The One Where We Geek Out on Argo Project with Lisa-Marie Namphy

Nov 4, 2025

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Key takeaways:

An open source project can only succeed if it has not only contributors and maintainers, but also users of the project.
Your open source project is really as good as the docs are.
It can be challenging for companies to commit to and adopt open source projects because they don't know if the project will be long enough.
Large organizations or startups looking to scale look for paid support from open source projects that they use, if it ends up becoming a mission-critical part of their development and/or operations.
If there's an open source project you love, show some love to the open source developers by donating to the project, because if they can't pay the bills, they can't maintain the project.
When Lisa was in university, girls weren't encouraged to go into tech, and it resulted in her being an English major, even though she was better at STEM subjects.
End users are just as important as the folks working on open source projects.
Even if you don't get accepted to KubeCon, there are tons of other conferences and meetups, both part of the CNCF and outside of the CNCF, that you can attend, including Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs).
KubeCrash is an online conference that, among other things, prides itself on featuring first-time speakers.
If you want to get into public speaking and want to build up your confidence, panels are a great way to get started.

About our guest:

Lisa-Marie Namphy is a developer community architect, and CNCF Ambassador with 20+ years in cloud native software. Currently, Lisa is Director, DevRel at Intuit. Lisa is also runs the Cloud Native Silicon Valley User Group. Lisa is an advocate and frequent speaker for DEl initiatives and open source technology, a writer, an avid sports fan, and loves wine and dogs.

Find our guest on:

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:

Transcript:
ADRIANA:
Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech and geek out on topics like software development, 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 the awesome Lisa-Marie Namphy. Welcome.

LISA-MARIE:
Hi! Thanks for having me.

ADRIANA:
Super excited to have you on. And where are you calling from today?

LISA-MARIE:
California. I am in the Silicon Valley. So our our Intuit office is in Mountain View, that's the one that I work out of. So, but I'm actually one of the rare, Bay Area natives. My mom is a professor at Stanford, so I literally grew up here, and I'm still here. So that's where I'm coming to you from today.

ADRIANA:
Oh, that's so cool. And you as as we record this, we are, are we in the middle of or finishing up KCD Bay Area?

LISA-MARIE:
We just finished. We just, I say we just aired it, but it was actually live, at the Computer History Museum last Tuesday, so, that would have been September 9th. And, the Computer History Museum is a fantastic place. If anyone's visiting the Bay Area. It's, you know, it has incredible history to go through. I think a couple of the speakers that may be on stage with us might end up on the walls of that building someday. It was also where the CNCF started. But there were some weird CNCF history, like they signed the, the charter. I don't know what they call it.

ADRIANA:
WHAT?!

LISA-MARIE:
Something happened in that building. So it was actually kind of really cool because Google, you know, donated Kubernetes and Google's right there also. That's practically on the Google campus. And so all of that happened there. And so it's a historic building. And it's, you know, right next to our office also. So very convenient. And I love that we're on Geeking Out here, because I think, you know, I've probably been a geek since childhood, given where I grew up, sort of in the water we drink. So, I'm, I'm your resident community geek from the Bay Area.

ADRIANA:
Oh, my God, that is like the nerdiest location ever. And I love it so much. Oh, that that must have been so fun to, to host the event in that venue.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, it really was fun. And it was a it was a really fun, you know, place to grow up as well because it was, you know, kind of the origin of open source, really. I mean, I remember in high school, you know, hacking away with, with my buddies just, you know, building whatever software application we thought was cool and that we thought we needed because a lot of stuff didn't exist back then and then, you know, was like, oh, this is. This is. Cool. So, you know, maybe other people would want it too. And, you know, you just give it out there and for free. This was like before the greed came in. And that was. That's kind of in our DNA. And so I've been, you know, really kind of at that, that open source and community mindset, my whole career, even though, you know, I didn't come at it. We can talk later, maybe, about. Career journeys and things like that.

So back to KCD. Yeah. It was amazing. Solomon Hykes keynoted for us, which was awesome. Jonathan Bryce kicked it off. He's, the new executive director of the CNCF. But, Jonathan, I go way back to his OpenStack days. He was the kind of founder of the OpenStack Foundation with Mark Collier. And, I ran the first ever like the OpenStack user group. We we started it here and built it out. And that was kind of the original, the user group that has now become the sort of Kubernetes and cloud native user group that I run out here. So for for 10 of those 15 years, it was the OpenStack user group. So it's, it's a nice, there's a lot of synergy between the two communities. And it's amazing that Jonathan is now, running the the CNCF with Chris Aniszczyk . And so kind of all my worlds colliding. And it was really fun to have Jonathan come out to the Bay Area and kick off the event as well.

ADRIANA:
Oh, cool. That's awesome. And is is that the first time that there's been a KCD Bay Area or.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, yeah, that was there's only four in the United States. Five in North America because there was one in, there's one in Guadalajara, or maybe it was Mexico City this year. There's one in Mexico and, four in the US. The this week is Washington DC. I think it's like maybe it's today actually possibly. Today or tomorrow, which so 16th or 17th for those watching this later. And there was one in Austin. I had the pleasure of emceeing that one, and one in New York City. So...

ADRIANA:
Oh yeah, that's right, that's right.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah. And hopefully next year, one in Toronto, maybe.

ADRIANA:
Fingers crossed! We will definitely. By the time this comes out, we will know one way or another and we can put that in the show notes for anyone who's curious.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, I mean, you deserve it. Toronto is such a great, tech community, great tech center. We ran a couple meetups in our Toronto office last summer as part of Toronto Tech Week. Which is really, really cool. We did an open source. I mean, up there that you came and spoke at.

ADRIANA:
I did!

