELSEY: I don't know if there's any parting words of wisdom, but I do think we're at this next cycle of new technology on its way, whether it's AI or LLMs, some people only know that stuff as chat GPT. And the question that I'm hearing a lot around is, like, is this thing going to take my job? And I always ask those folks, what is your job? And they say, "Well, for the last ten years, I've just been running scripts and automating things, and I'm like the same things for ten years in a row." I was like, "Listen, if that's how you would describe your job, then yes, you might have a problem when a new set of tooling comes around that reduces the need to do that." And that's always happened throughout tech. And I think what most people should probably think about is take these moments of insecurity and just do some self reflection and say, "Hey, my tools"...and I think we started the conversation this way. People tend to confuse automation to abstraction, and a lot of times, people get so comfortable automating the same things over and over, almost like a Westworld Loop, that they forget that we should rethink the thing that we're automating and ask ourselves if we should replace it with better abstractions. So I would say this this may be your very moment to pause for a second look at the work you do, and ask yourself, "Is it time for a new abstraction?" And if it is, I think that's the perfect opportunity to either go find a project that's attacking that problem or maybe even start your own that introduces the new abstraction based on all of that experience that you have.

ADRIANA: Awesome. I really love that. Well, thank you so much, Kelsey, for geeking out with me today. Y'all don't forget to subscribe, and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

KELSEY: All right, everyone, don't forget to Peace Out and Geek Out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout. Hey, hey Geeking Out fans! We're taking a little break for the holidays, so this will be the last episode of 2023. Be sure to catch us again in January as we Geek Out with a fabulous lineup of guests.

ADRIANA: See you in 2024. And Peace Out, and Geek Out. Bye!