The One Where We Geek Out on Community with Taylor Dolezal

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Mar 25, 2025

Taylor Dolezal, a tech innovator from CNCF, shares his insights on navigating the cloud native universe and striking a balance between tech and environmental responsibility. He reminisces about the quirks of past gadgets and programming languages, discussing how nostalgia shapes tech preferences. The conversation delves into the challenges of making software development greener and the importance of community support during crises like California's wildfires. Taylor also emphasizes the role of home automation in energy efficiency and the evolving dynamics at tech events.

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ANECDOTE

Blackberry Storm

Taylor Dolezal used a Blackberry Storm.
He later found vestiges of Blackberry support at Disney in 2016.

ADVICE

Environmental Sustainability Action

Take meaningful action on environmental sustainability.
Show a return on investment to convince business leaders.

INSIGHT

Green Software Development

Developers often overlook software's environmental impact.
Choosing efficient algorithms and languages can make software greener.

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About our guest:

Taylor Dolezal navigates the cloud native universe with a knack for puns and a keen eye for psychology. Living in the heart of LA, he blends tech innovation with mental insights, one punny cloud at a time. Avid reader, thinker, and cloud whisperer.

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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

Show notes:

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 a very special guest, Taylor Dolezal of the CNCF. Welcome, Taylor.

TAYLOR:
Yo. Howdy, howdy, howdy. Excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, thanks for jumping on the podcast. And as we're recording this, you're in the midst of some really nasty wildfires in the LA area.

TAYLOR:
Yes. Oh, my gosh. It's been, literally a wild ride all around the city. But, thankfully, this this house where I'm at, everything's okay. Just a lot of ash, dust, debris, really uplifting to see the community rally with one another, to, on everything. Despite, you know, some people have lost homes. There's been some really challenging, really sad things that have happened. But seeing everybody jump in and want to help one another out, truly beautiful, seeing seeing everybody get so involved. There have been there have been things like the Comedy Store here, a big, like, world famous comedy place. They're having free shows and raising money. So like, things that I never would have expected Los Angeles to do, really, going forth and doing. It's beautiful. I love seeing that.

ADRIANA:
Oh, my God, that's so nice. And especially, you know, in the midst of all of the I don't know, there's just so, so much negativity in the world. It's so nice to just see, like a bright spot in the midst of this tragedy too. So yay, yay, humanity.

TAYLOR:
Like the sun. Yeah.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. Awesome. Okay. Well, I, I do want to dig into that topic a little bit more, but before we get, going to that, I am going to subject you to my icebreaker questions. All right, here we go. Are you ready? All right, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

TAYLOR:
Righty.

ADRIANA:
All right. Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

TAYLOR:
iPhone since 20--... 2009

TAYLOR:
Fun fact, I had a, black. I was one of the people that got the BlackBerry Storm with the one, like, way back in the day. I'm like trackball. No, thanks. Yeah. The price of adoption there. Not. Not a good one. I think all of those phones v1 ended up being returned, by the way. Fun fact, but uh...

ADRIANA:
Damn. Yeah, I, I heard they were, quite glitchy. I had, I had a pre-Storm BlackBerry. I think I had a BlackBerry Curve. And then it started, shutting down, spontaneously in the middle of calls, and I'm like, screw this. I'm going to. This is when I switched iPhone.

TAYLOR:
I, I was surprised to find when I worked at Disney later on, like 2016 to 2020, they had a RIM server there and they were supporting that. So there were still vestiges of BlackBerry around there.

ADRIANA:
Damn! What? That’s wild. Wow. The things that are still around, that's bananas. All right. Next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?

TAYLOR:
I'd say ooh, that's a tough one. I'd say I'd say it's like, yeah, I'm 55% Mac. I really like Linux and stuff like that. I do want to it's is 2025 the year of Linux on the desktop. You know, it's. I need to find that out for every year. I think we'll get there someday. But, George Castro, one of my coworkers, and Bob and GC have me contemplating moving to a framework laptop or something like that. So we'll see. But Mac, for right now, but Linux is looking pretty good.

ADRIANA:
I feel one day we'll get there with Linux. I had a Linux dedicated Linux desktop back in the day. But I had to dual boot it with Windows or at one point I had a of Windows VM. And because I couldn't, I couldn't sync my BlackBerry and then subsequently my iPhone to, to Linux. So like bye!

TAYLOR:
It's, I mean, it's really the ecosystem much like CNCF Haha. You know, but it's, it's, it's that. What's the interoperability look like. That's like I can do something on Linux, but will my Zoom program work tomorrow? I don’t know... You know, so.. Stuff like that.

ADRIANA:
Yeah I feel yeah. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?

TAYLOR:
I do, you know, it's I love all of my, languages just the same.

ADRIANA:
All your babies. Okay.