LISA-MARIE:
Some other awesome community members, and I believe in December, I think the first week of December first or second, we are going to host the CNCF user group again, and I will expect to see you there, at our office, for the holiday edition of the Kubernetes and cloud native, not just Toronto. I think Archy, I think folks from all over Canada, are going to bring their user groups, and I will fly up and we'll have some fun.

ADRIANA:
Ooh, exciting. Yeah. It was so great to see you too for that for Toronto Tech Week, which, you know, I've, I've been living in Toronto since I came here for university. So in 1997 is when, when I moved here and I didn't even know that Toronto Tech Week was a thing until I got to the invite to do the panel to be a moderator for this panel at Toronto Tech Week. So it was it was lots of fun. And, I hope to participate in that again next year in some form or another.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, I didn't know it was a thing either. I think it's a really growing, community. Toronto's growing so much. As you’ve observed, since you were there for university. Yeah. It's. It's a wonderful city. Fantastic city. Granted, I've never been there in the winter.

ADRIANA:
It’s hit and miss, it's hit and miss, this winter was cold, but our winters of late, our our global warming winters have been kind of oscillating between below freezing one day and above freezing the next. And so it's like all the snow will fall. And then the next day it'll like, all melt. So it's like you never know what you're going to get.

LISA-MARIE:
Sounds like slush.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, sounds like slush. We’re definitely... Like, we're on the... because we're we're on the other side of the lake. Compared to like Buffalo, right. Buffalo is known for getting all the snow and they get the lake effect. We're like the the anti Buffalo. Like, lake effect for us means like, we don't get that dumping of snow. So the city itself... like, surrounding areas will get tons of snow. But the city itself, like it's it takes a lot for it to like, for us to get some good snow in Toronto these days because of, you know, all the concrete and all that stuff. So yes. So it'll be it'll be interesting to see when you're here. What what version of Toronto you'll get.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah. Well I, I love I love Toronto really because of the people. It's a beautiful city. The people are great. They're really great. I there was so much enthusiasm at that meetup. We had. All week. We had activities every single night. And they were very different. We hosted, Monday, Monday Girl Monday, something that, it was a women's group that came of first night and it was fantastic. Just really amazing energy. And, and people were like, oh, you know, I didn't know Intuit was super into open source. And I'm like, well, yeah, we are. We can talk about that later too, but.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LISA-MARIE:
See these guys?

ADRIANA:
That's right, I’ve got mine!

LISA-MARIE:
Yes! So cool! Yeah. So yeah. And it's been consuming open source of course, but also producing incredible open source projects and donating them, including the Argo project to, to the CNCF, and we still, you know, maintain it and we, you know, we. We, we need these like, people don't really realize... So Intuit, for those of you that are American on the call, you probably already know Intuit. And maybe you use it to do your taxes or to balance your books. If you're in a small business. But for the global folks, Intuit has over 100 million customers, and the brands are TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and MailChimp. And most of the customers have been, you know, small and medium businesses. So we close the books for and do the balance sheets for really a large majority of the small businesses in the United States, and now more medium sized businesses. So it's really important technology. And it runs on Kubernetes. This is what yeah, this is what maybe a lot of people don't realize. Kubernetes. And then we created Argo because we needed, you know, sort of a GitOps for Kubernetes. We needed things to be a little bit easier. We've also created a lot of cool things for our platform. Now, Kubernetes, as you know, is hard. Kubernetes out of the box is not easy. So every company, probably does something, you know, with their platform to make things a little bit easier. And actually, we just spoke at KCD last Tuesday about some of the things that we built for the platform just, around Kubernetes that, you know, we thought, well, maybe could be useful for other people. But Argo was one of the, the main things that was developed by Pratik and Ed Lee and Saradhi, who was my original manager at Intuit.

And and then, you know, they, they need it. We still run on Argo. Argo is still extremely important. And things like Argo Promotions, the number one asked for feature, is something that we built for the last cycle because we needed it, and so does everybody else. So we do, and like, this guy was when Argo graduated, this was Detroit.

ADRIANA:
And for for reference, for our our listeners only. You're holding up the the Argo.

LISA-MARIE:
Oh, I didn't realize...

ADRIANA:
We have we have video and and audio. So...

LISA-MARIE:
I am holding up the Argo mascot. We can argue it might be the cutest, most lovable mascot in cloud native.

ADRIANA:
I mean, I am. I am still vying for a women's fitted ArgoCD t-shirt, because the ones that keep getting sent to me are not fitted. And I want a fitted women's ArgoCD t-shirt.

LISA-MARIE:
What's your size?

ADRIANA:
I'm extra small.

LISA-MARIE:
Okay. All right. That I will dig.

ADRIANA:
I proudly I would proudly wear because I agree with you. It is the cutest mascot of all of the the CNCF. Sorry, not sorry.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah. No, I mean, for Salt Lake City, we made a really cool snowy version of the shirt. I know we did an extra small, I think about... I’ve given one of my niece, because they were really small. So I will I will look and see what we still have in our closet, but we will probably be doing, more things. We have a super special version of of Argo and Numi. We can talk about this later, but, from the same people that brought you Argo, this is sort of the next greatest open source, project coming out. And so will be, both of these two. I am now still holding up, plushies of of an orange octopus and a polar bear. We will have versions of both of them at KubeCon in Atlanta. And Argo is going to be dressed in quite the outfit.

ADRIANA:
Oh, my!

LISA-MARIE:
I’m not sure if I can give the big reveal, but, let's just say, since KubeCon is a week after Halloween, two weeks after Halloween, and a week before a really big movie is about to come out, we may just have something really special. This one might be wearing a black hat. Might be riding a broom. Maybe. We'll see.

ADRIANA:
Oh, my God, I'm excited. I can't wait to, you know, that'll be great.

