The One Where We Geek Out on Reinventing Yourself with Whitney Lee

Feb 11, 2025

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About our guest:

Whitney is a lovable goofball and a CNCF Ambassador who enjoys understanding and using tools in the cloud native landscape. Creative and driven, Whitney recently pivoted from an art-related career to one in tech. You can catch her lightboard streaming show ⚡️ Enlightning on Tanzu.TV, and she also co-hosts the streaming show You Choose! - a 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure'-style journey through the CNCF landscape alongside Viktor Farcic.

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

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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 Whitney Lee. Welcome, Whitney.

WHITNEY: Hello. I'm so happy to be here.

ADRIANA: I am super excited that you were able to join and I want to get into this a little bit later, but we're like kindred spirits in some ways, like because we have photography in common. Although you did it way later than me. I mean, way longer than me. I'm super excited to have you join.

WHITNEY: Yay. I'm joining you from Austin, Texas.

ADRIANA: Awesome. So cool. So to get started, we are going to do some icebreaker questions.

WHITNEY: Bring it.

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

WHITNEY: Presumably you mean which hand I write with. Not like which side of the bed I sleep on or I don't know which side of the car I drive on. I try to drive on the, on the right side when you do a steering wheel. So I'm, I'm right handed.

ADRIANA: It's funny because when I was.

WHITNEY: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

WHITNEY: Well, I write on the whiteboard as part of my, my job in the. It's switched in the camera. It's mirrored so it looks like I'm writing with my left hand to people. Yeah, but it's really just all mirrored. I'm writing like I'm not writing backwards.

ADRIANA: It's funny because I was actually going to mention that because when you had me on Enlightning talks, I, I messaged you just before it started. I'm like, are you a lefty? I get so excited when I meet other lefties. I'm like, there's more of us. And yeah, I was wondering actually about writing on the Lightboard also on. I'm like, are you like really good at mirror writing?

WHITNEY: It's hard enough to understand.

ADRIANA: Because it totally looks like that in the videos.

WHITNEY: Writing it backwards. Yeah.

ADRIANA: I hear you. Okay, next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

WHITNEY: I am. I have given into the iPhone ecosystem and really like, it's kind of like all my family does it and I. So it's. I'm an iPhone girl. It's okay. No judgment either way though. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Yeah. My, my family is also like all iPhone.

WHITNEY: You get that one person in there who turns the, the chat green. They don't even know what they're doing.

ADRIANA: This is, this is what wars are fought over. The. The Green Bubble. On a similar vein. And I think I might know your answer. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?

WHITNEY: I. I use MacBook. MacBook Pros. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Speaking to a fellow fan girl. All right, next question. Oh, yeah, go ahead.

WHITNEY: I draw a lot. I've really gotten into the Procreate app. I guess it's on my iPad.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

WHITNEY: Still part of the Apple ecosystem. For a second, I thought it was any different. I'm not. Yeah, I'm a stereotype. It's okay.

ADRIANA: Apple all the way. Woop woop. Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?

WHITNEY: Oh, YAML.

ADRIANA: I'm sure there's some, like, YAML haters who'd be like, grrrrr.

WHITNEY: Well, my. My story is that I changed careers into tech relatively late in my life and relatively recently. Only, like four years ago now. Um, so I. When I. I went back to school and I went to a boot camp, and in the boot camp, I learned JavaScript. Like, for a year, I. I did like, it's called the MERN stack, but I can't remember what it all stands for. Now. The R is React. Yeah. And Node and Express. Okay. And the M is Mon. Mongo. Anyway, this is not interesting. Yeah. And so I spent. I spent like a year, like, eating, living. Living code in the MERN stack and learning how to be an application developer. And then I immediately got a job as a cloud developer and then never touched any of that knowledge ever again.

ADRIANA: YAML is your language. That's awesome. I do like YAML. I was actually, like, just before we did this recording, I was editing a JSON file and it was like, getting mad at me because the. The syntax checker was like, you need a comma. I'm like, god damn it. If it was YAML, this wouldn't be a problem. And also making me use quotes.

WHITNEY: Rude!

ADRIANA: Yeah, I know, right? Okay, next question. Do you prefer dev or ops?

WHITNEY: Oh, I get. I. You know, ops. Based on what I just said, I think you could get that.

ADRIANA: That's what I assumed. And I know the answer to this question. JSON or YAML?

WHITNEY: Yeah, you tell me. You tell me about me. I like this better.

ADRIANA: I know, right? Like, all your questions are like, already. Your answers are already answering subsequent questions. I love it. Okay, next one. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?