TAYLOR:
Which dog is your favorite? I don't have a favorite. I... Right now, I'm really deep into, what, like, early days. So I’ll give you a quick run, I promise. VB6, .Net, Visual Basic, then C-sharp, and then PHP, Ruby. And so I was moving through those, Python’s come up a bit. Not really my favorite, especially with PEP8 and the indentation stuff. So I love looking at a language and being able to, like, read it, really be able to grok, understand it. Go has been there for a while for me, but I lately have been taking a look at, Rust a little bit. The one that I keep I can't get away from for the past ten years is Elixir. Taking a look at that functional programing, I think that, you know, not trying to make such a thing, but I think that there's a lot there that we haven't tapped into yet. I see a lot of other people looking at Zig and these other things too, but I don't know. Everybody take a look at Elixir. It's a full stack. You get live updates and stuff like that. You don't to jump between back end and front end and JavaScript, it's you stay in the same language. Used in telco. And then just I like I like how stable that it is, despite how the world might not be. So.

ADRIANA:
That’s awesome.

TAYLOR:
That's fun.

ADRIANA:
And fun fact there's, OTel instrumentation for Elixir.

TAYLOR:
I was so excited to, like, see.

ADRIANA:
That's cool.

TAYLOR:
Difficult kind of thinking about your program as a flipbook rather than I just dot color. What are you. You know.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, by the way, you mentioned VB6. Nostalgia like that was my which I used in high school.

TAYLOR:
Did I start to date myself. Yeah. Oh yeah. Fax machines, VHS. Oh no.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. There's a, there's a very special place in my heart for VB6

ADRIANA:
I kind miss it. It wasn't, it wasn't bad. Cool. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer dev or ops?

TAYLOR:
Oof! I, yeah. Can I split the difference? I'd say. I think that. It's. It really depends on the day. I'm. It's not a cop out answer. I really I love distributed systems and just like, wow. Beautiful. Like what we've been able to put together, but, No. Yeah, I'd say no. I'd have to lean a little bit more towards ops. Dev is fun when accomplishing that task, but I love seeing it all composed and tied together.

ADRIANA:
Yes, I definitely feel ya. There's it's very satisfying. Okay. Next one I may maybe I know what your answer is based on previous comment. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

TAYLOR:
I think yeah, I know, I just might come as a shock. I'm a big I like JSON. That makes a lot more sense to me. YAML is great, but again, same kind of,

ADRIANA:
You mentioned the spaces. The indentation. Yeah.

TAYLOR:
And in most parsers and stuff like that, you can go back and forth from JSON to YAML, which is, very helpful tip like JSON can be converted very quickly to YAML and back and forth, but but yeah, for yeah, my CNCF hat on, YAML, of course. But I guess not at home.

ADRIANA:
But also some like fun fact that, you know, like, I don't think most people realize also that you can write Kubernetes manifest in JSON. We just. Yeah, we default to YAML.

TAYLOR:
Exactly. It's like that's I think that what's what's the biggest secret that you that no one knows that you do. That's one of the ones I would say 100%.

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

TAYLOR:
Tabs 100%. We started we spun up the end user TAB. I thought that was enough of a sign to people. Give them their space to do great things.

ADRIANA:
I love it. Two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through text or video?

TAYLOR:
I'd say I, it's hard to be sitting on the couch during a cloudy day. Pretty rare here in Los Angeles. And then just, like, pour through RSS feeds and stuff like that. I love reading and that kind of clarity when it's something I don't understand. And I really want that, like deep aspect or like, please just explain it to me. You know, it's sitting down with a friend or video that's the best way to emulate that.

ADRIANA:
Yes. Oh, I like sitting down with a friend. Yeah, nothing beats that. Sometimes we forget to ask. I don't know, I get like, so caught up in my own problem solving. Like, I must figure this out myself. And then it's like, but. Or I could ask, you know, my friend here who's an expert in this area.

TAYLOR:
It's my favorite being able to sit down. It's I really love and respect to all the friends and people in the ecosystem that take the time and have the patience to sit down with me. I sometimes I feel bad because I'll treat them kind of like the I'll have immediate hot takes. I'll be like, why is it like that? You know? And then they're,

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

TAYLOR:
Superpower? I'd say it's, I'd say I'd say sleep, question mark. When something is really interesting, it's at it. I'm sure a lot of people can relate. It's just that really takes the precipice and the focus. And yes, I think KubeCon, very rarely and not like, hey, this is a it's not a badge. It's not good to not get it. Don't do it. It hurts your brain. But it's just very difficult to manage or kind of understand or figure out the balance when something is so exciting as all of our community all together in the same place all at once, there's a lot of when there's cool ideas afoot and lurking around, it's really hard to focus on much else and to lower the excitement for like, hey, okay, body, it's time to sleep. So I've had to learn a couple of tricks on that one to actually get me to a place where I can get the rest I need, but. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's. I think it's the energy. I don't know where it comes from. I don't know if I'm solar powered or what, or.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, I love it.

TAYLOR:
But I'll let you know when I figure it out.

