The One Where We Geek Out on Artists Turned Techies with Reese Lee of New Relic

Sep 12, 2023

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About our guest:

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

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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.

I've got with me Reese Lee from New Relic. Yay!

REESE: Hello. I'm so excited.

ADRIANA: I am super stoked to have you on because we work together on the OpenTelemetry End User Working Group. So we're like, always chatting.

REESE: Yes. Huge supporter of Adriana and so honored to be here. So hopefully we have something good for y'all.

ADRIANA: Yay, super excited. And Reese, where are you calling from today?

REESE: I am calling from Vancouver, Washington. So not Vancouver, BC. Lovely Pacific Northwest. It's very nice out right now, so that's why I'm in the sun.

ADRIANA: So awesome. Yeah, I had to retreat indoors. It is exceedingly humid here in Toronto. Yeah, we had a bit of a reprieve from the excessive heat that's been going around in most places, but the last couple of days have been sweltering. But I don't think I'm any better indoors because my office is super hot, but I...

REESE: Oh, no. Yeah.

ADRIANA: But I can't record outside because it's so noisy. There's always cars driving by and I always sit on my front porch when I work outside. So, alas, I can live vicariously through you .

REESE: Oh, no. Yes, for now. It's funny, it's been a pretty mild summer. We've even had a couple overcast rainy days. Usually by now we'll have seen some or more 90 degree days than we've seen so far this summer, so we'll see.

ADRIANA: Fingers crossed.

REESE: I can't believe it's August already. I guess, yeah. We still have more hot days ahead.

ADRIANA: Sorry?

REESE: Oh, just saying we still have more hot days ahead. It's not August yet.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, I know, right? Yeah, I think it's coming for us.

REESE: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Okay, so I'm going to start off before we get into the regular format. Well, I guess this is part of the regular format. I want to do some lightning round questions. I promise they'll be fun. Don't panic. You are the first person I'm subjecting to these lightning round questions.

REESE: Let me do some stretches.

ADRIANA: You have the distinct honour of being the first person I'm recording, so I'm testing out my format on you. Okay, question number one. Are you a lefty or a righty?

REESE: Righty.

ADRIANA: Are you iPhone or Android?

REESE: Android

ADRIANA: Mac, Linux or Windows? What's your preference? Not what you work with, but what you would prefer to work with.

REESE: Mac.

ADRIANA: All right, favorite programming language?

REESE: .NET

ADRIANA: Cool.

REESE:

ADRIANA: Dev or ops?

REESE: Ops? I don't know.

ADRIANA: And there's no wrong answer. And final question: Do you prefer to consume content through video or through blog posts?

REESE: Blog posts.

ADRIANA: I'm the same way. When someone throws a video at me, I'm like, Nah.

REESE: Yeah. I like to be able to read it and see the words. And sometimes people just either talk too fast or they talk too slow.

ADRIANA: Exactly. It's like sometimes I can read faster than they can speak, so let's get on with it. And then you can skim.

REESE: Yes. And then depending, sometimes they have weird...they try to do funny little things, which is fine, but sometimes I'm like, I just need the info. I don't have time for 20 seconds of you being silly.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's true. I know. I keep thinking that, too. Like, whenever I read blog posts. And sometimes I have a lot of preamble in my blog posts, so then I feel guilty for doing it.

But I'm like, I think somebody somewhere enjoys this. But for those who don't, I have clearly marked headings so that you can skim to the goodies.

REESE: Yes. It reminds me of recipes where you just want the recipe and they go into the whole backstory of how this recipe been in the family for generations, and they like to make it on rainy Sundays or whatever. And I'm like, oh, my God, I just want it.

ADRIANA: Yes, it yeah, I'm totally with you on that one. Like, on these recipe sites, I'm like, Just give me the damn recipe.

REESE: I'm already hungry. I don't have time to...

ADRIANA: I know, cut to the chase and can I have shortcuts?

REESE: Yes. What do I need to buy from the grocery store?

ADRIANA: Well, there you go. You survived my lightning round of questions, so let us get into the meaty bits. All right, so I guess let's start with the beginning. Like, how did you get into tech?