WHITNEY: Spaces. I prefer when my. When my YAML is structure aware. Spaces, whatever. Yes, yes.

ADRIANA: And then do you prefer to learn through video or text?

WHITNEY: Oh, ironically, since I make videos all day long, I don't I don't learn through video. I like text. Yeah.

ADRIANA: People have said to me, they're like, oh, you make videos, so you must like to learn through videos. I'm like, no, I like reading stuff. It's way faster.

WHITNEY: Very much. And I can go back over that. Like a video. Like the second I miss something, like when concepts are built on top of each other, the second you miss something or tune out for a little bit and try to come back, you've lost the context. And it takes a lot, it feels like it takes a lot of focus or like, or a good presenter who's always coming back and reminding you the context or like drawings or something to keep that context there. But yeah, it's easy to lose context in a video or a talk.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. It's funny because, like, I keep thinking back to like my university days where, you know, like, if the professor was talking about something really complex and then like, you zone. It's similar thing, right? You zone out for a second and you're like, and, and you're screwed for the rest of the lesson. Unless, you know, you're bold enough to like, raise your hand and ask questions and if the professor doesn't flat out dismiss you. And, and, and I, I just keep thinking, I'm like, I, you know, if it were me going to school now, like, I, I don't know if I could do it. Like, I would just zone out so much. I'd be like, I need to like, have some sort of, you know, recording or some sort of, you know, proper record of the thing so that I could like, rewind. I'm like, sometimes I feel like I wish our brains could have like, you know, a just in time Google search on conversations or rewind on conversations. Because, like, I don't know about you, but for me, like being ADHD, I'll be like having a conversation and then I'll zone out. I'm like crap!

WHITNEY: What'd I miss? Oh no.

ADRIANA: I feel so terrible.

WHITNEY: Redoing the college years. Like, I might get distracted. But these days, like this version of Whitney, I don't mind seeming like I don't know or actually not knowing or admitting that I zoned out or just like being this like, like, like college version of Whitney would be very shy about asking that question. And present day Whitney would be like, that does. I don't like getting up and yelling. I don't understand. Explain it.

ADRIANA: I, that's such a great point. And I, I couldn't agree with you more. Like, past me would have been like, just terrified would just sit there in confusion. And now I'm like, I do. I. I've described it as like the Columbo thing where you're like, you know, like, just for my benefit, can you, like, explain this? Because I don't fully get it. And for you kids out there who don't know who Columbo is, link in the show notes. But yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting how, like, wisdom and I don't know, like, just after a while you're like, I ain't got time for this. I just need to know.

WHITNEY: It's true. No time for my. Time for. I used it all up. It's gone now.

ADRIANA: That is perfect. I love it. Final question. What is your superpower?

WHITNEY: Oh, what's my superpower? I. I guess it's in line with, with not being afraid to ask questions or also maybe being super empathetic too. When I am a speaker, like, I'm making the talk that I want to hear. So it involves, it's really fast paced, it involves a lot of visuals, it has a lot of, A lot of context. So if you zone out, you, if you come back, you. You have stuff to bring you back and let you know where you are. Yeah, I'd say that's it. It's about it. I just don't care, so. I don't care how I seem, so I care a lot about doing my best.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

WHITNEY: But I don't care what people think because I know myself and I did my best. If someone's judging me after that point, then that's a problem with them and not a problem with me. Like, it. So what. What was my answer and all of that? I just blabbed a lot. I don't. Empathy combined with not caring what people think combined with storytelling.

ADRIANA: Yep. Yep. That's awesome. That's awesome. I love it so much. Yeah. And I, I think that's something because I think so many people in tech have, like, can be so self conscious of, of how they do. And I've. I've spoken to so many people, so it's so. I, I love it that you're like, yep, I did. I did what I could. I did my best. And that's. And I'm happy with that. And I think that's so refreshing.

WHITNEY: And my, my best varies from moment to moment. Like, I can see a video I made a year ago and it's a little cringy because I didn't know then what I. Something I know now, you know, but I know at that moment. I did my best, so I still can feel proud of that content.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's actually, like, such a great way of looking at it. And it's also a really good opportunity to see, like, how much you've grown too, right?

WHITNEY: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Look at me now.

WHITNEY: If you don't cringe at your past videos, your past journal entries, just like your past stuff, then that means you're not growing fast enough. So true. It should embarrass you.

ADRIANA: Oh, my god. You mentioned journal entries, But I'm like, thinking back to when I was a kid rereading my journal entries, I'm like, ugh.

WHITNEY: That's great. You've come so far.

ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Cool.

