Geeking Out with Adriana Villela

Adriana Villela, Hannah Maxwell

The podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between.

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Mar 25, 2025 • 50min

The One Where We Geek Out on Mobile App Observability with Austin Emmons of Embrace Mobile

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.

Jan 21, 2025 • 19sec

A Quick Program Announcement

Hey fellow geeks! A quick programming note. Starting in january 2025, we'll be dropping new episodes of Geeking Out every two weeks instead of once a week. Our next episode will be out on January 28th. peace out and geek out!

Jan 14, 2025 • 47min

The One Where We Geek Out on Sustainable Applications with Aicha Laafia

About our guest:Aicha Laafia Java Software Engineer with a love for coding, a taste for delicious food, and a heart for volunteering. Aicha is also a member of the Moroccan Association of Computing Science, a Women Techmakers and Girls Code ambassador, and an IAmRemarkable facilitator.Find our guest on:BlueskyLinkedInLinkTreeX (formerly Twitter)Find us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:KCD PortoIx-chel Ruiz on Geeking OutEnterprise JavaBeans (EJB)J2EEZ Garbage Collector (ZCG)Shenandoah Garbage CollectorJava Lombok ProjectKotlinDevoxx MoroccoDevBarcelona (DevBcn)Java ChampionsHorizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA)Vertical Pod Autoscaling (VPA)TAG Environmental Sustainability on CNCF SlackKube-GreenSQLITranscript: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 Aisha Laafia. Welcome, Aisha.AICHA: Welcome, Adriana. And welcome everyone.ADRIANA: So nice to have you on here and for a little bit of background. Oh, so first of all, actually, where are you calling from today?AICHA: Well, right now I'm from Lyon in France.ADRIANA: That's awesome. And you know, given that it's afternoon here in, in Canada when we're recording in Toronto, Canada, um, it's evening for you, so I appreciate you taking the time out of your evening, especially because you, you had an event that you were at earlier today that you ducked out of for this recording, so definitely appreciate that. And you know, I wanted to mention to our viewers slash listeners that the way that you and I met was really cool. We met at KCD Porto in Portugal in September of 2024. And yeah, I, I was keynoting there and then you came up to me after my keynote and we started chatting, and it was just so great chatting with you. I had like such an amazing time and, you were telling me your story, so I can't wait to get into that. But first, I have some lightning round slash icebreaker questions for you. Okay, you ready?AICHA: I'm ready.ADRIANA: Okay. I swear they're not terrible, they're not painful. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?AICHA: Well, I am a righty.ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?AICHA: I'm always Android girl.ADRIANA: All right. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?AICHA: Well, I preferred Linux, but I'm forced to use Windows.ADRIANA: Oh, that makes me cry. That makes me cry. Do you use Windows subsystem for Linux?AICHA: That's my hero, literally.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's what saved me too. The last time I had a Windows machine, I'm like, please let them have enabled it. Because that's the other thing. You get a Windows machine and like some companies disable it or don't allow you to like download the VMs, like the whatever Linux VM to run WSL.AICHA: Well, for me...that's the first thing I ask about is that give me the administration role in my. I have to take control.ADRIANA: Yes, yes, yes. Good call, good call. And I mean, you do dev work, you should have, you know, some, some sort of administrative access over your, your machine, right?AICHA: Indeed. And as I am you can say old school. I'm all more like comand type of people. Developers who use command more than like platforms or desktop applications. For me. I like to write things to see logs more than just to click on buttons.ADRIANA: For sure, for sure. I feel you. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite programming language?AICHA: It's obviously Java. I don't know like hesitate this question. Of course it's Java.ADRIANA: Of course. I love it.AICHA: I love it.ADRIANA: I think I told you Java was like I spent many years in, in Java, so Java and I were very good friends for a long time. I couldn't tell you what's new in Java anymore though. I'm so out of touch.AICHA: Well, there's a lot of things indeed. Like Java has been accelerating very, very fast and that's a very good news for us.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. Like what? Okay, so my. I'm of the days of like EJBs and J2EE which I don't even know if that's like a thing anymore. What's, what's something cool in Java like that you're excited about.AICHA: Like right now it's still a thing, but they're working more like beans or Spring doing its work with more advanced features that's handling the beans. But for Java native, like we have the system that. For example, what I really loved is the ZCG like the garbage collection. Right now it's really advanced. Like for there is ?Shenandoah, for example that it doesn't care about what memory size you have. It's always accelerating, always taking care of your memory handling mechanism. Also like right now we don't have to type a lot of things. That's something that many people complain about Java. There are that there are a lot of new features. You get anonymous classes you can create. You don't have like really to do that big lines. You have like Lombok project that you. We cannot like really right now write all those getters and setters for our instance. You can just enable annotation. Getter. Setter.ADRIANA: Oh my God, yes. This would have saved me so much time. I remember like painstakingly writing all the getters and setters back in the day and you know like your IDE can like auto generate that stuff and all that if you, if you're nice to it. But yeah, that's, that's nice that annotations can help with that. Yay. Yeah, annotations. I think we're just getting started when I was getting out of Java. So yeah, it's been a while.AICHA: You missed the fun.ADRIANA: I know, I know I missed the fun. I missed the fun. I, I gotta ask because, because you're, you're into the Java world. How do you, have you ever played with Kotlin or Groovy?AICHA: Groovy? Yes. Because I didn't. Well, Groovy. Not that much because most of the projects I worked on they were mainly based on Maven, so but a lot of part we tried to migrate some Groovy there and see to replace it but it didn't work. Yeah. So I'm mainly like Maven. For Kotlin, I didn't have the chance to do it, but it's really my to learn list because I've heard a lot of people saying it's really advanced. Like it takes the basic of Java, it's based on Java, but a lot of you can use it on the mobile, you can use it on desktop, even programs in like it's more light, small. Like in terms of performance. I've heard a lot of good things.ADRIANA: About Kotlin, so yeah, I, I have as well. So yeah, yeah I, I, that's one I wouldn't mind trying out if, if I had time. I gotta, gotta find that time though to learn. There's like so many cool things to learn, I don't know where to start.AICHA: Indeed this is, and this is why like Kotlin and Python is on my 2025 like to learn lists.ADRIANA: Yeah.AICHA: With the machine in AI right now, every like service we try to integrate AI a lot to automate the things especially that communicate with people and a lot of handling processes we try. So I have to learn Python because even using Java in the machine learning there are some script or some integrated libraries that use Python. So we have to understand. Oh in that the new things about Java, we can handle machine learning with Java too.ADRIANA: That's cool. That's very cool. It's funny you mentioned Python because Python was like the language I learned after Java and I mean Python's been around for so long. Right. And I have to say like, I hope when you get around to Python I would love to know what your thoughts are. I always, I like Python. I think it's a very pleasant, pleasant language to, to develop in. So yeah. Yeah and yeah it's like so big in, in the machine learning space. It's wild. I love it. I love that it's like it's still alive and kicking.AICHA: Indeed. Like for me before I started with actually the first time I tried something like coding. It was a Linux script that was like in the middle school. My sister, she was studying a little bit of like tech. It was the tech. So and she was trying some scripting Linux. She was like try this. I. I still remember my first command. It was "ls".ADRIANA: That was my first Linux command too.AICHA: I didn't know what does do what does how it works but I tried. But like yeah, that's interesting. And then when I tried to look for like what I want to do. For backup story, I used to dream to be a psychologist.ADRIANA: Oh cool.AICHA: I could not find like a really good school there that have the like the domain that I want to study there in Morocco. So it was like I need to something that you can analyze a lot of things that have a lot of logics there. And I found the tech industry especially when I got to know that that's something that we will do it in the future. It's really developing. It's. It will become part of our life. I start to be more passionate, more curious about this and this is where I try. Yeah I will do. I will go to the tech industry but what I will do. I try to look for something. Tried front end, back end when I was a student. B ut I found myself more into backend especially Java. Like I start with the C language at first. I, I create some really interesting like I even built a mini game for 3D using C. Language C. Yeah, I even like in. Then I switch a little bit doing something that like creating the systems more and with Linux like kernel that's. That was my geek in phase there in school.ADRIANA: That's great.AICHA: Yeah. And then I was like I, I was introduced to Java and I can call it like falling in love first line of code because I love really the sense of being organized. There is a pattern, it's organized. If you miss something, you know what's going on, what you missed. And it's really mature, it's really robust. Like it's always about mechanism that handling a lot from errors to security and all that. And even like back there there was a lot of code. I was like okay, that's a price I will take. I will code a lot. But it's good for me.ADRIANA: Yeah.AICHA: And this is why like I start to fall in love with Java. But what really make me adore it, it's always the community.ADRIANA: Oh yeah, yeah. I hear lovely things about the Java community. I actually had someone on the podcast earlier, Ix-chel Ruiz, she's based out of, I want to say Basel. Have you met Ix-chel?AICHA: Actually, thanks to Ix-chel that I did my first technical talk. And thank you a lot because we met back there in the Devoxx Morocco, like in 2022, I think, or 23. And I did the, like, my first real talk. It was on how to organize. I did it tech events, like IT events one to one. And I met her during her talk. By the end of talk, I went to talk to her and I said that I do this talk. Here's what I'm talking about. And she was like, you do Java, Why not do a technical talk? I said, I don't have experience, like no shared experience that you have. We need more women in tech. I even like did a little bit of a little interview, like open mic. That's something I used to do for community there in Morocco. And I met her and a lot of women in tech and it was like, go do it. And the amazing part is that my first, like, on site technical talk on the Barcelona, she was there. I met her.ADRIANA: Oh, my God.AICHA: Yeah.ADRIANA: Oh, my God. I'm getting like all emotional hearing this.AICHA: You know, for the fact that I told the community that this is my first real technical, like talk. They all went to to see my talk all in the front. I was like, oh, really? Like the Java champion that were my role model are now attending my talk. That's my.ADRIANA: Wow, that is such a great and inspiring story. And you know, like the fact that we have a connection back to a previous guest. And I remember actually when Ix-chel was. Was on the podcast, she mentioned that one of the reasons why she got into public speaking is that she wanted to empower other women. And I love hearing the story. Like I, you know, a story where another guest was empowered by her. This is so lovely.AICHA: Like, I really have to thank her because she did. She said, why not if you're already doing a talk, do the technical one.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. And. And you know, what you said is so important. A lot of people are like, well, but I'm not, you know, I haven't gotten too deep into this. I'm not enough of an expert. And people want to hear that stuff because there's still beginners out there. There. Like, it's very relatable. So relatable. And. And I think it's more relatable coming from a beginner talking from a beginner's point of view than someone being more experienced talking from a beginner's point of view. I think it's a very powerful story that way. I Love, honestly, I love the story. I love that you, you felt empowered by Ix-chel and, and you were lifted up by the rest of the Java community through their support just by being there for your talk. And, and you know, like I, I can. I saw you speak at KCD Porto. You were a great speaker. You gave, was it a lightning talk? I'm trying to remember. It was on sustainability. It was, it was a really great talk on sustainability. I'm so glad that I attended because it was, it was like really informative, you know, to the point, fun. Everything that a talk needs to be.AICHA: Yeah, for me, as I said, sustainability was, was and is a really topic that I'm interested of and I try to really let people know that we need to consider an impact that we forgot a lot or not being attention to it. We're always talking about protecting the environment, sorting our like our things, making, using like more renewable energy resources. But we never check what our codes do to the environment. And as I said before, our tech industry like contribute to 3% of the global greenhouse gas emissions, and by 2030 it will be more than 13%. And that's a really huge number that we contribute to it as developers. And for us, if you want to really like make impact you need big steps that we go to the data centers, to the other like companies that create the machines that use energy to let them reduce the energy or go for more, we can sell real like energy, renewable energy that's more greener energy resources. But for us that's something that's, for us as a developer, it's really big step that's so hard for. So why not start with baby steps by at least making our application optimized, making our code clean and then going step by step to be a green code.So first step is that for me you need to. The least thing you can do is that go with the more algorithms that use less time, the less time the less resources to consume. And then the second step is to monitor your application, whatever it's talking about, the energy or the carbon emissions. There are some SDKs that we can use, some tools we can use for monitoring and there's a lot of like big movements and efforts by developers to developers to seek this like this purpose. So please guys, don't just check the financial impact but also the environmental one.ADRIANA: I totally agree with you on that and I think that's so important because you know, we, we talk, I, I think there's a lot of talk on the impact that our data centers have on the environment. Which is a huge impact, like really making sure that our infrastructure is greener. But then there's also the software that we're running, making sure that that is greener as well. And I think you brought focus on a really important point. It's gotta come from both sides, both the operational standpoint and the development standpoint. The application standpoint. Those, those two things combined can help us make greener software. And it's, it's kind of ironic that like we're in an industry that you know like the, the mere fact that we're, we're working in this industry is contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Which personally makes me feel a little bit guilty as I go along because you see all this horrible stuff like all these extreme climate events going on.AICHA: Indeed. And many when you're discussing about how to really help the environment, you're like oh, we will use like common transportation, we will do this, we will take care of our plants. And I was like, show me your code. Show me your code. Show me your logs. Show me the energy usage that you use. They were like no, the thing is they thought that it will not impact. Then I said check the statistics because our codes use machines and machines needs energy and that energy it's due to some the we can call it like the complexity of our algorithms that's something we write were directly impacted. So as always. And also up, like, besides the code, there is the energy in the resource management and this is why like there in Porto I mentioned like, for Kubernetes, there is horizontal like HPA and VPA. Like you need to check your pods. Don't just overcharge your pod or create more pods that you will not need that consumes more energy.And also like during your pod, check your nodes too. So it's more like you need to seed balance. Don't create too many pods that will consume more and don't create then few pods that will be overcharged. So it will impact the performance. It's always about balancing the performance with. You can call it like the optimization.