Geeking Out with Adriana Villela

Key takeaways:Humans are delightfully malleable! As a right-handed person being taught sports by a left-handed person, Cortney learned to play many sports left-handed!Devs who shifted into the ops space have a unique perspective because they have done it all - not just the dev work, but also the ops work.QAs bridge the gap for Dev and Ops, because they have had to make everybody communicate with each other and they feel everybody's pain.Admitting that you don't have all the answers and asking for help is a superpower, as it "liberates" others around you to ask questions.Being unafraid to ask questions and ask for clarifications is how Cortney was able to level up in tech, in spite of not having a technical background.People are willing to help you if you're willing to put in the effort and if you show them that you've been trying.The fact that tech constantly changes means that we have new opportunities to learn and gain expertise in new areas.When we're in the midst of feeling like we're not doing enough, sometimes we need others to remind us that yes, we ARE.We tend to be incredibly hard on ourselves. There are other people who see the effort that we make, and they appreciate what it is that we get done.Tech moves so quickly that whether you take a break for 6 weeks or 1 year, by the time you get back, things have changed.When you're raising a child and working, having a partner, spouse, or someone else you can lean on for support makes a huge difference. Support can be physical or emotional.We need to have conversations to normalize support for working moms.Once we have kids, people ask how our kids are doing, but now how we're doing. And yet, our kids' wellbeing depends on our wellbeing.Context is queen. We assume that people hold it together because they're just that good, but it reality, we don't realize that they have a whole village of people helping them out.About our guest:Cortney is Head of Community at Nirmata. As a CNCF and Civo Ambassador, she helps co-organize the CNCF Bilbao Community, various Kubernetes Community Day events, and KubeJam. Additionally, she is a recognized voice in the cloud native space. Initially, a non-techie, she turned techie as employee 7 at a startup acquired by DataDog while writing content for the Data on Kubernetes Community. When not talking tech, you can find her talking DEl, sharing about her struggle with imposter syndrome, and trying to wrestle her kids to bed at a normal time.Find our guest on:BlueskyLinkedInXFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:MySpaceDial-up modemAltaVista (search engine)Ask Jeeves (search engine)Dial-up modem soundsMonokle“We love YAML so you don’t have to”Cortney’s KubeCon China 2025 keynoteDewey Decimal SystemData on Kubernetes CommunityKyverno projectTranscript:ADRIANA:Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast, in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech and geek out on topics like software development, DevOps, observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada.ADRIANA:And geeking out with me today, I have Cortney Nickerson. Welcome, Cortney.CORTNEY:I thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.ADRIANA:I'm excited to have you. It. You know, when when I was looking at guests to bring on for the next season, I'm like, how have I not had Courtney on yet?CORTNEY:Yes. Actually, I think you said to me you should be on my podcast. Again. That was what you said to me. We where were we? We were... we were at Rejekts. I think at the last KubeCon.ADRIANA:Oh yeah, Rejekts, that’s right. CORTNEY:You should be on my podcast again. And I was like, I haven't been on it. And you're like, wait, what? Wait. How's this possible? And I was like, I don't know. But I've seen like every episode. I've, I feel like I've been on it, but I haven’t been.ADRIANA:And finally we made it happen. Yay!CORTNEY:Yes we did.ADRIANA:So. And where are you calling from today?CORTNEY:Today I'm calling from Farmington, New Mexico. I spend most of my life in, in Spain, just outside of San Sebastian, in the Basque Country. But I am home visiting my, my parents in, in New Mexico today, so. Yeah.ADRIANA:We'll we're going to start with, lightning round questions or. Icebreaker, or, whatever. I, I used to call them lightning round, but sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're not. So... icbreaker.CORTNEY:Yeah. Yeah.ADRIANA:Well, let the wind blow as it may. CORTNEY:At your own pace questions.ADRIANA:Yes, at your own pace questions. I like that okay. First question. Are you left handed or right handed?CORTNEY:Oh. Good question. Writing right handed. But batting in in softball. Left handed.ADRIANA:No way. That's so cool. CORTNEY:Yeah, yeah. ADRIANA:Does it throw people off? Like when you're batting left handed because, I mean, there's so few, few left handed batters.CORTNEY:Yeah. Actually, my my dad coached me in sports my whole life, and he's left handed. And so he used to stand in front of me to do things. I stand behind him and mimic what he was doing. And so in almost all of my sports I’m better left-handed. So basketball as well, I spent more time dribbling with my left hand, because I was mimicking my dad. Layups from left hand side, like shoot, jump shot left handed. Batting softball left handed because I was mimicking my dad. Yeah.ADRIANA:That is so cool. Do you catch also like, like, I guess if you're left handed, catch with your right. So I bat left handed, but I pitched right handed. So catch with my left. Yeah.CORTNEY:But that was also because the first person who started teaching how to pitch, my dad was the catcher, and he didn't know anything about pitching, so he had somebody, work with me the first time. And they were right handed.ADRIANA:Ah!CORTNEY:So I'm one of those people that's like. Oh, well, that person does it this way, so I guess I do too. So depending on what you're showing me how to do, I might do it right handed or I do it left.ADRIANA:That's awesome. I it reminds me like, because I'm left handed, but I mouse right handed, and I couldn’t even fathom mousing, mousing left handed. My mom was left handed, But my dad is the computer guy, and he's the one who showed me a mouse for the first time, and he is right handed. So I think I just...CORTNEY:See? Same thing!ADRIANA:Yeah. CORTNEY:Very cool.ADRIANA:It's so cool. I also find, like, you know, you mentioned them showing sports. Like you were shown left handed way. So you gravitated towards that. I remember at one point I took squash lessons and, and this was as an adult, and I had attempted racket sports. And so I use my left hand dominant. So it always throws people off whenever, like they try to show me sports stuff and they're and they're right-handed. Yeah. And then I'm the lefty. I'm like, can you show that for left handed people? And it always throws people off.CORTNEY:Yeah. Yeah for sure.ADRIANA:So yeah. Yeah. Love it. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?CORTNEY:Android 100%. I use a Mac for work, but Android for phone. Absolutely.ADRIANA:Okay, that falls into my next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?CORTNEY:I'm. I'm a MacBook user. But I think probably because I came from a non-technical background. And so it was like, oh, Mac. Mac is great for design and it's great for a bunch of other other things. And then I just kind of stuck with it.ADRIANA:That's great. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?CORTNEY:I love this question. Because the first time I was asked if I knew any programing language, my answer is, I know HTML. Because that was all I knew. Now that time has gone by, I've learned some other programing languages, but to this day, my my favorite language is always going to be HTML, because I did not realize how stupid I sounded when I answered that way. But also, it's like I I'm aging myself, but I had MySpace and that's why I know HTML. So like, it was my first language, and I'm proud of it.ADRIANA:That's great. That's great. My, my. First dabbling into HTML. I went I went wild, like, do you remember the blink tag in HTML? Yeah, I, I used that with reckless abandon. And, and I, like, threw a bunch of animated GIFs on the website.CORTNEY:Of course. Of course.ADRIANA:it was, it was the. Tackiest most useless like, but so glorious in so many ways.CORTNEY:Under underneath it all. Like, HTML isn't really a coding language, but I still love it.ADRIANA:It holds a special place in my heart. I, I dabbled in HTML back in the day. I found it... when it was paired with CSS, things looked pretty, but I hated the fact that it never looked the same in every browser. And then I just got really mad and frustrated. I'm like, yeah. Buh bye. I'm doing backend.CORTNEY:I only had access to the internet of the public library. It was like one dial-up modem we had like basically 30 minutes, because there is such a long line of people who wanted to get on, but like, I don't I don't even think I had time to recognize what they're like, the same anywhere else. It was just like, oh, cool, I've got a.ADRIANA:And back in the time of dial up modems, I don't even think we had like that many options with web browsers.CORTNEY:Yeah. No, there wasn't a lot. There was. ADRIANA:You remember...CORTNEY:Yeah.ADRIANA:the flashing “N”?CORTNEY:Yeah. And YahooADRIANA:Ask Jeeves? CORTNEY:Oh I was just talking about Jeeves the other day. I was like, whatever happened to Ask Jeeves? We were just having that conversation the other day. I was like, know everybody, just ask Google or ChatGPT. But didn't anybody hear of Ask Jeeves? And half of the meeting was like, oh yeah, and the other half as a way too young. Way too young to be asking Jeeves anything. And I was like, okay. ADRIANA:That is so funny. I just remember, like, Ask Jeeves was the go to. And then all of a sudden, people started using Google, and I can't remember, like, in my brain when, you know, I switched to using Google. Like...CORTNEY:Yeah, me neither. Yeah, it did just happened. But Jeeves is like. And he was so cute. Like, their little logo guy was.ADRIANA:Yeah. CORTNEY:Just... like a little butler. ADRIANA:That's right!CORTNEY:Take care of all your stuff.ADRIANA:Brings back memories. That and... that and the dial up noise.CORTNEY:Yeah.ADRIANA:I used to have that as a ringtone for when my dad called.CORTNEY:Oh.ADRIANA:But now my phone is always on silent, so I don't really get to enjoy my ringtones.CORTNEY:Yeah, my phone's always on silent also. We should bring ringtones back. At least the dial up. The dial up.ADRIANA:Yeah. CORTNEY:(...) ringtone. The rest of them maybe not, but that one's like a nice, nice nostalgia to it.ADRIANA:It is is is. It probably like, hurts the ears of the young ones when they hear it and they're like, what is that noise?CORTNEY:What is that? Yeah. What is that? So okay. Next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?CORTNEY:Ops. For sure. Yeah. I think I've got a lot of reasons for it. But yeah. Ops.ADRIANA:Oh, do share, if you're up for it.CORTNEY:Yeah, well. My first job in tech was actually doing cold calls to people about a DevSecOps tool. And so I spent a lot of time talking to devs specifically because the whole concept was a “shift left” security concept. And the number of times I just heard over and over, because everybody wants developers to do everything, right. And it was like a ehhhgh, and if I talked to somebody from the Ops space, most of the time, they were trying to push it off onto the security team. They were never trying to push it off on devs. They were always trying to push it off on the security team. But almost like they had this whole, oh, I already push a bunch of stuff off on devs, and I don't want to have to, like, get yelled at by them again. And I don't want to talk to them. And so it's just better like, security team, you need to talk to security team.ADRIANA:Oh.CORTNEY:And I was like, okay, but, specifically it was that it was I was constantly hearing Devs be like, oh, everything. Everything. Shift left shift left shift left. I do agree with them that so many things are shift left, but also it just happens to be the the where they're situated in the pipeline. Right. It's like, well, things need to get started in one specific way. And like, you're, you're the starting point. And so the I personally adore devs who have moved into the Ops space and, and being in the cloud native space, there's so many of them. Like, I used to be a dev and then I got. Some of them got stuck having to figure out how to package their own things. Other people just kind of took more of an interest into this whole space. And I, I just find those particular people that have moved into ops from dev, to be incredibly knowledgeable because they've done it all now. And and so friendly and so helpful and oftentimes most active in community spaces.But also, if I had another option, I would inevitably pick the QA people. QA folks bridge the gap for everybody. I always and like they should be the platform team because, they have had to make everybody communicate with each other and they feel everybody's pain. They're like innately empathetic, and they're stuck in the middle all the time. Yeah. And, and they try to be helpful. And they never think that they know the answer, even though a lot of times they do, and they dabble in, in everything a little bit, but don't want to step on anybody's toes. And they really listen and, and so if I, if I had a third option, I would the QA. I think QA folks are highly underrated.ADRIANA:I love that that's such a great take! Yeah. I mean, I started my, career after university, doing QA.CORTNEY:Oh, see?ADRIANA:Yeah, and it was, you know, like, that's what was available at the company I joined. And it gave me it gave me some really good perspective. I had wanted to go straight into dev, but they got me into QA, and, I learned some things along the way. I have to say, I learned patience.CORTNEY:Yeah. ADRIANA:That was one thing. Yeah. Yeah, there is, there. I feel like QAs carry a lot.CORTNEY:Yes.ADRIANA:A burden of sorts, right? Because, like, they're the ones being pressured at the end of the day, like, pass the test. Pass the test. Pass the.... It's like, no, no, no, it's not working.CORTNEY:Exactly.ADRIANA:What are you talking about?CORTNEY:No, um, pressure is a privilege, no matter where you are in life, I think. But also they carry out a lot of silent, silent weight, from everyone around them. And, and often times they are the doing the glue work, that works together and makes things possible for both sides. So they're, they're, they're actually my, my favorite.ADRIANA:Yay. Thanks for sharing that perspective. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?CORTNEY:YAML. Definitely YAML. Also, I, I was DevRel for a project called Monokle for a bit, and, and created the slogan, “We love YAML so you don't have to.”ADRIANA:That's so clever. I love that.CORTNEY:So by default it's it's got to be YAML because that was my slogan. I made stickers and everything. I was like, we love YAML so you don't have to. Yeah.ADRIANA:Aw, that's great. Okay. Next one. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?CORTNEY:Tabs. Yeah. Tabs. But this is also PTSD from loads of years working in word docs, where spaces never come out the same, as everybody's space in their own machine. And then all of a sudden you use it and some like if somebody is using Windows and they send you that same word doc, but you're in a Mac, and all of a sudden everything's out of out of whack. And tabs just stay the same. So this is.ADRIANA:I'm there for consistency. I love consistency. Yeah. Yeah. It's frustrating when you, when you get, like, the different the different formatting based on the, based on the OS that you're running. It's like. Aggravating to say the least.CORTNEY:So aggravating, so aggravating. Or when you have something in a format that works and then you send it to somebody and they open it in like a Google drive, and all of a sudden you're like, what happened. That's not the font. That's not this. That's a space. Ugh. It’s aggravating.ADRIANA:Kay... two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?CORTNEY:I'm. I'm a text person, actually, I do, I do watch a lot of videos, but inevitably I will turn on the video and also read the transcript.ADRIANA:Oh, yeah. Yeah.CORTNEY:That's that's me. And so sometimes I'll get engrossed in the transcript that I, I totally stop watching the video.ADRIANA:Yeah. I, I, I much rather like transcript closed captioning like I love captions. Like if I forget to turn on the captions or like, someone at home forgets to turn on captions while we're watching TV, I'm like.ADRIANA:Turn on the captions. CORTNEY:Yeah.ADRIANA:And all three of us at home are, like, addicted to having the captions on when we watch TV.CORTNEY:Absolutely. Yeah. I'm. I'm that person. I, I prefer, I prefer text, so I, I guess this is also aging me. I'm sure I'm. Five years younger or. Or less be like. Oh, no. Video. Are you kidding me? Who reads?ADRIANA:I do wonder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because my my daughter like, hates reading and I'm like, oh whatever, I don't care. Because like, the, the amount of cool shit she learns on YouTube is, incredible. Like she was just telling me all all this, like, stuff, like she follows, like, astronomers and cosmologists and like, she's learning about dinosaurs. I'm like, okay, I, I don't care that you don't read books because you're learning cool shit on YouTube.CORTNEY:Yeah, there's tons of stuff out there. But I am the person who's like, oh, that video looks cool. And then I'll open the transcript. And totally stop seeing. Anything that's going on in the video. And just like be engrossed in the transcript. But I think part of it is just I learn better that way if I, if I hear it, okay. But if I read it, it sticks with me longer.ADRIANA:Yeah. It’s like the visual that visual aspect of the words on the page. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm the same way. I, I find videos too distracting. I'm too ADHD for it. I start watching a video and then they'll say something and my mind wanders, and then I'm like. Shit. What did they say again? And then I'm finding myself rewinding.CORTNEY:I do that as well. I do that as well. Whereas if I'm reading it, then I, my mind goes off and then I come back to...ADRIANA:Yes, yeah, yeah. It’s easier to come back to it. CORTNEY:Yeah. YeahADRIANA:Yeah. Exactly. I... same same. Yes.CORTNEY:Also. This attributes to the massive number of just excessive browser tabs I have open. Or when I force myself to stop like once every six weeks and go look at them and like, what was I on this page for? Like, why in the world did I go on this rabbit hole of a tangent? And I have like four browsers in a row that, like, clearly are all there because I went from one to the next to the next down some rabbit hole.CORTNEY:But I can't fathom why I was there. It's like it's been six weeks since they opened this, and it was really important to me at that time. I can't remember why now. It's just it's astounding that I do that, but I learn more, I guess, reading and than watching.ADRIANA:Yeah, I feel you and I can very much relate on the browser tabs. Like even when I start with like a fresh slate. Fresh browser, I'm like, okay, I'm going to be good. And the next thing I know I've got like 20 tabs open in the span of ten minutes. I'm like, what happened?CORTNEY:How does this happen. No. And and I had a whole bunch of browsers, like I go through these very odd anxiety where it's like, I know I need to close these tabs. I know they're pointless, and I know I haven't looked at them for weeks, but if I accidentally close the whole thing, it's just like overwhelming anxiety. Oh my God, I need to get it back. And then I have to stop myself and be like, Cortney, just let it go. You don't need to... like, you don't need to do the command to bring it back up. Like there's no reason for this. It's slowing everything down. But it will sit with me and then I won't restart my computer for a while because I'm like, just in case. Just in case it comes to me what was in a browser tab that I needed. It's a weird anxiety that I don't know why I have it, because I have yet to, like, not be able to find something again. But but but it's still there. ADRIANA:There's something comforting about keeping it. I also like, my computer even it screams at me like my work computer's like, you haven't rebooted in ten days. I'm like, mmm hmmm. I'm like, but all the stuff I have here is so important. And then it starts to slow down. I'm like, okay. Just start my computer again.CORTNEY:No, I do the inevitable do you want to reopen all of these tabs. Yes I do.ADRIANA:Oh yeah.CORTNEY:But also there should be like a checkmark on that dialog box. It's like ALWAYS. Don't ask again. It's always going to be yes. So stop asking me.ADRIANA:Okay. Final question. What is your superpower?CORTNEY:Probably being willing to just say, “I have no idea” about stuff all the time. And ask for help. I, I don't think I saw it as being a superpower. I used to think that it was like me just being inevitably dumb. And now I've realized it's actually empowering for me because it's allowed me to adapt and change the thing in my life over and over. And be reborn, professionally and personally. Because I'm willing to say that, I don't know, but also it's liberating for for the other people who are around me. So they can say they don't know too. So that's that's probably it. Just being so blatant about I have no idea what you're talking to me about. Can can you explain it to me like I'm your grandma or your mom? Because I probably could be.ADRIANA:Honestly, like, I used to be so intimidated in meetings to say, like, I don't know, but now I'm just like, just for my benefit. Can you explain what that means? And as you said it, it gives other people permission to like, oh, thank God I didn't get that either. There's probably like a room full of people. Who have no idea what the fuck's going on. You just said you just ask the the question. Please explain to me. It's great. It's liberating. I think this is a good segue into, you know, our, our main, conversation. I always love to hear about, like, the journeys of, of my various guests, like how they got into tech. Sounds like you've had an interesting tech journey. I'd love to hear about it.CORTNEY:Yeah, yeah. I, I actually didn't realize how strange it was, or is until recently. I gave a talk at KubeCon in Hong Kong. And my my very dear friend Amit DSouza, like the day before the CFP closed for Hong Kong and Japan, is like, let's submit, something. We’re just, kind of. It was like, oh, okay, yeah, I should I, I'm doing DevRel. Like, I should, why haven't I done this yet? And we were just kind of having this snarky back and forth conversation about things and we submitted a talk, about Crossplane. It was like, Crossplane is the answer. What's the question? And the whole thing came up just kind of like a snarky conversation about what people around us are talking about. And we made up a talk submission, and it was supposed to be a workshop, and we submitted it, and then it got accepted. And after it got accepted, it was like a week and a half later, because when she sends you acceptance emails, it's like the same subject line, right? Congratulations. You've been accepted. And it's a big letters and that's it. And so I read this subject line and I screenshot and I sent it to him and we were like, oh yay. We’re going to Hong Kong. Yay! And it was just kind of like, oh. And then like a week later, I get a message from my friend Atul, who was like, congratulations, this is amazing. And I was like, oh yeah, I got accepted. Yeah. The schedule's out. Yeah, it's accepted. And he was... And then I thought to myself, I should start looking at flights. So I open up the email to like, look for more information. And it says keynote in the first paragraph. But it’s so far, down, that you don't actually see it on your phone, right. And you don't see it in the subject line. And it was like, wait, what?ADRIANA:That is amazing.CORTNEY:It was. Yeah. It was really amazing. It took weeks for it to sink in. It was it was terribly, overwhelming, to be honest. And my friend Amit was like we both, neither one of us had noticed, it was just like, oh, woohoo! And then when we realized it was, it was daunting to me.ADRIANA:Yeah.CORTNEY:It went very well. We had a lot of fun preparing it. It we were we submitted a workshop and ended up having to cut that down to 10 to 12 minutes. Which is... As an exercise I had never done before. Like, we've got 90 minutes of content that has to be put into 12 minutes.. That, that. That. I've done the exercise of, okay, we've got 15 minutes of content. Let's turn it into 30, never the other way around. So that was daunting, in of itself. But after we gave the talk, it took me weeks to actually post anything about it. And a huge part of that was just, in, in the hands small handful of years that I've been in tech, it's just been so fast and so extreme, and so much that I hadn't actually stopped to reflect on it. Yeah. At all. Because my first job in tech was, doing cold calls on the telephone for a Spanish startup. That was a startup. It was a web application security tool. It happened to be an agent that deployed everywhere. Now, in retrospect, I'm like, wow, I know a lot of stuff about agents and a lot of like and for the whole AI world and MCP world and understanding the difference between like this has served me incredibly well. But all of that came from making cold calls on the phone for a company that just needed an English speaker who could also speak to them in Spanish. And I happened to be an American living in the same town that they were in. And being curious. Right. So I'd get somebody on the phone and they'd finally not hang up on me and finally give me some sort of conversation. And then they'd say something that made no sense, and I’d go back to team, be like, okay, so they said this. I don't know what else to ask. That team was so incredibly generous. It was my first experience with techies, as well. The anything I asked if I asked them to teach it to me, they did. Anything. And everything. We ended up getting acquired by Datadog, which was also, I didn't know at the time that that is what everybody aspires to have happen in a tech startup is to then get acquired by some IPOed company. Because I had no experience with tech prior to that job. All of my life experience had been in totally different things.ADRIANA:What was your original education background?CORTNEY:Yeah, I studied philosophy, international relations, and world religion.ADRIANA:No way!CORTNEY:So I have three degrees. But, yeah, that that's what I studied. Had nothing to do with tech at all. I grew up in New Mexico. Ten minutes from my parents’ house, where I am right now, there isn't really even cell phone service. Once you get out on the Navajo reservation, there's just there's not a lot of of service. It’s gotten better. But, a lot of times, we’d drive across the reservation to go visit my grandparents in Utah. And, and yeah, you have to wait for the satellite to go over. If you, if you need to make a call. There's nothing. So it wasn't like I grew up in a place that had a lot of access to technology, either. Dial up internet was oftentimes at the library. That's where you could get it. And that was about it. And so I just didn't have access to it. And when I went to college, I didn't go with my own computer. I was using the ones that, in the study hall because I was an athlete. And so we had access to computers there. I remember they had Ethernet, and I had only ever seen and been around dial up, and it was like, whoa! What is that? But my, my experience with that also was very limited. It was like, I would use the computer when I needed to actually type a paper, and do schoolwork on it. Otherwise, all of research was Dewey Decimal System in the library, because that's what I knew. And that's what worked for me. And and I didn't have access to anything else. And nobody introduces you to it. It was just uh, people who knew were in the know. But they don't realize that not everybody else is in the know. And so and then I moved to Europe and again, no, no real access to it other than for emails and, and work, stuff.So when I did my interview for this job, I had just had my son, and I was I had found a job that I really liked, but I had just had my son and I couldn't travel anywhere near as much with the newborn as what I had been doing. And I remember they asked me, how technical are you? And my answer sounds ridiculous now, but at the time I was being very sincere. It was like, well, if the electricity goes off of my house, I can probably like restart and like configure my printer on the second try, but I can google anything, right? Like I can figure it out. And turns out that was that was the answer that got me the job, because they were all devs who would Google, when they don't know what was going on, to find an answer. And and that was the right answer. And they were like, okay. You speak Spanish, speak English, and you can Google anything. We’ll hire you. Because they were in dire straits, obviously. But it was it was a massive change. Prior to that, I spent ten years running, international summer camps and language immersion summer camps with kids. We started off with 50 students and scaled out to, like, I don't know, 5000 kids and in six weeks doing abroad programs and summer camps and and half day programs and and random things. Nothing technical.I worked for some marketing firms that were doing marketing for, for big, like big retail providers like Macy's or Mark and Spencer's or, Samsung. Just like, big retail and, and doing marketing campaigns for them. I was, the softball coach for the Spanish national team for a bit as well. So I had done nothing that was technically inclined, to the, to the world that I'm in now. And so after giving that talk in Hong Kong, it was just this moment of pause where it was like, do I actually belong? It all happened so fast. And and truly had to take a couple of weeks to just sit with myself and the insane imposter syndrome that happened of, “How am I even here?” And, How did this happen so fast? Do... all of the amazing people around me have helped me so much and explained so many things and are still so patient with me because I still don't. There's just so many gaps. I still just don't know. And it was very much this thought of, do I actually deserve to be there, and, and truly had to sit with myself for a bit and have this realization of, okay, so most people who are my age have been doing this for 20, 25 years. I don't fit into that group. There's a whole subset of people who've been doing this about as long as I have who are like, 20, 25 years younger than I am. I don't actually fit into that group either, but I've. I've worked insanely hard. And so I, I guess just on, on the basis of just constant working at it, there is merit to that. But I truly had to sit with myself for a couple of weeks to, to get to that point. And, and doing so was, taking a moment to be like, how did I even end up here? And so my, my journey into this space wasNot a typical journey into this space. I showed up through marketing and sales, doing cold calls on the sales side of things, moved into marketing, went back into sales and sales enablement, fell in love with the really techie stuff and just kept wanting to learn and and doing a lot of self-learning and, and community stuff. I learned about Kubernetes first, by writing the newsletter for the Data on Kubernetes community. My friend Bart, who lives nearby in, in Spain, is like the other American who survived long. It's not a lot of us who survived that long there. Being an immigrant from the US is is a totally different thing than being in the US with immigrants. Right. And I think, oftentimes a lot of my, a lot of Americans I know are like, oh, I'm going to I'm going to expat. And it's like, oh, no, no, you're an immigrant. Expat makes it sound really glamorous. But no, no, you're going to immigrate.ADRIANA:It's a different vibe.CORTNEY:Yeah. You can dress that up for social media all you want, but actually, give yourself a year and a half and you're suddenly going to be like, oh yeah, and I'm an immigrant. Realize what that is and how much work that is as well. And, and appreciate things in a different way, I think. But yeah, he was there and he kind of stumbled into the Data on Kubernetes community and was like, I, I also know nothing about tech and you studied religion. And so let's pray together that we can get through this. It was very much, and, and for some reason, I was like. Okay. Yeah. I had a newborn and I was, I was doing cold calls on the phone, and started writing this newsletter, and kept asking more questions about Kubernetes and got involved in the community. And then and then ended up in a DevRel role, that when they hired me also, I thought, why have these people hired me? I have no idea why. Like I told them, I don't know how to do any of this. Why have they hired me? And then three years later, almost three years later, made the move into community role, Nirmata, which is where I am now in the Kyverno project. So it's it's been a lot of just not knowing and being able to be like, I don't know this. Will somebody please help me. And and realizing almost everybody will. And I think that's the that's the astounding thing about this space that in my experience, because I do have, extensive more experience in other industries than in tech, it's still this point in my life, that that innate sense of. Absolutely. I'll teach you if you're willing to put in some work. Or I can see that you've been trying. Let me help you. That. That doesn't exist, at the same scale as it does here. And I think that's probably the first thing that I actually fell in love with it long before having any. Even the notion that I might like the technical side of things, it was just the human factor of, oh, well.Look, look at this. Poor girl. She's really trying and she's trying to help us. And so, yeah, like, let's jump on a call and I'll give you time and time is the one thing that you you can't get back. Right. And people in this space are just incredibly generous with it. And so, yeah, now I'm, now I'm a techie for life. I hope.ADRIANA:I love that story. And, you know, you're you're