ADRIANA:
That's so great. And I think this is a great segue into, into our conversation. There's so many topics that I want to dig into. But first and foremost, KubeCon EU is right around the corner at the time that we're recording this, taking place in London. And as you said, it's like so much, so much excitement. Like, I, I attended my first KubeCon in Detroit in 2022 and oh my God, I was like, it was so overwhelming. And so whenever like new, new to KubeCon people, you know, come in. I'm like, don't worry. Just like, it'll be intense. Hey, there's a lot of stuff going on. Just find an area where you feel comfortable.

TAYLOR:
Marathon, not a sprint. All the pressure makes diamonds, as Chris Anuzchec will say.

ADRIANA:
And KubeCon is almost a is is always so much fun too, because it's got like such rock concert vibes, especially on the opening day keynote. Like it's usually like this massive, massive, you know, room or multiple rooms have been like, you know, combined. And like, yeah, it's just such a such a fun production. And, is there anything that you're looking forward to in, in this upcoming KubeCon?

TAYLOR:
I think, honestly, I'm really curious about the stories that are I has kind of been big fascinating. And then, oh, my gosh, I don't want to hear it anymore. You know, we're still kind of figuring out that space. And it's definitely going through the okay, I've heard enough like snooze a little bit, framing. And so I think there's some cool things that people are doing that are amazing on the end user side. I'm kind of curious on those stories, but at the same time with, I kind of blossom. It's like a fast growing tree. And. Yeah, the, the leaf cover, has kind of shaded out a lot of the other really interesting things that have been happening in the background that haven't gotten the spotlight or the attention. And so there is still the your ever popular and present platform engineering and security. That's kind of like the AI is, you know, more or less intentionally being left off. But you'll see it that you won't know it, but you'll see signs, you know, around the periphery. But, I think that's I'm really curious to hear more about this adoption stories. I anecdotally, I think that there's a lot of people working on developer experiential type things. Yeah. And especially with Claude Lemon assisted coding, all these things, it's really I see people starting to appreciate or comment on or have hot takes about. This is a bummer experience. I don't like this UX or this UI. So you have with problems come people ideating on solutions. Awesome things coming out and some not so much. And but that's where I like that momentum. So I think that there's a I'm curious to see how many people are going to focus on that topic specifically. Most of our end user technical advisory board has, has focused on that too. And you'll kind of hear pieces and parts of it as well. I think, Arun Gupta, our CNCF governing board chairperson, was talking, I think Bart, from the community asked him. He's like, what's your least favorite feature about Kubernetes? And it was, the onramp, which I would say. I would debate. I'm like, well, that's. Not a feature of Kubernetes. Yeah. And, But I didn't give him a hard time on that one. But I think that I hear him on that one. And it's like when you bring something to Kubernetes, it's there's there's that pain of understanding and what makes sense, having a great developer experience. Docker did this amazingly, Heroku with their CLI. Amazing. So being more thoughtful in asking the question, why is this so difficult to do? Or can we make this better, seeing that come up more often? I'm really excited for that. I know that's what I was supposed to fix, but, well, yeah, we'll we'll get there someday.

ADRIANA:
Absolutely. And, you know, I infer I was thinking like, another interesting topic, which I think fits into I guess what we are, what folks are experiencing in LA, related to the wildfires, the environment and technology. And I don't know. I don't know if you feel this way, but as a, as a techie, I, you know, like, I've always, like, really, really cared about the environment. And yet I work in a field that contributes to the production of greenhouse gases. And it like, it breaks my heart. But at the same time, like, it's, it's been interesting to see, some of the projects that have, sprouted, to, you know, encourage greener, greener software deployment, and greener development. I was just wondering if you, had any thoughts around that.

TAYLOR:
I think it's, it very, very nuanced thoughts on that front. I, I, I'm like you, you know, I'm like, I think about that all the time. Like, I know my name is Taylor, but I might not be Taylor Swift with my private jet, you know, that many emissions. But, you know, everything is checks and balances on that front. Yeah. So even thinking down to, you know, like, I've got some that sparkling water here was that made here? It was. It shipped across the country. Was it really efficient? You know, thinking about things like that, actually doing it and living something that is, taking into account all these things can be difficult. It's the reverse of that UX experience. Right. And a lot of people will succumb to that friction. It's just like, it's just really harder. I, I'd love to buy local, but this is going to be here tomorrow. You know, when you're down in the reality, things might shift or change. But I don't think that that should be something that dissuades people from doing the right thing. Atomic. I think it's atomic habits. One of the, And not to show that book, but it's really good. I, I had feelings about it before I read it, and after that I was like, ooh, this is great. The author made the point that, do you need to get 100% in every test? No. If you're 80 is okay, 91 is okay, 92 is okay. If you're making progress towards something, it's okay to have a little bit of, you know, don't don't be so, so difficult on yourself, especially if you want to build the habit or the pattern. When we're taking a look at things within the, it being kind to the environment and making, figuring out that impact to, I've seen a lot of groups that have the right intent and focus, but, unfortunately, it's really difficult to sell that. Right? We all know what the right thing to do is, but how do how do we make meaningful progress on that? Can we show a return on investment there for business or people that might want to sponsor these things? Not because it should make money. And yes, it's the right thing to do, but how do we continue making that forward? We can't drive around our, you know, we can't run around with our phone battery, you know, until it just depletes. We need to figure out some way to refill that make make the effort sustainable itself. So yeah, that's and that's the hard that's the hard thing. Right. Is trying to figure that out. But, yeah, I've seen a lot of people do amazing things, whether it's like, hey, this project, you know, it. Even things like looking at projects around the CNCF ecosystem, hey, do we really need this much compute? Well, it runs faster. Is that a good enough reason? All right. Can you deal with. Can you wait, you know, an hour more or two or. This is just a lot more efficient. Looking at projects actually measure power consumption or usage, being more mindful about like, again, do you need that matrix build or, or would one thing make sense or can we use one runtime really creative ways to solve technical problems so we aren't burning up enough. Yeah. But it's also two pronged as well. Right. It's use less energy or be less impactful in some areas and then generate more in others. And it's going to be that blend in that fusion. Yeah. Yeah. Again, lots of great things to talk about on that front. But I think at the end of the day, really what it comes down to is taking action, take meaningful action. We could talk about it all day, but let's let's get down to brass tacks and try to figure out how to how to make that impact, how to create projects like open cost and other things show savings and other benefits. There be, you know, less power means less power, bill. So yeah, you can figure out strategic ways to convince and talk to our business leaders and executives and showcase that, like, hey, let me make it easy for you to make the right decision. Then you're really compelling.