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point too and. Oh, sorry, go ahead.AICHA: No, it's okay. It's okay like for the fun fact is that I don't do DevOps but like it's only on casual things. I do it from time to time with our DevOps like team or engineer doesn't have the time to do it. But when I see a like real impact of our Java native codes I have to say that we need like to containerizations of our application. We need to more focus on the clouds because this is, you can call it temporary solution to like to avoid the machines that the traditional one because it's consume more energy than containers. Than using containers in virtual machines. So you can continue.ADRIANA: Damn. So it's basically a point for containers.AICHA: Indeed. CNCF is really working on some amazing projects for sustainability. I just discovered there in KCD Porto and I really loved what they do. They say we working on open source projects where everyone can contribute and right now we are seeing the impact of this we try to do too. So good job, guys.ADRIANA: Yay. And you're referring to the TAG Sustainability group in CNCF. That's awesome. And speaking of that, what. Is there any specific project in CNCF that that group is working on that like really, really interests you where you're like oh, they're really doing some cool work on sustainability?AICHA: Well right now I don't remember because I saw a lot of projects but there is one about Kubernetes that handle like really the pods that you are using, if it's not been used, it turned off automatically, something like that. So it's managed like the usage. If there are some heavy usage, it turn on some other pods inactivated and if, if a pod is not activated, is not used, it will be deactivated automatically. That's something about managing. Yeah, I just don't. I forgot the name. I'm having this issue of forgetting names of projects in libraries a lot.ADRIANA: That's all good.AICHA: It's Kube-Green. Kube-Green.ADRIANA: Oh yeah. Kube-Green. Sleep your Pods, reduce your CO2 emissions. Hey, I learned something new today. That's awesome. So Kube-Green is the, is the name of the project. That's, that's super awesome that there's something out there that, that you know is, is monitoring your, your pods. Um, yeah, it, it's funny. And, and you know like this is one of those things where you can tie it back to finance where you're like, well you know, if you're using, if, if you got a bunch of idle pods like it's going to cost you money because not the cloud, the cloud's not free. So I feel like it's a compelling argument to like you know, tie greenhouse gas emissions to financial repercussions as well. Because as we know executives speak in dollars and not CO2 emissions. So it helps to make for a more compelling argument.AICHA: Yeah, actually this is what I, I'm always saying at the end of my talk. If the stakeholders are not convinced, talk about finance, tell them that you will use less energy, less money.ADRIANA: Exactly. Perfect. Perfect. That's awesome. I got to ask you like what interested you in this aspect of like sustainability and tech in the first place?AICHA: Actually I just discovered it out of curiosity. I saw a tweet about something like sustainability. I look for it like sustainability in tech industry. The first thing that comes in the search is was statistics. That's how, how scary it is how big those numbers are. I was like damn, we need to take action and why not start it by myself. What I am doing, what I like to do is to share information. Especially like I start to submit talks. And this is why the first talk I did it was in the Barcelona to talk about the green programming in Java.ADRIANA: And what you know, I want to. I want to take a. A little step back in. In your. Just rewind on your career stuff. Because when. When you and I met, one of the things that most impressed me about you is you know, just like you had this curiosity to like hey, I just wanted to like learn. Learn about this. You know, the. The environmental impact of tech. I. I was so impressed. I think you told me a story about how like you were thrown into a very unknown situation at one of your previous companies where you basically had to learn DevOps kind of on the fly. If I recall correctly. and correct me if I'm wrong. I was wondering if you could talk about that.AICHA: I start first as intern there I was in the team with like lots of backend developer and there was a system engineer that handled this. After that it was a decision by the client do not like have any system engineering and we will have to do this. Then when I. When I then like after one year I've been transferred to another team. We were just only two backends and it was a lot of challenging tasks to do. So I started with little things. Thankfully I already have some background. Like I already know Linux. I already know Docker. How to use, how to run containers. It was the basics, but I have to handle a lot of things from Kibana from Logs. Grafana. How to check this. Jenkins. How to handle CI/CD Circle. If there is issue especially like you are talking about Ansible, how to use. Or versioning with Nexus. If some issue with logins or some issue with connection between them how to handle it. It was like a very new world for me. And I was like. The senior that that I have on my second team, it was a really good senior. He was a really good mentor because I said to him listen, you don't have to do all the work just because you are a senior. I'll try to help. Just give me the index what I can learn to do this. And he just gave me we can see the alphabets. Go learn Docker. I said I already have the background. And he was like, if you know Linux, Docker, and keep a little bit of Kubernetes, just take care of the system issues in the server and I will handle the rest. So by second, like on the second team, I only handled system issues. But then after a while I've been transferred to the other team and I was the only backend dev. This is where I have to do all the work. So yes, I start to learn about Ansible, Jenkins, Nexus, Grafana, Kibana, and all geeky stuff. Well, the thing is, first it was a little bit challenging, but I found myself really loving it like to discover. Especially because I start to understand DevOps. It's not only about tools, it's about how to communicate with the team, it's how to operate. Yeah, operate is only about machines about to operate between the teams. What the team needs, you need to talk to them to understand what version they need, what, like which time they will need it so we can schedule it to have the environment ready for them to test or to develop something there. So for me it was a good start. And this is where I become more interested in the cloud too, and DevOps.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so cool.AICHA: So it was like a best decision from the big head that lead to some really good results for us too.ADRIANA: That's such an amazing story. And you know, you've touched upon so many things that I think are so important for anyone getting into software, which is like, you know, you were. I think a lot of us who get into software, like the jobs that we start off with when we graduate are not the jobs we end up with years down the line. I mean, technology evolves so much and you have to evolve your learning along the way. You have to evolve your point of view and you have to be willing to take on new stuff. And I love that you have this very positive attitude towards learning because I think if you're not willing to learn new stuff, you're in technology. I don't know, like, I think you're gonna have a very short career. And you took it, you took it in stride and, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you're pretty, like. You're, you're pretty young in your career, right? If, if I recall from our conversations earlier.AICHA: Actually, yeah. I almost have like with interns all that, three years of experience. Like with the same job I start as intern, like handling small tasks small, fixing bugs. And then I went to my manager and I said, listen, I don't feel like this is the real tech, this is the real development. It's about fixing solutions, fixing problems, finding solutions. I need to understand like the business to fix the issues. It was like, okay, you can start doing some like analyze solution designs. You can start with small ones. This is where I went to the second team and they were, they know this fact. The first ticket that I worked on it, it was like a function ticket they gave me. This is what the like the client needs. I created solution design for it. The architect for it, I discussed with my senior, he validated. Then I start to develop it to implement what I write. And this is like for me my beginning to technical, like writing. So in by that when I start really to do technical talking, I start to write documentation too. Because I found something, some information were missing and was like, I need to write this myself. If it's not for me, it's for like the next generation, the one that will come after me.ADRIANA: Exactly. And that's, that's such a great attitude because I, you know, it's so easy to sit there and like complain about oh these docs are crappy and then but you can do something about it. You can go and fix it and make it better for everyone.AICHA: Indeed. Especially because the team that I was working on, it was a big one, but it was like if there is something to upgrade, something to handle, go for it. Because it's really old projects, they try always to make migration to upgrade new services, but for all documentation it was been untouched. So do you say you're welcome, just leave a note why you did this and everything's good.ADRIANA: That's great, that's great. And I think, you know, I do find like documenting things makes you a better speaker because I think it forces you to like really sit back and like choose your words carefully to be able to explain stuff. And especially for a technical talk, technical documentation, you really have to be able to explain it, explain things clearly in order to be effective at it. Which is I think a very, it's a very hard skill to hone. And you know, considering that like you're so young in your career and you've done all of this amazing stuff, it just blows my mind. Like you, you've got to be like, if I were your manager, I'd be like, can we just clone her a bunch?AICHA: Actually like the last team there, I was work in SQLI in Morocco. I had manager. He was like, listen, I'm already consider you a senior. You can do it. He never ever like questions my decisions.ADRIANA: Well, I think you bring in the right attitude too, because so many people like I've worked with, I've managed my fair share of people. And I've, I've, I had, I've had superstars like you. And then I've had the people who are like, tell me what I need to do. And it's like, dude. Just like, show, a little bit of initiative, please.AICHA: We can do it. Well, yeah, indeed, because I really had a good start. That's, I had a good start. You were like, listen, here we don't make difference between senior or junior. If there is a ticket and you are free, you can do it. You want help, ask for it. We will give you mentoring. And this is why they really spent two years and a half there. It was a really boosting career for me.ADRIANA: Yeah.AICHA: So. And then even like I had to make the hard decision to quit that company because I got opportunity to go to live here in France. And for me, because I really like, I want to try new adventure, especially to come to Europe. But we can say mainly because of events, because of community, because here it's more accessible right now. I can travel to events without like checking for visas or other traveling requirements. So I said, why not? I'm still young, I'll try it. And I come here in France with this company. They hire me as like backend software consultants and then they do conferences too. This is where I got opportunity to do talks from in Barcelona, in, in Spain, Barcelona and in Luxembourg too. But as there is a crisis here in like the tech industry, I've been fired, laid off. Yeah. And this is the like a message to everyone who's saying it will not impact you. You never know because. And it's not your fault.ADRIANA: That's so true. That's so true.AICHA: Yeah. Because thankful I'm already having like this cheerful mindset. When I, when I got the news, I was like, okay, that's happened. And what's really helped me, to be honest, is that on that period of time there was Paris Olympics, so I had the time, the full time to enjoy it.ADRIANA: That's true. That's true.AICHA: Good.ADRIANA: It's something to distract you while, you know, like from, from a, a very crappy situation. But you know, like, I, I think you, you made a really excellent point, which is like, you know, when, when you're laid off because a company's making cutbacks or whatever, it's. You can't help but take it personally. It's devastating news. It cuts you. It, it really does. And I mean and, and I think it's a perfectly normal reaction to have. I think you have to, you need that time to mourn it. Right?AICHA: Indeed. Because you start to question yourself, your like competence, your abilities. You keep telling, oh, because I don't have, like, I don't have experience enough that this is why it's happened to me in all that. And then I was like, well, I got. The thing is for me. Or I can give this advice to everyone. If you are facing any difficulty situation, give yourself the time to process it. Accept the fact it's happen. If you want to cry, cry. If you want to scream, scream. Just don't let it inside you. That's really. It will impact more your mental health. Express yourself. Let it go. Let it out of you. It's either if you are more like talking person, talk to someone. If you are doing physical, good. Go for a run or go for a dance. If you are more like party person, just don't, don't just stay like on your house alone thinking or thinking about it. Because the good is that. I already took this lesson from a book that I read. It's about when you start to understand what you can change and what you cannot change and not waste energy on what you cannot change. More on focus on solutions than the problem. You will like optimize, you can say your resources and you will help yourself, your mental self. So please difference between what you can change, what you cannot change.ADRIANA: Yeah, I, I think that's such an important thing. Such an important point to make is, is, you know, be aware of what you can change. Be aware of you can't, what you can't change because it's very easy to get sucked into that and, and you know, like one negative thought feeds another and, and it can, it can spiral and you know, we've talked about mental health a number of times on, on this podcast and, and getting laid off takes a toll on your mental health. You know, it, I, I'd be surprised if you said it didn't, you know, like, because it is like, it's tough.AICHA: Yeah, it did. Especially like for me because I never ever had this situation. I was studying and I had like there in Morocco, we have the last six months of ours, like studying in engineering school. We do an internship. And I was recruited during the internship, so directly. I didn't have any process and it was like kind of first time I'm jobless. I have a lot of like especially I have rents to pay. I'll have lots of charge. I need to look for a job ASAP. And it was like during the Olympics. So this stopped the recruitment. They were more focusing on the vacation, Olympics, and all that. So and the fact that by time I didn't find a job, I was like, why this is happen to me and that. I try hard. And then I was like, why? Just looking there in like the Paris region, why not look in France? And this is where I got this job here in Lyon. And the funny fact I really like here, I, I start to see like the impact of me getting laid off. It was a good thing.ADRIANA: Yeah.AICHA: Because right now here I'm really with, with the, with the team. That's really encouraging. Giving me all like give your potential. If you want to do something, if you want to suggest something, do it. And like really very, they are very like lovely persons. Like today we have the Christmas party. It was so fun. And for the fact that I don't drink, I was the only one that doesn't drink there. The only one that's eating like halal food.ADRIANA: Yeah.AICHA: Like the menu for today it was mainly fish and veggie meals because I cannot eat meat.ADRIANA: Right, right.AICHA: Yeah. This is how considerate they are. So for me it'sADRIANA: Nice that they were so accommodating.AICHA: Indeed.ADRIANA: And I was gonna say, you know, there's something to be said when you said you're the only one who, who wasn't drinking there. I was, I was laughing because I was thinking like there's something to be said for being the only sober person in a party full of like tipsy people. And it is really, I, I, I've been that person and it is funny.AICHA: You know, for the fact they say that even if I don't drink, I don't need to.ADRIANA: You've got the energy, you don't need alcohol to give you, to give you party energy. Right?AICHA: Yeah, that's the spirit. And as they said he, right now we are having a party. We forgot about the work. We enjoy yourself. There is a music, there is companies like chatting casually so no need for drinks.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I, I feel you, I feel you. I, I, I will choose bubble tea over alcohol any day. So that's great. Well, we're coming up on time. But this has been such a lovely conversation. Every time I talk to you, I'm more and more inspired by you. I. I see you doing some wonderful, wonderful things in your career. You're just getting started. Now, before we part ways, I was wondering if you could give some parting words of wisdom to our viewers and listeners.AICHA: There's always a lesson to learn. It's either we win or we learn from our experience. So whatever you have situation, if it was bad, just endure it, accept it and start to look for solutions. And this is for especially for you, the women in tech. Please, please, please start to shine out, start to be presented in communities and events. We need you. We need you a lot because as we are kind of minority, people start to think that there is few women that work intech when you are really having huge impact. So please, this is we can say for women and men, if you have experience, share it. The small details, share it. If you don't like to show off the camera, you can write articles, you can post like on LinkedIn. We are right now talking about Bluesky, our new platforms. Yeah. So choose the platform that you're feeling comfortable with. Start to share your the information that you have because even if you find it like something really simple, but it could help another developer. So please build the community to be like from developers to developers and don't be shy to seek help because we're not only giving information, but we need information too. So all I can say is that pay attention to your mental health, look for more communities in your domain and enjoy your life. That's it.ADRIANA: I love it. Oh, what a perfect way to end this podcast. Thank you so much, Aisha, 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... AICHA: 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.