so right about people's willingness to help out. I'm. Whenever I'm digging into something that I don't know super well and I reach out for help, I'm, you know, I still force myself to reach out for help, but I'm always scared. I'm like, oh, my God, they're going to think I'm an idiot. They're going to think I don't know what I'm talking about. And the patience. Like, more often than not, people are super patient. They'll send me resources, they'll do follow ups, and I'm so grateful. And I feel like Cloud Native especially, think because, and specifically like, Cloud Native open source, because of the nature of open source, there's so many contributors who are doing this. As you know, many do it as part of their jobs, but many not necessarily. Right. It's for funsies. They enjoy it. And I think that's reflected in their personality and willingness to help, right?CORTNEY:Yeah, it's it's incredible. Also, the refreshing thing about this space, is that there's so much to learn, like nobody is actually an expert on all of it. And when I first started, I did not realize that. I just didn't have context to realize it, either. The depth of everything. But the people who are the most expert, remind people of this all the time. Right. And, and they very much are like, oh that's a great question. Not for me. I'm an expert in this. Let me introduce you to this other person who is way more than that. And let's learn together. And there's always this undercurrent of oh, I know the basics, so let me tell you that. But let's see if we can find somebody else and learn together. I don't really know that much about that. Yeah. And that's that's phenomenal. I think that that sets those people apart. It probably is why they’re so amazing at what they do as well. But it's a, it's a constant. You come across people. I mean they're just really everybody knows who they are and and they know so much. But they consciously said, no, no, I know so much about this. But these other things I don't know about. Let's go learn about them together. And and that's that in itself is, is just really valuable. To to the community space at large, I think.ADRIANA:Yeah. That's what I love about tech is, like, the sky's the limit. I mean, even, you know, I, I'm one of those people has been in tech for 20 plus years. It's coming up it. Yeah. I've just hit 24, since I graduated school. I've been tech-ing for a while. But, like, the job I'm doing now is so wildly different from the job I started out with. Or even, like when you consider, AI was like, you know, not necessarily top of mind. You know, five years ago and now. And now there are people who had no expertise in the area and are gaining expertise in the area. Like it's such an opportunity for you to become an expert in a new area. I think as long as you're willing to learn along the way. And I think, you know, we're rewarded for for the desire to learn and keep up with tech.CORTNEY:Absolutely. That the AI space is, is mind blowing.ADRIANA:I know. I, I started dabbling. Like, I'm playing around with MCP servers. I'm like, there's so much I want to play around with. It's it's it breaks my brain in a, in a good way, in a good way.CORTNEY:In a good way. But also it's one of those things. It's like, I just don't have the time. I have this thing I need to do, and I really, really want to do a lot more of that. And where in the world do I find the time? The most lovely thing that has been said to me in a very long time. I was freaking out. I was like, I have so much to do. Where do these people find the time? And I said to my friend, Atul Sharma, who graciously gave me some of his time, and I and he, I’d seen him everywhere. Like the week leading up to our call. It was like, he was everywhere. He was. He was doing talks. He was on YouTube, he was on LinkedIn, he was everywhere. And I was like, thank you so much for your time, Atul, I'm really sorry. Like, I have to go because I don't have time. I mean, I have to go pick up my son. I have no idea where you find the time. And he starts laughing. He's so sweet. He starts laughing. He goes, oh, Cortney, I still live at home with my mom. You ARE a mom. That's why I have time. You need somebody to take care of you, and like basic things. Then you would have a lot more time to. I don't know where you find the time. I've seen you everywhere this week. Right? I hadn't said anything to him about. I've seen you everywhere. It was just like, I have no idea where you find the time to do all the things you've been doing. And that was his response. It was like, oh, I still live at home with my mom. Like she takes care of me when I when I'm not taking care of myself. I don't know where YOU find the time. And so every time I start thinking myself, oh my gosh, I don't have time for all these things, I remind myself , Atul says that I'm doing just fine. He sees me making time for a lot of things, and if he sees it then. Then it must be that way. I'm fine. Just stop pressuring yourself.ADRIANA:I love that, I love that, and I know I think it's such an important thing to touch upon because, like, I'm not going to lie. Like, this week, I was having a major bout of imposter syndrome, a major bout of, like, how is it that everyone else is doing, like, five kajillion things? And I'm like, I think I'm being productive, but it feels like everyone else of being like 20 times more productive than me. And also like, I don't want to burn out.CORTNEY:Yeah, yeah. ADRIANA:You know?CORTNEY:I can't afford to burn out. I yeah, that's exactly it's it's just a lot. I, I do. I fall back on what Atul said to me. It was about six months ago. And I fall back on all the times, like, stop, stop. You're doing just fine. You’re doing just fine. Other people see you finding time. They think that you're being really productive. Stop comparing yourself. Comparison is like the end of happiness. Just stop. You're doing what you can as best you can. Like, take a breath. Just focus on what's going on and and if you don't find time, maybe you will next week. But I have that. Like, I dial myself back that way probably 3 or 4 times a day, right?ADRIANA:Yeah, but it's, it's so nice that you have like kind of that anchor to pull you back. I think it's really important to have like kind of an anchoring thought or an anchor anchoring mantra to like, I'm doing okay. Sometimes for me, it's like I cry to my husband. He works from home as well. So like, I'll, I'll come down to the basement where he works.CORTNEY:Therapy session.ADRIANA:Give me a hug. And that helps.CORTNEY:It helps so much. Yeah. It helps so much to have that. But also, Adriana, I think I think you don't see how other people see you.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.CORTNEY:You're amazing. You you give back to the community. You're maintaining one of the fastest growing projects out there. You're constantly doing DevRel work and community work and all kinds of other things and giving time to people. And you have a podcast and and you find some time to go bouldering and just... right? Take a breath and.ADRIANA:Yeah, I, I need a reminder too.CORTNEY:Yeah, absolutely. Because the truth is I, we're all, I think, incredibly hard on ourselves in general. But when other people tell me how they see me, most of the time I'm like, wow, I can't believe you see me that way. I have really like, I'm just a stepped up my social media game, right? Like, wow, I got everybody fooled here. But also. But also there's there is truth to it, right? It's like, well, I actually don't post anything that I haven't done and I don't always there's all the stuff that I have done because I don't think it's actually worth posting, which you just posted the other day about self-promotion. And it really hit home with me because there's so many times and I'm like, oh no, I won't post it. It's not really like, oh no, I won't post it. But yeah, when other people tell you how they see you, right? And I'm always like, oh, it's not quite that, but also it's not, not that. It's, it's somewhere in the middle.And I try to hold on to those moments. They're, they're few and far between. But I do, try to hold on to them for me. They're, they're priceless for my for my mental health and to keep myself balanced because it's like, okay, like you're being incredibly hard on yourself. There are other people who see the effort that you make, and they appreciate what it is that you get done. And if this week it's less, it's less and next week will be more. But like be kind to yourself. So if you're ever like, I'm not being productive, you just give me a call and be like, Adriana.ADRIANA:I know, I know.CORTNEY:Let me remind you that last week you were doing this and this, this, this. I'm like, I see you, I. See your effort, like, Be a little bit nicer to yourself.ADRIANA:Good advice on this podcast. And you're right. I mean, even what you were saying, like people see you and a like I think we, we are extra hard on ourselves even like when we look in the mirror, you know, you. Even my daughter the other day...CORTNEY:Oh my goodness. ADRIANA:She said, I look horrible. I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, what are you seeing that I don't see? And yet, you know, we tend to do that. I think women tend to be extra hard on themselves. I'm not saying men also aren't, but I do feel like women get to be tend to be extra hard on themselves when it comes to this.CORTNEY:I think in different ways. I think many men are definitely hard on themselves. But they're hard on themselves in very different ways than than women. And, and, they have different, different types of pressures on them. I think a lot of pressure that men feel that they, they put it on themselves. Whereas women, we feel a lot of pressure that we haven't always put on ourselves. It's just completely there and it's coming from external forces and you don't. At least in my case, I don't always know how to handle that, or it takes me a while to figure out that, oh, like, that's not actually my criteria. It's somebody else's. Why am I feeling like I need to live up to that? I think men a lot of times they just, they have a the ones who are very hard on themselves have a very high criteria. Right. And and so it's, it's a different the external internal factors I think are different than also women. We just compound it with our own internal, dialogues as well. Like your daughter at the age that she is, being like, I look terrible. Oh my gosh. Like I see photos of myself and I come home to visit my parents when I was like 16, 17. And I'm like, dang, I was cute. Like like if I had realized then. That I was that cute, I would have taken over the world. But like, I didn't. And now it's late. And now I'm just. I'm just this. And it's good.ADRIANA:You're taking over the world.CORTNEY:Yeah. There's a different, different ways in taking over the world.ADRIANA:That's right.CORTNEY:But it’s just perspective.ADRIANA:It's so true. I wanted to switch gears a little bit, because, you know, I, I want to, I love talking to other like, working moms in tech. I feel like we need to have more of these conversations. Certainly. Like when, when I had my daughter, like, coming back to work right after mat leave. Holy crap. I just felt like I sucked at everything. And, you know, in, in Canada, we get, like, a year of mat leave. I'd been away for a year, and. And so this extreme guilt of, like, I haven't been productive. What are they going to think of me? And then having to, like, leave early because. Well, daycare.Or or leaving extra early because your kid has a fever and can't be at daycare. You know, and you and you, you mentioned that you have, a 21 year old and a 6 year old.CORTNEY:Yes.ADRIANA:And and I can imagine how, interesting that must have been.CORTNEY:My home is bipolar. I've got a 21 year old who I'm trying to convince she's not 6, and a 6 year old that I'm trying to convince is not 21. They keep me very, very preoccupied. But, yeah, this is something I don't think we talk about enough. Parenting in general is difficult. And it has its own emotional things tied to it. And, and moms and dads both live that. But, women working in tech, especially if you do take time off, things move so quickly in the space. Right. And so if you actually take the time off to focus on yourself and your child and your family, and by the time you come back, the feeling of I suck at this is because so much has changed. It doesn't matter if you took six weeks or if you took a year. So much has changed. And there's this thought as I've advanced to this point and so why am I? Why am I all of a sudden behind again? And, and I think it's that I just feel like you have to catch up and if it's six weeks or a year, but you've got that whole thing to catch up to, to all of the people around you who didn't take any time off. They've just been living that learning curve because it's happening in real time for them. And, and figuring out how to manage that and at the same time manage the mom guilt of I'm leaving my child at childcare.ADRIANA:Oh, yeah.CORTNEY:Right. The mom guilt of I just left my child and I'm trying to get back into this, this other thing, whether it's career because I love it or something else. But, like, I just left my child. There's a stigma to that, whether people want to admit it or not. There is. And, and there's an emotional feeling of that as well, whether you believe the stigma or not, it like you still feel the guilt of, okay, so I just left my child behind on top of it to come take my career back over. And now here I am, and I'm not up to date on anything. And so I suck as a mom and I suck at my career. It's like I suck at everything going on in my life. And also, it might have been six weeks, it might have been a year, but this body still is not mine.ADRIANA:Yeah.CORTNEY:Right. And so I suck at that too. There's there's people don't talk about that because it's not a fun thing to talk about. But at the same time, there's so much power in it for everyone who actually goes through that curve and and goes goes through that life experience and for the people around them as well. Right. Because in order to catch up, it requires a lot of support from other people, whether it's a spouse or a co-parent, partner, or in my case, my, my older daughter. I was like, can you please hold your brother? I just really need to finish this right. And she so lovingly did. And that was a growth in our relationship as well. But for my my colleagues, people who are around you, they also participate in that knowingly or unknowingly. They're they're a part of that. And they can make that so much better and, and nicer for people or so much worse as well. And so not having those conversations really takes away the possibility for people who are around women going through this to be able to be helpful and supportive. Because a lot of times you don't know what to do or how to be supportive because there aren't conversations around it.ADRIANA:It's so true. It's so true. Yeah. I mean, even even when you're pregnant, a lot of people don't know how to act around you. Like when I was pregnant, I swear to God, I got so mad because everyone's like, how are you feeling? I'm like, what? Like, I'm not an invalid. I'm not sick. I'm just growing a human. Like, I'm fine. Like, I'll tell you if I’m not okay.CORTNEY:Yeah.ADRIANA:I was a grumpy pregnant woman. I'm sorry to say. I'm like, just treat me normal.CORTNEY:Well, that's another thing, though. Exactly what you're saying. I had this whole phase with my son that it was like I'm still me, right? Because all of a sudden, you start having a first name and you just be. In my case, I'm just Ethan's mom, so, like, a whole subset of the world...ADRIANA:Oh, yeah.CORTNEY:That I actually knew prior to being Ethan's mom. I have now just become Ethan's mom. Oh, there's Ethan's mom, which I'm proud to be. Ethan's mom. It's not that, but also, it's like, well, but that's like a facet of who I am. Actually, I'm Cortney, and I'm still a whole human being who's got like, oh, a whole, like, life. And history long before I was Ethan's mom. And how does that suddenly get erased? Right. And and it and it's totally erased for some people. And that is really hard. It's it's really, really difficult to to just have a huge part of your being an existence just totally unrecognized because you have a cute kid. Right. And and not to take away from my super cute kid because he is, he's super cute, but also, I'm more than just his mom. And that that is very difficult, at least for me. It was it was very difficult to navigate, like, can you please just call me by my name or not say anything at all? Because I exist and and again, these are things that I think have been universally. Everybody is like, how are you? How are you feeling? Just like you were saying, right? Like, oh, look at you. How are you feeling? How how is everything going? And everybody tiptoes around. And then all of a sudden, just like that, it's like, oh, you don't really exist that much anymore. How’s the baby?ADRIANA:How’s the baby.CORTNEY:How’s the baby? How's the how's the child? How's the teenager? How's it? Which is great. And I and I love that people care. But also it's like, can you also ask me if I'm doing all right? Because like, also they're my my kids ability to be okay very much depends on whether I'm all right or not. So true. And so not having those conversations or just being able to say those things without worrying how they might trigger or affect other people takes away the possibility for others to to recognize that and and know that they probably should ask how you are and not just your not just your new baby or. Right, that they you still exist and you still want them to ask about you because I think a lot of people also think that you're so excited to be in a mom that that's what you want to talk about all the time.And it's like, oh, look at you. That's because you're the dad. And so you get a break or oh, look at you, you're good. You're you're young. Your parents got tired of talking about you once in a while, too. And those things are fine. But not not having those conversations doesn't allow people to kind of have that that context. So.ADRIANA:Yeah, I totally agree. And I think another one, that hit me, when I became a mom was like, get coming to terms with being a mom. Like, I could not for the longest time have that mom feeling. I'm like, I, I don't see myself as someone's mom. And to add insult to injury, for for my case, like I couldn't breastfeed my daughter, I had to rely on formula at an early age. And when my daughter was two months old, my grandma died in Brazil and I couldn't go to her funeral. And the minute I heard the news, my milk dried. Like I could just feel it go... So like, she was a formula fed baby. And first of all, like the shit I got from other moms for doing that.CORTNEY:Yeah.ADRIANA:It's like it. It killed my self-esteem. And then I'm like, great. I can't even provide for my daughter. I am a terrible mom because I can't breastfeed her. And and so, like, that messes with you. The change in routine messes with you because you're like, I used to be able to do this, and now I am tethered to this human who depends on me for everything, and I have to wipe its ass.CORTNEY:Yeah. You know.ADRIANA:It's, it's very jarring. And, like, for me, I had postpartum depression as well, and I didn't even recognize that. It was my husband who was like, this doesn't look right. And, you know, saw it, sought help, sought support from some of our friends to, you know, help support me. And these are things that, like, when you're in the thick of it, you don't even notice.CORTNEY:So you're just trying to survive.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.CORTNEY:I think one of the best things I ever read about motherhood, it was about the fact that in in war, they use lack of sleep as torture. Right. And so this is a very well-studied way to torture someone is to just not allow them to sleep or have quality sleep, or just let them barely fall asleep and. Wake them up. ADRIANA:Yeah. That fucks with you.CORTNEY:That is the correlation of having a newborn, as a mother.ADRIANA:Yeah, I and that's why I was laughing when you mentioned the lack of sleep thing because I'm like, oh my God, yes, I can complete. Yes.CORTNEY:Yeah.ADRIANA:That is that is a form of torture.CORTNEY:It is a form of torture. And people who are around you who are sleeping well, at first it's like, okay, well I'm fine, I'm just a little tired, but after a few months it's like truly my like I would wake up and it was like I'd look at my husband still laying there asleep and really just despise him because it was like, how can you not hear this child? Like, how are you not? And he truly didn't. Right. How? I still have no idea. But it was infuriating.ADRIANA:Oh yeah. Yeah.CORTNEY:Infuriating that he just didn't wake up. Right. And and at first it was fine, but after a few months, it was just so unbearable that I left the room and we just moved into totally different rooms that I wouldn't have to see him not wake up because I wanted to strangle him every time, like, kick in to wake him up once the baby was asleep, just so that he would have some idea of what it was that I was living through. The the number of times that I just felt insanely inadequate. Because also, you're given a human being that you have no idea what they actually need.ADRIANA:Yeah.CORTNEY:I would look at other women around me, and, and also, I was, my, my daughter, I adopted her, and she's two and a half, so I didn't do the newborn thing with her. I did that the two and three year old thing with her, which was...ADRIANA:Always fun. CORTNEY:Yeah. And also I was clearly much younger. And so it was just like oh wow wow okay. Wow. Oh look. I actually adopted a dinosaur. Wow. I like I don't know what's going on. But my son, my he he showed up ten days late, and so the time that my parents had allotted to be there with us was cut short because she showed up late, and he was born, and then he suddenly, they suddenly left. And here I was living in Spain. No extended family, no community around me, no nothing. Dealing with all of it, all by myself. And my husband would get up and he'd go to work, and he's very sweet and whatever, but he'd come home and I'd be like, please, like, please take the baby. Yeah, because I was breastfeeding. It was like. And then he'd try to give me a hug and to be like, don't touch me. But it was because I had somebody attached to me.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's another thing too, that I. Am. So you're like, don't.CORTNEY:So overstimulated. Like, I understand you just want to give me a hug, but like, please don't. Because like, oh my gosh. I'm just I just can't and it took everything I had to just get through that. And I'd see these other women I was supposed to go to, to a breastfeeding like a couple of weeks after I'd had my son. And I remember I got up and I did not feel like being up because I hadn't slept at all. But it was like, okay, I'm going to drag myself to this thing. And I got up and I got dressed, and then he puked on me. And so I changed, like, I changed my clothes. And then I got him totally dressed. And then he had one of those explosive, like, just shit shows up the back of his, like, onesie. And it was like, oh.We’re already running late. I'm never going to make it. And I thought, I like, bathed the child and like, redressed him. We finally get out of the house, I show up, everybody. There's like a whole room of women who are just very serene and very motherly and, like, who had stereotypical way. And they're all seated in dresses and, like, breastfeeding their baby. And I show up, I'm like scattered. My hair is everywhere. I have no idea what I'm even wearing. I haven't showered for a week because, like, when am I going to like, I just couldn't. It was everything it took for me to just breathe and function. And here they all are. They're all put together like, calm. And and I showed up like 45 minutes late, so it was like 20 minutes left. And the whole 20 minutes I sat there, my son was crying, right. Everybody else's babies were calm and they're doing tummy time. They're like, all fine. And my my kid is crying. I'm like tattered mess. And the 20 minutes I was there, I was just truly counting down the time to be able to leave because I was holding back tears. I just was like, I should not be doing this. I was not made for this. Clearly, I am looking at a room of women. I was not built for this. This is not what I was built for. I got home and got through the door and had my son on a blanket and dragged him to crawling while I was crying into the living room so that if I like, fell asleep, my husband would think that we were just there because I was so overwhelmed with with everything.And here, a year and a half later, taking my son to daycare and a mom at this breastfeeding class who had had twins. And I vividly remember her sitting there changing from one to the other, and she was just totally capable of two. And I had never felt so incapable in my life. And now she's a very good friend of mine, and her kids are very good friends of my son. But I remember I told her, wow, the first time I saw you, this is the situation. And and truly, I just felt so overwhelmed. And it was because she was asking me for help and she was apologizing for asking me for help. And she she was like, I'm really sorry. But like, my sisters are all out of town and so's my mom. Would you be able to? And I was like, of course, yeah, I really and she felt so bad about asking me for help. And I told her it was the first time I saw you like you were. You were serenely taking care of two kids like, oh my gosh, it's fine that you asked for help and so on. And she told me she's like, well, that was because I have three sisters and my mom. And so they were staying with me like, I don't know how anybody could do it otherwise. And it was, again, that whole concept and having context, right, to take a moment and be like, oh, and realize everybody who was actually in that room, I live in this town. I know them all now because the kids go to school with my kids. They all have a community of help because they didn't immigrate somewhere else where they don't have extended family and they don't have anyone to call.And so if they were, if they were scattered and needed to sleep, they had somebody to hold their baby where they did. So I didn't have that. And, and having that context and people just don't talk about it enough. If, if I had heard anybody say, take a moment for yourself and stop comparing, because if you don't have the same type of community support or the same type of similar support, or that you're probably doing just fine, you're actually going through a torturous situation that they do in war, right?ADRIANA:Like, yeah.CORTNEY:The fact that you're holding yourselves together is pretty good. Like, just sit with the fact that you're getting through it. I, I wouldn't have suffered anywhere near as much. Right. I wouldn't have suffered anywhere near as much. So every time. And I, I'm very grateful that you bring this up often because I think it's it needs to be it's not a taboo and it needs to be talked about. And the more people talk about it, the more others start to recognize it. One, it does take a community, whether we like it or not. It takes a community. And so be part of that community in whatever way you can be. Yeah, even if it's just showing some amount of moral support at work, let you be part of that community, in whatever way you can be. And to for women who are going through it, knowing this might be awful for a while, but like other people have survived it.And so it's okay for me to say it's really awful. And nobody's going to think worse of me because somebody else has gone through this and has openly said, it's really awful. Makes it okay. And and making that okay actually helps the mother be better because it takes the shame away from things. And and shame is such a powerful thing that is not good for anyone. Right. And, and I think parenting is so hard on its own anyway, being a mom, going through all of those different things and challenges a lot of shame comes with it because you don't really know what, like how you're going to react.And also every kid is different. And so a different mom, right? You're different if you have more than one. Turns out you end up being a different mom and you're at a different phase in your life and at a different age and a different everything. And you don't know how one might affect you in comparison to another, so being open about that empowers other women who are going through it to be like, okay, it's it's okay that I think this is awful. Because turns out it is, but it will be short lived, like there is another phase coming. And so I'm just I'll get through it and I'll live and I'll be okay. So, thank you for always bringing things like this up and advocating for it, because it is it's really important. And for the dads and the men who are around working with us, they want to be helpful.Like, I've yet to meet a man that doesn't think that their own mother is a superwoman. It's like their moms, their sisters, when you look at it. And I always say this, in the techie world, people get really into manga and and superhero things. This is this is true. It's not just a weird stigma. It's not everyone. Right? But that there is like a subset of us that like these things. But almost all of that is written by men. And inevitably the most powerful characters are women. Even the Lord of the Rings the, the powerful person who, like, takes away the ring is a woman. It was written by a man. And so I think oftentimes we lose sight of that as well.Yeah, like there are a lot of men out there who are advocates and who want to be supportive, and they want to be helpful, but they don't know what to do. And so unless we have these conversations, the the can't be added to be helpful because they don't know.ADRIANA:Yeah. And by like raising that awareness so that they know like what we're going through I mean yeah you go through it to a certain extent with your spouse. If you're if your spouse has had a child and you know, you're, you're, you're helping to raise, but, it's it's a different vibe to I think oftentimes when you're in your own little world, you think, oh, this only applies to me. Yeah. And then have other people talk about it. You're like, oh, that happens to others. Like, you know, when I was pregnant, I was I was so grateful to be pregnant because we wanted a child, but like, oh my God, I fucking hated being pregnant. And I think both can exist, you know?CORTNEY:Yes. ADRIANA:I did not love how my body changed. I'm sorry. You know, I was used to running around and climbing, and then I couldn't.CORTNEY:No, I envy the women who were like, I love being pregnant. And for the longest time, I was like, I wish I did, but oh, my God, it's just that so uncomfortable. And I am so swollen and I am so sick, like. And I am so sick of thinking about every last little thing that I eat. And I really just miss caffeine.ADRIANA:I know, like, am I allowed to do this? I can't eat sushi. Oops. I ate goat cheese by accident. I'm fucked. Yeah, I, I.CORTNEY:Can, I just have a piece of sliced turkey because it's in the fridge and I don't have to cook it. Oh my God, turns out I can't. What is listeria anyway? I don't even know what it is, but I'm so afraid of getting it.ADRIANA:Exactly, exactly. Yeah, all these things you have to worry about. But, you know, unless you're in it, you don't know. So to be able to talk about that, and have these conversations openly and, you know, make it a safe space for other, you know, moms, moms to be, to have, you know, to know, like, yeah, we got you. We've been through it. It'll be okay.CORTNEY:It'll be okay.ADRIANA:You can bitch about it, too. It's okay. Willing to hear all sides of the story, right. There will be. There will be women. And I'm so grateful for them. The ones who are, like, just by nature, super motherly and and caring and totally fine with setting themselves aside and being so-and-so's mom. Those women exist, and they should have a platform in which. But also turns out, at least in my experience, they're not the majority. They're part of.CORTNEY:There's not really a majority. Everyone's experiences is different, and unique, but there are certain things that, that tie us all together, like the lack of sleep and the overwhelming rage at your husband for not waking up and like. Like, those things are real. And they happened to to all of us at the end of the day. And so, making spaces to, to talk about that is, is helpful for everyone. And I don't care how uncomfortable it might make some people, at the end of the day, they're uncomfortable because they're struggling to hear things that they didn't know, and probably feel bad that they weren't able to provide more support. Right? Yes. And so it's important for them to be uncomfortable so that the next time they, they aren't uncomfortable with the situation.ADRIANA:Exactly. We got to normalize this at the end of the day.CORTNEY:Yeah.ADRIANA:Awesome. Well thank you. Well we are coming up on time. But before we wrap up, do you have any parting words of wisdom?CORTNEY:I don't consider myself to be very wise. I think my my parting words of wisdom, I it's it's a it's a quote that I personally really like by Winston Churchill. If you're going through hell, keep going. Don't stop there. If you're having a bad day, like, just keep going, keep going. The sun will come up. Tomorrow is a new opportunity. Go running to it with your arms open for for something better. That's a new day. Start over. But yeah, if you're going through hell, keep going. Don't don't stop there. Just just keep chugging through. And. And tomorrow's tomorrow will be a better day. That's that's it. That's that's how I try to get through my weeks.ADRIANA:That's great. I love that. That's such a great quote. Thank you so much for sharing. And, thank you so much, Cortney, for geeking out with me today. Don’t forget to subscribe, nd be sure to check the show notes and additional resources to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...CORTNEY:Geek out, peace 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.Geeking Out will be taking a short break for the holidays, but expect all new episodes starting in early January 2026. Peace out and geek out.