ADRIANA:
Exactly. Yeah, it's it's all about talking about those dollars and cents right? At the end of the day. I mean, that's that's always what gets people's attention.

TAYLOR:
If you make cents you might get dollars too.

ADRIANA:
Womp womp. And the other thing, you know, you talked about also like forging habits, like, you know, we in tech we got we got used to like, developing that agile mindset, that DevOps mindset. Why not develop that green, development mindset and, and the other the other thing that someone pointed out to me that was quite interesting because we we talk about a lot about like, you know, having greener, greener infrastructure or, greener deployment processes. But then there's also, the other side, which is making our software greener, choosing more efficient algorithms, choosing more efficient languages. I know that there's like some languages that are less efficient than others, like some runtimes are really like your beefy and stuff. These are things that like, we don't necessarily think about. Right. We've been just sort of taking this for granted, for a while.

TAYLOR:
It's that I find really fascinating and I think that, like, that's a great, you know, not that chipmakers need more to focus on right now, given given the state of everything, but, I think that it's, Yeah, it just it makes sense for I've seen even, like, system on a chip or chips themselves. They're like, this is tuned for this language. This operates this much better. Seeing some things like TPUs and other stuff as well. It's like, no, this can actually change. It's much more efficient. I find that fascinating. And I think that the New Relic and Datadog and others had I think it was more coming out of the New Relic camp because they were, you know, first, first in the scene with telemetry and some things, you know, in the in the early days, at least for me in my career and what they saw and they talked to in many of their cases was the fact that, developers didn't care about the things that they weren't able to see or measure. And that makes complete sense. Again, kind of within the habits thing. If I don't have a way to measure what I'm doing, using or impacting AI, it's really hard for me to make a change. I would I would love to right now be able to tell you what each device in my house pulls and uses in terms of wattage or anything else. Thankfully, data centers are a little bit better instrumented than that, but that's still can be difficult. Is this app consuming more power or not? Did it get shifted to some commodity hardware thing that's actually pulling more? Can we you know, it's there's a lot of ADRIANA: s still within the space. I think again, that's where I'd love to see more action. You know, in us to band together to think about is can we figure out measuring power or stuff like that, even for our homes and other things? Yeah, maybe it's a little bit better in Canada, but I've got to go around to I still have to go outside, go around, look at my box, measure it. Market.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah, we we still have a lot to. Yeah. It's wild, it's wild. Why why does it require that?

TAYLOR:
It's. And I think that it's in it's I would encourage more people to ask questions like that too, because that's where it starts, right? It's like, why not? Why is this a bummer? That's where the conversation starts. And I and I love that. And then we can start to build some things on that front, even if it's just a millimeter forward. That's further than we were yesterday. So really encourage people on that front.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, I love that. And the the other thing that I want to talk about on, on that similar, thread of, of environmental sustainability is, you know, AI as you mentioned earlier, that is like not just is such a power hog. And yet it's a little contradictory to because, I can help us potentially to tune our systems as well. So finding that finding that balance. Right.

TAYLOR:
It's I think with that too, it's the when you think about development, whether or just operational work too. Right. It's like, let's make this work first. Right. It's like learning a new meal or something that you're cooking, too. It's like, let me just see if putting these things together works. And it's like, do you like it? More salt? That's all. It's an iterative process. And that's the same thing. I think with any development or new paradigm shift like this is like, is it good? And then we figure out yes or no? Then comes the that should never keep scaling up. It should. It won't take you 50 minutes to make that meal again. You get better and better and better and it takes less, less, less. You can start to eyeball the ingredients. You get more familiar with it. Yeah, that's what I would reason is, should happen in a healthy kind of ecosystem or network effect or new paradigm shift. We can't no way. We should continue to just like, yep, just keep burning things until the ocean's boiling. It's like, no, no, no no no no no. And I find it kind of sad where you do have, you do see deals and things like that, where a lot of people have already signed contracts for computing these other things. And there's not truth. Truthfully, there's not a lot of people that have had the time and experience and they're like experts within creating these brag applications or AI based applications.

