Geeking Out with Adriana Villela

About our guest:Abdel Sghiouar is a senior Cloud Developer Advocate @Google Cloud. A co-host of the Kubernetes Podcast by Google and a CNCF Ambassador. His focused areas are GKE/Kubernetes, Service Mesh, and Serverless. Abdel started his career in data centers and infrastructure in Morocco, where he is originally from, before moving to Google's largest EU data center in Belgium. Then in Sweden, he joined Google Cloud Professional Services and spent five years working with Google Cloud customers on architecting and designing large-scale distributed systems before turning to advocacy and community work.Find our guest on:BlueskyLinkedInTwitter (X)Find us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:All Things OpenGoogle Pixel 9 FoldSamsung Galaxy FlipBlue Screen of Death (BSOD)Blue Screen of Death T-shirtSilicon Valley - Tabs vs. SpacesSIG BobaLeigh CapiliThe Kubernetes Podcast from GoogleKaslin Fields (co-host of The Kubernetes Podcast)On-Call Me Maybe PodcastKubeHuddleHumans of OpenTelemetryLicence-master (LMD)NagiosSimple network management protocol (SNMP)Apache MesosOpenStackDEVOXX Conference (Morocco)Additional notes:Adriana's blog post on OpenStackTranscript: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 Abdel Sghiouar. Welcome, Abdel.ABDEL: Hello. I should have. I should have known so I could brought my American accent. So, hey, y'all.ADRIANA: Hey, y'all.ABDEL: Hey, y'all. I'll try. I'll try.ADRIANA: It's funny because the first time I heard y'all. So my husband worked in Jacksonville, Florida for a couple of years. He. He's in consulting. And one time I came down to Florida with him for. For the weekend because he had some work stuff to do. And we stop off at a gas station and they're. They're like, how y'all doing? I was like. I started. I. I think I started laughing because I'd never heard, like, "y'all" in real life.ABDEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: And I'm like, this is the most glorious thing ever. And I now just love saying "y'all". And my daughter bugs me about saying "y'all". She's like, don't say y'all. I'm like, "it's so much fun to say.ABDEL: It is. It is. I love it. So. So, yes.ADRIANA: A little sidebar. So where are you calling from today?ABDEL: I mean, I'm home, surprisingly, because each time I talk to somebody, they're like, you're home. You're always on the road. I'm in Stockholm, Sweden. So that's where I'm based. But, yeah, usually I am somewhere.ADRIANA: I know every time I see you on, like, on Twitter, I'm like, it's always a different city. You are definitely globetrotting.ABDEL: Yeah, I am doing the way I say it is. I'm doing DevRel the hard way.ADRIANA: Yeah, no kidding. But, you know, I have to say, like, we met in person last year at All Things Open. And I remember it was like, just before. It was definitely before KubeCon EU. And you were, like, giving me tips on. On, like, places to. To stay in. In Paris. You're like, don't stay too close to the conference venue, because then it's like, it's kind of a boring area. You want something that's a little bit further out so that it's closer to the cooler, touristy stuff. And I'm like, yes. So that was such great advice.ABDEL: And I think we ended up being in the same hotel now.ADRIANA: We did. We did. Yeah. Yeah. You recommended. You recommended a hotel to me, I'm like, that looks like a good spot.ABDEL: Yeah, I remember that we shared like a. We shared like a walk and we had some croissant on the way to. To KubeCon at some point.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's right. That's right. On one of the days we. We ran into each other. I'm like, ah, staying at the same hotel and running into each other. What are, what are the odds? Right?ABDEL: Yeah, no, that's. That was fun. KubeCon Paris was fun.ADRIANA: That was. I'm looking forward to the next KubeCon. Are you going to be. Are you going to be in Salt Lake City?ABDEL: I am trying, but yes, most probably, yes, because I got accepted. I have a talk. Accepted. So finally. Thank you.ADRIANA: Congrats.ABDEL: Thank you. And yeah, so hopefully, hopefully I'll. I'll be there. It's going to be fun. We are planning some stuff for the podcast and me and, yeah, me and the colleague were accepted and then Kaslin is going to be there. So it'll be fun.ADRIANA: Yay. That's awesome. Cool. I have many questions, but before. Before we get started, I'm going to start with the. With the lightning round slash icebreaker questions.ABDEL: Sure.ADRIANA: Okay. You ready?ABDEL: Sure. Go for it.ADRIANA: First question. Are you a lefty or a righty?ABDEL: I am a righty.ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?ABDEL: iPhone. I've been experimenting with the Pixel 9 recently, the Fold one. Because I'm getting old and I need big screens and I do have to admit I like it, but I am not ready to convert yet.ADRIANA: Yeah, so the folding one, that's cool.ABDEL: Yeah, Nine Fold. The new model. The. Yeah, the big one, that is cool.ADRIANA: You know, like, I actually miss my flip phone. As much as I love my smartphone, there is something so satisfying about, like, flipping.ABDEL: Yes.ADRIANA: Flipping your phone off, flipping your phone up to talk and then just closing to hang up and. Yeah, I miss those days.ABDEL: Yeah. Unfortunately, the Fold doesn't open that way. Right. It opens like a book, but it's still.ADRIANA: Oh, it's that kind of a fool.ABDEL: Yeah. Yeah. So I think. I think that the one that you're talking about, the only model that exists is the Samsung Flip, they call it.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's what I was thinking.ABDEL: But yeah, the Fold is like basically a big phone, but double because when you unfold it, it's like. Yeah, just a large. A small tablet, essentially.ADRIANA: Yeah, I was going to say it sounds like a small tablet.ABDEL: Exactly.ADRIANA: Thing. I'd be curious to see one in real life. I don't think it'll make me convert from my iPhone, but I would still be curious to see it in real life.ABDEL: I am still on iPhone just because it's just so easy when you have everything Apple and so, yeah, we'll see. We'll see if I get. If I ever convert.ADRIANA: Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay, well, that leads to my next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?ABDEL: I'm both a Mac and the Linux user. I've been a Linux user forever, since my start of my career. Like, I started with Mandrake, which then became Mandriva, and then eventually Fedora and Ubuntu and Debian, and then eventually a few years ago converted to Mac just because it's easier for work. But I still have a Linux laptop and I still use Linux daily. So Windows, I have never used Windows in my life.ADRIANA: Really? No way.ABDEL: If you put me in front of a Windows computer, I wouldn't know what to do.ADRIANA: Oh, my God. Lucky you.ABDEL: Well, I don't know. Yeah, sure. Lucky me. Thank you. I guess.ADRIANA: I'm sorry to the Windows people out there. No, I don't know. I've told a few people, I'm like, I have a bit of Windows PTSD. I grew up on DOS and then Windows 3.1 and the succession of the Windows. And then I discovered Ubuntu in the. I don't know, early. I want to say early 2000s. I had it running as a VM. I discovered Ubuntu and VMS at the same time. I'm like, "whoa".ABDEL: Yeah, you could run a VM? Yeah. If somebody gets offended, I have three words to remind you. Blue screen of death. Or that's more like four words.ADRIANA: You know, I have a blue screen of death T-shirt that I wear to conferences sometimes. And it's great when people are like, oh my God, that's so cool. I'm like, these, these are my people who recognize the blue screen of death, of course, and can relate.ABDEL: Yes, yes, exactly.ADRIANA: Absolutely. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite programming language? And if so, what is it?ABDEL: Um, I'm a Python developer. Always been a Python developer for a very long time. I picked up Go a few years ago. I am learning Rust, and if you would have asked me this question six months ago, I would probably not even mention Rust because Rust has this like, learning cycle where you are fighting Rust and Rust is fighting you for a few months. And once you get the heck that, like the heck out of it, it becomes actually enjoy, enjoyable to write code in it. So in order of if in in order, I would say Python, my preferred language, go, obviously, I love Go. And right now I'm really having a good time actually learning and coding stuff with Rust.ADRIANA: Right on. Yeah, I've heard, like, people who like Rust like Rust, but I always hear the learning curve is just outrageous. Yeah. I have not dipped my toes into Rust-land. I'm with you on the Python thing. I love Python. I came up in the Java world, did Java for a really long time, 15, 16 years. And then a friend introduced me to Python. I'm like, how could I be introduced to Python in such like a late stage of my career? But it's all good. And then I'm like, I've fallen in love with Python. It's like such. I don't know, it's like a nice. I. I think it's a pleasurable language to code in.ABDEL: You know, there is one thing I, I really like. There is one thing that I really appreciate about Java, which existing go that makes me appreciate Go even more, is chaining functions. Like, you can chain functions like, you know, in Java with the way. Chain functions with the...ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, the dot. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah.ABDEL: And that exists in Go, and that's really amazing. It makes code so easy to read instead of like having to use variables to capture the output of one function to feed into another function. It's just one long line. It's just super amazing. Well, long, no pun intended for Java, but you get the point, right?ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true. I do agree. That's nice. I think it's fun from a writing perspective, but if you're reading someone else's code, you're like, what the fuck is happening here?ABDEL: That's true. Then with that comes the challenge of learning how to debug code and how to use breakpoints to debug code so you understand what's going on. But yeah, it's. It's both a blessing and a curse sometimes, I would say.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree with you on that. Cool. All right, next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?ABDEL: Oh, that's a very good question. You know, it's funny, I studied software engineering, so I'm by training or by degree, if degree matters in this context. I am a software engineer. Yeah, I never really wanted or liked the idea of just doing pure developments as main occupation, just because I always liked the interaction with hardware and the automation parts and all that stuff. When people ask me a lot of time about my career, I always tell them I used to do DevOps before DevOps was cool because I was always in this intersection of how do you use software to automate infrastructure? Right. And that's. That's at the base of it, what DevOps is all about. Right. So I would say in between, I never really was in a job that, that required me to write applications, like purely, like just backends. And I never was in a job where I did just system administration kind of, kind of work. So I was always between the two.ADRIANA: Ooh, that's awesome.ABDEL: So, yeah, I love that.ADRIANA: I love that. Yeah. It's funny, the way that you describe it is. That's what I love so much about DevOps too, is you get the software stuff, but you're getting to automate infrastructure and I don't know, it's so neat.ABDEL: Yes. You get to understand how things actually work after they are developed.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. It's funny, I went through a period in my career, I had left tech for a bit, and then when I returned, you know, someone asked me, like, what do you want to do? What do you want to do, like, with. With your career now that you're back? And. And I'm like, I really like the infrastructure side of things. I really like writing code. I wish there was a way to marry the two. And this was like before, you know, DevOps had become like, you know, like a household name. And then, and then, like, I learned about DevOps, I'm like, what? Where have you been all my life? You know?ABDEL: Yes. And I mean, putting aside all the, you know, the how to say all the things that people have to say about DevOps, because people have opinions about it, of course, but like, just not going too much into what people think DevOps is or it should be, I think at the most basic idea of what it is, that's what I enjoy. It's anything that is intersection between the two worlds.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I love that. Okay, next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?ABDEL: Oh, that's a very good question. I saw somebody today asking this question of like, what's your preferred programming language? What's your preferred configuration language that is not YAML. And don't tell me TOML.ADRIANA: I saw that. I have to agree. I don't like TOML.ABDEL: All right. I had to do something. Have you ever had to configure Containerd before? No, I haven't, because Containerd is TOML-based and it's horrendous. I would say configuration YAML for coding, JSON data exchange, JSON configuration, YAML.ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes sense. I have to agree with you on that.ABDEL: Cool.ADRIANA: Next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?ABDEL: Aren't they fundamentally the same thing? Aren't tabs just a combination? I mean, I'm just remembering, like, I have flashbacks to Silicon Valley right now, so.ADRIANA: Exactly. Well, honestly, that's why I ask the question. I'm like, it's either going to be very polarizing. Polarizing where people have opinions, or some people are just going to be like, meh?ABDEL: Doesn't matter. Right. What was that. What was that phrase? Like? At the end of the day, the compiler treat them the same way. So it doesn't really matter. Technically, I'd say I'm a tabs person. Yeah, Tabs is probably my most used. One of my most used keys on the keyboard.ADRIANA: All right, two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?ABDEL: Oh, definitely video. Yeah. I hate reading. I mean, if it's short text, yes, but long text, no video, for sure.ADRIANA: My daughter's the same way. She, like, she refuses to. She's like, I don't want to read books. And. And she learns all this, like, ridiculous stuff on YouTube. It's so cool. Like, she'll be like, today I learned about financial planning and today I learned about, like, you know, amputations. Like, not a joke. These are like real life examples. And I'm like, what?ABDEL: It's like a wide spectrum of topics that she is interested in.ADRIANA: I know the most random stuff, but, like, she learned some really cool stuff. I'm like, I am not going to interfere. Like, I'm not one of those parents who's like, you, you don't read, therefore there's something wrong with you. I'm like, no. Like, this is how you learn. And it's like, it's glorious. I love it so much.ABDEL: So, you know, I. I like, since we're geeking out here, in my. One of my internships, I had to build an app for a person who is a PhD. Like a....doc...like a doctorate, right. Doing. Doing some research. And the research was in pedagogy. So the way you teach people. And there is this, like, I don't know if it exists all over the world, but in at least where I'm from, Morocco, it's like a methodology for teaching kids, which essentially is based on the research from the 1950s, I guess, or something. Some dude at some point came up with this like 44 questions questionnaire or survey that you can ask people and based on their answers, you can classify them in either visual learner, auditive learners, you know, like, do you learn by text, you learn by audio, do you learn by reading, do you learn by Applied, etc. Etc. Right. And which at the time, it was so cool because I had to build an app which was like a survey app. So I was learning was pretty cool. But then later I learned that this was actually bullshit. That research is BS. It has been debunked over, over and over because, like, no one is one style of learning where all multitudes, like, we're all multi. Multi, to use a term which is very popular these days, we're all multimodal. Like, we learn using multiple ways. So the reason why I'm saying this whole, this entire long story is what's interesting about, for example, video. YouTube. Right. You would assume that people watch YouTube, but I am quite sure that there are people now that just listen to YouTube. As in you launch YouTube in the background and they're listening to it.ADRIANA: Yeah, like a podcast.ABDEL: Yeah, that's hilarious to me because, like, like, okay, so let's say, for example, you are listening, listening to a video which explains how jet engines work. Did you actually learn how jet engine. Like, did you look at the animations that explains how it works or did you just, like, hear about it?ADRIANA: Yeah, and that. That's the shortcoming of it because, like, my dad loves to send me YouTube videos. And I'm like, if you send me a YouTube video, chances are I'm not going to watch it because I don't have the patience to, like, sit there and watch a video. But then I'm like, if I just put it on while I'm, you know, like, doing dishes or whatever. And so that worked fine. He sent me this video about, like, I don't know, something to do with, like, the Moon's orbit and how it's, like, moving further from. From the Earth, I think something to that. Something to that effect. And so it was. It was all good until, like, they got into a part where they're showing diagrams. I'm like, goddammit. Now I have to, like, I have to pull out my phone and look at what they're showing in the animation.ABDEL: Yeah, it's. It's actually pretty interesting. Yeah, it's. It's pretty interesting how people are actually consuming content in YouTube these days.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. And. And then don't forget the YouTube shorts. Like, my daughter watches so many YouTube shorts, like, constant. I'm. It's like in either Instagram short, what are they called? Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts. And. And that. That's how she does her Learning, Sure.ABDEL: Whatever works for your daughter, I guess.ADRIANA: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's. That's cool. Okay, final question. What is your superpower?ABDEL: Oh, I don't get asked this question quite a lot. I think I know how to be sarcastic. Like, I know how to use sarcasm in. In a way that is, like, makes a point without being hurtful. Sometimes people get hurt, but, like, you cannot. You cannot. You cannot accommodate everybody's feelings, I guess. But I can use sarcasm in a very good way, I guess. I guess that would be one of my superpowers.ADRIANA: That's great.ABDEL: So, yeah, otherwise, I cook very well. I'm a really good cook. They just. Yeah, the simple superpower. Like, if. If the world goes south, I am going to be fine.ADRIANA: Okay, so I got to ask, what kind of stuff do you cook?ABDEL: A lot of Moroccan food, since I am from Morocco, but I experiment quite a lot. I like to try out all sorts of cuisines from. From different parts of the world. So probably second to Moroccan would be Mediterranean food in general. A big fan of Asian food. Korean, specifically, a lot of Korean food. But, yeah, generally speaking, just whatever. I like experimenting. I like, you know, blending and mixing stuff together. And probably a big part of my money wasted, if that's such a. If that's a correct term to use, goes into, like, kitchen stuff.ADRIANA: I mean, come on. Kitchen gadgets are so much fun.ABDEL: They are, yes. But, like, how many knives do you need when you are a home cook? Right. Probably not 10. So. So. So, no, it's. It's. It's. It's fun. I don't know. I feel like it allows me to get out of the. Like, do something with your hands. Like, be kind of tactile in a way.ADRIANA: Yeah.ABDEL: So. So, yeah, So I have cooked for big parties before. My biggest party is, like, 40 people.ADRIANA: Oh, wow. Does that include dessert?ABDEL: No, I don't do desserts just because I don't eat sugar. I avoid sugar, generally speaking. So usually I don't. Or if I invite people, I ask them to bring dessert, but I can cook for big groups.ADRIANA: Oh, that's very cool.ABDEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: All right, so party coming soon, your way.ABDEL: Yes. Oh, my God.ADRIANA: There should be, like, KubeCooking or something.ABDEL: Yeah, we should probably do something like that. You know, there is, like, a boba. There is a SIG Boba now.ADRIANA: That's right.ABDEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: I love SIG Boba. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I've got my bubble tea right here.ABDEL: Yeah. We like to claim that SIG Boba started with the Kubernetes podcast because it literally started with an interview on the podcast.ADRIANA: No way.ABDEL: Yeah. It was, I think, Leigh Capili, if I remember correctly, interviewed during one of the KubeCons, and Leigh was talking about the fact that we need parties without alcohol. And it was Kaslin who was interviewing, and they were like, boba and then a SIG Boba and then another, like, a KubeCon after. It was like, a thing.ADRIANA: Yeah.ABDEL: So.ADRIANA: Oh, my God.ABDEL: So we like to claim that we originated the idea.ADRIANA: Oh, that's so great. And this is actually a great segue into one of the things that I want to ask you about, which is like, your podcast.ABDEL: Yes. Yeah. So I'm a co-host of the Kubernetes podcast. Me and Kaslin Fields. Been doing it for almost two years now. Slightly more than two years. And, yeah, it's a lot of fun. You get to talk to a lot of interesting people. It's a challenge. I mean, as you understood, you know, keeping something running is a challenge. And we do have, like, help and producers, and we only do audio and where we're gonna start doing videos soon. So, yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun.ADRIANA: That's great. Yeah, it. It's. It's funny. Podcasting is so much work. Like, when in my previous podcast On-Call Me maybe, we had a producer, so she would edit everything and she would do audiograms, send stuff out for transcription. But this podcast is, like, everything me.ABDEL: Yes.ADRIANA: And the. That. The extent of the help I get is, like, my daughter edits the videos, but, like, everything else is me. So I have to, like, I have. I have to send stuff out for transcription. I have, like, an AI tool that I use for that, but I still have to check to make sure that it's, you know, not spewing crap. So I still go through the script and, like, you know, sometimes it misinterprets words, especially OpenTelemetry. When someone says "OTel", it thinks it's "hotel" constantly. So, yeah, it's. But it's fun. It's such a great way. A great way to. To meet, like, really cool people is through podcasting.ABDEL: Yeah. And I don't know, I feel like podcasts are one of these things where you can actually get access to a lot of people. I feel like people like just sitting and discussing for some time, so we can get pretty much anybody we want on the show. So it's pretty cool. Pretty nice.ADRIANA: That's awesome. And did you. Is this a podcast that you inherited, or is that a podcast that you started?ABDEL: We inherited It. So there used some. There was somebody else before us, and we took it over, like, 22 years ago. Yeah.ADRIANA: Oh, cool.ABDEL: And we've been. I mean, we changed a little bit. Some stuff. We reduced the schedule, like, the frequency, and we started doing some stuff. So one of them is the whole story behind the SIG Boba is we started doing interviews during KubeCon. So we go to KubeCon and we interview people, right? Oh, and, yeah, and then we produce an episode about. And then we do every KubeCon. So. So that's. That's, like, one of the things we do. And then we do a bunch of other things. It's. It's. It's fun to experiment also with different kind of contents to try to, like, try to attract different people. So. Yeah, no, it's pretty cool. It's a lot of fun.ADRIANA: That's great. So when you. When you do the KubeCon episodes, like, do you find, like, a room where you record? Are you, like, on the floor, and just, like, chase people down with a mic and record?ABDEL: We record on the floor, actually. So you have the background noise.ADRIANA: That is impressive.ABDEL: Yeah. So. And. And we are. One of our plans is to start doing video as well. I think that's going to be fun to just, like, stop people randomly and ask them, but not, like, I have a bunch of, like, fun things that I want to experiment with, so we'll see how that goes. But, like, yeah, I'm looking forward. It's going to be fun.ADRIANA: That's cool. Yeah. I have to say, like, when. So my previous podcast, On-Call Me Maybe was audio only. And so when I started this podcast, I'm like, I want to do audio and video because I know there's some people who love podcasts, and there are other people who are like, I hate podcasts, but they'll watch video. So I offer it in both formats. And also, like, the fun thing about doing it, doing the video is, like, first of all, you can see some really cool office setups. Sometimes you can see some, like, awesome outfits and hairdos that you just don't get to experience if you're just recording the audio. So that's been. That's been kind of fun to experience. Experience as well.ABDEL: Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's definitely. Yeah, that's. That's part of the plan. The other. Also part of the plan is to. I mean, if you have a phone, you can literally record anywhere. Yeah. So if you can, since I travel so much, it would be fun to be able to, like, try like travel and record in different parts of the world and just have, you know, some fun background or. I'm. I'm mostly interested in recording outdoors I think.ADRIANA: Oh yeah, yeah.ABDEL: Depending on the weather. So. So it be. It'll be fun. Yeah.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's great. I, I did my last season of, of this podcast. I ended up with two episodes that I recorded during KubeHuddle and I recorded those like on site, outside and that was fun. It was like I'd never done an on site recording, but there was like a couple my, my two guests that I had on there. I've been trying to chase them down, like trying to align schedules. I'm like, we're going to be in the same place. I'm going to sit you down, we're going to record.ABDEL: I've been, I've been to an event in Berlin a few weeks ago and during this event they had a podcast studio that anybody could use and that was actually a lot like, I really like the idea. I mean that's like most more professional. So that's was kind of triggered this idea of doing video because. Doing video on the go because then you can have different backgrounds and you can have, I mean maybe the quality of the video is not as important as far. As long as you can get the audio right and then you can get like people visible on camera, that's. That's all it matters.ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. I would definitely say like invest in a decent mic because I did last KubeCon North America in Chicago. I did a series called Humans of OTel, like for OpenTelemetry and I had these like really crappy Amazon mics that I had gotten. Like these, I guess they were, they were crappy lavalier mics and oh my God, like some of the sound quality was so bad. I, I had to like cut out a couple videos because I couldn't make out what the people were saying. And then, and then the next KubeCon, one of the OTel guys, Henrik Rexed said, he, he messages me. He's like, you know, I have some really nice recording equipment that we could use for the next KubeCon. I'm like, I'm like, oh, he's being so polite. Basically saying like, my audio quality was not that great. Please let me help you. And I'm like, I am happy to take the help. And his setup, like when we did the Humans of OTel for, for KubeCon in Paris was so sweet. Like he knows his shit, so...ABDEL: Yeah, I saw, I saw, I remember, I saw the setup. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember like, yeah, So I, I used to. We used to record for the KubeCon episodes with the Rode Wireless 2. And I recently got a pair of the DJI DJI wireless microphones.ADRIANA: Oh, nice.ABDEL: Just because I like them, because they come in like a very nice case with both the receiver and the transmitters. But the case also double up as a charging case.ADRIANA: Oh yeah.ABDEL: And I did some experiments and the audio quality is pretty good. So I'm looking forward to start using that one and see how it comes out.ADRIANA: Ooh, fun. New toys.ABDEL: Yeah, of course. It's always a good time to use new toys, right?ADRIANA: I know when people are like, oh, you have to get this mic. I'm like, okay.ABDEL: They're not very expensive, so.ADRIANA: No, they're not too bad. Yeah. I, I also like, after. After that incident at the. That first KubeCon in Chicago with Humans of OTel, I'm like, I need better mics and I need to obviously pay more than 50 bucks for. For my wireless mic. So yeah, it's definitely a worthwhile investment to get a decent set of lavalier mics.ABDEL: Definitely.ADRIANA: Definitely. The other thing that I wanted to ask is, you know, you mentioned that like you had studied. You said you studied software engineering in school, right?ABDEL: Yes.ADRIANA: But you now work and you found your way into the DevOps space. You work as a developer advocate currently, right?ABDEL: Correct. Yes.ADRIANA: In the Google Cloud space, right?ABDEL: Yes.ADRIANA: Yeah. So can you talk about how you found yourself in this role?ABDEL: It's. Oh, it's long story. Okay. I'll try to make it short. So a little bit of background. So I studied in Morocco. Right. So I am originally from there. I was born and raised there. I studied my master's degree in software engineering in one of the schools we have in Morocco. Morocco, for those who doesn't know, we follow the same. The same system as the rest of Europe. So that's basically high school bachelor, masters. Right? That's. I think that's the American version. But we say licence-master. It doesn't matter. Like three years you get a bachelor, five years get a master's. Right. So I got my masters in software engineering and my first job. And this is where things started being interesting for me in my career. My first job was actually in a data center.ADRIANA: Ooh.ABDEL: Yeah. Like an actual physical data center.ADRIANA: Oh, damn.ABDEL: Like, yeah. Yes, pretty much.ADRIANA: So you were cold all the time?ABDEL: Actually, it's a very interesting point. A lot of people think that you need to run data centers at sub zero temperature. You don't hardware, like data center grade Hardware is made to sustain very high temperatures.ADRIANA: Oh, good, Cool.ABDEL: We definitely had customers that wanted us to run their server rooms at like 10 degrees, 10 degrees C. I don't know how much is that in Freedom units.ADRIANA: I'm a Celsius girl, so.ABDEL: Okay, from the right part of the world. So. Which is too cold. It's cold even for humans. Right. So that's just. Yeah, but no, we run our. I mean, of course, the colder you want your data center to be, the more energy you're going to spend or waste. Right. So yeah, but yeah, I joined this company that was looking for. Initially they were actually looking for somebody to help them set up their internal systems because the data center was new. So you have, you know, your ticketing system and your CRM and all your tools that you need to actually make the thing operational. Your monitoring systems and all this stuff. And by monitoring, I'm talking back the days, Nagios time and you know, SNMP and old school before it became cool and we started calling it Observability, I guess. So I started there and yeah, that role was little bit of software engineering, little bit of automation, so kind of DevOps, right?ADRIANA: Yeah.ABDEL: And then through that role, I got contacted by Google and they actually hired me to work in their data center in Belgium. So that's how I joined Google. Yeah, we have data centers obviously all over the place, so Belgium is one of the biggest ones in Europe. So I joined that team and continued doing same thing. So a little bit of, you know, a little bit of automation, a little bit of system administration. Then a few years later, cloud started becoming a thing, at least for us. I mean, I guess it existed all over for other companies. But Google started being kind of more serious about it. And in 2017 they wanted me or they hired me to join a consulting team, an internal consulting team. So it's a team that basically works with external customers and help them architect, migrate, whatever, whatever that needs to happen to get stuff from where they are to Google Cloud. Right. So I joined that team initially to work on infrastructure because that's my background.ADRIANA: Yeah.ABDEL: But like very quickly I started working with Kubernetes. This is Kubernetes in 2017. So it was not as complex, I guess, as it is today, and I started learning it. I had no idea what containerization was. I had no idea what I. I think the only experience I had before was Mesos. But Mesos is like it's an orchestration system, which is similar to Kubernetes, but it's orchestrates virtual machines and not containers. Right. And I did work a little bit on OpenStack before. So conceptually it's the same idea. You are still orchestrating workloads. It just had different levels of the stack. Right. And yeah. And then just started learning Kubernetes and somehow became an. I'm putting air codes, SME, subjects matter, experts.So, so then. And then parallel to this and back in the days when I was still living in Morocco, I was all. I was very active in the Ubuntu community because I started with Linux, right. So I was a member of the local user group. So that's like, yeah, the user group for, for Ubuntu. And we were doing Linux parties events, you know, install parties. We just go to university and people come with a laptop and we will help them deploy Ubuntu, help them sort out drivers, you know, give them like functional environments where they can like, you know, play with Linux. And then in my role as a consultant, I started actually doing conferences and my first conference was back home.So there is a conference in Morocco called DEVOXX. It's a large conference and in 2017 they invited me and 2018 I joined the committee and I am in the committee since that 2018. So I was like, damn, I like this idea of like, you know, presenting public speaking, talking to developers, understanding what people are trying to solve. More understanding what people are trying to solve than actually talking to them. Really. Yeah. And yeah. And then in 2022, I basically, five years in consulting, I was like, I'm looking for something new.And I talked to the DevRel manager for eme. I was like, hey, I would like to give DevRel a go. And he was like, we don't have anybody in cloud native, so why not? And that's how I became joined DevRel.ADRIANA: Oh, that's so great. Wow.ABDEL: Yeah, it's a pretty, I think it's a pretty interesting transition in the sense of. The way I like to describe it is that I've been over time going up the abstraction layers from the hardware all the way into containers.ADRIANA: It's so cool to see like basically everything in your life had been building up to that moment, right?ABDEL: I guess, yes. Yeah.ADRIANA: So then you were like, by the time you became a DevRel, it was like, it felt like a natural fit too for you.ABDEL: Yes, yes, in a way. And also because I've always been comfortable talking in public, I guess I like, it always came natural to me. I think when I was actually back in my university time, I was doing tutoring for my colleagues in, like, in my class. So I would like, help people, you know, understand concepts, like after. After the actual class. And it always came natural that I think it's more. More coming from the fact that you just like to help people, not really wanting to talk at people. It's more like, hey, if I explain something and you understand it, I'm happy. Right?ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's such a satisfying feeling. Like, you know, you get it and now they get it.ABDEL: Exactly.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Compared to like, I don't know if you had this experience in university. I had professors who, you know, were too smart for their own good and couldn't explain anything.ABDEL: Oh, of course. Oh, yeah.ADRIANA: You know, I. One of my memorable moments was I had. I had this midterm and I go to the professor during his office hours and I'm like, can you explain, like, why I got this wrong? And he's like, well, it's easy. Obviously, if you don't understand the question, then I can't explain it to you. I'm like, what just happened here?ABDEL: Sounds like a Karen.ADRIANA: I'm like, all right, well, thanks for nothing, buddy.ABDEL: Yeah, I think that that's. That's probably. I mean, it's interesting, like the, the academic. I have friends in academia right now, like, we're in Sweden. I have. We have a lot of friends who are like researchers and, you know, postdocs and stuff like that. And, and they're like young and our age, and they had to all suffer through some of what you're describing eventually. Right. At some point. And I think that the. Probably one of the reasons is because when you are studying to become a professor, you have to build up so much knowledge that you end up not having to apply all of it. So you feel you are like, better than everybody else. Like, you obviously know more than your average students, right?ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.ABDEL: And so I have a friend who is a bio. Biochemist. She's like post doc and she does research and stuff and she has to teach. So she has one semester every year that she has to teach.ADRIANA: Yeah.ABDEL: And she. Sometimes she starts complaining about these kids, they don't understand anything. And I'm always like, remember when you were in their shoes, you also did not understand much. Right. So.ADRIANA: Yeah, so true.ABDEL: So I think that that's. Yeah, I had to experiment. I had to go through that as well. So. Yeah, whatever.ADRIANA: I mean, I think we come back more resilient and I think then, you know, for. For people like us, where it's like part of our job to explain how things work in an accessible manner. I feel like you almost tap into that feeling of helplessness, of like, oh my God, it was horrible when I didn't understand this concept and I was so lost. And then, you know, the whole. The whole thing just got away from under me. Right. Versus, like, having someone who can explain things in a. In a way that's accessible, where, like, you're like, oh my God, I finally understand how this works. Like, it makes such a difference. Having that aha moment and seeing people get it, I think is so satisfying.ABDEL: And that's exactly what happened to me six months later after I started learning Rust, right? So the aha moment, they're like, oh, now I know. Now I get it!ADRIANA: This gives me hope. This gives me hope if I ever want to touch Rust.ABDEL: I mean, you know how it works. Like, you start learning something and you go like through hello world, and it works and then it stops working and you don't understand what's going on. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm stupid. Oh my God, I'm stupid. Oh my God, I'm stupid. And you build up the stupidity and they're like, oh, no. I know, it's so true.ADRIANA: It's like, you know, it. It's almost like if your program works the first time around, like, first of all, when that happens, I'm like, I'm shocked. Why? But then also, yeah, right? Like, are you sure? Yeah. Are you sure? But, but the other thing too, in some ways, it's like, it's almost like you're robbed of the experience of. Of the failure, which leads to, like, so much more insights into the problem compared to like, getting it right the first time. Like when you fail so hard that you've broken your system and I can't tell you how many times I've broken things beyond repair. And then you kind of have to like, just start building it from scratch, one thing at a time, and then you finally understand, oh, this is where it broke. Like, I feel like that is such a validating experience. Even though I, you know, I spent the last, like four hours, like in panic mode. Like, why isn't this working?ABDEL: Yeah, yeah, that's true. I think learning to through failure is valuable. But also, like, you don't always have. And that's actually, I think you can relate to this. Like, in DevRel, you don't always have that luxury, right? Yeah, just sometimes you just. So I think my favorite thing that I would do in my current role is actually go on Stack Overflow. I am spending quite a lot of time there because I find that that's a really good resource for understanding what people are struggling with and trying to replicate the error and then walk my way back from that to try to figure out what was the intention of the user to start with. And then how can we solve this for the user, but how can we solve it for everybody else? Right? And that's like, that's so much. I get so much joy from that. Right. But that's something you can do. You can control your time, you can take time, you can do it, you have time to do it. You don't have pressure, you don't always have that. And the downside, I think, of DevRel is that you live in. I mean, I hate using this word, but you live in the cutting edge of the technology, that sometimes you are required to build stuff. And by stuff, I mean content about things that no one knows how to use yet.New features, new stuff come out and you are expected to teach people how to use it. But, like, you don't necessarily understand how it works. Right. And we live in this space right now. Right, like AI. So it's definitely a very interesting kind of role to be in. And knowing how to balance these two things is quite challenging, but quite good to learn from, I guess.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, it is exciting. And you make a really good point about, like, being on the cutting edge means that you're probably one of the few people who is tackling this problem, which therefore makes you one of the few experts, even if you're not an expert in that at the time, which is a little bit terrifying. And I've definitely found myself in. In that position. Like, even. There was something in OpenTelemetry the other day where they had, like, they had updated the API for something, the OpenTelemetry Operator. So I was like updating my YAML manifests for it and I'm like, unfortunately, the documentation in the readme was not up to date, so I had to chase down the answer by going. It was a combination of going into the code, but also...Googl...not Googling...searching through Slack messages to find my answer.ABDEL: What changed?ADRIANA: And then I'm like, yeah, yeah, exactly. What changed? And then, and then once I got it working, I'm like, okay, now I'm going to go back to the readme and fix this. Because, like, if. If I was confused, someone else is going to be confused.ABDEL: Yeah, yeah. And like, a lot of times when that happens to me, the same thing around GKE, which is our product, I mean our Kubernetes product. It's usually some change log that just slipped through the cracks that like that change happened somewhere. There is a comment, but it was not in the release notes. Right. The talk is not up to date. You know, different lab, but like to a large extent, I don't, I always think that that's something that would happen to anybody. Like any developer would eventually be faced with that kind of problems.ADRIANA: Yeah, definitely.ABDEL: And it is definitely part of your job as a DevRel to figure that out and figure out how that could be improved going forward. Right. Because like a lot of times people see DevRel as, oh, we just like travel and talk to conferences. No, no, no, no. There's a lot of time spent talking to engineering teams.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true.ABDEL: And telling them like this is how, this is how things are supposed to work. I know that you don't think so, but let me tell you so it's a lot of, it's a, it's a two ways role. You talk to people outside your company, but you also talk to people inside the company.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which makes it a very, a very sort of unique role. You're, you're, you're basically bridging, bridging the gap, right? So that you're, you're, you're like telling the engineers like this is how people are actually using it.ABDEL: So you better listen to me.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. Which sometimes is hard like you know, putting yourself in the shoes of the engineer and getting that feedback where you're like, you kind of, you know, it's your baby. You've invested your time into like writing it a certain way and being told like that's not how people are using it. You have to sort of put, put your feelings aside. You know, I, I have this, the, this mantra that I try to live by. I don't always succeed, but I, I try to live by like never fall in love with your code because you know, you just, you never know like someone's gonna come along and, and do it better and, and you have to be open minded enough to be like, yeah, this is a better solution. I gotta let go of, of you know, what, what I wrote and not be so, so possessive about it, so.ABDEL: Exactly. Exactly.ADRIANA: Yeah. Cool. Well, we are coming up on time, but before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you if you have any pieces of advice or hot takes that you want to share with our audience.ABDEL: Does AI count as a hot take?ADRIANA: Oh, sure.ABDEL: Uh, it's actually interesting. I am in the process of. I'm. I'm involved in some startup programs that are AI startups where we're supposed to review what the startup product is all about. And my hot take is the following. Not AI is not. Is not gonna solve all the problems that people think they are gonna solve. I feel like people are trying to shove AI like in places where it shouldn't, and it comes out very obvious. A lot of times when you look at something and they're like, but can't you just solve this in a different way? Why do you need to put AI everywhere? But, yeah, I know.And my other hot take is Kubernetes is here to stick around. I think that a lot of people think that it's a faded technology. It's not. It's going to be around for a while. So just, I guess the more people learn to live with this and accept it, the better it's going to be for everyone.ADRIANA: What are some quickly, some things that you kind of look forward to seeing in Kubernetes in the next little while?ABDEL: Maturity, for sure. There is quite a lot of interesting. I mean, again, in the AI space, there is quite a lot of improvements happening in Kubernetes itself that are happening for AI, but I see use cases for them beyond just AI. Right. Like the community is definitely shifting and adapting to accommodate kind of AI workloads, AI and ML workloads. But the ramification of this is going to go beyond. Beyond the beyond. I mean, speaking of observability, just in the last version of Kubernetes, they have added quite a lot of things around device observability.So if you have a GPU attached or a TPU, how can you expose metrics through the node and how can you monitor those? And that's pretty cool. But there are use cases where you have to attach all sorts of hardware to a node and monitor how that hardware is performing, and that's going to help solve other types of problems. And yeah, it's evolving and maturing at a very slow-ish pace, but it's at a very steady pace and I'm very excited to see what the future brings. And also there is a lot of things happening in networking space because that's kind of one of my areas of focus and I'm really excited to see how that goes.ADRIANA: That's great. Looking forward to seeing more cool things come out of Kubernetes in the next little while. Yeah, well, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Abdel, 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...ABDEL: Peace out and geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:Riaan has worked for Multi-National companies in Portugal, Germany, China, United States, South Africa and Australia.Certified Hashicorp Terraform InstructorHashiCorp Ambassador 2021, 2022, 2023Creator of Hashiqube - The best DevOps Lab running all the Hashicorp productsHashiCorp Vault and Terraform CertifiedCertified Hashicorp Vault Implementation Partner10+ years relevant DevOps experience with a strong focus on Automation and Infrastructure / Configuration in Code.Find our guest on:X (Twitter)LinkedInYouTubeGitHubBlogFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow Links:VersentTelstraUbuntu LinuxInstalling Ubuntu on Macbook ProMark ShuttleworthVSCode Dev ContainersHashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL)AWS CloudformationPuppetMagento%20and%20Symfony.)systemdHashiQube12 Rule for Life, by Jordan PetersonNever Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within, by David GogginsNSW Maritime and Road ServicesHashiCorp AmbassadorWiproHashiTalks 2024VagrantTerraformVaultRedHat Ansible TowerApache Airflow with DBTServianVault AssociateTerraform AWS EKS BlueprintsHashiCorp Core ContributorMitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp co-founder)Armon Dadgar (HashiCorp co-founder)HashiCorp BUSLHashiTalks Deploy 2023TerragruntOpenTofuAzure BicepHira(HashiCorp) Boundary(HashiCorp) Waypoint(Windows) NT 4Gentoo LinuxVagrant Docker ProviderAnsible AWXTranscript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, 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 is Riaan Nolan.RIAAN: Good morning, Adriana. How are you? It's good to see you. Happy Australia day. It's Australia day in Australia, so happy Australia day. At the moment, I'm working for a consultancy in Australia called Versent, and they've recently been bought by Australia's biggest telco, Telstra. So I'm a consultant for them. I do DevOps and HashiCorp stuff.ADRIANA: Amazing. So you said you're calling from Australia? Where in Australia are you calling from?RIAAN: I'm on the east coast in Brisbane. Brisbane, Australia, in Queensland. The state is called Queensland.ADRIANA: Awesome. And significantly hotter than the crappy rainy weather of Toronto today. We are at a balmy 3C. And you are at what temperature right now?RIAAN: Oh, my goodness. I'll tell you right now, weather. It's 25 degrees C right now...26 degrees C. It's 7:00 in the morning and it is going to go up to 30 degrees C today.ADRIANA: Oh, wow. Hey, my kind of weather, it's lovely.RIAAN: I tell you, it is so beautiful. We've got so many birds here, and thankfully I've got a pool here where I rent this property.ADRIANA: Oh, that's nice.RIAAN: If it gets too hot, I just jump in the pool.ADRIANA: That is very nice. Super jelly. Super jelly. That's cool. Well, are you ready for our lightning round questions?RIAAN: Yeah, sure. Let's see what you got.ADRIANA: All right. Yes. This is a get to know you better icebreaker sort of thing. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?RIAAN: I'm right handed.ADRIANA: Awesome. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?RIAAN: I am on Android. I prefer Android.ADRIANA: All right. And do you prefer Mac, Linux or windows?RIAAN: Strangely, I'm the type of guy that used to run Linux on a Mac on my MacBook air. Yeah, Ubuntu.ADRIANA: Nice.RIAAN: Made by Mark Shuttleworth, who's from South Africa. But it just became a little bit difficult with all the changes. Work takes over. And so I've recently, well, not recently, about five years ago, switched to MacOS on a Mac.ADRIANA: Oh, nice. So you were running like Ubuntu natively on a Mac. It wasn't a VM, it was like...actually...RIAAN: I can't sometimes with the new stuff that doesn't work. But my old little MacBook Air that I got from Germany runs Ubuntu dual boot.ADRIANA: Oh my God, how cool is that. That's amazing.RIAAN: Because KDE is just such a great desktop. And it's got so many customizations and Windows gestures that it just makes your day to day and your working incredibly easy.ADRIANA: Very cool. And now you're like, no, now it's MacOS on the Mac.RIAAN: Now I've become not lazy, but when something breaks on my Mac because I work as a consultant, so I get a company PC and then sometimes I'm on Windows, sometimes I'm on Linux, sometimes on a cloud thing. So now I'm just the default OS with dev containers. So I use VSCode's dev containers, which means I just need VSCode and Docker and the rest I do inside of the container.ADRIANA: Nice.RIAAN: I really keep it so simple and so easy nowadays.ADRIANA: That's awesome. Hey, that is the way to do it. To keep it simple. We overcomplicate our lives. So, awesome.RIAAN: Yes.ADRIANA: Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?RIAAN: Listen man, I must come from systems administration. So I like Python and I like Bash and scripting. And then of course HCL is my favorite. And I used to start off with PHP back in the day on PHP, but I've since moved away from it. I used to do a little bit of PHP in Magento, but I'm just really in love with the infrastructure stuff and the DevOps. So I don't even know if you can call YAML and Cloudformation and HCL programming languages. You probably can't. So I'm a script kitty. Let's call me a script kitty, you know.ADRIANA: All right, I love it. Okay, next question. Related. Do you prefer dev or ops?RIAAN: I love both. And I really like the synergy. I used to do Puppet stuff, and when I discovered Puppet, I was like, wow, this is incredible. And then along came Cloudformation and I could just code something in Cloudformation and in the user data, pass it off to Puppet, and then do all of my stuff in Puppet. And that was the "Aha!" moment. We have finally arrived.ADRIANA: Nice.RIAAN: I like. What's that cake? A red velvet cake. It's a mix between the two and white chocolate, vanilla and chocolate. I love it so much.ADRIANA: Awesome! I love it! Okay, another one. And I think I have an inkling of what your preference is. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?RIAAN: To tell you the truth, I hated JSON when I started with Cloudformation, but it didn't support YAML. So I wrote so much cloudformation that I loved JSON. I started loving it. But what's more readable and easier for the users. I mean, I do like YAML. It is just so beautiful and simplistic and easy to read. So it's like your kids. Let's say I've got two kids. I love them both equally. The JSON is the kid with red hair and YAML is a beautiful dark brunette kid with hazel eyes. I love them both equally.ADRIANA: I love that. I love that. Now, what if you threw HCL into the mix...as a Hashi guy?RIAAN: I love HCL. It's the fastest growing programming language and you can use it everywhere and it's just so flexible and just so forgiving. The shorthand if else. It's just such a great. That's probably what I'm going to start my son off. He's almost ready to start learning something and I think I'll start him off with that because it's really powerful if you can write a little bit of HCL and deploy it, and there you've got ten virtual machines. Yeah, that will just be the thing I'm going to start him off with.ADRIANA: That's very cool. Speaking of programming languages, so my daughter is like a perpetual artist. Like, she's just born artsy and my husband and I are both in tech. And she was like, "I'm not learning how to code." And I'm like, "But you're a great problem solver. You would be a great coder." But I'm like, "I won't push it on you because you do you." And then she took like, I don't know why, but she took a computer class in school this year and learned Python.And she's like, and she's like, "Mom, I hate to admit it, but I love coding." And she's just wrapping up her semester and she's like, "I'm going to be so sad that there's no coding next semester because I really enjoy the daily coding challenges." And I'm like, that's vindicating.RIAAN: People always say, oh, well, you get the creativity kind and then you get the. But I really think that programming and DevOps stuff is a very creative art so much. It's not the boring essay type of stuff. And even the typing is also a creativity outlet. I really think there is a place for it.