Dec 17, 2024 • 49min

The One Where We Geek Out on Security with Michael Levan

Dec 10, 2024 • 48min

The One Where We Geek Out on Ruby x OTel with Kayla Reopelle of New Relic

About our guest:Kayla is an engineer on the New Relic Ruby agent team and an active member of the OpenTelemetry Ruby community, where she's a maintainer for opentelemetry-ruby-contrib and an approver for opentelemetry-ruby. Outside of work, she enjoys cycling and tinkering in her garden.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:Apple IIeUnisys IconGitHub CodespacesOpenTelemetry Ruby (Core)OpenTelemetry Ruby (Contrib)Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. and geeking out with me today, I have Kayla Reopelle of New Relic. Welcome, Kayla.KAYLA: Hi. Thank you. Happy to be here.ADRIANA: I'm super excited to have you on. And where are you calling from today?KAYLA: I'm calling from Portland, Oregon.ADRIANA: Awesome. I've had a few people from Portland. There's a big tech community in Portland, isn't there?KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. They. At one point it was called the Silicon Forest, but I don't know if it has that same reputation.ADRIANA: That's awesome. Are you originally from Portland, or...KAYLA: No, I'm originally from a small town kind of near Mount Rainier in Washington state, but kind of grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so.ADRIANA: Oh, cool. That's awesome. It's. You know, I always chat with people who, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest and it's such a different vibe from east coast life. Like, it's so much more outdoorsy, focused in the Pacific Northwest, which I absolutely love. Like here, where I live, in Toronto, it's like, it's flat. So, you know, I go out west, I'm like, oh, it's...The mountains are so pretty. I so miss that.KAYLA: Yeah. Yeah. The times that I've lived other places, I. I miss seeing the mountains on the horizon. For sure.ADRIANA: Yeah. You cannot beat that. Well, awesome. Are you ready to do our icebreaker questions?KAYLA: Sure.ADRIANA: Okay, let's do it. Question number one. Are you a lefty or a righty?KAYLA: I'm a lefty.ADRIANA: Oh, my God. I always get so excited when I meet fellow lefties. Yeah. I love learning. I. I love identifying other lefties. I. I've mentioned this multiple times in the show, so if anyone's listening and bored of hearing this. But like, I always, I'm always like watching, you know, what hand people grab things with, and I'm like lefty. And I feel like it's the thing that only lefties will probably notice anyway.KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. Right. We're like a small enough percentage that it. It kind of catches you off guard. It's a little bit exciting.ADRIANA: Exactly. And I, I don't know if you do this, but like, my coat hangers go like my clothes hang in my coat hangers in a very particular direction compared to like right handed people or even like where I put my knives in the knife bl. In the knife block.KAYLA: Mm.ADRIANA: But yeah, that that's from like living in a house of, of right handed people where they outnumber me but I impose my will upon them.KAYLA: Nice. Nice. Yeah. Growing up there was always like a decent balance because my dad was also left handed. But you know, as an adult, like sharing a house with another with a right handed person, it's like the kitchen set up every time the. Where the cutting board is placed versus where the appliances are placed and the food.ADRIANA: It's like exactly how you turn, like. The handle for your frying pan. Like what, where it's oriented as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.KAYLA: And I've even looked at that sometimes when I've gone to like look at apartments or something. It's like, okay, where is the elbow space for?ADRIANA: Yes.KAYLA: Like, will it work?ADRIANA: Or even like something silly like sitting down to a meal. And if you're sitting next to a right handed person, you need to be on the outside so you're not like butting elbows when you eat, which right-handed people don't think about.KAYLA: Yeah, yeah, I know it, it like can cause sometimes a little bit of anxiety of like, okay, am I gonna get one of the two correct spots at this table?ADRIANA: Exactly.KAYLA: Yep.ADRIANA: And, and one, one follow up question on, on leftiness. Because I, I find like lefties. Well, I mean already by default, like, lefties hold their pencils like really weird. I hold mine extra weird to the point where, you know, I've had teachers like, you're not supposed to hold it like that. Who cares how I hold it in my writing? Yeah. Do you, Are you an extra weird pencil holder?KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah, I am. Yeah. Actually, let's see. So I hold mine. Yeah, I just kind of like balance it but have like an extra point.ADRIANA: Oh, nice, nice. And do you have like an extra callus. Yes. Yeah, the callus.KAYLA: And so whenever there were like standardized tests, this whole side of my hand would just be.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, the smudge, the smudge. I used to have smudgy paper that I used to like... Under my hand over my notebooks to avoid that. Yeah. I had, for years I had a callus on my, on my left pinky. And it's gone. It's gone now because, I mean, I hardly ever write, but it was, I thought it was never gonna go away. I hold my pencil really funny. I have, I have a banana here that I'm going to use to demonstrate because my, my pens are like far away, but I, I hold. Oops. This is how I hold my pencil is like this. So yeah. Teachers would be like, what the hell, you can't hold it like that. I'm like, watch me, So anyway, well, thank you. Always fun to meet another lefty. Now do you prefer iPhone or Android?KAYLA: iPhone. Yeah. I grew up using Mac products so I feel like it was just kind of a natural evolution.ADRIANA: That's so cool that you grew up like that. I did not grow up using Mac products, but I became like a late stage convert.KAYLA: My parents were both teachers and the school district that they work for got a huge grant from Apple and so they actually got to like take an early computer home.ADRIANA: Oh my God.KAYLA: In the summertime. Yeah. So like when it wasn't being used, which was great. So yeah. So back in the like green and black little boxy Mac days.ADRIANA: I remember those. Yeah. I remember growing up like schools always had the Macs and it was like the, it was the Apple IIe before...pre Mac. And then, and then in my high school they had a, they had a Macintosh lab for like all the graphic design and then for like the computer class we had like a lab of Unisys Icon computers which I don't even know if they make those anymore but they, they ran Windows and yeah, that, that's what we use for computer programming.KAYLA: Nice, nice.ADRIANA: That's cool. Now did you get into computers because of your parents bringing home the max in the summer or was that like a later enlightening?KAYLA: Yeah, that's a good question. I think that that got me curious in them and like I liked, I was like early on the IT person for my family. So it was like learning, learning how to do those things. I had a great computer computers teacher to, in elementary school but I kind of drifted away from it in junior high and high school and was using more like using computers for like creative things like you know, Photoshop or like film editing. But ended up, yeah, circling, circling back much later because I, I was charged at one point with creating like Internet based documentary extras, like different things that you could use to interact with media and archives. And there was so much that I was always just asking this other engineer to do that it got me somewhat curious of like, I wonder if I could do this myself someday. And it wasn't until you know, I was kind of at this point where I was wrapping up a film project that I had been working on for a few years and wasn't sure if I wanted to go looking for a new one or make a career change that a friend of mine who was a software engineer encouraged me to look into that. And so that's kind of how I got into coding and started learning about it and enjoying it.ADRIANA: That's so cool. So your original background was more on the film end of things?KAYLA: Yep. Yeah, yeah. Documentary film stuff.ADRIANA: Oh, wow, that's so cool. I. I have to say, like, you know, having. Not that I'm a great editor or anything, but, like, editing video was something that terrified me, like, even 10 years ago, and now I'm like, okay at it. And I have mad respect for. For people who do video editing, because that is. That's a lot more work than just photo editing. Like, so much work.ADRIANA: So much work, so.KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah. Such a skill.ADRIANA: Yeah.KAYLA: And it's amazing how you can take the same footage and just edit it in different ways and have completely different films, completely different feelings.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, that's true. It's all about, like, the context, right?KAYLA: Yeah.ADRIANA: Cool. That's awesome. All right, next question. I think you've answered it already, but do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah. So I would say, yeah, Mac is definitely where I feel most at home. I think Linux is really interesting, but I haven't had a chance to play around with it. And every time I'm using a Windows computer, it feels like I'm being forced to use my right hand. Like, I just. I can get to it eventually, but it just doesn't click in the same way.ADRIANA: Oh, my God, I love that.KAYLA: Last night, I was actually helping my aunt with her laptop, and she wanted to bookmark some websites and things like that, and it just. It took me like, an extra 30 seconds every time to be like, nope, this is where you click on this mouse and. Yeah. How you. How you right click and...ADRIANA: It's true. It's true. One thing I have to give credit to the Apple folks, like, when I switched from Windows to Mac, is I was surprised by how intuitive the shortcuts were because I'm a huge shortcut person. And I found that I discovered a lot of shortcuts by accident just through, like, I don't know, I'm like, what happens if I do this? And lo and behold, I'm like, what? It does that. Yeah. So mad props on the usability. That's one thing that I really appreciate about Macs, that I don't see that in Windows land yet.KAYLA: Yeah. One of the things that I like to do as a kid was see how far I could get with using just the commands on the Mac. Only use no mouse. Because Macs didn't really have a lot of games at that point in time, so it was like games to play. But you could get, you could get pretty far with just a keyboard.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. It's actually really impressive. Cool. Okay, next question. What is your favorite programming language?KAYLA: My favorite programming language is Ruby. Yeah, I, you know, I, it's funny. So I started learning JavaScript first and that, you know, felt it felt more like code like because you had all of these extra characters, you have these curly braces and lots of quotes and things like that. Yeah, yeah. And then I went to a coding boot camp that started, started us out with Ruby. And at first I like remember telling my partner like, man, this programming language sucks. Like it's just like I'm writing words, it doesn't feel like there's any code in there at all. But then as time went on I was like this, this feels quite nice to just think about almost like writing a sentence or how you would explain something to another person, like making the code seem very like story based.ADRIANA: Yeah.KAYLA: And you know, I was fortunate that after my coding boot camp I ended up working for a company that specialized in Ruby, Rails and React, which was exactly what I studied. And I've just kept landing myself in these roles so I get a chance to dabble now and then in other languages, but I don't feel nearly as comfortable as I do in Ruby.ADRIANA: Cool. That's so awesome. And you know, it's funny because there's, I feel like there's always a place for Ruby no matter what. Like there's such a demand for Ruby developers. It's such a, like alive and well community. And you know, I've also mentioned this a bunch of times on the show. I've had a lot of Ruby people come on and the, the common element is, you know, like they love the language so much and it's like such a, everyone talks about the community around it as well that they really love. So.KAYLA: Yes.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's so great. I've never touched Ruby. I've read Ruby code a couple of times because of a previous job and I have to say I, I'm like, yeah, I can tell what's going on from reading this. So mad props to Ruby.KAYLA: Yeah. Yes. Oh yeah. I love the community part of it too. Like I think that that made you know, career changing and learning a new language like feel so much more accessible and just like going to a conference that feels like every person you bump into is like extremely friendly and like wants to know who you are as a person and ask good questions. So it feels comfortable.ADRIANA: That's so great. I, I love that. And you know, I think half, half of what we, you know, half of what being soft a software engineer is about is the community or even in tech in general. It's all about the community, finding the place where you belong, finding your people, basically. And it's nice that I think, like, you can pretty much find your people in any, like, little technique, which is amazing. Awesome. All right, here's. Here's one that may.ADRIANA: May be controversial, maybe not. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?KAYLA: I think, I think Dev. I want to feel more comfortable with Ops, but every time. Like it. Yeah, it just feels a little foreign. I find myself often needing to relearn things, but I've. I've recently been working on a project that's had me get to spend more time in Ops and now I'm feeling a little more comfortable in it again. So that's exciting.ADRIANA: That's exciting. Awesome. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?KAYLA: Ooh, that's really hard. I guess, I guess YAML because I find that I have fewer compiling issues when I'm working with YAML. I'll forget a comma or add a comma somewhere with JSON that I'm not supposed to.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. My, my, my issue with JSON is like all the curly braces and all the quotes everywhere. Because, like, I mean, YAML is like very loosey goosey on the quotes. Like you do or you don't. JSON. I hate that, like the keys have to be in quotes and the values have to be in quotes.KAYLA: Yeah.ADRIANA: I mean, if it's a string, where...does it also. If it's a number. I can't remember now.KAYLA: I don't think so. I think numbers can be just themselves.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's like too many quotes, too many curly braces. It makes my brain want to go.KAYLA: Right. I'm just trying to like sift through them.ADRIANA: Let me read it. I can't read it.KAYLA: Yeah, exactly.ADRIANA: Yeah. Awesome. Next one. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?KAYLA: I guess I like, I like the look of a double. Of a double space. But I don't use my space bar to create that. I always use the tab key, so I don't know what that means.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you can configure VSCode to like when you hit tab, it just makes it as a space instead of a tab.KAYLA: Yep.ADRIANA: Yeah, I, yeah, I'm with you. I will never use the space bar to like tab my stuff. But I will use tab to create spaces.KAYLA: Yes, yes.ADRIANA: Cool. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?KAYLA: Hmm, I think it depends on what it is. Like if I am trying to like learn a new high level concept, I prefer, I mean really almost like audio more than video. Just being able to hear someone explain it to me. But if I'm trying to do like a, like a code along or like solve a specific problem, then I prefer text.ADRIANA: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I, I'm with you on that. A few, it's funny, a few people have also mentioned like just the audio aspect, which, you know, like I've mentioned many times on this show. I'm not much of a video person, but I will put on like a YouTube video while I'm doing chores and just listen to the audio because it feels very podcasty to me. Like I'll even like, lately I've been just comfort watching Star Trek the Next Generation and I'll just like, I'll just like do whatever, like be brushing my teeth and listening to an episode while I'm, you know, while I'm listening, I'm not even watching the video.KAYLA: That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I love to just have some sort of audio content when I'm, when I'm walking my dog and occasionally like if I'm stuck on something or just also like need to take a coding break if I want to feel like I'm still working, I'll listen to something tech related.ADRIANA: Yes, yes, exactly. That's awesome. Okay, final question. What is your superpower?KAYLA: Well, I've had, I've had people tell me that I can be really helpful with docs and you know, like make...rewrite things or reword things in, in like READMEs or change logs or something to, to make them more clear. So maybe, maybe that's my superpower.ADRIANA: That is a great superpower. There is something to be said about effective communication, so I am down for it. Awesome.KAYLA: I blame it entirely on this experiment they had us do in junior high where we had to write out the steps to make a peanut butter sandwich. I don't know if you've heard of this or have had to do it, but. And in class you'd bring your instructions and the teacher would then try to make a peanut butter sandwich, literally following your instructions. So if you didn't say to open the jar, they would slam the knife through the top of the jar and say, nope, not going to be a peanut butter sandwich.ADRIANA: Oh my God, that is such a great exercise. And that is such a great way to ingrain that in you. Because I. A personal pet peeve of mine when it comes to documentation for software or. Yeah, yeah, for, for software development, for like learning a new tool or whatever is like the skipped steps. Please include the steps. We don't all know what you're talking about because we're not as smart as you. So please dumb it down for the rest of us peasants.KAYLA: Yes. Because I think, I don't think I've ever come across a situation where I've been like, oh, I wish you were less specific. Right. Because even if you know the details, you can just skim and keep scrolling. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Not skipping steps is, I think, a true sign of great documentation.ADRIANA: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I love...the peanut butter sandwich exercises is a really good one. And I feel like more schools should be doing stuff. Stuff like that.KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, maybe try it yourself if you want to practice. Practice with docs or something. See how far you get.ADRIANA: That's a great idea. And, and actually even. Yeah. On, on a similar vein, not, not just trying the. I'm assuming you were referring to like specifically trying the peanut butter sandwich example, but like also making sure that like when you're writing your own docs, that you can follow your own instructions. Right?KAYLA: Yes, yeah. Checking. Checking it back afterwards and going step by step.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because that says a lot too. Like, especially like when I put out a tutorial or whatever and I want to. I'm like extra paranoid. So I want to make sure that it's like very reproducible. So I've taken to using GitHub Codespaces a lot to be able to reproduce things. And that has helped me so much because it's like a very, like, from scratch environment. So, you know, I haven't. It's not polluted with the other crap that I already have installed. And so it's, it's really great to vet whether or not like, you know, I'll. Whether or not my instructions are they work because of the stuff that I already had installed or do they work because they're actually correct?KAYLA: Yeah. Oh, that's a great point. I really haven't experimented much with GitHub Codespaces, but I know the OpenTelemetry Ruby repo has them set up. So maybe, maybe this is now the time to start playing around with that.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's awesome. And you know, you've. You've done the perfect segue into like our main topic of conversation because you are, I hope I get this correct. Are you one of the approvers or maintainers of OpenTelemetry Ruby?KAYLA: So I'm both. So on the OpenTelemetry Ruby repo, the one that holds the SDK and the APIs and such, I'm an approver. And then on the OpenTelemetry Ruby contrib repo, I'm a maintainer.ADRIANA: Oh, that's awesome. So tell us how you got to, you got into like this whole OpenTelemetry journey like from. Because it's, it's such a, I think it's such an honor and also an accomplishment to you know, become a, become, become an approver, become a maintainer of an open source repo. Especially a project like OpenTelemetry, which for those who are unfamiliar with it, it's the second most contributed open source project of the CNCF. So.KAYLA: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I've always been intrigued by the idea of open source. Like I, you know, kind of, when we were talking about the documentary path earlier, I think I was kind of in this like, you know, grassroots vein, like wanting to be a part of community driven things. And I kind of saw that in open source. So that, that felt intriguing to me. And the team that I work on for my day job is New Relics Ruby Agent, which is open source. So there, you know, I'm responsible for maintaining the New Relic RPM Gem along with some other fantastic people. And we will get, we have our, you know, repo on GitHub and will receive issues and pull requests and things like that. But you know, New Relic, like other Observability vendors have noticed that OpenTelemetry is becoming a really important part of the Observability ecosystem and has the power to disrupt, you know, tools like New Relic RPM that have existed for, gosh, I don't even know how long, over 15 years now I think. And so I was tasked with just checking out what the OpenTelemetry Ruby project was like and seeing how it compared with our agent. And so from there, you know, it was initially just kind of comparing code and seeing how that went. But as time went on I also kind of started comparing communities and seeing how there were so many more people contributing to this project and such, like diverse engineers from, you know, people who maybe had Observability experience or people who did not and you know, getting feedback from people who were using the Gem about things that, you know, if you captured a span in this way, we would find it much more meaningful than in the other way. And that kind of feedback I felt like was sorely lacking from the New Relic repo. We will get bug reports, occasionally we'll get feature requests, but they're few and far between. After doing this analysis and seeing that the OpenTelemetry Ruby project was missing two of the major signals, logs and metrics, chatted with my managers and was able to get some time to start working on the OpenTelemetry Ruby project. I had just done some logs work for New Relics to do automatic log forwarding and decided to start there with OTel for Ruby and have just kind of attended the SIGs and submitted PRs and collaborated ever since. I guess that was actually almost a year ago. So.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so cool. Wow, that's awesome. So it was, you know, like you're, it's something that you, you noticed there was this gap and so you, you went to your manager to like ask to fill the gap. That's so great. And you know, how, how, how was it like the initial experience of contributing to the SIG and contributing like your first code, like your first PR?KAYLA: Yeah, it was educational for sure. I, the first PR that I opened, well, this is not the first PR. At first I opened a docs PR. You know, I was going through some steps and I noticed that something was wrong or didn't work for me and kind of submitted something there. But I'd say the first like major piece of code change was I found an issue where OpenTelemetry had essentially copied New Relic's SQL obfuscation tool and integrated it into their repository. And there was some code duplication amongst the MySQL related Gems and the Postgres Gems. And the ticket was asking to create some type of helper that could be used across all of these Gems. So I was like, easy, great, I will just move this code to a new spot.Don't even need to really refactor it because it seems identical. Let's just do that. So I did that, submitted my PR, thought everything was looking good and just kind of kept learning about the project as time went on. Whereas New Relic RPM puts everything into one Gem. OpenTelemetry Ruby is extremely modular and every little part is its own Gem. And I don't think Gems are libraries for Ruby that you install. The first move was I put it in this general base Gem, but instead we decided that a new helper Gem would be better for this MySQL work. Then as time went on, this code hasn't been looked at for a while.Maybe we want to refactor something here or we want something to work better. I think a big lesson learned for me was that instead of encouraging that work to be done in a different PR and maybe creating a separate issue to come back to it later, I kept accepting those recommendations and incorporating them PR until, you know, every time I accepted one of those things, that meant it needed to get reviewed by more people and have more discussion and feedback before going forward. Because it's also, you know, even though it is. Was intended to be just kind of a code relocation, like it was starting to take on a bigger change. And this code is very important to the database instrumentation, to all of the database instrumentation. So we wanted to be really careful about not breaking things for existing users. So. Yeah, so I don't, I don't remember how long it was, but it was, it was quite a few months before that PR actually got moved in, merged in.I think we had well over 100 comments. But I think it did a great job of teaching me, you know, OpenTelemetry for Ruby standards for code, things that they like to test that are different from the way that New Relic likes to test things and also the way that, you know, they like to organize things and having the opportunity to take code that I was already familiar with and, you know, bring it to life more in an OpenTelemetry vein, I think kind of got me, got me hooked in terms of. Yeah. Trying to see things in this, in this new OpenTelemetry light.ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's so exciting too. And it's such a great way to, you know, to get your hands dirty is like, take something familiar. But, you know, you make such an excellent point too of like, letting the PR get too big. Because I almost got caught by this this week where I submitted a PR to the docs to include like, some like, troubleshooting tips for the Target Allocator. And I got emboldened and I'm like, you know what I have, I. Not only am I contributing, like, you know, troubleshooting tips for that, I'm also going to include troubleshooting tips for auto instrumentation for the OTel Operator in the same PR. And Severin, who's one of the maintainers of the docs, he's like, yeah, you should, if you don't mind, could you open a second PR for that? And I'm so grateful that he nudged me in that direction because I'm like, yeah, otherwise that first PR would have just. It would, would have just taken forever to get it merged kind of thing. So things like that like, I. I appreciate when, you know, if you have somebody who, who will nudge you or, or you learn on your own that, like, yeah, maybe, maybe I should split this up. There's definitely something to be said for, for putting. Putting an issue to bed, getting some closure, getting that. That feature incorporated as quickly as possible, as safely as possible as well. That's so great. That's so great.And how did you, like, what was the path for you from, you know, just like, initial contributor to like, maintainer or I guess contributor, approver or maintainer. Like, how. How does. What's that path look like?KAYLA: Yeah, so for me, you know, I started. I started attending the SIGs after this database PR, but also kind of like in conjunction with it. I made it clear that I wanted to contribute logs. I wanted to get as far as I could in contributing the log signal that I had the time and the resources and so started writing that and contributing a lot of code in that way. And also just paying attention to what was happening in the repo when even, like, smaller maintenance things were needed. So, like, if dependabot opened a new PR in contrib, like, trying to read it and approve it, even though I didn't have an official green checkmark, like, being able to just become more visible and, you know, hope that I could become a more trusted set of eyes through doing that.ADRIANA: Yeah.KAYLA: And the Ruby. The Ruby SIG is pretty small. I think that, you know, it. There are a lot of people who have been super committed to the project and really crucial with it, but I don't think they have the same time to commit that they used to have and so kind of trying to learn from them and help them out as well. So I think that helped build trust over time. And I let them know that I was interested in, you know, gaining, getting more responsibility and going through that path. And so, yeah, I worked with them to make it. Make it there.ADRIANA: That's awesome. And, you know, I think you touch on a really important point, which is advocating for yourself because sometimes we're too shy and we just hope that someone will notice and maybe someone will notice and you'll. You'll get attention that way. But, like, chances are, like, they're too busy in their own world doing whatever, so if you don't stand up for yourself, you're not gonna. You're definitely not gonna get it. So, you know, kudos to you for doing that. I think that's so amazing.KAYLA: Thank you. Yeah, I. It took a lot of encouragement. I think OpenTelemetry has been a great opportunity for me to practice advocating for myself, because that's something that's really hard for me to do. And I think, you know, anytime you join a new group or a community, especially one that feels like it's already established, it's kind of. I feel like I want to understand how people like to communicate with each other and what is expected. And, you know, I felt pretty strong when I joined that I wanted to, you know, try to gain more responsibility as an approver or a maintainer, but, you know, didn't want to just say, oh, I'm showing up because this is what. This is what I want.ADRIANA: Yeah.KAYLA: And. Yeah. And so, you know, I had a lot of support from other folks inside New Relic who have worked with OpenTelemetry, kind of encouraging and coaching me in ways to advocate for myself. But I'm feeling. Yeah, I'm feeling much more confident in it now. And I'm grateful that OpenTelemetry has given me that opportunity to kind of learn this lesson.ADRIANA: And it's probably one of the best communities to do that, because I've always said so many times, OpenTelemetry is such an incredibly welcoming community, and I've not yet encountered a situation where someone has made some sort of asshole comment on a PR. Like, everything is very thoughtfully worded because at the end of the day, they want your contribution. I mean, this open source is here because of people like us who are. Who are out there contributing. So you don't want to antagonize or alienate the contributors.KAYLA: Yes, definitely. And that's been a place where I feel like I've gotten a chance to grow as well, because I think with the New Relic repo, like, our team really wants to cater to customers and make sure that they feel seen and heard and that the product is working for them. Like, if you reach out to us, like, we really want to acknowledge that. And in OpenTelemetry, I think that energy is there too. But I also think that because there are so many different voices and perspectives that are coming into it, kind of the ideas about where the project should be and where it should go are different. So there's, I think, a lot more scrutiny about, like, is this the best way to add to this project? Is this something that we, like, want to take on maintaining or that we can, you know, trust will continue to be supported and. Yeah, so getting. Getting those more. Getting some PRs that fall into that gray area of whether, or not, you know, it's the right solution has been challenging because I really want to encourage more people to contribute, but at the same time, we need the right kinds of contributions. So coaching people in a new way or encouraging people to do something differently and figuring out how to say those things has been kind of a challenge for me.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's funny too, like, contribution, there's like, I guess a couple of different types of contributions because there's the, oh, I see a gap here and I want to fill it. And then there's the. Also, like, you can go through the list of open issues and see if that's something that you would want to take on. And especially believe there's like the great first issue or good first issue label on. On certain issues, which is designed for, you know, people who are new to contributing, as this is like the starter issue that you might want to take on. And it's all about, like, there's no issue. There's no such thing as a small issue to tackle because everything, every little thing, helps to contribute to the community.KAYLA: Yes. Yeah. It's hard to tell the impact of the change that you make. Even if it's like a single line change, you know, if you're bringing, maybe just changing a key so that it matches a new semantic convention, I mean, that can still have a huge impact as time goes on. Or like one of our good first issues I think we have labeled right now is adding. Adding a spell checker that's used in the opentelemetry.io website on the Ruby repositories. And you know, that, that could make a big difference because, you know, we don't really know how we're spelling things wrong or if we're not matching the style guide in places. And having that consistency, I think just makes for an easier experience. Whereas sometimes if you're reading something and it's misspelled, it can just be a bit of a. A hard stop.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, because then your brain can tend to be very judgy. Oh, they can't spell this. Why should I trust these docs?KAYLA: Yes.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting you mentioned the, the spell checker and the. Just like maintaining the style guide. Because that, that is definitely one thing. Like having made a bunch of docs contributions in the last couple years, like, they are very stringent on that. And even though it may drive you a little bit crazy as you're like trying to get like all those checks to pass as you're after you push your code for the PR, there is a method to the madness because it really does allow for like a more streamlined experience because everyone has a different way of coding. Everyone has a way of, different way of documenting and it is absolutely annoying to go through like inconsistent, inconsistent code. It just...eugh! So...that people put those checks and balances in place.There's, there's a reason for it even, even if I might seem a little bit annoying or inconvenient, like it'll save you that extra bit of, of stress in the end. Right?KAYLA: Definitely.ADRIANA: Awesome. Another thing that I wanted to switch gears on a little bit is you know, just get your thoughts around like open source communities in general. Like when we were chatting before we started the recording, talking about like these more community sponsored open source projects versus ones that are more like corporate sponsored or like one, you know, primarily one company kind of overseeing the open source project. If you have any thoughts on that.KAYLA: Yeah, I think, I think my experience like working on these two different projects has been really interesting or types of projects in like the vendor controlled land. There's a level of like wanting the community and I think almost assuming that if you make something open source the community will show up and maybe they will write the code for you. And I think that a lot of places that have open sourced products with that like hope or intention in mind have possibly been let down. I think. I'm not sure if it's because of the way that companies have support that works differently, usually an internal support team or if it's, you know, as a business having stakeholders and a structure that's more corporate and like business driven, that there's maybe less space for creativity outside of the specific goals of the organization. I also wonder too if in the vendor controlled space like you as a customer possibly feels different when you're looking at the code versus a fully like, I guess like maybe like company agnostic open source project because I think as a customer I would be more interested in trying to just get something fixed. Whereas maybe in like a more general open source environment I would feel more empowered to pitch an idea. I don't know if that's true, but that's my hunch.Yeah, that's one thing that I really, really love about OpenTelemetry is that the vendors and the end users are working together. And I think that there is no single company or organization that is, or I guess I should say company that's responsible for it because the CNCF is the organization responsible for it. It keeps things yeah, more, more creative, more, more volatile. But I think also will, will drive something that might be more More valuable overall.ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think OpenTelemetry spends a lot of effort in trying to keep things as vendor neutral as possible. And I say that in the best way possible because really, you know, like one of, for those who aren't aware, you know, I work with Reece Lee, who from New Relic, one of your, one of your co workers, on the OTel End User SIG. And we work for competitors, but like, I don't see it that way. That's maybe what it looks like on the outside, but I don't see it that way. We're all friends in OpenTelemetry, regardless of vendor. Like, we, we don't see each other's competitors. We're all like working towards the same goal.We all want the same things and we are trying to cater to like, our user base as much as possible. Like, we want something put out that's useful to the people consuming it. So, you know, we don't want to be about it. But also being strict in, in terms of like making sure that not, you know, we're not favoring a vendor over another. And if there's pushback around that, it's for a very like, valid reason because we really don't want it to be like one vendor standing out over the other. We're all friends.KAYLA: Yes. Yeah, yeah. As you were saying that, I was kind of reminded of the piece of advice that's given that's like always like, don't be afraid to ask a question because someone else in the room may have the same question as you. I think that is really true in OpenTelemetry because often if one user or one vendor runs into a certain problem, it may be something that other people are struggling with as well. And so that contribution in OpenTelemetry is like a tide that raises all boats. I think that's how you say that.ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. And you remind me of something that happened to me last week where I was like, I was stuck on this one issue and it was related to the OTel operator and I like popped into the Slack and before I started I was going to ask my question. I'm like, what if I search on this particular keyword to see if someone else has had that issue? And lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. So remembering that oftentimes your issue is not unique. And as you said, having the courage to ask that question benefits not only you, but others who are probably in the dark about that as well. Well, that's so great. We are coming up on time.So before we go, I was wondering if you had any hot takes or words of wisdom for our audience.KAYLA: Yeah, let's see. So, I mean, I guess maybe just from our conversation, I think. Yeah. Two big things that I would say if you're participating in any open source project, not just OpenTelemetry, is don't be afraid to ask questions, especially asking questions of the maintainers. I think maintainers are hungry to have people contribute and participate. And the other one would be, you know, even. Even though you may want to participate in some sort of group, like, don't. Don't lose sight of. Of who you are either and what your coding standards are either. I think bringing. Bringing your full self there and being able to ask questions and make statements from what you've learned to be best can usually create a really fruitful discussion so that either you learn something from someone else or perhaps they learn something from you.ADRIANA: I love that so much. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, really being, like, not being shy about, like, don't under. Don't underestimate, like, how capable you are is really like. Yeah, it's such an important. Such an important thing to bring, I think, to. To any table. Well, thank you so much, Kayla, for. For Geeking Out with me today, y'all. Don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...KAYLA: Peace out and geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