ADRIANA: Well, we. We have completed the. The icebreaker questions, so I wanted to talk, you know, we. You alluded to the fact that you. You came into tech later in life. I want to talk about, like, what you were doing before and then what led you to tech. Tell us about your journey.

WHITNEY: Oh, buckle in. It's a long one. So my degree, I graduated in 2003. I'm 45 years old. I graduated in 2003 with a degree in fine art. And for a moment, I even had a bit of a fine art career. But at some point I was like, I actually need more money than what's happening right now. So I started a wedding photography business. And I'd already been doing wedding photography as. So my degrees in photography specifically as a side job while I was making art. And so I just focused all my attention on this wedding photography business. And I had a wedding photography business here in Austin, Texas for 10 years. It was a long time. And I think I've personally been to 500 weddings. And my company, all in all, photographs were like 1200 weddings or something ridiculous. Because I had other photographers who'd work, worked for me, but by the end of it, I hated it. I hated it so deeply. I cannot understate this.

ADRIANA: I can totally relate.

WHITNEY: Yeah, you said before that you've had a. A year's worth of wedding photography.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I did family photography, so. And, you know, like, hats off to you doing wedding photography, because I feel like that is like the ultimate stressful type of photography because you cannot up. You have to capture the perfect day for the bride and groom or else.

WHITNEY: Yes. And. And it's actually my first talk ever was called, "Codezillas; The Universal Truth to Building Trust". Because there is so much about communication and like, people are making different assumptions about what is what wedding photography, what their wedding photograph should like, look like. And some people want a documentary style and some people want these specific portraits. And if you don't get a portrait of just the bride and the groom at the front of the church, then you might as well not have photographed anything else the whole day. You know, even though you have beautiful portraits of them outside and beautiful portraits of each of them alone at the front of the church, this may or may not have actually happened. This is not a hypothetical. Anyway. It was. It was. And also, like the editing, the photographs. You take hundreds and hundreds of photographs on the day. Like, getting those down to the good ones and then editing those so they look nice. Like, that's very tedious work. And it's not interesting tedious. And it's not tedious but I'm growing. It's just tedious for the sake of being tedious. And. And once. And so I was either, like buried under a mountain of editing or buried under a mountain of communication of emails and then just general admin work. And I didn't feel like on top of my life for many years. I just always felt behind, like, I'm letting someone.

ADRIANA: I can so relate to all of this. We did it for a year. And I want to add also, I don't know if you felt this, but, like, considering, like, what you charged and the amount of time and effort you put into it, it felt like you end up getting paid, like, less than minimum wage.

WHITNEY: It's true.

ADRIANA: And then the other one, I tell me if this ever happened to you, the. But you took like hundreds of photos. Where are all of them? And it's like, yo, a bunch of them are crap.

WHITNEY: Yeah, you don't want to see all of them. You don't look good all the time.

ADRIANA: So mad they're like, what happened to all the photos you took? It's like, I promised you 100, you get 100.

WHITNEY: So. So I was stuck in the circular life of booking. When you book a wedding, you take half the money and then you get the second half when you shoot the wedding. And like, it's hard to break out because you. You're losing as soon as you stop. You stop getting booking money. But you still have to shoot weddings. So it's a circle that's hard to break. And so. So my. I have younger brothers, and one of my brothers, his name is Jordan, he is. He is a band called Mutual Benefit. So it's a musical project. It sounds like a whole band, but it's all. He does all the arranging. And then he might play all the instruments or hire out the ones he can't play. And so his album in 2014 got a lot of success. It got on, like, Pitchfork's Top New Music and Rolling Stone's Top 50 Albums of the year and this and that. And so it's mutual Benefit Love's Crushing Diamond is the album. So since this music is all was all just made by him solo, he needed to put together a band to go on tour. And he asked me to play in the band in 2014. Yeah. And so that was exactly, like, the excuse I needed to be able to get out of wedding photography without saying I failed. You know, I was like, oh, I got this cool opportunity. I have to do it. And so I spent all my savings returning those wedding deposit money. And then my partner at the time wasn't supportive. We'd been together eight years. I broke up with them, and then I put all my stuff into storage and I lived without an address for a year in 2014.

ADRIANA: Oh, my god. Wow. What instrument did you play?

WHITNEY: I played keys and I'd sing harmonies with my brother.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's so cool.

WHITNEY: Yeah. So that happened in 2014, and I toured for a year, and when I got back to Austin, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew what I did not want to do with my life, and that is wedding photography. Wedding photography.

ADRIANA: So you. You had, like, you said you had, like, a whole company around this, so, like, you just shuttered the whole thing.