Key takeaways:It's important for junior folks to have a breadth of experience early in their careers to understand what they like and don't like, and to help shape what they want to do in their tech careers.Developers can't work in isolation and not care about the "big picture" of the product or service that they're working on. That's like moving to a new country and not caring about the cultural differences.Being invisible is a superpower, because it allows you to quietly learn, observe, and take things in.Being a quiet listener shouldn't be confounded with not speaking up due to shyness.It's important to use your voice to speak up and provide a safe place for others to speak upWe get into tech through different ways, have different skills, and different experiences, and these differences are what make for a successful team.There's not one way to succeed and make an impact in tech (and other professions), whether you're in upper management, an engineer, or anything in-between.As a senior person, you can also learn a lot from junior engineers and mid-level engineers, bringing in a different point of viewMentoring is about helping your mentees find their own strengths, and also learning from your mentees, as they always have something interesting to bring to the table.If you're going to be a manager, you've got to be really understanding of what your organization's strategic direction is, what its vision is, what its values truly are, and decide are you aligned enough to be able to represent that as a manager?University is a humbling experience of suddenly being surrounded by way smarter people than youThere are different skills to being a student vs being an employeeThere is a distinction between FinOps for the Cloud and "traditional" FinOps!Someone who works in FinOps (within the context of Cloud) has an understanding of how cloud vendors work and how things like workload, retention policies, autoscaling thresholds, etc. affect your cloud spend.About our guest:Deana Solis is the youngest daughter of Filipino immigrants and the mom of a biracial son. She credits her decades long career in tech for teaching her how to unplug from the grid in meaningful ways, connect with her ancestors, build community where she lives, and leave places better than she found them.She is a FinOps Foundation ambassador and mentor, known for her contributions in workgroups, certification curriculum, and humanizing FinOps talks.Find our guest on:LinkedInBlueskyFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:Carmen Huidobro on Geeking Out, talking about reframing nervousnessIxchel Ruiz on Geeking Out, talking about the importance of seeing people like us being representedAicha Laafia on Geeking Out (she was directly inspired by Ixchel Ruiz's talks)Charity Majors on Geeking OutKelsey Hightower on Geeking OutLiz Fong-Jones on Geeking OutWhat is FinOps?FP&AComptrollerTranscript:ADRIANA:Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech and geek out on topics like software development, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada.ADRIANA:And geeking out with me today I have Deana Solis. Welcome, Deana!DEANA:Thank you. Happy to be here.ADRIANA:And where are you calling from?DEANA:I'm in Vancouver, Washington.ADRIANA:Oh, cool. That's awesome. So before, before I introed you in, we were talking about pronouncing names, and, I thought it was interesting, so I wanted to bring it up on the podcast because I thought your name was pronounced “De-anna”, but it's actually “Dean-a”. And tell the story behind that, because I thought it was kind of cool.DEANA:You know, I have always blamed this on my dad because I knew the story. They were Rat Pack fans, and Dean Martin, was a favorite. My dad was a big audiophile. We had his records, so I just blamed him. It turns out that my mom was the big Dean Martin fan. She picked the name, and had I been a boy, I would have been Dean. But I wasn’t. So Deana.ADRIANA:That is so cool. I love that that's such a great name origin story.DEANA:But considering my last name and you pronounced that exactly correctly, it's perfectly acceptable to expect to pronounce it Deanna or Deanna, with all the syllables. But it's not. So.ADRIANA:Yeah. Fair, fair. Well, I mean, I think it's a it's a really great way to remember, though, in, in terms of pronouncing your name like, oh, I always think of like the Dean Martin reference. That's awesome. Well, so are you ready for our icebreaker questions?DEANA:Yes.ADRIANA:AV: Okay. First question. Are you a lefty or a righty?DEANA:Lefty.ADRIANA:Yeah, I always get... you... if you watch the show, you know, I always get excited about lefties. Were you ever, did anyone ever try to force you, to write right handed when you were growing up? Or, like, try to change anything about your leftiness?DEANA:Fortunately, in that area, no. However, I am somewhat ambidextrous. Like in sports. I think I'm I'm somewhat I'm ambidextrous. I throw right-handed. In basketball you wouldn't know which which I favor. But in, in baseball I would left because the coaches told me that was an advantage. And, so I could adapt and I had to throw right handed because like, in my first couple of years of that sport, I didn't buy my own glove. I got the hand-me-down. And also I am disproportionately surrounded by other left handers.ADRIANA:Oh no way. That is super cool.DEANA:Yeah. My my partner and his oldest son. My best friend's husband. Yeah, it's just funny.ADRIANA:Wow. One comment I was going to make because you said that you're, like, ambidextrous. For certain things, I tend to be, I tend to be left handed for most things, but for whatever reason, archery. Not not that I have done archery often, but when I've picked up a bow and arrow, I do it the right handed way. And my daughter, who is right handed, does it the left handed way.DEANA:Oh that's interesting. My son's an archer.ADRIANA:Oh, really? That's cool.DEANA:He's done that thing where he has, hit the bull's eye and then split it with his next arrow.ADRIANA:He can do that?DEANA:I don't know how close he was, but even close distance, that's not easy to do. And, I'm. I'm kind of proud of that. I had nothing to do with it.ADRIANA:Yeah, that is a cool skill. Just one more thing. One more curiosity on the left handed thread. Do you mouse left or right handed?DEANA:Oh, well, so I don't, I, what is it? Trackpad. What do you call it?ADRIANA:Yeah, trackpad. Do you trackpad left or right handed?DEANA:I think mostly right. Me too. Yeah. Me too, I, I tried, like because that's how I learned, like, when a mouse was presented to me and, you know, my, my dad's the techie in the, in the family. So he introduced me to a mouse and I'm like, so I picked it up with my, with my right hand. And I could not even fathom using a left handed mouse.DEANA:But do you do, like, multiple monitors?ADRIANA:Sometimes. Sometimes.DEANA:So I have found that when I'm moving windows around, or. Yeah, windows from one monitor to another or just from one side of the screen to another. I tend to be a two handed trackpad.ADRIANA:Oh!DEANA:You can, you know, continue to swipe while you're, without letting go of a thing. And I just, I wish I could teach it, but I don't know how I do it.ADRIANA:I've done that on occasion. Not necessarily with dragging monitors, but like, I know what you're talking about. It comes in handy Do you prefer iPhone or Android?DEANA:I think that I can adapt to either one, but I've owned far more iPhones. But hopefully, you know, my frequency of changing them is much less. And I'd be open to to trying one of the Androids because I have seen some really interesting products, but I probably get like a, a couple of generations old one.ADRIANA:Okay. Next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?DEANA:I don't think I could live without all three. Because I do quite a bit in the Azure space. And so, being closer to the, the Microsoft ecosystem, and all my keyboard shortcuts that are muscle memory are from Windows. And I love my Mac. It's a design thing, but it's kind of a privilege to be able to answer that question at all.ADRIANA:And that's good. Yeah, that's I, I like that.DEANA:And the Linux thing, you know, all the workloads that scale and that, that I'm, that my clients are using. You know, I wouldn't I wouldn't have a job if there weren't a ton of, of Linux workloads. I haven't been on a Linux desktop since 1999. So that was when I it pretty much lost its, its like, shine as, as a, as a personal, operating system for, for, for me. But, I will say that I still have my last Windows laptop from a few years ago that, you know, it can't be updated anymore. And I keep it around thinking, just maybe I could just put a Linux OS on there and give it a new life.ADRIANA:Ooh, yes, that sounds like a fun little side project. Yeah.DEANA:In all my free time.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I gotta gotta find that time first. Right? Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?DEANA:I do not. I think I told you, I, I never contributed, any code to to an open source project or I, I'm, I generally don't write it. Maybe policies, some YAML things and, and, edit existing Python scripts or, but that I'm more... since I have an app... ops background, I'm more comfortable with Python or I think I, I tried to learn Ruby and then the, the project that I was specifically learning it for completely changed directions in terms of like the whole pipeline, the whole toolchain changed and it was like, okay, drop that, learn this. And then also your role is going to change because we really need someone to, to, know about this particular skill set. And so, so it was just more in my wheelhouse and didn't go back to it. I just always sort of thought, okay, I'm going to finish that, that beginner Python course. But I don't need it to do the job that that my role is defined for.ADRIANA:That's cool, that's cool. Next question. Do you prefer dev or ops? I think I might know your answer.DEANA:Ops is obviously my comfort zone, and I'm such a process person. But I'm finding more and more that I need to lean into the dev, because those are processes that I'm starting to understand in terms of what drives businesses and what drives value. And so I, I it's the area where I would tend to lean, but they are definitely, inseparable. The more a company leans toward one or the other and says, oh no, we can have a vendor do that or we can outsource that. The less healthy I think it is in the long term for that organizational culture.ADRIANA:Yeah, I, I agree with you. And, you know, this brings up something that I've had a debate with, with some people on. I think I've even posted a thing on LinkedIn a while back, which is, you know, having devs be aware, more concerned or have knowledge, high level knowledge of, of ops things and vice versa. Right. Which, you know, in, in some ways I, I suppose we require ops people to be more versed in the dev world because of things like infrastructure as code, right, where you're really bringing those software engineering principles into the ops world. And yet you don't see as much of, like, you meet some developers who are like, I'm just going to write my code. I don't care how it's containerized. I don't care what happens after I deliver my code. What, do you have any interesting thoughts on that?DEANA:I really do think that when, when you're a junior dev or a junior, technologist, you know, just let's take the devs and the ops out of it. When you're, a junior software engineer getting into it and thinking, well, which direction am I going to go in? You absolutely need to do a rotation and see what actually fits your your strength and your biases or your heuristics, whatever the internals, that, where you can lean into your strengths and get some confidence so that you can then tackle the next thing. Or recognize that, oh, okay, this is really challenging for me. You've got to be able to rotate through both. When you're dealing with senior folks who have done it a certain way, if they're able to isolate, there's not a whole lot of value in trying to pull them into from one into the other. I don't actually see the sort of dichotomy that you described. I see more of whichever one you're in because I, I am in, a more split organization. And I think the bigger the enterprise is, you tend to see a lot more division of, of, labor in the roles in the way that the roles are defined.ADRIANA:Very true.DEANA:And I think that the folks who are, if you're in ops now, you need to have that enough of the dev to be able to function. Because it's moving so fast. You cannot be like me in, in the early 2000s with a dozen SSH terminals. Hitting enter, just in the right sequence. Because that's what you had to do without, without a control plane. So yeah, absolutely. The ops folks have to have that as a minimum. But I don't think that that, devs who want to like, software developers who are actually trying to make their product more effective, they have to be just as conscious of, at the very least, what their, what their organization, what their client prefers, because it's sort of like moving to a new country and and not caring, about cultural differences. It's because because there are going to be some assumptions that you should know about when you start thinking like, what am I optimizing for? You know, I am... like most of my job is optimizing something. And and what people don't realize, it's, you can optimize for competing things. You have to remember which one you picked when you got to that fork in the road. And for a software developer who cares about speed, it might not be as important to understand how their platform that they're developing, that they're going to deploy from, operates scale. Right. So yeah, I, I see that as being such an important way to, grow in your, in your own skill is to understand how the stuff you do interacts with the ground you’re standing on.ADRIANA:Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, thanks for thanks for sharing your take on this. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?DEANA:So the the JSON files that I, that I deal with, like on a regular basis are things that are outputs. You know, they're things that I read, and I can convert it to a CSV or, you know, depending on, on what the, what the use case is and who the end user is that needs that data. It may not always be another, another programmer. It may not be another application that's pulling that in. It's just that's how the output came out... Because we have no idea who developed that last application or that last, little function that put it out. And so this is what we've got. How do we convert it to what we need. And so that's sort of been my my area of dealing with it. YAML files can be tiny and it can just be a rule set and it can be... either one is is somewhat readable. But but that's coming from someone who likes to read spreadsheets. So.ADRIANA:I don't mind spreadsheets. I don't mind spreadsheets. Like, I'll, I'll read like CSV if it's in a spreadsheet for like, you know, open it in Excel. Good. I'm good. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs? Do you have a preference?DEANA:I don’t have preference, I don't even know what I, I think the whatever the the IDE is, tells me which one is the one I'm supposed to use.ADRIANA:Fair enough, fair enough. Two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?DEANA:I'm one of those auditory learners. And I don't even know if I definitely need both. And I, I tend to put a lot of content in writing more than I would in video. But I do consume probably more video because I can do it at double speed or podcasts at double speed because I just, I need to know if the information is there. Yeah. And while I'm looking at something else or while I'm. I'm, walking or driving. And I can, I can process it that way. Whereas if I'm sitting down to read it, I better have time, because I think I'm a slower reader and reading is just never it's never as, sticky as I need it to be.ADRIANA:Right, right.DEANA:But if something comes without any documentation, I will dismiss it and go to a better source. I need recommendation to sort of prove it out to me so I can, I can, see if I would write it differently or, if my memory matches, the words.ADRIANA:Yep, that makes sense. It's interesting what you were saying about, you know, putting podcasts on, on double speed. Like, I love listening to podcasts. I'm a huge podcast junkie. Like, I'll have a podcast on while I'm, like, brushing my teeth or, like, doing stuff around the house. But there is one thing I can't do, which is put podcasts on double speed. It like it breaks my brain. I start when I accidentally hit like the faster speed setting on my podcast. I'm like, what is going on?DEANA:You know, on my iPhone, on the YouTube app, when I'm, watching video content. I know that I can just hold my thumb down on the screen and it automatically goes to double speed. And that is probably my my favorite feature of having that app on my phone. And it's probably comes from my impatience with people in conversations. Not this one, but.ADRIANA:I, I, I know exactly what you mean. It's like, get to the point. I prefer reading over, over video. And for similar reasons. I feel like when I, when I watch a video, I need to like carve out time. But I'm also like too ADHD to pay attention to the video. And for reading I love skimming and, and you know, it's like, okay, just get me to the point where I need to get to.DEANA:I think maybe growing up in a household where, where two languages were spoken, but not by me. I heard Tagalog. My parents are Filipino. I heard it spoken a lot, and often directly to me and my siblings, but I didn't have to respond in it, I responded in English. So I think, I think because... maybe that set my brain up to be really sensitive to, are they talking to me? And so the way that a word is set or I listen to tone, I love video too. If it's like this, where I can actually look at you and say, okay, the the head nods and the body language. But where the video is, something on a stage far away. I will just I'll listen to audio only, and I will miss that screen and just not even pay attention to the slides. I'll just be listening for... for tone and, words that I have not heard before, or words that are used in a way that I'm not used to using them. You know, there's so many reused and overused terms. Just from, you know, are you talking about the the function or the application vendor that just came out with a new thing? And they'll, they will have used the same, same term. I can't think of one right now.ADRIANA:Yeah. No, I know what exactly what your, what you mean. And that, of course, adds to, that adds to confusion. Okay. Final question. What's your superpower?DEANA:I thought about this one a lot because I hear it. I think I've heard people ask it and I've been asked for a long time. And, you know, I think when you're asked in an interview, you think of, you try to think of something to impress them. I think that superpowers come from recognizing what your vulnerability is. That makes you different. And understanding all of the ways that you can use it to make everything else you care about, doing, make that better. And I think that I have landed on the same one that I used to use, which is invisibility, because sometimes when I'm in a room, people don't realize that I'm listening and gathering information. And recently, I heard it. Heard being invisible being compared to, the CIA. You know, they're never, they're not supposed to be visible. They can't really do their job gathering intelligence if they're super visible. I think in the observability space and in the... in my area, the FinOps space. You know, we don't want our tools and our processes to be in the front. They should just be quietly doing their jobs. And I think that that's kind of how I've spent a lot of my career, is just quietly doing the job and learning and understanding when, when, I needed to adjust. And so that invisibility has let me go into spaces and, and make observations that maybe I wouldn't have been able to before. When I learned to sort of turn it on and turn it off, that's when it became a superpower. When I learned to start being visible, start using my voice. In fact, that's when I realized, oh, this is this is actually a strength.ADRIANA:Wow. I love that so much. I first of all, I love your definition of what a superpower is. That's amazing. And secondly, invisibility. I think that's the first time we've had that on, on the podcast. And it's so true. There's something to be said about just being the the quiet listener. And then, as you said, to be able to turn it off and on as needed. Because I think being the quiet listener shouldn't be confounded with being too afraid to speak up. Which, unfortunately, you know, a lot of us get get caught up in that. Especially, I have to say, especially for women, you know, I feel like I have to sort of just remind myself, you know, like, I have a seat at the table. I deserve to be here. I should speak up if I have something to say.DEANA:It is intertwined with, the imposter syndrome that people say, oh, you've got imposter syndrome, or that we that that label that we put on ourselves when, when really something about, growing up, kind of being taught to be invisible. You would think that that's a very negative thing. But everyone, all of my, my ancestors, my, my elders who who taught me to, not be visible did it from a place of love. They did it from a place of wanting me to be protected from not wanting to stand out in a way that as women as, sometimes coming from marginalized communities, just speaking up and having an opinion, can have us be perceived as threatening or disruptive when actually, you know, that different perspective is something that it might make you better if you can listen to it, if you can find some, you know, some new wisdom, and, you know, and, and in our, in our, our, respective fields, the intelligence that the business actually needs.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And there's something to be said for, like, just sitting down, listening, taking in the information before you do something with it. Right? Because I think, we tend to see a lot of, like, you hear blah. And it's like, I got my response ready to go, right? It's like, let's pounce on that right away. And it's like, no, no, no, let's, let's listen to the story. And and to be fair, I think it's, it's it's an acquired skill. Right. Listening is a, an acquired skill. I think it comes naturally to some. But to most it's probably very difficult because we want to say... we have opinions on things. Right.DEANA:It can be learned and it can be practiced. And, I think that, you know, I've, I mentioned I surround myself myself with left handers, but I also I'm kind of disproportionately surrounded by extroverts. And so as an introvert, I have to practice the, the skills that extroverts just find natural and, you know, don't understand why I didn't speak up earlier in my career or when I thought that speaking up would make me, vulnerable. Well, you've just got to you've just got to assert yourself. You've got to be outgoing, you've got to make those connections. And really, it didn't serve me, or I knew it wouldn't serve me because I hadn't had the practice. And it was only, I think, when I felt called to do my part as a senior engineer, on a team where, you know, we'd had some women rotate in and, and sort of leave and never be heard from again. You know, I was looking around and thinking, wait, why? Why is there only one of us in a room at a time? Why are there only one of 1 or 2 of us at a really bigger room at a time? What am I doing or not doing... to reach out and make those connections and, And let them know that they're not alone and that their opinions do matter. And also connect with them and see if, if they're experiencing something that I experienced sometimes, which is, is, having an opinion heard and then, and not really valued until someone else says the same thing.ADRIANA:Right? Yeah. I think that's that's the most aggravating thing ever.DEANA:When I started speaking out, because I had a little bit more job security, a little bit more confidence in where I was at my career, when I started, you know, talking about my experiences and saying, hey, yeah, this happens, just happen to anyone else in the room. And to have a bunch of women say, oh, yeah, that's happened to me. That sort of reinforcement told me I'd been quiet too long. I'm not going to do that anymore. So it was a sort of new set of skills that helped me get out of the, timid, sort of natural comfort state of of being quiet and listening and say, okay, this this is where it becomes a superpower. This is where if I don't use my voice, no one else is going to, because no one else in the room, thinks it's safe or no one else in the room has actually experienced it because I'm the only woman, or that I'm the only brown person, or I'm the only.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DEANA:Yeah, I'm I'm the only one who's five foot tall walking around with a bunch of giants.ADRIANA:I feel that so hard. Yeah. I'm like five, three. So. And and it it's sometimes daunting. I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but, like, you know, when you have the floor and you're speaking in an audience, like, not even necessarily like in front of larger audience, but like in a meeting room and all of a sudden, like, people are paying attention to you, I don't know, I sometimes I in my head I'm like, oh shit, they're all listening to what I have to say. Oh crap, what if I say something stupid?DEANA:Oh, I mean, it happened earlier in this call. You you were asking a question. I'm like, oh my gosh, I have so many thoughts. I didn't want to get my answer wrong because I feel like this might be the only time they hear me say it. So I want to say it right.ADRIANA:Yes.DEANA:And I think, I don't know how long you've been doing public speaking, but I've only maybe the last five years. Six, if that. And really, you know, the smaller groups are always where I'm more comfortable. Please don't put me on a big stage. If you do, I'm going to say I'm going to call it out, that I'm nervous and that my heart is beating. Could you come back to me? That's happened. It's on. It's on YouTube somewhere.ADRIANA:It's it's daunting. I mean, like, especially when you're not, like, not mentally prepared for for certain interactions. Like, I was... there's a panel I was moderating... moderating a couple of weeks back and one of the, one of the panelists turned to me and like asked a question to me. I'm like, I'm going. And panic. Panic set in. I'm like, I'm I'm going to defer the question to somebody else to answer because I wasn't I wasn't prepared to be called on. And then of course, then for the rest of the evening, I'm like, oh my god, do they think I'm an idiot? Like, did I do something wrong? What if people hate me?DEANA:There are definitely there are definitely moments where, where that pressure is, like, physically, it puts that lump in my throat.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DEANA:I can always hear my voice shaking. And so, you know, let’s take the breath and I realize that, that that's exactly the signal that I need to tell me, keep going. Because this is important.ADRIANA:Yes, yes. Yeah, absolutely. And you've touched upon like, two interesting things that, have actually come up in previous conversations on this podcast. One, I had a guest talk about, like reframing nervousness that when you're nervous before giving a talk, it's a sign that you care, that you care enough about what you're what you're doing. And I think that's such a lovely way to reframe it and put it into a different perspective to almost like, calm me down to, I guess it has a soothing effect. And then the other one, is the idea that, you know, As someone who is in a minority group, it's so important, for others who look like us, to see us so it's almost like extra important for us to get past our, our fears and, and, and do this not just for us, but to inspire others. And, the cool story around that one is that the guest who was telling me that I had another guest on, who was inspired by that same woman, who, you know, who said, like, I'm doing this to inspire others. And she was one of the people who was directly impacted by that person. And as she's telling me this, it just sent shivers down my spine. I was like, getting all emotional because I'm like, this stuff matters. We're seeing direct impact of this.DEANA:Every time.DEANA:And a by the way, some of your guests are like, just phenomenal. And, were you on something with Charity Majors?ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah.DEANA:And Kelsey Hightower.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, I've had Kelsey Hightower on. I've had Charity Majors on. I've done a couple of panels with Charity as well.DEANA:When people who... like, thinking of people who, who, whose content randomly came in my feed as I was trying to, you know, get up to speed on this whole new cloud thing. You know, those are some voices. Oh, Liz-Fong Jones. So, just listening to those, people talk about not just what they know, and not in a way that that people can't connect to and access, like the the understanding underneath it, but also saying who they are and that, you know, they didn't get here how you think they did. Our different ways to get in the room. And different strengths that a team needs to really be to really achieve that, that really high goal and different, you know, talents and perspectives and all those things. And Adriana, that's what you inspire me, by the way.ADRIANA:Oh, thank you!DEANA:Everything. Like sharing the mic sharing the platform is, I think there are folks on your, in your, episode list that I otherwise would never have thought of following or we would have never heard of because they're just like, they're not in my ecosystem. And so it just like, wow, what a great exposure. And like to also say there's not just one way for folks to grow in tech and in, in life and in, in their profession. So there's not one way to succeed and there's not one way to have an impact. Like, not all of us are... not all of us are head of, head of, technology or the, you know, distinguished engineer. But we're all human.ADRIANA:Yeah.DEANA:We all put in the hours and the sweat and we all care that hard.ADRIANA:Yes, yes, that that, you know, sums it up so nicely and, you know, like, when I was younger, I used to like, chase titles. And I used to compare myself against people, you know, like a for a while there, my, my husband and I used to work at the same company, and then I left, and he's still there. And people that we knew mutually, he'd be like, oh, listen, this person got promoted to manager. And I remember getting so steamed about it and like, just genuinely pissed. And he's like, I'm not going to tell you anymore because you get pissed off every time. Because I was so jealous. I'm like, why am I not being promoted to manager? And then I came to this realization in my career, when I finally did become a manager, where I'm like, I don't like it. And there are other ways to, like, be a leader. Yeah, without being a manager. I realized, like, for me personally, I love digging into the weeds of tech. And managing people just isn't fun for me. So, like, once I let go of that and just enjoyed, like, gave myself permission to enjoy what I enjoy and and just, like, things took off for me, you know what I mean?DEANA:So for me, like all of the things that I liked about being management, being in management in my previous, previous life, it turns out I would have done if they paid me for it or not, and so I could actually keep doing it. I like the mentoring. So, I reach, when I find a group that is looking for mentors and I volunteer. I loved doing that with, a group that's no longer around, Portland women in Tech. And oh man, I miss that community. But. There are other, there are plenty of other communities that are still looking for mentors. I have mentees now that, you know, currently, are currently in a, in an engagement and, and I liked the strategic thinking, the systems thinking. I like thinking of systems of systems. And it turns out I'm going to do that anyway, whether I'm an individual contributor or a manager. And it turns out that I can actually help my leadership in ways that they didn't realize. And I can remind them that, hey, it's not just me, someone who's had a couple of decades in infrastructure that you should listen to. You should also be listening to some of your your junior engineers or your your mid-level engineers who are pretty quiet. They might actually know a little bit about why your systems are working the way they are. And help you make better strategic decisions, or have a better strategic, visibility on what your what you're actually actual risks and, and opportunities might be and you know, again and again it goes back to being able to turn it off and turn on with the invisibility. It's, that's that's one of those areas where a thing about being invisible is you can recognize other folks who are using it as a, as a shield and, who have a lot of, of super power, you know, lurking underneath. And you can help them. And I think that's one of my favorite things about being a mentor is most of my mentees.DEANA:I've learned so much more from them than they they I think they could have learned from me because all I do is just is I help them find their own strengths and all I can do is, is, show them that. That, yes, you still have a lot more experience you need to gain. Yes, you're going to get a lot of feedbackDEANA:that kind of hurts a little bit, hurts your ego a little bit because, you didn't come out perfect. But take those things as as growth. That's why they call them growing pains. And, and it's, it's a great way to be able to, connect those, those, management activities, or the things that I liked about it, into my daily work and, and like, keep recharging me for the, for the spreadsheets. And JSON files, that I, that I have to just deal with and, and that I actually enjoy, you know, for myself. But you know, the thing about management is you've got to be, if you're going to be a manager, you've got to be really understanding of what your organization's strategic direction is, what its vision is, what its values truly are, and decide are you aligned enough to be able to represent that as a manager?Are you aligned enough to be able to, make the company's priorities your own? In terms of how you speak? And, as an individual contributor, it's so much more liberating.ADRIANA:Yeah.DEANA:You know, I can I can even mentor up, which I think is is just part of part of being an expert in your field is, you can show folks who are, you know, miles above your pay grade how to, how to do a new thing and, how to create some value.ADRIANA:Yeah. And I think you make such an, an important point when it comes to mentoring, that I think, if you're not learning anything from your mentees, then I think you're doing it wrong. Because honestly, like, coming with this attitude of like, I am the authority on all the things and you shall listen to me like...DEANA:Also the same thing you did, though, too, about the unfairness of how management, how promotions were handed out. And by the way, I also, it was completely obfuscated to me early in my career that there was another way to get promoted without going into management.ADRIANA:Yes, exactly. Me too.DEANA:Right. And not just promoted but, compensated.ADRIANA:Exactly.DEANA:Enrich. Like we grow in different ways. Like I, I didn't talk like this. I wouldn't have been able to talk like this had I stayed in management because I could have only spoken what I was allowed to speak. Whereas now I the views and opinions that I express are my own.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's a different vibe. I, I remember my, at my last management position, my, my boss was trying to groom me for director position and he said something which, which you touched upon, which is you're going to have to put your personal goals aside and, and really focus on the company goals and, like, I'm not ready for that. It's not to say, like, you know, when you're working, of course, you like, you’re being... your paycheck comes from somewhere. It doesn't mean like, screw the company goals. I don't care. That's not it at all. But I think a different level, of like, really putting the company needs above your own professional needs. And when you're in these higher positions. And for me, I think it takes a bigger mental load as well. Like, it's big mental toll.DEANA:Oh, ego, too.ADRIANA:Okay. Yeah.DEANA:I think the thing that, that newer software engineers and and technologists, of all kinds. Really just anyone who kind of comes in from their, their college degree into their tech role, has in common is they're used to excelling. Probably. They’re at the top of their class up until K through 12 or I, I don't know how it is in Canada.ADRIANA:But yeah same same same.DEANA:Yeah. So so then like you, you're, you're a freshman in college and that's probably the first time in a long time that you're oh among all-stars. Oh no. It's going to be harder to stand out as the top 10% of the class, top 3% of the class. Because now these are the smartest people I've ever had in, all in one place. And so then maybe you get a little more humility and you've got a few years to build that back up. And if you're an extrovert, even easier, or if, if you're not, then you, you sort of lag further and further behind. I never thought I'd be in tech when I, I started out electrical engineering and I, for lack of better words, washed out. I it didn't didn't fit, at the time, at the time. But I, I took a different fork where I thought, okay, well, here's where I can start kind of building some value and it's fine, but everything that every next role just kept bringing me back and bringing that, that confidence back. But it brought me back to that feeling of, oh, yeah, this is what it's like to be around smart people again. And that okay. So I shouldn't say that with, with too much humor because and that was actually my attitude. I really enjoyed judging people for not being as smart as me, when really we're all smart at something. And when you're told you need to be smart about this in this way, and that's the only way to do it. You believe them when they tell you you're not smart.So for anyone who thinks, I could never write code, I could never, administer that cluster. I could never do FinOps. Try it. You might actually have a strength that you haven't. You know, that you haven't actually discovered in yourself. And that's when, you know, that's when you can unlock it. And that's when you can say, okay, it's not about the smart people and the not smart people. It is really about people showing up with the strengths that they have got and the willingness to grow and have each other's backs. And that's how you build teams, that's how you make sustainable operations. That's how organizations become resilient. And, you know, we keep learning from each other. I learn so much from you, I really do.ADRIANA:Oh, thank you.DEANA:OTel stuff. Not in the observability space, but in the way that all data is in some way. You can use it as telemetry. To just tell you, like, is this the right signal? I am the bounds. I can't see my boundaries. This helps me understand what what the the bottom and the top looks like. And you know, whether or not I'm moving in the direction that I intended to. And so same thing with FinOps data, which is basically cloud cost data. It's just data analysis. It's just... it's a lot. It's coming at you fast. So you've got to be able to to sometimes listen to things at double speed. But you're not, like, it's it's not anything new. It's not more than, than, the thing that you're just willing to show up and care about, like, if that's the thing you care about, if observability is the thing you care about, if security is the thing you care about, you know, learn how to do it right, learn how other people do it differently from you.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's, you know, you've touched upon so many really cool and important points. I think first of all, I, as you said, like you coming, coming from like, high school and being the smartest person in your high school and then kind of coming back to reality when you're surrounded by all these other people in university who are like, oh, damn, that person's way smarter than me. It's it's such a humbling experience. I think it's an important experience. And I think for me, one of the biggest lessons was learning that, it's okay to not be the smartest person in the room. In fact, I never want to be, because I always want to keep learning. And then the other thing that I thought of, too is, you know, one of the struggles I had when I entered the workforce was, I was a great student, but I was such a shitty employee because I didn't know... it's a different skill set to be an employee versus a student. Right? Like, as an employee, there are expectations of being you know, more of a self-starter. And as a student, especially the unfortunately, I don't think that the education system is really geared towards independent thinking. And so it becomes a shock when you enter the workforce because it's like, tell me what I need to do, or, you know, like, I, I don't know, I just everything was a different vibe.And I sucked at it. And once I, once I learned how to navigate the workforce, and I wish, I wish there were more opportunities for people to navigate the workforce before they graduate from high school or university or whatever. Then it became a lot better, but it was jarring for me. I sucked at it.DEANA:Yeah, I think that's where, and it's, again, easier, I think, for extroverts to find other folks to give you that feedback of, like, is this normal? Like, is it okay that it that I had to build my own dev environment and my own sandbox and without any like, parameters or got guardrail like, is that okay, let's or should I, you know, say something and try to make it better for the next one who comes in. You know, there's going to be someone... I'm going to get experience. I'm going to learn how to use these tools quickly and, and tear them down, rebuild them, you know, with with just the muscle memory in my in my finger knuckles and but oh, maybe I should document this somewhere and or correct the existing document and say, actually, the next person who does this is going to have to at least know to ask these questions before they say, oh, that's the that's the one. That's the compressed file that well, that's going to work for me.ADRIANA:Yeah. No. Yeah, I, I feel ya. I do want to pivot to one more topic. Before we wrap up, because we are coming up on time. But you've mentioned, FinOps a couple of times, and for those, in our audience who aren't familiar with shin ops, can you give like, a brief overview and also how you got into it?DEANA:Oh. So, I think I got into it. Well, I’ll explain what it is first, and, and, it is commonly described, as financial operations, and that's actually not completely accurate. FinOps, if it's used by a person in finance and accounting, is exactly that, financial operations. Maybe it's reporting, maybe it's journal entries, maybe it's something in the finance processes. It's not actually what Cloud FinOps It's it's more of a, a portmanteau of the terms finance, financial management, and DevOps. So taking sort of the cultural principles of, of that collaboration and that mutual accountability, from, from more technical spaces into this, business management of technology space. That's what FinOps is. And some companies use it to just control their, their cloud spend. Just make sure that no one's spinning up gigantic clusters of very expensive instance types. And some people use it as a telemetry to say, this is, this is a really efficient, stack. And I need to scale that. And, you know, I need to invest in this area because it's actually it's actually creating, a return, creating value for, you know, my, my team or my, my organization. So, so it's, and like I said, it's it's a lot like observability in that, you know, we're building intelligence with data, and we're, we're getting data that we've had, but organizing it and making it accessible, and it's really just telling us what we do, what the impacts of our engineering decisions are, and how that, you know, how that costs more money.ADRIANA:Yeah.DEANA:Or how like, or how our, maybe our, our, SAS contracts are like are, are performing.ADRIANA:Yeah. And you know, it's, it's something so important to take into account because I think. You know, once a lot of organizations move to the cloud, especially if you're not, you know, if, if you are just a, a consumer of the service and not the one paying for the bill, it's easy to just, like, magically provision resources and just, you know, like the Cloud Fairy brought me this Kubernetes cluster. But there's a, until, like, you are staring at a massive, like, AWS or GKE bill, you're like, oh, shit. Like, I've gotten dinged even, like, on my personal, GKE account where, I had a an instance where I had a Kubernetes cluster that had, like, logging and monitoring enabled because that's enabled by default. Well, guess what? That ate up some massive, massive cloud costs. And and so now you're like, where do I where is the switch to turn this stuff off so that it doesn't, you know, so, so that it doesn't eat up my costs.DEANA:So that's where you if you bring in your, your FP&A, or your finance partner, in, or your, your, assistant comptroller in and say, say, well, what happened? What went wrong? I don't know, there was a $50,000 spike. And you know, that that would have bought me my next car. But, you know, fix it. With someone in FinOps who has, sort of access to, engineering terms and understanding of who your cloud vendors are to be able to say, okay, here's what happened on this workload, because of these events and because of these retention policies and because of these autoscaling thresholds, you left something running. You left the lights on, you left the bathtub flowing.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DEANA:Twenty simple things that can be proactive and that we can actually govern through automation. We can say, by the way, this open faucet has a time to live. This sandbox account is really important. We need to be able to allow a $50,000 spike, maybe, for about five minutes.ADRIANA:Right.DEANA:You know, to make sure that those guardrails are in place. If your organization doesn't have someone to go through and say, okay, I'm, I'm going to invest in, in this technology. And these consultants say that it's going to give me this much ROI. I need someone inside who's going to actually keep an eye on it. How are you observing it? What monitoring are you putting in place? What signals can you look for? Right. That's not rocket science. It's just, it's just, it can be a lot. And I promise you, there are a lot of quiet people who are quietly doing other work who would actually really excel in something like FinOps. And also a lot of automation that can be put in place where I think engineers who do the IAC, like, get really excited about writing those, policies and putting those, those different guardrails right into the pipeline to say, yeah, the CI/CD to say, okay, I'm not going to let, you know, the manager speaking. I'm not going to let that happen. Well, here's actually how the code will prevent that from ever happening. And... when you have like a, an understanding of what the exception process is, then, like, everybody can, can, gain that intelligence from having the experience and having all that context. It's a tough thing though, because, you know, you you don't always know why policies exist.ADRIANA:And yeah.DEANA:If I know engineers, they want to just know how to get around them.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. And you touched upon a really important point because I think, it's this lack of understanding of why the policies exist, pisses engineering... engineers off. And as you said, try to, it causes them to try to get around it. And I think understanding where these policies come from, makes a huge difference. And I think working with engineers to craft the policies, I think goes a long way as well, because then it's like, okay, I had a hand in this, I, and I think it brings that extra level of empathy too, right?DEANA:Oh yeah. Yeah. And collaboration really is what keeps people happy in their jobs, I think. That's when you realize, oh you know, I did a thing and, and I want to, I want to work with that person again. Like I think that's the thing that makes, makes some of our work less boring. You know just just less isolated.ADRIANA:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. This has been really great. Before we wrap up, do you have any final, parting words of wisdom?DEANA:I think I just want to acknowledge that it's been a tough time, that we need a lot of compassion to keep, showing up for people we've never. We've probably never worked with before. Never. Interacted with to just know that that, if you were living in a place where there are floods, or if you're, if you're in an industry or, or. Well, it's a tough time to be in tech, where you have a little less job security than you did, and than you thought you would this year. You know, just having that compassion is something that, it's going to be helpful to just remind ourselves who, to know that. The person who is probably giving you the most friction might have just had the worst day after a lot of bad days. And, and maybe be curious about that.ADRIANA:Yeah.DEANA:That you can keep showing up for them and, and keep seeing how maybe you're the person who can, can turn it around for them. And, or maybe that person's experience is something that can turn it around for you. I, I feel like I keep getting reminders of that. Really, every day. And, I didn't know I was going to say that, but that's the kind of week it's been.ADRIANA:I feel ya. And, you know, thank you so much for calling that out, because I think it's it's really important to put stuff into perspective. Tech times are definitely strange these days. And having that little bit of extra empathy goes a long way. So thank you so much. And thank you so much, Deana, for geeking out with me today.ADRIANA:Y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...DEANA: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.