Dec 3, 2024 • 53min

The One Where We Geek Out on Java with Ix-chel Ruiz of Karakun

About our guest:Ix-chel Ruiz has been developing software applications and tools since 2000. Her technical research interests include server side languages like Java, dynamic languages, client-side technologies, testing, automation and observability. Her humanities research interests include personal, professional and organisational development and transformation. Java Champion, Oracle ACE pro, Testcontainers Community Champion, CDF Ambassador, Hackergarten enthusiast, Open Source advocate, public speaker and mentor.Find our guest on:BlueskyMastodonLinkedInTwitter (X)GitHubSessionizeFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:Apache Groovy (programming language)Basel Java User Group (JUG)Apache Groovy Committee (aka PMC)Jochen Theodorou (one of the Groovy core contributors)edX Online CoursesCodemotion Conference Madrid 2024Pascal (programming language)Softimage (company)Autodesk MayaJavaOne ConferenceQCon BrazilJavaLandJCrete Un-conferenceJChateau Un-conferenceJAlba Un-conferenceJalapeño Un-conferenceBaselone ConferenceDevoxx UK ConferenceJfokus ConferenceLian Li on Geeking Out talking about un-conferencesJava Champions Additional notes:Ix-chel's upcoming conferences/un-conferences: JNation, MAD Summit, DevBcn, JCreteTranscript: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 Ix-chel Ruiz. Welcome, Ix-chel!IX-CHEL: Thank you for having me. Thank you.ADRIANA: I'm very excited to have you on and tell folks where you're calling from and where you work.IX-CHEL: Okay, so I'm calling from Basel, Switzerland, and I work in Karakun. We are small consultancy company here in Switzerland and we also have offices in Germany and India, in several other places around the world. But we're still very, very small. And I still love that.ADRIANA: That's awesome. Yeah, I love small consulting companies because I feel like the projects are a lot more interesting that way too.IX-CHEL: Yes. It allows a closer relationship with the people that you work with, the teams that you work, and your clients. So it's. You are there to help them figure out something. And sometimes it's. It's actually systems and sometimes it's a totally different thing.ADRIANA: It's so true. That's so true. I. So I did consulting early in my career, but I worked at Accenture for four years, so I feel like. So I have the, like the big corporate consulting experience, which was. It was very interesting. It was very challenging. It led to early burnout. But I. I do admire, like, the smaller consultancies and I have a couple of friends who work at smaller consultancies and. And they quite like it. So.IX-CHEL: I joined that club.ADRIANA: Awesome. Awesome. Well, before we get started with the meaty bits, I'm going to get you started with some lightning round questions. Lightning round slash icebreaker. We'll see how if they go fast or slow. It's all good either way. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?IX-CHEL: I use both.ADRIANA: That's awesome. I love that. Okay, do you prefer iPhone or Android?IX-CHEL: I have to say that I have an iPhone. And at the beginning I had Dell machines, but then at work several years ago, they gave me a Mac and from there on, like, having Mac devices made life easier because everything was synchronized. So now I have four of my own devices. AppleADRIANA: Oh, you just answered my next question. If it was Mac, Linux or Windows. That's awesome. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because I think, like, when I got my first iPhone, I was still on a Windows machine and I'm like, oh, my God, what is this nightmarish crap? And then, and then I got like an Apple. Like, I got a Mac with my iPhone and I already had an iPhone. I'm like, magic.IX-CHEL: Yes. Easy to use. Compatibility, consistency goes along the, like, a long way.ADRIANA: I completely agree. Yeah, I mean, that, that, that's why I'm part of the Mac cult. I like that everything plays nice together.IX-CHEL: Exactly.ADRIANA: Awesome. What is your favorite programming language?IX-CHEL: Java. I have to say Java, but in between. I mean, at this moment in time, you cannot say that you only love one language because you end up using a lot. So you're a polyglot by almost by definition. So I love Java, but I also like other languages. My second great love is Groovy because at that time, yes, at that time it gave me everything, like, less ceremony, more the dynamic part. So it was. And you could create magic in so little lines of code. So, yes. So Java, Groovy. I also have done a little bit of Go and many of JavaScript, obviously. Obviously. Full Stack developer.ADRIANA: That's cool. You know, I think you're the first person I've met who's liked Groovy. And, you know, I messed around with Groovy for a bit as well. Like when I first started getting into Jenkins and I wanted to do some more customization stuff. And I remember, like, other people dissing Groovy, but I'm like, but this is like less verbose Java because I was a Java developer for like 15 years and I'm like, this is less verbose Java. This is like super freaking cool. And I'm like, why are people, like, harping on Groovy?IX-CHEL: No, no, I mean, honestly, I remember. I remember my first session, it was in one Java one. And then this. The speaker was showing how to, for example, open Excel and do crazy stuff all programmatically, all from the Groovy console. And it was so easy. And I was like, oh, my God, I need that. I mean, because I'm coming from the, from the Ubuntu, like, shell and the command line interface, it's my life. So suddenly, like command line interface, but for applications that usually you're like, oh, my God, how many clicks do I have to do here to make things work? So suddenly, no clicks involved, and you were doing something incredible, and I fell in love. The funny part of that story is that my husband entered Groovy first and he was like, I have been trying to convince you of try Groovy. And you got convinced by that speaker and not by me.ADRIANA: It's always the ones closest to us that we don't want to listen to. It's like, yeah, for sure. They know what they're talking about. That's great. I love that. Oh, yeah, sorry, go ahead.IX-CHEL: Sorry. It's because. It's because we got into this. I'm hosting one of the core contributors of Groovy in the Basal JUG next month is Jochen Theodorou. He is part of the PMC of Groovy. He has been working on the internals on the compiler. I mean, I still very close to Groovy in my heart and with the people that I work with.ADRIANA: Oh, that's so awesome. That's so great. Yeah, it's funny because you don't hear too much about Groovy, and I'm very. I'm very pleased to hear that there. It's still like a very thriving community.IX-CHEL: Yes.ADRIANA: Awesome. All right, next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?IX-CHEL: Okay. As I told you, I started with Ubuntu when I was in high school. Like, honestly, I received. I actually was not Ubuntu. Ubuntu was very sophisticated years later. I started with the distribution in a CD-ROM, when you had to go to university to have people. And that time it was the. The university, the main university of Mexico, and they will burn you a CD-ROM and give it to you. That's how you distributed Linux at that time. So I hear. I'm dating myself.ADRIANA: Like, oh, my God. Yes, yes, yes.IX-CHEL: I totally.ADRIANA: Yes, I'm with you there. CD-ROM days.IX-CHEL: Oh, my God. So CLI, Ops and making to everything, Automate and scripts and everything. That's where I started. That's what pulled me into computers. But then I'm a developer, so you're asking me. For me, there is no separation because probably that's because of my background. So I cannot answer that question. Honestly.ADRIANA: You know what? I love your answer. And it's funny because I was having a similar discussion with people on this because I like, for me, the thing that attracted me to, like, the whole DevOps movement was the, like, oh, my God, I can use, Like, I like the hardware aspect of it. Like, I like infrastructure, it's cool. But I like coding. And I'm like, oh, you're telling me now I can, like, merge both of them. And the other aspect of it too is, like, as a software engineer, I think, like, for me personally, I think it's shocking when, like, you ask, you ask other software engineers, like, how to build, like, a Docker image of their code, and they're like, I don't know. That's what the DevOps engineer does. And I'm like, In my mind, I find that confusing because for me, DevOps was always meant to be like, no, we're supposed to know how to do this stuff. And now you're telling me that you're like leaving it to someone else, like you've inserted another layer of person to do a thing for you. And I'm like, shouldn't, shouldn't you be like remotely curious as to like how, how you build like the images you're going to deploy?IX-CHEL: I'm so with you there and let me paint you this image. And I think you are going to be a little bit scared, as I did when somebody make me realize that. He said, have you realized that now most of the people interact with their phones, that is their main interaction with a device. And have you realized that they don't even know how to organize or comprehend the concept of directories and files?ADRIANA: Oh my God, so true.IX-CHEL: So because I was telling him that I joined into one of these edX courses about data because I wanted to learn more about managing data, acquiring data and everything like that. And I was, I was complaining a little bit because I told him like the first five sessions it was about how to structure data in directories, like how in the hierarchy. And it was like, do we really need three sessions for this? And when he turns around and he said, like, Ix-chel, do you realize that there is a lot of people, the majority of people that do need this kind of introduction and even more because before we have computers, like most of people had to go to the computers, drag and drop files, create the structure of the directories. And now our main interface is going to be the phone, which doesn't like, obscures all that. So I think we're going getting more tech savvy in some things, but forgetting the fundamentals because they don't realize that there's an operating system, that you need files, that they are organized, that there's a meaning. So it is kind of scary for me.ADRIANA: Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I experienced this firsthand with my daughter. So my daughter is turning 16 this year. And so first two kind of funny stories. One, so her first, I guess computer was like an iPad or iPhone. And when, when we put her in front of an actual laptop, she started trying to touch the screen and I'm like, oh my God, of course she would. Because like that's, that's her interaction with, with computers. That's, that's what she thinks, how she thinks they work. And then secondly, once she started using a computer more regularly for school like for assignments and stuff. She had no concept of directories as well. And so my husband, who's also in tech, my husband and I had to be like, okay, this is how you organize your documents. This is where you're going to want to put your stuff so that you know, you don't have like your, your stuff for like chemistry in the same place as your stuff for English, for example. And it was just like, for me, like, it. I'm like, oh, of course that wouldn't make sense to her because she's never been exposed to it. But for us, it's like, we grew up with this. Of course it's obvious that you need a directory structure, so. Yeah, it's so wild.IX-CHEL: Yes, yes. I'm really interested in how we're evolving in that regard.ADRIANA: Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what other side effects there are going to be. And it's funny because I even find myself like, I'm too lazy sometimes to do stuff on my laptop, which would be like 50 times easier because I'm like, my phone's here with me. I, I don't want to get up and go into the next room, grab my laptop to do whatever. Let's see what I can do on my phone. But then you get my dad who's like, why the hell would you want to do this on your phone? Like, you've got like a perfectly good computer, like it's a bigger screen. And for me I'm like, that's just too inconvenient.IX-CHEL: I totally understand that one.ADRIANA: Yeah. Okay, next question. This might be difficult to choose again. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?IX-CHEL: Okay, well, it's not so difficult because honestly, meaningful indentation. I don't like when it's difficult for people to realize that there is a mistake.ADRIANA: Yes.IX-CHEL: I mean, linters and validators are getting better, but it is like setting yourself for failure. And this is something I keep telling people. Like, why do we design either formats, tools that are not helping the users to realize best practices and mistakes easier, or why do you make it so easy for people to fail and miserably fail?ADRIANA: Yeah, fair enough.IX-CHEL: So JSON is not the best thing ever either. In the other way, because the format was also very limited, but it allows better this. It doesn't set yourself for failure so easy. Still not the best format either.ADRIANA: But I, I agree it's more forgiving. YAML. YAML is very unforgiving. I, I like YAML because I think it's cleaner to read. I find there's like too many curly braces in, in JSON, it makes my head go boom. But I, I do agree with you. I think JSON is definitely more forgiving. All right, next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs.IX-CHEL: You know, I'm going to tell the story there. I have heard everything under the sun in terms of like, you code like a girl. This formatting, it's so weird. I prefer tabs, I prefer spaces. If you don't put the spaces between parentheses or like. There are several arguments and some of them are really interesting. I, for example, with people with dyslexia space, if you leave a space between the parentheses, it's going to be easier for them because it reads better. Yeah, but then I love the solution of Go and Go. The people that design go, they agree that they will going to disagree on where we're going to be the best practices or so they created the form, you run that formatter and every single piece of code looks exactly the same. There is consistency. So they didn't agree on we should do this or we should do that, but they agree on having consistency. So I'm missing that from other languages. So honestly, at some point we should say I don't care, but let's agree on something even if we agree on disagreeing and then we try to create the least chaos in the world.ADRIANA: Yeah, and that's a really good point with, with the Go formatting because that, that's definitely one thing that I appreciate. Like I, I did, I spent a few years doing Python and the thing with Python is that I think compared to Java, I feel like there's like so many different ways to format your Python code, irritatingly so, and I'm very particular about how, how I format it but, and, and of course people have their own way of doing it. But then, but then like if, if we both, you know, commit our code into the repo with our different ways of formatting, it's like, you hate how I formatted. I hate, hate how you formatted. So the go away, as you said, is nice because it's like, yeah, do it your way, but when you save the file, it's going to get formatted the way I like it. So.IX-CHEL: Ha, ha ha. Exactly, exactly. These discussions are meaningless. So, and then you focus on other things and, and actually it helps you because you find partners faster. If everything looks the same, whatever thing that it's different, it will caught your eye and, and sometimes that's exactly what we need when we are reading code. So I, I will answer. I would, I will hope that we have that consistency and even if I hate it, I will still adopt it because. Sake of sanity and consistency.ADRIANA: Yes, I totally agree. We need, we need more like automatic formatting with Go in other languages. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, two more questions left. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?IX-CHEL: Depending on the content. But I think I love video. It. It has more, more levels of communication obviously. But sometimes when I really need to focus on the content, then it is better for me audio only.ADRIANA: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I agree. I, I'll. I've told people this before that like send me a YouTube video. I probably won't watch it, but like I will put it on. Like I'll leave my phone on my table with my AirPods on while I'm like doing errands and I'll listen to the video and then, but then if there's a visual component, be like, crap, where are you? But I, I like it because I can just, you know, do mindless things and listen and be more attentive towards it rather than sitting and watching.IX-CHEL: Exactly, exactly. Because then you, you can focus. Like honestly focus.ADRIANA: Exactly. Exactly. Cool. Okay, final question. What is your superpower?IX-CHEL: Good question. I, I keep telling people that one of my advantages is that I can articulate things in, in a different way. And I always telling people that telling a story is really important. And I think that is something that I appreciate about myself.ADRIANA: I love it. I love it. Yeah. And I think people, people respond well to stories. It's easier for them to remember the stuff that you're saying when you have a cool story to go with it. Right. Rather than some like blah, blah, blah, blah that no one's gonna.IX-CHEL: Yeah, I mean, well, I, I like to listen a lot of information. I like to research a lot about human behavior. And for example, that when you tell a story, our brain waves start to synchronize better with the speaker. And we also, because we are kind of guessing what is coming next because we all have this innate idea of what a story looks like. Like the intro, the main part where there is conflict, there may be conflict resolution and then the conclusion. So everybody's have this idea of a story. So they are trying to kind of guess what is happening. So their focus is going to be more into your words. So whatever you are telling them at that moment, it will be well received. Better received that it's only a statement.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's such a great point. And I love that so much. And I think, and I think also like it's such a powerful tool. Especially like when you're giving a talk at a conference. Because like, I don't know about you, but like I have, I have difficulty sitting. I don't know how I made it through university. I have difficulty sitting through and like watching, watching people give a talk, unless it's like a fun talk with a fun story and then you're like, oh my God, yes, as you said, it's like, what are they going to say next? Because this is really like, this is really cool. It's flowing in a, in a really like logical way. Right.IX-CHEL: Oh, in my last conference I was in Codemotion Madrid last week actually. And in many conferences there's. They are adding this kind of like community space and like a kind of a non conference. So in many conferences they're putting like lightning talks. Like you go and write your name and talk about five minutes about any topic and you can prepare your slides or you cannot prepare a slide, whatever. And for the last two conferences I have done it. I have gone and write my name in a lightning talk and the topic that I really. Because now I really think that it's super important for everybody, for everybody is storytelling.ADRIANA: Yes.IX-CHEL: And so I go there. I haven't written or put a slide deck because I want it to be spontaneous. I want to. And it's also a way for me to improve because I want to react to the audience. So the last time in Codemotion I had a full room and it was. They received very well my, my session. But honestly, the feedback of the people that were in the lighting talks, it was much, much better. Like people were like, oh my God, Ix-chel, I really, really enjoyed your...So, storytelling. It's, I think the superpower that we all need to, if not master, at least be mindful that it could be ours.ADRIANA: Yes, I love that. I'm super down for that. All right, well, you survived the lightning round questions.IX-CHEL: Yay.ADRIANA: Congrats. So now let's get into the meaty bits. And I think, you know, before, before we started recording, you were telling me that like, you know, you have done various things throughout your career. So first off, like, you know, how, how did you get started in tech? Like, tell me about your tech journey.IX-CHEL: Well, as I said, I live in Switzerland, but I also mentioned Mexico because I mentioned the university that I went to get my CD with the first versions of Linux. Well, okay, yes. So I'm from Mexico and at that time, and I was still in high school, but in my high school we shared the buildings with the University. And they had this cool, cool computer lab and I wanted to work there, but I'm still a high school student, so I went through a lot of hoops and I ended up, at that time it was Irix machines. Like it was super big machines and it was amazing. So that's what pulled me from a very, very young age into working with Unix at that time.ADRIANA: Nice.IX-CHEL: So that's how I landed. And then machines were easy to understand. Easy. According to me at that time it were. They were easy to understand and easy to command, let's put it like that. So. And yeah, from there on I decided computer science as my career. And my love for UNIX and the command line and programming has been there since I was a teenager, really.ADRIANA: That's awesome. What was your first programming language?IX-CHEL: It was Pascal. And then. Yes, yes, yes, Pascal. And then I went to C and then C++. And by the time I was, I was about to graduate, like year and a half before my graduation, Java made a splash. So I joined Java very, very early.ADRIANA: Nice. That's awesome. Yeah, I got into Java just. I think they were doing Java in my university, in my third year of university. So I got into Java around that time and I mean, it was the hot language at the time, right? It was like, oh my God, we must all do Java.IX-CHEL: Yes. Forget about pointers.ADRIANA: Yeah, I know, right? I know you do C, programming, then you get into Java, you're like, ah, we friends again.IX-CHEL: Oh my God.ADRIANA: Yeah.IX-CHEL: So that, that's how I started with computers. I fell in love with this big machines that I actually they were used mostly for effects... CGI at that time because they were using Softimage and Maya and things like that. So I wanted, at the beginning it was like, let's go and do a special effects at movies. But later on, like, no, I want to go deep.ADRIANA: That's so cool. So, so what was your, what was your first job out of school?IX-CHEL: My first job out of school. Oh my goodness. Actually, it was something more about like we were creating models for. At that time there was a plugin that had photorealistic details and you could create 3D models on that. It didn't. I mean, the technology died. But at that time people wanted to create like kind of avatars in real life, like clippy, but 3D and with the quality of movies.ADRIANA: For that time it was like I had it. It was like well ahead of its time.IX-CHEL: Yes, completely. Completely. That was my first job.ADRIANA: Oh, that's so neat. That's so neat.IX-CHEL: Yes.ADRIANA: And, and I, I seem to remember because we're on a couple panels together and you mentioned this earlier as well, that you've, you've, you've done the DevRel thing. You've, you've. And then you've gone back into the software, back into being a software engineer. So I guess the question is, what got you into DevRel and then what made you switch back?IX-CHEL: Okay, so first part, I was very. I'm an introvert. I'm an introvert that can have this like, this kind of moments of energy that is super extrovert. If you meet me at a conference, I'm talking, I'm doing, I'm with people. You see me after the conference, doesn't want to speak a word like a week. So I'm an introvert most of the time. So my first, as I said, I started with computers very early. They were my passion, but Ix-chel didn't speak. So as with your husband, he's. My husband is also in tech. He's actually also another PMC of the Groovy language. So you can imagine how deep we are.ADRIANA: That explains his hardcore into Groovy then.IX-CHEL: Yes. I told you. He was like, he convinced you and I didn't convince you. Remember that story?ADRIANA: Oh, damn.IX-CHEL: So we went to JavaOne and I was with him because he was a speaker at that time. And you know, we went to the speaker's dinners and whatnot. And then you could see the light of the eyes of the people. Like, what do I talk to the spouse? Because they didn't know that I was in technology. And literally they know that I was also in technology and I had same background and the same profile as my husband. So whatever. They talk with Andreas, my husband, they could talk to me.ADRIANA: Yeah.IX-CHEL: And in one of the meetings, in one of these dinners, I was talking to the organizers of QCon Brazil. Yes. And he, he was sharing his, his own experience that there were not a lot of women when he was at university. And, and he was telling me like, it's because we don't have enough role models. And I also was telling him my own experience because I have a dual degree. I'm computer science, but I'm also electronics and communication. Like hardcore. I decided computers at the end, but I'm still like designing. I could design circuits that could have been my future, but I decided computer, they were cooler. And I was telling him like, at least in computer science I had more women in school and in the electronics and communication, it was like, no, I. We Were only three women.ADRIANA: Oh, my God.IX-CHEL: In my entire generation.ADRIANA: Oh, my God.IX-CHEL: So I was telling him that I totally understand his, his, his position. And he said, like, you know, we need more women speakers. And I'm telling you, this is like more than 15 years ago. And I was like, yes, you're right. Like, yes, you're right. And once I explain, like, I have the same profile as my husband, I work in the same project we are actually, etc. Etc. And he's like, oh, my goodness. I mean, why don't you start speaking at conferences? I'm like, no, like that. But he got me thinking, like, that's the problem. We don't have enough role models, so somebody has to do it. Like. And at that time I said to myself, you're not so bad at what you do, and this is important for you because I had some really bad experiences when I was in the university and I hate them. I hate them so much. That that was for. For a time, my fuel.And I said, I don't want any other woman having this insulting experiences. So I want more women so that we are not like the most strange thing in the room. So I told my husband, you know what, I'm going to start. Like, I want to speak at conferences. I want to show that we are good technically, we can do whatever. Like, it doesn't matter, but it's. This is important. So that's how I started to speak at conferences. And then, and then I started doing that a lot, but while still being a consultant. And I thought it was really important. And then I like it. And I travel and I met a lot of people and everything like that. So people were like, you are a DevRel. I'm like, no, I have deadlines, I have clients, I have projects I need to provide. Like, no, this is. This is part of my passion. This is part of what I do in my free time. And sometimes now I negotiate with my companies telling them, please sponsor 20% of my time to do all this stuff.ADRIANA: That's awesome.IX-CHEL: But people thought that I was a DevRel. And then one of my friends that I met at. In this kind of conferences or traveling or tours, he. He changed jobs and he literally knocked at my door and he said, Ix-chel, do you want to try being DevRel? And I thought for long because I said, this is my passion. This is 20% of my time, maybe more. This is 20% of my time paid by the company and almost all my free time.ADRIANA: Yeah, it takes a lot of effort and energy.IX-CHEL: Yes. So I said, yes, I'm going to do this. But turns out that for me, one really important part is technology