About our guest:

Kayla is an engineer on the New Relic Ruby agent team and an active member of the OpenTelemetry Ruby community, where she's a maintainer for opentelemetry-ruby-contrib and an approver for opentelemetry-ruby. Outside of work, she enjoys cycling and tinkering in her garden.

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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 Kayla Reopelle of New Relic. Welcome, Kayla.

KAYLA: Hi. Thank you. Happy to be here.

ADRIANA: I'm super excited to have you on. And where are you calling from today?

KAYLA: I'm calling from Portland, Oregon.

ADRIANA: Awesome. I've had a few people from Portland. There's a big tech community in Portland, isn't there?

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. They. At one point it was called the Silicon Forest, but I don't know if it has that same reputation.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. Are you originally from Portland, or...

KAYLA: No, I'm originally from a small town kind of near Mount Rainier in Washington state, but kind of grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so.

ADRIANA: Oh, cool. That's awesome. It's. You know, I always chat with people who, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest and it's such a different vibe from east coast life. Like, it's so much more outdoorsy, focused in the Pacific Northwest, which I absolutely love. Like here, where I live, in Toronto, it's like, it's flat. So, you know, I go out west, I'm like, oh, it's...The mountains are so pretty. I so miss that.

KAYLA: Yeah. Yeah. The times that I've lived other places, I. I miss seeing the mountains on the horizon. For sure.

ADRIANA: Yeah. You cannot beat that. Well, awesome. Are you ready to do our icebreaker questions?

KAYLA: Sure.

ADRIANA: Okay, let's do it. Question number one. Are you a lefty or a righty?

KAYLA: I'm a lefty.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God. I always get so excited when I meet fellow lefties. Yeah. I love learning. I. I love identifying other lefties. I. I've mentioned this multiple times in the show, so if anyone's listening and bored of hearing this. But like, I always, I'm always like watching, you know, what hand people grab things with, and I'm like lefty. And I feel like it's the thing that only lefties will probably notice anyway.

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. Right. We're like a small enough percentage that it. It kind of catches you off guard. It's a little bit exciting.

ADRIANA: Exactly. And I, I don't know if you do this, but like, my coat hangers go like my clothes hang in my coat hangers in a very particular direction compared to like right handed people or even like where I put my knives in the knife bl. In the knife block.

KAYLA: Mm.

ADRIANA: But yeah, that that's from like living in a house of, of right handed people where they outnumber me but I impose my will upon them.

KAYLA: Nice. Nice. Yeah. Growing up there was always like a decent balance because my dad was also left handed. But you know, as an adult, like sharing a house with another with a right handed person, it's like the kitchen set up every time the. Where the cutting board is placed versus where the appliances are placed and the food.

ADRIANA: It's like exactly how you turn, like. The handle for your frying pan. Like what, where it's oriented as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KAYLA: And I've even looked at that sometimes when I've gone to like look at apartments or something. It's like, okay, where is the elbow space for?

ADRIANA: Yes.

KAYLA: Like, will it work?

ADRIANA: Or even like something silly like sitting down to a meal. And if you're sitting next to a right handed person, you need to be on the outside so you're not like butting elbows when you eat, which right-handed people don't think about.

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah, I know it, it like can cause sometimes a little bit of anxiety of like, okay, am I gonna get one of the two correct spots at this table?

ADRIANA: Exactly.

KAYLA: Yep.

ADRIANA: And, and one, one follow up question on, on leftiness. Because I, I find like lefties. Well, I mean already by default, like, lefties hold their pencils like really weird. I hold mine extra weird to the point where, you know, I've had teachers like, you're not supposed to hold it like that. Who cares how I hold it in my writing? Yeah. Do you, Are you an extra weird pencil holder?

KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah, I am. Yeah. Actually, let's see. So I hold mine. Yeah, I just kind of like balance it but have like an extra point.

ADRIANA: Oh, nice, nice. And do you have like an extra callus. Yes. Yeah, the callus.