Key takeaways:An open source project can only succeed if it has not only contributors and maintainers, but also users of the project.Your open source project is really as good as the docs are.It can be challenging for companies to commit to and adopt open source projects because they don't know if the project will be long enough.Large organizations or startups looking to scale look for paid support from open source projects that they use, if it ends up becoming a mission-critical part of their development and/or operations.If there's an open source project you love, show some love to the open source developers by donating to the project, because if they can't pay the bills, they can't maintain the project.When Lisa was in university, girls weren't encouraged to go into tech, and it resulted in her being an English major, even though she was better at STEM subjects.End users are just as important as the folks working on open source projects.Even if you don't get accepted to KubeCon, there are tons of other conferences and meetups, both part of the CNCF and outside of the CNCF, that you can attend, including Kubernetes Community Days (KCDs).KubeCrash is an online conference that, among other things, prides itself on featuring first-time speakers.If you want to get into public speaking and want to build up your confidence, panels are a great way to get started.About our guest:Lisa-Marie Namphy is a developer community architect, and CNCF Ambassador with 20+ years in cloud native software. Currently, Lisa is Director, DevRel at Intuit. Lisa is also runs the Cloud Native Silicon Valley User Group. Lisa is an advocate and frequent speaker for DEl initiatives and open source technology, a writer, an avid sports fan, and loves wine and dogs.Find our guest on:LinkedInBlueskyFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:KCD Bay AreaComputer History MuseumSolomon HykesJonathan Bryce (CNCF executive director)OpenStackChris Aniszczyk (CNCF CTO)KCD Guadalajara (Mexico)KCD Washington, DCKCD New York CityKCD Austin (Texas)Toronto Tech Week 2025CNCF Toronto Holiday Meetup at IntuitToronto Tech Week AI panel at the Intuit officeArgo ProjectIntuitNumaflow ProjectApplatix (company that originally created ArgoCD, acquired by Intuit)Posix CertificationSun SPARCStation 20 (aka "Sun pizza boxes")PL/SQLProject Ironic (OpenStack)Project Nova (OpenStack)Project Neutron (OpenStack)KubeCon Austin (2017)Adriana & Marino at Platform Engineering Day colocated eventKCD Announcements for H1 2026KubeCrashArgoCon EU 2026Atom text editorTranscript:ADRIANA:Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech and geek out on topics like software development, DevOps, observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have the awesome Lisa-Marie Namphy. Welcome.LISA-MARIE:Hi! Thanks for having me.ADRIANA:Super excited to have you on. And where are you calling from today?LISA-MARIE:California. I am in the Silicon Valley. So our our Intuit office is in Mountain View, that's the one that I work out of. So, but I'm actually one of the rare, Bay Area natives. My mom is a professor at Stanford, so I literally grew up here, and I'm still here. So that's where I'm coming to you from today.ADRIANA:Oh, that's so cool. And you as as we record this, we are, are we in the middle of or finishing up KCD Bay Area?LISA-MARIE:We just finished. We just, I say we just aired it, but it was actually live, at the Computer History Museum last Tuesday, so, that would have been September 9th. And, the Computer History Museum is a fantastic place. If anyone's visiting the Bay Area. It's, you know, it has incredible history to go through. I think a couple of the speakers that may be on stage with us might end up on the walls of that building someday. It was also where the CNCF started. But there were some weird CNCF history, like they signed the, the charter. I don't know what they call it.ADRIANA:WHAT?!LISA-MARIE:Something happened in that building. So it was actually kind of really cool because Google, you know, donated Kubernetes and Google's right there also. That's practically on the Google campus. And so all of that happened there. And so it's a historic building. And it's, you know, right next to our office also. So very convenient. And I love that we're on Geeking Out here, because I think, you know, I've probably been a geek since childhood, given where I grew up, sort of in the water we drink. So, I'm, I'm your resident community geek from the Bay Area.ADRIANA:Oh, my God, that is like the nerdiest location ever. And I love it so much. Oh, that that must have been so fun to, to host the event in that venue.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, it really was fun. And it was a it was a really fun, you know, place to grow up as well because it was, you know, kind of the origin of open source, really. I mean, I remember in high school, you know, hacking away with, with my buddies just, you know, building whatever software application we thought was cool and that we thought we needed because a lot of stuff didn't exist back then and then, you know, was like, oh, this is. This is. Cool. So, you know, maybe other people would want it too. And, you know, you just give it out there and for free. This was like before the greed came in. And that was. That's kind of in our DNA. And so I've been, you know, really kind of at that, that open source and community mindset, my whole career, even though, you know, I didn't come at it. We can talk later, maybe, about. Career journeys and things like that.So back to KCD. Yeah. It was amazing. Solomon Hykes keynoted for us, which was awesome. Jonathan Bryce kicked it off. He's, the new executive director of the CNCF. But, Jonathan, I go way back to his OpenStack days. He was the kind of founder of the OpenStack Foundation with Mark Collier. And, I ran the first ever like the OpenStack user group. We we started it here and built it out. And that was kind of the original, the user group that has now become the sort of Kubernetes and cloud native user group that I run out here. So for for 10 of those 15 years, it was the OpenStack user group. So it's, it's a nice, there's a lot of synergy between the two communities. And it's amazing that Jonathan is now, running the the CNCF with Chris Aniszczyk . And so kind of all my worlds colliding. And it was really fun to have Jonathan come out to the Bay Area and kick off the event as well.ADRIANA:Oh, cool. That's awesome. And is is that the first time that there's been a KCD Bay Area or.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, yeah, that was there's only four in the United States. Five in North America because there was one in, there's one in Guadalajara, or maybe it was Mexico City this year. There's one in Mexico and, four in the US. The this week is Washington DC. I think it's like maybe it's today actually possibly. Today or tomorrow, which so 16th or 17th for those watching this later. And there was one in Austin. I had the pleasure of emceeing that one, and one in New York City. So...ADRIANA:Oh yeah, that's right, that's right.LISA-MARIE:Yeah. And hopefully next year, one in Toronto, maybe.ADRIANA:Fingers crossed! We will definitely. By the time this comes out, we will know one way or another and we can put that in the show notes for anyone who's curious.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, I mean, you deserve it. Toronto is such a great, tech community, great tech center. We ran a couple meetups in our Toronto office last summer as part of Toronto Tech Week. Which is really, really cool. We did an open source. I mean, up there that you came and spoke at.ADRIANA:I did!LISA-MARIE:Some other awesome community members, and I believe in December, I think the first week of December first or second, we are going to host the CNCF user group again, and I will expect to see you there, at our office, for the holiday edition of the Kubernetes and cloud native, not just Toronto. I think Archy, I think folks from all over Canada, are going to bring their user groups, and I will fly up and we'll have some fun.ADRIANA:Ooh, exciting. Yeah. It was so great to see you too for that for Toronto Tech Week, which, you know, I've, I've been living in Toronto since I came here for university. So in 1997 is when, when I moved here and I didn't even know that Toronto Tech Week was a thing until I got to the invite to do the panel to be a moderator for this panel at Toronto Tech Week. So it was it was lots of fun. And, I hope to participate in that again next year in some form or another.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, I didn't know it was a thing either. I think it's a really growing, community. Toronto's growing so much. As you’ve observed, since you were there for university. Yeah. It's. It's a wonderful city. Fantastic city. Granted, I've never been there in the winter.ADRIANA:It’s hit and miss, it's hit and miss, this winter was cold, but our winters of late, our our global warming winters have been kind of oscillating between below freezing one day and above freezing the next. And so it's like all the snow will fall. And then the next day it'll like, all melt. So it's like you never know what you're going to get.LISA-MARIE:Sounds like slush.ADRIANA:Yeah, sounds like slush. We’re definitely... Like, we're on the... because we're we're on the other side of the lake. Compared to like Buffalo, right. Buffalo is known for getting all the snow and they get the lake effect. We're like the the anti Buffalo. Like, lake effect for us means like, we don't get that dumping of snow. So the city itself... like, surrounding areas will get tons of snow. But the city itself, like it's it takes a lot for it to like, for us to get some good snow in Toronto these days because of, you know, all the concrete and all that stuff. So yes. So it'll be it'll be interesting to see when you're here. What what version of Toronto you'll get.LISA-MARIE:Yeah. Well I, I love I love Toronto really because of the people. It's a beautiful city. The people are great. They're really great. I there was so much enthusiasm at that meetup. We had. All week. We had activities every single night. And they were very different. We hosted, Monday, Monday Girl Monday, something that, it was a women's group that came of first night and it was fantastic. Just really amazing energy. And, and people were like, oh, you know, I didn't know Intuit was super into open source. And I'm like, well, yeah, we are. We can talk about that later too, but.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, yeah.LISA-MARIE:See these guys? ADRIANA:That's right, I’ve got mine!LISA-MARIE:Yes! So cool! Yeah. So yeah. And it's been consuming open source of course, but also producing incredible open source projects and donating them, including the Argo project to, to the CNCF, and we still, you know, maintain it and we, you know, we. We, we need these like, people don't really realize... So Intuit, for those of you that are American on the call, you probably already know Intuit. And maybe you use it to do your taxes or to balance your books. If you're in a small business. But for the global folks, Intuit has over 100 million customers, and the brands are TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and MailChimp. And most of the customers have been, you know, small and medium businesses. So we close the books for and do the balance sheets for really a large majority of the small businesses in the United States, and now more medium sized businesses. So it's really important technology. And it runs on Kubernetes. This is what yeah, this is what maybe a lot of people don't realize. Kubernetes. And then we created Argo because we needed, you know, sort of a GitOps for Kubernetes. We needed things to be a little bit easier. We've also created a lot of cool things for our platform. Now, Kubernetes, as you know, is hard. Kubernetes out of the box is not easy. So every company, probably does something, you know, with their platform to make things a little bit easier. And actually, we just spoke at KCD last Tuesday about some of the things that we built for the platform just, around Kubernetes that, you know, we thought, well, maybe could be useful for other people. But Argo was one of the, the main things that was developed by Pratik and Ed Lee and Saradhi, who was my original manager at Intuit.And and then, you know, they, they need it. We still run on Argo. Argo is still extremely important. And things like Argo Promotions, the number one asked for feature, is something that we built for the last cycle because we needed it, and so does everybody else. So we do, and like, this guy was when Argo graduated, this was Detroit.ADRIANA:And for for reference, for our our listeners only. You're holding up the the Argo.LISA-MARIE:Oh, I didn't realize...ADRIANA:We have we have video and and audio. So...LISA-MARIE:I am holding up the Argo mascot. We can argue it might be the cutest, most lovable mascot in cloud native.ADRIANA:I mean, I am. I am still vying for a women's fitted ArgoCD t-shirt, because the ones that keep getting sent to me are not fitted. And I want a fitted women's ArgoCD t-shirt.LISA-MARIE:What's your size?ADRIANA:I'm extra small.LISA-MARIE:Okay. All right. That I will dig.ADRIANA:I proudly I would proudly wear because I agree with you. It is the cutest mascot of all of the the CNCF. Sorry, not sorry.LISA-MARIE:Yeah. No, I mean, for Salt Lake City, we made a really cool snowy version of the shirt. I know we did an extra small, I think about... I’ve given one of my niece, because they were really small. So I will I will look and see what we still have in our closet, but we will probably be doing, more things. We have a super special version of of Argo and Numi. We can talk about this later, but, from the same people that brought you Argo, this is sort of the next greatest open source, project coming out. And so will be, both of these two. I am now still holding up, plushies of of an orange octopus and a polar bear. We will have versions of both of them at KubeCon in Atlanta. And Argo is going to be dressed in quite the outfit.ADRIANA:Oh, my!LISA-MARIE:I’m not sure if I can give the big reveal, but, let's just say, since KubeCon is a week after Halloween, two weeks after Halloween, and a week before a really big movie is about to come out, we may just have something really special. This one might be wearing a black hat. Might be riding a broom. Maybe. We'll see.ADRIANA:Oh, my God, I'm excited. I can't wait to, you know, that'll be great.LISA-MARIE:It'll be a fun, fun thing this year. But anyway, yeah, we we create this technology because we need to use it. We need our, you know, we need our our products to run on it. And because of that, we got end user of the year award twice from the CNCF at KubeCon in 2019 and 2022. So, we take our end user-ness very seriously and into it. And, we do contribute back a lot. Also to, GraphQL, part of that foundation, big Istio users. So, lots of stuff, that I know you're very familiar with, that powers our, our tech platform and our, our product line. And then we run a lot of meetups and, those are all open source meetups. We like to feature end users, but we also like to feature community members from cloud native community. So we do have a quarterly in Mountain View for any of those around. And we're going to try to start doing them quarterly in the Toronto and San Diego offices as well. So our next one will have just happened before this airs, October 20th. But in Toronto it's the first week of December. So...ADRIANA:Amazing. Yeah, I can't wait. And I should mention also, for Canadian folks like, we use we use TurboTax as well. I use, I use the online version. I can't use the desktop version because I'm on a Mac, so I only use the online version, which honestly, I love because I hate installing extra crap on my machine anyway. So...LISA-MARIE:Yeah, I think we have a desktop version for the Mac, but the online version is better. That's where you're going to get a lot of the AI stuff. Yeah. A lot of those done for your experiences. And they're getting better every version. So, I think I would say stick with, you know.ADRIANA:Yeah. LISA-MARIE:So your, your cloud native original here.ADRIANA:Yeah, it's super cool. And it, I think when, when, we were, when we met up at Toronto Tech Week. I think one of the comments that you made when, when you were, when you opened up, the, the event that I was at, was the the fact that not a lot of people realize that Intuit is the creator of ArgoCD, which is wild. Like, that's such a little known fact. I guess in some circles, for me, I'm like, of course it is. Yeah.LISA-MARIE:Yeah it is. And and Argo Workflows and Rollouts and Events, but, yeah. Argo CD, it was, so the company was called Applatix that Intuit acquired. And that's where Pratik, Ed, Saradhi, and Luca came from. And that was in the early days, I believe it was just workflows at the time. And then once they came into Intuit and they built ArgoCD, at that point, then they realized they needed to, you know, get more community help and more community adoption, and not just from users and contributors, but also from vendors that were going to build, companies around this. And that's really what it takes to make an open source project succeed. You can do it other ways. But if you for those of you out there who have your open source projects and you're thinking about how to keep them sustainable and viable for many, many years, and go from, you know, an idea in someone's head to now, the third most popular for third largest project in the in the CNCF, you really need a community to do that. And and not just a community of developers and maintainers, because those folks can change companies, leave jobs. You know, you can't guarantee that. You can't always count on it. So once you bring in the vendors and in our case, it was, RedHat, Akuity and CodeFresh, at the time, now, Octopus Deploy. And if it wasn't for them, they probably, you know, we wouldn't have necessarily we wouldn't have been ready to donate Argo to the CNCF, because we wouldn't have known for sure that it would be, sustainable. And and because we needed it to be, you know, we it's, you know, mission critical for us. So that was kind of the thinking and, and I thought Pratik’s timing was really good.They had over 500 customers using it. They had the four... the three vendors and us, really making a like, I mean, obviously Red Hat could have succeeded, but really with CodeFresh and Akuity, you know, they were building their companies around, around it. So it it doesn't always bother me that other people, that people think that maybe one of those brands started it because they, they have to market it. They've spent a lot of time and investment in getting that word out there. And that's great. I mean, it's great for us. It's great for Argo. And it's it's great to keep the project going. So it's, you know, it's something that we're super proud of and we. We take a lot of pride in it. And sometimes our, you know, folks internally are like, how come nobody knows that we that we did it. And we want, you know, we. Want to be known as a cool tech brand and as a very, you know, a cool open source player and contributor. So we would love people to know that. And obviously Argo is is an amazing project and a super special, project that we're going to keep, contributing to. So we have a lot of pride and we'd love people to know it, but, you know, it's fine. We had Dan Garfield from Octopus Deploy on stage talking about Argo Promotions, at KCD and yeah, I probably he didn't mention Intuit, so I did, when I introduced him. By the way, this is a feature that, you know, that came out of, of our team, but, it's it's all community. And, you know, I wouldn't be a good CNCF Ambassador, Kubernetes Ambassador if I was, you know... it's a friendly competition, but it's we are really all in this together with community, and we don't sell anything. So, you know, we're we're truly end users.We I mean, we sell TurboTax and QuickBooks, but we don't sell anything having to do with Argo or Kubernetes. So, we don't, you know, we don't have to, to do that the way other companies do. So it's one big happy family, right?ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And I think you touched on something really important, which I think is part of the recipe for a successful open source project, which is, it's not just supported by one company. Right. Like, you know, the success of Kubernetes, the success of OpenTelemetry, it's not just like, it's because there are so many companies that are officially backing and dedicating people, to, participating, developing, working on, on these products and in, in various aspects. Right? It's not it's not just the code. It's it's the release notes. It's, you know, the blog post, like there's so much, so much going on. I think that's part of the, like, one of the reasons why OpenTelemetry is so successful. Like, I always tell people, like, on a day to day basis, I'm working with a bunch of competitors, but I don't see them as competitors. They're all friends. Right. And that's that's I think it's so great that you guys did that as, as well, like with Argo, making sure that it's like you're not the only ones propping it. There's, there's other backing as well.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, definitely. And so any names that... I keep saying Argo’s the third most popular project. You named the first two Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry. And but there's a lot of smaller projects and as you said, there's lots of ways to contribute. And people think, oh, well, you know, I need to write code. I need to, you know, be a maintainer... docs. I mean, I'm always lobbying for, you know, if you if you have a passion for writing, especially writing English language and not just code, you know, people seem to have this notion that AI is going to be able to write all the docs. And... ADRIANA:Yeah.LISA-MARIE:That's not the reality at the moment. We will get there, but it's not there right now.ADRIANA:Not right now, no.LISA-MARIE:You need help. And you know your open source project is really only as good as the docs are. I mean, those of us in DevRel, I would say, your docs team, that's your original DevRel. That was our case at Cockroach. We had phenomenal docs. And you know, I encourage all open source projects to really think that through from the beginning. And, you know, that's that's going to help a lot. But people, when they look at adopting open source technologies, especially something that hasn't been given to a foundation yet, that you're not really sure. Is that going to be updated? Is it going to be around, you know, for is, is it going to outlive what you need it to? You know, if you need it for four years, are those maintainers going to keep maintaining it for four years? Is there going to be, you know, new releases of it? Is it going to stay cutting edge? So it's really hard, you know, hard for companies like us. Like we evaluate a lot of open source technology. And that's the question we ask. You know, how how viable is this community, how sustainable is this product going to be? And, because the last thing you want is, you know, you're making all your own updates and you're basically doing everything for the for the product, and you're hoping it gets out there into, you know, so you don't have to like, fork the whole thing. And but it's a problem. So for those of you out there also, you know, trying to figure out how you're going to play in this open source community or develop your own, your own technology, just know, I mean, that's what companies are really thinking about before they adopt. So the more community you have, the more diverse your user group is, the more companies you get involved. And if you get lucky and you get a vendor in who's going to, you know, really, bet their business on your project, then that's a good recipe for success.ADRIANA:Yeah, absolutely. And I and I think you touched on, on a really important point too, like when you, you know, I think a lot of startups, heavily rely on, on open source because it's like, hey, it's it's free, available... yay. I don't have to pay for this, but then you get to large enterprises, or even those, those, those startups start to scale and you need something a little bit more, you know, a little bit more beefy, or you need to, you need you need a guarantee. It's not so much a beefiness. You need a guarantee of reliability. Right. And I remember in my banking days, it kind of broke my brain initially when, when the bank I was working at was, was like, well, we don't really, we're, we're a little bit hesitant about working with open source, because we need, we want to pay somebody for support.So unless there's like some support contract wrapped around that open source offering, then it's too much of a risk, right? Especially when you have critical applications, critical services running that rely on these tools. How do you ensure that when shit hits the fan, there is going to be, you know, a timely resolution, right? Because like your Oracle database, I'm dating myself, spent many years of my career doing Oracle stuff. When your Oracle database starts crapping out, you can call, you know, the Oracle support team, and they'll get on the phone with you in the middle of the night to try to resolve your issues. So do you have that guarantee when you're working with with open source software? Right.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, it's it's really true. And, you know, if it's a really small project, I always try to encourage people, you know, give them some love, give them some money. If you're using this project, there's a way to donate to the maintainers, and the team developing, because if if they can't pay the bills, they're going to, you know, have to get a full time job that they're working around the clock at, and they're not going to be able to maintain that, technology. So, we always try to give a little love back if we are using a project and it's like, you know, a guy and his dog in his garage, you know, or a woman and and her dog, I was going to say cat, but I’m a dog person, so if it was in my garage, it was a dog. Yeah. And and then, you know, you have to support that if you can. And so it's like, you know, consider like a Go Fund Me or something like that to, to really help. And your Oracle days also brought up... I started my tech career, one of my early jobs out of college, actually spent over five years at Oracle. Way back in the ‘90s. So I yes, that was, that was early stages in my career. I had actually worked for a Posix certification company before that. So I did geek out... I mean, if you want to talk about geekiness, Posix, Posix certifications.ADRIANA:Oh, damn...LISA-MARIE:And I was like, trying to teach myself Linux at the time, and but it was really cool technology. And we had, you know, back in the day, if you wanted to sell to the government, you had to have Posix certifications, like, you know, it was a really important thing. And so we would have technology in there, not just software, but hardware that we were certifying. Like we had the original Sun pizza boxes in there. We had IBM mainframes, we had all this technology, and they would bolt it to the floor of our office so somebody couldn't walk out with it, because it hadn't even been released yet. And we test it. And we do. You know, we did a couple hundred Posix certifications a year, and then, you know, you'd get your certification and, you know, Microsoft would run off with their technology and, and they'd be able to sell it. So that was kind of how I, right out of college, got into tech because I was an English major, which probably came out of the fact that my mom was an English professor here at Stanford. And it was a little bit of a default. And I went to college back in the dark ages when, you know, my Jesuit advisors were not encouraging women to go into the math and sciences field, even though my math SAT scores were twice like my English scores were. But, you know, they were like, you want to go into the School of Nursing? School of Education. What do you want to do? I was just like....ADRIANA:HOW?LISA-MARIE:Yeah. Yeah. It was like that. So, I didn't have enough, like role models or examples at the time, even though I grew up here, and we were just like, such geeks. But you know, it was like you get influenced by your advisors and...ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah...LISA-MARIE:That was what they knew, I guess. And it wasn't until my senior year that one of my roommates was a math major, and I was like, neat. We get to do that? What are you talking about? And I was taking electives. I was like, tutoring the hockey team in calculus, even though I wasn’t taking calculus. But I was taking astronomy and all kinds of.ADRIANA:WHAT?LISA-MARIE:Love it. I still love that stuff.ADRIANA:Oh my God, I love astronomy. I will nerd out with you on that any time.LISA-MARIE:Yes, 100%. Oh my gosh. When we get to Toronto, we're assuming.ADRIANA:Okay, okay. Yes.LISA-MARIE:The first thing I do when I, when I get somewhere, I orient myself like, okay, where are all my friends?ADRIANA:Oh my God.LISA-MARIE:Because you can rely on that. The planets. The moon. Stars kind of, you know, you know where they are and they're just they're there for you and yeah. Love it, love it. Though a Scorpio is one of my favorite constellations. And so this is his time of year. And he's he's looking great up there in the sky from where I live. So every, every day I just ground myself. I'm like, hey, Scorp, what’s going on?ADRIANA:Awww....for me, it's always like, in the winter, looking up at Orion. It's like that sense of comfort.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, I'm a Libra, but that's not an interesting constellation. Just the stars are kind of boring the way they are. I just love Scorpio. And that fantastic tail. Orion is is an awesome one too, and Cassiopeia is probably another one of my favorites.ADRIANA:Totally, totally.LISA-MARIE:Cool that W and it's just right there. I totally love it.ADRIANA:Awww, I love finding a fellow astronomy nerd. That's great. LISA-MARIE:Totally. Totally. So I wish, I wish I had gone into that field. I should have been a rocket scientist at NASA. You know, NASA's like literally there. We started OpenStack at NASA. And I was running meetups right there. And, but I, you know, and I would go and geek out with the space, the space portal guys, on a Friday afternoon, we would bring a bottle of wine and go up there on the base. And, you know, I'd find out all the things going on. So I absolutely love that. I should have done it. So if you're listening to this and you're a young woman and you're choosing your career, go for what you love, go for your passion. I came back into tech through this roundabout way. And, you know, nothing like taking Pascal courses at a community college and, you know, night school to try to, like, figure out, to learn PL/SQL, to understand the Oracle database.ADRIANA:PL/SQL was my buddy for years. It was like a love hate relationship with it.LISA-MARIE:Yes, yes. Well, SQL's come a long way. My last role before, Intuit I was at Cockroach, Cockroach DB. Learned all about distributed SQL and that was some really cool stuff. It’s an amazing architecture. And once you kind of get into it, especially if you're a SQL and a relational database person, and then, you know, you look at distributed SQL and it's like, as the friend Jim Walker used to say, you can't unsee it. Once you see it, can’t unsee it. It's just a really special thing that makes you be able to do incredible use cases, you know, Mongo and stuff and, you know, just the, the scalability and reliability is just, you know, it's unmatched. So I really had a lot of fun there at that company for three years. Getting to chat. You know, they have an open source version as well. And so building community there, they had fantastic docs. I'm sure they still do. Just the one of the best examples I've seen of a really amazing, docs and education team. But yeah, that's really, really, really fun technology and, you know, but then to get the opportunity to actually work for an end user, I mean, my, my whole community career has been pushing end user stories out there and telling the stories that, you know, people come from the technology side, like, oh, I'm a Kubernetes maintainer. I'm, you know, I'm geeking out at the new feature in Argo.And it's like, well, why don't we talk to the people that are actually using this? Why don't we let, like, people tell their story? Let's talk to even the architects and, you know, who is actually the operators, right? Let's not forget about them. And when we start in this huge technology, OpenStack did the same thing. And Kubernetes, you know, we tend to start from the inside out. And when I was running the OpenStack meetup, you know, we'd always have the project maintainers come and talk about, you know, whether it was project Ironic or Nova or Neutron or whatever the projects were. And after a while I'm like, I don't think the people who are building and using this stuff really need to know what the next feature in Neutron is. Like, you know, sometimes, because people in the Bay area tend to roll our own, you know, “vanilla Kubernetes”, they call it now because. That just sounds so delicious to me. Every time someone says that...ADRIANA:I know. Right? Not as tasty as it sounds.LISA-MARIE:I know, right? ADRIANA:Or at least it's a lot of work to get that tasty Kubernetes instance running.LISA-MARIE:Exactly, exactly. That's better than rolling your own, because in California that also has its own, connotation. But yeah, but the rest of the world, you know, they're happy with distros, you know, OpenShift and whatever, Rancher, and other distros that are out there. And that's fine. You know, you have a throat to choke, right? It's it's not as hard. But those tend to be behind the, you know, the behind trunk, right, behind the latest release. So, what are we doing at these conferences and at these meetups talking about like the latest, latest feature when it's like ,people aren't going to be able to use that for three years and people get upset. So, so I like to tell end user stories and have people share, you know, what, what they're building, how they're doing it. You know, how you're customizing Kubernetes because like I said, it's hard. What are you doing? And maybe somebody else can learn from that. So that's the user group that that we like to run out here. And that's the talks I like to submit to, to KubeCon and to other conferences. And it turns out they get accepted, a lot, because it's a story people want to hear.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, people love hearing those stories. And speaking of KubeCon, like what was, what was the first KubeCon you ever attended?LISA-MARIE:Ooh. Austin. Maybe that time it snowed and we all got stuck at the airport. Or the people that were at the party at Rainy Street got snowed on. So that was probably 2017, I want to say. And then I've been, I think, every one since. I was doing all of the OpenStack summits, and I, I was one of the first ones to start talking about Kubernetes at the OpenStack summit. And I was getting like, Linux Foundation, you know, travel assistance support, because people weren't talking about Kubernetes. They were talking about Docker a little bit first, but then, Kubernetes at, at, you know, on OpenStack. And I was running meetups like, how do you run Kubernetes on OpenStack? How do you run OpenStack on Kubernetes? How do you have an OpenStack sandwich? Kubernetes, OpenStack, Kubernetes. You know, how do you have clouds spin up clouds? So it was it was early days that I got involved in the Kubernetes community, but then I, didn't actually start going to the KubeCons until I well, I went to the one in Austin. And then when I joined Portworx and we were starting to sponsor them, I started going, with, with the vendors and then just started submitting talks.And I think I spoke at, I don't know, probably 6 or 7 KubeCons, 8 maybe?ADRIANA:Wow, that’s amazing! That’s such a huge accomplishment, especially, you know, considering how like, it's such a low acceptance rate. Considering how many applications they get.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, it used to be like, 12 to 13%, maybe higher, if you're with an end user. I think it's probably even lower than that now. But, you know, I'm a CNCF Ambassador, as are you. And so we also, get involved in talks or get asked to be part of them. So there's been a few that way. I think I've seen you speak at, with Marino, or not. And now they have the colos, I, I saw your your talk. I dove out of ArgoCon, and your talk was in the big room right across the hall. And I jumped in there. Took a bunch of photos. They didn't come out as great cause I was in the back, so I didn't send them. But I always love, love your talks. Your slides are fantastic. All of the animations and everything. You have like the, cartoons. I guess I should say, always, always informative and entertaining. So I always like to catch your talks. I caught your talk in Salt Lake City also, that you did with Marino. Yes. I mean, I'm almost like an Adriana stalker.ADRIANA:Oh, my God, I love it. LISA-MARIE:Yeah. Yeah. So KubeCon is a whole other thing, you know, surviving that, that show. But there's a lot of really great events if you, if you didn't get your talk accepted there, or you don't have your company supporting you to go there, that's one of the reasons the KCDs started. There's a lot of other, meetups, whether they're a part of the CNCF or not. You know, you can look on Luma and Meetup.com and just find all those local meetups, you know, not everybody puts their stuff through the CNCF And then there's also like, we started this conference that you were part of last time called KubeCrash. By the time this airs, so just for some branding, I got my filter on. So I don't know if it's going to come through, but. Yes, this is, the the KubeCrash branding. Okay, that's super blurry.ADRIANA:Just a little, just a little blurry.LISA-MARIE:Just like, for a minute it wasn't blurry, but anyway. Oh, there it is. Yeah. That was. So KubeCrash is a conference that, four amazing women started. Mostly it was Catherine Paganini's brainchild, and she called it Danielle Cook and me and said, you know, what do you think about this conference? And we were just coming out of Covid and we thought, like, how can we continue to bring technology to people who can't go to KubeCon? And this was KubeCon Valencia. Right before KubeCon Valencia. So we started this conference where we asked... it was all virtual, still is. We asked people to come talk about tech, talk about something Kubernetes. And it was like no time zones left behind. So we filmed it or we streamed it from our hotel room in Valencia on a US time zone. And then we thought, well, we'll just keep doing that at KubeCon. But it got to be too much to do it at KubeCon. So now we do.ADRIANA:Oh, yeah.LISA-MARIE:Two weeks before, two weeks after. So this time we will have done it next week for me, but we'll have done it on September 23rd. And then I think we're going to do the next one in January. So stay tuned for that date, probably the end of January. So it's a really great conference. We had amazing speakers. We've had Solomon Hikes keynote, we've had you know, I love to feature end users. We've had Alex Crane from Chick Fil-A. We've had Boeing. We've had a lot of banks, Capital One. We've had gosh, AI panels, you know, we we did a whole zero trust themed one. And then we started crowdsourcing our theme. And the last four times, Platform Engineering has unanimously won. So we've had a lot of Platform Engineering talks. Yeah, we had an amazing Observability panel. And I think that was the panel you were on last time, right? Or were you on?ADRIANA:I did, no, I did a talk with, with Reese on, troubleshooting the OTel Operator.LISA-MARIE:Oh, that's right. We were going to originally ask you to be on the panel, and then we were like, no, no, no, no, no, you need your own.LISA-MARIE:You need your own talk.ADRIANA:Oh my god. I feel so honored. LISA-MARIE:Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know, Catherine and Danielle, we're all big fans of yours, so. So yeah. Yeah, that was a good talk. And all of the recordings are there. So if you go to KubeCrash.io and you click on past events, you can look at the one from the spring and you can see Adriana's talk. It's very good. And then we had this panel that was outstanding. I just think of you as the, OpenTelemetry expert. So I assumed you were also on that. But we, this panel was like, these five fantastic women who were just really, really good. And the panel was so good, and I just wanted to give them more and more time. So we ended up submitting it for KubeCon, and it got accepted. So we we couldn't get all the same women, but we, Danielle is going to moderate it. And, we have, so by the time this airs, that won't have happened yet. So come check out this incredible panel. Just look for Danielle Cook's talk. And four incredible experts in OpenTelemetry are going to be on that panel. So that was a fun talk to push from KubeCrash out to KubeCon, because usually we go the other direction. So KubeCrash is great. And I hope to see you all at a KubeCrash in the future.ADRIANA:Yeah, I'll include the link to KubeCrash in the show notes. And as a follow up question, how does, if one's interested in speaking at KubeCrash? How, what's the process for that?LISA-MARIE:Yeah, you if there's a, an email from the website that you can join, or sponsor, but I think is probably all one email, click on it pretty much anything and you'll get to us. And so, you know, just we we did a call for papers once, through Sessionize, and we might do it again, but, we really like, you know, people come to us with a unique idea, you know, something, informative that if we have a theme like Platform Engineering, again, that's a very broad theme. I, I want to feature more AI stuff because that's what everybody wants to talk about. And that's just the big problem everyone's trying to solve. And like, in one way or another. So those talks could be interesting. We really love featuring end users. So most of the keynotes, we’ll call them, or we always have an end user panel. So if you're a first time speaker, we also like to feature a lot of people who don't have a footprint out there on the web yet, so that when you apply to a conference, you have something you can point to and say, yes, I did this talk. So and if people are shy and, you know, they're just starting out and trying to get confidence, panels are amazing things to be on. It's really kind of low. It's not a heavy lift. Unless you're the moderator, like I often am.ADRIANA:Yeah, sometimes it’s more work for the moderator than the panelist.LISA-MARIE:It's a lot of work if you're the. Moderator, if you do it well. But, but yeah, for panelists, you know, if you're an expert in the field, let us know what it is. And, so we do, like to feature but yeah, KubeCrash.io, there's email addresses there and that that gets to all of us. If you just hit up one of us, sometimes you will, like, send me a note on LinkedIn or Catherine a note. And it's better to reach all of us because we're all busy, that we're busy at different times, and we kind of do, you know, as you do community, it's a labor of love. It tends to be your nights and weekends. So, most of us have really busy jobs that we have to focus on, so we like people to go through the channel just so they get the most eyes on things. And we do have a, we have a slack channel now for, the alumni speakers, and we have a diversity slack channel, on the CNCF Slack. So if you're, passionate about, diverse speakers and more diversity, DE&I representation at conferences, just hit one of us up. I'm probably Lisa at on the CNCF Slack. or Lisa Marie maybe. But now I think I'm just Lisa or L Namphy. I don't know, but you can Slack me and I can add you to our, diversity speaker channel. I know you're on it. And thank you very much for being on it. Yeah. Something we're all really passionate about.ADRIANA:Oh that's awesome. Yeah, that's so great. And I mean, especially because you do have like, your very busy day job, on top of all this. So to be able to run this as well is, I think, a testament to how important this sort of thing is. So thank you for your work on that.LISA-MARIE:Yeah. And it's just, you know, if you're community architect, is a title that I use, because it's more than just organizing or managing. It's really thoughtfully thinking through how to build viable communities, diverse communities, you know, inclusive communities, and sustainable communities. And it's a lot that goes into it. But it's kind of, if it's who you are, it's who you are, you know, you can't really not do it. Like I was doing it way before I was an Ambassador and way before any foundation said, you know, you should run your meetup through us or, or anything like that. You know, it's just getting people together to talk about technology. You know, we do it anyway. We geek out here on on Friday nights and talk tech and yeah, it's what we're passionate about. And so communities kind of come together around those kind of things. And you know, right now, like if you go to south of Market in, you know, the south part of San Francisco, every bar, every coffee shop, it's just AI, AI, you just hear all these, you know, startups that were started on a napkin. But like, you have all of these, like. And and all the incredible passion around what's going on, in San Francisco with a lot of the AI stuff, so you can't really get away from it, but it's, you know, luckily, I love it, and I'm super passionate about it. I kind of eat, breathe and sleep it.ADRIANA:It's been, you know, it's been fun dabbling in, in AI. We were try... We were chatting just before the recording started, and I've, I've, I've become very fascinated with MCP servers. So I've been having lots of fun playing around with that. I know there's an Argo CD MCP server that I think Akuity put out.LISA-MARIE:They like to hear their name. They like to hear their name.ADRIANA:That's right, that's right. The octopi are dancing around. Yeah. So I'm I'm still I'm still wrangling that one at the, wrangling with that one at the time of this recording. I'm hoping I can I can sort out my, my connectivity issues, because I, I, I love the idea of, like, I, I started vibe coding. A little bit, and it's been a journey because it's like, on the one hand especially actually for, for like, for, for SRE type tasks. Right? SRE and platform engineering type tasks, especially things like I can never remember the command for like, you know, I want to grab the base64 decoded value of a secret in Kubernetes.LISA-MARIE:You don’t have that command...ADRIANA:I don't have it memorized. I have it in. I have in my private GitHub repo a list of like, Kubernetes commands I always forget. So I’m like, now, with chat bots, I can just ask it and it'll tell me, you know, like thank you or my favorite, like, regex. Nope. Never like I've I know some, but like, you know, now I can just ask my chat bot. Hey, create a regex that does this. I’m like, great. It tells me. I don't have to worry about this crap.LISA-MARIE:That's going to be an awesome talk when you get that going. You should submit that. If you don't. I mean, ArgoCon is an obvious, but I think that would be an amazing KubeCon talk.ADRIANA:Okay, I will, I will. May be I will for KubeCrash. Dun dun dun.LISA-MARIE:Heck yes. That would...ADRIANA:Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'm giving the. I'm giving this talk. On September 22nd at the Toronto, CNCF meetup for the CNCF 10, 10th anniversary. So, yeah. So yeah, I'm happy to demo, at KubeCrash or I like your idea of submitting to ArgoCon. I think that'd be lots of fun.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, our January KubeCrash. That would be perfect. And it'll be perfected by then, I am sure.ADRIANA:That’s right. That’s right.LISA-MARIE:Or at the meetup in Toronto. Well, you already do in Toronto. Meetup. So.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah, yeah.LISA-MARIE:Diversify. Spread that around. But yeah. No. Vibe coding is super cool stuff. I was messing around. You know, they encourage all of us, like, even I am director of developer relations. I don't really need to write code. But we do a lot of follow me homes and try to have, customer empathy and, like, what are our users going through? And, things that, like autosave or lack of autosave is something that drives me nuts because I hate losing my work. I just can't stand it. I just typed all my goals into the system last week, and one of my team was like, I don't see your goals, where are they? And I'm like, oh, it’s in there. And like, you don't hit submit. And now I'm just, you know, I'm trying to talk to HR like you auto save them somewhere, right? Like, don't make me go through those hours of my life again. And, especially something as painful as, you know. Writing a resume or doing your goals.ADRIANA:Oh my gosh. No, I've I've totally had that stuff happen to me, especially, especially around those HR tasks where you're like, it's taken me forever to convince myself to do this. Now that I've done it.LISA-MARIE:You don't want to lose it.ADRIANA:Now you’ve gone and messed with all my work.LISA-MARIE:Right. So I was messing around, just in QuickBooks. And I was like, maybe I can build a little, you know, kind of enhance the auto save stuff so that users don't lose their work. Like, let's have an auto save every 30s. And I'm just using vibe coding, because my, my coding skills are not mad. So I'm like, vibe coding. And I'm like, okay, I can... let me try this. And I'm like, oooh, that looks... that’s so annoying. It's like popping up and now I'm losing my concentration, not my work. And so I was like, let's make that more subtle. And there's just so many cool things you can do and you know, I am geeking out for like, you know, getting lost in this hour of having fun with trying to see if I can get this feature in. Turns out I should have been doing it in my My Goals app. That'll be the next thing I try to tackle. But yeah, vibe coding is really, really cool.ADRIANA:Yeah, it's weirdly addictive too. Like, I feel like in a way, it's like, it's like playing slots, right? Because you're refining your prompts and you're like, oh, I'm so close. I am so close to the jackpot. So you keep going and going and going. Next thing you know, you've lost like an hour trying to refine this prompt to get it just the right way.LISA-MARIE:Yes. Yeah, exactly. Playing slots, throwing good money after bad. Yeah, definitely.ADRIANA:There is that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.LISA-MARIE:Somewhere. I can almost reach it. I can almost get there. Oh my gosh. So fun.ADRIANA:Oh well we are coming up on time. But before we wrap up, I wanted to ask if you have either any hot takes or, words of wisdom that you wanted to share with our audience.LISA-MARIE:Oh gosh, I have, I have several, but do we get to talk about superpowers? You always ask your guests that.ADRIANA:Oh yeah yeah yeah! We, uh we didn't get to the light... er, sorry... I call them lightning round questions. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they are. But we can do the, we can do the icebreaker questions really fast and then and then transition into the, into the words of wisdom. How's that sound? Okay. All right, we will we will do the lightning round questions as lightning round. Usually they take sometimes they take like 15 minutes to like most of the show. LISA-MARIE:Okay. We'll go. We'll be lightning.ADRIANA:All right. We'll be lightning. Okay. First question. Are you a lefty or a righty?LISA-MARIE:Righty.ADRIANA:Do you prefer iPhone or Android?LISA-MARIE:IPhone.ADRIANA:Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?LISA-MARIE:Mac.ADRIANA:Do you have a favorite programing language?LISA-MARIE:No, but my favorite text editor was Atom. Do you remember that one?ADRIANA:Oh my God, I do. I never used it, but I remember it.LISA-MARIE:Yeah, I had a t shirt and everything. Programing languages. Probably have to go with Python.ADRIANA:I love Python, I agree. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?LISA-MARIE:JASON. I mean, everybody loves to hate on YAML right? I don't. I'm not a YAML hater, I just love. I have a lot of team members name Jason. So we have. A lot of Jason. Yeah. JSON one seems to be. And the Argo guy at one point was, you know, it was a Jason and the Argonauts reference until it ended up. Also, there's an octopus in Australia called Argo. So, Jason, JSON, I got to go with that one.ADRIANA:Awesome. Love it. Okay. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?LISA-MARIE:Tabs.ADRIANA:Okay. And two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?LISA-MARIE:Text.ADRIANA:And final question what is your superpower?LISA-MARIE:Building bridges and connecting people and technologies.ADRIANA:Awesome, I love it. And I mean, I get that vibe just from like our entire time in this interview. And I think it's wonderful to have, like you and others like you in the community doing that. And, and sharing their passion because. And especially as a woman in tech, because we need to inspire others like our, like us, so that they know that yes, you can do tech if you want to do it.LISA-MARIE:Absolutely, absolutely. Women of tech, women of color in tech, a lot of, non-binary or, LGBTQ women in tech. I love that you're doing this podcast. I love that you invited me. Thank you. So much. I mean, I thank you for all that you do for the community and for women in tech. Really appreciate it. And, really appreciate spending time with you. We need to do more of this.ADRIANA:I know, I know, it's always like, whenever we see each other at KubeCons, it's always like, hi, bye! Like, because KubeCon is so, you know, like, busy.LISA-MARIE:Yeah. ADRIANA:So, it was so nice at the Intuit event in Toronto. This I guess early summer, to, like, get some time to chat. And, I'm very, very glad that you were able to come on the podcast, because for me, it's so important to, to elevate women in tech and other members of upper... underrepresented groups on this podcast. So, I really want to I want to share people's amazing stories and, and love of technology, geeking out on the things that they love. With, with this audience. So thank you.LISA-MARIE:Yes. And thank you for validating all of our inner geeks. It's really fun to geek out with another woman. It's actually super, super fun. I love it.ADRIANA:Awesome. And so now for your parting words of wisdom.LISA-MARIE:I, I would say since we've been talking about KubeCon and conferences, I would say these conferences are great. They're great for meeting people. They're great for networking. They're great for getting together. They're great for learning. If you leave the conference and you leave it all at the conference, it was totally worthless. So what I encourage people to do, and my dear friend Jono Bacon is really big on this is. Probably who... he's one of my mentors and who taught me to really think, very thoughtfully about this. What is the one thing you're going to do when you leave the conference to take with you going forward, so that you keep it going and do it the first day you get home? Like, what is the first day when you're back in the office? The thing you're going to do that you learned at the conference or that you got out of the conference? And if you were only there networking, you know, write to all those folks on LinkedIn, do something and make a connection. Invite one of them out to, you know, to lunch, to tea, coffee, whatever it is. But if it was, you know, community Leadership Summit or a DE&I day, all of that learning is worthless unless we do something with it. So what are you going to do on day one when you get back from the event or the conference or the meetup that's going to be game changing that you learned at the meetup. And if you approach every conference that way, I think we can all be game changing.ADRIANA:Oh, that is amazing, I love that. That is great advice. I mean, this is the best way to make the most out of your conference experience. And and keeping that in mind, right, as you're attending the conference, so that you don't, you know, it's at the back of your mind for when you get home. I love it. LISA-MARIE:Exactly. Don't leave it all at the conference. Otherwise what was the point?ADRIANA:That's right. Yeah, that's great advice. Well, thank you so much, Lisa, for geeking out with me today. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...LISA-MARIE:Peace out and geek out.ADRIANA:Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials, by going to bento.me/geekingout.