REESE: Yeah, I've really only been in...I'm still a baby, I think, in the tech industry. Before I came to New Relic, I had my own small business, which I did for several years.

I was in recruiting for a while. I was in retail management for some time. And after several years of running my own business, I was ready for new challenges, and I was also ready for a steady paycheck again.

And I enrolled in a local coding bootcamp, actually, which, incidentally, is where a lot of Relics also come from. Got into tech support at New Relic, which is what I did for the first couple of years and then kind of happened upon Developer Relations. And so I've been doing that for almost a couple of years as well now. I'm now a Senior DevRel Engineer with a specific focus on open source technologies, specifically OpenTelemetry, which is how Adriana and I met. And yeah, I am here now.

ADRIANA: Wow, that's so cool. That is, like, quite a varied path.

REESE: Yeah, it has been. I kind of wish I'd checked out tech sooner. I always had this idea that programming was very dry, very boring. That was just a perception that I had. And I had a friend, she's an artist. She used to make apparel. She has some really cool stuff. I actually have quite a few of her pieces, and she went to the coding bootcamp, and I was like, what really? That interests you? And she was the catalyst, really, for me, looking into software programming.

And that was how I learned that it's actually really creative and it's all about creating, just using a different format from like, I used to make jewelry and art. And so I love creating stuff, being creative.

And when I learned that, holy shit, programming is actually a very creative activity, just using a different medium, I was really intrigued, enrolled literally, like, two weeks later in the same bootcamp that she did.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

REESE: And yeah, haven't looked back since.

ADRIANA: That is so awesome. It's funny because I always have said that programming is a very artistic endeavour. I think you met my daughter the one time, and she is so artsy, and both my husband and I are in tech. And she's like, "Fuck no, I do not want to do this. I do not want to sit at a computer all day long." She's an artistic person. She wants to be a dentist. So I think she prefers to sit at a dentist chair hovered over somebody's face than at a desk. But hey, each their own.

But I keep telling her, I'm like, "Hannah, honestly, you'd be such a kick-ass developer." I mean, not that I'm not going to force her either way. She takes her own path. I am fully for that. But I always thought that if she allowed herself, she would actually be a very kick-ass developer.

REESE: And she might and she might eventually take her own path to yeah, like, if I'd known sooner, I definitely would have checked it out way earlier than I did.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

REESE: You just never know.

ADRIANA: I feel you. I started out early in programming, but then I rejected it for a really long time. When I went off to university, I'm like, I'm never going to touch coding again. But I studied engineering, and it's part of the curriculum. You have to code as part of it. But I think when I started studying in school is when I finally had these "Aha!" moments because I was mostly a self- taught programmer.

I'd get those big thick books from the bookstore and learn QBASIC. That was my first programming language for me, that was like, oh, I don't want to do any of this stuff. This seems horrible. I don't have the brain for this. And then I discovered, oh, I actually do have the brain for this. I was just, like, looking at it completely differently.

REESE: Yes, absolutely. Along with thinking it was dry and boring, I also thought, oh, I don't have my brain. Doesn't work quite that way. I'm still learning a lot. There's still a lot of technical things to learn to practice.

But I didn't even know at one point that it would be a thing I would be interested in. So I really hope people, especially those that are kind of sitting on the fence or they also think it's boring, I hope they somehow find this and they're like, oh, maybe I should check it out.

ADRIANA: Yeah, let them be inspired!

REESE: Mmhmm.

ADRIANA: So your business before you went into, like, you took the coding bootcamp, so you were selling, like, jewelry. You said you're making your own.

REESE: Yeah. So there's really two small businesses that I was running. One is Chubby animal illustrations. It was mostly like, fat cats. And I also had brass and gemstone jewelry that I would make. So I did a lot of local regional art shows, also had my products in a lot of stores over the country and had international customers. And it was really fun. And I still do that on the side a little bit now to kind of keep that juice flowing. Creative juice flowing is what I meant.

ADRIANA: That's awesome.

REESE: Yeah.