So unfortunately, a lot of these GPUs are just sitting there. Many of them turned on, just burning and chilling. They're not, you know, in standby mode. That was the money that was paid for them. So, yeah, again, I think being more intentional about, like, having something at the right time, if you can try to as much as in your life, are these open source efforts or elsewhere lazy, load them in, try not to pull things down until you need them. That's why I don't have eight different cans of, water around my desk right now.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, it's it's akin to, like, you know, you know, leaving leaving a room. Turn the lights off. If you're if you're not using it or like, you've got a power bar, but nothing, all the things that are plugged into it are not being in, not in use. While that power bar consumes some power as well, just from being on, even if the other things aren't on. So turn that off.

TAYLOR:
You don't leave your stereo on like max volume when you leave the house. It’s like, all right, house, enjoy the tunes you know.

ADRIANA:
Exactly, exactly. And this is our actually reminds me to like, you know, my my husband is, like, into home automation, so he, like, automated all the things during lockdown. And this is, this is actually a great example of, like, home automation, where home automation can be your friend. Right? Because, you know, you can you can have, you can have a certain lights come on at certain times. Or if you, my favorite is if you forget to, like, leave, if you leave a light on accidentally, you've left the house. You you can see that on your phone. And you can toggle that switch from your phone, which is, like, amazing, right? Having these, you know, these little convenience things that also help out in the end.

TAYLOR:
I love that. I've got a, Google Nest. I'm also big on home automation to and, like I, I used to have the nice, like, drive up and the lights will fade on and, you know, it's like, very immersive, the triggers and things like that that happen with my house. But, I've since moved. I have been here for three years, but I need to maybe, maybe spend a weekend or two sticking to that. But but I do have like a Google Nest. And I love that because I'll go and I'll travel and things like that from time to time. And, it's nice to be able to have that at least switch to idle or eco mode when I'm out. Google Nest will at least, and many others I believe will actually connect, at least in LA there's like surge times. And so to reduce the load on the electrical grid, it'll actually say like, okay, you can survive with like, let me turn it up to maybe like 76 or 77°F or.

Or you know, I won't turn on heating until this time and it will, really help out. Yeah. I, I haven't seen anything like that. Suggested, attempted tried. But maybe that's something that, you know, I'm curious to see what the community thinks on that one. Yeah, we do that and subscribe to that in a data center or like, hey, this region or even shifting data centers when, when something is, you know, you don't need to pay shipping costs for for your applications. Thankfully just need to pull down from a registry or something might make sense to run in a, specific data center at a certain time. You know, it's things like that where you could start asking the what if or why or maybe questions where that would start having those impacts.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. It's it's all about being curious. Right.

TAYLOR:
Yeah. And everyone has infinite time. So. I get you can’t explore everything. But, but that's. That's why such a broad community is awesome. Yeah. You know, appeal to some people, not to others. And so people can run off and check these things out again, I think that that curiosity is so critical, again, urging people I know, it's like I, I fall prey to this too, but it's so fun to talk about. But we really need help making these things happen. No one's going to go do it, you know? And unless we actually go do it.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, it's true. And that's why, you know, I think events like KubeCon can be great for that. Because, you know, it's a it's a meeting of the minds. People are like, so jazzed up. You get the adrenaline rush, the dopamine rush. And people get excited. It helps the hype people up about topics. And I mean, I've, I've come back from so many KubeCon like, oh my God, I got to try this out now, right? Here's something cool. Someone's presented on an interesting topic. And I love that that power of the community. I also want to give a plug to Open Source Summit, as well, because it's, I like into it, liken it to like a KubeCon Lite you know, the same awesomeness of KubeCon without the overwhelm. Yeah, it's always so much fun.

TAYLOR:
It's I like those and I like the, there's a couple for folks that are like, CNCF is is underneath the Linux Foundation. It’s a sub foundation. If you think of, Open Source Summit, Linux Foundation event, there's also one for LF members called LF Member Summit. That's like an Open Source Summit lite. And so that's like 100, 200 people even less. And I like that level of I like the different tiers of events, like that, because there are some where you like, really want to dive deep with somebody and get strategic. And then KubeCon where you're like, oh, you just kind of, you know, cherry pick or run around the candy, the, the technical candy store, like a little bit of that. Talk to them, go here, do that. Get that swag.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, it just speaks to the power of community. Like I got involved, with the CNCF, like, actually, when I took my first DevRel job, almost three years ago, in, in OpenTelemetry and, like, you know, this was my first personal experience in contributing to open source and, like, I'm so lucky that the OpenTelemetry community is, like, such a kind, thoughtful community where I've I've said this many, many times and I'll say it again, you know, like I said that in my first PR with like, deep trepidation and, and even though, you know, people had comments, of course, they're they want to help you improve. But it was like, I want to help you improve. I'm not here to bite your head off. Not like you see with, you know, some very traumatic StackOverflow posts where you're asking a question and someone's like.