LISA-MARIE:
It'll be a fun, fun thing this year. But anyway, yeah, we we create this technology because we need to use it. We need our, you know, we need our our products to run on it. And because of that, we got end user of the year award twice from the CNCF at KubeCon in 2019 and 2022. So, we take our end user-ness very seriously and into it. And, we do contribute back a lot. Also to, GraphQL, part of that foundation, big Istio users. So, lots of stuff, that I know you're very familiar with, that powers our, our tech platform and our, our product line. And then we run a lot of meetups and, those are all open source meetups. We like to feature end users, but we also like to feature community members from cloud native community. So we do have a quarterly in Mountain View for any of those around. And we're going to try to start doing them quarterly in the Toronto and San Diego offices as well. So our next one will have just happened before this airs, October 20th. But in Toronto it's the first week of December. So...

ADRIANA:
Amazing. Yeah, I can't wait. And I should mention also, for Canadian folks like, we use we use TurboTax as well. I use, I use the online version. I can't use the desktop version because I'm on a Mac, so I only use the online version, which honestly, I love because I hate installing extra crap on my machine anyway. So...

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, I think we have a desktop version for the Mac, but the online version is better. That's where you're going to get a lot of the AI stuff. Yeah. A lot of those done for your experiences. And they're getting better every version. So, I think I would say stick with, you know.

ADRIANA:
Yeah.

LISA-MARIE:
So your, your cloud native original here.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, it's super cool. And it, I think when, when, we were, when we met up at Toronto Tech Week. I think one of the comments that you made when, when you were, when you opened up, the, the event that I was at, was the the fact that not a lot of people realize that Intuit is the creator of ArgoCD, which is wild. Like, that's such a little known fact. I guess in some circles, for me, I'm like, of course it is. Yeah.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah it is. And and Argo Workflows and Rollouts and Events, but, yeah. Argo CD, it was, so the company was called Applatix that Intuit acquired. And that's where Pratik, Ed, Saradhi, and Luca came from. And that was in the early days, I believe it was just workflows at the time. And then once they came into Intuit and they built ArgoCD, at that point, then they realized they needed to, you know, get more community help and more community adoption, and not just from users and contributors, but also from vendors that were going to build, companies around this. And that's really what it takes to make an open source project succeed. You can do it other ways. But if you for those of you out there who have your open source projects and you're thinking about how to keep them sustainable and viable for many, many years, and go from, you know, an idea in someone's head to now, the third most popular for third largest project in the in the CNCF, you really need a community to do that. And and not just a community of developers and maintainers, because those folks can change companies, leave jobs. You know, you can't guarantee that. You can't always count on it. So once you bring in the vendors and in our case, it was, RedHat, Akuity and CodeFresh, at the time, now, Octopus Deploy. And if it wasn't for them, they probably, you know, we wouldn't have necessarily we wouldn't have been ready to donate Argo to the CNCF, because we wouldn't have known for sure that it would be, sustainable. And and because we needed it to be, you know, we it's, you know, mission critical for us. So that was kind of the thinking and, and I thought Pratik’s timing was really good.

They had over 500 customers using it. They had the four... the three vendors and us, really making a like, I mean, obviously Red Hat could have succeeded, but really with CodeFresh and Akuity, you know, they were building their companies around, around it. So it it doesn't always bother me that other people, that people think that maybe one of those brands started it because they, they have to market it. They've spent a lot of time and investment in getting that word out there. And that's great. I mean, it's great for us. It's great for Argo. And it's it's great to keep the project going. So it's, you know, it's something that we're super proud of and we. We take a lot of pride in it. And sometimes our, you know, folks internally are like, how come nobody knows that we that we did it. And we want, you know, we. Want to be known as a cool tech brand and as a very, you know, a cool open source player and contributor. So we would love people to know that. And obviously Argo is is an amazing project and a super special, project that we're going to keep, contributing to. So we have a lot of pride and we'd love people to know it, but, you know, it's fine. We had Dan Garfield from Octopus Deploy on stage talking about Argo Promotions, at KCD and yeah, I probably he didn't mention Intuit, so I did, when I introduced him. By the way, this is a feature that, you know, that came out of, of our team, but, it's it's all community. And, you know, I wouldn't be a good CNCF Ambassador, Kubernetes Ambassador if I was, you know... it's a friendly competition, but it's we are really all in this together with community, and we don't sell anything. So, you know, we're we're truly end users.

We I mean, we sell TurboTax and QuickBooks, but we don't sell anything having to do with Argo or Kubernetes. So, we don't, you know, we don't have to, to do that the way other companies do. So it's one big happy family, right?

ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And I think you touched on something really important, which I think is part of the recipe for a successful open source project, which is, it's not just supported by one company. Right. Like, you know, the success of Kubernetes, the success of OpenTelemetry, it's not just like, it's because there are so many companies that are officially backing and dedicating people, to, participating, developing, working on, on these products and in, in various aspects. Right? It's not it's not just the code. It's it's the release notes. It's, you know, the blog post, like there's so much, so much going on. I think that's part of the, like, one of the reasons why OpenTelemetry is so successful. Like, I always tell people, like, on a day to day basis, I'm working with a bunch of competitors, but I don't see them as competitors. They're all friends. Right. And that's that's I think it's so great that you guys did that as, as well, like with Argo, making sure that it's like you're not the only ones propping it. There's, there's other backing as well.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, definitely. And so any names that... I keep saying Argo’s the third most popular project. You named the first two Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry. And but there's a lot of smaller projects and as you said, there's lots of ways to contribute. And people think, oh, well, you know, I need to write code. I need to, you know, be a maintainer... docs. I mean, I'm always lobbying for, you know, if you if you have a passion for writing, especially writing English language and not just code, you know, people seem to have this notion that AI is going to be able to write all the docs. And...

ADRIANA:
Yeah.

LISA-MARIE:
That's not the reality at the moment. We will get there, but it's not there right now.

ADRIANA:
Not right now, no.

