Welcome to

the Code Nuby Podcast. We talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I'm your host, Ron, and today we're talking about going from site reliability to principal engineer with Alice Goldthuss, principal software engineer and systems programmer specializing in building resilient, distributed systems at scale.

What I want to say is it's a job and you should have a life outside of it. But honestly, in my 20s, I was just constantly reading books, constantly coding, constantly figuring out Linux, prepping conference talks, traveling to give conference talks, just going all the time, because I just felt like those dogs nipping at my heels.

Alice talks about her coding journey and what

an SRE is

after this. This episode of Code Nuby is sponsored by Pork Bun, a refreshingly different domain name registrar. Get a free dot app or dot dev domain name for your next online project by visiting pork bun code newbie dot dev or click the link in this episode's description. This episode is supported by Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small and strange, like what are the components of a software stack? Our mistakes that big of a deal and do you have to know how to code to get started in open source? Listen to Compiler in your favorite podcast player. We'll also include a link in the show notes. Thanks to Compiler for

their support.

Thank you so much for being

here. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

So what initially drew you to code?

I grew up around code and computers. I grew up in a very rural upstate New York town where we literally got our first traffic light when I was in high school and our only traffic light when I was in high school. But my parents were both programmers and so we always had a computer in the house even before we had internet. And so it was just sort of something I was used to having around and seeing. And initially what drew me to learn how to code was to create a website where I could talk about my favorite characters from different media properties. My father had left this like learn HTML for book hanging out and I was like, oh yeah, that's what I need. And I taught myself how to write HTML for by hand, like inline CSS. And at the time I didn't understand what it meant to like host a website. I knew that if I wrote code in, I think it was even notepad++ and then I opened it in Firefox or perhaps Netscape, I could see it. And so I had there for me to website. That was my initial interest was, oh, I can now make a website to talk about things that I like.