WHITNEY: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Like, and you had employees as well. Like, they were.

WHITNEY: They were independent contractors. So they. I would get them wedding business, but they could also get their own wedding business and they were able to. So I just stopped. Yeah second shooters.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah. Okay. So the combination of, like, they'll. They'll do, like, they do primary or primary or secondary kind of thing.

WHITNEY: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Cool.

WHITNEY: And then, like, all my. All my photo gear is up in my attic collecting dust.

ADRIANA: Yeah. I haven't touched my camera in forever. I didn't have money to buy the lenses that I bought during my photography years. And now that I do, I'm like.

WHITNEY: I do think about getting a little camera that I can keep in my pocket when I travel, just so I don't need to use my phone. Like. Yeah, well, I could actually finally, like, use that knowledge that I built up. Like, I'm a master in this one area that I just don't do anything about. But anyway, so we're back. So I'm back from tour. Yeah, it's like 2015 now, and I am not a wedding photographer, but I don't know who I am. And so I was I drove for Lyft and Uber for a while, and then I worked at restaurants for a while. I was a server at like a. A fancy Japanese cuisine restaurant here in Austin. And then I switched to being a server at like a. A hippie vegetarian cafe, which is way more my speed. And then my son was in college and he was like, mom, he's in. In college for software engineering. And he's like, mom, you would really like this. You should try. You should try coding. It was 2019, now it's in January, and I write my very first line of code. All it is is an online introduction course to the program I went to called Hack Reactor. I'm not even sure if it survived the pandemic, but it had a pipeline to get you through. And I totally just wrote that first line and then I could ride the wave of what Hack Reactor told me to do next. So at first it was a. An online course that I was in maybe four nights a week for three hours a night or something like that for January. And it's like, oh, I really like that. And then they trained me up to pass their entrance exam and I did that. And then, then I had to do hundreds of hours of coding to get into the to pre course they called it. So I was accepted, but I had to complete this before I was allowed to start. So then in July of 2019 is when I actually went in person to the bootcamp right before the pandemic. We had no idea.

ADRIANA: Oh, my god.

WHITNEY: Yeah, So I was there 11 hour days, 6 days a week for 3 months. So, like in 2019, I really just like, lived in JavaScript and code. And then in October of 2019, I graduated. And in November of 2019, I was a cloud developer at IBM.

ADRIANA: Oh, wow, that is amazing. And did you love, like, the course, like those long days where you, like, was there ever a point where you're like, oh my god, why am I doing this crap?

WHITNEY: No, I loved it because I. I hadn't had a direction in quite some time, so it was nice to. To feel like I was doing something. And even, even with wedding photography, like, I don't feel like I was really stretching what I could do or applying my intelligence or like, you know, growing.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

WHITNEY: And so I. I was craving it. So by the time it came around, it was great. Although I will say, like, when I was in regular school, I was used to being an A student and I would work really hard to be an A student, and it was part of my identity that I'm like, I have good at school. And then I got into boot camp and I was not at all the best. I wasn't even. I was like medium easily, maybe slightly below. But that was because everyone else in the course had a lot more tech experience coming into it. And then we're all learning at a breakneck, breakneck speed once we're in there. It's not like normal school where you can spend extra time because there literally is no extra time.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

WHITNEY: But also, I think coding school taught me a growth mindset that I really didn't have before. I wasn't raised with the growth mindset. And so when I was. When I figured out to see the people around me with, who share my interests, these people are my community. They're not my competition. And that just, like, makes the world such a better place. It makes everything about life way better if you can shift your mindset from competition to community, the same people around you.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that is so true.

WHITNEY: Yeah. That's the big thing that. That bootcamp taught me that. And just like, you know, it helped me see what I'm capable of. But when I got that job as a cloud developer at IBM, I had no idea what I didn't know, which is a good, good thing. Like, I had no idea how complex and vast the world of cloud technology was and how little I knew about any of it. Like, the first I heard, the first I learned Kubernetes was in preparation for the job interview for IBM.

ADRIANA: Oh, damn.

WHITNEY: Yeah.

ADRIANA: And. And this was then, like, so outside of, like, what you had learned, though, in your coding boot camp, but I guess in a lot of ways, though, like, what you had picked up, like, you picked up some, like, you know, they weren't necessarily like, you know, the technical programming skills from the boot camp. I mean, you pick those up, but you're able to transfer, like the learning part of it to.

WHITNEY: To this. Right, exactly. Yeah. Learning. Learning how to learn.

ADRIANA: Yes, yes.

