Geeking Out with Adriana Villela

Denise Yu, an Engineering Manager at HashiCorp and a professional margin-scribbler, brings her unique perspective on managing burnout in the tech industry. She emphasizes the importance of finding meaningful work to stay engaged and strategies for coping, like exploring new, enjoyable activities. Denise candidly discusses her experiences with burnout, advocating for open conversations about mental health at work. She also highlights the benefits of job hopping early in one’s career to enhance adaptability and discover personal strengths.

Angela Blake, a passionate coach dedicated to cultivating happy work cultures, shares her insights on navigating change in both tech and non-tech environments. She emphasizes the need to acknowledge people's feelings during transitions and explains the importance of communication for acceptance. Angela also discusses her journey into tech coaching, highlighting empathy and collaboration as key to easing organizational change. Moreover, she advocates for protecting personal energy through setting healthy boundaries, crucial for maintaining mental well-being.

Join Tim Banks, a Customer Solutions Architect and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion, alongside Marino Wijay, an Open Source Advocate and tech explorer. They dive into amusing Costco adventures and share light-hearted anecdotes about managing family schedules. The duo also unpacks the evolution of observability in technology and everyday life, emphasizing its relevance from software development to hiring practices. Their discussion on standardizing observability tools like OpenTelemetry reveals how effective data management enhances business efficiency and empowers informed decision-making.

About our guest:Eromosele David Akhigbe is a Developer Advocate at StepSecurity, where he combines technical expertise with a passion for making technology more accessible and understandable. He’s also an active contributor to the OpenTelemetry community. A proud first-class graduate of Mechanical Engineering from Landmark University and a Decagon-trained software engineer, Eromosele is a strong advocate for open-source software and is committed to projects that democratize access to tech.He believes deeply in Africa’s potential to shape the future of technology and innovation. Outside of work, you’ll often find him playing lead guitar or engaging with communities that share his mission to uplift the African tech ecosystem.Find our guest on:LinkedInInstagramFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:OutreachyJuraci Paixão Kröhling on Geeking OutYuri OliveiraAdriana's blog posts on OpenTelemetryHenrik Rexed - IsItObservableSematextVSCode: Convert Tabs to SpacesAdriana's KubeCon talk on the Target AllocatorEromosele's blog post on the OpenTelemetry DemoMarino Wijay on Geeking OutSIG BobaContributing to OpenTelemetryKCD Ghana 2024KCD Nigeria 2022Apply to OutreachyOCamlWikimediaTranscript:ADRIANA:Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela. Coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have Eromosele Akhigbe. Welcome, Eromosele!EROMOSELE:Thank you Adriana for this opportunity. It's so nice to be here.ADRIANA:And I'm so happy to have you on.EROMOSELE:Thank you so much, Adriana.ADRIANA:Okay. So, where are you calling from today?EROMOSELE:Yeah, I'm calling from Lagos, Nigeria. So Nigeria, for some of you that don't know, is in Africa, is located at the western part of Africa. So yeah, that's what I'm calling from.ADRIANA:That's so cool. That's awesome. It's interesting. I've had, two people from Morocco on my podcast, but when I had them, they weren't in Morocco. So you are my first, like, person from Africa who's living in Africa, on the podcast. This is super exciting. Okay, so, I have so much to get into. But before we do that, we are going to start with the icebreaker questions. Are you ready? Okay. First question. Are you left handed or right handed?EROMOSELE:Right. Right handed.ADRIANA:Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?EROMOSELE:iPhone anyADRIANA:Okay. Next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?EROMOSELE:Mac. I'm currently using a Mac. No to Windows. I do not like Windows. Yeah. I'm a Mac user.ADRIANA:Did you. Okay, here's a question for you. Did you ever use Windows before? Because it's funny, I've talked to some people who are like, I've never even used Windows. I'm a Mac user through and through.EROMOSELE:No, I used to use like, Windows, when I started my tech career. And, it was the experience wasn't the best.ADRIANA:Yeah, I, I also for, for listeners of the podcast, they probably know... they've heard me talk about this many times, but also like I started my life with Windows, my tech life. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?EROMOSELE:Yes, I do, and it's Golang. And I also have a not so favorite programing language, although, you did not ask, which is, Java I'm not a fan of Java. I'm not I'm not a crazy fan of Java because of my experience. So my, my, my experience with Java was, the first programing language because, I, I was always, intrigued by programing since I was in secondary school. So I was intrigued, but I didn't have the, you know, the resource to learn at that time. So I was still my dad. And then one time he brought one IT guy from his company, and the guy came. And I think that after learning how to use the terminal, you know, and I learned how to change password using admin, you know, I learned about admin stuff. I was a very curious kid. So, you know, and I told the guy that I can hack your laptop, and the guy didn't believe because he was an IT professional. And I'm a young kid.ADRIANA:Yeah, yeah.EROMOSELE:And he was like, I dare you to. And I did it. And he was shocked. I told him that okay, I'm really interested in programing. I would like to learn. And I think I believe strongly that it's because of what I did. Because I embarrassed him. He decided that the best language is for me to start with was Java. He gave me I would say the worst tutorials I've ever, you know watched and I you know trying it. I thought I was just a dumb person. I couldn't just like because how willing just to type hello world public main static. It sounded so scary and crazy to me. So, you know, I just decided that maybe programing wasn't my thing. When. When I had my friends talk about JavaScript, I was like, wait. If Java is this hard, this script of Java. So I just ran away from programing, you know,ADRIANA:Oh, wow. So that turned you off initially?EROMOSELE:Yeah, yeah. For like, four years.ADRIANA:Can you imagine if you’d been like completely put off by it. Like how? Like how different your life would have been? How did you end up learning Go?EROMOSELE:Yeah. So très interesting story. Yeah, so in 2022 I was in my because in my I was in uni... I was in uni and we're having like some kind of internship. By the way, I studied mechanical engineering. So I didn't study software engineering at all because I ran away from code. I was scared of code.ADRIANA:So yeah, dude. I like ran away from code in university too. I was like, I don't want to do this for a living. And then like in university, they fricking teach you how to code. And you're like, dammit!EROMOSELE:Yeah.ADRIANA:My degree is in industrial engineering. So I don't I don't have a computer science or computer engineering degree either. So there you go anyway. Carry on.EROMOSELE:So, we had an internship, and during that time I had a really good friend of mine shout out to him, by the way, his name is Isaac. And, you know, he just encouraged me that, okay. You don't want to program. Why not try DevOps, you know, and. Okay. DevOps. You know that. Okay. Sounds cool. Let me try it. Let me give it a try. And during that time I started learning DevOps. But the, the school I went to guess what decided teaching us JavaScript first. And I was like what. I'm back to programing again And I was so scared at first. But then I now realize that, wait a second, it's not that deep, you know? It's actually easy. It's not hard, you know, to code. And I'll say, like my passion for coding, you know, started, you know, dreaming again. But then I just because I went for my final year and I couldn't balance programing and final year projects, you know, things like that. So I had to put a pause. Yeah. And then December 2023, I decided to pick it up again, you know, instead of learning DevOps. And good was really nice course from... I can’t pronounce his name, but Abhishek, something like that. He's a really good guy, Udemy, then the life, my choice. My turning point was Outreachy. I don't know if you heard about Outreachy Adriana.ADRIANA:I have, I have, but for folks who aren't familiar with it, tell tell. Them tell our audience about Outreachy, yeah.EROMOSELE:Yeah, definitely. So Outreachy basically, it's like an initiative to encourage people that are in underrepresented communities, you know, to get into open source and open science. So it's not just for tech guys, also for, you know, science people. Like we have some projects about biomes, you know, microbiomes and things around that. So, I, you know, you know, show back story. When I went to apply for Outreachy, I was like, bro, nobody's ever going to pick me. But the beautiful thing about Outreachy is that is not based on experience like, you don't have to have a nice resume or like 20 years of experience or 3 years of, you know, what can experience. In fact, it's an internship and it's really, really nice. And kudos to the people that are, you know, pushing it. I applied for it, you know. I applied for it and I got it. I got into the first phase and that's how I got connected to the OpenTelemetry community. Yay!ADRIANA:Outreachy is not like, I know there's a lot of Outreachy people involved with the CNCF, but Outreachy is not necessarily a program of the CNCF. It's one that the CNCF is involved with. Is that correct?EROMOSELE:Yeah. So, so how Outreachy works is that Outreachy you know, accepts. So if you CNCF as a, as a organization can decide to sponsor an intern to work in an open source project. So that is how it works. Usually we have, OpenTelemetry you know, so you just have a little task that, you know, so on that is new, can come in and do you know, and gain experience with the community. So it's really, really nice. I think you also have, mentorship, something like that. So it's a similar kind of, you know, structure. So, that's how I got to meet Juraci and Yuri. Really awesome. There were awesome, awesome mentors. And I had to start learning Go because to contribute. Yeah. So I was I was forced to learn Go because to contribute OpenTelemetry or to OpenTelemetry is written in Go. Most parts of it, except the SDKs, is written in Go. So I have start learning Go from scratch, to learn about OpenTelemetry. But I read so many. I don't know if you can remember, but I read so many of your blogs at that time to like ramp up on OpenTelemetry. Even Henrik. Even Henrik, whose videos, were so... IsItObservable? That YouTube channel his videos were so helpful.ADRIANA:Henrik has great stuff.EROMOSELE:Yeah, really, really nice. Really, really practical, you know, and stuff. So because, those, those content was what helped me to ramp up my knowledge of OpenTelemetry. Through that knowledge, I was also able to speak in a conference, my first tech conference. You know, I was both a speaker and an attendee. Really interesting.ADRIANA:Oh my God. That's so cool. I love that. You know, and this is why I like these types of programs are so, so important to get people...You know, who normally wouldn't necessarily like, be in these in, in these open source communities like you rediscover you basically discovered that you liked this stuff because of of Outreachy. This is so great.EROMOSELE:Yeah. And then, you know, got to work with Yuri directly. Yuri was an amazing person. You know, he was very patient with me, because he understood where I was coming from, that I came from a non-tech background. I was able to finally get, you know, the project done after a while, and. Yeah, started working with Sematext. Sematext is an observability company based in the US, you know, like Datadog and, like the popular Dynatrace, you know, so it’s an observability firm. Integrating OpenTelemetry, you know, building an exporter for them. It's already it's already in process. So I think that's a very brief very, very brief. And yeah, also through the things I did in OpenTelemetry, I also got sponsored to OpenSource Summit, which I couldn't come because of my visa. But then...ADRIANA:So sad. I remember you telling me. Boo! Yeah, it was the Open Source Summit in, in Europe. Yeah.EROMOSELE:Right. Yeah, Vienna. Yeah, Vienna.ADRIANA:That's too bad. That's too bad. I hope I hope you, you someday get to visit Vienna because it's such a beautiful city.EROMOSELE:I hope so, too. And then got also got, the sponsorship to KubeCon, where I met amazing people like you finally, in person. And I met so many people that I had looked up to in the OpenTelemetry space at reading their content, you know, and it was really it was a wholesome experience. I'm still trying to recover from the... Once again, thank you so much for being such an awesome person.ADRIANA:Yeah. Oh my God. Like, seriously, it's, you know like such a pleasure to get to meet you and yeah, we hung out a bunch at KubeCon North America. And I love how you're just like, you know, it's so hard.For those who watch the show who've never been to a KubeCon. It is a massive conference. It is overwhelming. And if you've never been before, that means you don't really know anybody. And so for you to, like, go and and introduce yourself like, it takes like, so much like courage, I think to, like, put yourself out there like, you know, and I think it's so important to be able to do that stuff because, you know, it gives you an opportunity to connect with, with really cool people. And I'm so glad we got to connect. And then we got to hang out a little extra too at SIG Boba, which was tons of fun. It was such a blast. Yeah. I'm glad, I'm glad. We got to meet, and then I had you, interview for Humans of OTel. And then I'm like, hey, you should be on my podcast because I think you have some cool stuff to say. Okay, I'm going to, continue with the icebreaker questions. I think I know the answer to this next one, but I might be wrong. Okay. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?EROMOSELE:Kind of hard. Okay. I think I'll go with dev, because currently that's the part I really have a lot of experience in currently. But, we're going to definitely have another conversation about DevRel you know, DevRel, kind of.ADRIANA:Okay. Yeah.EROMOSELE:I'm looking into that space. And so definitely going to get pointers.ADRIANA:All right okay. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML.EROMOSELE:YAML. YAML.ADRIANA:I am with you.EROMOSELE:Definitely YAML I don't know, maybe because of my bias, because I've, because I was exposed to a lot of YAML. You know, everyone the first time I, go to write YAML, I was like, what's the problem with the indentations?ADRIANA:I know, I know how like so many people are like, I prefer JSON because I hate the indentation for YAML. I understand notation for YAML will like sometimes drive you crazy. It's fine, but like it's so much,EROMOSELE:The like way you get used to it. You know, you just just make so much sense. Like structure. So yeah.ADRIANA:I also hate curly braces because of Java. There's like so many curly braces in Java.EROMOSELE:Really. But but you know, for fun fact, last year I decided to face my fear and actually went to software engineering school, and I learned Java.ADRIANA:Nice, nice.EROMOSELE:Just to face, like fear. But I'm not writing Java.ADRIANA:It's. It's been a really long time now since I've last touched Java. I think the last time I want to say 2018, but every time I touch Java, it's like I have to reteach myself how to set up the JVM on my machine because I always forget and something always goes wrong. And then there's like other JVM that got installed on my machine from some other thing that I needed. And now, like the JVM, they're fighting with each other, and then you add Eclipse on to that, and then it's fighting with the JVM that's installed on your machine, along like if it got installed with another JVM. Like, I'm just like,EROMOSELE:Java is too strict. It's too strict. Like, once you miss one thing, everything feels.ADRIANA:You know, my my thing with Java, like, my, my main issue. And I'm told that it's it's gotten better is I find it very verbose, so, like, you need to, like, code the getters and the setters. And, like everything, everything is a class. And so you want to do the most mundane thing, and you still have to create a class and it's like, but I am told that things, have gotten more concise. Also, this is on my like to learn list, but I'm told that Kotlin is like, basically, if Java were retooled, that would be its beautiful baby.EROMOSELE:Are you serious?ADRIANA:Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a JVM based language. But it's, like, way more concise and cleaner than Java. So it's like Java improved, so.EROMOSELE:That sounds cool.ADRIANA:And I know a few people who tried out Kotlin and really like it, so.EROMOSELE:But it's like, isn’t that like, for Android or something?ADRIANA:Yeah, I believe so. I believe so, yeah.EROMOSELE:Okay.ADRIANA:Yeah, it is, it is used a lot in Android. So anyway, fun fact. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?EROMOSELE:I like I would say spaces because apparently there's some like I think you should want to read config if you want to write a YAML file. So they're not allowed. You're not allowed to use tabs. It's like there's always this kind of weird error that happens when you use tabs. So I just I prefer spaces. Yeah.ADRIANA:Yeah I, I did convert to spaces because of that. But like my tab in VS code is configured so that it converts it to a space. So I still use the tab key.EROMOSELE:Are you serious? How do you how do you? You better teach me how to do that.ADRIANA:I got I got to look at that setting. I'll. I'll see if I can find it and send it to you after. But yeah, that was that was miraculous for me. I'm like, ooh, okay.EROMOSELE:Cool it. That will be so helpful.ADRIANA:I don't like, you know, space based spaces like tab key get the job done. So I guess maybe I'm a hybrid. I'm like, I use spaces, but with the tab key makes it. There you go. Okay, two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?EROMOSELE:Actually, this. So when I want to first, you know, understanding content, I first go to a video. Because sometimes text can be very overwhelming. So for me so I first go to video, maybe watch 2 or 3 videos, have a general overview of what the technology or topic is about. Then I now go down to the documentation, text. And recently I was going through the OpenTelemetry docs. And I remember when I started like one year ago because like, one year ago that I started learning about OpenTelemetry almost, almost a year right now. I was so overwhelmed by the documentation. I was so it looked so scary. I didn't know where to start. I started getting a lot of things. Traces, spans, metrics. I'm like, what's going on? So I see there was YouTube. I went to Henrik, you know, and I started reading some things and some things that are making sense. Context propagations that are making sense. And I watched, talks, you know, so from OpenTelemetry talks, then getting comfortable with that. I went through your blog, you know, with some things that, you know, and it said I didn't know. Then finally I went to documentation. So I'll say video first, then text.ADRIANA:Oh, nice. Nice. So they complement each other. But your your go to for starters is video. That's awesome. You have to say you know like I I'm the opposite. I'm I'm text until I hit the point of desperation and I can't find anything as a blog post then it's like okay fine, I'll watch a video. And I have to say like, there was a talk that I did at KubeCon I want to see maybe last year, it was on the Target Allocator, and I was like, trying to learn some stuff, and I could not find any materials on it. And then I found a thing, a video that Henrik had done. And I'm like, okay, thank you. With, with like, I think there was like a sample repo too. And like, thank you. Henrik. I finally figured this out. Yeah. Because, like, the docs, for the Target Allocator and for the OTel Operator, where we're a little, they need a little bit of improvement. And so, like, one of the things that I did personally, like after after I learned this stuff, I'm like, I'm going to go now into the readme and the docs and like and share my knowledge.ADRIANA:It’s easier because it's, I think, like, I love the OTel Operator. It's like one of my favorite components of OpenTelemetry. But, it's like, it's difficult to understand. Right. And until you play with it, you don't realize how magical it is. But like, it's you got to get past the documentation. So like making making the docs accessible is important.EROMOSELE:Yeah. You know, and what you're saying just, shows the power of content, like content creating. Content creating is because the creation is so powerful. Like, I did my whole journey with OpenTelemetry. I decided to write two blog posts I told you to review, and I think I sent around that time to to give you a suggestion and you gave really nice suggestions then at that time. But yeah, so the power of content, through those blog posts, I know a lot of people that have texted me privately and told me that, oh, they have blocked my blog posts, you know, on how to run the OpenTelemetry Demo, helped them get started with OpenTelemetry and it really help them, you know, than, you know, getting so overwhelmed with all the info. So content creating content is so, so important, you know, just helps you to learn more and then it also helps the community, you know.ADRIANA:Exactly.EROMOSELE:Yeah.ADRIANA:Yeah. And I think that's like such an important point because like, you know I don't know about you like, you mentioned like it does help you, it helps the community. But, for me, it's so helpful to like, if I can recreate my steps and then write about it, because especially, like, sometimes I write blog posts very selfishly because I'm like, I need it documented somewhere. And I've actually gone back to previous blog posts. I'm like, I know I wrote about this. How the hell do you do this again? I don't remember, so it's like an archive of my knowledge stored in the interwebs. But my thought process too is like, if I'm struggling, someone else is struggling to.EROMOSELE:Yeah, yeah, yeah.ADRIANA:You know, sometimes I think, like, Oh, should I write about this because someone else wrote about it, too? Well, you know what doesn't hurt? Write about it. You never know who it's going to help. You might have a slightly different take that someone else doesn't have or like you're writing with, like, more up to date. You know, you're using like a more up to date version of that tool. So now your stuff is like probably more relevant than something like a blog post from like five years ago. Sad. Sad but true, right? Because tech evolves. So yeah, I agree with you. Creating that content is so important. And don't be shy. Don't be shy about creating the content. Like just like you do. Like, you know, you saw you've seen the benefits of, what you're doing that's so amazing.EROMOSELE:It's just that. Yeah, it's just like nowadays it's so hard to balance the two, like working, writing. Because writing takes a lot of effort. Because you...ADRIANA:Oh, my God.EROMOSELE:You have to do your ideas. You have to think about how the audience, how to explain things well so that people don't get lost. So yeah, I think that, you know, planning to get back into once I get my groove back on.ADRIANA:Awesome. That's awesome. I will say like, one thing that really helps with with writing, like I remember before I got into developer advocacy, I was managing a couple of teams. And I remember when I interviewed for for that job, I made sure that, like, writing blog posts was built into my job. Because... it's a lot of like, it's a lot of work, you know, it's like contributing to open source projects like, yeah, yay, awesome if you do it on your free time. But let's face it, contributing to an open source project can be like a full time job in itself, and I don't know about you, but with my free time, I kind of want to do something completely unrelated to what I do during the day, right? So I think being in a job where you're afforded the ability to contribute to open source projects, to contribute to community knowledge, even if your role isn't, you know, like specifically a developer advocacy role. Because I think, I think those, those community contributions matter and are important.EROMOSELE:Yeah, really, really important.ADRIANA:Awesome. Okay. We're down to the final question of of the icebreaker. Okay. Okay. What is your superpower?EROMOSELE:Okay. You probably know this. My superpower is the ability to. Relate with people.ADRIANA:Yeah, I can vouch for that. I can vouch for that. Yeah, yeah. You know, seriously, like, you come across as, like, so chill and just, like, so friendly and willing to learn and, Yeah, I think, like, you're super approachable. And I think, you know, like, like I'm, I'm actually kind of an introverted person. I'm not the type of person. I am for real introverted. And so, like, conferences, like, I've been lucky that at subsequent KubeCons I've, like, met more and more people. So I have like a bunch of conference friends. Yeah. But my first KubeCon, I was like, oh my God, just let me stand in a corner and hide from everybody. Because I think sometimes it's really, it's really hard to approach people. And so when, when an extroverted person comes and starts talking to me and I get like a nice chill vibe from them, you know, it's like I, I've heard it referred to as like, when when an extroverted person adopts you. I, I feel in some ways like you adopted me at KubeCon as well, like, you know, because your, your friendliness, like you were so approachable. Like, yeah, yeah, we can, we can chill. I think extroverted people putting introverted people at ease, I think, makes us seem extroverted as a result.EROMOSELE:You know what? What actually helps me is, I know one thing that if I'm nervous, the other person, is nervous too. Like, we are both nervous. Yeah. So let us take the first step. So. And the worst that can happen is the person sees, I don't want to speak, and then you move on. But the best that can happen is, you know, relationships that, you know, can be bigger than, you know, what was what it was at that time. So it's I think. The upside is always the reward is better than the risk. So I always go for the reward. But don't get me wrong, when I go to KubeCon, I was first terrified. Because when I was my first time outside Nigeria. So it was it was a full experience for me, full experience, full new experience for me. But I had a Colombian friend, we shared a room together. His name is Daniel Daniel Cifuentes. Really nice guy. And I will say he helped me to, you know, ease into the whole relating with new people and then, I met you. I can't I can't meet my heroes and not speak to them. No, that's not possible. So I had to approach you.ADRIANA:And I think we, we kept, bumping into each other. I know, like when, when I invited you to come for SIG Boba, I was like, I was heading out with. With Marino, who was a past guest podcast, and and and. Yeah, you're like, finishing off your day. You're like, hey, how's it going? I'm like, hey, we're going to SIG Boba. Want to come with? Like, what the heck? Why not? I'm also a lot more, likely to go for these, after events if it's like, rather than saying, like, oh, let's meet at the venue. If we go together, I'm like, okay, I'll go, because otherwise I'll be like, it's the end of the day... I don't want to go there. I'm just going to go back to my hotel room and just like, watch Netflix because, yeah, otherwise I'd be hiding out. So, I'm glad. I'm glad you joined. And it was, like, lots of fun. Plus, like, bubbles tea. That's cool. Yeah. So we got we got through the icebreaker questions. Hooray! Congratulations. So, you know, like, OpenTelemetry has been an overarching, topic, of our conversation. And you said that you got into it through Outreachy. And so, was it because of of your work in OpenTelemetry that you, you ended up getting, like your Outreachy work in OpenTelemetry that you ended up getting your, your job at Sematext?EROMOSELE:Oh, yeah. The.. I had worked on the Collector, you know, before, and because of the conference I had to go for, I had to learn so much about the Collector, you know, so just to say conference inspired learning or something like that, you know, so because of the. I didn't want to fall, so I had to go. I learned so much about Collector. Yeah. Yeah. So I was able to, you know, show so much at that time that it is possible to auto instrument an application without adding code. Yeah. And that was really, you know, mindblowing. So they employed me because of that, because I had that skill and I could... Yeah. I could I had, I had not done this before, but and also probably have is that I have the ability to learn fast, you know, if it's structured, I can learn very fast and I can, grab things easily. So I had not built an exporter before, but. Yeah, I looked through a lot of code or the exporter code was able to find patterns and similarities, and I was like, yeah, I can build an exporter for Sematext and OpenTelemetry and they were like, okay, come onboard and let's do that. So yeah. So that's.ADRIANA:Yeah! That's amazing. And you know, it's that is a great superpower. And I think this is the superpower that really, differentiates you know, the awesome people from the not so awesome people in tech because like, look, let's face it, you can't be on top of every new technology that's out there ever, right. And so you kind of you pick a technology that, you know, resonates with you and, and then you learn it like, you know, the, the stuff that I did when I finished university, so different from what I do now. And like, you know, and I learned OpenTelemetry on the fly for a job as well. When I was managing, I was managing a team, an observability practices team, and I was trying to get the company to use OpenTelemetry. And I'm like, I don't know that much about observability. I don't know that much about OpenTelemetry. Let me learn about it. So I learned about it on the fly, too, right. Because you got to do that. You got to learn. You got to learn fast. You become you become the expert, as quickly as you can. Learn... Sometimes it means like not learning, maybe not necessarily fully in depth at first. Right? But it's like learning enough. And then you can start asking questions and being curious and be like, oh, how does this work?How does that work? And I think what you said also about, you know, like you never wrote an exporter, but you look through the code and you look for patterns and I think like that's what we have to do as a software engineers is we look for the patterns. It's like learning a new language, right? Like you learned, you learn Java, you learn JavaScript, you learn Go. There are different languages, different syntax. They have different paradigms, but also they have some similarities. And so you learn from your experience, draw on your experience with like one language to sort of like get through learning the other language, which is cool.EROMOSELE:Yeah. It's so nice.ADRIANA:Yeah. So, what's, you know, as, as someone who's, been been involved