TAYLOR:
Oh my gosh, you're.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. Everyone, everyone has been so nice. Like, I'll, I'll post questions on the various OTel, channels on CNCF slack. And like, people take the time to answer the questions, you know, like, I really, really appreciate that.

TAYLOR:
It's it's, I think that you're capturing something that is really interesting to me, too. I really like the psychology aspect of that as well. I'm not a psych major. You know, I'm psyched about psychology, but I don't have a major in that. But, it's some of the books behind me, like, Carl Jung and stuff like that. Very fascinating. Especially when it comes down to that, that feedback and figuring out the best way to share that, early, like Linux days. I think there was a joke, like you had said on Reddit where to get a response from early days community, it was you had to insult it. Almost like. Linux is dumb. Because I can't set up Wi-Fi. Then you would have tons of well, no, you know, it's like the well, actually crowd comes to actually to well actually you and show you. Have and that's, that's that's helpful.

At least back then. Now it's completely different and it's this like, hey, what do you think about this? And I feel like we've gotten far further away, you know, hopefully that with that kind of feedback in people. But yeah. Nothing. No, no community is perfect. Very aware of that. But I think that it's, it's interesting to see how we keep changing and rethinking how, how meaningful we can be to one another and figure out how to actually help you or, I, I've loved working at companies that have documents that are like, here's how to best work with me. You know, like, I wake up early, I like coffee over tea, some of the some of the icebreakers that you've had too. What's your human README look like? It's I laugh, I think.

ADRIANA:
Oh my God, that's so great. I hadn't heard of that before, but that is so perfect. The human README. That's great.

TAYLOR:
I don't know what my license is. Hopefully Apache. I think.

ADRIANA:
You know, I wanted to ask you because you you're you're with the CNCF. How long have you been with the CNCF? And, how how much change have you seen in the time that you've you've been with the CNCF.

TAYLOR:
So, so much. It's been just about just shy of three years now. Yeah. It's been really fascinating to me. I remember coming in and this was like post Covid and, yeah, Post Malone and, and we got to see everybody returning back to conferences and interactions, and everybody was just so hungry for that kind of interaction. Right. We've been cooped up for so long, and it was just really nice to see one another and get back to this. The speed of development and exchanging of ideas and everything that I loved that. But, definitely, you know, that that, that pent up steam and energy and momentum couldn't carry on forever. And so I kind of saw that like really concentrated, then started to separate again into different facets within the community. Really been interesting over the past couple of years to see, the focus on, licenses altogether. You know, I used to work at HashiCorp before CNCF, you know, asked, ask me anything. Feel free to reach out at me, stuff like that. I have many spicy opinions and thoughts on that front. Given where I am with all my focuses and biases.

But, I think that's been something that's been really interesting to see, too. Lots of market effects and other, you know, more things that you probably wouldn't read before you, you go to bed. Not that interesting, not really story worthy. But there's things like in the US with like the zero interest rate percentage going away, how organizations think about their software engineering teams, that they think about open source, going through similar things like you have brought up with environmental sustainability, how do we pay for this? How do we make sense of this? And then getting to I'm really, really like huge shout out to Bob Killen who joined the CNCF coming from Google. He's he saw this problem so acutely and then has been able to really develop some great material and thoughts on how you measure ROI and prove this out is like, no, we have the data. It is much better. It's better than just saying like, everything's better and open source. He's like, I'll show you exactly where that is. I'll say, come here, you know? So I think the more efforts like that are going to be what we see over the next couple of years, kind of cutting through it. I again, I think I had a good, a good intention and direction, but we have to get it right.

And there are places where we're generating a lot of like slop and glut and just this waste, especially within content pull requests and things like that. And it's such a bummer. Again, attention is good. It might be able to get you a feature that's great, but like, let's figure out something that is maintainable for maintainers and doesn't overindex them waste their time because they're already there. They're are they've already got a ton on their shoulders. We don't want to add more to them. Here's 15 more pull requests to take a look at. Probably not how they want to spend their day. Yeah. Triage intention kind of this. Like how do we have our heads up display on a lot of these things is, I think, what's important to take a look at.

Yeah. But yeah, that's and that's just from what I can see there will absolutely be unknown unknowns. I'm curious to see what they're going to be over the next couple of years.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. It's definitely really exciting to seeing like the CNCF like just grows so much. And like there's such a sense of community and camaraderie. And I think, the reason why so many projects in the CNCF have done well, too, is because I think organizations are seeing a value in having folks on the payroll contributing to open source projects. And, you know, I give OpenTelemetry as an example because we've, you know, it's it's a project that has the backing of major observability vendors where they do have developers on the payroll doing OTel work because we're trying to establish it as a standard so that we're all ingesting the same data. And the differentiating factor is, what do we do with your data? And if if we didn't have that, you know, then it would be back to, you know, the, the pre OTel days of like everyone's just like maintaining their own framework and that's, that's just like more cognitive load that than you need it really. And, and and plus you don't have the power of the community like you have people from different companies. You know, I work with frenemies, I'll say in air quotes because they're they're all my friends. Like, seriously, I don't see them as competitors. Like, we we all work towards the same goal. And I think that's that's what's so wonderful about about CNCF.