WHITNEY: And so. So at IBM, I build out, I was like, they hired broadly across from, like, either new college grads or new boot camps. Like, that was like their thing.

ADRIANA: Oh, cool.

WHITNEY: Killer role. Which meant I was like 20 years older than most other people around me, all of my colleagues, and just like one of just a very few number of women there. It was very different, but they. My job was to build out proof of concepts for potential clients using IBM technologies. And it was meant to be a travel position, but the pandemic happened, which. So it wasn't a travel position, but I had signed up to be gone like 70 of the time, which I was excited about. But later I was thankful didn't happen because for those type of jobs your travel is going to strip malls and suburbs and yeah, you know, it's not like, it's not like.

ADRIANA: What made you apply to IBM in the first place. Like having, having completed like the coding boot camp, going basically from the dev world to the world. Yeah. What, what inclined you to, to apply for that?

WHITNEY: I was going to say yes to literally anybody who took me had nothing to do with being interested in cloud or even understanding what it is. And if anything, because I clearly gravitate toward visual stuff, I thought DevOps would be bad for me because it's like I thought making applications where I'm interacting with visual components related to that application was going to be where I land. And so DevOps was just like, I'll do anything for my first year or two to get, get my foot in the door and then I'll figure out what I actually want to do. And so that's all I've applied to everything and I've been CS first.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. I love it. I love it. And did you find like, with your, with your background like being so artistic, did that help you with, with the tech side of things? Because I always like, I think in technology like there is so much creativity involved it's just not necessarily obvious to you know, the outsider who might, they'd be like, what do you mean? Creative.

WHITNEY: So those of you who are familiar with my work, I most things I do have some sort of big visual component. My talks, when I give them are almost animated. I have so many slides. I use GIFs, not GIFs like hand drawn GIFs that I drew. Like I hand draw like 100 slides and flip through them real quick and it's like, and then my, my show called Enlightening is a very heavily visual show. I have a Lightboard studio in my home and so but I didn't, when I started, I didn't realize that my visual part was going to come in handy. In fact, when I started I thought everything I've done in my life leading up to this point has been a waste of time because now I'm just doing something brand new and now I know that's not true at all. Like there are so many lessons I learned from before. Even lessons about communicating well with, with wedding clients very much come into play about communicating well about software delivery. So although all that stuff has been really useful and I'm glad for that and my, well, my rounded background has come in handy because I'm very different here. But I like how I'm different and I like how I can learn technical concepts but kind of come at them at a different way and teach them again in a way that's, that's unique, that's special to me.

ADRIANA: I love that. And you know, I gotta give a shout out to your Enlightning show because like when you had me on as a guest, like I am in awe over first of all, like you run such a well oiled machine so like hats off to you, like for real. But also like one thing that I really appreciate is like you are also taking this opportunity to like learn new things and, and you're basically like you're learning on the spot and you're demonstrating that you're learning because then you're regurgitating it back to your guest, which I think is so, so cool. And yeah, I just have so much admiration for, for your work because that takes a lot of, you know, like time and effort to put together and you're just nailing it.

WHITNEY: Thank you. So if you don't mind, I'm going to say what Enlightning is just for those people who are listening who maybe don't know Enlightning. It's a streaming show and on my show I want to learn about a concept or a technology. So I'll invite a guest on to be an expert. So you've been a guest on my show. It was a wonderful show about Observability 2.0. And so when the guest comes on and I know nothing about what they're going to teach, sometimes I know context because I've done related tools, but I basically don't know anything. And I start, I'm behind an empty light board and there the little square on the, on the screen and through words only, no demo, no screen sharing, they teach me about a technical concept and then I take notes and maybe draw diagrams on the, on the board as we go. So I can't pretend to know something I don't know because I'm actually held accountable by needing to write it on the board or capture the information somehow. And it's nice because it forces me to ask clarifying questions. I would write this on the board. Would you say it's true if I write this verb instead of this other verb? You told me. And we kind of get at the crux of maybe some confusing things without realizing you don't even know that you don't quite have the concept right in your mind until you try to write it down and you have the X. Yeah. But we end, we end up going from like zero to like good, good entry level knowledge within an hour and a half or two hour show. And it's really fun.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate too, that it, you know, there's like refinement along the way.

WHITNEY: Right.

ADRIANA: Because it puts, you know, your guest is, you know, forced to like, really think about what, how to communicate the idea because you're writing it down. So it's, it's basically like as a guest, you, your guests have to teach you and then you have to show that you've learned the material. So it's, it's like this mutual thing going on there that works extremely well. And I think also because you put your guests very much at ease, you have a very chill vibe on your show. Very much. Appreciate it. So y'all need to check out Enlightning.