ADRIANA: I have to say, running a business is so hard because I did that for a year. And after a year, I was like, no, I'm done.

REESE: What did you do?

ADRIANA: I decided to quit tech in like, I don't know, it was like 2013 or 2012 to become a professional photographer, and it was going to be like, "Bye bitches, I'm done." And I came back to tech a year later.

REESE: I mean, to be fair, I do know professional photographers as well who work for themselves, and it does take a lot to build up to that place.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly.

REESE: And years, for sure.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

REESE: Yeah.

ADRIANA: That was the thing. For me, after a year, I was at a crossroads. I'm like, if I love this enough, I can keep at it and maybe I'll even build my business. And I was starting to see I had made some changes to how I approach things, and I was starting to see the changes, but by then I was like, this is exhausting. I don't actually want to do this for a living. I actually loved tinkering with doing my website and I liked blogging and sending out my newsletters, which is a lot of DevRel-y stuff. And I'm like, oh, I had more fun troubleshooting the PHP and some plugin that I bought for my WordPress site than having to deal with the day-to-day BS of running a business.

And then I'm like, you know what, it's time for re-evaluation. And I came back to the exact same team. And for me, I think the hardest thing was getting over the fact of what will people think of me? Because I was like, "Bye, I'm done." And then I'm like, you know what, I don't care what people think. I'm doing this for me, not for other people's perception. So screw it.

REESE: Yes. That is so important. That's such an important thing that I hope we really impart to everyone who's listening is that do what you got to do. Don't worry so much about what other people are thinking.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

REESE: They're going to think what they're going to think. No matter what you do. If you think you're doing the right thing, other people could still be judging you and thinking you're not doing the right thing. So who cares? Just do what's right for you. Try out what's good for you and go with that. People are going to think what they're going to think anyways, and just let them be. Just focus on being the best thing for yourself.

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. You do you. So what made you sort of decide, like, you wanted to put a pause on the side...I guess they weren't side businesses at the time, the actual businesses to shift over to do this bootcamp. I know you said you were inspired by your friend who...artist friend who was doing this bootcamp, but what kind of made you sort of take a step back and think, maybe I need to change.

REESE: Well, kind of like to what you said, running your own business is hard. There's definitely a lot of great perks. So my work schedule was almost whenever I wanted. I would just obviously have to make sure for the shows that I wanted to do, have those scheduled and make time to make the products for those shows. And the landscape has changed so much too since I was last really in it with social media. A lot of people run their businesses online fully as artists, and that can still be really hard because of the algorithm. And like, oh, now Instagram wants you to do reels. And you don't really want to do reels. You just want to take photos of your products, which, as a consumer, I prefer sometimes to just look at photos because not everyone's good at doing videos. And if I have to rewatch a video four times just to see the products, that is so annoying.

So the landscape has changed a lot and of course the pandemic. I think things are kind of getting back to normal. But I went to the bootcamp in 2019, which is a year before everything shut down, timing-wise it was really interesting because all of a sudden the markets were like, can we be open? Should we not be open? But people need to depend on this for the livelihoods, we don't know what to do.

And so I viewed it as a very serendipitous time for me to have made that change because by that time everything shut down. I was already at New Relic doing tech support and seeing my artist friends kind of like trying to figure all that out. I felt very grateful. And to answer your question, yeah, I have been doing it for several years. I really enjoyed it. But it is definitely a huge grind. If you're not working, you're not making money a lot of the time, like there's online sales and stuff, but you still have to promote, promote, promote, make sure your products get seen it's a lot. And paying 300 something dollars a month for health insurance was starting to get real tiresome.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, I totally agree.

REESE: Yeah. So I was also thinking I just wanted to try something new, look for some new challenges and get into something I've never done before. And so I also viewed my friend's trajectory as very opportune because it led directly to my timing of my switch and everything world events happening. So, very grateful.

And for anyone who's listening, if you're thinking about trying a new career, do it.Just try it out if you can and see if you like it or not.

ADRIANA: I mean, if you're in a position where you're like, I can afford to check this out for like a year and see how I feel, absolutely, go for it. Because there's always going to be an excuse, right, to not try.