Key takeaways:Being laid off "forced" Colleen to upskill, so that she could broaden her skill set and therefore open up more job possibilitiesThe importance of having a good support network - Bart Farrell encouraged Colleen to get into video editingHow to put out a great short format video? Be a great storyteller!Even though Colleen didn't find a job as a journalist, she realized that she could still find writing jobs in other areasSome people feel intimidated by storytelling, even when they're constantly exposed to great stories.If you're going to be a great storyteller, you have to be a great listener.Writing about a topic with which you are unfamiliar means putting in the time to do research and cite references. AI can help with some of the grunt work, but it won't replace crafting a well-written story.How support from the cloud native community helped Colleen during her time being unemployedEven with DEI initiatives going the way of the dodo, we need to keep speaking about these important topics and elevating underrepresented groups.Having a strong community like the CNCF keeps us wanting to stay in that community.Tell your story, because it will always resonate with someone, and it can change your life.About our guest:"Allow myself to introduce...myself." - Austin PowersEver feel like you're juggling flaming torches planning events—trying to keep all the details in the air while something’s always about to catch fire? Yep, she's been there. Events have a way of throwing curveballs, and when tech and tools aren’t playing nice, chaos can easily take over.That’s where Colleen Coll comes in. She love turning event madness into magic. Whether it’s on-site event coverage using digital media, live reporting, or behind-the-scenes management, she makes sure everything runs like clockwork. She's also a huge fan of using There.App, which simplifies on-location event management by keeping everyone in sync and streamlining the entire process, so no detail gets lost in the shuffle.From tech conferences to startup launches, I capture the moments that matter and keep things smooth, whether it's happening live or behind the scenes. And when she's not on the ground, she's writing—blogs, articles, and ghostwriting for tech leaders to tell the bigger story behind the event, brand, or mission.Find our guest on:BlueskyLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-coll-b971505/)Find us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:TLDR newsletterBart FarrellMarino Wijay (on Geeking Out!)Tim Banks (on Geeking Out!)Tech Field DayFuturum GroupVisible ImpactState of Open ConAmanda Brock on Geeking OutStephen AugustusPriyanka Sharma (former executive director of the CNCF)The Duckbill GroupTranscript:ADRIANA:Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast, in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech and geek out on topics like software development, DevOps, observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriena Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada.And geeking out with me today, I have Colleen Coll. Welcome, Colleen!COLLEEN:Hello. Hi, Adriana.ADRIANA:I'm so happy to have you on. And, you know, like, I'm pinching myself. I'm like, why did I not have you on sooner? Like.COLLEEN:Well, I'd just be honored. I am honored that you finally asked. But I wasn't expecting it because I was just loving it as a spectator. Because you have so many. So many interesting people talking about whatever. Even if it's tech, even if it's not tech. Just kicking out, period. And geeking out in general, in particular topics. So, when you asked me, I was like, what? So. Yeah. Thanks for having me.ADRIANA:Yeah. Super excited. Okay, well, I'm going to start off with, some icebreaker questions. Okay. First question. Are you a lefty or a righty?COLLEEN:I am a righty. Most of my partners are always lefties. ADRIANA:Really? COLLEEN:Oh, yeah. I probably shouldn't be telling everybody, but both of my husbands, both former husbands were lefties.ADRIANA:That is so wild!COLLEEN:They’re great guys. Nothing bad. We're all cool.ADRIANA:I got to ask, for, for a righty living with a lefty. Were there any, like, nuances that you noticed?COLLEEN:Okay. Now, thinking about it. I think that they were. Oh, yes, I do. I think they had better handwriting than me. So I can't I never, like, had the chance to see if that was, you know, to test that out, that theory out. But both lefties had better, way better handwriting than myself.ADRIANA:That's so interesting. Did you ever, have, like, did you ever did you ever notice, like, if someone's putting a knife away in a knife block or like, hanging a coat on the hanger, like the the sort of lefty nuances where it's, like,flipped around. COLLEEN:I should have. No, I have not. ADRIANA:I'm just curious because I'm the only lefty in my household. It's it's... my my husband, my daughter, and I, living together, and, I'm the only lefty, and I. I impose my will upon them.COLLEEN:And it has everything to do with how you, like, hang a coat. Yeah, yeah, yeah.ADRIANA:So I'll hang my coat and I'll hang other people's coats facing a, facing one way, like the lefty way on the coat hanger and then knives on the knife block. Oh, like if my husband puts a knife in the knife block, I'll like, reverse it. To to suit my needs.COLLEEN:Wait, wait, wait. Is there a difference in how you hang the toilet paper roll?ADRIANA:No, we agree on that one.COLLEEN:I think that's I.ADRIANA:Think, I don't know, like, they're they're they're. We might not be together if we disagreed on that one.COLLEEN:Just checking because I.ADRIANA:Do feel like, wars, wars are fought over how how one hangs toilet paper rolls.COLLEEN:Girl, don’t get me started. Anyways.ADRIANA:I love the sidebar. Okay. Did I ask you, do you prefer iPhone or Android?COLLEEN:Oh, I prefer, well, I don't know if I prefer, but it's. What I have had is the iPhone. But, friends of mine that have the, Androids, I mean, those are, they're fucking impressive, especially when it comes to the camera, so. I’m in video and digital, and I'm like, maybe I should switch, but I don't know. I think there's a community or maybe a cult, that if I do switch, I’ll be hunted down. I’m that paranoid. So we'll see.But I, I like them both, but I can't. I mean, for, video and digital, anything like that. Pics. I mean, I mean, hands down the Droids, they're, they're awesome.ADRIANA:One of my friends who's on Android upgraded her phone recently, and she had the dopest photo of an eagle in mid-flight. And I'm like.COLLEEN:See?ADRIANA:Wut?COLLEEN:See? Yeah, I mean, it's just the truth, but yeah, whatever. Maybe I just have to buy a camera.ADRIANA:I have my, my old dSLR, gathering dust in my house. I haven't picked it up for like, five years now. I don't know if I ever told you this, but I used to be a, I was for a year, a professional photographer. So, I did family photography. I quit tech. I quit tech. Because I was, like, sick and tired of it. And I hated my job. And I hated my life so completely.My my work life. Not my life life. And. Yeah, so I, I, I was a family photographer, and so I invested in a nice, like, I got like a full frame Canon dSLR and like, the fancy ass lenses. And I taught myself Photoshop, and I got pretty good at taking the family photos, but then I hated... I had, like, some of the nastiest clients. And that just drove me away. COLLEEN:I totally understand. I used to be, before I got into tech. I used to be, because I've always been in events, but I used to be on the hospitality, restaurant side, and I planned, freelance planned weddings, bar mitzvas, stuff like that. And yeah, I know how people can be.ADRIANA:Actually weddings like, I, I never, I never, shot weddings because I was really scared, of, like, the bridezillas and the, you can't fuck up my perfect moment. And I'm like, oh, my god, what if I miss the shot? Like, you're going to get angry.COLLEEN:I know this sounds completely like, cliché, but it was never the brides for me. It's always the brides’ mothers.ADRIANA:Oh.COLLEEN:I mean, yeah, but my favorite experience, my best experience was planning this, bar mitzvah for, the the, his partner, his wife was, she was a VP. She was way too busy. So she asked, her husband, this guy who's just fucking amazing, and he says, look, I want to hire you. I know what I want, but I want somebody to organize it for me.And I was like, yeah, cool. And it was just it went off so smoothly from the planning process to the day, to a point where they wanted me to dance with them. But I'm just like, I know that’s a little unprofessional but, fuck it, I did anyway. I had so much fun! But. And there are so many, so much candy.It's not even funny. I don't know... like, sweets, everywhere. And I know when you're that age and all those kids. And that's what you know, because, I mean, they were really partying.But it was amazing. It was just amazing. So yeah, but I get it.ADRIANA:You know, it's funny though, because like, you know, you you've got like your 1 or 2 dream clients and then they kind of in some ways it kind of ruin it for you because you want all of your clients to be like that. And you're like...COLLEEN:Yeah... but it's all good. That's why I'm in the business. I should get out based on some of these experiences that I have had with people and planning, but maybe I'm just like a glutton for punishment because I can't stay out of it. But event plan... I, I just love it. And I love to travel and I love meeting new people. And, you know, even sometimes when those people aren't really nice.ADRIANA:And you're very talented at it. And I definitely want to I'm dying to dig more into into that very shortly. Okay. Next question. Are you a Mac, Linux, or Windows gal?COLLEEN:I am a Mac fully. I used to be. No, I'm Mac. Screw it. I just, I mean, I went to Windows for a minute, and it's nice, but when I went back to Mac. And these weren't my choices, these... based on where you work or, you know. Project is. And right now I have my MacBook Air, and I just fucking love it. And, one of the clients I have right now, because it's super privacy, kind of cyber security, they sent me, what is it?I forget. Some kind of Windows. I think it's IBM. No, it's, Shit. I don't even know what it is. That's why I hate it. It's said Dell. Fuck that. Yeah. Dell. Yeah. It's great because I used to have it. Dell. Yeah, yeah.ADRIANA:I know. Dell was like, a part of my life for a long time.COLLEEN:Huge ass clunky thing, and and, I don't know, my fingers are just not used to the mousepad that they had. I had to, like, super like, press harder. But it was an old version, you know? But I mean, I can't I'm, I'm, I'm spoiled at the moment. Yeah. And, I'd like to stay there, but you know, I, you know, I can be bought. So I’ll go with whatever they get me.ADRIANA:It's funny you mentioned the the like the mouse clicking on on the non Macs because there was one job It was a semi recent job where it was a, a Windows shop. So there was no Mac for me and I was, I was so sad. And they gave me a Lenovo and I swear I spent the whole time I was there, like crying over my laptop. And just like the lack of that, like beautiful Mac experience. So I can... I for sure I feel you on the on the touchpad experience. It's just it's it's not the same. Obviously, beggars can't be choosers, but whenever I'm, you know, applying to a company, I'm like, so, do you, do you allow for Macs, do you distribute Macs to your employees?COLLEEN:Yes.ADRIANA:And if they say yes, then it's like, bonus points.COLLEEN:Yes, yes. I've been I've been very lucky with, some of the past companies that I've worked for and they've been Mac. But I get it, though, I, I love that I have experience with both.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah for sure for sure.COLLEEN:So it's it's good. I can just like, you know, adjust to anything. And that's part of being in events. You got to be that way and being a part of the community, being in media, I mean, nothing should shock you, but,ADRIANA:So true. Speaking of media, I've got, I've got two more questions for you. Do you prefer to consume, content through video or text?COLLEEN:Ooooh... video. At the moment. It's interesting because... That. Last year I really got into short form video, because I was pitching myself, and I was kind of desperate I was laid off from a year and a half ago, January 2024.So I was just desperate to find work. And sometimes when you are desperate and vulnerable to find work, you got to upskill and find out. Oh, another way that you could pitch yourself, especially being my age and not, as you know, young and, and, I'm “seasoned”, but sometimes “seasoned” people may be a liability for some companies.I have no idea why, but that's another issue that we can talk about. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I, I needed to upskill, and, my son used to do my videos for me for where I used to work, and he got this new job, and he's like, hey, mom, I don't have time for you. You need to learn.ADRIANA:There's the ultimate incentive. Like, sorry, buddy.COLLEEN:Yeah. So I said, okay, I'll do it. And I took these tutorials with Capcut and, just and just do, you know, just kind of upskill and found these, these, this information about, you know, how to boost your campaigns with video and short form video, got on TikTok, which is an addiction.So to answer your question, to get my news, I love the short form video. And I love getting it... the alerts on my phone. And I love that if there's video with it, it's great. I love, getting the links to stories, but sometimes you have to pay for a subscription, and I don't get the full...Yeah, but I belong to a lot of newsletters, TLDR news newsletter is where I get most of my content, whether it's Fast Company, whether it's TLDR for tech. AI lot of AI newsletters. So that's how I usually get my content.ADRIANA:That's very cool. It's interesting. Like, you you touched on a couple of things that I want to unpack. First of all, the short form videos, like, so for me, for me personally, I don't like videos, for consuming content. For me, it's like a last resort. And I'll, I'll always, I'll, I'll default to text when I can.I will say, though, that, my, my daughter has gotten me into, like, Instagram Reels, like watching them. So we’ll just, like, send each other. I have, like, a circle of friends, plus my daughter, where we just, like, send each other Instagram Reels all the time. But I have this weird thing on Instagram Reels where I don't like to turn up the sound.So I, I like to have. I prefer the reels with the captions. And so that's how I watch my reels. And if they make me turn up the sound, it’s like, nope.COLLEEN:Well that's funny. They do say that, Adriana, because that's how I do it. I do you well, you can't do that on TikTok. I don't think you can. But for Reels in Instagram, I just keep it quiet and do I see something funny? Then I'm like, oh, and there's certain influencers that I do want to see, especially the the comedies. I'm always like...ADRIANA:I love the comedy ones.COLLEEN:Oh yes. And they make me laugh. So there’s definitely, turning up the volume on that one. But yeah. So yeah. Okay. Video over text.ADRIANA:And then the other thing that I want to mention, because you said, like you, you've done some short form video, and I have to say, so first of all, I've seen your short form videos. They are super awesome. Like, just next level. And, you know, it's interesting, like, there is, it's such a different skill to produce short form video compared to long form video. And I was wondering if you could, talk a little bit, about that. Like what, that's like, what. What the differences are.COLLEEN:Well, coming from someone who’s dabbled as a producer and not more of the logistics part of AV, audio visual, and then getting thrown in, if you want to call it thrown in. But getting desperate and vulnerable to make sure you put... to upskill, learning this was not as hard as I thought, but to be good at it. You got to be creative and you have to be a fucking fantastic storyteller.Now I know people throw videos together, but then there's people that tell the story, and I had to give a huge mother effing shout out to the guy that inspires me. He always does, and he's one I don't only at my son. Well, my son said, mom, I don't have time for you, but Bart Farrell is the guy. He says, Colleen,I think you would be good at this. I think that you would be good at this. And I finally got into it and he is the f the M-F-er GOAT.ADRIANA:Oh my God. Like, Bart’s stuff is so good.COLLEEN:Yes. And I'm, I'm waiting for him to, like, not be good. And even his stuff that isn't fantastic is fucking amazing. I just, I follow him and he tells a fucking story in all of his videos, whether it's something about kickboxing somewhere or being on the floor at CNCF or anything. It does it. It's the way he shows it.It's the way the zooms. It's the way he crowd shots, the music he uses, the close ups of the people and the slow motion of their hands. I'm like, wow, oh, I just love it. So that's my advice. You have to be a great storyteller. You can't just like, put it out there because people want to see creative and storytelling no matter what.Even if you're not doing it through video you have and you do it through text. If you can tell a great story and it, resonates with people, you will have followers, if that's what you're looking for. I just want to put out good content that if, if, if there's a tribe of people or community people that will, will like, but it it resonates with them.And there was a pain point. There's something that they can resolve and and I can help with that. So that's, I mean, that's my story and I'm sticking with it.ADRIANA:Yeah. And I think you're so spot on on on like telling the story and like because they're short form videos, like they have to be engaging. Right. Because for the first five seconds this thing's boring. Like, fuck off. I don't want to. Next up next, real.COLLEEN:Girl, I’m glad you said that. Because when I'm on TikTok and I'm, you know, I scroll and if somebody is going on and they don't get me into the next, like 15 seconds, I'm just like, scroll. Yeah. I mean, you gotta wow me. You know, seriously, about what you want to say. If you're selling something, you're telling a joke and sometimes even silence can tell the story just just by looking at the fuckingADRIANA:it's funny, because I think a lot of, like, I think YouTube and Instagram have upped the length of their of their shorts, Reels, what have you.And even though, like on the one hand, I'm like, because I post climbing videos. Sometimes my climbing videos are over a minute. On the one hand I'm like, yay, I don't have to cut this or speed it up. On the other hand, I'm like, oh shit, now I have to watch this fucking long video. I don't want to watch it.COLLEEN:Well, I mean, I think the long forms can be more educational and the other ones are, if you speed it up. This was more of a promo and an advertisement. I mean, it's just how, how how you use it and but you have that community of climbers and community. I mean, you and Marino, you guys are fucking crazy. I'm not doing that.ADRIANA:Okay, I have a final question from the list. What is your superpower?COLLEEN:Oh, it’s easy. I'm a kickass storyteller.COLLEEN:Mostly writing. And now I'm getting into the video part of it and I want to perfect that.ADRIANA:Nice.COLLEEN:That is my biggest superpower. My second is I throw great parties.ADRIANA:Right on.COLLEEN:And even when I'm older now and I'm like, can I just have theme parties, like all the time? My last big theme party was when I turned 54, two years ago, and I had a studio 54 party. And I just came up with the idea.So I had about a hundred people come to this party and it was amazing. It was amazing. So yeah, I don't know how I'm going to be, keep doing that, because I’m getting a little tired. And if I do, it’ll be smaller versions. But yeah, that's my superpowers.ADRIANA:That's so cool. And I gotta ask, like, how did you get into, like, the storytelling first with the writing and then transitioning into video? You alluded a little bit to the video part, but how how did you get with the writing?COLLEEN:Well, it's this is funny. I actually my, my major in college was journalism. Yeah. And, I loved writing. I remember being in high school and I wanted to write for the paper, and they were looking for people to review, music. And this is back in the 80s. Damn it. So I reviewed Run-DMC. Which one was at the time the one that they had, Walk This Way on it and, and it was like, maybe 500 words.I got sort of popular for reviewing music. So I decided when I went to go to college, I'm going to major in journalism, blah, blah, blah. I love writing. Those classes were, wow, I mean, you if you had two errors or grammar, whether it's grammar, spelling or anything, you get an instant F. Just they, I mean, they, they really put like a lot of stress. But when I graduated, I couldn't find a fucking journalism job if my life depended on it. And if I did, it paid nothing. Not a goddamn thing.But no, I struggled, but I did. This is what I figured out is that whatever I got into, whether it was marketing or, business strategy or whatever, that was available, they needed writers. And then I just, then I became a speech writer for events, and and it just, just kept going and going. But I focused on event planning, project management and, and just just straight up marketing and how to promote product services and shit like that, and loyalty programs for restaurants.I worked in health care, but people love when you know how to write, because there's... a lot of people just don't.ADRIANA:It I feel like it's a lost art form to a certain extent because there's, there are like especially in, in tech. So I, my, my degree is in industrial engineering. And one of the prerequisites of my program was, in my first year, we all had to take a technical writing course. Everyone like groaned about it and like, fuck, technical writing is hard.But I do appreciate... as as hard as it was. And I was like, used to writing prose, and I was like pretty good at, at English class and kicked ass with the essays and all that. But, you know, like, technical writing is so fucking dry, so precise. But anyway, it taught me an appreciation for for that form of writing, especially like when it comes to documentation, but just in general, like I, it it's sad that there aren't enough good writers in tech, because I think we really, really need them.COLLEEN:I think sometimes the expectation, I think some people are intimidated by it. Because some of the people that I've, I've met in tech are incredible storytellers. I just think that they just don't see themselves as that. And it's, most of these people read... read comic books, watch movies that are very great, the storytelling, you know, on steroids.They just really need to have the confidence to do that. And then the ones that do you see them as influencers, whether they have podcasts or they're just writing stuff. Justin Garrison, and YOU. Hello. And, yeah. And Tim Banks is a great storyteller. I mean.ADRIANA:Oh, yeah.COLLEEN:And then Kelsey Hightower, when he just... he's a great storyteller. No, not only in his writing, whether it's, social media post, but when he gets on stage, he whether it's scripted or not, he doesn't look like he's scripted. And he tells a story that always comes back to what the topic is. That is so easy and difficult for certain people, because they're intimidated by it. And some people are naturals at it and some people can learn it. And what I like to do is I like to be the producer of it. A lot of people think that I have this camera and whatever, and I'm like, they're like, oh, you're an influencer. I'm like, hell fucking no, I'm not.I’m the last person. Nothing wrong with the influencers. The ones who get, do it, do it right. I'm following you. But I am the producer. I like to tell the story with my camera. And if I'm in it, like, for a minute. This is me. This is. This is my signature. Me being in.People ask me, Colleen, don’t you want to be interviewed? I'm like, no. No. The only time I would like to be, if I'm doing the interviewing, I will stand there. Whatever. But I consider myself as a producer, and that's how I tell my story. But you're right. Tech writing is not easy. But there's specific parts of writing. There's the creative. And you can do that in tech and then the things that you really need to not fuck up with, like the documentation when you're doing tech writing, whether it's for coding or whatever.But even before I got into tech, I was writing, NIH grants for people, because I used to be in biotech, for a lot of research assistants. And you're trying to get money, you know, for their, their cause. I know a lot of, you know, a lot of it had to do with, you know, curing cancer.So you have to be like. And then those instructions for NIH grants. Oh, my God. I mean, if I can survive that, I am the best project manager on this planet.And you find some other people who were project managers for NIH grants, and they will tell you. They, I mean, it's just like, it's just another life. It's like being in another, like in the matrix and stuff. But that's how I got my whole brain of how to do, how to separate creative storytelling and documentation and project management that's straight up.Yeah, whatever. And then combining the two. I hope I explained that right. But it's, it's it's good. And I never really noticed how awesome it was for me in the future, because when I got laid off and I just thought, okay, I'm just looking for something, event planning, event planning. And people ask me, well, can you write? Can you ghost write? I'm like, yeah, I guess I could, and now I'm doing more of that than I am event planning, and I fucking love it. I went back to my roots.ADRIANA:I love that so much. I have to say, like, by the way, mad skills. You know, you mentioned that you have have done speechwriting and I feel like that requires some mad skills because you have to write the speech in a way that conveys the voice of the person delivering the speech.COLLEEN:Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned that, because some people can be a natural at it, if you know what you're doing. I'm a natural at it because I sit and I listen to people, and that's a fucking art these days because I know when to shut the fuck up. I you all know who I'm talking about.But one of the things, if you're going to be a great storyteller, you need to shut the fuck up and just listen. This this, gig that I have right now is, there's a, one of, the VPs was asked to be a co-presenter, and, at one of these sessions at IBM Tech Exchange, and, one of the strategies is to put together... What one of the projects put together a social media strategy, you know, pre, during and post to make him like, this is awesome.We want people to go to this session. And they're like, oh, Colleen, can you write content? I'm like, yeah. And I can write some thought leadership pieces and stuff like that. And I'm like, I, do you know, Robert? I was like, no, I don't know, Robert. But this is what I'm going to do with Robert. I'm going to sit down.I'm going to have a one on one with Robert, and I'm going to ask him, brainstorm what is his expectation? I'm going to look at him. I'm going to listen to it, I’m going to listen to his tone. I'm going to listen how he explains what the topic is on this session, and I'm just going to listen and I'm just going to watch. And that's how I get the tone. That's an art, and I'm really good at it.ADRIANA:Yeah, I was going to say, like, easier said than done. I'm sure like to be able to really capture.COLLEEN:People are paying me for it. So I'm getting all these like people I've heard and they're like, Colleen, I need for you to go write this for me. You know, thought leadership is like, yeah, yeah.ADRIANA:You're a chameleon, I love it.COLLEEN:Did I mention I like money?ADRIANA:I was going to mention the, I guess the other aspect of, of, what you're doing, too, is like, not only conveying that person's voice, but writing about things that you might not necessarily be, like, super familiar with, either, I would imagine.COLLEEN:That's where the journalism background comes in. Because and, and not a lot of people have that. And yes, AI is great. LLMs, thank god, they save me a lot of work. But if you don't know how to capture, something that you don't know about, by not doing the research and not looking like you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, not knowing how to cite where you got your information and all that other stuff.Yeah, I mean, eventually AI will probably get better at it, but I can see it from a mile away. And a lot of people, other people will. But not only that, I can see that AI, if it's straight up and it's not crafted, if you do AI, what saves me a lot of is the research part of it.I have to find where I'm going to find it. I know where to find it, I read it, I make sure that this is, being a journalist, that whatever I found is valid. Yes. Yeah. Because you never, don't ever want to get caught. You know, you go viral that you're an asshole. But, no, it's just that's where I differ... is I have a journalistic background where I know how to get that information.It's easy for me now. So I, well I don’t want to say easy. It's quicker, so I can be more productive in putting out more, information.ADRIANA:And isn't it cool how, like, things that you've done in the past end up playing such a huge factor in your present, right?COLLEEN:It is very cool. And I'm glad you said that, because I had no idea. I love being event planner. My goal right until last year was to go global with conferences. I love the CNCF. I love being in that community, but now I have this new thing I just never thought I would get back to and I love.I realize how much I love writing and now I'm realizing how I can combine it to what my goals were. To be in on site media coverage. And now using video.And one of the things that I don't want to lose, and I'm sorry if I this is not part of your your questions, but, how do I say this? Not being in the community as an employed individual last year, was seriously, heartbreaking. It was mentally fucked up for me, because I felt like I was like kicked out of a club. But not intentionally.Me trying to get back in, you know, like in high school and shit. And, what I discovered, is meeting people like you and people like Marino and all these other awesome people, Bart, making sure that I don't get lost. Like, hey Colleen. Whether they're telling me about, you know, job opportunities or project opportunities and freelance. I mean, I, I've had the opportunity when people heard that I was looking for Tech Field Day, to, Futurum Group, to Visible Impact.All these people asking me to do stuff. Yeah. And Bart, and and and and, the Marinos and even Tim and and everybody just just letting me know. Colleen, we got your back. That is something I hope that the CNCF community keeps. because they do it well when they do it well. And, I still want to be in that in some way or fashion.I know things are changing. Don't get me started with this new current administration. When things change, whether you're especially being a woman and a person of color, how we we keep in the mix and we don't stray away from that. And I'm going to keep being an activist for it, even though some people don't think that I should.But, fuck it. That's how I’m built. I can't keep quiet when things like that are important. When you roll back things that worked and kept people like us in the mix having those opportunities because you, oh my God, you were just so great. And I'm always going to be your cheerleader. You, Autumn Nash, and a bunch of other women in tech and and women of color.But when I saw that what was going on in the rollbacks, I was like, oh no, no, no, we're not doing this.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah. And that's why it's so important. Like, honestly, it's one of the reasons why I keep doing the podcast, is I want to keep elevating, you know, underrepresented groups, people who like, you know, DEI haters shit on just because we're not we don't look like what, what whatever, whatever that stereotype is. And we need to keep just keepin’ on.And I really appreciate you like, talking about these things and even, you know, what you were saying, the feeling of of being unemployed, and and feeling like you were, like, out of the club kind of. And I think having those conversations is really important because we, we often seem the sort of, like, cheery, you know. Oh, well, you know, I'm looking for my next opportunity and it's, you know, I see this as a great opportunity for blah blah, which is awesome to have that like, positive outlook, but like, let's face it, we're human.This shit hurts. It hurts. It feels like rejection. Even if it's, you know, like, can't be helped for whatever reason. It still is so shitty. And I think having a place where people can freely talk about it and just like, let their feelings go is so important.COLLEEN:People are scared of change. And I get it. But, because they've never experienced it before. You can't. Just because everything is working for you. Not. Well, forget about other people who are probably going through something. And I had people were like, oh, Colleen, you should smile more or, you know, don't get so... don't give up something will come.I'm like, I know that, I said, but I really appreciated the other people. People that would like, oh, man, I'm I'm so scared. You know, I don’t know if I'm going to find something. And these people just shut the fuck up and let me say what I had to say. And then just gave me a fucking hug. And I always will appreciate that.So when this happens to when I know that if I see it happening with other friends, I will never. If they reach out to me, ever, ever treat anybody the way I've seen others do. You know, get ghosted, or don't even acknowledge them or just play them off like, oh, don't worry, you know, I mean, people like you said, people are human and that is some serious shit to get through.And Microsoft with their layoffs and I'm sure there's going to be more. So, but I want to be a community. I want to be in that community of people to help. Whether I repost something, if you just want to talk to me, and I'll try, even though I'm probably not in your space at all, but I'm going to be that person. And sometimes that's not being popular.I don't give a fuck if I'm popular anymore, if I have something to say. So I know you all. Or if somebody watching this. You know who I'm talking about. I will always advocate for everyone in need, especially people, women and persons of color, especially in the tech community.ADRIANA:Yeah, absolutely. And I so appreciate everything that you do. Like your your work is incredible. And I, you know, I, I'm, I'm so lucky we got connected. And it's funny too, how we got connected. I want to say it was like sometimes, sometime last year you reached out to me, because you were helping out with, State of Open Con, right?And uh, like, hey, can you do, like, a a quick episode with Amanda Brock to promote State of Open Con? I'm like, oh.COLLEEN:That's right. And I didn't even know. I was just so happy there was some woman, there's a woman of color that was doing podcasts in tech because I don't see that often. And I was like, oh my god, that's wonderful. And Amanda, you know, being a woman and all her hard work for State of Open Con. I mean, I love being in that, in that space.I'm just so happy. And you, you went out of your way to do it even though because I know, you know, it was last minute. But, you know, that's media.Yeah. So that's how we met. And then I heard I saw that you were connected to, you know, my folks, like Marino Tim. And, and then I met, some more people, via you. And we saw each other. I think I was open source in Seattle or somewhere I can.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we run in a lot of the same conference circles, right? Yeah. I know it's such a treat when I see you around. I'm like, oh, there's Colleen doing her thing! Yay!And then like, next thing you know the videos are out and you're like, oh damn. That was fast! Those videos are really good. And that was so fast.COLLEEN:So yeah, I, I just love this community. And and I'm glad that the majority love me back. You know, for sure.ADRIANA:I know we're, we're kind of coming up on time, but really quickly, I did want to talk, briefly about, if you can, quickly talk about how you got into the CNCF community.COLLEEN:Oh, this is fantastic. When I got my job, through The New Stack, that was one of my first jobs after, Covid. Well, actually, it was during Covid, and I. I just lost my job in biotech. And I was looking. And then, don't you know, Covid happened, so I'm just like, whatever. And, The New Stack hired me, and they hired me as a producer, a digital person, and they're like, okay, Colleen, we got it.Even though it was virtual. You need to plan this, you know, this and that, because we need to plan our interviews or podcast with CNCF. I'm like, what the hell is this? Yes. Yeah. And I met Chad and all these other media people and I'm like, and they were so welcoming. And I just got I got thrown into it, but not in a negative space.I mean, in a way. It was just awesome. And this huge community of people I got to meet like Stephen Augustus and, and and Priyanka and all these other people, like. And I was seeing women in spaces that I've never seen before, and I just loved it. So that's how I got into it. And and then when I went to a small startup called the Duckbill Group, same people, and always attached.Everybody knows each other. Just like a huge family. So that's how I got into it. That's why I don't ever want to leave.ADRIANA:Oh my God, I love it, I love it. We definitely want you! We are coming up on time and I know you have to go. So before we part ways, do you have any words of wisdom for folks in our audience in the spicy, non spicy, whatever flavor you want.COLLEEN:I don't want people to give up, their stories. Try to be as, as the best storyteller of your own story, as, as and put it out there as fast as you can, because, you never know what's going to happen. And it always it will resonate with someone else. And it could change your fucking life. Tell your story.ADRIANA:I love that. Oh, that's so wonderful. Thank you so much, Colleen. This has been an absolute pleasure. And I'm so glad that we, got a chance to do this. So thank you for geeking out with me today, y'all. Don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time.COLLEEN:Peace out, geek out!ADRIANA:Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