LISA-MARIE:
You need help. And you know your open source project is really only as good as the docs are. I mean, those of us in DevRel, I would say, your docs team, that's your original DevRel. That was our case at Cockroach. We had phenomenal docs. And you know, I encourage all open source projects to really think that through from the beginning. And, you know, that's that's going to help a lot. But people, when they look at adopting open source technologies, especially something that hasn't been given to a foundation yet, that you're not really sure. Is that going to be updated? Is it going to be around, you know, for is, is it going to outlive what you need it to? You know, if you need it for four years, are those maintainers going to keep maintaining it for four years? Is there going to be, you know, new releases of it? Is it going to stay cutting edge? So it's really hard, you know, hard for companies like us. Like we evaluate a lot of open source technology. And that's the question we ask. You know, how how viable is this community, how sustainable is this product going to be? And, because the last thing you want is, you know, you're making all your own updates and you're basically doing everything for the for the product, and you're hoping it gets out there into, you know, so you don't have to like, fork the whole thing. And but it's a problem. So for those of you out there also, you know, trying to figure out how you're going to play in this open source community or develop your own, your own technology, just know, I mean, that's what companies are really thinking about before they adopt. So the more community you have, the more diverse your user group is, the more companies you get involved. And if you get lucky and you get a vendor in who's going to, you know, really, bet their business on your project, then that's a good recipe for success.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, absolutely. And I and I think you touched on, on a really important point too, like when you, you know, I think a lot of startups, heavily rely on, on open source because it's like, hey, it's it's free, available... yay. I don't have to pay for this, but then you get to large enterprises, or even those, those, those startups start to scale and you need something a little bit more, you know, a little bit more beefy, or you need to, you need you need a guarantee. It's not so much a beefiness. You need a guarantee of reliability. Right. And I remember in my banking days, it kind of broke my brain initially when, when the bank I was working at was, was like, well, we don't really, we're, we're a little bit hesitant about working with open source, because we need, we want to pay somebody for support.

So unless there's like some support contract wrapped around that open source offering, then it's too much of a risk, right? Especially when you have critical applications, critical services running that rely on these tools. How do you ensure that when shit hits the fan, there is going to be, you know, a timely resolution, right? Because like your Oracle database, I'm dating myself, spent many years of my career doing Oracle stuff. When your Oracle database starts crapping out, you can call, you know, the Oracle support team, and they'll get on the phone with you in the middle of the night to try to resolve your issues. So do you have that guarantee when you're working with with open source software? Right.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, it's it's really true. And, you know, if it's a really small project, I always try to encourage people, you know, give them some love, give them some money. If you're using this project, there's a way to donate to the maintainers, and the team developing, because if if they can't pay the bills, they're going to, you know, have to get a full time job that they're working around the clock at, and they're not going to be able to maintain that, technology. So, we always try to give a little love back if we are using a project and it's like, you know, a guy and his dog in his garage, you know, or a woman and and her dog, I was going to say cat, but I’m a dog person, so if it was in my garage, it was a dog. Yeah. And and then, you know, you have to support that if you can. And so it's like, you know, consider like a Go Fund Me or something like that to, to really help. And your Oracle days also brought up... I started my tech career, one of my early jobs out of college, actually spent over five years at Oracle. Way back in the ‘90s. So I yes, that was, that was early stages in my career. I had actually worked for a Posix certification company before that. So I did geek out... I mean, if you want to talk about geekiness, Posix, Posix certifications.

ADRIANA:
Oh, damn...

LISA-MARIE:
And I was like, trying to teach myself Linux at the time, and but it was really cool technology. And we had, you know, back in the day, if you wanted to sell to the government, you had to have Posix certifications, like, you know, it was a really important thing. And so we would have technology in there, not just software, but hardware that we were certifying. Like we had the original Sun pizza boxes in there. We had IBM mainframes, we had all this technology, and they would bolt it to the floor of our office so somebody couldn't walk out with it, because it hadn't even been released yet. And we test it. And we do. You know, we did a couple hundred Posix certifications a year, and then, you know, you'd get your certification and, you know, Microsoft would run off with their technology and, and they'd be able to sell it. So that was kind of how I, right out of college, got into tech because I was an English major, which probably came out of the fact that my mom was an English professor here at Stanford. And it was a little bit of a default. And I went to college back in the dark ages when, you know, my Jesuit advisors were not encouraging women to go into the math and sciences field, even though my math SAT scores were twice like my English scores were. But, you know, they were like, you want to go into the School of Nursing? School of Education. What do you want to do? I was just like....

ADRIANA:
HOW?

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah. Yeah. It was like that. So, I didn't have enough, like role models or examples at the time, even though I grew up here, and we were just like, such geeks. But you know, it was like you get influenced by your advisors and...

ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah...

LISA-MARIE:
That was what they knew, I guess. And it wasn't until my senior year that one of my roommates was a math major, and I was like, neat. We get to do that? What are you talking about? And I was taking electives. I was like, tutoring the hockey team in calculus, even though I wasn’t taking calculus. But I was taking astronomy and all kinds of.

ADRIANA:
WHAT?

LISA-MARIE:
Love it. I still love that stuff.

ADRIANA:
Oh my God, I love astronomy. I will nerd out with you on that any time.

LISA-MARIE:
Yes, 100%. Oh my gosh. When we get to Toronto, we're assuming.

ADRIANA:
Okay, okay. Yes.

LISA-MARIE:
The first thing I do when I, when I get somewhere, I orient myself like, okay, where are all my friends?

ADRIANA:
Oh my God.

LISA-MARIE:
Because you can rely on that. The planets. The moon. Stars kind of, you know, you know where they are and they're just they're there for you and yeah. Love it, love it. Though a Scorpio is one of my favorite constellations. And so this is his time of year. And he's he's looking great up there in the sky from where I live. So every, every day I just ground myself. I'm like, hey, Scorp, what’s going on?