WHITNEY: Thank you. Thanks. It's a blast to make and I feel so, so much gratitude that I get like masterclass lessons every week from people who are experts in their field.

ADRIANA: And do you run these like every single week or do you have like, periods where you're like, I'm going on a break? Like, how, how's that work?

WHITNEY: So I have another show called You Choose, which we'll talk about shortly. But I, I like to use Enlightning as a vehicle to get to know all the tools I need to know for you choose. So leading up to You Choose, I might do two Enlightnings a week for a while, but then, but then I'll go down to zero for a couple months. So it tends to be all or nothing based on what, what my personal learning needs to be. And right now I'm doing, I'm doing a whole series on Observability tooling. So I'm covering all the CNCF tools around Observability, and that's been really fun. And your episode really got me off on the right foot in terms of getting the context of everything that's going on. So I appreciate that.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. I got to ask, what gave you the idea of starting Enlightning in the first place?

WHITNEY: All right, I was at IBM. I was a cloud developer. Things are fine. I got, quote, unquote, promoted this. The. I was on the cloud pack acceleration team, but that got dissolved and I got quote, unquote, promoted to be a customer success manager. And customer success manager. I'm more man. They want me to more manage people teams to come in and implement solutions. But I'm, I'm really doing a lot of managing and not enough like tech hands on. I want to be technical and it's not a very technical position and so I didn't like that about it. Meanwhile, at IBM, I had found my way onto the IBM Cloud YouTube channel behind their Lightboard there. So if you Google what is RabbitMQ or what is Kafka, you'll see my, my, my face, my little, very young Whitney face telling you about that. But so at some point I realized like I like making these videos a lot and I don't like this new customer success success position I'm in. And I learned that there's such a thing called a developer advocate. So I started looking for developer advocate positions and I learned about one at VMware Tanzu and it required deep Kubernetes expertise. And I was like, I definitely do not have deep Kubernetes expertise. But I mean I want to apply anyway because I'll have some conversations, I'll meet some people, I'll learn about this idea of a developer advocate role. Like there's nothing to lose here. So I applied for the job and I met some wonderful people as part of the interview process and I did not get that job because I was under qualified for that job. But they liked me and my personality so much and the videos I'd made for IBM Cloud that they made a whole new job just for me on the team.

ADRIANA: Oh my god, that's like the ultimate form of flattery. That's so great.

WHITNEY: It's so nice. And they also bought the Lightboard Studio that you see behind me for me back then. So they hooked me up with the Lightboard studio, they gave me a developer advocate job and then they were just like, okay, now make some content. So at first after I got done being really flattered and shocked, then I was like, oh my god, what have I done? I have to make content. I don't know anything. So I just see, so Enlightning was a way of making my myself vulnerable and like having experts explain what their technology does to this really this woman who's really new actually, which is less me now. And back then I would be like, okay, what's a custom resource again? But anyway, that's how that got started because I needed a way to make consistent content as someone who was brand new. And then I conceived of Enlightning as a way to be able to accomplish that.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. And I want to switch gears a little bit because if I recall correctly, you were also recently part of like the first Platform Engineering Day colocated event. Is that.

WHITNEY: Yeah, I was a keynote speaker. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Yeah, you and Abby did that. I heard great things about the talk. I haven't caught it yet about. There was something about lipstick on a pig.

WHITNEY: It' called, "Sometimes Lipstick is Exactly What a Pig Needs". And it's about how and when to build different types of platform interfaces. The punchline is, you want to build an API, all your logic should be behind that API. That's your pig. And then whatever interface you want to put, the API could be a building block and then you could add your interface. That's the lipstick on the pig. That was. That was fun and an absolute gift to get to do that, especially with Abby. Abby is wonderful. I love, love, love Abby.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, she's great. I've had her on the show before and I, I keep joking with her, like, you know, we gotta play like Six Degrees of Abby Bangser her because, like, she knows so many people. She's recommended so many people for this show in particular and so many other people know Abby, I'm like, oh, my god.

WHITNEY: And you should see her. Yeah. At KubeCon. She doesn't sleep. She has someone to see. She's at morning Coffee, Platform Coffee. She closes down the bar at night. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Yeah. That's awesome.

WHITNEY: It's impressive on so many levels.

ADRIANA: Absolutely. And so, so for like the Platform Engineering Day, were you, were you also one of the organizers for that or.

WHITNEY: No, no, I just. No, I just showed up. I gave my talk. It was great though. Props to the organizers.