for me is a tool, tool to solve problems, a tool to improve human lives. And being a DevRel, it's fantastic because you have all these interactions with people, you get all these feedback from developers, you are creating stories, you are helping people learn new things. But I was still missing this part of this is a tool to help solve problems. So I was missing a lot being a part of a project, like a steady project. I want my teammates to be not for this podcast, not for this MVP or this POC. I want people that we have meetings for six months, for one year where the project is still building, etc. etc. So that's why I decided it is fantastic being at DevRel. It's fantastic. Me being so introvert made it a little bit hard because being on more time than 20% or 60% or whatever, it was very hard on me. I love it. But I said, let's go back to engineering because you want to solve problems and have deadlines. And I was talking to my friends in Codemotion, my dear friends, and I said, you know what, I hate to say, but I was missing deadlines. I work better under pressure.ADRIANA: That is hardcore.IX-CHEL: Let's see how long can I sustain that again? Maybe I will go back to DevRel. No, I, I actually don't know. No, no, I, I'm happy doing what I'm doing right now.ADRIANA: That's awesome. So how, how long were you a DevRel for before you. Two years. Okay, two years. And then you're like, no, I want to code.IX-CHEL: Well, you know, DevRel means so many different things for so many different companies. And one, like you can see that I'm the person that research a lot for her talks for whatever. So I started interviewing a lot of DevRel. My friends and I, we got like the list of if you're a part of marketing is one way, if you're part of engineering is other way, if you're part of sales is another way. And the objectives and the guidelines and the type of work that you have to do and the priorities are totally different. Yeah, so my, my, my view on that, it's just one perspective from one company, from one department. So I cannot tell you honestly, like is DevRel what I experienced? It was one experience of DevRel with some perspective.ADRIANA: And that's a really good point because as you said, depending on where DevRel falls in your organization, it's going to be a completely different experience. It depends on your manager and it depends. Some companies, companies are hung up on like you have to produce like this kind of content this many times a month or whatever. And then that can be like really stressful in its own, in its own way. Like for I. I've been lucky in, in my role where like, I don't have those kinds of constraints, which has been very nice. And my DevRel work is mostly aligned to open source and OpenTelemetry. Um, but I mean, I've seen, I've seen the other side of it where, you know, folks are like beholden to like producing content constantly and all this stuff. And it's really hard sometimes to like produce content because you have to sit down and learn the thing. But you can't learn the thing if you're expected to produce content all the time. So I, I have to say, like, I'm grateful for my current experience where, you know, I have, I have enough autonomy to like do things at a, at a reasonable pace, produce things that make my employer happy. But I know, I know it can also be like, so, so different.IX-CHEL: Exactly, exactly. And the other thing that is important to understand is that producing video, producing audio, producing text requires different abilities and skills. And you have to be resonate with the task at hand. And if it's a task that you enjoy, it's going to be super fast and it's going to be something that makes you feel better. But if they are sometimes pushing you in a certain direction, then it's not so enjoyable. So the problem with DevRel, I think one of the problems with DevRel is that we are trying to apply hard measurements, that we are trying to apply this qualitative ideas into something that. Quantitative ideas into something that is qualitative and that mismatch. It's a little bit complicated sometimes.ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. And I think that's what causes a lot of conflict because companies want, they want metrics. How are we doing? How do we know we're successful? And sometimes I think companies will tend to like mishire as well for dev rel because it's like, oh, this person has a huge like social following. Okay, but social following because of what? Right, you know, like, you can't use that as like your only, you know, measurement for hiring, for hiring someone.IX-CHEL: And, and you can also not measure really easy the impact that you have when you are targeting different audiences. Yes, I think, honestly, I think that the position is really important. I will never say that this is like a costing center because people usually some management managers, and let me tell you that this is what I'm saying. It's not because of my experience at my previous company. No, I lucked out. My boss was the best boss ever. He got it right. He understood. Like, let's talk to the audience, let's talk to the developers. It's not, it's not a sales pitch. You are actually telling them what is the problem. You're telling them what is the solution. And this solution is not your product. It, like, it can be your product, but the solution is this and that. You're explaining the solution. And if your product happens to solve the issue in a more eloquent way or with less impedance or less mismatch or less pain, well, that's an advantage. But you have to provide something to your audience. Either it's a better understanding of the problem, a better understanding of the solution, or just knowledge for them to make the right decisions. So my boss knew all of this, but I also, because I told you, when I joined DevRel, I didn't know what this was about. So I started interviewing all my friends. Like, what do you do? What does your day look like? What is your goal? What makes you happy? What makes you unhappy? What do you call success? What do you call a failure? So I got all these stories about what DevRel meant to them and their companies. So I started having this very distorted picture and I was like, oh my goodness. So it was, it was an interesting experience and I have a lot of a broader perspective on what it does, it means. And so that's why I'm telling you what I think it's wrong between the appreciation of the role, the role in itself, and its actual impact on the, on the community. So. But this is not...talking about my own experience.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's. That's some really good insight. And, and I think you, you've got it spot on. Well, another thing that I wanted to talk about, just switching gears a little bit because in, in our pre chat, you mentioned that you have organized some conferences and unconferences and I. Why don't you, why don't you talk more about that?IX-CHEL: Well, the one that I'm going to mention is the smallest one, it's Basel one, but I love it because I'm the head of the content committee. So that happens in Basel. And I said it's a small one because we. Last year we have 300 attendees, but we have an amazing speaker lineup. So I was very, very happy about that. The other one that I help organize as part of the program committee, is Javaland, which is one of the largest in the German speaking area.ADRIANA: Oh, cool.IX-CHEL: Yes. Yes, that. That is one of my also favorite ones because it used to happen in one amusement park. Now we change it to race car. Yes, very famous. But anyway and probably we in the future we will change again to amusement park. The other conferences that un-conferences that I help organize is for example JCrete. JCrete is one that happens in Crete. So really nice. That is an awesome conference...un-conference. So we call ourselves the disorganizers. And for example we. There has been a sister conferences from un-conferences from this one one at the early in February of this year was, for example JChateau, which happens in France. And you can guess what we do is go to Chateaus, wine tasting, and amazing French cuisine.ADRIANA: So that sounds amazing.IX-CHEL: If you are into Java, you want to do un-conferences, go either JCrete, JAlba, JChateau. We will have Jalapeño in Mexico, in the beach, in hotels, all inclusive. So I'm also involved in. In those kind of un-conferences.ADRIANA: Clearly I'm not going to the fun conferences because these un-conferences sound amazing.IX-CHEL: They are. Honestly, at this point I prefer. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm in love with JavaOne. I'm in love with BaselOne. I also help or I was in the program committee of Devoxx UK. I have been working in the past in Jfokus, one of the largest in Scandinavia. So I love conferences and there's very special conferences because of how do they create the program, how do they organize the space, the topics, etc, etc. But for me un-conferences are like super special because you don't have speakers, everybody's a speaker and you don't have a program. So we encourage people to share their questions or their knowledge or we try to figure out like these conversations that have created amazing opportunities. There have been completely new companies born, for example from JCrete because it's the magic of the right people at the right moment, in the right environment.ADRIANA: That's so cool. It's funny you mentioned un-conferences because one of my past guests, Lian Li, she talked about how she started into speaking, got into like public speaking. It was after like attending an un-conference. And she said that I guess her. Her topic got chosen and so that was like her first time getting to. To speak in front of an audience in that way. And she said then it led to other speaking opportunities. So it's so cool to have that sort of like organic, you know, like entry into.ADRIANA: Into speaking. It's like low pressure but high reward.IX-CHEL: Yes and honestly the community also helps a lot. For example Javaland it's organized by more than 40 different Java user groups around Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland. And for example the ones in different parts of Germany we have in Javaland attracted that it's the newcomers track where we actually help people to speak for the first time at a conference. So people that have never had a speaking experience, we ask them if they need mentors to develop the content or to develop whatever help they need. We can provide that. For example and in the JUG meetings we also have these sessions for new speakers and it's important because we provide the feedback at two levels. One is in terms of the topic and the other one in terms of how do we help you be more effective as a speaker. The other one that has been interesting because I also part of the Java Champions group and we always talking about how do we help the next generation of speakers how do we help people do this jump? Because technology is interesting but you also need the human factor, somebody that helps you learn and helps you grow.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. That's so important. And a question for you on in comparing organizing and un-conference compared to a conference, is it easier to organize an unconference or is it just a different kind of challenge?IX-CHEL: I mean even organizing conferences is totally different because of culture, because of the size. I for example, I joke with people like, Javaland. Javaland requires meetings from entire days, like eight hours. We sit down in a room and we try to figure out stuff. Yeah but that's one way of organizing. Other conferences like everything is asynchronous. We only meet one time, we have a one hour conversation and that's it. We have a program. So I can tell you that the same thing happens with un-conferences. There was one time in JCrete we were almost 200 people, a little bit above 200. So the logistics of that was a nightmare because you still need to help them with the accommodation help them like figure out all the details like an un-conference of this of JCrete we don't have a sponsorship so everybody almost paid its own way. So there's a lot of questions we try. I mean it's also Crete which is, means that it happens during summer, so we're competing with a lot of tourists to rent cars. We are competing with hotels. So sometimes it's a nightmare. Yeah you can imagine But I think, I think that un-conferences require a little bit more coordination. Coordination doesn't mean more time to organize just more coordination.ADRIANA: Right? Gotcha. Gotcha. That's awesome. Well, we are coming up on time. I mean, I can keep on talking forever and ever. There's like so many, so many cool topics to dig into, but unfortunately our time is coming to a close. But before we wrap up, is there any piece of advice or hot take you would like to share with our audience?IX-CHEL: So many. But the first of the first one is learn. Learn something, even if you don't think that you need it. Like, be curious. Go read a page, even random sometimes, like something caughts your eye. Go to the next level. Be curious. You never know when that knowledge is going to be helpful. It usually creates small threads in our brains and you can pull them out later on. And sometimes you realize you know things that you don't realize that you know. And that is amazing feeling. So be curious. Always ask why. Don't be afraid of asking why. Having philosophical questions about everything. Life is philosophy. So curiosity, asking questions. That's my advice.ADRIANA: Awesome. That is amazing advice. I live by that myself, so. And I can definitely attest that it makes for, you know, magical things come out of being curious and asking why. So definitely great advice to. To end off on. Well, thank you so much, Ix-chel, for geeking out with me today. Y'all don't forget to subscribe and check us out on our socials. You can check out our show notes as well. And until next time...IX-CHEL: Peace out and geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villella. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

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