in OpenTelemetry for the, for the last little while. You know, you mentioned, like, the different resources, for, for OpenTelemetry that you've, that you've relied on. What about, how would you say, like, your experience with the OpenTelemetry community has been because that's that's always, like something that's that I love about OpenTelemetry is the community. So what are what are your thoughts around that?EROMOSELE:Yeah. I would say my experience with the community was and has been still great. I can I can mention his name. Dimitri. He was so helpful during my, during my internship because most times, the issues that I have to, solve, he will be do like, he will be the one reviewing those in the past. And then he was always like, giving me tips and pointers. Okay, try it. Yeah, try try this. Go like this. You know, and he really helped me, you know, in getting my first PR merged. I remember I remember when it first got merged, I was like, whaaat? I feel like I'm...ADRIANA:It’s like a party, right?EROMOSELE:I was like, wow. I contributed to open source. And it was just really an exhilarating feeling, you know, knowing that. Yeah, someone like me that had like a month ago, I had no knowledge of Go. No knowledge of OpenTelemetry. And then two weeks, three weeks after I made my first contribution. So like I always I always advise people, even in my community, you know, I advise people that don't be scared because the what stops a lot of people from contributing to open source is to feel like, oh, I have to be like a senior engineer. I have to know everything. I have to have to be so good. Twenty years’ experience. Nobody will care about what I have to do. Well, it is not really true. Because the people in the community, first of all, are willing to help. Well, I can’t speak about all communities, but OpenTelemetry, for example. If you're honest, you told them that. Oh, this is what I know. This is what I can do. What can I start from? You know, this thing called good first issues? You know, they have good first. Yeah. So, not so technical, but you can just, you know, start your journey from there. And I believe that once you get the first PR merged you know, this, this drive to do more, you know, I think that yeah, I think on my first PR merged, I, I doubled down, you know, I doubled down on my learnings.EROMOSELE:I doubled down on my Go. And I was able to get five other PRs merged.ADRIANA:Wow. That's awesome. So it had inspired you. It kind of gave you that kind of boost, right. Confidence boost. And inspiration to to contribute more. That's great. And I so agree with you. Like getting your first PR merged is like I don't know if you've never experienced that. I hope like folks out there, I hope you get to experience it because there's nothing like it. And, you know, like I think you you made a really important point to like, you know, don't be shy about like, what you think is worthy of contribution because it is open source and people always need help. Yeah. And especially if you find something where there's a gap. So, you, you've noticed something like there's thing in the documentation or like you noticed a bug or whatever, or as you said, you you look through the issues, list for a particular repo and see if there's something where you're like, I think I can do that.EROMOSELE:Another thing like I would like to speak about is, you know, like people like us, like when I, when I came for, like, one of the reasons that made me like, apply for KubeCon and all was that I hadn't really seen a lot of Nigerians living in Nigeria, like I saw Nigerians that were not living in Nigeria, like America, Canada. But Nigerians living in Nigeria. I didn’t really see so, so much representation, you know.ADRIANA:Yeah.EROMOSELE:From our community and, and in our community, like the the tech space is really booming. Kubernetes... I had a conversation with Jake. Jake is a CNCF Ambassador. I'm sure you know, you know, basically talking around topics around how to build and improve a community here in, you know, Nigeria and Africa at large because there's so much there's so much that's currently happening here. But, the access to, you know, the like, you know, this, you know, everybody sees what's going on in the US. You know, it's very easy to see what's going on in the US. What's going on. Yeah. But then, you know, places like Africa, like things are actually going on, but no one is really seeing what's happening. If no one knows what you're doing, then, you know, no one can call you for it. So I just one of the things that inspired me to actually apply for that sponsorship, you know, to go to attend KubeCon, you know, see how these things work and how can we bring, you know, this kind of thing. So, our own local community, like, I spoke to Jake about, you know, something, starting something like a KubeCon Africa.ADRIANA:How cool would that be? It's cool... I know there have been some KCDs in Africa.EROMOSELE:Ghana and Nigeria. Yeah.ADRIANA:That's so cool. That's cool.EROMOSELE:But there's so much, so much things can be done, you know, in the whole, you know, building the community space. And, you know, hopefully I'll get tips from people like you that are so good at this. At building community.ADRIANA:Hey, we learn from each other. I love that so much. And yeah, I mean, I think it's really important. And this a conversation that I've had with a few people too, like even even stuff about like, language barriers. Right. That there's so much, so much stuff like so much open source contribution is done in English. And if you know English, great. If English is not your strong language, that it's like you're shutting your doors to like a bunch of brilliant people who work, which is not their first language. And why should it be? I mean, you know, you're born in a different country. It's a different first language. So I think it's really cool that there is, so much of an effort now that you see in the CNCF around, like international like internationalization of documentation, like OpenTelemetry, I think, the docs are now available in a number of languages, which is really cool. Even in Portuguese, I found out. And it's, it's easy to forget like if you're, if you, if you speak English relatively well, you just sort of like. Yeah. Of course. Like, what what about other people, you know. So I think representation matters. Making people aware of, of other communities and other places that are not North America, not necessarily Western Europe, like tech exists in all parts of the world. And I think, it's really important to to bring that to the forefront. So I love what you're doing. I love that you're, you know, the hustle is on and you're just, like, excited to learn and you're putting yourself out there. I think it's fantastic. And you're so young too. I love it, yeah. Well, we're coming up on time. But before we finish off, I wanted to ask if you have any parting words of wisdom.EROMOSELE:Well, to the. Well, I'm talking to newbies now. Not to the experienced guys, but to the newbies out there, don't be scared to take that step, that first step, because that first step is what can change your life entirely. If I was scared to take. I was scared to take the Outreachy step. But I just told myself, “What's the worst that can happen?” They won't pick me, I won't, you know? I'll. I'll still be fine, you know? But what's the best I can happen? The best that can happen is that my life can, you know, change forever. So. So everyone out there, that's still scared to take that first step? You want to start a company? You have an idea. You know, don't be scared to take that first step. Take that first step, and things will meet you on the way. And two, three years down the line, you'll be happy you did.ADRIANA:Aw, that's so great. I love that so much. And before we wrap up, there is one more thing that I want to mention. Because you've, you know, you got your start through Outreachy. Can you tell folks, how does that they can apply to Outreachy if they're interested and maybe just talk a little bit about the selection process?EROMOSELE:Okay. Okay. Cool. So Outreachy has like two... I’ll say two cohorts. So there's one that's currently happening in a few days starting in a few days. And then we have another one in August. So you have two every year. So to apply to Outreachy you have to write five essays. Yeah. So there's no like there's no exams or anything. You just have to write five essays And in those essays you have to basically talk about how you are, you know, underrepresented in the location that you live in, how you have been underrepresented in the tech industry and the location that you live in, you know, basically share your story. You know, share how probably, you know, for women, you know, the whole issue around, subjugation, you know, from the society that we live in. For someone like me... So, in our state, we are classified... People classify us as people that practice voodoo, you know, like witchcraft.So, like, most times, most of, the wins that I, you know, had done when I was coming up, people just say, he's from that state. He's probably doing something on shady underneath, you know, so there's really it's really terrible. And the funny thing about under these things is that you may not even know you're going through these things. Like, you may not even be aware because it might be so normal to you, but for some people, it's just it's normal to, be talked down on, you know, talked down. Yeah. So you have to actually sit down and think because, man, there's so many things that you don't know that you are currently facing that are not normal, that are very, very abnormal. If you can write, write those stories in, you know, in five essays, the only... Adriana, maybe you can add the, the link to the application at all.ADRIANA:Oh yeah. Absolutely. I'll, I'll include that in the show notes for sure.EROMOSELE:Yeah. Awesome. So, write you write your story and then if you get selected, oh, you got you go through the first phase. So the, the second phase of the second phase, you have, you have to pick an open source project. And I picked OpenTelemetry. I'm so happy I did, but yeah.ADRIANA:Did you randomly pick it or was it something about it where you're like, this is something that interests me because of something you read?EROMOSELE:Yeah, yeah. You know, so I was, I would say I was late. I was late and I was also very interested in, you know, then I was learning DevOps. So like DevOps of seemed very familiar. So I'm like, okay, let's go for OpenTelemetry. And it seemed like the most familiar thing for me at that time. Yeah. But there are many other projects. Yes. Wikimedia. There's OCaml really, really other awesome open source communities. So then you have to pick the project and then you have to contribute to the project and be very you have to stand out because most times we compete with a lot of people that I was competing with like 59 other people. Don't. Yeah. Don't don't be scared. Because at first I was scared because the people I was competing with were like, senior engineers, like, have been doing this for long.And I was like, oh my gosh, how will I get this done? But, you know, the mentors are not biased. They see effort. So they see that you put in so much effort because someone that has been writing Go for the past ten years, you know, the effort I'll put in is like the same effort you put in and they grade effort more than experience, because what they want to do is they want to empower people. So once you get in welcome to Outreachy. So that's how...ADRIANA:That's great. That's great. So I love that because you know it's really and I think this is what tech should be all about. It's not necessarily what skills do you have now. It's like what is your potential. And I think that's what it is like. I think we need to be able to invest in people based on their potential, because otherwise you like miss out on awesome people, right? So that's that's great. Is the internship is it a paid or unpaid internship?EROMOSELE:Well, it's paid - $7,000.ADRIANA:Right on! That's amazing. I ask because like there's some internships where people are like working a lot and then they it's like an unpaid internship. That's great. Awesome, awesome. Very cool. Feels like very worthwhile. And and just to, clarify. So you said you need to have done a contribution in the open source project that you selected. So, so you need so like, when you applied for Outreachy, you had already done like an OTel contribution at that point?EROMOSELE:No. I hadn't. I had no...ADRIANA:Oh, okay. Oh, it's just like as part of the part of the internship, like, once you get selected, you.EROMOSELE:Yeah, yeah.ADRIANA:You have to, you have to fulfill that as a, as a requirement of the program. Cool, cool. And then and then, as part of Outreachy then are you like, because, like, if I recall, like, Juraci, he was at Grafana before. Yuri was at, at RedHat Both awesome guys, by the way. I can totally vouch. Juraci was actually on the podcast before, and, but so are you working then under the umbrella of OpenTelemetry or under the umbrella of, like, whatever company that, like the your kind of Outreachy mentor is is working at?EROMOSELE:I'm working on an umbrella of OpenTelemetry.ADRIANA:Okay. Okay.EROMOSELE:So they they're like my mentors.ADRIANA:That's awesome. Well. Thank you. Thank you so much for for explaining how the Outreachy program works. I think this is, a really, really cool opportunity, especially for for folks who are looking to get into open source and get some, some cool work experience. And, yeah, it sounds it sounds like a great program. Juraci always talks about Outreachy, and now I understand why he's so passionate about it. So this is this is truly, truly amazing. And, you know, that's a perfect way to to wrap up our episode. So thank you so much, Eromosele for geeking out with me today. Y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...EROMOSELE:Peace out and geek out!ADRIANA:Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking out is also produced by my daughter Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally design all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

Parveen Khan, Quality Practice Lead at CFC and passionate advocate for high-quality products, shares her insights on leadership in tech. She discusses the power of seeking help and fostering open communication to enhance collaboration. Parveen emphasizes the importance of authenticity in leadership, urging leaders to create safe environments for their teams. The conversation also explores the dynamics of transitioning roles and the value of networking, highlighting the need for resilience and continuous learning in professional growth.

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

Mariana Carvalho, a writer, career mentor, and co-founder of Brazilians in Tech, shines a light on the importance of empowering women in technology. She shares her inspiring journey from marketing to tech, emphasizing how seizing opportunities shapes careers. The conversation dives into the significance of community connections for women, sustainable tech practices, and accessible education in the field. Mariana's personal stories of triumph and resilience highlight the vital role of supporting each other in driving diversity and inclusion.

Autumn Nash, a Product Manager at Microsoft specializing in Linux Security, shares her inspiring journey from an art background to the tech world. She discusses the unique struggles of balancing motherhood and a tech career, emphasizing the need for community support. Autumn opens up about navigating societal pressures, self-promotion, and mental health challenges that many working moms face. She also highlights the importance of leveraging privilege to empower others and create a supportive environment in the tech industry.