KAYLA: And so whenever there were like standardized tests, this whole side of my hand would just be.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, the smudge, the smudge. I used to have smudgy paper that I used to like... Under my hand over my notebooks to avoid that. Yeah. I had, for years I had a callus on my, on my left pinky. And it's gone. It's gone now because, I mean, I hardly ever write, but it was, I thought it was never gonna go away. I hold my pencil really funny. I have, I have a banana here that I'm going to use to demonstrate because my, my pens are like far away, but I, I hold. Oops. This is how I hold my pencil is like this. So yeah. Teachers would be like, what the hell, you can't hold it like that. I'm like, watch me, So anyway, well, thank you. Always fun to meet another lefty. Now do you prefer iPhone or Android?

KAYLA: iPhone. Yeah. I grew up using Mac products so I feel like it was just kind of a natural evolution.

ADRIANA: That's so cool that you grew up like that. I did not grow up using Mac products, but I became like a late stage convert.

KAYLA: My parents were both teachers and the school district that they work for got a huge grant from Apple and so they actually got to like take an early computer home.

ADRIANA: Oh my God.

KAYLA: In the summertime. Yeah. So like when it wasn't being used, which was great. So yeah. So back in the like green and black little boxy Mac days.

ADRIANA: I remember those. Yeah. I remember growing up like schools always had the Macs and it was like the, it was the Apple IIe before...pre Mac. And then, and then in my high school they had a, they had a Macintosh lab for like all the graphic design and then for like the computer class we had like a lab of Unisys Icon computers which I don't even know if they make those anymore but they, they ran Windows and yeah, that, that's what we use for computer programming.

KAYLA: Nice, nice.

ADRIANA: That's cool. Now did you get into computers because of your parents bringing home the max in the summer or was that like a later enlightening?

KAYLA: Yeah, that's a good question. I think that that got me curious in them and like I liked, I was like early on the IT person for my family. So it was like learning, learning how to do those things. I had a great computer computers teacher to, in elementary school but I kind of drifted away from it in junior high and high school and was using more like using computers for like creative things like you know, Photoshop or like film editing. But ended up, yeah, circling, circling back much later because I, I was charged at one point with creating like Internet based documentary extras, like different things that you could use to interact with media and archives. And there was so much that I was always just asking this other engineer to do that it got me somewhat curious of like, I wonder if I could do this myself someday. And it wasn't until you know, I was kind of at this point where I was wrapping up a film project that I had been working on for a few years and wasn't sure if I wanted to go looking for a new one or make a career change that a friend of mine who was a software engineer encouraged me to look into that. And so that's kind of how I got into coding and started learning about it and enjoying it.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. So your original background was more on the film end of things?

KAYLA: Yep. Yeah, yeah. Documentary film stuff.

ADRIANA: Oh, wow, that's so cool. I. I have to say, like, you know, having. Not that I'm a great editor or anything, but, like, editing video was something that terrified me, like, even 10 years ago, and now I'm like, okay at it. And I have mad respect for. For people who do video editing, because that is. That's a lot more work than just photo editing. Like, so much work.

ADRIANA: So much work, so.

KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah. Such a skill.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

KAYLA: And it's amazing how you can take the same footage and just edit it in different ways and have completely different films, completely different feelings.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, that's true. It's all about, like, the context, right?

KAYLA: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Cool. That's awesome. All right, next question. I think you've answered it already, but do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah. So I would say, yeah, Mac is definitely where I feel most at home. I think Linux is really interesting, but I haven't had a chance to play around with it. And every time I'm using a Windows computer, it feels like I'm being forced to use my right hand. Like, I just. I can get to it eventually, but it just doesn't click in the same way.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God, I love that.

KAYLA: Last night, I was actually helping my aunt with her laptop, and she wanted to bookmark some websites and things like that, and it just. It took me like, an extra 30 seconds every time to be like, nope, this is where you click on this mouse and. Yeah. How you. How you right click and...