ADRIANA:
Awww....for me, it's always like, in the winter, looking up at Orion. It's like that sense of comfort.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, I'm a Libra, but that's not an interesting constellation. Just the stars are kind of boring the way they are. I just love Scorpio. And that fantastic tail. Orion is is an awesome one too, and Cassiopeia is probably another one of my favorites.

ADRIANA:
Totally, totally.

LISA-MARIE:
Cool that W and it's just right there. I totally love it.

ADRIANA:
Awww, I love finding a fellow astronomy nerd. That's great.

LISA-MARIE:
Totally. Totally. So I wish, I wish I had gone into that field. I should have been a rocket scientist at NASA. You know, NASA's like literally there. We started OpenStack at NASA. And I was running meetups right there. And, but I, you know, and I would go and geek out with the space, the space portal guys, on a Friday afternoon, we would bring a bottle of wine and go up there on the base. And, you know, I'd find out all the things going on. So I absolutely love that. I should have done it. So if you're listening to this and you're a young woman and you're choosing your career, go for what you love, go for your passion. I came back into tech through this roundabout way. And, you know, nothing like taking Pascal courses at a community college and, you know, night school to try to, like, figure out, to learn PL/SQL, to understand the Oracle database.

ADRIANA:
PL/SQL was my buddy for years. It was like a love hate relationship with it.

LISA-MARIE:
Yes, yes. Well, SQL's come a long way. My last role before, Intuit I was at Cockroach, Cockroach DB. Learned all about distributed SQL and that was some really cool stuff. It’s an amazing architecture. And once you kind of get into it, especially if you're a SQL and a relational database person, and then, you know, you look at distributed SQL and it's like, as the friend Jim Walker used to say, you can't unsee it. Once you see it, can’t unsee it. It's just a really special thing that makes you be able to do incredible use cases, you know, Mongo and stuff and, you know, just the, the scalability and reliability is just, you know, it's unmatched. So I really had a lot of fun there at that company for three years. Getting to chat. You know, they have an open source version as well. And so building community there, they had fantastic docs. I'm sure they still do. Just the one of the best examples I've seen of a really amazing, docs and education team. But yeah, that's really, really, really fun technology and, you know, but then to get the opportunity to actually work for an end user, I mean, my, my whole community career has been pushing end user stories out there and telling the stories that, you know, people come from the technology side, like, oh, I'm a Kubernetes maintainer. I'm, you know, I'm geeking out at the new feature in Argo.

And it's like, well, why don't we talk to the people that are actually using this? Why don't we let, like, people tell their story? Let's talk to even the architects and, you know, who is actually the operators, right? Let's not forget about them. And when we start in this huge technology, OpenStack did the same thing. And Kubernetes, you know, we tend to start from the inside out. And when I was running the OpenStack meetup, you know, we'd always have the project maintainers come and talk about, you know, whether it was project Ironic or Nova or Neutron or whatever the projects were. And after a while I'm like, I don't think the people who are building and using this stuff really need to know what the next feature in Neutron is. Like, you know, sometimes, because people in the Bay area tend to roll our own, you know, “vanilla Kubernetes”, they call it now because. That just sounds so delicious to me. Every time someone says that...

ADRIANA:
I know. Right? Not as tasty as it sounds.

LISA-MARIE:
I know, right?

ADRIANA:
Or at least it's a lot of work to get that tasty Kubernetes instance running.

LISA-MARIE:
Exactly, exactly. That's better than rolling your own, because in California that also has its own, connotation. But yeah, but the rest of the world, you know, they're happy with distros, you know, OpenShift and whatever, Rancher, and other distros that are out there. And that's fine. You know, you have a throat to choke, right? It's it's not as hard. But those tend to be behind the, you know, the behind trunk, right, behind the latest release. So, what are we doing at these conferences and at these meetups talking about like the latest, latest feature when it's like ,people aren't going to be able to use that for three years and people get upset. So, so I like to tell end user stories and have people share, you know, what, what they're building, how they're doing it. You know, how you're customizing Kubernetes because like I said, it's hard. What are you doing? And maybe somebody else can learn from that. So that's the user group that that we like to run out here. And that's the talks I like to submit to, to KubeCon and to other conferences. And it turns out they get accepted, a lot, because it's a story people want to hear.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, people love hearing those stories. And speaking of KubeCon, like what was, what was the first KubeCon you ever attended?

LISA-MARIE:
Ooh. Austin. Maybe that time it snowed and we all got stuck at the airport. Or the people that were at the party at Rainy Street got snowed on. So that was probably 2017, I want to say. And then I've been, I think, every one since. I was doing all of the OpenStack summits, and I, I was one of the first ones to start talking about Kubernetes at the OpenStack summit. And I was getting like, Linux Foundation, you know, travel assistance support, because people weren't talking about Kubernetes. They were talking about Docker a little bit first, but then, Kubernetes at, at, you know, on OpenStack. And I was running meetups like, how do you run Kubernetes on OpenStack? How do you run OpenStack on Kubernetes? How do you have an OpenStack sandwich? Kubernetes, OpenStack, Kubernetes. You know, how do you have clouds spin up clouds? So it was it was early days that I got involved in the Kubernetes community, but then I, didn't actually start going to the KubeCons until I well, I went to the one in Austin. And then when I joined Portworx and we were starting to sponsor them, I started going, with, with the vendors and then just started submitting talks.

And I think I spoke at, I don't know, probably 6 or 7 KubeCons, 8 maybe?