Key takeaways:Being able to see things from different perspectives allows you to open your mind to see and solve problems from different angles. It also allows us to reach others better.Life-long learning is a must in tech careers, otherwise we can't improve and evolve.How early recognition and support from Duffie's mom helped him learn to read with dyslexia.Spending time in Hawaii and California while growing up gave Duffie different perspectives that have served him well in his tech career.There are tools out there available for exploration, for those curious enough to learn about different technologies. You just need to bring your curiosity.Finding the right fit at a company is more than just overall company culture. It's also about team culture and having people believe in you and give you room to grow and succeed.Welcoming tech communities are those that have systems and supports in place to grow and nurture new contributors.How do you communicate effectively when the words you're using may be interpreted as a challenge? Let them know that you only seek to understand, and are relying on their expertise for that.Everything you've been through has set you up for success moving forwardDon't fall in love with your code; when someone builds on your code or ideas, take it as form of praise, and not as a form of criticism.When a company is acquired by another company, how do you keep the acquired employees from jumping ship? Keep them motivated, and ensure that there is a clear vision tying their work to the overall vision.An expert as someone who can take other people and make them proficient at a thing; not somebody who knows all the answers.Understanding a problem from multiple perspectives is a is a multiplier for your understanding and for your career.Make room for things to be hard. Not everything has to be easy for everybody.About our guest:Duffie Cooley is the Field CTO for Isovalent @ Cisco. He has been involved in the Kubernetes Community since 2017. He is an emeritus member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee and has helped lots of folks learn more about The Kubernetes Ecosystem and eBPF through tgik and eCHO office hours. His handle is mauilion as he grew up in Maui, Hawaii and likes big cats. If you see his face come say hi! He's usually carrying around a few cool stickers as well.Find our guest on:BlueskyLinkedInFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:Star Trek IV: "We are looking for Nuclear Wessels" clipStar Trek IV: Scotty's "Hello, Computer" clipKaahumanu TheatreArch LinuxMotorcycle Engine Control Unit (ECU)IPython (interactive Python)"Billion Laughs" Kubernetes CVE (CVE-2019-11253)Jinja "unsafe"Zip driveNorthPoint CommunicationsCovad Communications CompanyDigital Subscriber Line (DSL)Graphical Network Simulator (GNS)Duffie's talk at KubeCon Amsterdam 2023Creative Whack PackDan Wendlandt, CEO and founder of IsovalentOpen vSwitchCilliumTetragonKubeadmAdditional notes:Geeking Out: Liz Fong-Jones on being a Field CTOTranscript:ADRIANA:Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast, in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech and geek out on topics like software development, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada.And geeking out with me today. I have Duffie Cooley. Welcome, Duffie.DUFFIE:Thank you so much.DUFFIE:It's an honor to be here. You have such a tremendous, you know, history of podcasts so far. So I'm just really grateful to be a part of it.ADRIANA:Oh, thank you so much. And, Duffie, where are you calling from today?DUFFIE:I live in Alameda, which is not too far from San Francisco. It's right across the Bay Bridge.ADRIANA:I got to, like, nerd out with you when you said Alameda is. It makes me think of Star Trek IV. It is. It is the same place.DUFFIE:This is where the nuclear vessels were hosted.ADRIANA:So this is why I know of Alameda.DUFFIE:Another one that, people connect with is, what do you call it? MythBusters.MythBusters did a bunch of stuff, like, out on this, like. And you're like, where in the Bay Area did you find such a big, flat space to, like, crash semi-trucks? Here on Alameda out on the point. That’s where it was filmed.ADRIANA:Oh, that's so wild, I remember MythBusters. That was a great show.DUFFIE:It was. I love the whole premise. You know, it's like people having, like, the the, some challenging thing, and you're like, is it real? Did it really happen? All right.ADRIANA:Let's. Yeah. Yeah, and by the way, my my my final comment on Alameda and the Star Trek movies, I know everyone loves Wrath of Khan, but Star Trek IV still holds a place in my heart as the best one, because there is time travel and Scotty talking to an old Mac. So...DUFFIE:I remember seeing that movie for the first time I was, I, I grew up in Hawaii.ADRIANA:Oh cool.DUFFIE:That movie is one of the movies that I absolutely remember seeing in the Kaahumanu Theater, like in in Kahului in Maui. It's like, you know, there are a few movies where you like, really connect with a place in a time. And that's one of those movies for me.ADRIANA:That's so awesome. Cool. I have so many questions now about, like, growing up in Hawaii, but, I'm going to start first with our, lightning round questions. Are you ready? Tsk... icebreaker. Used to call them Lightning Round. But they're not lightning. Okay. First question. Are you lefty or a righty?DUFFIE:I'm a righty, but I am dyslexic, so jury's out.ADRIANA:Love it. Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android? iPhone. All right. Next one. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?DUFFIE:Linux. All day. I've been a Linux on the desktop user for 20 something years.ADRIANA:Oh, damn. What's your what's your favorite distro?DUFFIE:My favorite distro. That's a tough one. I've been through so many. I think Arch is probably my current favorite because of the the community builds and everything else like that at work, however, when I'm at Cisco, I have to. I have to use Ubuntu, which I don't mind. It's a great distro as well, but but yeah, like for the, for the obscure kind of stuff that you need to make your desktop your own, I think Arch is really the great one.ADRIANA:Nice, nice. And, that is one thing like Linux does let you, play around a lot.DUFFIE:Almost to its detriment. Yes.ADRIANA:Yeah. That's true. My, my only, my only beef with with Linux and maybe it's improved. It's been a while... was like I couldn't get it to play with all the peripherals all the time. And when I used to have, like, you know, an iPhone that I had to connect to, to my computer to sync, or actually, before that, I had BlackBerry. I couldn't use the BlackBerry software to sync my BlackBerry in my Linux box. Sadly.DUFFIE:It's a challenge for sure. I mean, it's I was just recently. Speaking of geeking out, I'm also a motorcycle rider, and I was recently changing the programing of the computer that operates the motorcycle's fueling and electrical systems. And for that, I needed a Windows computer, because the only software that I could use to load the program onto the device that was doing the programing was the windows computer.And so I again remembered how to do this with Vagrant. I spun up a Windows 11 machine, figured out how to do a USB passthrough, because I'm not going to install Windows just to try this out. Right? Like...ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DUFFIE:You know like but yeah, I feel you on the on the challenge of like being able to having to deal with stuff that sometimes it's, it's-- Windows is the only way. And...ADRIANA:Yes. But also you're like updating software on your motorcycle. Feel like you buried the lede there.DUFFIE:Well, it's interesting stuff. I mean, just like with motorcycles, actually, with most fuel injected vehicles, especially recent ones, they have an ECU that's responsible for like good timing in the fueling.And and from the factory they come in this issue in this state where because of the way that the regulations work, they have to stay within a particular range of fueling and timing to remain underneath an emission thing, which does two things. I mean, I appreciate the emissions challenge, but the other part of it is that it causes the motorcycle to run very lean a lot of the time, which causes the motorcycle to run hot.And actually you end up in this kind of like weird bad loop where the motorcycle can't really operate at efficiency. So it's continuing to run badly. And and if it were to able to run efficiently, it would actually run significantly more efficiently then the computer program allows for it. And so that was the change I was making, was allowing for the computer to actually learn from the sensors on the bike how efficiently it's running.So it could actually do a better learning loop and operate correctly. Right. It's still in the the, the two that I put on this motorcycle is still a 50 state tune. If I had to go and get my exhaust checked, it would still pass.It's just that it allows the motorcycle to be unrestricted in how it fuels and times the bike so that it's still it's still being very efficient, but it's not being held back by that regulation on it.ADRIANA:Got it. That's very cool. Speaking of... so, like, what do you what do you write that in?DUFFIE:Oh, I'm not sure. I didn't actually write this one. So this is all like, I so basically what I get back is a program that looks like a map, right? It looks a little bit like a graph. And the units on one side are perhaps things like, measurements of oxygen and, and measurements of temperature and things like that.And on the other side we have like timing adjustment, like up or down and also fueling how much fueling. And you can think of this like a big heat map. Right. And what it's trying to do is it's trying to figure out a way to make it so that as you move through the power cycle of the motorcycle, it's creating a scenario where everything is fueled and timed correctly based on the temperature and the, oxygen levels being measured at the exhaust system.ADRIANA:Oh, cool.DUFFIE:Right. And so it's like, it's this and this is what I mean by that second, but it's kind of a closed loop system, they call it, because it's constantly measuring the situation at hand and trying to adjust timing and fuel based on that.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool.DUFFIE:But I think it's probably written in C or, you know, something crazy because it's been around forever. Yeah, I feel like it's one of those industries ripe for disruption, but nothing is ever... it’s like, such a niche thing, you know?ADRIANA:So true, so true. Yeah. That's so cool. It isn't it wild to realize, I mean, I think we already know, deep in the back of our minds that computers run our vehicles, but it's still, like, kind of blows my mind.DUFFIE:It is a trip. Yeah. For sure. Like and it's funny there's there are still you can still find vehicles for which this is not true. Right. Like there's still plenty of vehicles out there that that are still, you know, carburated and all of that stuff. Yeah.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DUFFIE:Like with, with fuel injection and all of that. It's really come a long way. Just a couple of years ago I bought my first all electric car and that's nothing but computers, right? Like there's. Other than the brakes, maybe, you know, like I.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:Yeah.ADRIANA:And speaking of electric cars, like, so I, I have a hybrid and when we, when we bought the hybrid, the first time I drove it and it was in electrical mode, I'm like, what's going on? There's no noise. Like it breaks your brain.DUFFIE:Yeah, it's a trippy thing. And then, you know, it's just a power powerband and everything. And then I thought when I bought this car, because I come from the, you know, like, I had, had a mini Cooper Clubman before this, and I had a Honda Element and a bunch of other cars that are great cars. But like, I thought that when I bought the electric car, I would have, like, range anxiety that I would be worried, like I would I would have this concern of like, am I going to be able to get to the next charging station?You know, like, and really, it's not a thing in California in California where I, where I do all of my driving.ADRIANA:Right.DUFFIE:It's not a thing I have to worry about at all.ADRIANA:Right. Right. This is THE place to own an electric car.DUFFIE:Yeah. And also, the car goes 200 something miles on a charge.ADRIANA:Damn.DUFFIE:So it's not like, you know, it's not. It's not like. It's like that's about what a tank would have taken me.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:Right. Like I take a gas, so they're taking me about the same distance. So it's like it's already kind of like aligned with, like my mental picture of, like how far I can go before I have to deal with the gas thing.ADRIANA:That's great. And does your car charge fast?DUFFIE:It is. Yeah. It's like the 400 volt system or the 800 volt system or something. So I pull in to a fast charger and 20 minutes later from empty, I'm at like 80 or 90.ADRIANA:Oh that's pretty good. That's pretty good. I heard there's like some really cool technology out there in the world that allows you to, swap out car batteries. So then I guess it makes the, the experience a lot better so that you're not having to sit there, you know, waiting 20 minutes for for a charge, even.DUFFIE:I've heard of that one. I've also heard of like there's another one that I've seen or I haven't seen it, but I've heard it read about, which is like they put like a mat in your driveway or whatever. And then like, it's like wireless charging speeds.ADRIANA:Oh my god. Oh my god.DUFFIE:Right. Like overnight it would just wireless. It would be like your little mouse or whatever. It just wirelessly charge. But yeah, I haven't seen any of that in person. But it's pretty amazing.ADRIANA:Damn mind blown. Yeah, that is so trippy. Well, I could I could keep on asking questions about this, but, I'm going to move on to the next question in our series. Do you have favorite programing language?DUFFIE:Do I have a favorite programing language? Whew. That's tough. I will say Python.ADRIANA:I love Python. So, Team Python.DUFFIE:And and to qualify that I think I'll say Python because of IPython. I'm a, I'm a type of learner that I kind of need to be hands on. I need, I need to be able to ask questions, everything with my hands and like figure out how it works.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DUFFIE:And it really unlocked my ability to understand how programing works because like, you can write all kinds of crazy ways of transforming data dictionaries and all this other stuff. But unless you're able to, like, jump in and see what state it's in, like, did it work? Is it doing the thing I expect, like in an interactive way?ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:I have a hard time, like in my head, like putting together how it works. It's easier now with like structs in Go, like it's, it's like, it kind of like it makes it a little bit easier to understand what the data will with the shape the data will take. But like in Python, I feel like was the first one that really unlocked. Like being able to understand and being able to watch a program work through the different parts of the logical flow.ADRIANA:Right. Right. That's so cool. Love it. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer dev or ops?DUFFIE:I think I prefer ops, and the reason is like for me, a big part of the thing that gets me up in the morning, the thing that drives me to go and do it again is the people.And so between dev and Ops I feel like dev frequently like we were, we are working on our own to build, to improve a piece of software or some piece of infrastructure or whatever it is. And we're, we're focused on that work and then like maybe once a day or perhaps like a couple times a week, we go and we meet each other and talk about what we're going to work together, etc..And in ops, it's like a daily you're working in a team, right? Like it's you're handing off between the different parts of it and all that pretty constantly. And I feel like that's definitely more my speed of operations before for a number of different companies. But.But yeah, like, I really like the, the people part of the puzzle as much as I like the technology. So I need both of those things to, to really feel like I'm doing the right work, you know?ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah. It's true, it's true. It's Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, it's it's so interesting. I feel like we all crave, like, human connection, a place to belong. And then finding, like, our people in our little like niche of work. Right. Is so, so important.DUFFIE:I completely agree. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, dev is the other where I feel like dev is challenging because like, it can feel very isolating, right? Like, I feel like in many ways. And some people are into that. Right. Like it takes all kinds. Right? Like some people... for them, like being able to really apply their whole self to that problem and move that problem along is all they need.And that's great. Right.DUFFIE:But for me I need that multiple puzzle piece, you know like.ADRIANA:I totally feel ya. Yeah. It is interesting that dev really is a solo endeavor. Unless you do, you know, you do like,programing or swarm programing, which I don't know. I'm, I'm too much of a control freak to do pair programing. And I'm, I'm the one who has to be on the driver's seat.I've only paired successfully, like, with one friend, and it was like, you know, he he knew that I was the one who had to be in the driver's seat, and he, he he, he was happy to, to stay in the passenger seat, and it worked really well. But I don't know if I could do that with anyone else.DUFFIE:I'm curious if you have have tried doing, like, pair programing with, like, a computer or like, AI or something.ADRIANA:Oh, like vibe coding. I have not, I'm not not. Yeah. I wouldn't say I've tried vibe coding yet, but that's on my to do listI finally, I feel like I finally have a project for vibe coding. Because I hate doing front-end. I'm allergic to front-end dev. Like, JavaScript lost me years ago.lDUFFIE:That is an entire thing. Like, oh yeah. Like completely with you on that. It’s like, you might understand databases and data manipulation, all this other stuff. And then you get in the front-end, you're like, what in the world is happening?ADRIANA:Exactly. Like, you lost me at JavaScript and CSS and like the fact that shit doesn't work for multiple browsers and like, no. DUFFIE: Oh my god. Yes. Right. Like, wow. ADRIANA: Yeah. So my my vibe coding project is build me a website. I like it because right now, like I host my my blog on medium and I'm happily doing that.But like I have owned my own domain since I think 2000 and I've not. It's been a while since I've done anything with it. I think I might have had stuff on it a long time ago. Some like shitty static web page that has long since been taken down. This is my excuse. So yes, I, I, like you are so right though on on like pair programing... like, vibe coding is like pair programing with the AI. That's cool.Okay. Next question in the series, do you prefer JSON or YAML?DUFFIE:JSON or YAML? Wow. Well, I was, you know, a few years ago, I was working with Rory McCune, Ian Coldwater, and Brad Geesaman, and we were looking at a, an exploit on YAML which allows for a multiple multiple application attack where, it was called “Billion Laughs”. It's a really fun CVE in the Kubernetes CVE history.And what this would do is in YAML, there's this idea that you can take a, an anchor and then copy and then generate code based on that anchor, where you apply it within your YAML file. And there was no upper bound set on the expansion of the anchor. So what the submit was that like, you could actually like submit a very small YAML file that would result in an expansion of memory and the API server cut it off all over.ADRIANA:Well down.DUFFIE:So there is no such thing in JSON. Like there's no like expansion idea in JSON. This is a feature only of the YAML of the only of the YAML thing, so I don't know which one I prefer. I'd say that YAML is probably easier on the human, and JSON is definitely easier on the computer.ADRIANA:Yeah, I can see that. I could see that. Yeah, I find YAML easier on the eyes. I found the curly braces of JSON like too much for me. It's just it's noise.DUFFIE:Yeah. And if you don't have like if you don't have some kind of ID to tell you when you're blowing it, it's really very difficult to write.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:Like but it's also interesting that JSON that YAML has these like challenges like, like it'll, it'll determine it, like a boolean value is different than, you know, is detected as a YAML feature rather than as a Boolean value. And like the date thing, there's, there's a bunch of weird little peccadilloes about YAML that make it maybe not quite incompatible, but certainly not the perfect tool for what we use it for.Where you apply quotes and where you don't. And how do you escape sequences and like oh yeah. Oh my gosh. There's so many things.ADRIANA:Quotes. Yeah, yeah. The quotes, the quotes, the dam quotes. It's like, do you like quotes? Do you not like quotes?DUFFIE:I came across a very interesting problem leveraging YAML in, Ansible, the other day. And I was because I was trying to basically create a string that actually had quotes in it, and I was having the hardest time getting, Ansible to do the right thing in templating. It was actually using Jinja, really at the end of the day.But like, I couldn't get you to do the thing I was trying to get it to do because of the escaping. And then I finally figured out that they, they have actually built a function called unsafe.ADRIANA:Oh.DUFFIE:And they were just like, mark this particular string unsafe. And they're like, just don't interpret it. Just put it in and just put it in and and take it out and like don't try to play with it. Don't try to understand what it says. Just use this string as I have given it to you and it works great now.ADRIANA:Wow that's great.DUFFIE:Absolutely amazing. Life changing, right? Because like trying to manipulate. I was like, is it three single quotes and then a double quote, is it like like I'm trying to figure out how to make this work. And I could not get it, and then finally I found “unsafe”.ADRIANA:Oh my God, I gotta love the name too. Unsafe. Yeah. Oh my God, yay software people. Okay, next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?DUFFIE:I prefer that my tab presents as two spaces.ADRIANA:Because of the YAML shit. That's honestly why I started like converting my tabs into spaces in VS code is because of YAML. I still like YAML over JSON though. For all its shortcomings.DUFFIE:For sure.ADRIANA:Okay, two more questions. Are you more of a video or text person for learning stuff?DUFFIE:Ooh, tricky. I think it depends on what I'm learning actually. So I think if I learning programing or learning a new language or learning some new tricks about that language, I'll typically read it or I'll typically like, find a program, a sufficiently advanced program written in the language that I want to learn, and then go see how they do it and figure out, like, the different little challenges that they run into and how they solve them, and like, kind of dig into it from that perspective.But I'm always looking for stuff like the pragmatic this or like, you know, 101 weird problems with ECS. You know, like, I'm always looking for that kind of content to understand what's happening. Like, there's a great article, that a good friend wrote that was, that was writing about about the language that, like, describes all the weird stuff that you don't really expect, like shadow copies and like that kind of stuff.So that's reading. But then on the learning. So I'm, I'm a Rubik’s cuber. I play with Rubik's cubes all the time. It's like one of my, one of the things I picked up during the pandemic.ADRIANA:Oh, cool.DUFFIE:And for that, I feel like I need to watch somebody solve using a particular algorithm a couple times and then I can then I can try it manually. Yeah. And then and then once I start doing it manually, then it's like a manual memory and I can actually remember it. Right? Yeah. Actually I think it depends on what I'm learning.ADRIANA:Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense I yeah, I, I feel like... try to solve a Rubik's cube by reading instructions. This would be so hard. Yeah.DUFFIE:It's really, I mean, and that's how it was for a long time. I mean, there was the Rubik's cubes were around before YouTube, right?ADRIANA:Like, yeah, that's true. That's so true. Yeah. I mean, the stuff we take for granted, honestly, like, it just blows my mind. You know, like the other day I was watching, the show on Apple TV+ called Constellation. I don't know if you've seen it yet. Really good. Really good sci fi. But they, when the characters had, like, it's she was it's it's like, you know, like current current day.But she had she had a cassette tape and someone had sent her cassette tape and my thought was, how the fuck is she going to play this cassette tape? Right. And she had like, a toy, like cassette tape player, I guess that her kid had, and that's how she played the cassette tape and I'm like, damn, you know, like, I'm thinking back, I think I got rid of my last tape player.I don't know, like five years ago when I moved. And I've got, like, I don't have an actual dedicated CD player. I've got a couple of, like, external CD drives sitting under my desk for just in case. It's I mean, all these are these things that we used to rely on, like just gone. I remember handing in, like, my homework in university on floppy disks.DUFFIE:Or Zip drives. Remember zip drives? So that was like even a shorter flash in the sun, right? Like that was like.ADRIANA:Yeah, that was very short lived. I it was so short lived that I never owned a Zip drive.DUFFIE:Yeah. So it's one thing though, my experience with Zip drives, which was funny, it was like I worked at Juniper for about six and a half years, and Juniper builds routers and routers and switches, and some of those routers were built during the period of time when flash drives were a thing. Yeah. And so like to load software onto the router.There was a class of router. I can’t remember which one it is. But there's like some there's some Juniper router that it actually uses Zip drives. So load the operating system into the router. And we and you know this is in like 2006, 2007. So we're there and like and like we're we're like trolling eBay trying to find flash drives.ADRIANA:Like because.DUFFIE:Because like even working at Juniper, like nobody's selling them new anymore. Right? Like you're... old stock so we can keep these routers alive. It was amazing.ADRIANA:Holy crap. Okay, final question. We've reached our final question of the icebreaker questions. What is your superpower?DUFFIE:Like superpower? I think when you ask other people what my superpower is, it's that I am able to communicate complicated things in a way that is easy to understand.I think my superpower is that, you know, we all have our own challenges. And one of the challenges that I have is like, I, I, I had a series of experiences that really taught me that I have to think about perspective differently.And that means that if I'm looking at a problem, I can only ever understand the problem with my own faculties, my own eyes, my own brain, my own hands. I can only understand it so far. And that's and that's limited by my experience. Right. But but what I've been through before, whatever it is, however, if I try and teach that thing, then I get exposed to the faculties of others, right?They might say, what happens if this happens? What happens if that happens? Hey, have you thought about this? You know, like what? What happens when this other part happens? And I'm like, and those for me are like the most valuable thing. So in a way that's my superpower is I don't rest on the idea of a single perspective.ADRIANA:Ooh, I like that. That's very cool. And so, so important because I it, it made me think back to like, yeah, my, my husband's also in tech. And so I'll... and we're in different different areas. And so I'll be telling him about some of the stuff that I'm, I'm working on. And then he'll start asking questions because it's not his area.And, and I'm like, oh, and I don't... I have I have to say I almost get annoyed. Because I'm like, why are you thinking about it that way? And it's like, but then I have to kind of take a step back and think, of course, he's thinking it that way because he's approaching it from a completely different angle. So yeah. Yeah.DUFFIE:Exactly. Yeah. It's always I mean, it's it's such a trippy thing that I feel like all of us bring there's a number of different like concepts that talk about this. Right. Like one of them is the idea of the beginner's mind. Right. In the beginner's mind, all things are possible in the expert's mind. Very few.But there's, there's a ton of different like concepts that, that speak about this as it relates to people and I love and I love the whole idea that like, you know, we each bring our own perspective to a set of problems, whether that problem is related to humans, whether that problem is related to coding, whether that problem is related to logic.We we each have a built up over our, our journey, you know, like a different set of understandings and expectations about how these things work. Yeah. And being open to that is huge. Right. Like that's I think probably the biggest skill of a teacher that we don't really talk about is that like being open to those perspectives that are not their own is such a huge thing.ADRIANA:It really is because it, it, it opens so many doors.DUFFIE:Yeah. In your own brain and everybody else's brain, like, it's like, you know, it's like we, you know, we are you and I, we're both talking about, like, lifelong learning. I think we were talking about this. So lifelong learning is when you're in tech, you're constantly learning, you know. Yeah.