REESE: Yes, I think a lot of people think, oh, I got to do this and this and they have this laundry list of things to do before they're ready and...

I saw this meme that I think will illustrate this point more and I'll send to you so you can put in your show notes or something, but it was something like, confidence doesn't come from being ready. You have to take action to build that confidence, if that makes sense.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it makes sense. I think it's like one of those gradual things, right, that builds up. Like...

REESE: So, like, yes, okay, "Don't wait until you feel confident enough to act. Your confidence builds as you take action."

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's perfect. I love it.

REESE: That was the thing. Yes, I messed it up, but that was it.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. Words to live by.

REESE: Yeah, I screenshot it because I was like, I'm going to Oh, cool. share this with people and I will send that to you're...

ADRIANA: Yeah, I want to put that in the show notes. That's awesome. Cool. Now I'm beholden to including these in the show notes. Dun dun dun. Cool.

So you mentioned your journey into tech and then so you started in tech support once you got your first tech role, and then what brought you into DevRel and then specifically, like OpenTelemetry?

REESE: Oh, man. I really enjoy tech support, and there's aspects of it that I miss even like, solving, just like spending time trying to figure out these technical problems that our users are having. I really enjoy that piece of it. I do still get to do that a little bit in my current role.

So I've been doing tech support for a couple of years. I knew I wanted eventually to explore beyond tech support and most tech companies, there's so many different paths you can check out, right?

Software engineering, product management, technical training. There's so many other paths also that I was not even aware of, like program management, talent acquisition.

And so I knew I wanted to try other things. I kind of decided on one route specifically. And so I was just really open at the time to just seeing what was available and looking for opportunities to add to my skill set here at New Relic. I didn't know anything about Developer Relations. Did not even know it was a thing.

There were two engineers that I had worked with in tech support. They worked on the .NET Agent, and both of them reached out to me separately about this new role that was on their team. They were on the OpenTelemetry team. And at first when the first engineer reached out to me, I took a look and I was like, oh, that's very cute. That's very nice that you thought of me, but I don't know about this. And then when the other engineer reached out to me, I was like, okay, maybe I should believe in myself a little bit more.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

REESE: And so I ended up reaching out to the hiring manager, and she and I chatted more about the role. And that's when I found out about Developer Relations a little bit more. And the more I learned about it, the more intrigued I became because it's a lot of different things rolled into one, which is very great for my ADHD brain.

I need a lot of different things to keep me stimulated and motivated. And yeah, after chatting with her more, I decided to go through with the internal application process and I was hired on.

And that was when I really dove into OpenTelemetry and learned more about what it is, exactly what it means for Observability moving forward, and landed in the OpenTelemetry End User Working Group, which is how I met Adriana.

And yeah, it's been a wild ride. I've since published several blog posts. I've spoken in front of a live audience of hundreds of people, which I used to be extremely, extremely shy. Like, even in college, I had trouble speaking in front of the class and would need my professor to help me because I was extremely shy. And so the fact that I have now spoken on technical topics in front of hundreds of people is amazing to me.

ADRIANA: And you're a great speakerk. I can vouch for that. I remember attending two of your talks and I'm like, damn.

REESE: Thank you. Oh, my God, that means so much coming from you because I don't know if you all have seen Adriana's Talks, but she is awesome. Her slides are amazing.

ADRIANA: Thank you.

REESE: Yeah. So thank you.

ADRIANA: Awwww...And hopefully we can do a collab talk at some point. Fingers crossed. That our KubeCon. Or is it Observability Day? We applied for one of those together. Observability Day, I think. Fingers crossed!

REESE: Those notifications, I think, come out next month, I think so? In, like, a week...

ADRIANA: I'm going to be on edge. Yeah. Because I think August 6 is the deadline for the CFPs for KubeCon and Observability Day.

You're right. You're right. Yeah. The deadline.

ADRIANA: I guess they'll let us know in a month.

REESE: Yes, you're right. Okay.

ADRIANA: We'll see. We'll see. So...And we applied also for DevOps days, Montreal. Let's see how that goes. Fingers crossed.