ADRIANA: It's true. It's true. One thing I have to give credit to the Apple folks, like, when I switched from Windows to Mac, is I was surprised by how intuitive the shortcuts were because I'm a huge shortcut person. And I found that I discovered a lot of shortcuts by accident just through, like, I don't know, I'm like, what happens if I do this? And lo and behold, I'm like, what? It does that. Yeah. So mad props on the usability. That's one thing that I really appreciate about Macs, that I don't see that in Windows land yet.

KAYLA: Yeah. One of the things that I like to do as a kid was see how far I could get with using just the commands on the Mac. Only use no mouse. Because Macs didn't really have a lot of games at that point in time, so it was like games to play. But you could get, you could get pretty far with just a keyboard.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. It's actually really impressive. Cool. Okay, next question. What is your favorite programming language?

KAYLA: My favorite programming language is Ruby. Yeah, I, you know, I, it's funny. So I started learning JavaScript first and that, you know, felt it felt more like code like because you had all of these extra characters, you have these curly braces and lots of quotes and things like that. Yeah, yeah. And then I went to a coding boot camp that started, started us out with Ruby. And at first I like remember telling my partner like, man, this programming language sucks. Like it's just like I'm writing words, it doesn't feel like there's any code in there at all. But then as time went on I was like this, this feels quite nice to just think about almost like writing a sentence or how you would explain something to another person, like making the code seem very like story based.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

KAYLA: And you know, I was fortunate that after my coding boot camp I ended up working for a company that specialized in Ruby, Rails and React, which was exactly what I studied. And I've just kept landing myself in these roles so I get a chance to dabble now and then in other languages, but I don't feel nearly as comfortable as I do in Ruby.

ADRIANA: Cool. That's so awesome. And you know, it's funny because there's, I feel like there's always a place for Ruby no matter what. Like there's such a demand for Ruby developers. It's such a, like alive and well community. And you know, I've also mentioned this a bunch of times on the show. I've had a lot of Ruby people come on and the, the common element is, you know, like they love the language so much and it's like such a, everyone talks about the community around it as well that they really love. So.

KAYLA: Yes.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's so great. I've never touched Ruby. I've read Ruby code a couple of times because of a previous job and I have to say I, I'm like, yeah, I can tell what's going on from reading this. So mad props to Ruby.

KAYLA: Yeah. Yes. Oh yeah. I love the community part of it too. Like I think that that made you know, career changing and learning a new language like feel so much more accessible and just like going to a conference that feels like every person you bump into is like extremely friendly and like wants to know who you are as a person and ask good questions. So it feels comfortable.

ADRIANA: That's so great. I, I love that. And you know, I think half, half of what we, you know, half of what being soft a software engineer is about is the community or even in tech in general. It's all about the community, finding the place where you belong, finding your people, basically. And it's nice that I think, like, you can pretty much find your people in any, like, little technique, which is amazing. Awesome. All right, here's. Here's one that may.

ADRIANA: May be controversial, maybe not. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?

KAYLA: I think, I think Dev. I want to feel more comfortable with Ops, but every time. Like it. Yeah, it just feels a little foreign. I find myself often needing to relearn things, but I've. I've recently been working on a project that's had me get to spend more time in Ops and now I'm feeling a little more comfortable in it again. So that's exciting.

ADRIANA: That's exciting. Awesome. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

KAYLA: Ooh, that's really hard. I guess, I guess YAML because I find that I have fewer compiling issues when I'm working with YAML. I'll forget a comma or add a comma somewhere with JSON that I'm not supposed to.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. My, my, my issue with JSON is like all the curly braces and all the quotes everywhere. Because, like, I mean, YAML is like very loosey goosey on the quotes. Like you do or you don't. JSON. I hate that, like the keys have to be in quotes and the values have to be in quotes.

KAYLA: Yeah.

ADRIANA: I mean, if it's a string, where...does it also. If it's a number. I can't remember now.

KAYLA: I don't think so. I think numbers can be just themselves.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's like too many quotes, too many curly braces. It makes my brain want to go.

KAYLA: Right. I'm just trying to like sift through them.

ADRIANA: Let me read it. I can't read it.

KAYLA: Yeah, exactly.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Awesome. Next one. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?