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:I feel like that's a big piece of it too, right. Like the way we're way to really actively engage in that is to think about it, think about the limitations of perspective.ADRIANA:Yeah. And I think, you know, going staying on that lifelong learner topic, you can't I feel like you can't be in tech and not be a lifelong learner. And expect your career to progress. And I think that being open to different perspectives is what allows that to happen, because I think people who jumped on to like any anytime you're jumping onto new tooling or new concepts like getting, you know, open your mind around DevOps, like what you're telling me, I have to like, do my work differently. Like it's hard, it's scary.DUFFIE:Totally true. Yeah, yeah, I think I mean, even even outside of tech, I think that's true. Right? If you're if you're a chef, you're oh my god. Yeah. You're a hairstylist. You're like any number of different things for you to really progress.ADRIANA:Yeah. And certainly anything artistic I mean you can't just be like okay with the status quo. Can you imagine? No evolution. How boring. How boring.DUFFIE:Nope. Yeah. Wild stuff.ADRIANA:Yeah. Well, we got through all the all the icebreaker questions with who? Thanks for playing along. I have so many questions because. So, actually, there's one thing I want to touch upon because you mentioned earlier on, that you're dyslexic. And, I was wondering because my, my husband's, dyslexic as well. And, so for him, like, one of the things that I've learned because, I'm, I'm, I'm a fast reader, I guess certainly compared to him and I it it has taught me being married to him that if I'm showing him something, I have to be super patient, as and respectful of the pace in which he reads.And he talks about a lot about, coping mechanisms, as being as a dyslexic person,DUFFIE:My experience is very different than your husband’s. I imagine that, like, everything is on the spectrum at some point.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course.DUFFIE:When I was, when I was coming up, I failed the second grade, and my mom figured out that the reason I was failing was that I was dyslexic and the school didn't have the wherewithal to make that assumption or make that, assessment themselves. And so my mom went to learn how to teach a dyslexic kid how to read, and she taught me to read.And then after that, I was I was at a I was reading at a collegiate level, like very quickly, like, I, I understood how this worked. It was game on, you know.ADRIANA:Damn! That's awesome.DUFFIE:And like you at this point, like if I'm looking at a page of text, I have to I would have to actively not read it.Right. Like I'm already processing the data on that page. Just have it. Just having it in my vision.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah, yeah.DUFFIE:I'm not thinking about like I'm not thinking about the process. I'm not like and I can read log files looking for a particular thing. It's like it's one of those. It's like a, it's an incredibly quick way of getting information into your brain. But like but but it's definitely a skill, right. Like it's. It's a trippy thing.ADRIANA:Yeah. That's so cool. It's, it's cool that you got, like, a diagnosis or at least, I guess, recognition, early on in life because my, my husband was, he, he had the experience where I think it was he never even got, like, a formal diagnosis. It was like after, you know, a long time of struggling.And I guess reading enough stuff online where he's like, oh, shit, I think I might actually be dyslexic. And it, it tracks and it his experience was such a negative one where it's like, you know, the, the teachers would like, harp on him over like, oh, you're not applying yourself and like, you’re too slow, and blah blah blah.And, and you know, kind of, he was, almost dismissed. He bet on himself. But like, and computers kind of saved him, but like, it was no thanks to, you know, people who didn't recognize that at the time. So kudos to your mom for like, really...DUFFIE:Oh my gosh.ADRIANA:Helping. My god.DUFFIE:Yeah. I can't, you know, I can't it's it's a it's such a wild thing to think about, but like, I can't imagine that not working out the way that it did because like, where would I be? You know, like, I don't even know what life would look like if I had if my mom had not figured that out in the time that she did, like, help me out.It’s wild. You know, like one of those. What? It's one of those turning points that happens so early in the, in the, in the maze that you're like like, oh, like, how else would that have gone?ADRIANA:Yeah, right?DUFFIE:It's crazy.ADRIANA:It's trippy. Yeah. So kudos. That's amazing. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. Another thing that I wanted to ask, you mentioned, so you said you're so were you born in Hawaii, or you grew up in Hawaii, or both?DUFFIE:I was born in California.ADRIANA:Okay.DUFFIE:And my parents, my parents were never, like, kind of, like, really together. Like, my father and my mother were like, together, and they were traveling together for quite a while, but they were never really, like, a long term thing. And, so my mother and my stepfather met and they met and they married. And then basically about a year after that, when I was. I think eight, and my sister was four, we moved to Hawaii because that's where they wanted to be.ADRIANA:Nice.DUFFIE:And I was in Hawaii from when I was eight until, basically just around high school, like middle school, high school ten, and then moved back to California to live with my dad, and then kind of went back and forth between California and Hawaii for several years. Yeah. To, in like visiting my mom, or coming back to live with my dad.And I remember, like, all these weird little culture shock. So, for example, one of the first times back to California to live with my dad, the first time, he was living here in San José, he was living down in San José, and we had, I had this wild experience. So in Hawaii, it's always been very expensive. A lot of food you have to get in, right?ADRIANA:Right.DUFFIE:Go into the grocery store with 20 bucks. It's not going to end up with a lot of groceries. Even at the time, like in in the early 90s or the early late 80s, it was still very expensive.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:And so, having that experience of, like, being able to go into a grocery store in San José, like a big, Big Saver or whatever, right, and walk out with a grocery cart full of food for 20 bucks was mind blowing.ADRIANA:Oh, wow.DUFFIE:As a teenage boy, I'm like, this is not making sense to me right now. But it was like it was it was such a crazy thing, you know, like having that experience of like, wow, this like the, you know, understanding the economic climate of different areas and like realizing that while the different like or even gas, the price of gas in Hawaii was always more expensive than the price... I remember gas in California, being as cheap is like, not... less than a buck.ADRIANA:Wow.DUFFIE:Never a thing in Hawaii. Like...ADRIANA:That is wild. It's so cool, though, that it, it kind of it teaches you different perspectives and gives you an appreciation as well for those things.DUFFIE:These are some of those experiences that I was talking about that really drove me to think that, like that perspective is... That perspective is more important than your own, right?ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And and, out of curiosity, like what got you into tech?DUFFIE:So when I was in high school, I got into computers, and I was one of the people who kind of understood compu-- like my brain has always just kind of understand, have understood how computers work pretty well.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:And so I was like the teacher's aide in the computer class, and I was getting into, like, all the all the different things from that perspective. And I was also into theater at the time. So I was I it was technical theater. So doing lights, sound, staging, working all of that stuff. And so interestingly, both of these two fields involve technology.And so I think that really kind of like became a through line for me was like working in different, technical fields. So, like whether that was, for, for years when I was working in Hawaii, I was doing lighting, sound, staging, rigging, and I was always, you know, working at that part of the tech. Because in Hawaii, if you're not working in the tourism industry in some way, you're not working, right?ADRIANA:Right, right.DUFFIE:It’s really hard.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DUFFIE:And so when I came to California and I was like, you know, I'm already pretty good with my computer already, like exploring Linux, already exploring Windows. And I was kind of like playing with all the different operating systems and how all they were, they all work and all that stuff. I started getting into systems administration.And I went from systems administration into network administration because again, that's one of those like, things I really wanted to know how all of that worked. Yeah. And so best way for me to understand how all that worked was to go and play with it, like to go to work on it like. So that was network administration, systems administration... I first broke into real tech when I... and.... just before the year 2000 and I joined a couple of companies that were, that were providing DSL. There were DSL wholesalers. So they, Covad and NorthPoint communications were, were the two that I joined, and both of them were tremendous experiences because they were both. In in CovadI was actually out doing physical installations of DSL. There's all kinds of crazy stories related to that. And then at NorthPoint, I went inside and I was doing customer support, and I was actually answering phone calls of installers and also customers who were trying to understand why their thing wasn't working or how to get this turned on or etc.And so I went from like customer support up into the architecture level pretty quickly because I understood how these systems work pretty, pretty well, and I was able to communicate it and teach it and share it. I became like my path to, kind of a higher I don't know if like a more senior role or, or really gave me an opportunity to kind of jump into different parts of the system because I was able to teach and bring people with me.ADRIANA:Yeah. And it's such a wonderful feeling when you're able to, like, get through to people, right? Through...DUFFIE:Seeing the light come on? It's amazing.ADRIANA:The network stuff that you were doing. Was it all like, self-taught or like, how did you, come to learn it?DUFFIE:A lot of it was self-taught. A lot of it was actually also, exploring how things work based, like there's always been a number of different technologies out there, like GNS, graphical network simulator. Where you can actually like, you know, on a reasonably inexpensive computer, you know, build their whole research lab and explore this stuff. And Kubernetes, there's KinD, right? Kubernetes, Kubernetes in Docker. It's another great example. You don't need you don't need to have an Amazon account to be able to play with Kubernetes. You can play with it in Docker on your laptop, right?Those particular types of things have always been around for people who want to play with them and understand how how different parts work and understand different protocols and understand how to build adjacencies and how to troubleshoot them, like those things have been around for a long time, whether they were KinD or whether they were, GNS, or like, things like this.And so that's that's always been kind of like I'm about to let my curiosity like, what happens if I'm trying to convert from, you know, BGP to OSPF. Like, I don't know, let's let's try it.ADRIANA:So yeah. So you've basically gravitated towards networking for for a chunk of your career then. Is that is that accurate.DUFFIE:Yeah, I think networking, distributed systems, people, it's always been one thing or another. I've worked on a variety of different technology efforts across a variety of different companies. I helped build the first shared infrastructure at Apple and it was great. It was called PIE, Platform Infrastructure Engineering. So “apple pie”, you know.We were so proud of that name.ADRIANA:Oh my God. That's so cool. How was it working at Apple?DUFFIE:I think as with many big companies, I think Apple has an incredible opportunity to go and work with some of the and do some of the best work of your life.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:If you find yourself in the right group working with the right people, putting you, you know, giving you the right opportunity and really letting you kind of like, grow into that. I think that you can really find that at Apple. You can also find the opposite experience where, like, you come in with this, a bit, perhaps, it's not even really about what you bring to it. Sometimes that you're just you're in a situation where it's just untenable and it's not going to work for you, and you're going to need to go somewhere else and go find another opportunity somewhere else.And I think that's true of most big companies. You find these little pockets of areas where you can really do the best work for your life, and sometimes you find pockets where that's just not a possibility. It's really hard.ADRIANA:Yeah. And the, it, sometimes it just boils down. I mean, yes, there's the, there's the company culture, but also like, just finding the right team, the one where it feels like home. Which can be such a challenge.DUFFIE:Yeah. Where the people believe in you. Where they where you where you get to really, like, come into your own and shine and like, it's it's an amazing experience, but I, I really in many ways I wish there were some way of. Kind of guaranteeing that for people or.ADRIANA:I know. Right. It's so true. Like sorry. Good.DUFFIE:Yeah. It's it's one of those things that like I do feel like the Kubernetes community does pretty good at this. There's other communities out there that do pretty good at this where they're like, like we know everybody had to be new at some point, and we want to make it so that in your time as being new, you have somebody to ask questions of, like, how do we build that community?Which is really the crux of the community problem. Like, how do we build that community to enable you to feel like you're not an imposter, to make you feel like your contributions are valuable, that your questions are valid, that you're you're not just that you're not alone in this. You're trying you're not trying to run up this hill by yourself. There's a bunch of us running beside you. You know what I mean?ADRIANA:Like it's so true. It's so true. And I think, like, there, there. Certain, as you said, certain communities that make it so, so easy to do that, that kind of give you that safe space. You know, I think back to like some of the nasty shit you see on StackOverflow where you're like, I'm just asking a question. And then they're like questioning your whole, like, existence.And you're like, hey, I just want an answer.DUFFIE:And and the stress of all of this, I mean, even like the, the stress about this also really affects how people react or are able to spend time. Right? Like, if I like,I've definitely run into situations where like I'm asking somebody a question and they're very resistive to the question because they feel that their interpretation of this question is I'm calling into validity, whether the thing you did was right or wrong.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:I'm like, no, I, I there's no right or wrong. But but but other. But how they internalize that question is... that I have no control over. I can say like hey man, I think you did the absolute best you could with the information that you had at the time, 1,000% every time. Otherwise you probably wouldn't have done it right.But yeah, it's, it's, it's a challenging it's this is that people puzzle right. Like how do you, how do you communicate effectively when what you're, when the words you're using may be interpreted as a challenge. As opposed to just a question. Right. Like, I seek to understand.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah. And I think and I think, you know, to, to your credit and your superpower, having that perspective, can be extremely helpful because it probably primes you better to not have that resistance when, when someone comes at you with a question like that, that you know. Yeah.DUFFIE:Right. Like, you know, being able to prime the other person and say like, you know, first of all, let's let's play it out. I'm not trying to like, challenge the decisions that you’ve made.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DUFFIE:Let's trying to understand how it works. And you're the best person to ask because your name is on the good committee.ADRIANA:Yeah. Right. Yeah.DUFFIE:Take me on that journey. Right.ADRIANA:Like it's true. Yeah. It's all about disarming, right? It's funny because, you know, I've, I've, I've said this to so many people, like contributing, especially contributing to open source can be so, so daunting, especially like very well-established projects. Right. Where you've got, like your, your old guard and you're like, oh my God, dare I? Dare I throw my hat into the ring?DUFFIE:I feel like, you know, it's definitely... it's, it is absolutely one of those situations where, like, the longest journey begins with a single step, you know.And the other part of this that I wanted to call back to on the whole perspective, which I think is an interesting thing for people to hear.Some people feel like if they learn a programing language, and then the next programing language comes out, that everything that they did was lost work.And one thing I've learned in my career is that there is no lost work. Like that, that everything that you have been through, every part of your experience has set you up for success moving forward. Like if you know how to troubleshoot networks, what you’re troubleshooting is a distributed system.And you could apply a lot of the same brain logic to the problem of understanding why databases aren't redistributing, that you could, to understanding why, a network problem exists or a network partition exists.I call this like, building intuition. You're, you're constantly building intuition because you're solving problems at different levels of a stack or solving problems even within the same stack. Your, your problem solving skills are what you're building. That's the thing you take with you, regardless of where you're going next.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that that's what people need to remember. Even, you know, one of the things that I always tell people, from a coding perspective is like, never fall in love with your code, right? Because, like, yeah, you write something and then someone else is gonna look at your code and build on it and make it better.And, like, isn't that the ultimate compliment? Someone, someone is inspired by something you've done and then thought of another way to like a way to improve it.DUFFIE:Oh my gosh, just add this KubeCon in London. There was a great talk that was talking about, kind of changing the way that we think about security and applications and stuff and, and it was neat because they based their talk on a talk that I had done with Brad and Rory and Ian in Amsterdam.ADRIANA:Oh, cool.DUFFIE:They, they took the idea of it and they were like, well, let's take it further. Let's understand container scanning even further than what they jumped into. Right. And I was like, I love that. Right?ADRIANA:Like, yeah.DUFFIE:Take the idea further. When I was a kid, there was this Creative Whack Pack. There was this set of ideas, and one of the things that they put in that pack was, don't ever fall in love with an idea. But it's just it's kind of a corollary to what you're saying about falling in love with your code, right?ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:The mental path you took to get to this idea isn't the only one we have. We all can agree on that.ADRIANA:Yeah, it's it's never it's never a waste like, you know, I, I, I'm, I consider myself a serial blogger. And oftentimes all like up there is the last blog post I wrote, I started writing, I had finished writing it, I and then I started like reviewing the, the the copy and I think the last thing that I had was like a conclusion to write and, and I'm writing out the conclusion and I'm reviewing the copy and I'm like, oh shit, I framed this blog post as X, but I kind of buried the lede and I need to reframe it and, and then, you know, I it wasn't a complete gutting, but there is definitely like a lot of rework. And whenever stuff like that happens, I just tell myself, like, it's okay. Because what you're doing is making it better. So even if you like, delete an entire section, entire paragraph or whatever, it's totally fine because what's coming out is going to be way better than what you had before.DUFFIE:Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I love I mean, even the idea of challenging your own, it's like part of not falling in love with code or not falling in love with an idea is, is giving yourself that room to grow, right?ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:Giving yourself that permission to say, actually, I've been thinking about this all wrong.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DUFFIE:You don’t need somebody else will tell you that. Like, you can tell you that too, right?ADRIANA:Being kind to yourself by giving yourself permission. Absolutely. And it's all part of the creative process. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about, your current role, at Isovalent, which was acquired, I guess, semi-recently by Cisco. So how did you, how did you come to, work at Isovalent, and talk to a little bit about the work that you do.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:So I, quite a few years ago now, I worked for a company called Nicira, which was a network virtualization company, and it was a fascinating role because it was I had just come from Juniper Networks, where I was, lab manager.And so I spent like, basically, I think it was like 5 or 6 years or something at Juniper, learning every possible way to break a network at any type of scale.And then I come to, to Nicira where I am, working on working with the team and developing network virtualization. And my part of that opportunity was like, how do I how can I bring this skill set that I have learned in troubleshooting networks to, this problem of building network virtualization?So, like, in real... in “real” networks, right? Non-virtual networks, I should say. Like, there are things that I know how to... that I'm like, are ingrained in my mind about troubleshooting and understanding the state of the network as it relates to, like how all things are operating.When they're building a network virtualization model, like we need we need similar tools. I still need to know when things are propagating. I still need to understand the state of that network, whether it's virtual or real. And so it was this fascinating role where I'm like working with a team that's developing all of this software and saying, I need to know how this works.I need to understand when this happens. I need to, you know, just bring my real world experience from troubleshooting networks to this new virtual arena. And that was just a great role. I had a wonderful time. And at that job I met Dan Whitland. Who is the CEO of Isovalent.ADRIANA:Nice.DUFFIE:And I also met Thomas Graff, who at the time was a contributor to Open vSwitch, which was one of the open source projects that came out of Nicira as well. And so, Dan and I have been friends the entire time, like we've known. We run into each other at different conferences. We're always good, glad to see each other.Etcetera. And so when, I decided to leave, so I was like, you know, I'm from Nicira, I did a bunch of other stuff. I went to Apple, I went to a company called Illumio. When I decided to leave Apple, I decided to kind of jump into Kubernetes because I saw this really incredible opportunity within the Kubernetes space.ADRIANA:Nice.DUFFIE:Having lived through the OpenStack days, I was like, oh, this is this is going to happen again, and it's going to be Kubernetes and it's going to be really fascinating to watch. And so I reached out to CoreOS. I said, you should hire me. They said, why? I said, just try it. And they interviewed me and I got the job. I worked at CoreOS, and then at Heptio.And then after Heptio was acquired into VMware. I decided to leave VMware. I went, and then, at that time, I was chatting with, Dan, who had built Isovalent at that point. At that point, and Isovalent getting to a place where they were like, really going after the market.And I decided that I wanted to go and do like a field CTO role. And I sibilant, and so I went to dad and I said, and I pitched it, you know, I'm like, hey, this is what I'd like to do for Isovalent. Are you interested in this?And at this point, I'd already at Heptio and at CoreOS, built a very public persona around learning and engaging in technology and engaging an open source, which, you know, which is a big part of myself and a big part of what I've given to the community over the years. And I said, you know, I'd like to keep doing that.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:But I'd also like to be part of, like, you know, a customer facing role doing, sales, engineering and that sort of stuff. So we built a role called Field CTO, and that's where I came into at Isovalent.ADRIANA:Oh, cool.DUFFIE:And I was there for the longest I've ever been at a startup, actually. Cause like, the startups that I joined have, have either been acquired within a year or, or something around that space, which is, I will admit, a weird little humblebrag. I'm not trying to say [...] that [...]. Right. But like, but I think as it all works out, like I have a, you know, most of the startups I, I've been a part of have, except for, with the exception of Illumio have been acquired within a period of time.When I first joined Isovalent, I did think that Isovalent was going to be another one of those, like, year long journeys.ADRIANA:Yeah.DUFFIE:But then the pandemic happened. Actually it was in the pandemic when I joined. And then, you know, navigating all of that over the period of about, I think it was pretty close to three years when we were acquired.ADRIANA:All right.DUFFIE:Which is, you know, an incredible journey, incredible time as a startup, building the business from a, you know, from a very successful open source project to a reasonably successful enterprise product and a really kind of growing year over year. And, you know, and then helping uh, hire and helping train people and helping level people up in the technology and that space for doing a lot of public work around all of that.And now, after the acquisition, continuing to be very successful within Cisco. Isovalent is continuing to be, to grow crazily. And I think it's one of the most successful acquisitions I've ever been a part of, in that even after a year and a half, nothing... I'm still excited to go and work on that.Because it's changing, because it's the same team, because it's, because the people are still here. We're still moving. We're still, like, learning from our experience. We're still growing as a company within Cisco. We have just an incredible opportunity. And it's it's been it's been really, it's been amazing to just like, it's amazing to me that like, even after a year and a half, I'm still excited about doing it because, like in the past when CoreOS was acquired by RedHat,I left, and went to Heptio. When Heptio was acquired by VMWare, I left, because I felt like that when the whole Pivotal acquisition happened, I was like, yeah, this is not for me.When Nicira was acquired by VMware, we were like, oh, we have to rewrite everything. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to go. And like...So after a year to be able to say so I'm just as committed to this role, just as committed to this opportunity as I was in the first year at Isovalent is such a radically different experience than I've had at any other acquisition that it's just... I feel very fortunate.ADRIANA:I mean, acquisitions can be so tricky, right? I mean, there's nothing like a culture killer if, if not done properly.DUFFIE:Like, in the Isovalent case, you're hiring 160 people.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.DUFFIE:And you need and you need to make sure that you have in that, in that hiring. What are they going to do? What's the vision? How does it apply to the overall vision. Like what is... like how do you keep them motivated? As a startup it's pretty easy. It's like, be motivated or die, right? Like it's not going to work if you don't.We're not all working on the same thing. But like, but within a large company like Cisco, you're like, okay, well now here's the thing that we're working on that is part of moving all of Cisco forward. And here's, and, and is that interesting to the 160 people that joined? Like, is it validating their assumptions? Is it like, driving them forward?Like, it's so hard to do is an acquisition. I feel like so many of them fail because there’s not really, there's no concise story vision, that really helps people who are coming into that scenario understand what the way forward is.ADRIANA:And I think that's the, that's the hardest part is like, do you, do you know where you fit in in the greater scheme of things and you feel like you're, you're you're I don't know, like it's almost this feeling of claustrophobia. Right. The parent company is like engulfing the, the acquired company and and do you maintain your, your culture. How do you integrate with the existing culture. Like that's a lot of,DUFFIE:A lot of really interesting problems. Yeah.ADRIANA:Isovalent is also known for, like, eBPF. Do you dabble... do anything in that, on that side of things? Just out of curiosity?DUFFIE:I do. Most of the time I spend my time on the frameworks that we're building. So things like, Cillium and, and, Tetragon. Tetragon is an incredible way of actually like, like if you have a problem that you want to solve with eBPF, Tetragon is a good framework for thinking about how to implement that.ADRIANA:Nice.DUFFIE:And you could definitely check out more about it at like Tetragon.io. But like I, I spent a lot of my time like helping people understand how that that might work. Like if you say, I want to do this, and I want to I want to have these outcomes, and I want to make this change, like, how do you how do I do that with Tetragon? I'm happy to help figure that part out.I also spend a lot of my time just helping people understand Kubernetes and how networking works and all that other stuff.DUFFIE:Within Kubernetes, so much of the networking is abstracted away from your your day to day use. You're not thinking about, okay, how do I get this pod an IP address? Not on your mind at all. Right.You might ask, how do I get traffic from outside into my application, right. Thinking oh, it's a load balancer. Right. How that creates, I don't know.I'm not thinking about how how all of this works in the, in between. Right. And that's, that's the fun part for me is that I'm, you know, something of an expert in that part of it. Like how does that infrastructure part work.And to be clear, like I'm defining expert as someone who can take other people and make them proficient at a thing. That's, in my mind, what an expert is. Not somebody who knows all the answers.ADRIANA:That's such a great definition. Man, if we knew all the answers, we would be rich! Alas, ‘tis not the case. I did ask, do you... are you actually a Kubernetes contributor as well?DUFFIE:I have in the past contributed. Mostly I contributed to the Kubeadm project, at the time. I was, I was working on Kubeadm. I've also worked on, contributed to Kubernetes in general and some of the docs I've contributed to, obviously to Cillium and to, other projects like in the space, like I contributed a little bit to Flux and to different things.ADRIANA:Oh, nice. That's cool.DUFFIE:But yeah, I think, but yeah, I mean, lately I haven't been contributing much because I've been focused on trying to help navigate this crazy big acquisition piece into into Cisco.ADRIANA:Yeah. Fair enough, fair enough. Makes sense. Cool. Well, we are coming up on time. But before we wrap up, I was wondering if you have any words of wisdom for our audience?DUFFIE:I'll definitely reiterate that understanding a problem from multiple perspectives is a is a multiplier for your understanding and for your career. So being in a situation where you say, not only am I not in love with an idea, but I want to understand how you understand the idea. Really changes, really, really helps you grow.The other one is make room for things to be hard. They don't have to be... Not everything is easy for everybody. Things that you assume are the easiest in the world. They're so obvious. It's not even things you have to think about. These things are true for you because of your experience, and everybody has a different experience, right?So like, yeah, we were just talking about this earlier. Your husband has dyslexia and with the way you described his journey with dyslexia is so wildly different from my own that it may seem to me I'm like, well, why was that so hard? Like, I wouldn't say that, but you get what I'm saying, right? Like a wildly different perspective of, like.You know, everybody, everywhere you look, you will see this difference in perspective.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Different perspectives, different journeys. Right?DUFFIE:Right? Yeah. I love that.ADRIANA:These are great words of wisdom. Also I cannot end the recording without doing a shout out to your awesome t-shirt, because... hello? It’s our podcast mascot. So I've got, and I was showing you earlier, I've got this little desk lamp that you could squeeze. Tee hee! It's so great. If I could, I would totally have one as a pet.Well, thank you so much, Duffie, for, geeking out with me. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check our show notes to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time.DUFFIE: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.

Mandy Moore, a seasoned marketer and podcast producer with over 15 years in the industry, shares her journey from an unlikely tech gig to mastering storytelling. She discusses the crucial elements for successful podcasts, emphasizing consistency and community building. Mandy highlights the importance of engaging on social media as a two-way street, while revealing tips on crafting compelling copy and effectively repurposing content. As a working mom in tech, she embraces the chaos and encourages others to act before feeling ready.