REESE: Yes, I know. Oh, my gosh. I sort of got...every week is, like, such a whirlwind.

ADRIANA: I know, right? CFPs are so exhausting to do and I guess for our listeners who aren't familiar with the term CFP is call for proposal. Right? Usually that's what it stands for.

REESE: Yeah.

ADRIANA: So it's like when there's a conference or whatever, they put out a CFP, so you have to fill out an application for speaking. Like, it's basically a proposal for a talk. And if they like you, then you get to talk. But it's a lot of work to put together a CFP, and every conference has its own nuance, so then you have to tweak it for their specific ask, and then they'll limit the number of characters for a certain description. So then you write this beautiful thing and it's like, I'm sorry, you're over by 100 characters. You're like, fuck.

REESE: Although I have found usually for me, it's easier to have more and then subtract versus, like, oh, I might not have to add more.

ADRIANA: Yeah...

REESE: But yes, it's a whole project in itself, like, submitting proposals and then trying to come...

ADRIANA: And then when you get rejected, it's like, "They don't love me. What's wrong?"

REESE: Trying to come up with topics that I think are timely, relevant, interesting, not just to the audience, but something that I might want to learn, too. Oh, man.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly.

REESE: It's a whole thing.

ADRIANA: Yeah, because that's part of the, I guess, CFP game, if you will, is like, you don't necessarily have to be an expert in that topic, but if it's something that you want to learn more about, it's an opportunity. Like, if you get accepted, it's like, well, I guess I'm digging into this now.

REESE: Yes. And so actually, my old manager, she pointed out something. Well, I guess I kind of done it because I submitted a talk proposal about tail sampling in The Collector within, like, a month of me starting my DevRel job and not really knowing too much about OTel at the time, and found out a couple of months later I got accepted, and I was like, oh, shit, I really got to learn up and down.

But she explicitly said she would submit talk proposals on topics that she wanted to learn about that she didn't really know. And I was like, that is what I did without knowing it. And it's such a great idea to make sure you have time to learn something that is your job and that you can now teach to other people.

ADRIANA: Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I keep running into your tail-based sampling article every so often, and it's very well-written. Like, Reese is a very good writer. So good speaker, good writer. You got the whole package.

REESE: Thank you. I do have a degree in magazine journalism, so I would hope I am a good writer.

ADRIANA: That is so awesome. Oh, my God. You're like Mystery Woman. So many skills.

REESE: Finally putting my degree to good use

ADRIANA: That's so cool. I did not know that. Damn. This is why we have podcasts, so that we could learn more about each other.

REESE: I really enjoyed writing, and when it came time to apply to university, I was like, writing journalism. But then with me being so shy as I was at the time, I just found it really hard to be in a reporter mode.

ADRIANA: Yeah, because you have to be outgoing.

REESE: Once I start talking to people, that's fine. I've gotten some good interviews in the past, but going out, I'm much better at it now. And I know a lot of people will be shocked to learn that I was so shy, but I was. And I've definitely had to get out of the comfort zone and talk to people on my own.

ADRIANA: Especially when you're running your own business, like, you got to promote yourself. That's what I found scary about running my own business, where I'm like, oh, God. Because I'm the same as you. I am mortified of talking to most people. When I was a kid, even going up to an information desk at a mall was like it took me half an hour of convincing myself, okay, I can talk to this person and forget talking on the phone. That is a mega phobia of mine. But to run your own business, you have to put all that aside and just suck it up and do it. And I do feel like for me personally, it helped a lot, and it sounds like for you as well.

REESE: 1000%. Oh, you know, other things that have helped along the way too, being in retail management and just people feeling like they can just come up and say whatever they want to you.

ADRIANA: Oh, jeez.

REESE: And I worked in recruiting for a while for an agency, and so I did a lot of cold calls.

ADRIANA: Oh, jeez. That's very...

REESE: You have to get over that real fast as well. Yeah, it's been interesting, like post college, just been putting myself in these situations where I'm like, okay, I have to talk to people.

ADRIANA: Well it paid off.