KAYLA: I guess I like, I like the look of a double. Of a double space. But I don't use my space bar to create that. I always use the tab key, so I don't know what that means.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you can configure VSCode to like when you hit tab, it just makes it as a space instead of a tab.

KAYLA: Yep.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I, yeah, I'm with you. I will never use the space bar to like tab my stuff. But I will use tab to create spaces.

KAYLA: Yes, yes.

ADRIANA: Cool. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

KAYLA: Hmm, I think it depends on what it is. Like if I am trying to like learn a new high level concept, I prefer, I mean really almost like audio more than video. Just being able to hear someone explain it to me. But if I'm trying to do like a, like a code along or like solve a specific problem, then I prefer text.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I, I'm with you on that. A few, it's funny, a few people have also mentioned like just the audio aspect, which, you know, like I've mentioned many times on this show. I'm not much of a video person, but I will put on like a YouTube video while I'm doing chores and just listen to the audio because it feels very podcasty to me. Like I'll even like, lately I've been just comfort watching Star Trek the Next Generation and I'll just like, I'll just like do whatever, like be brushing my teeth and listening to an episode while I'm, you know, while I'm listening, I'm not even watching the video.

KAYLA: That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I love to just have some sort of audio content when I'm, when I'm walking my dog and occasionally like if I'm stuck on something or just also like need to take a coding break if I want to feel like I'm still working, I'll listen to something tech related.

ADRIANA: Yes, yes, exactly. That's awesome. Okay, final question. What is your superpower?

KAYLA: Well, I've had, I've had people tell me that I can be really helpful with docs and you know, like make...rewrite things or reword things in, in like READMEs or change logs or something to, to make them more clear. So maybe, maybe that's my superpower.

ADRIANA: That is a great superpower. There is something to be said about effective communication, so I am down for it. Awesome.

KAYLA: I blame it entirely on this experiment they had us do in junior high where we had to write out the steps to make a peanut butter sandwich. I don't know if you've heard of this or have had to do it, but. And in class you'd bring your instructions and the teacher would then try to make a peanut butter sandwich, literally following your instructions. So if you didn't say to open the jar, they would slam the knife through the top of the jar and say, nope, not going to be a peanut butter sandwich.

ADRIANA: Oh my God, that is such a great exercise. And that is such a great way to ingrain that in you. Because I. A personal pet peeve of mine when it comes to documentation for software or. Yeah, yeah, for, for software development, for like learning a new tool or whatever is like the skipped steps. Please include the steps. We don't all know what you're talking about because we're not as smart as you. So please dumb it down for the rest of us peasants.

KAYLA: Yes. Because I think, I don't think I've ever come across a situation where I've been like, oh, I wish you were less specific. Right. Because even if you know the details, you can just skim and keep scrolling. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Not skipping steps is, I think, a true sign of great documentation.

ADRIANA: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I love...the peanut butter sandwich exercises is a really good one. And I feel like more schools should be doing stuff. Stuff like that.

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, maybe try it yourself if you want to practice. Practice with docs or something. See how far you get.

ADRIANA: That's a great idea. And, and actually even. Yeah. On, on a similar vein, not, not just trying the. I'm assuming you were referring to like specifically trying the peanut butter sandwich example, but like also making sure that like when you're writing your own docs, that you can follow your own instructions. Right?

KAYLA: Yes, yeah. Checking. Checking it back afterwards and going step by step.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that says a lot too. Like, especially like when I put out a tutorial or whatever and I want to. I'm like extra paranoid. So I want to make sure that it's like very reproducible. So I've taken to using GitHub Codespaces a lot to be able to reproduce things. And that has helped me so much because it's like a very, like, from scratch environment. So, you know, I haven't. It's not polluted with the other crap that I already have installed. And so it's, it's really great to vet whether or not like, you know, I'll. Whether or not my instructions are they work because of the stuff that I already had installed or do they work because they're actually correct?