About our guest:Whitney is a lovable goofball and a CNCF Ambassador who enjoys understanding and using tools in the cloud native landscape. Creative and driven, Whitney recently pivoted from an art-related career to one in tech. You can catch her lightboard streaming show ⚡️ Enlightning on Tanzu.TV, and she also co-hosts the streaming show You Choose! - a 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure'-style journey through the CNCF landscape alongside Viktor Farcic.Find our guest on:YouTubeLinkedInBlueskyMastodonFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:Procreate AppMERN StackColumboCodezillas: The Universal Truth to Building Trust (Devoxx UK)Mutual Benefit (band)Love's Crushing Diamond (album: Mutual Benefit)Hack Reactor (software engineering bootcamps)Adriana on EnlightningLightboardSometimes, Lipstick is Exactly What a Pig Needs (Platform Engineering Day)Abby Bangser on Geeking OutViktor FarcicDevOps ToolkitChoose Your Own Adventure: The Struggle for Security (KubeCon)Additional notes:⚡️ Enlightning (YouTube)You Choose (YouTube)Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And Geeking Out with me today I have Whitney Lee. Welcome, Whitney.WHITNEY: Hello. I'm so happy to be here.ADRIANA: I am super excited that you were able to join and I want to get into this a little bit later, but we're like kindred spirits in some ways, like because we have photography in common. Although you did it way later than me. I mean, way longer than me. I'm super excited to have you join.WHITNEY: Yay. I'm joining you from Austin, Texas.ADRIANA: Awesome. So cool. So to get started, we are going to do some icebreaker questions.WHITNEY: Bring it.ADRIANA: Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?WHITNEY: Presumably you mean which hand I write with. Not like which side of the bed I sleep on or I don't know which side of the car I drive on. I try to drive on the, on the right side when you do a steering wheel. So I'm, I'm right handed.ADRIANA: It's funny because when I was.WHITNEY: Yeah.ADRIANA: Oh, go ahead. Sorry.WHITNEY: Well, I write on the whiteboard as part of my, my job in the. It's switched in the camera. It's mirrored so it looks like I'm writing with my left hand to people. Yeah, but it's really just all mirrored. I'm writing like I'm not writing backwards.ADRIANA: It's funny because I was actually going to mention that because when you had me on Enlightning talks, I, I messaged you just before it started. I'm like, are you a lefty? I get so excited when I meet other lefties. I'm like, there's more of us. And yeah, I was wondering actually about writing on the Lightboard also on. I'm like, are you like really good at mirror writing?WHITNEY: It's hard enough to understand.ADRIANA: Because it totally looks like that in the videos.WHITNEY: Writing it backwards. Yeah.ADRIANA: I hear you. Okay, next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?WHITNEY: I am. I have given into the iPhone ecosystem and really like, it's kind of like all my family does it and I. So it's. I'm an iPhone girl. It's okay. No judgment either way though. Yeah.ADRIANA: Yeah. My, my family is also like all iPhone.WHITNEY: You get that one person in there who turns the, the chat green. They don't even know what they're doing.ADRIANA: This is, this is what wars are fought over. The. The Green Bubble. On a similar vein. And I think I might know your answer. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?WHITNEY: I. I use MacBook. MacBook Pros. Yeah.ADRIANA: Speaking to a fellow fan girl. All right, next question. Oh, yeah, go ahead.WHITNEY: I draw a lot. I've really gotten into the Procreate app. I guess it's on my iPad.ADRIANA: Yeah.WHITNEY: Still part of the Apple ecosystem. For a second, I thought it was any different. I'm not. Yeah, I'm a stereotype. It's okay.ADRIANA: Apple all the way. Woop woop. Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?WHITNEY: Oh, YAML.ADRIANA: I'm sure there's some, like, YAML haters who'd be like, grrrrr.WHITNEY: Well, my. My story is that I changed careers into tech relatively late in my life and relatively recently. Only, like four years ago now. Um, so I. When I. I went back to school and I went to a boot camp, and in the boot camp, I learned JavaScript. Like, for a year, I. I did like, it's called the MERN stack, but I can't remember what it all stands for. Now. The R is React. Yeah. And Node and Express. Okay. And the M is Mon. Mongo. Anyway, this is not interesting. Yeah. And so I spent. I spent like a year, like, eating, living. Living code in the MERN stack and learning how to be an application developer. And then I immediately got a job as a cloud developer and then never touched any of that knowledge ever again.ADRIANA: YAML is your language. That's awesome. I do like YAML. I was actually, like, just before we did this recording, I was editing a JSON file and it was like, getting mad at me because the. The syntax checker was like, you need a comma. I'm like, god damn it. If it was YAML, this wouldn't be a problem. And also making me use quotes.WHITNEY: Rude!ADRIANA: Yeah, I know, right? Okay, next question. Do you prefer dev or ops?WHITNEY: Oh, I get. I. You know, ops. Based on what I just said, I think you could get that.ADRIANA: That's what I assumed. And I know the answer to this question. JSON or YAML?WHITNEY: Yeah, you tell me. You tell me about me. I like this better.ADRIANA: I know, right? Like, all your questions are like, already. Your answers are already answering subsequent questions. I love it. Okay, next one. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?WHITNEY: Spaces. I prefer when my. When my YAML is structure aware. Spaces, whatever. Yes, yes.ADRIANA: And then do you prefer to learn through video or text?WHITNEY: Oh, ironically, since I make videos all day long, I don't I don't learn through video. I like text. Yeah.ADRIANA: People have said to me, they're like, oh, you make videos, so you must like to learn through videos. I'm like, no, I like reading stuff. It's way faster.WHITNEY: Very much. And I can go back over that. Like a video. Like the second I miss something, like when concepts are built on top of each other, the second you miss something or tune out for a little bit and try to come back, you've lost the context. And it takes a lot, it feels like it takes a lot of focus or like, or a good presenter who's always coming back and reminding you the context or like drawings or something to keep that context there. But yeah, it's easy to lose context in a video or a talk.ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. It's funny because, like, I keep thinking back to like my university days where, you know, like, if the professor was talking about something really complex and then like, you zone. It's similar thing, right? You zone out for a second and you're like, and, and you're screwed for the rest of the lesson. Unless, you know, you're bold enough to like, raise your hand and ask questions and if the professor doesn't flat out dismiss you. And, and, and I, I just keep thinking, I'm like, I, you know, if it were me going to school now, like, I, I don't know if I could do it. Like, I would just zone out so much. I'd be like, I need to like, have some sort of, you know, recording or some sort of, you know, proper record of the thing so that I could like, rewind. I'm like, sometimes I feel like I wish our brains could have like, you know, a just in time Google search on conversations or rewind on conversations. Because, like, I don't know about you, but for me, like being ADHD, I'll be like having a conversation and then I'll zone out. I'm like crap!WHITNEY: What'd I miss? Oh no.ADRIANA: I feel so terrible.WHITNEY: Redoing the college years. Like, I might get distracted. But these days, like this version of Whitney, I don't mind seeming like I don't know or actually not knowing or admitting that I zoned out or just like being this like, like, like college version of Whitney would be very shy about asking that question. And present day Whitney would be like, that does. I don't like getting up and yelling. I don't understand. Explain it.ADRIANA: I, that's such a great point. And I, I couldn't agree with you more. Like, past me would have been like, just terrified would just sit there in confusion. And now I'm like, I do. I. I've described it as like the Columbo thing where you're like, you know, like, just for my benefit, can you, like, explain this? Because I don't fully get it. And for you kids out there who don't know who Columbo is, link in the show notes. But yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting how, like, wisdom and I don't know, like, just after a while you're like, I ain't got time for this. I just need to know.WHITNEY: It's true. No time for my. Time for. I used it all up. It's gone now.ADRIANA: That is perfect. I love it. Final question. What is your superpower?WHITNEY: Oh, what's my superpower? I. I guess it's in line with, with not being afraid to ask questions or also maybe being super empathetic too. When I am a speaker, like, I'm making the talk that I want to hear. So it involves, it's really fast paced, it involves a lot of visuals, it has a lot of, A lot of context. So if you zone out, you, if you come back, you. You have stuff to bring you back and let you know where you are. Yeah, I'd say that's it. It's about it. I just don't care, so. I don't care how I seem, so I care a lot about doing my best.ADRIANA: Yeah.WHITNEY: But I don't care what people think because I know myself and I did my best. If someone's judging me after that point, then that's a problem with them and not a problem with me. Like, it. So what. What was my answer and all of that? I just blabbed a lot. I don't. Empathy combined with not caring what people think combined with storytelling.ADRIANA: Yep. Yep. That's awesome. That's awesome. I love it so much. Yeah. And I, I think that's something because I think so many people in tech have, like, can be so self conscious of, of how they do. And I've. I've spoken to so many people, so it's so. I, I love it that you're like, yep, I did. I did what I could. I did my best. And that's. And I'm happy with that. And I think that's so refreshing.WHITNEY: And my, my best varies from moment to moment. Like, I can see a video I made a year ago and it's a little cringy because I didn't know then what I. Something I know now, you know, but I know at that moment. I did my best, so I still can feel proud of that content.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's actually, like, such a great way of looking at it. And it's also a really good opportunity to see, like, how much you've grown too, right?WHITNEY: Yeah.ADRIANA: Look at me now.WHITNEY: If you don't cringe at your past videos, your past journal entries, just like your past stuff, then that means you're not growing fast enough. So true. It should embarrass you.ADRIANA: Oh, my god. You mentioned journal entries, But I'm like, thinking back to when I was a kid rereading my journal entries, I'm like, ugh.WHITNEY: That's great. You've come so far.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Cool.ADRIANA: Well, we. We have completed the. The icebreaker questions, so I wanted to talk, you know, we. You alluded to the fact that you. You came into tech later in life. I want to talk about, like, what you were doing before and then what led you to tech. Tell us about your journey.WHITNEY: Oh, buckle in. It's a long one. So my degree, I graduated in 2003. I'm 45 years old. I graduated in 2003 with a degree in fine art. And for a moment, I even had a bit of a fine art career. But at some point I was like, I actually need more money than what's happening right now. So I started a wedding photography business. And I'd already been doing wedding photography as. So my degrees in photography specifically as a side job while I was making art. And so I just focused all my attention on this wedding photography business. And I had a wedding photography business here in Austin, Texas for 10 years. It was a long time. And I think I've personally been to 500 weddings. And my company, all in all, photographs were like 1200 weddings or something ridiculous. Because I had other photographers who'd work, worked for me, but by the end of it, I hated it. I hated it so deeply. I cannot understate this.ADRIANA: I can totally relate.WHITNEY: Yeah, you said before that you've had a. A year's worth of wedding photography.ADRIANA: Yeah, I did family photography, so. And, you know, like, hats off to you doing wedding photography, because I feel like that is like the ultimate stressful type of photography because you cannot up. You have to capture the perfect day for the bride and groom or else.WHITNEY: Yes. And. And it's actually my first talk ever was called, "Codezillas; The Universal Truth to Building Trust". Because there is so much about communication and like, people are making different assumptions about what is what wedding photography, what their wedding photograph should like, look like. And some people want a documentary style and some people want these specific portraits. And if you don't get a portrait of just the bride and the groom at the front of the church, then you might as well not have photographed anything else the whole day. You know, even though you have beautiful portraits of them outside and beautiful portraits of each of them alone at the front of the church, this may or may not have actually happened. This is not a hypothetical. Anyway. It was. It was. And also, like the editing, the photographs. You take hundreds and hundreds of photographs on the day. Like, getting those down to the good ones and then editing those so they look nice. Like, that's very tedious work. And it's not interesting tedious. And it's not tedious but I'm growing. It's just tedious for the sake of being tedious. And. And once. And so I was either, like buried under a mountain of editing or buried under a mountain of communication of emails and then just general admin work. And I didn't feel like on top of my life for many years. I just always felt behind, like, I'm letting someone.ADRIANA: I can so relate to all of this. We did it for a year. And I want to add also, I don't know if you felt this, but, like, considering, like, what you charged and the amount of time and effort you put into it, it felt like you end up getting paid, like, less than minimum wage.WHITNEY: It's true.ADRIANA: And then the other one, I tell me if this ever happened to you, the. But you took like hundreds of photos. Where are all of them? And it's like, yo, a bunch of them are crap.WHITNEY: Yeah, you don't want to see all of them. You don't look good all the time.ADRIANA: So mad they're like, what happened to all the photos you took? It's like, I promised you 100, you get 100.WHITNEY: So. So I was stuck in the circular life of booking. When you book a wedding, you take half the money and then you get the second half when you shoot the wedding. And like, it's hard to break out because you. You're losing as soon as you stop. You stop getting booking money. But you still have to shoot weddings. So it's a circle that's hard to break. And so. So my. I have younger brothers, and one of my brothers, his name is Jordan, he is. He is a band called Mutual Benefit. So it's a musical project. It sounds like a whole band, but it's all. He does all the arranging. And then he might play all the instruments or hire out the ones he can't play. And so his album in 2014 got a lot of success. It got on, like, Pitchfork's Top New Music and Rolling Stone's Top 50 Albums of the year and this and that. And so it's mutual Benefit Love's Crushing Diamond is the album. So since this music is all was all just made by him solo, he needed to put together a band to go on tour. And he asked me to play in the band in 2014. Yeah. And so that was exactly, like, the excuse I needed to be able to get out of wedding photography without saying I failed. You know, I was like, oh, I got this cool opportunity. I have to do it. And so I spent all my savings returning those wedding deposit money. And then my partner at the time wasn't supportive. We'd been together eight years. I broke up with them, and then I put all my stuff into storage and I lived without an address for a year in 2014.ADRIANA: Oh, my god. Wow. What instrument did you play?WHITNEY: I played keys and I'd sing harmonies with my brother.ADRIANA: Oh, that's so cool.WHITNEY: Yeah. So that happened in 2014, and I toured for a year, and when I got back to Austin, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew what I did not want to do with my life, and that is wedding photography. Wedding photography.ADRIANA: So you. You had, like, you said you had, like, a whole company around this, so, like, you just shuttered the whole thing.WHITNEY: Yeah.ADRIANA: Like, and you had employees as well. Like, they were.WHITNEY: They were independent contractors. So they. I would get them wedding business, but they could also get their own wedding business and they were able to. So I just stopped. Yeah second shooters.