REESE: Yes. Now speaking live in front of ike 500 people.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Like, KubeCon EU, you had quite the audience for your Metrics talk...

REESE: Yes

ADRIANA: And it was a good talk.

REESE: thank you.

ADRIANA: You're welcome.

REESE: Yes

ADRIANA: So we're almost at time, but I did want to spend a little bit of time talking about the OTel end user working group. I figure we should always promote the fun things that we do. So yeah. Why don't I let you explain what it is and the cool things that we do?

REESE: So the OpenTelemetry community, I'll just take a step back a little bit. So the OpenTelemetry community, like, I think a lot of open source communities, is made up of many special interest groups or SIGs, as well as working groups or WGs, but I guess we can just say working groups that all have specific purposes to develop the community and the technology that it's part of, right?

And so the End User Working Group, it was actually created by my former manager of the OpenTelemetry team here at New Relic. She saw a need to create a space where end users could come together and have access to resources to help them learn about OTel, adopt OTel, implement OTel, as well as a space for vendors and other interested parties who want to help develop OpenTelemetry to create resources for end users.

And so to that end, we now have several monthly events that we do. So you'll see Adriana and myself at a lot of these.

We have the End User Discussion Group, which is where end users come together and discuss challenges that they face with their migration. We also have a guest maintainer or someone from the technical or governance committee come on to help provide additional insight to the project and help answer some of the deeper technical questions that we may not be as aware of.

We also have OpenTelemetry in practice, which is kind of an hour long, or they're about presentations about OpenTelemetry. So, like, for instance, we did one recently about how Observability is a team sport which is about adopting OpenTelemetry at a specific company. It was Farfetch with that one. That was a really good one.

We had someone come on and talk about what distributed tracing is and how to do it with OpenTelemetry.

So that's two.

We have another one, which is the End User Q&A/interview/feedback session. It's kind of all those things. And that's where we sit and chat with an organization who is adopting or has adopted and implemented OTel in their organizations, and we find out, why did you decide to migrate to OTel? What are the challenges that you face? Like, how did you migrate? Because a lot of end users are interested in that. We also do blog posts which from some of these events that you can see on the OTel blog.

We also have a community survey that anyone is welcome to take and share. Whether you are just kind of starting out in OTel or you have already implemented OTel in production, we are always looking for ways to improve the project. And that was one thing I forgot to mention at the beginning, which is one of the goals of the End User Working Group.

So besides being a space for end users and developers of OTel to come together, we also want to create and maintain a constant feedback loop from end users to maintainers with the ultimate goal of improving and advancing the project.

So these are the activities that we started and are doing pretty much every month to meet those goals. And so that's why feedback is so important to us. Connecting with end users is so important to us. And if you have an OTel story to tell, we would love to hear it. We know other end users would love to hear it. And so I know Adriana will get all these in her show notes about how you get in touch with us and stuff. So I will get that to her and yeah, I feel like there's other stuff that I might be forgetting but those are the main ones.

ADRIANA: I feel like you got the important ones yeah. I do feel...like you said, we do blog post summaries of some of these events, and then we also put up some of the videos for these because that way we cater to our video lovers and our blog lovers alike. Which I find that they're usually very well-received. Like, whenever I post them on socials, people really seem to enjoy the content.

So it makes me really happy that even if you're not able to actually attend the session, you can still benefit from it after the fact. And I always find in these sessions, you always learn new things, especially end user discussions where because we do usually have somebody from the OTel community who's in attendance and they'll mention stuff that being worked on where you're like, oh my God, I didn't know that was a thing. Even so, I always find it's super useful to attend these and there's always something new to learn and then there's people with really gnarly ass use cases for OTel, sharing some of the questions that are asked. I'm like, oh my God, this is awesome. I did not know about this.

REESE: Yeah, and so if you're interested and you don't feel like you have specific questions but you kind of just kind of want to listen in, please feel free to do so. There's no obligation for you to ask questions if you don't really know if you just kind of want to sit in and learn and don't even know what questions you might want to ask yet.