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah. And honestly, I think software engineering is such a creative profession. It's just creative in a very different way than. You're not painting on a canvas, a traditional canvas, but the IDE is your canvas.RIAAN: Yes. And you have to use your imagination when you run into a bug, you have to kind of walk it through and I wonder, what is it now? Yesterday I got a bug where HashiQube wouldn't start and I was like, is it the new Vagrant version? And then I'm like, what could it be? Could it be Docker? It turns out it's the Docker. The new Docker at 25.0 doesn't let Vagrant start. And you have to be creative. Where should I start looking now?ADRIANA: Oh my God. As a sidebar, let me tell you, every time there's a Docker update, I am like shaking in my booties because I feel like every Docker update causes my system to melt down and I can't run an update. I have to actually nuke Docker and then reinstall it and pray that other stuff that was relying on Docker is still working.RIAAN: And then yesterday with that bug, I go read the Docker change log and they had some problems with the systemd update. So the Docker developers must be like, every time there's a systemd update and I can't even just update it, I have to nuke my whole thing. It's amazing how dependent we are on each other's work. It's like this ecosystem.ADRIANA: Oh my God. Yes.RIAAN: It relies on other components.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, next question from our series. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?RIAAN: I like spaces. I love spaces. Tabs give me that feeling where somebody walked over your grave. When I see it, I'm just like..."Ugh!"ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's such a great description. Okay, second last question. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?RIAAN: That is funny. I'll tell you, I like video. I'm in two minds of what do we learn easier? I think text is too slow to make us humans learn. I love reading my book. I'm reading at the moment is Jordan Peterson's "Twelve Rules for Life". But I've been trying this out now. So while I'm reading it, I'm listening to the audiobook on Spotify and I don't know yet whether this is going to make it stick, but now I'm using my ears, my mind, and my reading, and I'm just now busy checking it out. What is going to be the best way to get content through your thick skull?ADRIANA: That is very cool.RIAAN: Learn it quicker. So I don't know, but I do like videos. I do love it when they give a link in the video to a GitHub repository. Yes, because it's like copying code from a picture. Copying code from a picture. I'm like,ADRIANA: Yeah, I know, right? Yeah. It's like, oh, I have to type this out.RIAAN: Anyway, that's where I am at the moment. Let's go with video with a link to a GitHub repo.ADRIANA: Awesome. I love it. You mentioned something interesting, which is like you're reading the book but also listening to the audiobook on Spotify. And I've done something similar. So I don't have too many physical books just because they take up too much space. But what I've done is I would buy the Kindle book but also get the Audible add on. So then if I was out for a run, I could listen to the book, and then if I was at home and in the mood to read, then I could open up the Kindle book and it would be in the exact spot where I left off in the Audible. And I'm like, oh, my God, this was like the best way to consume content, right? So for me, I thought it was so cool.RIAAN: Yeah. Follows actually your audio.ADRIANA: Yeah. Because they're tied the same. It's the same account, like the Audible account, uses my Kindle credentials. My Amazon account.RIAAN: Incredible. Yeah. I still have to have a little bookmark in the book.ADRIANA: Right.RIAAN: To keep it kind of in sync. Incredible. Wow. That's a good tip. I love physical books, but I might just switch now. I don't know. I'll let you know.ADRIANA: Yeah. My sister has a bunch of physical books, so she'll lend me one every so often. And I love the touch of a physical book. And there's something so satisfying about carrying a book around the house. But the convenience of the ebook is like, I can be like waiting at a doctor's office, open the iPhone and read my book.RIAAN: Yes, I do like it. I do like the physical mean. I've got a couple of them. Another great one is this one from David Goggins, and I was fortunate enough to meet him in person in Brisbane. And the other one I read before that was this thing. So weird, man. I mean, you know, after COVID, just as I was reading it, I was just keep on thinking how lucky and how thankful we are to be out of this COVID thing because they were going to pass rules from the World Health Organization and mandate us locally to countries and not all countries are the same. And I don't know, it was creating a sticky situation.So after this, I was just reading that book and every second page I was like, oh, thank God. I don't think I could have handled that one. So, yeah, I do like the physical books and stuff, but the Kindle is just so convenient.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. All right, final question. What is your superpower?RIAAN: My superpower is probably, I'm curious and I'm quite patient. I can stick with a problem for a very long time. I might let it go for a little bit, but I would always come back to it and revisit it. And persistence is absolutely key. So I think that would be my superpower. I always say I'm not actually clever. My problem is that I'm curious. So through my curiosity, I just discover and I happen to learn stuff.RIAAN: I suppose. That's my superpower.ADRIANA: I love it. That's so great. Well, you've survived the lightning round questions. Awesome. Well, there's so many things I want to talk to you about, but one of the things, because you and I met when I was starting on my Hashi journey, where a coworker of mine found HashiQube, which you've created. And it is like whenever I have a chance, I will promote HashiQube to people, to Hashi folks, because I think it's such a great tool. To be able to basically mimic a data center setup of Hashi tools on your laptop, I think is incredible. And that it pretty much ports to your data center setup afterwards is super incredible and has saved my ass so many times, especially in my previous job when I was working with a Hashi stack.So it was such a great way to learn how to use it, to have a setup that could mimic what we would have in real life without me having to figure it out. I appreciate that you figured all that stuff out. If you could talk a little bit about HashiQube and what inspired you to start it, where it started. And now, what are some of the new capabilities?RIAAN: I totally hear your sentiment about being able to test something and mimic it in production because it's just so valuable. But really, where it started is when in South Africa, I was director of DevOps for Mage Mojo, a company that used to run Magento e-commerce stores on Kubernetes. But I really was looking for a visa, and I came to Australia and I was applying for so many jobs. I mean, if you can imagine applying from South Africa for remote jobs. I found it quite challenging at that stage, and I got a job as a consultant, and I was off the tools, mostly off the tools as the director of DevOps. But then being as a consultant, as you can imagine, your hands on the tools and that stage. I was working for Maritime Road Services. It's a government agency here in Australia and New South Wales.And I was subcontracting for a company called Wipro. And the stack we were working on was Jenkins as the CI/CD, Ansible Tower as the configuration management, getting secrets from Vault, and then Vault maintaining these secrets and everything orchestrated with Terraform. So Terraform would install Vault and Terraform Enterprise at that stage and maintain the stack. So at that stage I was living in the central coast and my train ride was about 1 hour, 50 minutes, 2 hours. And I was new to Vault and I was new to Terraform and I was just like, oh, I need to get this stuff in my head. But then as I go through the central coast, there's this river where there's no mobile connection and it was just difficult to get Internet and download stuff. So I thought, I know I must do something different. And Vagrant, I used Vagrant before for developer environments, vagrant.And then I put Vagrant with Vault and some Terraform in there with local stack so that I can learn how to code Terraform but not having a cloud account. And then when I get to work, I would try get access from Ansible Tower to this Vault and it just doesn't work. And I would go to the vault administrator and say, look, I think there's something wrong with this policy. And they were like, no, no, it's working. I was like, okay, well, now I'm going to test it on my local. I'm like, you see, if I remove this star, I don't get down the secrets, I don't get access to it, but if I add it, it works. So I used to go to the Vault guy and say, look here, this is my lab. This is where I'm testing it.I think the problem is here. And lo and behold, the problem was there. And since then, as a consultant, you work on Kubernetes with Helm. And then I would quickly need to test some Helm Charts or Docker builds and DBT with Airflow. And this is really where HashiQube started and I needed a place to store my configs and this is where HashiQube came about, where I could just text and store my configs and that's the start of it.ADRIANA: That is so cool. That's amazing. Yeah. And I can't say enough good things about HashiQube, because it's got all things. I want to go back to something that you said earlier. So you said that you used to be a director of DevOps and then when you moved to Australia, it sounds like you got into more hands-on stuff as a consultant. How was that transition like going from a director where you're not hands-on, to getting nitty gritty into the hands-on? How did that feel? What prompted the career pivot?RIAAN: First of all, it was insane. I was so overwhelmed, I had impostor syndrome on steroids. The people that I worked at that consultancy, Servian, were extremely professional, and even just the way they looked. And when I came to Australia, the accent was quite thick. So I would sit in a meeting and they would speak English, but I wouldn't understand a word. They would use abbreviations. And so I felt completely overwhelmed, but I would just be consistent. Look, you've hit some goals in the past.It's not like that. You don't know anything. But it was incredibly overwhelming because I used to use AWS and Cloudformation very successfully. Now, I don't know one line of Terraform and the Hashi stack with Vault, and it was just so overwhelming. But I must tell you, having a lab creates confidence. Having a place to test something out of the public eye, you can make stupid mistakes totally. It just gives you that place where you can figure something out and also break it slowly but surely. I decided, well, I don't know a line of Terraform yet, but I'm going to keep at this until I feel that I'm proficient and confident in Terraform.And I just kept at it. I started with the associate exam. I then started trying to give courses on Terraform. And then I became a Certified Terraform Instructor. I did my Vault Associate Exam. And then lately, I'm a Vault Implementation Partner, certified. And so, you know, it really starts off very organically. And so where I started and why I wanted to come to Australia is before that, I was for four years in Berlin, and my son was born in Berlin.But I really wanted him to know his parents and his grandparents and my brother and his kids. And you can't do that from the other side of the world. So we moved back to South Africa. You know, the situation there, I was retrenched four times in South Africa, and the place is a little bit, due to the corruption in government, there are quite high crime and murder rate, and you just feel unsafe. You have to look over your shoulder. As a man, you can handle it pretty easily. But my wife was always getting nightmares and stuff.And I just thought, like, I can't live like this, man. My kid is five years old. I need to give him a better future. I can always go back. I've still got some family there. But then I started looking around and as director of DevOps, my visa to the US didn't quite work out. It was dragging its feet. And so the guy said, well, you can go work in Ukraine with our Ukraine colleagues.So I had the visa stamped in my passport. But then this job from Australia came about and I was just like, oh, the language transition, the weather is more up my alley. Yeah, I'm just going to go for this. And I had the chance of staying director of DevOps, but I also had the chance of learning something new and doing something new. And I always kind of take, I wouldn't say the hard way out, but I take the uncommon, charted...that way. And so I'm so happy looking back at it, that I did come to Australia. That's the whole story. So now, hopefully by April, we'll be applying for Australian citizenship and that will conclude our five year journey.ADRIANA: Oh, wow.RIAAN: Citizenship in another country. I tell you what incredible last five years.ADRIANA: That is such an adventure. I mean, you're not only pivoting your job, but you're also moving to a totally different country, starting fresh. Like, so many changes, and just making it work.RIAAN: Yeah, I tell you, it was just absolutely incredible. But Australia is such a welcoming country. It's truly the rainbow nation with all of these nationalities. I mean, I go to my kids' school and I see Chinese and Filipinos and Indians there and know, and Kiwis from New Zealand and Africans and us from South Africa and all these kids play soccer together. And when I have my South African accent and the Indian parents have their accent, but all the kids sound Aussie. Yeah, mate. How are you doing, mate? And I thought always just. It is just so beautiful. I'm always astonished at how incredibly beautiful it is.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so cool. Wow, that is such an awesome story. Thank you for sharing.RIAAN: My pleasure, my pleasure. It's such a feel-good story for me. I often look back at it and I'm just like, wow, it's so funny. Sometimes you look back at things you did two years ago and how this is now playing a role in your current day and age, but two years ago, you didn't know that what you were doing was actually going to, but you stick with it and you feed and it grows and. Yeah, that's so funny how life is.ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally know what you mean. I always tell people, everything that we've done in the past prepares us for this point in time, right in the present. And as you said, you don't necessarily know that it's going to lead you here. But it feels like it's been kind of in the works, right?RIAAN: Yes.ADRIANA: Or maybe because it happened.RIAAN: Yes. And if it feels good, do it. I liked your episode with Kelsey Hightower. I mean, he's also quite emotionally intelligent, and I would think quite a hyper aware individual to spot your podcast and ask the question. And, I mean, I really just am inspired by people. Like, I mean, well done, Kelsey. I mean, you've also inspired me. So hats off to you, mate.ADRIANA: Thank you.RIAAN: And I love your podcast and all the stuff you do. You're talking at HashiTalks now around the corner. Yeah, that's right.ADRIANA: HashiTalks. Yeah. And you've got a talk as well, right, for Hashi talks?RIAAN: Yes, I do. Everyone teaches you how to write Terraform code, but no one teaches you the scaffolding surrounding it, like dev containers, managing Terraform versions, scanning your code, doing the linting having environment, and everyone is like, oh, you must have micro repos. Mono repos is so bad. But this whole development lifecycle, just try to commit to three repositories with other maintainers and make prs and then wait and see how long you can get that code merged in. It is incredible. And so I'm going to give a talk a little bit about that to just help people get started and accelerate their Terraform development. So I'm looking quite forward to that.ADRIANA: Oh, that's awesome. That sounds like such a great topic.RIAAN: Yes. There's so much stuff that goes on behind the scenes that writing Terraform code is becoming the easy part.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's funny because I think, like many things, getting started withTterraform is easy. And then when you actually go to apply it for real life scenarios or know, I think a year ago, I was doing some work in terraform, and I want to clean up my code, and I'm like, I want to use modules. And I had everything working without using modules. And then I go to use modules, I'm like, crap, it's broken. You go to prettify your code, and it's like, another roadblock. But this is the cost of beautiful code. But these are the things that you don't realize as you go and evolve your code, right?RIAAN: Yes. And making your modules usable. So now you need to write modules and patterns. And I don't know if you've ever seen the Terraform EKS Blueprints repository. If you Google "Terraform EKS Blueprints", that is just such an amazing little project. So it's deploying EKS, but in there, they've got patterns and these patterns are just so well written. And if you look at the multitenancy with teams, one, I've used it at great success in my consulting gig last year.And I just want to say, hats off to those maintainers and developers. They've really done a good job. And if you ever want to see how to write...what good looks like, that would certainly be the repository to visit.ADRIANA: That's good to know. Thank you. Yeah, I just checked it out, as you mentioned, that it looks very well organized.RIAAN: It's incredibly well organized. It's really incredibly well...and when you start using it, you will see, oh, wow, there's been a great deal of thought that went into this thing.