KAYLA: Yeah. Oh, that's a great point. I really haven't experimented much with GitHub Codespaces, but I know the OpenTelemetry Ruby repo has them set up. So maybe, maybe this is now the time to start playing around with that.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's awesome. And you know, you've. You've done the perfect segue into like our main topic of conversation because you are, I hope I get this correct. Are you one of the approvers or maintainers of OpenTelemetry Ruby?

KAYLA: So I'm both. So on the OpenTelemetry Ruby repo, the one that holds the SDK and the APIs and such, I'm an approver. And then on the OpenTelemetry Ruby contrib repo, I'm a maintainer.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's awesome. So tell us how you got to, you got into like this whole OpenTelemetry journey like from. Because it's, it's such a, I think it's such an honor and also an accomplishment to you know, become a, become, become an approver, become a maintainer of an open source repo. Especially a project like OpenTelemetry, which for those who are unfamiliar with it, it's the second most contributed open source project of the CNCF. So.

KAYLA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I've always been intrigued by the idea of open source. Like I, you know, kind of, when we were talking about the documentary path earlier, I think I was kind of in this like, you know, grassroots vein, like wanting to be a part of community driven things. And I kind of saw that in open source. So that, that felt intriguing to me. And the team that I work on for my day job is New Relics Ruby Agent, which is open source. So there, you know, I'm responsible for maintaining the New Relic RPM Gem along with some other fantastic people. And we will get, we have our, you know, repo on GitHub and will receive issues and pull requests and things like that. But you know, New Relic, like other Observability vendors have noticed that OpenTelemetry is becoming a really important part of the Observability ecosystem and has the power to disrupt, you know, tools like New Relic RPM that have existed for, gosh, I don't even know how long, over 15 years now I think. And so I was tasked with just checking out what the OpenTelemetry Ruby project was like and seeing how it compared with our agent. And so from there, you know, it was initially just kind of comparing code and seeing how that went. But as time went on I also kind of started comparing communities and seeing how there were so many more people contributing to this project and such, like diverse engineers from, you know, people who maybe had Observability experience or people who did not and you know, getting feedback from people who were using the Gem about things that, you know, if you captured a span in this way, we would find it much more meaningful than in the other way. And that kind of feedback I felt like was sorely lacking from the New Relic repo. We will get bug reports, occasionally we'll get feature requests, but they're few and far between. After doing this analysis and seeing that the OpenTelemetry Ruby project was missing two of the major signals, logs and metrics, chatted with my managers and was able to get some time to start working on the OpenTelemetry Ruby project. I had just done some logs work for New Relics to do automatic log forwarding and decided to start there with OTel for Ruby and have just kind of attended the SIGs and submitted PRs and collaborated ever since. I guess that was actually almost a year ago. So.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so cool. Wow, that's awesome. So it was, you know, like you're, it's something that you, you noticed there was this gap and so you, you went to your manager to like ask to fill the gap. That's so great. And you know, how, how, how was it like the initial experience of contributing to the SIG and contributing like your first code, like your first PR?

KAYLA: Yeah, it was educational for sure. I, the first PR that I opened, well, this is not the first PR. At first I opened a docs PR. You know, I was going through some steps and I noticed that something was wrong or didn't work for me and kind of submitted something there. But I'd say the first like major piece of code change was I found an issue where OpenTelemetry had essentially copied New Relic's SQL obfuscation tool and integrated it into their repository. And there was some code duplication amongst the MySQL related Gems and the Postgres Gems. And the ticket was asking to create some type of helper that could be used across all of these Gems. So I was like, easy, great, I will just move this code to a new spot.

Don't even need to really refactor it because it seems identical. Let's just do that. So I did that, submitted my PR, thought everything was looking good and just kind of kept learning about the project as time went on. Whereas New Relic RPM puts everything into one Gem. OpenTelemetry Ruby is extremely modular and every little part is its own Gem. And I don't think Gems are libraries for Ruby that you install. The first move was I put it in this general base Gem, but instead we decided that a new helper Gem would be better for this MySQL work. Then as time went on, this code hasn't been looked at for a while.