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah. Okay. So the combination of, like, they'll. They'll do, like, they do primary or primary or secondary kind of thing.WHITNEY: Yeah.ADRIANA: Cool.WHITNEY: And then, like, all my. All my photo gear is up in my attic collecting dust.ADRIANA: Yeah. I haven't touched my camera in forever. I didn't have money to buy the lenses that I bought during my photography years. And now that I do, I'm like.WHITNEY: I do think about getting a little camera that I can keep in my pocket when I travel, just so I don't need to use my phone. Like. Yeah, well, I could actually finally, like, use that knowledge that I built up. Like, I'm a master in this one area that I just don't do anything about. But anyway, so we're back. So I'm back from tour. Yeah, it's like 2015 now, and I am not a wedding photographer, but I don't know who I am. And so I was I drove for Lyft and Uber for a while, and then I worked at restaurants for a while. I was a server at like a. A fancy Japanese cuisine restaurant here in Austin. And then I switched to being a server at like a. A hippie vegetarian cafe, which is way more my speed. And then my son was in college and he was like, mom, he's in. In college for software engineering. And he's like, mom, you would really like this. You should try. You should try coding. It was 2019, now it's in January, and I write my very first line of code. All it is is an online introduction course to the program I went to called Hack Reactor. I'm not even sure if it survived the pandemic, but it had a pipeline to get you through. And I totally just wrote that first line and then I could ride the wave of what Hack Reactor told me to do next. So at first it was a. An online course that I was in maybe four nights a week for three hours a night or something like that for January. And it's like, oh, I really like that. And then they trained me up to pass their entrance exam and I did that. And then, then I had to do hundreds of hours of coding to get into the to pre course they called it. So I was accepted, but I had to complete this before I was allowed to start. So then in July of 2019 is when I actually went in person to the bootcamp right before the pandemic. We had no idea.ADRIANA: Oh, my god.WHITNEY: Yeah, So I was there 11 hour days, 6 days a week for 3 months. So, like in 2019, I really just like, lived in JavaScript and code. And then in October of 2019, I graduated. And in November of 2019, I was a cloud developer at IBM.ADRIANA: Oh, wow, that is amazing. And did you love, like, the course, like those long days where you, like, was there ever a point where you're like, oh my god, why am I doing this crap?WHITNEY: No, I loved it because I. I hadn't had a direction in quite some time, so it was nice to. To feel like I was doing something. And even, even with wedding photography, like, I don't feel like I was really stretching what I could do or applying my intelligence or like, you know, growing.ADRIANA: Yeah.WHITNEY: And so I. I was craving it. So by the time it came around, it was great. Although I will say, like, when I was in regular school, I was used to being an A student and I would work really hard to be an A student, and it was part of my identity that I'm like, I have good at school. And then I got into boot camp and I was not at all the best. I wasn't even. I was like medium easily, maybe slightly below. But that was because everyone else in the course had a lot more tech experience coming into it. And then we're all learning at a breakneck, breakneck speed once we're in there. It's not like normal school where you can spend extra time because there literally is no extra time.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.WHITNEY: But also, I think coding school taught me a growth mindset that I really didn't have before. I wasn't raised with the growth mindset. And so when I was. When I figured out to see the people around me with, who share my interests, these people are my community. They're not my competition. And that just, like, makes the world such a better place. It makes everything about life way better if you can shift your mindset from competition to community, the same people around you.ADRIANA: Yeah, that is so true.WHITNEY: Yeah. That's the big thing that. That bootcamp taught me that. And just like, you know, it helped me see what I'm capable of. But when I got that job as a cloud developer at IBM, I had no idea what I didn't know, which is a good, good thing. Like, I had no idea how complex and vast the world of cloud technology was and how little I knew about any of it. Like, the first I heard, the first I learned Kubernetes was in preparation for the job interview for IBM.ADRIANA: Oh, damn.WHITNEY: Yeah.ADRIANA: And. And this was then, like, so outside of, like, what you had learned, though, in your coding boot camp, but I guess in a lot of ways, though, like, what you had picked up, like, you picked up some, like, you know, they weren't necessarily like, you know, the technical programming skills from the boot camp. I mean, you pick those up, but you're able to transfer, like the learning part of it to.WHITNEY: To this. Right, exactly. Yeah. Learning. Learning how to learn.ADRIANA: Yes, yes.WHITNEY: And so. So at IBM, I build out, I was like, they hired broadly across from, like, either new college grads or new boot camps. Like, that was like their thing.ADRIANA: Oh, cool.WHITNEY: Killer role. Which meant I was like 20 years older than most other people around me, all of my colleagues, and just like one of just a very few number of women there. It was very different, but they. My job was to build out proof of concepts for potential clients using IBM technologies. And it was meant to be a travel position, but the pandemic happened, which. So it wasn't a travel position, but I had signed up to be gone like 70 of the time, which I was excited about. But later I was thankful didn't happen because for those type of jobs your travel is going to strip malls and suburbs and yeah, you know, it's not like, it's not like.ADRIANA: What made you apply to IBM in the first place. Like having, having completed like the coding boot camp, going basically from the dev world to the world. Yeah. What, what inclined you to, to apply for that?WHITNEY: I was going to say yes to literally anybody who took me had nothing to do with being interested in cloud or even understanding what it is. And if anything, because I clearly gravitate toward visual stuff, I thought DevOps would be bad for me because it's like I thought making applications where I'm interacting with visual components related to that application was going to be where I land. And so DevOps was just like, I'll do anything for my first year or two to get, get my foot in the door and then I'll figure out what I actually want to do. And so that's all I've applied to everything and I've been CS first.ADRIANA: That's awesome. I love it. I love it. And did you find like, with your, with your background like being so artistic, did that help you with, with the tech side of things? Because I always like, I think in technology like there is so much creativity involved it's just not necessarily obvious to you know, the outsider who might, they'd be like, what do you mean? Creative.WHITNEY: So those of you who are familiar with my work, I most things I do have some sort of big visual component. My talks, when I give them are almost animated. I have so many slides. I use GIFs, not GIFs like hand drawn GIFs that I drew. Like I hand draw like 100 slides and flip through them real quick and it's like, and then my, my show called Enlightening is a very heavily visual show. I have a Lightboard studio in my home and so but I didn't, when I started, I didn't realize that my visual part was going to come in handy. In fact, when I started I thought everything I've done in my life leading up to this point has been a waste of time because now I'm just doing something brand new and now I know that's not true at all. Like there are so many lessons I learned from before. Even lessons about communicating well with, with wedding clients very much come into play about communicating well about software delivery. So although all that stuff has been really useful and I'm glad for that and my, well, my rounded background has come in handy because I'm very different here. But I like how I'm different and I like how I can learn technical concepts but kind of come at them at a different way and teach them again in a way that's, that's unique, that's special to me.ADRIANA: I love that. And you know, I gotta give a shout out to your Enlightning show because like when you had me on as a guest, like I am in awe over first of all, like you run such a well oiled machine so like hats off to you, like for real. But also like one thing that I really appreciate is like you are also taking this opportunity to like learn new things and, and you're basically like you're learning on the spot and you're demonstrating that you're learning because then you're regurgitating it back to your guest, which I think is so, so cool. And yeah, I just have so much admiration for, for your work because that takes a lot of, you know, like time and effort to put together and you're just nailing it.WHITNEY: Thank you. So if you don't mind, I'm going to say what Enlightning is just for those people who are listening who maybe don't know Enlightning. It's a streaming show and on my show I want to learn about a concept or a technology. So I'll invite a guest on to be an expert. So you've been a guest on my show. It was a wonderful show about Observability 2.0. And so when the guest comes on and I know nothing about what they're going to teach, sometimes I know context because I've done related tools, but I basically don't know anything. And I start, I'm behind an empty light board and there the little square on the, on the screen and through words only, no demo, no screen sharing, they teach me about a technical concept and then I take notes and maybe draw diagrams on the, on the board as we go. So I can't pretend to know something I don't know because I'm actually held accountable by needing to write it on the board or capture the information somehow. And it's nice because it forces me to ask clarifying questions. I would write this on the board. Would you say it's true if I write this verb instead of this other verb? You told me. And we kind of get at the crux of maybe some confusing things without realizing you don't even know that you don't quite have the concept right in your mind until you try to write it down and you have the X. Yeah. But we end, we end up going from like zero to like good, good entry level knowledge within an hour and a half or two hour show. And it's really fun.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate too, that it, you know, there's like refinement along the way.WHITNEY: Right.ADRIANA: Because it puts, you know, your guest is, you know, forced to like, really think about what, how to communicate the idea because you're writing it down. So it's, it's basically like as a guest, you, your guests have to teach you and then you have to show that you've learned the material. So it's, it's like this mutual thing going on there that works extremely well. And I think also because you put your guests very much at ease, you have a very chill vibe on your show. Very much. Appreciate it. So y'all need to check out Enlightning.WHITNEY: Thank you. Thanks. It's a blast to make and I feel so, so much gratitude that I get like masterclass lessons every week from people who are experts in their field.ADRIANA: And do you run these like every single week or do you have like, periods where you're like, I'm going on a break? Like, how, how's that work?WHITNEY: So I have another show called You Choose, which we'll talk about shortly. But I, I like to use Enlightning as a vehicle to get to know all the tools I need to know for you choose. So leading up to You Choose, I might do two Enlightnings a week for a while, but then, but then I'll go down to zero for a couple months. So it tends to be all or nothing based on what, what my personal learning needs to be. And right now I'm doing, I'm doing a whole series on Observability tooling. So I'm covering all the CNCF tools around Observability, and that's been really fun. And your episode really got me off on the right foot in terms of getting the context of everything that's going on. So I appreciate that.ADRIANA: That's awesome. I got to ask, what gave you the idea of starting Enlightning in the first place?WHITNEY: All right, I was at IBM. I was a cloud developer. Things are fine. I got, quote, unquote, promoted this. The. I was on the cloud pack acceleration team, but that got dissolved and I got quote, unquote, promoted to be a customer success manager. And customer success manager. I'm more man. They want me to more manage people teams to come in and implement solutions. But I'm, I'm really doing a lot of managing and not enough like tech hands on. I want to be technical and it's not a very technical position and so I didn't like that about it. Meanwhile, at IBM, I had found my way onto the IBM Cloud YouTube channel behind their Lightboard there. So if you Google what is RabbitMQ or what is Kafka, you'll see my, my, my face, my little, very young Whitney face telling you about that. But so at some point I realized like I like making these videos a lot and I don't like this new customer success success position I'm in. And I learned that there's such a thing called a developer advocate. So I started looking for developer advocate positions and I learned about one at VMware Tanzu and it required deep Kubernetes expertise. And I was like, I definitely do not have deep Kubernetes expertise. But I mean I want to apply anyway because I'll have some conversations, I'll meet some people, I'll learn about this idea of a developer advocate role. Like there's nothing to lose here. So I applied for the job and I met some wonderful people as part of the interview process and I did not get that job because I was under qualified for that job. But they liked me and my personality so much and the videos I'd made for IBM Cloud that they made a whole new job just for me on the team.ADRIANA: Oh my god, that's like the ultimate form of flattery. That's so great.WHITNEY: It's so nice. And they also bought the Lightboard Studio that you see behind me for me back then. So they hooked me up with the Lightboard studio, they gave me a developer advocate job and then they were just like, okay, now make some content. So at first after I got done being really flattered and shocked, then I was like, oh my god, what have I done? I have to make content. I don't know anything. So I just see, so Enlightning was a way of making my myself vulnerable and like having experts explain what their technology does to this really this woman who's really new actually, which is less me now. And back then I would be like, okay, what's a custom resource again? But anyway, that's how that got started because I needed a way to make consistent content as someone who was brand new. And then I conceived of Enlightning as a way to be able to accomplish that.ADRIANA: That's so cool. And I want to switch gears a little bit because if I recall correctly, you were also recently part of like the first Platform Engineering Day colocated event. Is that.WHITNEY: Yeah, I was a keynote speaker. Yeah.ADRIANA: Yeah, you and Abby did that. I heard great things about the talk. I haven't caught it yet about. There was something about lipstick on a pig.WHITNEY: It' called, "Sometimes Lipstick is Exactly What a Pig Needs". And it's about how and when to build different types of platform interfaces. The punchline is, you want to build an API, all your logic should be behind that API. That's your pig. And then whatever interface you want to put, the API could be a building block and then you could add your interface. That's the lipstick on the pig. That was. That was fun and an absolute gift to get to do that, especially with Abby. Abby is wonderful. I love, love, love Abby.