Key takeaways:Coping with ADHD and leveraging it as a superpowerThe importance of effective communication (and how that got her working on Kubernetes)New contributors can and should call out more senior contributors when they are wrongIncrease in the student contributions in open source, specifically KubernetesThe importance of making tech connections with more senior folks, and how that helped Kat transition into cybersecurityPath to tech included being paid to watch horror moviesAbout our guest:Kat Cosgrove (she/they) is the Head of Developer Advocacy at Minimus, focused on the growth and nurturing of open source through authentic contribution. In particular, her specialties are approachable 101-level content and deep dives on the history of technology, with a focus on DevOps and cloud native.She was the Kubernetes Release Lead for 1.30 Uwubernetes, and currently serves as both the Release Team subproject owner and SIG Docs tech lead.Find our guest on:BlueskyLinkedInFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:Google Fi WirelessMicrosoft ZuneWine (Windows emulator on Linux)Kubernetes release teamKubernetes Community Groupsk3sdockershimcontainerdDockershim Announcement (Kat's article on the Kubernetes blog)UwubernetesOpenTelemetry End User SIGMinimusUK House of LordsOpenUK Annual Awards 2025Blockbuster videoBlack Lodge VideoCode Fellows BootcampTranscript:ADRIANA:Hey everyone, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast, in which we dive into the career journeys of some of the amazing humans in tech, and geek out on topics like software development, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have Kat Cosgrove. Welcome, Kat.KAT:Howdy.ADRIANA:And where are you calling from?KAT:Edinburgh, Scotland.ADRIANA:Ooh, exciting. Okay. Are you ready to dive into our icebreaker questions?KAT:Yeah, let's hit it.ADRIANA:All right, so first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?KAT:I am a righty.ADRIANA:Okay, next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?KAT:Android. I, had an I. The last iPhone I had was a 3GS. It died when I dropped it in the bathtub, and, I just, I don't know, I have a, Pixel 9 Pro.ADRIANA:How do you like that?KAT:I love it, but I I'm kind of chained to it. Or, like, I committed hard to the Pixel because I use Google Fi. Because I travel so much, that I don't want to deal with cell phone carriers that, like, charge you different rates for different countries for data and minutes, and Google Fi does not. So I'm, I'm locked into the Android Google ecosystem.ADRIANA:It's all about the lock in, right? With... cell phones. So. Yes.KAT:Yeah. Once they get you, you got.ADRIANA:Yeah. That's it. That's right. Yeah. Apple got me at the iPhone 3G. Yes. And I, I've not let go since. I had a BlackBerry before that. Which I loved until it started to like shut down in the middle of phone calls. And then I just got, like, pissed. I'm like, I'm switching. I don't care.KAT:Yeah, yeah, that's, that's how I rage quit. The iPod. I don't know what. Like, I'm cursed or like, my iPods were haunted, but, like, I had three iPods in a row that I had to take back to the Genius Bar to get replaced because, albums were skipping, like, albums that had been purchased from iTunes were skipping as if, like, I had ripped a bad CD or something. Kept doing it, and I gave up and bought a Zune. And I...ADRIANA:How was that? Because I almost bought one.KAT:I loved it, I missed them. The software sucked shit. Like the actual, like Zune desktop application was laggy and slow, but the actual experience using the literal device was incredible. I really miss it. I don't use my ph-- I hike a lot and I don't like to have. I don't use my phone when when I hike, but I still like to have music. If Microsoft would rerelease the goddamn Zune, I would buy one in a heartbeat, like so fast.ADRIANA:That is so cool because I, I totally considered one at the time and I remember too... like the Zune, had some advanced features even over the iPod. I think you could even do like, Bluetooth, like music transfer between Zune users, right? Is that...?KAT:Yeah. You could and, I think, I think I remember them, being able to handle, audio output at a higher bit rate. But it's it's been so long since I had a Zune. Like, I have no idea if that that's a correct memory or not, but also they just, like, looked cooler. I was very goth back then, and like, I still am, obviously. But I mean, look at me, but, the Zune came in black and white. I'm not. I'm come in black. So.ADRIANA:Well there you go. So endorsement for the Zune. That's so cool.KAT:It's a good technology. Let's go.ADRIANA:Right on. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?KAT:It depends on what I'm doing. This call is coming to you from my Windows desktop, okay. Which is a machine that I built for gaming, and also handles all of my big video calls. It's got a big camera mounted behind my desk and a ring light for, like, daily, everyday use. Browsing the internet, playing video games, Windows, Windows, Windows all the way. I actually think that it would be a pretty hard sell to convince me to use Linux as a daily driver in any situation. The user experience is still just like, not very good. And my primary reason for having a home desktop is playing video games, which Linux is just simply not good at. For any time that I have to write code, I use my MacBook. That... that I do prefer, like, I can do it on Windows, right?Like, WSL2 is fine, but I already have all of my dev environments set up on my MacBook, so I use that. But, most of the time if I'm on the computer, I'm on this Windows machine.ADRIANA:Ah! Cool, cool.KAT:Sorry everybody.ADRIANA:Hahaha. It's interesting though, because, you know, so many of my friends who are gamers, it's like, yeah, Windows. It's Windows for gaming or bust. Because can't... you cannot convince anyone to a game on a Mac, or on a Linux machine.KAT:No. Like some stuff you can emulate. Like like a bunch of older games have native support for Linux, or you can, you can run Wine or something like it to emulate Windows to run it, but it's not going to be great, experience-wise and like brand new Triple-A games. No, it's not going to happen.ADRIANA:Yeah. I feel ya. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?KAT:Yeah. It's Python. I, I do also know like Go and JavaScript and PHP, but, if I need to prototype something very, very quickly, Python may not be the best choice for like what I'm actually trying to do, but I can make it, do it, and I can make it do it pretty quickly. Like it's a good multi-tool language for me.It's it's not the first language I learned. So that's that's not why. It's just, it it feels very, very flexible. So I could prototype something in Python and then build it in a more ideal language later on. But if I'm just trying to bang something out real quick. Python.ADRIANA:I can so relate to that because, my I, I did Java for 16 years, so I learned Python later in life and... I find is... so nice to code in.KAT:It is! It's pleasant. It's like, it's like, it's pseudo code with valid and executable, right? Yeah. You can kind of just, giving it a lot of the time and you're going to be pretty close to writing valid Python. So yeah. Why not.ADRIANA:Exactly. Yeah. It's it's it's just it's absolutely lovely. And. Yeah, it's also like my nowadays like my go to whenever I want to fuck around with stuff. It's like, yeah.KAT:Somebody's got a library for that, you know.ADRIANA:Exactly, exactly. And it's one of those like it's, it's, I guess an old timey language by now. I mean, it's been around for a while.KAT:Yes. Since like 1996, I think. So it's like it's it's not quite a legacy language, but like it's definitely it's mature for sure. It's not geriatric, but it's mature. You can make it do damn near anything, really.ADRIANA:You really can! Okay. Next question. Do you prefer dev or ops?KAT:That's like that's a difficult question. So I used to be a dev. I was a web developer, and then I was an embedded Linux developer, which does cause, like a very, very specific type of brain damage from which I have recovered, entirely. But when I started doing developer advocacy, I was working for, like, DevOps tooling companies. I was working for JFrog. So. Ops has made me a lot of money and given me like the financial freedom to, take care of myself and people I care about. So. So I like ops quite a lot for that. Like, now, obviously I work in cybersecurity, but, I don't know. I think I'm still going to have to go dev because ops doesn't allow me as easily to build stupid shit when I'm bored.ADRIANA:Yes, that is.KAT:And so like, on the one hand, financial freedom on the other, stupid shit.ADRIANA:Yeah.KAT:And the stupid shit does make me happy, so... I’m going to have to go dev.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah. And on the stupid shit, when I'm bored, it's like, you know, you can, sure you can spin up like a Kubernetes cluster in your Google Cloud, but it's going to cost you.KAT:It's going to cost you. It's going to cost you. That shit is not free. No. Whereas making a, I don't know, dumb fake conference and chucking it on Netlify is free as long as you don't get too much traffic. So it's, you know. Yeah. I'm gonna have to say dev for the fun factor.ADRIANA:Love it, love it. Okay, next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?KAT:JSON? And I know that I shouldn't say that because I work in Kubernetes and we kind of like assume that everything is going to be YAML, but you can feed Kubernetes JSON as well. It doesn't doesn't have to be YAML. YAML bothers me because there isn't a consistent spec. It is like too easy to end up with something that's improperly formatted because there's like, invisible whitespace hanging out.ADRIANA:Yeah.KAT:That drives me absolutely bonkers. I just find JSON easier to read, too. So, Related. I once heard a woman straight face at a conference for, like, the entire duration of her talk. Say, Johnson, instead of JSON. And, like, I think she was fucking with everybody, because she was like, she was very capable. She she was not. She wasn't like junior. She wasn't new. She was very capable. So I think she was fucking with everybody. God. And I have thought about that since. And that conference was like, I don't know, fucking 7 or 8 years ago or something. And I still think about it. So, like, whoever you are, I can't remember your name. If you listen to this, please reach out because I just I gotta know if that was like, if you genuinely call it that, if you were fucking with people, if you don't know how it's pronounced, I gotta know. I really hope that you were fucking with everybody because it was so funny.ADRIANA:But she was like, that is next level. Like for.KAT:Incredibly good. It was at a Python conference. I just Johnson instead of JSON the whole time. Yeah.ADRIANA:You mentioned one thing which, you know, I, I knew about, but it is a little known fact about being able to feed JSON instead of YAML, manifest to your Kubernetes. So do you. So do you opt for using JSON instead? When when you're, when you're when you're applying like Kubernetes manifests?KAT:Myself, no, unless it is something that nobody else is going to have to deal with. Like most of the time I am like writing a Kubernetes manifest myself. I'm doing it for, the purposes of writing a blog or writing technical documentation for the Kubernetes project, which means I need to present it in the way that most Kubernetes users expect to see it. So I've got to kind of sling YAML for that one.ADRIANA:That is super fair. But if left to your own devices, I guess you would use JSON.KAT:Yeah I would, yeah, because I’m the only one maintaining it, I would rather be writing, reading and maintaining JSON.ADRIANA:So that's that makes sense. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?KAT:Tabs. But I use Sublime Text. Because I don't like full fledged IDEs They have too much shit going on. I find it annoying and distracting. And I just have Sublime Text, set up to interpret tab as spaces.ADRIANA:Nice.KAT:So, I'm hitting tab, but it is inputting spaces.ADRIANA:Yeah, but that's how it how I have my VSCode set up as well. So yeah. Cool. Okay. Two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?KAT:Text? I cannot focus on a video. If I am forced to, consume content in the form of a video. I look to see if there's a transcript or I turn on closed captioning. I don't know what it is. And I've got to be running the video at like 2x, so I prefer to, if I'm learning something, I need to read it and then do it.ADRIANA:Yeah.KAT:A video, I, kind of, slows me down so much that I get distracted and lose focus.ADRIANA:I... very relatable. I, you know, I produce videos as part of my job. Yeah. But I optimize on blog posts. I, I'm a serial blogger, and for consuming content, I'm the same as you, like text or bust. Videos are a last resort. Like desperation. I can't find the blog post on The Thing. I guess I'll watch this video.KAT:I guess. You do what you gotta. But I would very much prefer the-. Like so please, people producing video content, give me a transcript.ADRIANA:Yes, yes. Yeah. And that's so important. Like I've started... one of the things that takes the longest, when I do this podcast is the transcription. And even though I've got a tool that will transcribe it, I still have to go through and make sure that it's not spewing shit because, yeah, the things that come out of the, the transcription, program are just like, they're so hilarious. I should just like, screen capture every time it comes up with some weird words because.KAT:It probably doesn't know how to spell Kubernetes.ADRIANA:So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, I work in, OpenTelemetry a fair bit, and we shorten it to “OTel”. And the number of times it comes out as “hotel”.KAT:Oh that's funny. Okay. Hotel.ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah.KAT:Okay.ADRIANA:But yeah, I, I agree with you on the transcription. The captions like, I mean, I watch TV with captions on. I'm too ADHD to like... I can't just sit and watch. And that's the problem. I can't just sit and watch a video and I'm like, I got to be doing something. I feel like a lot more active when I'm reading versus watching a video. I get restless.KAT:Yeah, the jokes about, like, kids today needing to have like, somebody's jangling keys up here and subway surfers up on their phone just so that they can have a conversation that is, in fact, me. I am 35 years old, and I do need like six things going on at once in order to focus on one thing.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah. So I've got a million things on my desk that I fidget with. Even on it on any given day between playing with a hair elastic, I've got a collection of pins that I play with.KAT:I'm peeling gel polish off my fingernails.ADRIANA:Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah. Anything. Anything to, like, focus the brain. Right? Yeah. Cool. All right. Final question of our icebreakers. What is your superpower?KAT:So I have ADHD, and I don't take medication for it anymore. Because I don't like the way it makes me feel. It makes me feel like slow and sluggish and empty. The downside to that is that, I procrastinate a lot pretty badly. The upside is that if you give me a deadline, that thing will be done on the deadline. I'm going to stress myself out, and I'm going to bang that shit out, like in a couple hours.ADRIANA:Yeah.KAT:But it will always be done on the deadline. I do not turn in work late. I don't. The only exception to that is conference talks. Because I define like an extra deadline for myself, like two weeks before the conference. Because I think it's disrespectful of your audience to, like, be writing a conference talk on the plane. A lot of developer advocates, like, brag about doing that, and I think it's so fucking shitty, and you should never admit to doing that in public. But, conference talks I do get done in advance. But everything else, I am just like, I, I'm not going to turn in work late. Never.ADRIANA:Awesome. That is a great superpower. So relatable, so relatable. I'm with you on the conference talks like I, I've had so many developer advocate friends say same thing like, I'll write a conference. Sorry, I'll write a talk on the plane. I'm like, I can't. I’m too... my anxiety kicks in. Like, there's no way that that's going to happen. I need time to prepare. Time to practice. Like.KAT:Yeah, like, I might still be tweaking slides on the plane, but, like, the talk is done. The talk has been practiced. Like I'm ready to go. You know, so I just, I don't know, be more respectful of your audience. They're they're paying a lot of money to see you.ADRIANA:Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And on on the the other point that you mentioned on the deadline because I it it must be a tech thing. So... so many of us have ADHD and I've noticed with my, my ADHD friends like it's the... procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate. And if you give them no deadline, nothing will happen. As soon as you give the deadline... It's like, it's on.KAT:It's done. It's done. I'm going to get ‘er done. Yeah. And it will stress me out and I will complain about it the whole day. Like, for sure. Like, I owe a blog tomorrow. I have not started it.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.KAT:I've known about this for a month and I haven't started it. But that shit'll be done tomorrow.ADRIANA:Oh and plus your brain is probably working on it in the background anyway, unbeknownst.KAT:That's my excuse for it. Yeah. That like for the last month, I've been, like, idly thinking about how I'm going to structure this and what exactly I'm going to say. So like when I get up tomorrow at 6:30 in the morning and I have spent two hours hammering it out, it won't take really all that much effort, and it'll be in the hands of my colleagues before they wake up in the US.ADRIANA:There you go. Yeah. It's the superpower of ADHD.KAT:Yeah. I don't know if they know that I operate that way. It’ll be really interesting when they, listen to this.ADRIANA:Yeah.KAT:Whoops! Sorry, Josh.ADRIANA:The other thing that you mentioned, which I thought was interesting, so, like, my ADHD is undiagnosed, but I tick all the boxes, and so.... I don't, I don't take any medication. And I've always wondered, like about, you know, what it's like to take meds because my, my personal fear, and I'm not against, like, you know, meds for, for mental health issues, but specifically for ADHD. I'm like, I see it as a superpower. So I'm like, oh, if I were to take it, how how different would it be? So it's interesting that for you, like in your personal experience, it didn't work for you. And you're, you're like rolling with you're you're making it work for you.KAT:Yeah. I'm just raw dogging it. And like, I, I think I think also. Other people can chime in with whether or not they had this experience. But, some of my friends experienced this, I experienced this. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until I was 20. So I spent like, my entire school career learning to work with what is wrong with my brain. Right. And like, developing coping mechanisms to make myself, like, functional at school and then functional at work. And being on ADHD medication. At first I was on Adderall and then I was on Vyvanse, and Vyvanse was much easier for me to deal with then than Adderall. It's screwed with those coping mechanisms. Like those those same coping mechanisms didn't work anymore because I was on an amphetamine that made it possible for me to focus without any effort. So it just made me feel, like weird and sluggish and not myself. So, you know, it also made it harder for me to eat, which sucks. And I, I, I really, really love eating. And, it's hard for me to eat on ADHD medication, so I lost a lot of weight, which is not not ideal either.ADRIANA:So yeah, I've heard I've heard that about, folks on ADHD meds. And that's always been a fear of mine, too, because I too love to eat. I enjoy my food.KAT:Yeah. Oh, yeah.ADRIANA:I mean, you know, at the end of the day, it's it's very much a personal choice. We're not endorsing one way or the other.KAT:Oh, totally.ADRIANA:It’s, very interesting to to hear like that, that perspective on things. So yeah.KAT:I think it's it's worth trying like because if you've got if you got ADHD, I think it's worth trying being medicated for it, you might love it. I hated it so.ADRIANA:Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Thank you for thank you for sharing. Really appreciate it. So I want to, get into some other, some of the nitty gritty, so, I mean, you do some, like, really cool work. You are heavily involved in, in the Kubernetes world. Why don't you, could you share with our audience, like, how you got involved, what you're currently doing? Yeah.KAT:Yeah. So I'm currently the Kubernetes release team sub project owner and a technical lead for SIG docs. SIG stands for Special Interest Group. Kubernetes is made up of something like 30 ish, 30. I think it's 37. SIGs. There are SIGs that own code, like SIG Node or SIG Storage or SIG Networking. We call those vertical SIGs. Then we also have horizontal SIGs that have responsibilities spanning the whole of the project. And that's things like SIG Docs and SIG Security and SIG Release is I think technically, a horizontal SIG, but it's like it's a weird it lives in a weird corner off on its own for its responsibilities. And I got in through internet drama, actually.So I learned Kubernetes at work when I was still an engineer. I was, I was doing embedded Linux development, and I needed to run Kubernetes on a small embedded device. So I learned k3s, which is, kind of a very, very small version of Kubernetes that's, takes a lot of shortcuts for you. It's not a great way to learn Kubernetes, but it is cool and useful.And I was just kind of a Kubernetes user for a long time. But, a few years ago, like, I was friends with a bunch of Kubernetes maintainers, but I was not a contributor myself. A few years ago, the Kubernetes project decided to deprecate something called the dockershim. If you've been around long enough, you may, may remember this kerfuffle, but if you don't, a long, long time ago, the dawn of Kubernetes, the only, container runtime you could use in Kubernetes was Docker. That was the original Kubernetes runtime, and it is the entire Docker Engine stack. Eventually other runtimes were introduced and the Kubernetes projects decided we need a standard for how these runtimes interface with the rest of Kubernetes and Docker didn't comply with that runtime or with those, those requirements.But because it was the first and so many people were using it, most users were using it, we compromised and we included something called the dockershim. And this was just like a tiny little software shim that allowed Kubernetes to get at the instance of containerd, the actual runtime that was running inside of the entire Docker tech stack. And this is just how things were for like six years, right? But the dockershim was a pain in the ass to maintain, and we didn't want to do it anymore like it was. It was janky and people didn't want to maintain it. So they announced they were going to deprecate it and they fumbled that announcement pretty catastrophically. They they grossly overestimated how much the average person understood about Kubernetes, about containers, about the, relationship between Kubernetes and Docker. So, like, there were people that thought, Google was killing Docker, the company, when like, like that's... enormous leap. Like, that's Google doesn't have anything to do with the day to day management of Kubernetes. They donated it to the CNCF and they lost control of it. And all container images are container images, whether they're produced by Docker or something else. So I, saw everybody freaking out online and like, thumbed out, I don't know, ten or so tweets explaining the relationship between Kubernetes and Docker, and the history there, like whether regular devs needed to care about this or not.At what point you as a cluster admin need to care about this or not. And it went viral and I went from like 4000 Twitter followers, like 12,000 Twitter followers overnight, which was pretty scary, and immediately got called in by SIG Contributor experience for Kubernetes to write a bunch of blogs, explaining it. And then I kind of just never left.Like, I stuck around. I got asked to serve on the Kubernetes release team as a shadow on the comms sub team, which is responsible for gathering feature blogs for a particular release and just kind of bounced around the release team for a while until I led the 130 release, which is now end of life, unfortunately. That was Uwubernetes. We get to, you get to give them code names when you're a release lead.And I unfortunately did... I girlbossed too close to the sun. I had done a very good job running the release team, so the SIG Release leads, the actual leadership of that part of Kubernetes, made up a new job for me. And now the Kubernetes release team is my problem forever. Until I decide to step down. So, three times a year.I have to make sure that Kubernetes gets out the door safely. Each cycle is four months long, and we're like, about smack dab in the middle of one right now. Yeah, it's it's a year round job now.ADRIANA:And on top of your day job.KAT:On top of my actual job, which, fortunately, because I'm a developer advocate, a lot of companies, like, want you to still be doing open source shit... as your day job. So it is, fortunately, part of my day job. It was at my last employer. It was not at my employer before that. And I was having to do it, like after hours.And that sucked ass. So be nice to, open source contributors and maintainers. Most of this is done in people's spare time for no money at all.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah. And that's such an important point. And I also like, you know, big kudos to the companies that do support their employees working in open source. I, I'm in a similar position as you like I it's baked into my job to work in open source. So I'm grateful for that because I honestly don't know where I'd find the time. It's... wild.KAT:It’s hugely time consuming and like my my best friend is also an engineer. He works at Disney. But he doesn't get to do any open source as part of his day job. It's it's not it's not his thing. So he rarely does it. But the other day he did make an open source contribution, to some like, Roku thing. And he complained endlessly about how much of a pain in the ass the entire process was to, like, be able to do that. And that that sucks. You should be making it easy for your engineers to help maintain the things that you rely upon to make money.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah. Now was it a pain in the ass because of the process around the project that he was contributing to, or was it his company was being a pain in the ass about it?KAT:Both. Like, we do. This is something that I think we need to work on as open source maintainers. We all have like very different requirements for contributing to a project and like hoops that have to be jumped through. And I know most of us document them really well, but it it is a barrier. And maybe maybe there should be some standardizing on on. Hoops. Which is why sometimes you see contributors only exist within a specific ecosystem. Right. It's it's why you see some people working in open source and like never leaving. I don't know, Fedora or never leaving the Node.js ecosystem or never leaving like a foundation. Right. So like only contributing to LF projects or Apache projects or whatever because the the hoops are familiar and they don't have to learn new rules and new social norms every time.ADRIANA:Yeah. Very true, very true. And then also like, depending on what, what area you're contributing to, like the maintainers. It might it's, it's a different vibe. Right. It's a different set of maintainers. So hopefully the maintainers you're, you're working with are a chill group who provide, you know, thoughtful comments around pull requests so that you're not turned off from ever contributing again. Like for for me, I, I worked in, like I've been in tech for now. I guess it'll be 24 years and most of my career was in the enterprise corporate side, like closed source. And only in the last three years I've gotten into open source. And I was like, shitting my pants, contributing, like doing my first open source contribution, like, oh my God, they're going to judge me.KAT:Oh, it's fucking terrifying.ADRIANA:It is so terrifying. Like it's such a vulnerable experience. You're being vulnerable when you open a pull request. Straight up. You know.KAT:It’s fucking scary at like, since I run the release team. So the Kubernetes works in a weird way with respect to this, we're the second largest open source project in the world, behind Linux. And we have a constantly rotating cast of people who are brand spanking new to open source. Like some of them are still in college. In the release team, because it's an open application. Anybody can apply to shadow on the Kubernetes release team. And so like there's a lot of hand-holding. There's a lot of teaching people like, no, it's okay to comment on this PR, you should comment on this PR you have to comment on this PR like, you have to tell this person who has been in the industry for 30 years, who was one of the original Kubernetes committers, that he's wrong because he is.And that's so scary for somebody who's brand new. Right. Like that's scary for some people who have been in the project for years. And I get to handhold a bunch of sometimes literal children through, through saying no to an original committer.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.KAT:That's terrifying. But it's a really great way to, I don’t know... get ballsy early on in open source.ADRIANA:Oh, totally. And it's such an important thing to do, like, I was having a conversation with someone who, you know, she, she was interviewing with someone that she met at a conference, and I, I asked her, I'm like, oh, so did you, did you like, you know, say, “Hey, remember me from, like, when we met at Blah Blah Conference?” And she's like, no, because he's he's more senior than me. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We all breathe the same air. Like we're all human. His position makes you... makes him no more important than you. And you have to get past those hangups. And she said, you know, I think part of it is cultural. We are taught to like, you know, be respectful to our elders and therefore the the people older than us, more senior than us are the ones who know everything. And and so I reminded her, I'm like, no, no, you got to remember that. Like, you know, older folks like me, we still have tons to learn from you guys who are more junior like, this is super important.KAT:New people see things in a way that like, we can't like when you're an expert in something, you entirely forget what it's like to not be an expert. And like, you have an enormous blind spot because of that. Like, you should always be leveraging people who are brand new. They're super helpful.ADRIANA:Exactly, exactly. So I think it's great that that you're you're hand-holding folks in that way and encouraging them to, like, stand up for themselves and point out the wrongs. Because unfortunately, we have too much of that in industry. And I find, especially in large enterprise, with this obsession with seniority and rank and file and all that. So people won't point out you know, the gross wrongs and just let people continue doing stupid shit. Basically.KAT:Yeah, we end up with a lot of like, missing stairs, right? Like people who, like, this person sucks ass. Everybody knows they suck ass, that they're difficult to work with. They have to be handled in a specific way, but we just ignore that and like, work around them because they had like, one really important contribution. And 15 years ago, or because they're like forwarding a lot of like unwritten knowledge or something. But fuck that. Fuck that entirely. Like it's it creates like such a hostile environment for new people and anyone from an underrepresented group. Get the fuck rid of them. Like, don't let your missing stairs stick around just because they used to be important.ADRIANA:Exactly, exactly. Such an important thing to keep in mind. The other thing that I wanted to, dig into a little bit that you mentioned because, you said that you work with, a lot of, like, there's a lot of college students, contributing to open source, which is amazing. I, I love that that is a thing. Now, because, like, definitely when I was in college, I don't even I don't even know that, there was... I mean, open source was around for sure, but it was definitely, not something I was necessarily aware of or even, like, thought capable of contributing to. Like, it just never crossed my mind. And so the fact that we have these college students who are doing this sort of thing, like KubeCon, I think has like a cloud Native University track, or colo event, which like so cool, like it's really, focusing on, on bringing in this like young new talent, which I think is awesome.KAT:I think like universities must have changed their curriculum recently because we get like we get so many student applicants. And then the cloud native student, track at KubeCon is is pretty large. Like, it gets a lot of applicants too for for speakers. And the talks are usually pretty busy. So like, I think some universities must have adjusted their curriculum to put open source on there, or at least to put Kubernetes on the curriculum in some way, because it was a pretty like we've always had a few students. Right. Like really really particularly driven students who are like terminally online and aware of what's actually being used at companies today and not just staying glued to whatever their, school is teaching them. So there's always been a handful of them, but now it's like it's got to be. Sixty percent of applicants for the Kubernetes release team is students or like fresh grads. And so it's it is significant. Yeah.ADRIANA:I love that. I love like all that fresh perspective. And you know, they're not jaded yet by being...KAT:Oh god, yeah. They're still bright eyed and bushy tailed and hopeful. Right. Their their souls haven't been crushed. They haven't worked in like, the enterprise for a decade and lost their sparkle yet. So it's it's also it's revitalizing to work with people who are still like genuinely so excited about technology.ADRIANA:Yeah I, I agree, I agree and I'm one of the maintainers of the OpenTelemetry End User SIG, and we've had a couple of really fresh faces, fresh faces, like young, young, folks join our SIG regularly as contributors. And I love the energy that they bring, the enthusiasm, the like, “I'll take this on!” I'm like, “What? Yay!”KAT:Hell, yeah.ADRIANA:Bring it on, bring it on.KAT:Love that shit.ADRIANA:Yeah. I wanted to switch gears a bit, and talk about, like, your, your your day job, at Minimus, because you mentioned that you're, in cybersecurity. How did you get into that?KAT:This story is actually so stupid how I got this job. So the job market is terrible right now as we're recording this in 2025. Absolutely abysmal. I've been looking for a job for, like, six months. I live in the United Kingdom, and I needed visa sponsorship. And so that made things like, significantly harder and significantly slower. But this is a great example of why you should talk to people who are way more senior than you and try to be friends with people who are way more senior than you. Because I got this job out of a personal recommendation from somebody I met who was the CTO at a another friend's company, at an award ceremony at the House of Lords.ADRIANA:Wow. Damn.KAT:I was like, yeah, I was there to, win an award for, open source code contributor of the year for OpenUK, which is, a UK organization. I did not win. I got runner up. The person who won it absolutely did deserve it. But, I met this guy there. He already kind of knew who I was. Because I am friends with somebody who worked for him. And, when he went to this new company, Minimus, they they said they were looking for an experienced developer advocate. And he recommended me. I had never worked directly in cybersecurity before, but, I have a lot of friends who are in cybersecurity or are, relatively well known hackers. So, I already had the connections that they wanted, and I had a shitload of experience. And developer advocacy and very strongly held opinions about how it should be done.ADRIANA:Yeah.KAT:From a developer advocacy standpoint. So there was no like, there was no fucking around. There was no, like, beating around the bush with what I thought needed to be done in the interviews. And they, liked the assertiveness.ADRIANA:That is amazing. I love that.KAT:There I ended, but it's still like it's it's a container cybersecurity company. So I was like, I do have relevant experience because I'm a Kubernetes maintainer, and I used to be, a software engineer, right. Specifically working with containers. So I have the dev experience, the user experience that they're looking for.ADRIANA:That's so cool. And I think this, this all brings I have this firm belief that, like, where we are now is a result of all the things, all the things that we've done before has have led us to now. And so, you know, you get to a certain point in your career and you're like, oh, this actually kind of makes sense.KAT:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I haven't actually been in tech for that long. I didn't get into tech until I was like already like very much an adult. Before that, I was trying not to be my dad. My dad's a software engineer, and we're, like, damn near the same person. So I was like, I got to have not my dad's job. I can't have the same job as my dad. So I screwed around and tried to do other stuff for a long time and it just, like, didn't work.ADRIANA:What was the other stuff that you did before tech?KAT:I was a bartender for a while at a strip club. So that was fun. But, I also worked at, a video rental store. So, like an indie, an independently owned video rental store, called Black Lodge Video was in Memphis, Tennessee. Whereas, like, the average Blockbuster would have like 600,000 titles in the store. We had like 40 something thousand.ADRIANA:Damn.KAT:Yeah. So in order to, like, recommend movies to customers, everybody had to kind of like pick a genre and that's, that's their genre. So for a few years, I got paid to just like watch horror movies and talk to people about horror movies and, when I, when I make enough money to leave tech and never come back, I am probably just going to go back to doing that because it was great. It was rad. You know, all I did was watch movies and talk about movies. That's all day.ADRIANA:Now. Do you have a particular favorite genre of horror movie? Do you prefer like the supernatural stuff or like the slasher flicks?KAT:So I like, I like psychological horror a lot, like, unreliable narrator type horror. I like when horror crosses over with sci-fi quite a lot. That's probably my favorite. So stuff like Event Horizon or Alien, Fright, where, like, you can argue that this is horror and you can argue that this is sci-fi. I like the, I like ghost stories, but not so much Western ghost stories. As much as I like Japanese or Korean ghost stories. Japan and Korea both had periods where they just, like, absolutely crushed the ghost story movie genre. That did a very, very good job with that. The French also had a period of time where they were churning gore in a really interesting way. And that, that, that was, that was a good period of horror movies for me.But generally it's like sci-fi horror crossover or, psychological horror. Like, you can't tell if this is an unreliable narrator situation. Like, is this person possessed? Is this person actually insane? I know it's it's it's very fun to shit on, M. Night Shyamalan. There was there was a period where he was very predictable with the what a twist thing.KAT:Yeah, but, The Visit is genuinely, like, I don't get scared watching horror movies anymore, but that's the last time I can remember watching a movie and my stomach dropping. Like the twist in that one. I was like, oh fuck. Like, if you watch these kids are, these kids are so cooked, dude, that that's you can make fun of them for the what a twist thing all you want.ADRIANA:You know, Enjoy those movies. I still.KAT:Like, fuck.ADRIANA:Like, they they fuck with you.KAT:They really, really, really do. They do. And the The Happening had some really inventive death scenes as well.ADRIANA:Oh my God, that one.KAT:Like, the lawnmower thing.ADRIANA:Hurting my brain. Like, for real. I can... because I was the one with the. Wasn't that the one with the plants? Like... yeah... I can never I couldn't really look at plants the same way.KAT:Yeah. Because they want to murder you. You know, or they want to make you murder you. It's what's actually going on. God damn, that man can crank out a really unpleasant movie.ADRIANA:Yeah.KAT:We're all so mad at him for Avatar. But if he can go back to just making, like, really upsetting horror movies that’s... he. He kills it.ADRIANA:Yeah, I totally roll with genre. I...KAT:Yeah.ADRIANA:It's so cool. I love the, the breadth in the in the career. You know, my, my dad also is in tech, and, he used, like, a software architect for many, many years. He's retired. And when I graduated university, I ended up working at the same company as him. We both worked at Accenture, for, for brief a period, and it was.And that's where I met my husband, too. So it was the three of us working there. And, you know, it wasn't until I left, like, the whole time I was there. Like, they're both really smart. My my husband is also in tech. And I spent the entire time trying to live up to them to be just like them.And it wasn't until I left and realized, oh, I can forge my own path. And then that's when I started to actually find myself in tech. But like, I, I can totally understand the, you know, avoid, avoid following in the footsteps.KAT:Yeah.ADRIANA:Because it's so...KAT:I don’t even I don't write any of the same languages my dad does. Even. So, like, I don't I don't know what I was so worried about, but he he didn't believe I was a real programmer until I learned a compiled language, though, like, he thought that Python did not count. JavaScript did not count. I had to learn something compiled for it to count. You know, we got there eventually. We got there eventually. But he, he he took a while to call me an actual software engineer because of that one.ADRIANA:So what ended up getting you into tech after after, like, dabbling in various areas?KAT:I have been, like, doing it as a side hustle, in that I was like, I was building WordPress and Joomla templates for people. As a side hustle because, like, bartending in the state of Tennessee pays you $2.13 an hour plus tips.ADRIANA:Ouch. Were the tips good?KAT:No.ADRIANA:Oh, shit.KAT:No. This is like.ADRIANA:Technically.KAT:Legally if you don't make it up to federal minimum wage. Over the course of a pay period, 725 an hour, you report that and your employer is supposed to pay you the difference. But the reality is that if you do that, you're just going to get fired, right?ADRIANA:Right.KAT:Right. So like yeah. So it didn't it didn't pay great. And while I loved working at Black Lodge video, it also didn't pay great. So I was I was doing a side hustle and, I got one really, really beefy contract, for a sports association. It was the most expensive contract I had had at that point. It was, ten grand, which doesn't sound like a lot of money now, but at the time, it was like a life changing quantity of money for me. And I thought, man. Maybe I have to actually commit to this. So I, I went to a coding bootcamp. I had moved to Seattle at that point, because my, my husband at the time was a fencing coach, and he, he took a job with the fencing club there. But, I went to a coding academy. I went to Code Fellows and learned Python and, my first job was not, like, super well paying for Seattle for junior, it was $60,000. But that was so, like many, many times more money than I had ever seen in my bank account. Yeah. You know, so it was, it was kind of hard to leave after that, like suddenly being able to pay off like old medical debt and stuff was pretty. Well, it was it was hard to be mad at that. That one $10k contract made me go, okay, you know, like, maybe like, I'm good at this, obviously. I enjoy doing this and, it it pays, you know, it pays better than working in a video store. It pays better than bartending. And it will continue to pay, whereas, you know, service industry roles are notoriously, like, not very stable. I don't know what I would have done if I was still in the service industry during Covid.ADRIANA:Yeah, that... that was brutal for folks in the service industry.KAT:Yeah, I would have been so fucked. Right? Like many, many people were fucked.ADRIANA:So absolutely.KAT:You know, it was a good choice. And, I have accepted that. I just am my dad, and that's okay. You know, my dad is cool as hell, so. He's retired. He lives, on the beach in Mississippi in, a in a house on stilts. And, all he does is hang out with his dog that he found out on the side. The the highway. He makes soap that he sells at a farmers market, and he watches like the Real Housewives.ADRIANA:Damn.KAT:He's he's very happy. He's, like, really living the dream. I'll call him. And it's the 2 p.m. there, and he's like, drinking a martini with his dog. I’m like, so.ADRIANA:That is a chill life.KAT:Yeah. So he's he's got it. He's got a pretty good, you know, and like I, I would like that to be me when I'm 70. Yeah. Yeah for sure for sure.ADRIANA:That's cool I like that. You know, I, I could just keep going and going. I've, I've had so much fun chatting with you today. We are coming up on time, but before we, we wrap things up, I was wondering if there is any words of wisdom or spicy takes, that you wanted to impart.KAT:Spicy take as a Kubernetes maintainer. Sometimes Kubernetes is, like, fully not correct for your use case. Don't over complicate it like, you don't... You don't need to throw Kubernetes at it straight out the the fucking gate. Also, you should probably not be rolling your own cluster. You should be using a managed service. You you absolutely should not roll your own cluster unless you are very, very sure that you know what you're doing personally. Or you have like $300,000 a year laying around to pay somebody who knows what they're doing to administrate your cluster. Otherwise, please use a managed service. Do not roll your own.ADRIANA:I am fully supportive of that. Absolutely. And on your your first statement of like it. Kubernetes might not suit your use case. There. There is definitely, there was definitely a huge influx of people who are like, we must use Kubernetes because it is The Thing. Yeah.KAT:It is a cool thing, but it is also so much more work than is necessary for some things.ADRIANA:Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And, very, very great. Spicy take, very important to, to educate the folks out there. So, yeah, I really appreciate it. Well, thank you so much, Kat, for geeking out with me today. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time.KAT: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.

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