TAYLOR:
It's I completely agree. I, I've been I still haven't found a good fit for this. I will one of these days, but I really do want to do like a diss like a funny disc diss track with someone else in the community. Like we want that kind of, you know, burn someone on on, like social media or something like that in a playful, playful match. But it's, that's fun. And then you kind of, like, encourage one another as, like your rival within the industry. I do think that's so much fun. And, yeah, I think it's really about the consistency. The two. Right. Having a place that you can actually point in and go, it's not like, oh, that's the only meetup I can go to where I can express this, or people are interested in the same thing. We finally kind of created this community where we can all come together and discuss all that stuff, and users feel safe to be able to explore those things and vendors to showcase new technologies and these other things. We can set up standards and have certainty that that's not going to change out from underneath us and power for many years. I it's, it's safety. And I really appreciate all the people that help cultivate and create that. Our, our one of our end user technical advisory board members also talked about open source and saying that, think of it almost as a vendor, too. And I think that that was really impactful to me hearing that at the past KubeCon in Salt Lake City was I was like, oh my gosh, he's right. How how many times do you talk to a vendor and interact with them? Imagine that relationship. If you just never spoke to them or any person in your life, you're like, you're in my life. I'm never going to engage with you. Yeah, open source won't work like that either. Vendor relationship doesn't work like that. Friendship. Horrible. So, it's it's it's all about intention. It's all about the perspective that you hold on that front and again like and hopefully that's always changing. And you're never the same person, you know from moment to moment as you go through all those perspective changes. But it's fun. It's a it's a wild place to be.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, definitely. And you know, you also touched upon something that I think is like a key thing for these types of events, conferences, are the relationships. Like, when I think back to my first KubeCon, where I knew maybe five people, and now every time I go to a KubeCon it looks it feels like a big, like, family reunion. And like, it's like your KubeCon friends. You know, once a year or twice a year. And it's like, hey, let's, let's hang out, let's, let's nerd out.

TAYLOR:
Don’t be square. Just be there at KubeCon.

ADRIANA:
It’s where all the cool kids at. The the other thing that I want to go back to, because, you know, we're talking about, the fires in LA, and you're, we were talking earlier about, like, the rallying of the community because, you know, we're talking about the tech community, but also, we've got like, the community, like the human community. And which I think is, is so important. If you could talk a little bit about that. What what the experience has been like, you know, it's it's obviously like a really crappy situation. And, you know, like Toronto, we, we we are not near a forested area, but, north northeast of us is, is Quebec. And we had a couple of years, some, some forest fires and then the smoke, blew down in our direction. So we saw like some haze and whatever. And the air quality was bad. And I remember having to wear a mask outside because, like, you'd go outside, you can't breathe. You're much closer to that. That is scary. Like, tell us folks what what that's about, like, so. So that they get a sense of like the this is serious stuff.

TAYLOR:
It's it's it's truly wild. I, I was, I, I went up to, to see some friends in, Palo Alto, just the weekend before all of this kicked off. I ended up driving back down to Los Angeles. In in an EV, you know, for for this. And, and it was on, Tuesday that I was coming back down. I was getting back into Los Angeles, maybe, like 930, 10:00 at night. And, so that was prime time for all of this starting to really kick off. I that was the Altadena fire that was close to me. That kicked off as I was driving home. I was about 30 minutes out, and that 100 mile an hour gust of wind blew, cars were crashing, debris was thrown onto the road, people's windshields were exploding. It was.

ADRIANA:
Whoa.

TAYLOR:
I can't even tell you. Like fear didn't enter into that. It was more like. It was like I was watching mad Max. And so it was like I was like, what? You know, you're in shock at that point. I continued driving, roiling black smoke cars pulled up to the side of the road, have to drive through it. And then finally, three minutes out from my house, it transformers. Exploding. Purple. Lights.

ADRIANA:
Oh my God.

TAYLOR:
And I'm like, what is going. You know, it's.

ADRIANA:
That's very dystopian.