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, she's great. I've had her on the show before and I, I keep joking with her, like, you know, we gotta play like Six Degrees of Abby Bangser her because, like, she knows so many people. She's recommended so many people for this show in particular and so many other people know Abby, I'm like, oh, my god.WHITNEY: And you should see her. Yeah. At KubeCon. She doesn't sleep. She has someone to see. She's at morning Coffee, Platform Coffee. She closes down the bar at night. Yeah.ADRIANA: Yeah. That's awesome.WHITNEY: It's impressive on so many levels.ADRIANA: Absolutely. And so, so for like the Platform Engineering Day, were you, were you also one of the organizers for that or.WHITNEY: No, no, I just. No, I just showed up. I gave my talk. It was great though. Props to the organizers.ADRIANA: Yeah. These things take a lot of, A lot of effort to put together. I tell you. I've assisted in putting together KubeHuddle here in Toronto. You know, I, I was not a. I would say, like, I was not the main organizer, but it was still a lot of, A lot of work to put together. So hats off to folks who to organizers, like, oh my god, like anyone who works like KubeCon. Like KubeCon organizers. Holy cow. That's like. That's like rock concert level event. I tell you.WHITNEY: It's impressive. So far it's not something I've had the urge to do in any way, shape or form. I think it's a little similar. T oo close to Weddings that it makes.ADRIANA: A little bit of PTSD there.WHITNEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel.ADRIANA: Yeah, I feel you.WHITNEY: But if it's okay, I'd love to talk about the other show. You Choose. Since I mentioned it. Is that all right? Yeah, you know about You Choose?ADRIANA: No, I don't. I've heard of it and that's the extent of it. So, yeah, please enlighten me.WHITNEY: Okay, so you choose is a show I co-host with Viktor Farcic on his YouTube channel, which is called DevOps Toolkit. And on You Choose. We start with application code on a developer's laptop, and we need to help that application navigate its way through the entire CNCF. And so each episode represents a different system design choice. And so the very first episode, for example, was building a container image. That's what we need to do with this source code on a developer's laptop. So then we gather all the relevant CNCF technology that can do that thing, and then we have a guest on that represents each technology. Usually a maintainer, but it could be an advocate or super user or something too. And each presenter, each. Each expert gets only five minutes to present about their technology because we just want to know the basics of what it is. We don't want to. We don't want all the bells and whistles, in fact, that can get confusing when we just need to know what it does. And so then we have a question and answer part of the show, and then we put it to a vote, and we ask the community to vote about which one they want to see implemented into our ongoing demo. So the one that got chosen, we try not to say one, sometimes I slip. The one that got chosen, not the one that won, but the one that got chosen was buildpacks. Cloud native buildpacks. And so at the beginning of the next episode, we implemented buildpacks into the ongoing demo. And then the episode itself was about container registries, which different container registries in the CNCF and how they're different from each other. So it's a comparative view of different technologies with a little bit of, like, competitive twist. Even though we try not to make it competitive, that little. It's a little there. And it's a really nice. It's a really nice overview of how different tools work together in the cncf.ADRIANA: So it's like a little choose your own adventure kind of thing while you're building.WHITNEY: Exactly.ADRIANA: Mega example.WHITNEY: Yes, exactly. In fact, we, we, we conceived of it because we wanted to do a choose your own adventure style talk for KubeCon. And we did. And, and, and then we're like, well, this is. We're gonna. So the, the very first choose your own adventure talk we did for KubeCon was from the developer's laptop through to a development environment and that we came up with seven different system design choices, if I recall correctly. And we're like, oh, there's a lot of projects we need to learn about in time for KubeCon, so let's make this into a streaming show. Yeah. To help us get organized.ADRIANA: Right. So great.WHITNEY: And so that we've been. We've been at it for a year and a half, almost two years, I think. So we did. We call them chapters because of the choose your own adventure thing. So chapter one is from source code to a developer's laptop. So it's like building container image configuration. Well, there's only cert manager, but we have one for HTTPs, adding a database, that sort of thing. And then development environments that run on Kubernetes themselves. And then our second chapter was getting it from a development environment to a production environment, which is actually a very short chapter because production doesn't have all the things production needs to be production. It's just on that for that chapter we covered GitOps and declaratively defining a cluster, how you're going to do that with infrastructure as code and oh, ingress, we covered on that one. And then chapter three was all about security. Then we added security to our cluster and that one had like 10 different system design choices and went through all the different security projects in the CNCF. And now we're doing Observability and that's coming up. We're going to start that the first week. The first Tuesday of September.ADRIANA: That's so cool. Yeah, that's very exciting. Wow. And so like when you. Your own adventure talk, then did you have audience engagement then to sort of help define the direction of. Of the talk as it was going? Is that the idea of it?WHITNEY: That's a great question. Yes, we absolutely have live voting during our talk. And Victor, I do all the exciting explaining of each of the system design choice, like why the system design choice and then all the tools and then what differentiates the tools from each other. And then Victor does the. Then people vote and Victor does the live demo based on people choose in real time. Yeah. During the talk.ADRIANA: Kudos to both of you, that is. That is a lot to. To do. That's a lot of pressure. Makes for a great talk though. It sounds, it sounds really fun and engaging.WHITNEY: It's really fun and funny. And we, we just, we presented the talk at different KCDs or Kubernetes Community Days over the summer. We did three of them and on the one in Zurich, Victor completely crashed the demo. Like everything. He didn't get a single, a single thing right. But it was still really fun and informative and people, like, people even asked us afterward, like, did we crash it on purpose? I was like, I don't know to what end we would do that. Like, why on earth, what we would be hoping to achieve. But like, we took it in stride and had so much fun with it that they, they didn't, they didn't understand that it was definitely not on purpose. They thought maybe we meant to do it that way. Yeah.ADRIANA: Very cool. And I, I wanted to ask, like, you know, you're. You're obviously like, very comfortable doing talks and, and whatnot. What, what was your, what first got you on the speaking circuit? Like, where. When did you go? Like, hey, I want to try this out?WHITNEY: Well, when I got the job as a developer advocate here at VMWare Tanzu, I got the job thinking I was going to make a bunch of Lightboard content. And then once I got here, then I realized that there's a big speaking engagement part to it too that like, all of my co workers on my small team are all speaking at conferences. And then. And so one of them in particular reached out to me about us making a talk together. And so I just. Yeah. So the. I feel like I just rode the waves and that's where they took me. I didn't set out to make to be like, oh, I need to be a speaker now. But I just, it was just like such a natural part of, of the job that I just moved right in. Yeah.ADRIANA: That's awesome. And plus, like, you get to use your, your extreme creativity as part of it, which is so cool.WHITNEY: Yeah. And even the, the musician part of my background, like, I have practice performing, so the biggest crowds, yeah, they were scary at first, I'm not gonna lie. But they're what I got. Maybe got over it a little faster since.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah.WHITNEY: Performance practice.ADRIANA: Yeah, it all goes back to, you know, the fact that all of the things that we've encountered in our past, no matter how insignificant they seemed at the time, like they helped build us into what we are today.WHITNEY: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Don't discredit anything you've done in the past. It all, it matters more than you realize. It all comes together.ADRIANA: Absolutely. And also, I want to mention that, like, there's. It's funny because, like, I'd say, like, traditionally, I think a lot of people tend to assume that you have to have like a degree in like, computer science, computer engineering to be in tech. And, and I've had The pleasure of meeting so many people who, you know, that wasn't their original background, where they either got into tech by, you know, they were self taught or they attended a boot camp. And it's just so cool to see the diversity in these backgrounds and these types of people bring so much into tech and you know, that cannot. Like, it's so underrated and I think it needs to be. We need to remind folks like it's, it's tech is, is awesomely inclusive in that respect.WHITNEY: I love that about it. Yes. I love it so much. I, I am surprised how much I love DevOps. Like, I really thought getting that first job out of bootcamp that I would do DevOps a couple years and then get somewhere more interesting. I did not expect to absolutely fall in love with DevOps and with the community. It's the best.ADRIANA: I totally agree. DevOps is lots of fun. I found in my career was like the thing that was missing throughout my entire career. It's like, where have you been all my life?WHITNEY: Do you think it's the technologies or the people or both?ADRIANA: I think it's both. I have to say that initially it was definitely the technology that attracted me to it. And I started out in my tech career was very much in the corporate enterprise world, you know, very prim and proper and you know, I got in trouble for swearing at the office and it was like business casual attire. So I only saw the technology side. I really saw it as like a technology thing. And then as I've gotten more into the open source world, I have been so lucky to like meet so many people like you and others who have been on my show with different perspectives who are like such chill vibes and, and more most importantly for me, like meeting other women in tech because I feel like most of my career has been like just surrounded by a bunch of dudes in tech and like be able to collaborate with, with so many women and, and on my show I've had so many women in tech, which has been fantastic.WHITNEY: I love that.ADRIANA: Yeah, for me, like that that's just the ultimate thing. So, you know, in the end the, the, the people end up trumping the technology because they have so much, so many different cool perspectives to bring and then they lead me to, to like other avenues of technology.WHITNEY: Kudos to you for bringing, for highlighting so many women voices on your show. I love that.ADRIANA: Oh, thank you. Well, we are coming up on time, but before we wrap up, I was wondering if there were any parting words of wisdom that you wanted to share with folks in our audience.WHITNEY: I'll no pressure. I'll. I'll restate what I said earlier in the episode because I think it means a lot if you see the people around you who are interested in what you're interested in as your community and not as your competition. It makes your life a much more joyful and peaceful and happy place.ADRIANA: Absolutely. And I, I think these are excellent words to, to part with and, and I hope everyone takes this to heart because it really, it just makes the work a lot better that way.WHITNEY: Absolutely.ADRIANA: Well, thank you so much, Whitney, for geeking out with me today. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe. And be sure sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...WHITNEY: Peace out and geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:Austin Emmons is an iOS Developer at Embrace Mobile, a company that works on Observability for mobile applications and beyond. Austin has been developing for Apple platforms since the early iOS days. Outside of tech, he enjoys mountain biking, rock climbing, and taking his dog, Nacho, on new adventures.Find our guest on:LinkedInGitHubFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:Objective-CSwiftLibbyReact NativeUnity (Game Engine)OpenTelemetry SwiftOpenTelemetry Semantic ConventionsJoin CNCF SlackOTel Client Side Telemetry SIG channel on CNCF SlackOTel Android SIG channel on CNCF SlackOTel Swift SIG channel on CNCF SlackNacho Bonafonte (Swift SIG maintainer)OTel End User SIG channel on CNCF SlackAdditional notes:Embrace Apple SDKEmbrace Android SDKTranscript:ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks! Welcome to Geeking out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have Austin Emmons. Welcome, Austin.AUSTIN: How's it going?ADRIANA: Not bad. Super happy to have you here.AUSTIN: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.ADRIANA: And where are you calling from?AUSTIN: I'm based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.ADRIANA: Awesome. Well, are you ready for the lightning round questions?AUSTIN: Yeah, let's do it.ADRIANA: Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?AUSTIN: Righty.ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?AUSTIN: I'm an iOS developer, so iPhone. I get tempted every, every time Google comes out with a new Pixel. I'm definitely tempted, but I have to say iPhone.ADRIANA: Cool. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?AUSTIN: Mac my entire life. And I got made fun of a lot in college when I showed up to computer science with a MacBook and I was just like, well, I'm, I'm, I'm dual booting Windows when I need to, but I would get out of that as soon as possible because I just, I would. Yeah, I had to hack together a lot of stuff just to get Java compiling and everything. And that was, that was fun. But yeah, definitely Mac.ADRIANA: Oh, damn, that's so cool. Yeah, I don't know, like, when I was in university, if there was like any. Anyone I ever saw with, actually. So when I was in school, there were very few of us with laptops and certainly not, I don't know of anybody who had a Mac at the time because I think they were like, also so expensive.AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, no, I, I cut a lot of lawns the summers prior to save up for the first Mac. And when I say hack together some stuff, I just had to, you know, look on the other side of the Internet, I guess, to figure out the. The instructions did not come in the course syllabus like it did for everybody else.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's so cool. Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?AUSTIN: Swift. I really like. It's, it's, it's strict, very strict, but it's also very expressive. And if I need to write something quick or for some personal projects, Ruby would be my, my go-to. I've had a prior life as a Rails developer where I learned a lot of the server side stuff and so Ruby really, you know, opened my eyes to that. Yeah. And yeah, I find like throughout my career it's either like you're a Python shop or a Ruby shop. Somehow I've thread the needle to lean on the Ruby side of things, and now I'm at a Python shop. But I'm an iOS developer, so I don't have to focus on it too much.ADRIANA: Oh, that's so interesting. It's funny, I've had quite a few Ruby folks on this podcast and the thing that I always find with the Ruby folks is that they really, really love Ruby, which I think it's so cool. I think it speaks to the community.AUSTIN: It's a. It's just like, it's just simple to me. I don't know, like it just clicks of, okay, that makes sense. And it's maybe not as powerful, but the community for sure is there. Like, it's amazing. And then when you want to tear open somebody's gem or somebody's work, you. You can. And so, yes, it's open source to the fullest, I think, which is awesome.ADRIANA: That's very cool. It's funny, I was talking to someone because I. You. You were talking about like, you know, as Ruby being your go to if you want to like, throw something together quickly. And I actually had a very similar conversation with someone last week about this. Also interviewing for the podcast and she was saying like, you know, she knows a bunch of languages, but like the one that she always comes home to is, is Ruby. So I thought that was interesting and it's kind of cool hearing it from two people now.AUSTIN: Yeah, I mean, recommend it to anybody that's trying either getting into programming or even if you've been a seasoned programmer, just try it out. It'll change how you think about programming. But that's any language. If you try out a new. That's what I love about kind of taste testing new languages. It's just like, okay, how do you do a for loop? Even that could be so different. And it's still for loop, but it's just good enough. And Ruby, for me, it was actually the innumerable like package or, you know, they have so many tiny little algorithms or methods that you can use just to map and all those. It's like that was a whole new introduction to me of like, oh, one, I get these for free. That's awesome. One. And then again another, I can chain them together and really do what I need to. And now I go to other languages and I. That's like the first thing I ask for. Look at, it's like, okay, now I need to get back into that more functional type of programming.ADRIANA: Right.AUSTIN: Even though Ruby is. Is very object oriented. So, yeah, it's, it's a good language.ADRIANA: Cool. Yeah. And to what you were saying earlier too, I think it's interesting. Like, I think one of my favorite things about like tackling new languages is that compare and contrast. Right. Because you already, you have the experience like of a base language and it's always so interesting to see how different languages approach different things and how they have their nuances and, you know, if they're more verbose than other languages you've worked with and whatnot.AUSTIN: Yeah, I, I mean for most of my career I actually had to straddle iOS and Android and that was very similar. Where it wasn't just I'm working in two different languages and I have to compare and contrast. Java at that point and Objective-C on the iOS side. It was actually the platforms themselves. It's like, okay, how do I show full screen content? You know, iOS you call it a view controller. Android, you call it an activity at that point. You still can, but they've kind of shifted the thinking to fragments and, and compose now. And so it's like you had to stay along and be up to date with every change that the platform developers were making on top of the changes of the language. And I would always implement the same feature two or three times where it's like, implement it for iOS first. Okay, that works. Have to implement it for Android. It's the same feature but I have to do it slightly differently. But I did it in a way that I have this experience that I like a little more. Okay, what can I take from that Android side and actually come back to my iOS implementation and improve that a little bit. And if you have the time, that's really beneficial because it just stretches your brain out and yeah, I couldn't recommend it enough.ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's so cool. So I'm, I think I know the answer, but what, what do you prefer developing on more iOS or Android?AUSTIN: You know, I recently had, it's iOS but I recently had some work to do. It's probably a year, year and a half ago in Kotlin on Android and I had stepped away from Android for probably three or four years and then come back to it for just a really quick two or three month project, and I loved it. Kotlin and, what they've done, it's just, I don't know, so much more intuitive than Java. It really feels like it is a first party product. In the early days of Android, when I was in my early days, I guess you could feel that it was an open source project and you could feel that the design patterns that they were using were different depending on what part of the platform you're working in. Whereas iOS was, everything is very cohesive. You know the Apple platforms and the frameworks, they provide very common design patterns. And so you knew like it, you felt used to it even though you had never seen this before. So you know, transitioning from requesting some the device location to the device motion, you know, it's almost identical code. On Android, there might have been separate patterns that used and so I think nowadays Android has leveled up and those design patterns are more similar or at least maybe it's just the entire community developing these packages have everybody's leveled up and come together on how they like Android code to look right.ADRIANA: Oh cool, that's awesome. Definitely seeing an evolution in the right direction on that one.AUSTIN: Yeah, just established patterns I think would be the, the best way to put it is like those have started to actually like solidify and take shape. And I mean, nowadays it's 10 years, almost 15 years for these platforms. So they're, they're getting up there in terms of the maturity which is interesting. And now we have new stuff to go work on and we'll see what the next frontier is, I guess.ADRIANA: That's very cool. And by the way like I, I, I want to go back to like your mention of Kotlin. So my dad is, he's like a software architect and he's retired now but he has been like a huge proponent of Kotlin forever. So he always like goes on and on about how much he liked and he was like an early adopter of Java. And then his, his thought around Java was like oh it's, it's like it's an anti pattern to programming just because you know, Java is like so, so verbose and so like heavy. And then when he, he, he did some, some Kotlin for, for some work that he was doing he would just go on and on and on and on about, about Kotlin and how elegant it is. So anyway, it made me maybe think of, of that comment that he made once you mentioned your, your Kotlin work as well.AUSTIN: Yeah, it's very similar to Swift too. There's, there's just going back to that, just that tiny comparison to the subtle nuance. It's, it's amazing like, and I can't think of like a good example. It's, but it's like the day to day stuff that you run into of just declaring a variable or you know, describing something as being lazy. It's like this is a pattern that has been well established in programming for years and now they've just made it a concise little keyword. And that's fantastic that it shows the evolution and it's again very expressive language, very type safe and just, you know, has null safety as well. So just a very safe language for. It's just, it's just helpful. Just the language itself is helpful, which is great when you're a developer and that's the tool you're using.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. Very cool. Okay, next question. Question. Do you prefer dev or ops?AUSTIN: Probably dev. And yeah, there's. It's tough because I want to build a new thing, but that thing also has to exist once I, you know, we put it out and, and maintaining and managing that is, is a whole different beast. But yeah, I would say building new features, working on new tools, trying to take the technology that we are given by these platform developers or these bigger corporations and put them together in new and different ways or just even just playing around with somebody's open source project that's new and different. It's like, okay, does this inspire me? Is this interesting? Is this useful? Can I use this on my day to day? That is a lot of fun and the hope is to be able to contribute back and put something else out there that somebody else finds interesting and useful and they can use on their day to day. And so yeah, for me, definitely just the development side of it.ADRIANA: Cool. And on a similar vein, similar ish, I guess. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?AUSTIN: For. Well, it depends what we're doing for config files. YAML 100% of the time. That's the Ruby and me, I think that was part of the Rails development is all. It's all YAML config for APIs and sending data to a server to a back end, it's all JSON and I don't know if anybody's used YAML on that side of it yet. That would be. I'd be curious to come across that.ADRIANA: Awesome. Also, do you prefer spaces or tabs?AUSTIN: Spaces. Yeah, I know they take more space.ADRIANA: I'm part, I'm part of Team Spaces, recent converts. So I'm. I'm down.AUSTIN: Yeah.ADRIANA: There's something. They're a lot more consistent too. Like you, no space in one OS is going to be the same as the other OS.AUSTIN: And well, I don't know if this makes me weird or not, but I need my tabs to be converted to spaces. I hate the space score six times. Like, if I'm in a text editor where I have to space out my indentation, I would go nuts. And so I'm sure no one is doing that, but I don't know when I have to, like, format something in Slack to send a code snippet off or something, and I find myself counting spaces, making sure they all line up. I'm like, all right, maybe. Maybe I should just move to tabs.ADRIANA: Yeah, I know what you mean. I have my VSCode configured to convert the tab key to spaces, so I'm totally down. Okay, two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?AUSTIN: Video, I would say. I even. I'm not a reader. I. But I. I recently got a library card and signed up for Libby, which is a great app if. If people haven't checked it out. But I stick in the audiobook section. And so I am listening to stuff as I'm walking the dog or, you know, prepping to get. Get to bed or something. And video is. Is kind of analogous to that where it's like, I need to be told and shown. Diagrams are fantastic, and straight text just. I find myself catching every, like, sixth, seventh, tenth word. It's kind of spaces out the longer the document. And then I'm just like, wait, I need to go back and. And reread all of this. So I don't know. I just have zero attention span and for. For words. And that's just practice. But, yeah, I don't know. I think my mom would say.ADRIANA: I was gonna say it's interesting because, so my daughter, she's in the same boat. She'd rather do, like, video over text. And she's also, like, not a. A big reader. And she got a lot of flack from people like, oh, you need to, like, you need to love books. Why don't you love books? And it's like. But she consumes all her stuff through video, so who cares how she gets her information as long as she gets her information? So...Yeah, exactly. And I think, like, people get too hung up on. On, like, how you're getting your information. It doesn't matter, like, because we all learn in different ways. So. Yeah, I. I just want, like. I think it's important to remind folks of that because people can get so judgy over stuff like that, you know?AUSTIN: I do. There is, like, There is a really big sense of accomplishment when you close a book and it's the final page. It's just. I don't know what else does that. I mean, finishing a video game. You know, I've been watching a lot of Elden Ring because that's a new big game and, and it's just amazing that like, oh, I got to the end of that. It's just this massive epic. And so books. Yeah, there's. There's nothing replaceable about a physical book.ADRIANA: Yeah, true. I, I definitely agree. Although, like, I don't think I've. I hardly have any physical books in my possession anymore. I might have like five. Everything now is, is like on my, on my Kindle just from the space perspective. Like, I just don't have a spot in my house to keep so much stuff. I had to get rid of a lot of my physical books a long time ago.AUSTIN: I, I think once I have a place that I know I'm gonna be in for a long time, then I might start accruing some of it. But just moving, I've had to move two or three times in the last six years and, and it's just awful to have a box of books that weighs 50 pounds down the stairs. Let's go.ADRIANA: So, yeah, moving in itself is like a very awful experience. Like even from a small place where you're like, nah, I don't have that much stuff. And then you're like, where. How have I been keeping all this crap for so long? Where has it been hiding there?AUSTIN: In college, I did have a roommate that I lived with. It was just him and I and we lived on this fourth floor of the walk up. And there was a really heavy box that I help him move up the stairs. And I dropped it in our kitchen when we got to the top. What the heck is in this? Is it just weight? Like, this is just dead weight? What the heck is it? And he just looks at me. Oh no, that's my weight set. And it was just of little like dumbbells and all this stuff. The only time it got carried in the two or three years we were there is when I moved it up and then moved it out. He didn't use it at all. I didn't use it at all. And I was just like, you just gotta get rid of this. This is not going in the truck.ADRIANA: Oh my God. Yeah, that's the, that's the worst. I, Yeah, I have. I, I bought a. One of those weight sets. You know the ones that you like turn a knob and it'll like, it's.AUSTIN: Oh, very cool.ADRIANA: And oh my God, when it came in the mail and my I, I work out in, in, in this room, which is like on the second floor of my house. When it came in the mail, I'm like, how the hell am I gonna carry this thing? Because I, I think like, each dumbbell is like 50 pounds or some ridiculous weight like that. So I, I, I think I either asked my husband. Yeah, I think I asked my husband. I'm like, you do it. Use your manly strength, please. I can't do it.AUSTIN: Get two people. It's like moving a couch at that point.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that stuff is heavy. Okay. All right. Final question of our lightning, not so lightning round questions is, what is your superpower?AUSTIN: Oh, man, I don't know what direction I want to go. I, I have a, like, probably like seeing ahead, maybe seeing the future. If I had a superpower. I'm, when I played sports or something, I always had a knack for just knowing what was going to happen before it happened. And just, just like the vision, I guess, is, you know, in sports as well, you have to kind of skate to where the puck is going, as Michael Scott says, and just being able to play. You know, I played soccer mostly, so playing the ball into space to let people run onto it was really important. And that's carried through into technology of just knowing, oh, okay, this, I, I can see the development happening here. This is kind of the direction it's going. So maybe I should meet up with it up ahead. And that can be really, really useful. You know, sometimes you say, I'm going to meet up with it here, and it's, it's taking a 90 degree turn in a direction away from you, and you're like, I'm in the middle of nowhere. So it's not 100 of the time, but I think just having an understanding of, okay, this is kind of shaping up. Yeah. Let me, let me, you know, get ready for the next, the next act. And so, yeah, that's, I mean, I would love, you know, freeze rays or flames or something physical as well, but something cerebral would be, would be very cool as well.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that, that's a great superpower because. Well, especially in tech, like, I, I think there's some technologies where you're kind of like, I feel like this is going somewhere. It's, it's good to start investing now. Right?AUSTIN: Yeah, it's, it's, hopefully it works out. I guess you just kind of try to fire off a bunch of ideas to see. Okay, yeah, that could work.ADRIANA: Yeah.AUSTIN: And that's what I like too.ADRIANA: Awesome. Well, we've, we've survived the lightning-ish round questions. Not so fast, not so fast. Lightning round questions. So now onto the meaty bits. So you work at Embrace and if you can explain what is it that Embrace does, that would be super cool.AUSTIN: Sure, yeah. Just quickly it's. We're an Observability product and we focus mostly on mobile platforms. So Android and iOS we have SDKs for React-Native Unity. We have some clients that are in the game space, but those games are mostly on iOS and Android. And we've recently gone open source, which is, was a big shift in the company to, to kind of come out of the shadows. But even on top of that we've also converted the foundation to be in OpenTelemetry, which is really exciting. OpenTelemetry is kind of a new standard, new ish standard for Observability and it isn't really practice in the mobile space. And so we're excited to hopefully get a lot more people in the mobile space to, you know, join and kind of share their ideas and explore this new standard for what's possible. So I am the one of the lead iOS developers on the team, so I'm focusing mostly on the iOS SDK. But we have, you know, I work very closely with our Android team to make sure that we're both at least following the spec somewhat together as we kind of work through it. Which is, which is fun.ADRIANA: Cool. That's so awesome. And so when you mentioned that Embrace made the shift to open source. Was it just a matter of like, okay, we're opening up our code base. Did you do like a major re-architecture? Because you also mentioned that you did some like OpenTelemetry integration as recently. Was, was it part of that move to open source as well?AUSTIN: Yeah. So on the iOS side it was a re-architecture situation, the conversation. And we have the 5.x SDK which is the closed source one, and now our new 6.x SDK that is open source and built on OpenTelemetry. And the big difference there is we wanted to go all in to OpenTelemetry and so there was a lot of conversation of okay, we can add these objects and expose this interface and then shim it kind of back into the existing structures we had under the hood. But it was kind of just like, well, if we're not going all the way, why go at all? So, you know, it's like this. I, I don't want to do anything half assed. I, I want to go into this and really contribute. And it was, you know, that 5.x is built in Objective-C. Uh, and so open sourcing an Objective-C framework in 2024, I don't think was going to gather as much buzz and excitement. No offense to the people that love Objective-C. I, you know, it's, it's what created my career. I can't, I can't say anything bad about it, but, but Swift is, is my favorite language, we've established. And so it was, it was time to really remake the thing with all of our understanding and learnings of Observability and on these, working with these platforms and then build something on top of OpenTelemetry and really start participating in that working group and that community.ADRIANA: Cool. So when you're using OpenTelemetry on your own product, is that mostly to benefit your developers, like developers within Embrace, or is this also benefiting consumers of your product as well?AUSTIN: Hopefully everybody. So for me, the consumer is a developer working in their app and they want to observe something. And so we have some instrumentation that's automatic so that you can capture network requests just by installing the SDK. And the OpenTelemetry Swift project has very similar instrumentation as well. And so you can use that project there and get some instrumentation out of the box. And so I think the big benefit that we saw from it internally was now everybody can speak a common language and there's an established set of primitives like a span and a span event to log. These are, these are things that the terms often get overloaded and especially when you're in an organization and you have people of all levels that are, you know, marketing the product or selling the product. If you can have a very tiny set of primitives