ADRIANA:
Wow, that’s amazing! That’s such a huge accomplishment, especially, you know, considering how like, it's such a low acceptance rate. Considering how many applications they get.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, it used to be like, 12 to 13%, maybe higher, if you're with an end user. I think it's probably even lower than that now. But, you know, I'm a CNCF Ambassador, as are you. And so we also, get involved in talks or get asked to be part of them. So there's been a few that way. I think I've seen you speak at, with Marino, or not. And now they have the colos, I, I saw your your talk. I dove out of ArgoCon, and your talk was in the big room right across the hall. And I jumped in there. Took a bunch of photos. They didn't come out as great cause I was in the back, so I didn't send them. But I always love, love your talks. Your slides are fantastic. All of the animations and everything. You have like the, cartoons. I guess I should say, always, always informative and entertaining. So I always like to catch your talks. I caught your talk in Salt Lake City also, that you did with Marino. Yes. I mean, I'm almost like an Adriana stalker.

ADRIANA:
Oh, my God, I love it.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah. Yeah. So KubeCon is a whole other thing, you know, surviving that, that show. But there's a lot of really great events if you, if you didn't get your talk accepted there, or you don't have your company supporting you to go there, that's one of the reasons the KCDs started. There's a lot of other, meetups, whether they're a part of the CNCF or not. You know, you can look on Luma and Meetup.com and just find all those local meetups, you know, not everybody puts their stuff through the CNCF And then there's also like, we started this conference that you were part of last time called KubeCrash. By the time this airs, so just for some branding, I got my filter on. So I don't know if it's going to come through, but. Yes, this is, the the KubeCrash branding. Okay, that's super blurry.

ADRIANA:
Just a little, just a little blurry.

LISA-MARIE:
Just like, for a minute it wasn't blurry, but anyway. Oh, there it is. Yeah. That was. So KubeCrash is a conference that, four amazing women started. Mostly it was Catherine Paganini's brainchild, and she called it Danielle Cook and me and said, you know, what do you think about this conference? And we were just coming out of Covid and we thought, like, how can we continue to bring technology to people who can't go to KubeCon? And this was KubeCon Valencia. Right before KubeCon Valencia. So we started this conference where we asked... it was all virtual, still is. We asked people to come talk about tech, talk about something Kubernetes. And it was like no time zones left behind. So we filmed it or we streamed it from our hotel room in Valencia on a US time zone. And then we thought, well, we'll just keep doing that at KubeCon. But it got to be too much to do it at KubeCon. So now we do.

ADRIANA:
Oh, yeah.

LISA-MARIE:
Two weeks before, two weeks after. So this time we will have done it next week for me, but we'll have done it on September 23rd. And then I think we're going to do the next one in January. So stay tuned for that date, probably the end of January. So it's a really great conference. We had amazing speakers. We've had Solomon Hikes keynote, we've had you know, I love to feature end users. We've had Alex Crane from Chick Fil-A. We've had Boeing. We've had a lot of banks, Capital One. We've had gosh, AI panels, you know, we we did a whole zero trust themed one. And then we started crowdsourcing our theme. And the last four times, Platform Engineering has unanimously won. So we've had a lot of Platform Engineering talks. Yeah, we had an amazing Observability panel. And I think that was the panel you were on last time, right? Or were you on?

ADRIANA:
I did, no, I did a talk with, with Reese on, troubleshooting the OTel Operator.

LISA-MARIE:
Oh, that's right. We were going to originally ask you to be on the panel, and then we were like, no, no, no, no, no, you need your own.

LISA-MARIE:
You need your own talk.

ADRIANA:
Oh my god. I feel so honored.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know, Catherine and Danielle, we're all big fans of yours, so. So yeah. Yeah, that was a good talk. And all of the recordings are there. So if you go to KubeCrash.io and you click on past events, you can look at the one from the spring and you can see Adriana's talk. It's very good. And then we had this panel that was outstanding. I just think of you as the, OpenTelemetry expert. So I assumed you were also on that. But we, this panel was like, these five fantastic women who were just really, really good. And the panel was so good, and I just wanted to give them more and more time. So we ended up submitting it for KubeCon, and it got accepted. So we we couldn't get all the same women, but we, Danielle is going to moderate it. And, we have, so by the time this airs, that won't have happened yet. So come check out this incredible panel. Just look for Danielle Cook's talk. And four incredible experts in OpenTelemetry are going to be on that panel. So that was a fun talk to push from KubeCrash out to KubeCon, because usually we go the other direction. So KubeCrash is great. And I hope to see you all at a KubeCrash in the future.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, I'll include the link to KubeCrash in the show notes. And as a follow up question, how does, if one's interested in speaking at KubeCrash? How, what's the process for that?

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, you if there's a, an email from the website that you can join, or sponsor, but I think is probably all one email, click on it pretty much anything and you'll get to us. And so, you know, just we we did a call for papers once, through Sessionize, and we might do it again, but, we really like, you know, people come to us with a unique idea, you know, something, informative that if we have a theme like Platform Engineering, again, that's a very broad theme. I, I want to feature more AI stuff because that's what everybody wants to talk about. And that's just the big problem everyone's trying to solve. And like, in one way or another. So those talks could be interesting. We really love featuring end users. So most of the keynotes, we’ll call them, or we always have an end user panel. So if you're a first time speaker, we also like to feature a lot of people who don't have a footprint out there on the web yet, so that when you apply to a conference, you have something you can point to and say, yes, I did this talk. So and if people are shy and, you know, they're just starting out and trying to get confidence, panels are amazing things to be on. It's really kind of low. It's not a heavy lift. Unless you're the moderator, like I often am.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, sometimes it’s more work for the moderator than the panelist.