Maybe we want to refactor something here or we want something to work better. I think a big lesson learned for me was that instead of encouraging that work to be done in a different PR and maybe creating a separate issue to come back to it later, I kept accepting those recommendations and incorporating them PR until, you know, every time I accepted one of those things, that meant it needed to get reviewed by more people and have more discussion and feedback before going forward. Because it's also, you know, even though it is. Was intended to be just kind of a code relocation, like it was starting to take on a bigger change. And this code is very important to the database instrumentation, to all of the database instrumentation. So we wanted to be really careful about not breaking things for existing users. So. Yeah, so I don't, I don't remember how long it was, but it was, it was quite a few months before that PR actually got moved in, merged in.

I think we had well over 100 comments. But I think it did a great job of teaching me, you know, OpenTelemetry for Ruby standards for code, things that they like to test that are different from the way that New Relic likes to test things and also the way that, you know, they like to organize things and having the opportunity to take code that I was already familiar with and, you know, bring it to life more in an OpenTelemetry vein, I think kind of got me, got me hooked in terms of. Yeah. Trying to see things in this, in this new OpenTelemetry light.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's so exciting too. And it's such a great way to, you know, to get your hands dirty is like, take something familiar. But, you know, you make such an excellent point too of like, letting the PR get too big. Because I almost got caught by this this week where I submitted a PR to the docs to include like, some like, troubleshooting tips for the Target Allocator. And I got emboldened and I'm like, you know what I have, I. Not only am I contributing, like, you know, troubleshooting tips for that, I'm also going to include troubleshooting tips for auto instrumentation for the OTel Operator in the same PR. And Severin, who's one of the maintainers of the docs, he's like, yeah, you should, if you don't mind, could you open a second PR for that? And I'm so grateful that he nudged me in that direction because I'm like, yeah, otherwise that first PR would have just. It would, would have just taken forever to get it merged kind of thing. So things like that like, I. I appreciate when, you know, if you have somebody who, who will nudge you or, or you learn on your own that, like, yeah, maybe, maybe I should split this up. There's definitely something to be said for, for putting. Putting an issue to bed, getting some closure, getting that. That feature incorporated as quickly as possible, as safely as possible as well. That's so great. That's so great.

And how did you, like, what was the path for you from, you know, just like, initial contributor to like, maintainer or I guess contributor, approver or maintainer. Like, how. How does. What's that path look like?

KAYLA: Yeah, so for me, you know, I started. I started attending the SIGs after this database PR, but also kind of like in conjunction with it. I made it clear that I wanted to contribute logs. I wanted to get as far as I could in contributing the log signal that I had the time and the resources and so started writing that and contributing a lot of code in that way. And also just paying attention to what was happening in the repo when even, like, smaller maintenance things were needed. So, like, if dependabot opened a new PR in contrib, like, trying to read it and approve it, even though I didn't have an official green checkmark, like, being able to just become more visible and, you know, hope that I could become a more trusted set of eyes through doing that.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

KAYLA: And the Ruby. The Ruby SIG is pretty small. I think that, you know, it. There are a lot of people who have been super committed to the project and really crucial with it, but I don't think they have the same time to commit that they used to have and so kind of trying to learn from them and help them out as well. So I think that helped build trust over time. And I let them know that I was interested in, you know, gaining, getting more responsibility and going through that path. And so, yeah, I worked with them to make it. Make it there.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. And, you know, I think you touch on a really important point, which is advocating for yourself because sometimes we're too shy and we just hope that someone will notice and maybe someone will notice and you'll. You'll get attention that way. But, like, chances are, like, they're too busy in their own world doing whatever, so if you don't stand up for yourself, you're not gonna. You're definitely not gonna get it. So, you know, kudos to you for doing that. I think that's so amazing.