ADRIANA: Yeah. These things take a lot of, A lot of effort to put together. I tell you. I've assisted in putting together KubeHuddle here in Toronto. You know, I, I was not a. I would say, like, I was not the main organizer, but it was still a lot of, A lot of work to put together. So hats off to folks who to organizers, like, oh my god, like anyone who works like KubeCon. Like KubeCon organizers. Holy cow. That's like. That's like rock concert level event. I tell you.

WHITNEY: It's impressive. So far it's not something I've had the urge to do in any way, shape or form. I think it's a little similar. T oo close to Weddings that it makes.

ADRIANA: A little bit of PTSD there.

WHITNEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I feel you.

WHITNEY: But if it's okay, I'd love to talk about the other show. You Choose. Since I mentioned it. Is that all right? Yeah, you know about You Choose?

ADRIANA: No, I don't. I've heard of it and that's the extent of it. So, yeah, please enlighten me.

WHITNEY: Okay, so you choose is a show I co-host with Viktor Farcic on his YouTube channel, which is called DevOps Toolkit. And on You Choose. We start with application code on a developer's laptop, and we need to help that application navigate its way through the entire CNCF. And so each episode represents a different system design choice. And so the very first episode, for example, was building a container image. That's what we need to do with this source code on a developer's laptop. So then we gather all the relevant CNCF technology that can do that thing, and then we have a guest on that represents each technology. Usually a maintainer, but it could be an advocate or super user or something too. And each presenter, each. Each expert gets only five minutes to present about their technology because we just want to know the basics of what it is. We don't want to. We don't want all the bells and whistles, in fact, that can get confusing when we just need to know what it does. And so then we have a question and answer part of the show, and then we put it to a vote, and we ask the community to vote about which one they want to see implemented into our ongoing demo. So the one that got chosen, we try not to say one, sometimes I slip. The one that got chosen, not the one that won, but the one that got chosen was buildpacks. Cloud native buildpacks. And so at the beginning of the next episode, we implemented buildpacks into the ongoing demo. And then the episode itself was about container registries, which different container registries in the CNCF and how they're different from each other. So it's a comparative view of different technologies with a little bit of, like, competitive twist. Even though we try not to make it competitive, that little. It's a little there. And it's a really nice. It's a really nice overview of how different tools work together in the cncf.

ADRIANA: So it's like a little choose your own adventure kind of thing while you're building.

WHITNEY: Exactly.

ADRIANA: Mega example.

WHITNEY: Yes, exactly. In fact, we, we, we conceived of it because we wanted to do a choose your own adventure style talk for KubeCon. And we did. And, and, and then we're like, well, this is. We're gonna. So the, the very first choose your own adventure talk we did for KubeCon was from the developer's laptop through to a development environment and that we came up with seven different system design choices, if I recall correctly. And we're like, oh, there's a lot of projects we need to learn about in time for KubeCon, so let's make this into a streaming show. Yeah. To help us get organized.

ADRIANA: Right. So great.

WHITNEY: And so that we've been. We've been at it for a year and a half, almost two years, I think. So we did. We call them chapters because of the choose your own adventure thing. So chapter one is from source code to a developer's laptop. So it's like building container image configuration. Well, there's only cert manager, but we have one for HTTPs, adding a database, that sort of thing. And then development environments that run on Kubernetes themselves. And then our second chapter was getting it from a development environment to a production environment, which is actually a very short chapter because production doesn't have all the things production needs to be production. It's just on that for that chapter we covered GitOps and declaratively defining a cluster, how you're going to do that with infrastructure as code and oh, ingress, we covered on that one. And then chapter three was all about security. Then we added security to our cluster and that one had like 10 different system design choices and went through all the different security projects in the CNCF. And now we're doing Observability and that's coming up. We're going to start that the first week. The first Tuesday of September.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. Yeah, that's very exciting. Wow. And so like when you. Your own adventure talk, then did you have audience engagement then to sort of help define the direction of. Of the talk as it was going? Is that the idea of it?

WHITNEY: That's a great question. Yes, we absolutely have live voting during our talk. And Victor, I do all the exciting explaining of each of the system design choice, like why the system design choice and then all the tools and then what differentiates the tools from each other. And then Victor does the. Then people vote and Victor does the live demo based on people choose in real time. Yeah. During the talk.

ADRIANA: Kudos to both of you, that is. That is a lot to. To do. That's a lot of pressure. Makes for a great talk though. It sounds, it sounds really fun and engaging.