ADRIANA: Yeah, so true. It's such a great learning opportunity. I know people always will tell me after the fact, too, that they always get so much out of these sessions. If you're an OpenTelemetry fan, highly recommend.

REESE: Yes, and then you can come chat with Adriana and myself real time.

ADRIANA: And we've got our third co-lead as well, Rynn, who also...they did a lot of the OTel in Practice in the past as well, and a lot of organizing. Like there's a meetup group for OTel End User Working Group, so I know they're always keeping that up-to-date.

Tons and tons of stuff that we work on behind the scenes and there's three of us running this thing and there's so much work to do. But it's good that there's stuff keeping us busy because it means that there's demand from the community.

REESE: Yes. And it's also a great know if you want to contribute to the community but not necessarily with code contributions. We could always use help with content creation. Oh, there is one more thing. The YouTube channel. The OTel YouTube channel.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's where we post our videos after. Yeah, we edit them so that they're not like boring.

REESE: Adriana does a fabulous job with that. But yes, we are going to try and do more with the YouTube channel as well with creating content.

ADRIANA: Yes, content creation, especially video, is like so much work. Oh my God.

REESE: Yep, yep.

ADRIANA: Like even a short little Instagram reel, you're like, Holy crap. Especially when you're like fiddling around on your phone going, how do I use this little tiny thing here?

REESE: Oh yes. Yeah, going back know, running like my own small business, product photos, product descriptions, all of those things, all of those things take so much.

ADRIANA: Time and effort. But we do it because we love it.

REEDE:Yes.

ADRIANA: Cool. Well, as we wrap up, I wanted to know if there are any parting thoughts that you would like to share, any inspiration with our audience.

REESE: Whoo. I feel like I did I did so much better in the lightning round that than now, I guess since we kind of talked more about the career side of things. One thing that I try to impart on my colleagues to help them with their own career growth is especially as so much of us work on remote teams.

Now, do your best to be visible with your communications and your contributions online so that your teammates, your future managers, future teammates see and shout out your co-workers.

Talk about the problems that you've solved. Obviously not in a braggadocious manner, but just be like, hey, I did this thing, and I want to thank so and so for their help. It goes such a long way for people to see that who may not necessarily work with you a lot over Zoom or in person.

And that has really helped me with my career growth here, is being very visible in my online communications. And yeah, from that, I've had people reach out to me about internal opportunities. So I really want to encourage people to be as visible as you can.

ADRIANA: I think that's really, really great advice. And being visible means sometimes it means tooting your own horn and it feels weird, but it's got to be done, otherwise nobody knows what you've done.

REESE: Yes, it's a skill that I am still learning as well. But think about, like, when other people do it, you're like, oh, my gosh, I didn't know you did that. That's great. Great job.

ADRIANA: It yeah, totally.

REESE: So think of it from that perspective. And it's rare that I'll be like, look at this person bragging about themselves.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

REESE: I never really thought that at all when I've seen something like that on Slack. And so if that's your concern, don't let it.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree. And the same goes especially for an outward-facing role like ours, doing it on social media. People are not going to see your content unless you put it out there and it feels weird. I admit sometimes some of the stuff I post feels weird, but no one's going to know that I've done this unless I post it them.

REESE: Exactly. I mean, you know, no one knew what Apple was at one point. They had to get the word out there.

ADRIANA: Exactly. And I also really liked your other point of giving shout outs? Give credit where credit is due. Because I think we don't get here just from climbing the mountain solo. We've had a lot of help along the way and making sure that folks get that recognition, because I do feel like what goes around comes around. There's good karma to be had. Paying it forward, I think, goes a really long way.

REESE: Yes, 100%.

ADRIANA: Cool. Well, thank you, Reese, for joining me here today. This was a super awesome conversation. And thanks for letting me guinea pig you on my lightning round questions.

REESE: I am so honoured, and thank you so much. I'm so excited to see what you do with this new podcast.

ADRIANA: Yay. I'm psyched. Thanks for following me on my journey. Well, everyone, thank you for joining today on Geeking out. 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, I am your host, Adriana Villela, with Reese Lee, signing off with...

TOGETHER: Peace out, 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.