KAYLA: Thank you. Yeah, I. It took a lot of encouragement. I think OpenTelemetry has been a great opportunity for me to practice advocating for myself, because that's something that's really hard for me to do. And I think, you know, anytime you join a new group or a community, especially one that feels like it's already established, it's kind of. I feel like I want to understand how people like to communicate with each other and what is expected. And, you know, I felt pretty strong when I joined that I wanted to, you know, try to gain more responsibility as an approver or a maintainer, but, you know, didn't want to just say, oh, I'm showing up because this is what. This is what I want.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

KAYLA: And. Yeah. And so, you know, I had a lot of support from other folks inside New Relic who have worked with OpenTelemetry, kind of encouraging and coaching me in ways to advocate for myself. But I'm feeling. Yeah, I'm feeling much more confident in it now. And I'm grateful that OpenTelemetry has given me that opportunity to kind of learn this lesson.

ADRIANA: And it's probably one of the best communities to do that, because I've always said so many times, OpenTelemetry is such an incredibly welcoming community, and I've not yet encountered a situation where someone has made some sort of asshole comment on a PR. Like, everything is very thoughtfully worded because at the end of the day, they want your contribution. I mean, this open source is here because of people like us who are. Who are out there contributing. So you don't want to antagonize or alienate the contributors.

KAYLA: Yes, definitely. And that's been a place where I feel like I've gotten a chance to grow as well, because I think with the New Relic repo, like, our team really wants to cater to customers and make sure that they feel seen and heard and that the product is working for them. Like, if you reach out to us, like, we really want to acknowledge that. And in OpenTelemetry, I think that energy is there too. But I also think that because there are so many different voices and perspectives that are coming into it, kind of the ideas about where the project should be and where it should go are different. So there's, I think, a lot more scrutiny about, like, is this the best way to add to this project? Is this something that we, like, want to take on maintaining or that we can, you know, trust will continue to be supported and. Yeah, so getting. Getting those more. Getting some PRs that fall into that gray area of whether, or not, you know, it's the right solution has been challenging because I really want to encourage more people to contribute, but at the same time, we need the right kinds of contributions. So coaching people in a new way or encouraging people to do something differently and figuring out how to say those things has been kind of a challenge for me.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's funny too, like, contribution, there's like, I guess a couple of different types of contributions because there's the, oh, I see a gap here and I want to fill it. And then there's the. Also, like, you can go through the list of open issues and see if that's something that you would want to take on. And especially believe there's like the great first issue or good first issue label on. On certain issues, which is designed for, you know, people who are new to contributing, as this is like the starter issue that you might want to take on. And it's all about, like, there's no issue. There's no such thing as a small issue to tackle because everything, every little thing, helps to contribute to the community.

KAYLA: Yes. Yeah. It's hard to tell the impact of the change that you make. Even if it's like a single line change, you know, if you're bringing, maybe just changing a key so that it matches a new semantic convention, I mean, that can still have a huge impact as time goes on. Or like one of our good first issues I think we have labeled right now is adding. Adding a spell checker that's used in the opentelemetry.io website on the Ruby repositories. And you know, that, that could make a big difference because, you know, we don't really know how we're spelling things wrong or if we're not matching the style guide in places. And having that consistency, I think just makes for an easier experience. Whereas sometimes if you're reading something and it's misspelled, it can just be a bit of a. A hard stop.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, because then your brain can tend to be very judgy. Oh, they can't spell this. Why should I trust these docs?

KAYLA: Yes.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting you mentioned the, the spell checker and the. Just like maintaining the style guide. Because that, that is definitely one thing. Like having made a bunch of docs contributions in the last couple years, like, they are very stringent on that. And even though it may drive you a little bit crazy as you're like trying to get like all those checks to pass as you're after you push your code for the PR, there is a method to the madness because it really does allow for like a more streamlined experience because everyone has a different way of coding. Everyone has a way of, different way of documenting and it is absolutely annoying to go through like inconsistent, inconsistent code. It just...eugh! So...that people put those checks and balances in place.

There's, there's a reason for it even, even if I might seem a little bit annoying or inconvenient, like it'll save you that extra bit of, of stress in the end. Right?

KAYLA: Definitely.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Another thing that I wanted to switch gears on a little bit is you know, just get your thoughts around like open source communities in general. Like when we were chatting before we started the recording, talking about like these more community sponsored open source projects versus ones that are more like corporate sponsored or like one, you know, primarily one company kind of overseeing the open source project. If you have any thoughts on that.