LISA-MARIE:
It's a lot of work if you're the. Moderator, if you do it well. But, but yeah, for panelists, you know, if you're an expert in the field, let us know what it is. And, so we do, like to feature but yeah, KubeCrash.io, there's email addresses there and that that gets to all of us. If you just hit up one of us, sometimes you will, like, send me a note on LinkedIn or Catherine a note. And it's better to reach all of us because we're all busy, that we're busy at different times, and we kind of do, you know, as you do community, it's a labor of love. It tends to be your nights and weekends. So, most of us have really busy jobs that we have to focus on, so we like people to go through the channel just so they get the most eyes on things. And we do have a, we have a slack channel now for, the alumni speakers, and we have a diversity slack channel, on the CNCF Slack. So if you're, passionate about, diverse speakers and more diversity, DE&I representation at conferences, just hit one of us up. I'm probably Lisa at on the CNCF Slack. or Lisa Marie maybe. But now I think I'm just Lisa or L Namphy. I don't know, but you can Slack me and I can add you to our, diversity speaker channel. I know you're on it. And thank you very much for being on it. Yeah. Something we're all really passionate about.

ADRIANA:
Oh that's awesome. Yeah, that's so great. And I mean, especially because you do have like, your very busy day job, on top of all this. So to be able to run this as well is, I think, a testament to how important this sort of thing is. So thank you for your work on that.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah. And it's just, you know, if you're community architect, is a title that I use, because it's more than just organizing or managing. It's really thoughtfully thinking through how to build viable communities, diverse communities, you know, inclusive communities, and sustainable communities. And it's a lot that goes into it. But it's kind of, if it's who you are, it's who you are, you know, you can't really not do it. Like I was doing it way before I was an Ambassador and way before any foundation said, you know, you should run your meetup through us or, or anything like that. You know, it's just getting people together to talk about technology. You know, we do it anyway. We geek out here on on Friday nights and talk tech and yeah, it's what we're passionate about. And so communities kind of come together around those kind of things. And you know, right now, like if you go to south of Market in, you know, the south part of San Francisco, every bar, every coffee shop, it's just AI, AI, you just hear all these, you know, startups that were started on a napkin. But like, you have all of these, like. And and all the incredible passion around what's going on, in San Francisco with a lot of the AI stuff, so you can't really get away from it, but it's, you know, luckily, I love it, and I'm super passionate about it. I kind of eat, breathe and sleep it.

ADRIANA:
It's been, you know, it's been fun dabbling in, in AI. We were try... We were chatting just before the recording started, and I've, I've, I've become very fascinated with MCP servers. So I've been having lots of fun playing around with that. I know there's an Argo CD MCP server that I think Akuity put out.

LISA-MARIE:
They like to hear their name. They like to hear their name.

ADRIANA:
That's right, that's right. The octopi are dancing around. Yeah. So I'm I'm still I'm still wrangling that one at the, wrangling with that one at the time of this recording. I'm hoping I can I can sort out my, my connectivity issues, because I, I, I love the idea of, like, I, I started vibe coding. A little bit, and it's been a journey because it's like, on the one hand especially actually for, for like, for, for SRE type tasks. Right? SRE and platform engineering type tasks, especially things like I can never remember the command for like, you know, I want to grab the base64 decoded value of a secret in Kubernetes.

LISA-MARIE:
You don’t have that command...

ADRIANA:
I don't have it memorized. I have it in. I have in my private GitHub repo a list of like, Kubernetes commands I always forget. So I’m like, now, with chat bots, I can just ask it and it'll tell me, you know, like thank you or my favorite, like, regex. Nope. Never like I've I know some, but like, you know, now I can just ask my chat bot. Hey, create a regex that does this. I’m like, great. It tells me. I don't have to worry about this crap.

LISA-MARIE:
That's going to be an awesome talk when you get that going. You should submit that. If you don't. I mean, ArgoCon is an obvious, but I think that would be an amazing KubeCon talk.

ADRIANA:
Okay, I will, I will. May be I will for KubeCrash. Dun dun dun.

LISA-MARIE:
Heck yes. That would...

ADRIANA:
Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'm giving the. I'm giving this talk. On September 22nd at the Toronto, CNCF meetup for the CNCF 10, 10th anniversary. So, yeah. So yeah, I'm happy to demo, at KubeCrash or I like your idea of submitting to ArgoCon. I think that'd be lots of fun.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, our January KubeCrash. That would be perfect. And it'll be perfected by then, I am sure.

ADRIANA:
That’s right. That’s right.

LISA-MARIE:
Or at the meetup in Toronto. Well, you already do in Toronto. Meetup. So.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

LISA-MARIE:
Diversify. Spread that around. But yeah. No. Vibe coding is super cool stuff. I was messing around. You know, they encourage all of us, like, even I am director of developer relations. I don't really need to write code. But we do a lot of follow me homes and try to have, customer empathy and, like, what are our users going through? And, things that, like autosave or lack of autosave is something that drives me nuts because I hate losing my work. I just can't stand it. I just typed all my goals into the system last week, and one of my team was like, I don't see your goals, where are they? And I'm like, oh, it’s in there. And like, you don't hit submit. And now I'm just, you know, I'm trying to talk to HR like you auto save them somewhere, right? Like, don't make me go through those hours of my life again. And, especially something as painful as, you know. Writing a resume or doing your goals.

ADRIANA:
Oh my gosh. No, I've I've totally had that stuff happen to me, especially, especially around those HR tasks where you're like, it's taken me forever to convince myself to do this. Now that I've done it.

LISA-MARIE:
You don't want to lose it.

ADRIANA:
Now you’ve gone and messed with all my work.