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so cool. I always appreciate when folks put in that effort, especially in the open source world, because it's like extra work, right? And that someone was cared enough to just make it easily consumable for me is so nice.RIAAN: It's so selfless and I appreciate that little bit of it. I always think that people who contribute to open source projects, their glass is really overflowing because you have your personal life. I mean, you have kids and a family and a career, and yet you can still...and some people when they open up tickets, they're like, this doesn't work. Fix it. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay. And then you have to be nice. And I mean, it's really like helping a parent with their Internet problems. Right?ADRIANA: I know, right? Oh my God, so true. Yeah. And especially, as you said, the ticket is, "This doesn't work." And it's like, "Okay, can you tell me what isn't working?"RIAAN: Sounds so funny. But I always think back, our parents taught us how to tie our shoes and not to be cringey or anything, but they taught us how to wipe our bums. And really they had to have this insane amount of patience with us and try and try and try again. And I was trying to remind myself, especially when I've got a kid now nine years old, before that, I was kind of oblivious to the fact. But now that you've got a kid, sometimes you just have to stand back and laugh at the situation because it's just so funny. This development thing takes time.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true. That's a perfect way to describe it. Because when you have a kid, you're seeing your kid experience things for the first time, things that you take for granted, right? Like learning how to walk, learning how to crawl, or them, like when they're babies and they discovered that they have feet and they stick their feet in their mouths and you're like, oh, that is so cool, right? And these are things that you don't think about because it's like, yeah, I know where my feet are.RIAAN: I forgot what it feels like. Or what it tastes like to have your big toe in your mouth.ADRIANA: Right?RIAAN: I don't know what a big toe tastes like anymore.ADRIANA: Yeah.RIAAN: But I love the open source thing and also try to make things easy and consumable for people. I think that's the ultimate goal.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. So much work goes into open source and I think I'm heavily involved with OpenTelemetry and I'm trying as a personal thing that I am trying to live by, which is like recently I was developing some content around OpenTelemetry and then I was going through the docs and realizing, oh, it's missing some stuff. And so I'd write a blog post about it to clarify it. But then I thought, well, that's nice, but it's missing stuff from the OpenTelemetry docs. Let's be a good citizen and contribute back to the OpenTelemetry docs, right? If there's something that you can contribute, even something so simple like documentation, clarifying documentation, I think it's so important if you're able to take the time and make that pull request to make somebody's life a little bit easier, right? Because oftentimes the developer docs for an open source project tend to be your first point...where...your one stop shop, hopefully...They're definitely your original landing point, right? So let's as a community try to make these docs better, right?RIAAN: 100% agreed. 100% agreed.ADRIANA: Now, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but still on the Hashi train of thought, you are wearing a Core Contributor t-shirt for HashiCorp. I was wondering if you could explain what that's all about. Like what does a HashiCorp core contributor do and what led you to there?RIAAN: I got this last year in the post and I was just so happy to get mean. The Credley page says, "HashiCorp core contributors are individuals who are committed to the spirit of open source. They actively contribute to HashiCorp open source tools through submissions of pull request issues and bugs and contributor to documentation while advocating and adhering to the HashiCorp principles." And I've done a few pull requests and I help test stuff. I contribute to bugs and if anything, I just validate it and say, I've run this, I've tested this, it does work, whatever. I've got this problem here. And that got me this t-shirt, and I was just incredibly thankful. HashiCorp is quite a stunning community, and the individuals that make up this, I mean, you know, from the Ambassadors, they're a fun bunch.They...the you, they...the me, they...the other people in the community. And I do think that they've got a certain gravitas to attract these certain individuals, like looks for like, and I feel welcome there, and I like contributing there. And just because it's such a nice stack. I mean, Mitchell, Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, they really made something really mean. I do know they went through this BUSL license change, but I mean, it was kind of expected, right? It's a company. It needs to make money. We live in a material world. We all need to make money.I understand it. To me, just the logical evolution of this next step. But that said, the contribution that they've made to open source and to helping people like me learn and the stuff they give us for free is just incredible. So I'll be forever thankful for that.ADRIANA: That's so cool. And I love that you're being rewarded for your contributions with this designation. I think it's so awesome.RIAAN: I do appreciate it as well. I contributed such a small contribution, and still they recognized that, and I was just thankful and appreciative. It's beautiful. It feels good to get a little gift or something.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. It's nice to know that the community appreciates. And on the same vein, like you mentioned, you and I are both HashiCorp Ambassadors. And actually you're the one who nominated me initially for the HashiCorp Ambassadorship. So I definitely appreciate that.RIAAN: You know, because I always say, like, I meet a lot of people in my work, and this is not to be bashful or anything, but a lot of people are...If you can imagine a heart monitor and you see a blip on that monitor and I see blips, and I think that those blips should be recognized and called out. I think we should be the type of person that say, wow, you look good today, or, this is inspirational. I read your blog post, and I was actually surprised when I saw that you wrote all of these blog posts using HashiQube. I was like, wow, this thing has been out in the wild. And this is the first time I see it, and I was blown away. I contacted you, I think, over Medium.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's right.RIAAN: Because you were not only using HashiQube, but also writing about it and using it in different ways. And I was incredible. And that's exactly why I nominated you because I think these type of people should be called out and should be celebrated. And you were certainly inspiring to me. And if you were inspiring to me, I bet you you're inspiring to many others out there. And that's the next wave of Ambassadors coming up in the world.ADRIANA: Yeah, for sure. It's been a great program so far. I think I've been an Ambassador for two years. When did you become an Ambassador?RIAAN: 2021.ADRIANA: Oh, awesome.RIAAN: So this year I'll be an Ambassador again. You have to put in the work and the street cred and stay active in the community and stuff. But while you can, you should. If you can.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. I put in an application again for this year, so fingers crossed I get it again. Fingers crossed. Yeah, it's been great through the Ambassadorship program. They invited me last fall to MC HashiTalks Deploy in December. So that was fun. That was so fun.I'd never MCed before, so I was super nervous. But they were very organized. They're like, this is how it's going to go and this is the order. And here's a table of who the speaker is. You just need to fill out this stuff as prepare a script for yourself. So it was like, okay, because I was full on panicking when I agreed to become an MC. I'm like, okay, that'll be easy. And then there was like all this process.I'm like, oh my God. It is very overwhelming.RIAAN: But they do make it easy for you, but they do support you in pulling it off. Easy is definitely the wrong choice of words, but they do very much support you in getting this thing across the line. And then in the end you look back at it and you're like, wow, that was fun.ADRIANA: Yeah, it was a great experience and I'm so grateful for the opportunity that I was afforded because of being an Ambassador. So it's nice to have these little things here and there.RIAAN: I love it.ADRIANA: Now, one thing that I wanted to ask...you're very involved in...you do a lot of Terraform work. Have you played around with the now competitor OpenTofu?RIAAN: That's a good question. And no, I have not. I mean I did use Terragrunt before and I actually quite like Terragrunt. And to be honest with you, I don't think that that was nice to make OpenTofu. I'm an open source guy, man. I've been using Ubuntu Linux since 2008 and I started using RedHat in 2000, actually RedHat 6.2. And there's always a way to go about things. And I believe in having diplomacy. Someone created it.And now you're kind of like taking ownership of this and you're taking it. And that's also against the spirit of open source. So I have not tried using OpenTofu. I actually cringe when I hear that name. Sorry to say it, I know what they did with OpenTofu. I mean, I did think about it. It's Open TF Tofu and whatever, but I won't be using it. I'm just so know, it just feels weird to me.It just feels wrong to me. And so I like Terraform. And in the same breath, I also haven't tried Bicep from Azure. I'm a ashicle guy, I'm a terraform guy. So I have not delved into that. And I wish them luck on their journey and stuff. But when I see that name, it's just worthy to me. So I've unfortunately not tested it out or anything.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Now, going back to one thing that you mentioned earlier, which was Terragrunt. Can you explain to folks who aren't familiar with Terragrunt what that's all about?RIAAN: I mean, I do like Terragrunt. Just touching on the topic. I wish that they could have just played nice because it could have really benefited this ecosystem so much more. And the companies...there is enough money in the world for everyone. Trust me, there's no reason why...there's enough money. There's billions and trillions and gazillions. So there's always an amicable way to do something.But getting back to Terragrunt is very. I like what the Yevgeni Smirnoff did. You write your module? Everything driven through variables. And so your module should be completely flexible, very dynamic. And then what Terragrant is, is they add a Terragrunt HCL file and then you can make your folders names, variables. So you can imagine if you've got an environments folder and you've got Dev, Prod, UAT, Low, Production, whatever, Non-prod in there, you can turn this folder name into a variable. So you can then define this thing at the very top-level and benefit from this in your modules. So you can say module name and you can use module name in your tags.So when you do apply this Terragrunt stack, these Terraforms, you can benefit from all of this modules that you define in the top and top down. So for those who's ever used Puppet and Hira, it's very similar to Hira. So in Hira, you've got a common file and this common file can be used down in your hierarchy. But let's say you want to overwrite a key name down in a couple of folders, let's say environment. Then you've got dev, and then in dev you've got your availability zones or your regions and then further down you've got availability zones that you stack support. And then lastly you've got your Terraform module and you just want to override a key on a module somewhere down you just overwrite this key. And so what, Terragrunt was quite nice as they defined everything in YAML, so you can have complete very complex YAML code structures that you can then pass to many, very many Terraform modules.And these things all get executed in parallel. And so you can bring up complex infrastructure environments quite quickly. And because your code is DRY, your Terraform modules can be used many times over and you just pass parameters to it which is defined in your YAML files. And this is how Terragrunt comes about. It's actually beautiful the way they've done it. It's really nice. It becomes a little bit complex when you debug yourself because if you can imagine you've got ten Terraform threads now running all at once and if one breaks, the rest of them also stops and it's like quite an avalanche of output. But as far as if you get to use it and you use it properly, then you can accomplish quite a lot very quickly.ADRIANA: Cool. And on a similar vein, maybe not so much Terragrunt, but in general for Terraform, how do you test Terraform code?RIAAN: So my Terraform code, what I do is I have an examples directory or a patterns directory next to my modules. So if you can imagine I would have in my top gun Terraform developer environment I would have Terraform and then AWS, GCP and Azure and custom. And inside those I'd have modules folders and inside of those I'd have our Terraform modules. Then next to the modules folders I would have patterns and the pattern would be Linux server behind load balancer. And that Linux server behind load balancer would just be a main and a variables and outputs that then reference these modules with the source stanza inside of these modules. And then I just build them or I run them and I apply them. I normally just do a plan and I see if it works. But I do run them through an init and if I want to test it all at once, I actually drop a Terragrunt HCL file in there and I use "terragrant run" or "plan" to test all of these things.I use Terraform in conjunction with this and then I plan all of these modules quite quickly. And if my plan works, I leave it out there and then I wait till I run into it again or someone needs an update or something. And then I look at this again.ADRIANA: Cool, that's so awesome. Well, thanks for sharing. We are just about at time, but before we wrap up, I actually have two questions. One, what is your favorite HashiCorp tool?RIAAN: My favorite HashiCorp tool would really be Terraform at the moment. There's a few. There's Vagrant. I love vagrant.ADRIANA: Vagrant is great. I really love it. It was my first Hashi tool.RIAAN: It's incredibly powerful. I mean, I really must take a shout out to vagrant. I mean, thank you, Mitchell and Armon for writing this thing. I use it every day, still. It's incredibly powerful. So I love Vagrant. I dig Terraform because that's my staple. I eat that thing every day for breakfast.I love Nomad. I run Nomad jobs quite a lot. And so nomad is just so easy. You just drop it on a server and there could be still PHP and Apache sites running on there, but there's Nomad with containerized jobs and you can just migrate it and it's so cost effective and so easy to test it. And I've also liked Waypoint at the moment.ADRIANA: Oh, Waypoint, yeah, I haven't played with Waypoint for a while. Yeah, I need to play with it. Because I think when I played with Waypoint, it was very early days and I can early days. I'm so curious to see how it's evolved since then.RIAAN: It's got a lot of potential, and then Boundary is the next thing I really need to sink my teeth in and get a couple of examples into HashiQube. Just get people started and that's on my to do list to do. But yeah, there are so many.ADRIANA: So many awesome tools.RIAAN: You know what I mean? To pick a favorite. I mean, it's even difficult to pick a favorite cloud because all of these things just enable you to do stuff. So mean. GCP has got its way of working and Azure has got its way of working and AWS works in its ways, but they all help me on my day to day and I'm just so thankful we've got cloud computing. I mean, holy moly, can you imagine? Still back in the day.ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah, it's wild to see how much software has evolved in the last 20 years. Holy cow. Mind blowing.RIAAN: Mind blowing coming from NT4 and A+ where I started with chips and RAM and stuff. I mean, it's incredible to see how it's evolved.ADRIANA: I totally agree. I totally agree. I mean, there was no cloud when I started my career.RIAAN: No, just think back fondly. I mean, I used to use Gentoo and compiling stuff and running my own postfix mail servers and pure FTP servers and. Oh my goodness. Incredible.ADRIANA: And now look, the world is at our fingertips with cloud. That's pretty mind blowing. Well, before we wrap up, do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience?RIAAN: Well, maybe if you want to check out hashicube. I always plug that little thing. It's just so incredible to see a little docker container running more docker containers.ADRIANA: Oh my God, it's like mind blowing sometimes.RIAAN: Just think back and how lucky I was to get that to work. It is just incredible. And so easy to POC stuff and get stuff up. So, I mean, if you want to check out HashiQube, if you want to learn or play around with, that's my DevOps lab from now on going forward. Yeah, so cool.ADRIANA: It's a great lab.RIAAN: And that's the only plug. And see you guys at HashiTalks in a couple of days.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. The other thing I want to mention on that same vein is I think you getting vVgrant to work with the Docker provider is probably one of the best running examples of Vagrant with the Docker provider, because I don't think there's a lot of documentation around that. So thank you for that. Hats off to you because, yeah, I think getting that to work, which you did, to be able to run HashiQube on the M processor, Macs, that's why you needed to get that running, right.RIAAN: I so like it because it is just so light and if you do Vagrant SSH, it's very difficult to say you're in a Docker container now.ADRIANA: Yeah, I know. You would never know. You would never know.RIAAN: And it's incredible. I can really see things going that way. It's the way I do stuff at the moment. I no longer do VMS, so even when I run HashiQube on an EC2, or when I want to run Ansible AWX Tower on an ec two, I just HashiQube and "vagrant up".ADRIANA: Yeah, it's the way to do it. I love it. Well, thank you so much.RIAAN: Thank you for having me on your show. It's so good to see you. And shout out to your daughter, who I believe is doing your editing for your videos and job well done. I take my hat off. Thank you so much for your time and it's so good to see you again.ADRIANA: Yeah, it was great to see you as well. And thank you, Riaan, for geeking out with me today. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe. Be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...RIAAN: 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 going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:Edith is a Tech Evangelist at Percona, a company known for its work with open source databases. She used to work as a DevOps engineer, helping IT companies and startups set up and use DevOps. After taking a break for two years, Edith started working with Open Source, which helped her get back into the job market. She has made valuable contributions to the Apache Airflow project during her time with Outreachy and is working on translating the Kubernetes website into Spanish. Edith is also an ambassador for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, focusing on creating content, and is recognized as a Docker captain. She has taken part in tech programs like Stanford's Code in Place and studied at 42, a coding school in California. Recently, Edith moved to the United Kingdom on a Global Talent Visa, which was a big step forward in her life.Find our guest on:X (Twitter)LinkedInYouTubeFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow Links:Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)OutreachyApache AirflowKubernetes Community Days (KCD)Liz RiceKCD Peru - July 20th, 2024KubeHuddle Toronto 2024Additional Links:Docker Captains programCode in Place (Stanford University)42 Silicon Valley (coding school)Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, 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. Geeking out with me today. I have Edith Puklia. And where are you calling from today?EDITH: Yeah, I am calling from UK. London, UK.ADRIANA: Awesome. I've had a few people on the show that have called in from London. I think you're like the third person from London. I had Abby Bangser, who I think it was Abby who introduced. Right? Abby is the ultimate connector of people. So thank you, Abby, for introducing us.Yes, I had Abby and then Jennifer Riggins, who is a tech journalist. You probably saw a bunch of her pieces on The New Stack. And then you. So you are my three London, UK people. Very exciting.EDITH: Thank you.ADRIANA: And we share a South American connection as well, right?EDITH: Yes. You are from Brazil, right? Peru here.ADRIANA: Yay. Home of the llamas.EDITH: We love llamas. We love them.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, you have the awesome mug. Yeah. I was telling you earlier before we started recording that llamas and capybaras are like my two favorite animals in the world, so I always get excited when I see either one of them. Cool. Well, let's start with the lightning round questions. Are you ready?EDITH: Yes.ADRIANA: Okay. Are you left-handed or right-handed?EDITH: Right.ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?EDITH: iPhone.ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer to use Mac, Linux or Windows?EDITH: Linux. I love Linux.ADRIANA: All right. Hardcore. I love it. What is your favorite programming language?EDITH: Okay, there are many. Now my favorite right now I can say that it's Rust.ADRIANA: Very cool, very cool. I hear that it's great. But also very complicated to get into.EDITH: Yes. I mean, I don't code like a deep programming. I am just starting, just learning, but I was fascinated for what you can do with it.ADRIANA: Cool. I'm curious as a sidebar, what got you interested in learning Rust?EDITH: Because how you can easily integrate with other technologies. For example, with Docker I was trying to play, I was able to do fast with Rust. And using Chat, GPT is also a great tool to learn,.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Very cool. Okay, next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?EDITH: Hard question here. Yeah, I prefer Ops.ADRIANA: Okay, cool. Next one. Do you like JSON or YAML better?EDITH: YAML. I feel that I can read it.ADRIANA: Yes. Yeah, that's my thing with YAML too. I think it's easier to read. Okay, next one may be controversial spaces or tabs? Which one do you like better?EDITH: Spaces or tabs? I use spaces.ADRIANA: All right.EDITH: Yeah. You?ADRIANA: Okay. So I used to be a big fan of tabs, but then I started using spaces, especially when working with YAML, because it felt a little bit more organic for me. Yeah. So I used to be very adamant, like, no, it's got to be tabs. But now I'm like, I'm open right now. I'm down for spaces. So, yeah.EDITH: Okay.ADRIANA: Also, kudos to you for turning the question back on me.EDITH: But I am curious about you too. Why you too?ADRIANA: I love it. Very awesome. Okay, two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?EDITH: Okay. I love videos. I have a hard moment reading a lot of text, but videos is more easy for me to consume for you. I can imagine that too, because you do videos a lot also, right?ADRIANA: No, it's mostly text for me. It's funny, though. I was talking to my dad yesterday, so my dad does not...he was like, I do not like podcasts. I'm like, but my podcast is on video, too. He's like, it's just boring to see people's heads on video, but he's more of a video guy because he likes the visual stuff. He refuses to do podcasts. And my daughter loves, loves, loves videos. She's always learning things on Instagram or YouTube.EDITH: And you have a lot of articles.ADRIANA: Definitely. Like, I prefer writing. I think I've embraced video a little bit more. I used to be very scared of editing video, and I feel like nowadays the tools have made it easier to do video edits so that it looks like I'm not fumbling around. So I feel a lot more comfortable doing video editing compared to, like, ten years ago when it felt impossibly hard.EDITH: With writing. I feel really hard writing. Long time ago, I was not able to write a single article that take me too long to write. But now I feel I'm more comfortable because I am trying to do constantly.ADRIANA: Oh, that's awesome.EDITH: Yay.ADRIANA: I love to hear stuff like that. Final question. What is your superpower?EDITH: Patience.ADRIANA: Patience. I love it.EDITH: Yeah. You?ADRIANA: Oh, jeez. My superpower. I think I'm really good at connecting people together. I find myself in situations where I'll have a conversation with someone and then they'll ask me a question. I'm like, I know a person that you can talk to. Yeah.EDITH: You have a lot of people in your mind.ADRIANA: Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. At least remember people who should be talking to each other.EDITH: That's a superpower.ADRIANA: All right, cool. Well, that was it for the lightning round questions. You survived! Yay.EDITH: Thank you.ADRIANA: Okay, so now for the fun stuff. As I mentioned before, we got connected through Abby, and then it turns out we have another connection in common, which is we're both CNCF Ambassadors from the spring 2023 group. So, very exciting. I guess our first year of ambassadorship is coming to a close, and I guess they're renewing applications end of this month. So my question to you is, how has it been this last almost year as a CNCF Ambassador?EDITH: Almost a year because we started at March. I think the last year. I was here in London, too. Then I go back to Peru. And how I feel this year being CNCF Ambassador, I think it doesn't cost to me too much make things for being Ambassador because I was in the category. If you see there are several categories, right? Run events or you go many, you can choose whatever you want. I choose the part of content creations which I love. So when I inspire it, I just create a video. I just make a flyer or a pdf of anything which I do in my free time. And I love it because editing videos and making that things require a lot of patience.ADRIANA: Yes. There's your superpower.EDITH: That's my superpower. And I can do that. I feel really excited. I feel like I'm going to apply again. For the last month, I was not just involving in content creation, I was also involving in organizing events. We are organizing Kubernetes Community Days. Lima, Peru is the first time we are running these events in Peru with other members of the community and also being members of CFP proposals reviewers, for example. I was involved in many other things.No just content creation. A lot of things to learn. A lot of things that I never did in the past, but I never thought to do it. But I am doing. Wow, this is amazing. It's hard sometimes because it costs to learn, but it's very interesting and I like.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And I have to say, I really enjoyed being a CNCF Ambassador because of the different opportunities that it's opened up, like just making new connections and being given opportunities to review CFPs and being given speaking opportunities that you necessarily wouldn't have had otherwise.EDITH: Yeah. I feel in the same way, just to tell you that the first trip that I did in my life outside Peru was for CNCF because I won a scholarship. So I didn't speak English, just my name. And I got to Seattle and saw a different experience. Just being in the KubeCon in Seattle, it was just amazing. And things that made me think, wow, there is doors here that I should start open. It's here I should go. I saw a lot of opportunities, and since then I go to that side of CNCF and all those communities my career start to doing that. I think the support for women in tech is also very valuable what we are doing as a community.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do want to go back to your earlier comment on your first trip out of Peru, and you said you didn't know English at the time. How long ago was that?EDITH: I'm sorry? It was 2018. Yes. I mean, I study English. Yes, I talk basic English, but outside you is different.ADRIANA: It's different, yeah. It's so true. Because it's the slang, it's the technical terms. It's funny, because I was thinking back...as you mentioned, I'm from Brazil, but I grew up most of...I've been in Canada since I was ten. I've been in Canada for, like, almost 35 years. So I am bilingual. I'm even trilingual.I speak French, too, but I have to say my Portuguese has degraded in the time that I've been here, even though I speak to my parents in Portuguese, but I lack some of the technical terminology and I even lack some of the slang. So I actually started joining...following people on Instagram for Portuguese language school so that I can up my game to just get back into some of the slang terms and just be a little bit more conversational than I am, because I've lost some of that from not being around that many Portuguese speakers.EDITH: Yeah, I understand that. I have been here speaking English not too long time, but I already start to forgetting how to write things in Spanish, and I brought it wrong. And my father is always correcting me asterisk.ADRIANA: I know my dad's always correcting me as well, because sometimes I'll do a translation...what seems to be a direct translation of the English word to Portuguese, and he's like, yeah, that's not the same word. It means something totally different. I'm like, oh, my God, I feel so embarrassed.EDITH: You are not alone.ADRIANA: But then I remember something that I've read, like, being able to speak more than one language and making the effort to converse in more than one language is putting yourself out there. It's a sign of bravery, because, holy crap, it is so scary to attempt to communicate it in a language that you're not necessarily familiar with or super comfortable speaking in. Before we met today to record this, I recorded a podcast episode in Portuguese, and it was my second time recording a podcast episode in Portuguese. And I was so scared because I'm like, I don't know technical terminology in Portuguese. And so some of the advice that I got from a few of my Brazilian friends who live here in Toronto, they're like, "Don't worry if you don't know the word. Just use the English word, but give it a bit of a Portuguese accent." Yeah. I mean, like, you know, even though, like, something like that completely scared the shit out of me. At the same time, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to force myself to do this because the more I do it, the more comfortable I will get.EDITH: Yes. I don't know why we are like that. I mean, we are really afraid. We jump and we start to doing. Then it pass and we said we did it. Yeah. Before that start to feel like the fear, the hands start to with everything, that scary moment. Then you use go, but then you jump to another thing.EDITH: To start to jump to a ring and another ring. The same motions.ADRIANA: Exactly. It actually reminds me of, like, I was having this conversation last week with someone where I'm like, oh, my God. When I first learned about cloud and cloud native, I'm like, it's this terrifying, scary thing. So I was like, I don't want to do it. I don't know. I don't think I can do it. And then I did my first thing in the cloud and I'm like, oh, okay. It was okay.ADRIANA: Yeah, it wasn't scary.EDITH: You are complete. Nothing happened. It's weird how we can be afraid of things that also involve human beings, like communications, like speaking, we are afraid. I don't know what we are afraid. What is the fear that we feel to be exposed, to see that others look at us and we are trying to embarrass. I think we all are humans and we all have the mistakes.ADRIANA: Yeah. And I think we judge ourselves a lot more than others judge us. When I'm having a conversation with someone in Portuguese, especially like, with my family in Brazil, and thankfully know Google translate to help me when I'm on WhatsApp, but I'm like, oh, my God, they're going to look at me and they're going to make fun of my grammar, whatever, or use the wrong word. But then I also have to remind myself they have better things to do than to nit-pick on your grammar. They have their own lives. Get over yourself. It's not all about you.EDITH: Yeah.ADRIANA: Okay, so I want to switch gears again and talk a little bit about your career, like how you got into...and I know you do a lot of work around Kubernetes and containers. What got you in it?EDITH: Yeah. Okay. I was in the field of tech for almost ten years. I can say I work it as a DevOps, also as a developer for big companies in Peru. For companies where I started from scratch, things. Was really hard. For example, when DevOps was not big tendency. Right now we are starting from scratch. I started from scratch alone.Trying to start servers, make all that stuff was really hard, but challenge. And after that I decided to quit my job in 2018, I think...2019. Because of healthy problems, emotional problems, healthy problems, back problems, and with family problems, everything like when you have one and everything start to make a big thing. And I decided to take a moment. I take two years. I never thought it will take me too much, but I took two years. Okay. But these two years was really amazing for me. It was amazing because I give me this time to know me better.Things that I never did in the past. Because I was always running, running, piecing the car. I don't know how to say the accelerator of the car and trying to gas in that life. But then when everything happened, I just. No plan. Nothing for that future, for the future, just that. Just myself, my thoughts and my body. And thinking what made me happy, what will make me happy for the future.It's how I invest the time in two years. So not just thinking, but also doing. Because I wanted to improve English, I wanted to improve also my technical skills. And I realized that tech made me happy. It's one of the things also make me happy. Okay. I'm also geek.ADRIANA: I love it.EDITH: Yeah. Between several things, tech also made me happy. And I start to improve my skills. I start to learning English, which was really challenged for me. Now I can communicate how I want. I think I need to improve, but it's good for me. So I started to apply for jobs after having an internship in Outreachy. Did you hear about Outreachy?ADRIANA: Yes, yes. I have heard of Outreachy. For folks who have not heard of Outreachy...EDITH: Yes. Outreachy is a program, open source program. In three months you can have a mentor. It is also paid. So you learn a lot of things because you put your hands in real open source projects. I put my hands in Apache Airflow, where I start to code. I start to make things that I had never thought to do it. It was really amazing. And I wasn't with Oyo, but they give me a pay.So it was enough to me to survive and to learn English and improve some soft skills and also technical skills. Then I started to apply a job. I set a goal for me, for myself, to apply for an international company where I can speak English. Have that opportunity to speak English. So applied maybe to 200 jobs in two months. I applied the most I can.ADRIANA: Wow.EDITH: Sweden, Germany, USA. I send my CVs a lot. So one of the companies was Percona, and after the process and everything, I was hired by Percona and now I'm working as a technology evangelist in Percona, which is an open source company.ADRIANA: That's so cool. And I have to say, it so resonated with me when you said that as part of your time of really digging into who you are and what you love, that you decided that you love tech. Because I felt like I went through a similar thing in my career as well. I was working at a bank and I had quit my job at the bank to become a professional full time photographer. And I was like, this is it. I'm done. I don't want to work in tech. I want to do photography.This is my passion. And I did it for a year, and then I came to this moment in my life where I was like, so it's really hard. And if I really want to make this work, I can probably give it another year or two and probably finally start seeing growth. Because at the time, it was like I wasn't really right then I thought, but do I want to invest this extra time to grow my photography business? What do I actually like doing? Then I realized I had more fun tinkering around, like doing my newsletters and tinkering around with my website, and I was using WordPress and I bought this plugin that wasn't working. And I'm like, let's go into the PHP code to see what's wrong. And I'm like, oh, I think I like that more. So I ended up like. I'm like, you know what? I want to go back to tech.It took a year of me not being in tech to realize that I actually enjoyed tech. So, anyway, yeah, your story so much resonated with me, and I think it's so awesome and so important to take the time in our careers to figure out what makes us happy because, I don't know, we're at work for most of our lives and it better be something that we enjoy, right?EDITH: Yeah. And it's different and it's unique history. I can say yours, for example, is totally different than mine, but it's very unique. It has the meaning for you, and that is the good thing, the very important thing that maybe nobody's going to understand. But we are going to understand, right?ADRIANA: Yeah.EDITH: We are the only one who understand that special moment. Yes.ADRIANA: It's so true. Very deep thoughts. I love it. So philosophical. So great. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, because how did you get into doing Kubernetes work?EDITH: Kubernetes in Peru, we started to hear about Docker, for example, we started to see the whale everywhere. What is the doll? And that was the curiosity, the doll with a terminal. The terminal to Docker and containers and all that stuff. The same, I think happened with Kubernetes. In Peru, we started to listen about Kubernetes as a technology, as a standard things, but just listening. So I started to follow. What is this Kubernetes thing that people talk? And I start to follow people on social media, like Liz Rice, for example. The first person, people that I was following was Kelsey [Hightower].You interview Kelsey. Kelsey, Liz. That's big people there. So I was really fascinated for the keynote that they did. So I started to investigate about KubeCon, and it's how I got the scholarship to go. And once I go there, I see, wow, Kubernetes is the thing. So I started doing some demos at home with Google Cloud because I had free credits. So I start to play because it's what I want to. I love to do, to play with technology.Do it, destroy it, create it, destroy it. Mac, Linux, Windows, destroy it again. I don't know. But I found it funny. Funny, yes. Funny. Enjoyable? What is the word? Okay.ADRIANA: Yeah. Fun.EDITH: Yes.ADRIANA: That's awesome. It's so cool. And I especially love what you said about creating and destroying. And I think that's honestly some of the most fun stuff about playing with Kubernetes clusters is like, you do a bunch of stuff, you mess it up. Okay, time to start over again.EDITH: We are not in production, so you can destroy.ADRIANA: Right, exactly. Yeah, definitely don't do that with your production cluster. So you mentioned playing around with Google Cloud. Have you played around with any other cloud providers?EDITH: Yes, I had the opportunity to play with Red Hat, with Amazon, with Google Cloud and Azure. Yeah.ADRIANA: Cool. And which one's your favorite of the ones you've played with?EDITH: Google is my favorite. I don't know. I feel like interface, the graphical user interface, was more, for me, easy to do it, easy to create, to understand. For me, I feel that in that time, I feel that Amazon has a lot of things. Maybe that I didn't get too much distracted. But anyway, I use in the same time the three cloud providers.ADRIANA: Cool. That's awesome. So switching gears a bit, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of your community work.EDITH: Thank you for that question and community. I started in community participating as all of us just going to the events and see people talking and watch. But then I say, okay, there is another weight because you are in a certain level I can say you advance a little bit in your career and you say, okay, there is people who did a lot for you. They give time, they prepare. So you learn. So let's make it something for that too. And it's the mindset of the community, right? Get back this kind of things. So now we started with creating communities.I say we because it's not just me, we always work with people in communities and we created communities in the city where I was living. There was where I was living lacks of community techs. There is no much communities in tech. So it's where I wanted to start. I'm going to create communities with many people. So Docker was one of the companies that helped me to make it with sponsoring some events. So we start to create events for per year. For example, we celebrate the anniversary of Docker. Like, the 10th anniversary which was a lot of people going to that event and they are learning about the technology and that is one of the work that we are working until now.I like of that and I feel proud about that because we are doing something small but maybe could be impactful and give this opportunity to people that don't have the opportunity to make in that city without leaving the city. Yeah, this is one of the things that we are doing and the other is CNCF. I love this. So we had this big opportunity also because CNCF sponsor it. We have all the support of CNCF to make it possible a Kubernetes Community Days in my country in Peru. So we as a team because we are several people working in that we are creating this community for this year, for July. So I hope we can see it and we can repeat it over the year. So this will be impact also and generate more opportunities for people in our country.ADRIANA: That's amazing. Now how much work goes into putting together a Kubernetes Community Day> But actually before I get you to answer that, maybe it would be helpful to explain to our audience what is a Kubernetes Community Day? What's the purpose of having something like that?EDITH: Yeah, these are spaces where we give people the opportunity to share about the expertise they have about the Kubernetes and the CNCF ecosystem that exists. So a Kubernetes community days is an event. Could be in person, online or both, two days or one day. We choose that. And where several experts or people who want to share about ecosystem of Kubernetes go and start to talk about that. Could be not just talk, could be workshop, could be several things lightning talks, open forum, things like that. And sometimes it's free, sometimes it requires some payment. It depends on the organization, but it's a big opportunity to join a lot of experts, beginners, enthusiasts, members of communities between all this ecosystem. Kubernetes ecosystem.ADRIANA: That's amazing. So it's basically like a little mini conference.EDITH: Yeah.ADRIANA: It mini though? It sounds like. It sounds like a lot of work.EDITH: We compare it with KubeCon, could be mini, but to be honest, it's not like to be mini. Not mini like I saw 500 people in some of the Kubernetes Community Days in Europe, I think.ADRIANA: Holy cow. Damn.EDITH: We are targeting in Peru for the Kubernetes Community Days in Peru, we are targeting also 500 people. Yeah. Attendees.ADRIANA: Amazing. That's so cool. And so for organizing Kubernetes Community Day or KCD, what type of support do you get from the CNCF? As a CNCF Ambassador I would imagine that you get a little extra boost of support from the CNCF? So if you could talk a little bit about that?EDITH: Yeah. What we have is support from members of the CNCF, people who work there. So they help us organize and we have synchronization meetings sometimes to see how is our progress. Also they try to support us the most they can. For example providing us the logos and designer people who can also help us. They also sign a budget for coupons, courses, coupons and some budget. I don't remember the amount of the budget to start the event. That will help us to pay some things and what more? I'm not sure about that but they give the opportunity also to travel to the KubeCon I think.But maybe I am wrong. I'm not sure about that but I think there is many opportunities. Once you are in the ecosystem and once you are doing things there are many opportunities. Networking is also a big opportunity because in an event you can contact with several people who also are organizing. This is my first time organizing so I don't have precise response how much that will take me because it's the first time that I am running it. Let's see how it goes.ADRIANA: So does the CNCF provide then the overall funding for running a KCD or do they provide some funding? Do you need sponsorships? How does that work?EDITH: Yeah, we need a sponsorship. Each team tried to find a sponsorship in the country or outside the country. So with that budget is how they estimate how many attendees we will have and how we are going to assign it. In some cases, this is free and the budget that you need is maybe less, right? It depends, to be honest, of the country and of the city of the country, because the governance community is now is for city. So let's give the opportunity to have more in a country.ADRIANA: Cool. That's awesome.EDITH: Did you think to organize an event? Did you think to participate?ADRIANA: So I'm actually helping to organize an event in Toronto called KubeHuddle, which is like...I think the first KubeHuddle took place in the UK, I want to say a few years ago. And then there was a KubeHuddle in Toronto last year that I attended as a speaker. So then the organizer of KubeHuddle, Marino, he asked me at the end of last one, he's like, "Do you want to help organize the 2024 one? I'm like, okay, yeah." So I am involved in that...because I have so many things on my plate, like, I'm trying to take on what I can without being overwhelmed, but still making sure that I help out. So this is my first experience with that. And KubeHuddle is taking place on May the 7th in Toronto. So this year it's going to be a one-day conference. Last year it was a two-day conference. This year it's a one day single-track conference. So yeah, very exciting. So is KCD Peru? Is it a one-day or two-day conference?EDITH: One-day conference.ADRIANA: One day. And is it multiple tracks or is it single track?EDITH: Multiple. We are thinking multiple.ADRIANA: Okay, cool. Awesome. Very exciting. I'm super stoked for you. I hope it all goes well. Now we are coming up on time, but before we finish off, do you have any parting words of wisdom for our audience?EDITH: If I can say something, it's enjoy life.ADRIANA: I love that. That is perfect.EDITH: See the sun. Look at that and enjoy it. It's very nice. Sometimes. If you have sun.ADRIANA: Except on cold days.EDITH: It's really cold. There is no sun.ADRIANA: I don't know...What's the temperature like in London today, because here it's a warm -4C.EDITH: Today there was a sun, but once you put the finger outside, it freezes. But the sun was lining.ADRIANA: That makes it better. Yesterday it was like -15C in Toronto and I went for a walk and I had to go into different stores to warm up. So I didn't freeze. But yes, I absolutely love your parting words of wisdom. I think we get so caught up in our work lives that we forget to also just take a break, reset, enjoy life. Enjoy the non-work time. Well, this was awesome. Thank you so much, Edith, 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...EDITH: Peace out, and geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Vilella. 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.

In this engaging conversation, tech journalist Jennifer Riggins shares her journey in navigating the intricacies of tech journalism. She discusses the vital balance between storytelling and technology's cultural impact. Jennifer highlights AI's multifaceted implications, particularly its environmental consequences and the need for human oversight. Additionally, she addresses the challenges faced by non-native English speakers in tech and emphasizes the importance of inclusivity and diversity in the industry, advocating for meaningful experiences for underrepresented communities.

About our guest:Charity is an ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of O'Reilly's Database Reliability Engineering and Observability Engineering, and loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.Find our guest on:X (Twitter)LinkedInFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow Links:Honeycomb.ioThe Four Tendencies, by Gretchen RubinChoose Boring Culture, by Charity Majors (blog)Helicopter Management, by Charity Majors (blog)Choose Boring Technology, by Dan McKinley (blog)The Advantage, by Patrick LencioniQuestionable Advice: "My Boss Says We Don't Need Any Engineering Managers. Is He Right?" by Charity Majors (blog)Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)The Engineer/Manager Pendulum, by Charity Majors (blog)The Hierarchy is Bullshit, by Charity Majors (blog)OktaCharity's Calendly for career adviceParse, Inc.Honeycomb Pollinators SlackDevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)OpenTelemetry specification has gone GAAdditional Links:Observability Engineering (book)Database Engineering (book)Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, 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 am so excited to have Charity Majors of Honeycomb on! Welcome, Charity.CHARITY: Yay! Thank you for having me, Adriana.ADRIANA: I'm so excited. And where are you calling in from today, Charity?CHARITY: San Francisco. I just got home. I was in Charlottesville, Virginia, with my little sister over Christmas, and so I am newly home again, looking forward to a very quiet week between Christmas and New Year's.ADRIANA: That is always the best week for chillaxing, right?CHARITY: Nothing going on. This is why at honeycomb, we just give everyone the week off. Obviously, some people have to be on call, but why pretend you're getting stuff done if you aren't?ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah, I fully support that. I totally agree. I think more companies should embrace that.CHARITY: Yeah. I don't feel like anyone should have to be performing that they're excited to be at work or like, we don't make people have a set number of vacation days or anything, but...That's the worst. If you're like, well, it wouldn't really be working, but do I spend one of my precious vacation days? Yeah, fuck it.ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. Honestly, I get so much anxiety over vacation days, like, having to meticulously plan them and, like, oh, where do I spend them? And maximize vacation with family and school holidays. And there's, like, so many school holidays, right?CHARITY: Seriously, there's no perfect system. Like, if you do the unlimited holiday thing, people are like, well, but then you're not treating it like real comp. And people have stress about, are they hitting the right number of days or not? And people won't take it. But then if you have specific number of vacation days, then it's where do I spend it? And everything. So I guess if there's one thing that being a CEO CTO of a company has taught me, it's that people are going to complain no matter what. All you can try and do is pick what is genuinely best for your people that will really help you get as much work as possible done without asking people to fake it and do a bunch of. So, we've gone the infinite vacation route, because, all things considered, I think you kind of want to have a mandatory minimum. Like, you have to take two weeks off, right?ADRIANA: Yeah.CHARITY: And above and beyond that, it's like, are you getting your work done here? It's a standard. The company standard is about three weeks a year, but nobody's looking over your shoulder and policing you.ADRIANA: Yeah. See, I appreciate those policies, especially at companies where they fully respect autonomy, because there's the companies where it's like, well, it's unlimited, but we really only expect you to take like three weeks or four weeks or whatever, and it's like, so it's not really unlimited. Right. And that's disingenuous and annoying and very stressful. I don't know. I bust my ass and I need the time to chill.CHARITY: Yeah. But I will say some people will start taking five weeks, six weeks. But then the question that you have to ask them is, you're taking too much time. It's like, well, are you really getting your job done? And what's the impact on the people around you? Really?ADRIANA: Yes.CHARITY: Because, yeah, it isn't actually fair if you take eight weeks off. Anyone would understand if you have a health issue or if someone in your family is. We've had those situations. But if you're working at a startup with some intensity, we have VC money that's burning in the bank. You kind of can't get your job done, really, if you're not there for two months out of the year.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah.CHARITY: I think always trying to steer it back to the impact. Right. Can you get your job done and are you letting down the people around you, or are you being a real functional member of a high performing team? Those are the terms to have this debate on not how many days you're here or not. The other thing, unlimited time, is that it removes the aspect of scorekeeping and time keeping and quibbling about hours, because some people don't really care, but some people get really concerned about, well, am I taking 2 hours off here and 3 hours there? If I take 4 hours of that a day or not? And those are brain cells that I would really rather you just devote to solving the problems that we're paying you to solve, not to bookkeeping around your own anxiety or your projected expectation of someone else's anxiety about the hours that you're spending on your job.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. I have to admit, the timekeeping stuff is so stressful, and I've been lucky the last three years. I have not had to fill out any timesheets, which has been like, oh, my God, my first job out of college was, like, consulting. So all of your fucking hours are accounted for.CHARITY: Oh...ADRIANA: So everything and even your downtime, right? If you're in between projects, you got to charge it to internal thing. And it was like, yeah, I lasted four years.CHARITY: Oh, honey. I don't know how! One of our company values is we hire adults. And I actually think about that. It's as much about us as it is about the people we hire. It's like, are we treating people like adults? Do we expect them to manage their own time or not? And of course, the difficult points come. I think as an industry, we're just terrible at figuring out how to really take people on as apprentices and turn them into fully-fledged employees. I mean, there's that middle section that takes, even for a fresh college grad or someone entering...It takes five to seven years, I think, for you, really, to bring someone on and bring them up to a level of senior engineer and teach them all these things.But you can interpret it, our value as you're on your own. You better come fully baked because we're not going to help you, which is not what we're trying to project or do. But it's challenging, no?ADRIANA: Yeah. It's so challenging, like coming out of school, right? Trying to figure out where you fit in. And it's also kind of, for me, it was like a bit of a mind fuck because I was like the goody goody. Like, I will do all the assignments. And marks were everything. And then you go out into the real world and it's like, yeah, bye bye. That did not apply. For me, it was a massive adjustment and I kind of sucked fresh out of school, like my first couple of years in the work world trying to figure out, what do I do? What do I do? There's like, no marks. Not in the standard sense, right?CHARITY: No, of course not. You must be an upholder type. Do you get a lot of satisfaction out of checklists? Like your own checklists and the checklists that people do?ADRIANA: I do, I do. My own checklist. My whiteboard next to me. It's mostly clean now because of the holidays, but it had my to-dos...but I've had to learn to roll with it. I had to be a lot less uptight than I was in school, because I think you just have to, in the work world.CHARITY: Well, because you learn eventually that if you want to be successful, it's not actually about checklists, it's about figuring out what matters to you and what matters to other people and then figuring out how to creatively achieve those goals. And the checklists are there as a tool, right? I'm not telling you anything you don't know.