WHITNEY: It's really fun and funny. And we, we just, we presented the talk at different KCDs or Kubernetes Community Days over the summer. We did three of them and on the one in Zurich, Victor completely crashed the demo. Like everything. He didn't get a single, a single thing right. But it was still really fun and informative and people, like, people even asked us afterward, like, did we crash it on purpose? I was like, I don't know to what end we would do that. Like, why on earth, what we would be hoping to achieve. But like, we took it in stride and had so much fun with it that they, they didn't, they didn't understand that it was definitely not on purpose. They thought maybe we meant to do it that way. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Very cool. And I, I wanted to ask, like, you know, you're. You're obviously like, very comfortable doing talks and, and whatnot. What, what was your, what first got you on the speaking circuit? Like, where. When did you go? Like, hey, I want to try this out?

WHITNEY: Well, when I got the job as a developer advocate here at VMWare Tanzu, I got the job thinking I was going to make a bunch of Lightboard content. And then once I got here, then I realized that there's a big speaking engagement part to it too that like, all of my co workers on my small team are all speaking at conferences. And then. And so one of them in particular reached out to me about us making a talk together. And so I just. Yeah. So the. I feel like I just rode the waves and that's where they took me. I didn't set out to make to be like, oh, I need to be a speaker now. But I just, it was just like such a natural part of, of the job that I just moved right in. Yeah.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. And plus, like, you get to use your, your extreme creativity as part of it, which is so cool.

WHITNEY: Yeah. And even the, the musician part of my background, like, I have practice performing, so the biggest crowds, yeah, they were scary at first, I'm not gonna lie. But they're what I got. Maybe got over it a little faster since.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah.

WHITNEY: Performance practice.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it all goes back to, you know, the fact that all of the things that we've encountered in our past, no matter how insignificant they seemed at the time, like they helped build us into what we are today.

WHITNEY: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Don't discredit anything you've done in the past. It all, it matters more than you realize. It all comes together.

ADRIANA: Absolutely. And also, I want to mention that, like, there's. It's funny because, like, I'd say, like, traditionally, I think a lot of people tend to assume that you have to have like a degree in like, computer science, computer engineering to be in tech. And, and I've had The pleasure of meeting so many people who, you know, that wasn't their original background, where they either got into tech by, you know, they were self taught or they attended a boot camp. And it's just so cool to see the diversity in these backgrounds and these types of people bring so much into tech and you know, that cannot. Like, it's so underrated and I think it needs to be. We need to remind folks like it's, it's tech is, is awesomely inclusive in that respect.

WHITNEY: I love that about it. Yes. I love it so much. I, I am surprised how much I love DevOps. Like, I really thought getting that first job out of bootcamp that I would do DevOps a couple years and then get somewhere more interesting. I did not expect to absolutely fall in love with DevOps and with the community. It's the best.

ADRIANA: I totally agree. DevOps is lots of fun. I found in my career was like the thing that was missing throughout my entire career. It's like, where have you been all my life?

WHITNEY: Do you think it's the technologies or the people or both?

ADRIANA: I think it's both. I have to say that initially it was definitely the technology that attracted me to it. And I started out in my tech career was very much in the corporate enterprise world, you know, very prim and proper and you know, I got in trouble for swearing at the office and it was like business casual attire. So I only saw the technology side. I really saw it as like a technology thing. And then as I've gotten more into the open source world, I have been so lucky to like meet so many people like you and others who have been on my show with different perspectives who are like such chill vibes and, and more most importantly for me, like meeting other women in tech because I feel like most of my career has been like just surrounded by a bunch of dudes in tech and like be able to collaborate with, with so many women and, and on my show I've had so many women in tech, which has been fantastic.

WHITNEY: I love that.

ADRIANA: Yeah, for me, like that that's just the ultimate thing. So, you know, in the end the, the, the people end up trumping the technology because they have so much, so many different cool perspectives to bring and then they lead me to, to like other avenues of technology.

WHITNEY: Kudos to you for bringing, for highlighting so many women voices on your show. I love that.

ADRIANA: Oh, thank you. Well, we are coming up on time, but before we wrap up, I was wondering if there were any parting words of wisdom that you wanted to share with folks in our audience.

WHITNEY: I'll no pressure. I'll. I'll restate what I said earlier in the episode because I think it means a lot if you see the people around you who are interested in what you're interested in as your community and not as your competition. It makes your life a much more joyful and peaceful and happy place.

ADRIANA: Absolutely. And I, I think these are excellent words to, to part with and, and I hope everyone takes this to heart because it really, it just makes the work a lot better that way.

WHITNEY: Absolutely.

ADRIANA: Well, thank you so much, Whitney, for geeking out with me today. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe. And be sure sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

WHITNEY: 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.