LISA-MARIE:
Right. So I was messing around, just in QuickBooks. And I was like, maybe I can build a little, you know, kind of enhance the auto save stuff so that users don't lose their work. Like, let's have an auto save every 30s. And I'm just using vibe coding, because my, my coding skills are not mad. So I'm like, vibe coding. And I'm like, okay, I can... let me try this. And I'm like, oooh, that looks... that’s so annoying. It's like popping up and now I'm losing my concentration, not my work. And so I was like, let's make that more subtle. And there's just so many cool things you can do and you know, I am geeking out for like, you know, getting lost in this hour of having fun with trying to see if I can get this feature in. Turns out I should have been doing it in my My Goals app. That'll be the next thing I try to tackle. But yeah, vibe coding is really, really cool.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, it's weirdly addictive too. Like, I feel like in a way, it's like, it's like playing slots, right? Because you're refining your prompts and you're like, oh, I'm so close. I am so close to the jackpot. So you keep going and going and going. Next thing you know, you've lost like an hour trying to refine this prompt to get it just the right way.

LISA-MARIE:
Yes. Yeah, exactly. Playing slots, throwing good money after bad. Yeah, definitely.

ADRIANA:
There is that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

LISA-MARIE:
Somewhere. I can almost reach it. I can almost get there. Oh my gosh. So fun.

ADRIANA:
Oh well we are coming up on time. But before we wrap up, I wanted to ask if you have either any hot takes or, words of wisdom that you wanted to share with our audience.

LISA-MARIE:
Oh gosh, I have, I have several, but do we get to talk about superpowers? You always ask your guests that.

ADRIANA:
Oh yeah yeah yeah! We, uh we didn't get to the light... er, sorry... I call them lightning round questions. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they are. But we can do the, we can do the icebreaker questions really fast and then and then transition into the, into the words of wisdom. How's that sound? Okay. All right, we will we will do the lightning round questions as lightning round. Usually they take sometimes they take like 15 minutes to like most of the show.

LISA-MARIE:
Okay. We'll go. We'll be lightning.

ADRIANA:
All right. We'll be lightning. Okay. First question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

LISA-MARIE:
Righty.

ADRIANA:
Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

LISA-MARIE:
IPhone.

ADRIANA:
Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

LISA-MARIE:
Mac.

ADRIANA:
Do you have a favorite programing language?

LISA-MARIE:
No, but my favorite text editor was Atom. Do you remember that one?

ADRIANA:
Oh my God, I do. I never used it, but I remember it.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah, I had a t shirt and everything. Programing languages. Probably have to go with Python.

ADRIANA:
I love Python, I agree. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

LISA-MARIE:
JASON. I mean, everybody loves to hate on YAML right? I don't. I'm not a YAML hater, I just love. I have a lot of team members name Jason. So we have. A lot of Jason. Yeah. JSON one seems to be. And the Argo guy at one point was, you know, it was a Jason and the Argonauts reference until it ended up. Also, there's an octopus in Australia called Argo. So, Jason, JSON, I got to go with that one.

ADRIANA:
Awesome. Love it. Okay. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?

LISA-MARIE:
Tabs.

ADRIANA:
Okay. And two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

LISA-MARIE:
Text.

ADRIANA:
And final question what is your superpower?

LISA-MARIE:
Building bridges and connecting people and technologies.

ADRIANA:
Awesome, I love it. And I mean, I get that vibe just from like our entire time in this interview. And I think it's wonderful to have, like you and others like you in the community doing that. And, and sharing their passion because. And especially as a woman in tech, because we need to inspire others like our, like us, so that they know that yes, you can do tech if you want to do it.

LISA-MARIE:
Absolutely, absolutely. Women of tech, women of color in tech, a lot of, non-binary or, LGBTQ women in tech. I love that you're doing this podcast. I love that you invited me. Thank you. So much. I mean, I thank you for all that you do for the community and for women in tech. Really appreciate it. And, really appreciate spending time with you. We need to do more of this.

ADRIANA:
I know, I know, it's always like, whenever we see each other at KubeCons, it's always like, hi, bye! Like, because KubeCon is so, you know, like, busy.

LISA-MARIE:
Yeah.

ADRIANA:
So, it was so nice at the Intuit event in Toronto. This I guess early summer, to, like, get some time to chat. And, I'm very, very glad that you were able to come on the podcast, because for me, it's so important to, to elevate women in tech and other members of upper... underrepresented groups on this podcast. So, I really want to I want to share people's amazing stories and, and love of technology, geeking out on the things that they love. With, with this audience. So thank you.

LISA-MARIE:
Yes. And thank you for validating all of our inner geeks. It's really fun to geek out with another woman. It's actually super, super fun. I love it.

ADRIANA:
Awesome. And so now for your parting words of wisdom.

LISA-MARIE:
I, I would say since we've been talking about KubeCon and conferences, I would say these conferences are great. They're great for meeting people. They're great for networking. They're great for getting together. They're great for learning. If you leave the conference and you leave it all at the conference, it was totally worthless. So what I encourage people to do, and my dear friend Jono Bacon is really big on this is. Probably who... he's one of my mentors and who taught me to really think, very thoughtfully about this. What is the one thing you're going to do when you leave the conference to take with you going forward, so that you keep it going and do it the first day you get home? Like, what is the first day when you're back in the office? The thing you're going to do that you learned at the conference or that you got out of the conference? And if you were only there networking, you know, write to all those folks on LinkedIn, do something and make a connection. Invite one of them out to, you know, to lunch, to tea, coffee, whatever it is. But if it was, you know, community Leadership Summit or a DE&I day, all of that learning is worthless unless we do something with it. So what are you going to do on day one when you get back from the event or the conference or the meetup that's going to be game changing that you learned at the meetup. And if you approach every conference that way, I think we can all be game changing.

ADRIANA:
Oh, that is amazing, I love that. That is great advice. I mean, this is the best way to make the most out of your conference experience. And and keeping that in mind, right, as you're attending the conference, so that you don't, you know, it's at the back of your mind for when you get home. I love it.

LISA-MARIE:
Exactly. Don't leave it all at the conference. Otherwise what was the point?

ADRIANA:
That's right. Yeah, that's great advice. Well, thank you so much, Lisa, 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...

LISA-MARIE:
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.