TAYLOR:
It's, I'll look back in like every X amount of time, I'll look back and it will be funnier because I'm safe, you know that, like, in that moment. Oh my goodness. It was just wow. Again, this this fear is not there. It is more just shock. And you're like, did what I see just happen is is has been most of the feeling here, at least for me. I know I've talked to some friends and others, that some have had to evacuate, some been displaced. Thankfully, you know, all of them, that they still have their lives, families, you know, it's like thankfully, thankfully, thankfully. But seeing a lot of the footage, videos and then hearing their stories, you know, some of them are have just been really, fearful or angry that their friends or family haven't reached out or they don't hear anyone. There's just this lingering frustration and they don't know how to make sense of it. And I think that that's kind of the sad part. The good part is that that was kind of earlier on and like I'd say more of last weeks kind of like vibe and temperature check. This week it's you started to see a little bit of it last week, but people showing up. Oh my gosh, you lost everything. Here, take some clothes. Tons of businesses around here. Like candle stores and companies. Places you just have nothing. Now that you don't see the correlation. Come work here. We have Wi-Fi. We're going to give you water. Hey, anyone affected by this? We'll give you a free meal. So many places. Just like open arm- completely open. Doors, open arms, willing to help, assist. Comedy stores here, putting on shows, fundraisers. 100% of proceeds are going to victims of these amazing neighbors in affected areas. Like, hey, my cul de sac got impacted. We have a GoFundMe here. These people's names. Here's what they lost. Please help us. There's a park just nearby my house.

About like a quarter of a block away. And, tons of green grass there and a whole bunch of people just head gear, clothes, things, cutlery, plates, things that you just wouldn't normally expect to have. It's been, I would have never thought in Los Angeles, where it's a city that's really desperate. You have to drive everywhere. It just kind of feels distant, even when you're in a very tightly tight knit community. You don't talk to your neighbor, you know, everyday kind of vibes to see that where there's always people out there overwhelmed with people trying to donate time, money, supplies, things like that I would have never expected is truly one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And so I love seeing that from the community and getting to talk with people, get to hear their stories. You get to see what's going on. You get this form of connection that again, after Covid, it's like, this is finally we we are starting to get back to we're learning how to be ourselves again.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TAYLOR:
And I love that I love them.

ADRIANA:
That's so heartwarming. I mean, in the midst of the tragedy, to see humanity come together like that, which, you know, we, we kind of need these feel good, heartwarming stories because times, times are, are testy right now, for sure.

TAYLOR:
It's I, I think that it's, you know, it's one of those things of life that might not be fair, make sense or, you know, there's like justice, fairness, and I forget what the other one and like equality or the things that you are never guaranteed in life, like, you know, I wish that they were, but, you shouldn't need something like this to happen, to have this warmth.

TAYLOR:
But like some, sometimes that's just how it plays out. But it not getting away from how beautiful that this is. And getting to see those people come together, like you said. So, yeah, I'm. I'm inspired. It's hard to not say that. And, you know, just like. Yeah, it's just in my eyes. It's just, I swear.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, it's really it's really heartwarming to see. And like I said, we we need more. We need more of these stories. We need to be reminded. We need to remind each other that there's still goodness and kindness in the world. Which is so, so important. Now we're we're coming up on time. But before we, we close things off, I was wondering if you had any words of wisdom or hot takes?

TAYLOR:
Yeah, I think that, I really I that's just very front and center for me right now is just, you know, with everything going on, AI, wildfires, all these other things, it's it's for me, what's right in front of my eyes is just that intention. When you take a look at, again, seeing this around the community going backwards in our flow, beautiful to see that people are focused on things, you know, like, what do I bring, what do I do? And then self-organizing. Amazing. Is it perfect? No, but everything is getting to where it needs to go within reason. So I think the same thing with AI, it's focusing in on intention. You know, it makes sense to have seven pull requests and all those, you know, are you a 10x developer with all the green tiles on GitHub? Not just something that's having an impact, right? Think about the change that you're making. It's I encourage people to have momentum to not be discouraged. And, on that front, figure out your balance. But, while you're there, think about some other things to do, too. If you've corrected this word or this this thing, look around. Is there anything else that might make sense to change in your code base or otherwise? Are there other questions for process or other things that you haven't thought of that you're like, let me just give this another 20 minutes and think just to make sure it's hard to get changes in after the fact. And then you kind of lose that credibility, too. Unfortunately, when you're quick to ship something or get something out, you know you can lose all that. Trust that you've spent a lot of time building, or you know you can hurt yourself in ways that you might not see just as, something to caution on, but, overall, it's, Yeah, it's yeah, very, very interesting start to the new year in so many aspects. I want to hear all of your stories. I definitely want to encourage people to reach out if you have trouble or questions with getting into open source.

Let's let's figure something out, please. I'm. I'm not somebody who's like, don't at me. Don't reach out. Please do. I love having these conversations. Async or sycn. Would love to chat more on that front. Yeah. If you're not feeling like you're able to bring your full, true, authentic self, let's have a conversation. Let's fix that. I'd love to. I'd love to offer anything that I can on that front.

ADRIANA:
I love that, and I will vouch for what you said because I reached out to you, on on CNCF Slack and said, hey, you want to be on my podcast?

TAYLOR:
We'll make it happen.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. So super, super reachable. Definitely. So, this has been amazing. Thank you so much, Taylor, for geeking out with me today and for taking the time, especially in the midst of all this chaos going on, in the LA area. 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.

ADRIANA:
Until next time...

TAYLOR:
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 design all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to Bento Dot me slash geeking out and.