KAYLA: Yeah, I think, I think my experience like working on these two different projects has been really interesting or types of projects in like the vendor controlled land. There's a level of like wanting the community and I think almost assuming that if you make something open source the community will show up and maybe they will write the code for you. And I think that a lot of places that have open sourced products with that like hope or intention in mind have possibly been let down. I think. I'm not sure if it's because of the way that companies have support that works differently, usually an internal support team or if it's, you know, as a business having stakeholders and a structure that's more corporate and like business driven, that there's maybe less space for creativity outside of the specific goals of the organization. I also wonder too if in the vendor controlled space like you as a customer possibly feels different when you're looking at the code versus a fully like, I guess like maybe like company agnostic open source project because I think as a customer I would be more interested in trying to just get something fixed. Whereas maybe in like a more general open source environment I would feel more empowered to pitch an idea. I don't know if that's true, but that's my hunch.

Yeah, that's one thing that I really, really love about OpenTelemetry is that the vendors and the end users are working together. And I think that there is no single company or organization that is, or I guess I should say company that's responsible for it because the CNCF is the organization responsible for it. It keeps things yeah, more, more creative, more, more volatile. But I think also will, will drive something that might be more More valuable overall.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think OpenTelemetry spends a lot of effort in trying to keep things as vendor neutral as possible. And I say that in the best way possible because really, you know, like one of, for those who aren't aware, you know, I work with Reece Lee, who from New Relic, one of your, one of your co workers, on the OTel End User SIG. And we work for competitors, but like, I don't see it that way. That's maybe what it looks like on the outside, but I don't see it that way. We're all friends in OpenTelemetry, regardless of vendor. Like, we, we don't see each other's competitors. We're all like working towards the same goal.

We all want the same things and we are trying to cater to like, our user base as much as possible. Like, we want something put out that's useful to the people consuming it. So, you know, we don't want to be about it. But also being strict in, in terms of like making sure that not, you know, we're not favoring a vendor over another. And if there's pushback around that, it's for a very like, valid reason because we really don't want it to be like one vendor standing out over the other. We're all friends.

KAYLA: Yes. Yeah, yeah. As you were saying that, I was kind of reminded of the piece of advice that's given that's like always like, don't be afraid to ask a question because someone else in the room may have the same question as you. I think that is really true in OpenTelemetry because often if one user or one vendor runs into a certain problem, it may be something that other people are struggling with as well. And so that contribution in OpenTelemetry is like a tide that raises all boats. I think that's how you say that.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. And you remind me of something that happened to me last week where I was like, I was stuck on this one issue and it was related to the OTel operator and I like popped into the Slack and before I started I was going to ask my question. I'm like, what if I search on this particular keyword to see if someone else has had that issue? And lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. So remembering that oftentimes your issue is not unique. And as you said, having the courage to ask that question benefits not only you, but others who are probably in the dark about that as well. Well, that's so great. We are coming up on time.

So before we go, I was wondering if you had any hot takes or words of wisdom for our audience.

KAYLA: Yeah, let's see. So, I mean, I guess maybe just from our conversation, I think. Yeah. Two big things that I would say if you're participating in any open source project, not just OpenTelemetry, is don't be afraid to ask questions, especially asking questions of the maintainers. I think maintainers are hungry to have people contribute and participate. And the other one would be, you know, even. Even though you may want to participate in some sort of group, like, don't. Don't lose sight of. Of who you are either and what your coding standards are either. I think bringing. Bringing your full self there and being able to ask questions and make statements from what you've learned to be best can usually create a really fruitful discussion so that either you learn something from someone else or perhaps they learn something from you.

ADRIANA: I love that so much. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, really being, like, not being shy about, like, don't under. Don't underestimate, like, how capable you are is really like. Yeah, it's such an important. Such an important thing to bring, I think, to. To any table. Well, thank you so much, Kayla, for. For Geeking Out with me today, y'all. Don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

KAYLA: 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.

#323 - Best 25 in the 21st: ARRIVAL