that we can agree on, then we can speak openly about what it is and what it does and, and use terms that hopefully are familiar to people outside of, of the company and then to hopefully benefit people outside of the company. They're coming in and, and hopefully the learning curve is as shallow as, as possible or as flat as possible. Because the primitives, if they're used to OpenTelemetry, the primitives are the same exact primitives. They're, they're working with spans to create a trace or they're creating logs. And there's no question of what is this, how is this modeled? What do I do to measure this as performance? It's just, oh, no, I need to wrap this with a span. So, yeah, hopefully that is beneficial to both sides and we'll see. Well, you know, it's always a feedback gathering opportunity when, when you put something out there and the fact that it's open source, I'm very, you know, hopeful that we get very good feedback because people can see under the covers and say yeah, you know, this, this doesn't line up how I would expect. Or I can see where this breakdown is occurring. Or this is great.AUSTIN: I'll be an optimist and say, no, everything's fantastic. You did an awesome job.ADRIANA: That's so cool. So, so, and then, then the Embrace product itself is, is basically it provides like a, like a UI so that like any, any mobile app can like that's, that's sending telemetry data to it. Can you. It's similar to like other Observability tools, but it's this one specifically tailored for, for mobile then.AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah. And there are things that are mobile specific like a crash report or Android you have something called an ANR, an application not responding. It's a very common pop up that occurs or application exit info where it's just like the app just quits behind the scenes. The system killed the app. The next time the app launches, the system then provides, hey, we killed your app. Sorry, here's why. That's very mobile. Well, that one is especially Android specific data that we can then collect and save in our dashboard and hopefully explain to the users this is what happened, here's why. Or even just things where a user has quit the app and the user, apparently it seems the user got frustrated or stuck on this page. Go check out that page. Maybe there's a layout issue on the device that that user was using where the submit button was rendered off screen in whatever circumstance. You know, maybe their, their name had pushed it somewhere or their, whatever product they were purchasing had just pushed it off, off screen. It happens. But you know, hopefully they have the tools then to go fix that issue and, and you know, clip some of that text or you know, reflow their layout so that that button is now accessible.ADRIANA: Cool. So then is it correct for me to assume that Embrace ingests like OTel data in like the native OTLP format or do you guys have like, like an exporter?AUSTIN: So we're. Yeah, the state of it currently is we have a generic export, so we have instrumentation, we have interfaces to add a span that mimic the OpenTelemetry API. So you can add span, add logs, you can configure if you'd like a generic exporter. And so that's if you have a collector set up already, maybe you have a system somewhere in the cloud that is already ingesting telemetry. And you just want to add a new source to that? Yeah, you just pass us a generic exporter. A lot of those have already been implemented in the OpenTelemetry projects, or you can implement your own if you want to get it to your server in a custom shape and go from there. We by default will upload that data to our backend as well so that you can consume it in our dashboard. And so that's the current state of things. Where we want to go is actually provide the extensibility on the front end of that to ingest more of the data. To say here's the embrace tracer object, that is an OpenTelemetry object, conforms to the OpenTelemetry API. And you have your app that is already instrumented using OpenTelemetry. Just pass that tracer in and all of the instrumentation that you've provided throughout your app will just work. And it'll now flow through our SDK and into our system if you'd like it, or through our generic exporter if you'd like it. And that's kind of the free use. It's just, you don't have to touch our dashboard at all, but you're using our SDK and there's some benefit to the SDK to just maybe recover data if an app crash occurs. Or you just want to use our crash reporting tool and so you can just have that running and then have instrumentation flowing through. So yeah, that's, that's where we're work, what we're working on, you know, this sprint. And so you'll, you'll see that coming soon. If not, you know, already by the time this is out.ADRIANA: So cool. So then does that mean, do you do, do consumers of Embrace need to use the SDKs then, your SDKs in order to emit telemetry? Or from the sounds of it, it look, they can use OTel then like can you bypass the, your, your own SDKs like the Embrace SDKs?AUSTIN: We want people to be able to hot swap it of just saying, you know, and, and the way I look at that is, you know, there are three layers that, that we're playing with and it's the OpenTelemetry spec itself, the API that, that is, you know, very strict and very foundational. The semantic conventions that are provided by OpenTelemetry that the SIGs have come up with and agreed upon and promoted. And then the third layer is, I call them the embrace semantics. And it's the things that we've done. The instrumentation how we collect maybe device low power or a low memory warning and it's a custom shape to that telemetry that is still just a span maybe or it might be an event or a log, but we've, it's, it hasn't yet been baked into those OTel semantic conventions. And that's the goal is, is it's going to start, we're going to try to prove its value and its worth and the structure of that and the use case for that, that the shape of that telemetry and then once it's established, participate with the client side SIG, the Android SIG, the Swift SIG to say is this how you would, you know, model a low, low power mode?ADRIANA: Right.AUSTIN: And if that's the case, then let's propose it as a, an OTel semantic convention and then just have everybody understand, okay, if you have low power mode events, you know, it might be a span with the name of the span as this and the attributes are this and that and we measure the whole time. And so there's, you know, we, we, that top layer is really just for us to be able to move quickly and provide value to our customers. But as we're doing that, we're constantly talking with, with the SIGs every week to say, you know what, what's working for you? And the, it kind of goes both ways too. Any new semantic conventions that come out, we want to use and, and take on as soon as we can.ADRIANA: Right.AUSTIN: Right. But then our, our consumers, hopefully if you know, if they are using the OTel Swift SDK directly and they're happy with it, then great, that's fine. We might in the future put out a package that could sit next to the OTel Swift thing that is just like some Embrace conventions that are little helpers, you know, we extend the span to say, you know, just to make little, make it quicker and easier for developer to measure something like low power mode or disk IO for connecting to an SQLite database locally on the client. That would be just useful and we want to hopefully drive that and be helpful. That's those tools I was talking about of just being helpful that somebody finds inspiring and useful.ADRIANA: That's awesome. Then what it sounds like to me and correct me if I'm wrong, is trying to make sure that you're as much up to date with the OTel semantic conventions and APIs as much as possible. It sounds like then the Embrace SDK is almost like an implementation, your own implementation of the API, which is by design like an OTel thing that anyone can really implement the, the API with their own SDKs. But also as, but also making sure that you contribute back to the community and hopefully making some upstream contributions to the OTel project that can then be part of that. Reintegrated.AUSTIN: Yeah. Into the foundation.ADRIANA: So that, yeah.AUSTIN: So it's not, you know, then, then you know, our name gets out there and people maybe not just the patterns that we've hopefully established to get out there and people start using them. And that, that would just put a smile on my face like, oh, you found that useful. Great. And, and it's just, yeah, it's all about that learning curve. Mobile developers especially we found aren't used to OpenTelemetry, haven't. It's just not talked about as much or it's not as standardized and so so hopefully by making it easier, it's, it's more accessible and people jump in. So yeah, that's the, the manifesto, I guess.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's great. It's so interesting because there's so much focus on kind of your common languages for instrumenting in OTel and yet mobile apps are all around us. They're such a ubiquitous part of our lives that when you think about it, it's like, oh, of course there should be instrumentation on our mobile apps, but it's easy to forget about that. So it's cool that that's being tackled and that area is getting some TLC now.AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah. It's not a new frontier. There have been players in the space for a little bit, but definitely TLC is always appreciated if nothing else.ADRIANA: Yeah, definitely. And one thing I want to ask you about as well was in, in terms of like implementing OpenTelemetry in your own application internally, how was that for, for, you know, like the, the teams that Embrace. Like, was it how, how would you say the experience was? Like what, what were some of the challenges that you encountered? What are some of the things where you're like, oh my God, this is amazing.AUSTIN: None of it was too OpenTelemetry specific. Most of it was just now we have a third party dependency that, that we depend on and in a really big way. And OpenTelemetry isn't our only dependency and but it just comes down to the minutia. So we have this generic export where we can, especially for tracing, we export this object called span data. When a span finishes, it gets frozen for a lack of a better term as a span data object and then exported. Right now, at least in the Swift side of things, that was private and we couldn't Access that and create our own and send them off. It caused some development time I guess to, because we had, we had written out and basically re implemented a lot of the SDK to do what we wanted to do. And then we realized oh this, this export won't work.We can't, we don't have access that final piece. So we actually just, let's scrap it and just use it directly. And now we'll, we had to kind of change our thinking to just use the, the OTel SDK as a third party dependency a little more directly than we initially expected. We just wanted to stay at the API layer and that was a challenge just because it was an assumption that was made that was broken probably two or three months into the project and then had to slow down to make sure that we could do what we needed to do. But now we're past that and you know, works great and it was, you know, better, you know, we, we, we got to a better state and what was great about that is you know, I, I attend the Swift SIG. I went to the Swift SIG and Nacho is, is one of the like lead guys there and he was very helpful, explained what, what his expectation would be and why that is private, why that span data object is private and, and why we shouldn't just open it up. You know, and so that is exactly how the process should go. There was a question, I raised the question.They you know, came together, discussed and said no, where there, there's a workaround for you and so go, go use the workaround. So, so it was you know, helpful to do that and, but it just, it just, I think that software, general, software development in general is you know, the assumption was broken. Yeah halfway, you know, a time, after some time occurred and now there's you know, not a sunk cost fallacy but just like we're going to have to change the assumption, that original assumption. So let's, let's walk back a bit. But other than that the team understood like the, the, the benefits of OpenTelemetry are so apparent. Like we need a common envelope so that all of our telemetry can, can flow through this same channel. And if we want to start instrumenting a new thing, we shouldn't have to change anything along that channel. It should just be a new span and we've done, done some things to kind of type hint what that span is.So if we have a network request, our backend can pick it up and see, oh, this is a network request and we're going to treat it as such. And that's been very useful. But that's all within the constraints of OpenTelemetry, which is great because it, it makes, it takes a lot of the decisions away, which means we can focus on the things that we really care about or we really want to try to do.ADRIANA: Yes, then you don't even have to reinvent the wheel because it's there.AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, exactly.ADRIANA: Nice. Yeah. And do you use, do you use OpenTelemetry then to debug your own product, like your own code?AUSTIN: We do actually. And this, there's a feature that we just implemented. Feature? Is it a feature if it's not external? I think so, but we implemented, we call it internal logs and it's how the SDK itself works. And so we have errors that occur. We store data into an SQLite database ourselves for local storage and it's a file operation that can fail for, especially on mobile devices for many different reasons. The device can just stop or the device can be out of disk space. And so when that happens we have to do something about it. And we, you know, the disk space one's a little odd because you're trying to save data that you can't, but we send off these internal logs that are just OpenTelemetry logs.ADRIANA: That's so cool.AUSTIN: Yeah. And it's the best type of dog food, I guess.ADRIANA: You know, it's totally, I love, I love hearing these end user stories because, you know, I'm one of the maintainers of the End User SIG and so I think being able to share stories of folks not just in the companies who are like, you know, your typical consumers of OTel, which is like whatever, whatever large enterprise, but also like the, the Observability vendors themselves. Using OpenTelemetry on their own product, I think makes for a very compelling story because especially like, if we want folks to use OpenTelemetry, then it stands to reason that Observability vendors would, it would be very wise to use OpenTelemetry on themselves and to use that to help them troubleshoot their own product.AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And even just the performance of like another is the, the startup time of our SDK. It's if, if we're slowing down, you know, we ask that our SDK is, is created and started at the app launch time. Well, that's a critical point in time for an app and you want to show that user the initial content as soon as possible. And if our startup time is blocking and slowing down the app startup time, that's going to cause problems for us and that user. And so we don't want that. So we can trace that. We can just break it down by each operation that we want to show exactly how long it takes. And there's some interesting things that the platforms do that we can hook into. Like how is the process kind of warms up and the. The system actually kind of warms things up after it guesses if the user is going to interact with an app or not. So if a push notification comes in, it's likely that the user is going to tap that push notification and come into the app. And so in certain circumstances, the system will warm that process up. And if we know that launch time of the process, we can actually see how long it took or how long that warming process, how long that process was kept warm, I guess, is what I'm trying to say, before that user has entered the app. And so it's just very interesting things. It's almost not even the performance of our SDK, but just like interesting behavior that the system is doing that I'm curious about. Maybe no one else is interested in this, but I'm just like, okay, this is how Apple is doing stuff under the hood. Let me. Let me take a peek.ADRIANA: That's very cool. Well, we are coming up on time, but before we wrap up, I wanted to ask if you have any words of wisdom or hot takes to share with our audience.AUSTIN: If you're working on a project and it's closed source and you're curious about going open source, I would say just do it. It's very useful to get feedback. I have a couple of side projects that I am toiling with. I just need to spend the time to actually finalize them and push out, you know, the little blurb of a readme that they need, but I just need to do it. And so that would be the words of wisdom. Put it out there, get feedback. It's cool. I will use it. It's. And you know, it'll be more fun. I'm sure it will.ADRIANA: That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, Austin, 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...AUSTIN: 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.