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I completely agree. And I think that's a lesson that comes so much more easily for some than others for sure. Especially. I've hired a couple of interns in my past life and trying to steer them in the direction of, like, chill. Let's relax. Let's just focus on getting the work done and learning cool shit.CHARITY: In a lot of ways, though, I would argue that the upholder is the easiest type of person to onboard because they're motivated by everything.ADRIANA: True.CHARITY: So when I use the term upholder, I don't know if you've read the book, "The Four Tendencies"? It's this book that it's super cheesy and I don't want to get anybody's expectations up, but it was actually really pivotal for me and Christine [CEO of Honeycomb] and finding a way through our relationship because she's an upholder. I'm the opposite. I'm a rebel. Which means that I reject all of your checklists and my own too, called checklist. Basically, it's about motivation. And there's only four possible types.It's a two by two, right? It's like your own motivation, like what motivates you and the goals that you set for yourself and then the goals that other people have for you. And you can either be super motivated by both or you can be what's called a questioner type, which you can't really give a fuck about other people's expectations. But if you care about something, then you can hit that goal every time. And then there's the type that needs a gym buddy because you struggle to do the things that you set for yourself, but you respond really well to external structure. And then there's the type that rejects all of the structures. And that's my type. And this was really helpful to us in just like, sort of because Christine and me are just such polar opposites that she was just like, who the fuck are you? How does your brain work? Why is it that I give you this perfectly formed challenge and you're like, "Fuck all your challenges." And I'm just like, "Why are you telling me what the fuck to do? Don't you know that's the easiest way to demotivate me, is to tell me what to do?"And so it was really helpful because this book actually has these almost, like, examples of, if you're this type in a relationship with this type, here are some conflicts and conversations that you might have if you're in a working relationship and you're this type paired with this type. And it was just like, oh, my God. Some conversations that I had had with my partner, like almost word for word, some conflicts Christine and I had had, almost word for word. It was just like, here are some tools for getting around them. So I really like it.ADRIANA: That is so helpful. It's funny, because I think the way you describe yourself is how I would describe my daughter, too, to a certain extent, because when she was in preschool, her teacher could not teach her, and she realized that the way to teach her was not to teach her, but to teach her friends. And then it would cause Hannah to go over, oh, that looks interesting. So she's like, don't tell me what the fuck to do. I'm from Brazil. And I'm like, oh, it'd be so cool if you learned Portuguese. She's like, "No." What did she do? She learned German.CHARITY: That is how you deal with rebels. You have to rely on them to find their own intrinsic motivation, because if it becomes part of their identity and part of who they say that they are, then you can't stop them.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I'm like, you know what? You do you. I embrace that. And I think she's happier for it. I'm happier for it.CHARITY: Everyone should be happier for it. As a manager, part of what you have to do is, I feel like, as a manager, in the beginning, we try to give our reports the experience that we wish we had had. For upholders and for...I can never remember...the obligers. Obligers are the ones that need the external structure. You're really giving them a gift. If you give them a structure or if you give them regular check ins and you let them know what the expectations are, you're giving them a huge gift, and they will rise to the occasion and they'll thank you for it. And if you do that for rebels or questioners, you're insulting them.That sort of versatility. And it's not just managers, of course. It's anyone who's, like, in a senior plus position, where what you need to do depends a lot in influencing others. Just sort of having a mental map of how other people respond to sort of motivations is super helpful.ADRIANA: Yeah. I actually remember reading one of your blog posts on, like, I think you're talking, like, being manager and trying to make everybody happy, but it's not also about being their buddy and making everybody happy, but also, you do have company goals to fulfill. And so to what extent do you protect your team, but then don't end up doing the things that need to be done, which I think is such a common pitfall for new managers, because for me, certainly when I first got into a management role. I'm like, this happened to me.ADRIANA: I'm not going to let that happen to my direct reports. I am going to be the best manager that I can possibly be. Right. It can kind of blow up in your face if you're not careful. Like, I wanted to be friends with my direct reports. That did not work out in the long run. Initially, it was like, yaaaay. But afterwards, it was like, no.CHARITY: We're always overcompensating for our own experience.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. And in the end, I think we learn, right?CHARITY: Yeah, exactly. Eventually, hopefully, we find a happy medium. I think about that so often when thinking about diversity issues in the industry or about management or that it's natural for there to be like, this is a young industry. This is a very young profession. For as old as some of us feel like we are, we're still like, there's been... When I was coming up, we didn't talk about women in tech. There was a few of us that were just, like, quietly there, wearing men's clothes and just sort of pretending we were straight white dudes. And so there was a lash, right? And then there was a backlash.And it swings. I'm not going to say too much about how sensitive I think some people are, but I understand why they are. I understand why they are. And also, that's not where we have to end. That can't be where we end up. We have to end up in a place that is less reactionary on all sides.ADRIANA: Absolutely.CHARITY: The goal of our businesses and our companies, this is something I've been thinking about a lot. The few times that I feel like the honeycomb culture has gone off the rails a little bit, is when we've kind of lost sight of the fact that we are here to serve our customers. We are not here to have the most diverse company in the world. We're not here to give people the best work life balance. We aren't even here to give everyone the best employment experience of their lives, which early in our, when it seems for so many years like we were going to fail, Christine and I would console each other. We'd be, you know, if we go under tomorrow, as we think we probably will, at least I think we've done a good job of giving a lot of people an experience that will set the know so they won't accept shitty jobs for the rest of their life. But now that we're hoping to be around for a long time, we can't forget that we are here to serve our customers. The decisions that we happen to think that a lot of these things go in harmony.Treating people really well means we treat our customers well. Having people who are happy at work. We believe in having healthy businesses, which is a lot of people's complaints. They see symptoms, but what they'reacting to is the fact that the business is not healthy. The way people are relating to each other is not healthy. I wrote this other blog post a while ago, I don't know if you saw it about, "Choose Boring Culture"?ADRIANA: That sounds vaguely familiar.CHARITY: You know, because Dan McKinley wrote that blog post that was hugely influential on me about choose boring technology where he's like, you know, as a startup you get three innovation tokens. Choose wisely. And I feel know the same is true for culture and businesses. And like, we stand on the shoulders of...you know, a lot of people, a lot of really smart people have figured out things about how to make companies work well. There's this great book by Pat Lancioni called the Advantage, which I think of as like the James Madison of business and organizational structure. He's incredibly innovative thinker and he makes things very simple. But he's like, the advantage increasingly in corporations is not your widgets. Because everybody's widgets are getting so good. It's how healthy is your organization, which means how much of your people's creativity are you really taking advantage of? How much of their creativity do you feel free to bring to work? Is your organization equipped to absorb it and to change from it and to react to it? Are you able to keep people who are passionate about their work? Do you let people go who are detracting from the culture? And he's like, it is amazing how poorly most organizations are run to this day.So choose boring culture. I think in a lot of ways, companies don't have to make their companies interesting and fun because people will do that. People have so much fun, creative energy in themselves. You just have to create a boring place for them to work where they can do their best work and they'll come up with all the fun stuff.ADRIANA: Oh, I love that. That's so cool. You touched upon something that I am a huge proponent of, which is like, letting go of people who are not adding to your corporate culture. Because I think there's this tendency, I think, in our industry to hire rock stars and kind of ignore the shittiness and their personality because, oh my God, they're the best of the best at blah. Right? And I've personally experienced a couple of incidents in my life where if you have somebody who is constantly just being negative on your team, no matter how good the rest of your team is if they're like, poo pooing everything, it sullies the culture. It's like a poison pill. And it's not like, oh, I'm going to fire your ass. It's like, well, perhaps this team might not be the best for what you want to achieve. Perhaps I can help you find a position in another team in the company. Because it's just poison.CHARITY: I think it starts with not having kid gloves on. I don't think you jump straight to firing. I don't even think you jump straight to moving. A lot of these people have never really been told no in their lives. And some of them can take it, some of them can. But I think you owe it to them to figure it out, right? To start giving feedback consistently and regularly working with the person. And this is something that I think can be really frustrating to people who are. When it looks like management is doing nothing right, because it looks like, I know that people at Honeycomb have felt this way at times, because it looks like they're just kind of being shitty and they get better and then they don't.And it's always a judgment call. And I would actually agree that we always probably wait a little too long in general, but we waited a little too long with everyone. And I would take that over being a little too fast to fire people, because I think that that even more trust. But, yeah, I agree. If they can't bend, if they can't change, if they can't understand that the smallest unit of software ownership is the team, it's not the person. It doesn't matter how great one person is, because one person can't own software. It's all about, are you contributing to the overall greatness of this team? You can bend your rockstar talents to that, but if you're not willing to, or if you can't, then there's no place here for you. I'm sure you can get paid a lot more money somewhere else.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely true. Absolutely.CHARITY: Sorry, go ahead. I didn't mean to cut you off.ADRIANA: Oh, no, I was just saying I agree with you, but I think that.CHARITY: Letting go of people is hard, and I think that it comes in all forms. I think that it's really discouraging to people who are on a high performance, who want to be on a high performing team, when someone isn't really showing up and who consistently isn't showing. The person who's like, consistently taking six weeks of vacation when everyone else is taking three or four, or the person who is kind of half asking it. And all of us half ass it sometimes, right? But people can tell you work on a team for a while, you get a real good sense of how hard everyone is working, how much they're trying. Sometimes it comes in form of, this is almost some of the most heartbreaking ones of when you've got someone who's very junior who just isn't working hard enough. And it's like we kind of don't have the language to tell them that. Because on this pendulum, we're so far over to the side of, you shouldn't be like, work crush code. It's almost like we've kind of lost the ability to tell people, no, really, you're probably not going to make it if you don't put in a few more hours and if you don't have a little bit more grit.And some people don't want to work that hard, and that's fine, but you aren't automatically granted a job based on however hard you do or don't want to work.ADRIANA: Yeah. And it's such a tough conversation to have. I had someone in a previous team that I hired on as a senior person, and then she was, like, scamming on my. She was scamming on everyone else. She would just pretend that she was doing work by, like, oh, let me attend meetings with so and so. And meanwhile, I'd hired this junior person who was working like she was working at the senior level. And it was so frustrating. I was trying to have the conversations with the senior person saying, listen, I want to help you. How can we work together? But she got offended. And these conversations are so hard to have because we all perceive differently how we're doing. And in her mind, she was doing just fine. How have you had those conversations in the past with people?CHARITY: Oh, it's really hard. There's no version of this that isn't hard if you care about people.ADRIANA: Yeah.CHARITY: My most recent blog post was about why anyone should go into engineering management. Because it's a hard fucking job. And the answer is, because we need them. Because we need them desperately. Like a team with a great engineering manager builds circles around teams without one. And the other reason in my piece, I said is that it changes you as a person, and it gives you these skills that a lot of us didn't learn when we were growing up about how to be honest and how to have hard conversations and all these things. But as to your question, how do you go into this? The number one thing I think is no review should be a surprise. You should be having this conversation consistently, which is a hard thing to do because it makes people feel demotivated and frustrated.But sometimes they have to feel that way. We've instituted a rule at honeycomb that if you're thinking of putting someone on a PIP, if you're thinking of, you have to literally say the words, your job is at risk because it's so tempting when you're face to face with someone who you really want to succeed, to soft pedal it or for them to feel upset and for you to kind of walk it back, or for you just to use words that let them walk away thinking something that is not what you want. And there are tools you can use to make sure. You can write up an email afterwards to be like, just to be clear, this is what I saw. This is what I'm saying. This is what you're hearing. But I really do think that one of the most important tools we have is just being explicit because they can file it away. We all have such infinite creativity when it comes to explaining away things that we don't want to hear.And we can be like, oh, my manager is kind of a bitch. Oh, they're just in a bad mood. Oh, they're just kind of riding me lately. Oh, it's because of this thing. But this will be over. And I feel like if something really isn't trending, well, we have a responsibility to be more of a dick. We have to be the ones who kind of put our bodies in the breach and be like...and just sit there and deal with their reactions, which are going...They're going to have negative feelings. And it's really hard to sit with someone else's negative feelings who you are the proximate cause of. It's really hard, but you have to do it. It is the best thing for them to do it, to let them know this isn't just a small thing. This isn't just a flash in the pan. You are not succeeding. You are not on a path to succeeding here. You are on a path to, your job is at risk. Honestly, that's the kindest thing you can do for someone.ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes so much sense. And you're right. It's so hard to get those words out. Like, "Your job is at risk." Yeah. And I've worked in organizations, too, where pussyfooting around the topic was like kind of the cultural norm, and so things wouldn't get said that should have been said, and you don't have the favorable outcomes in the end.CHARITY: Yeah. And then people feel stabbed in the back, understandably. I would, too. They go...walk away going, "If they had just told me, if I had only known." And that is the worst outcome. That is the thing that I always remind myself of when I'm just like, I love this person. I don't want to be mean to them, but I cannot take it if they walk away feeling like I didn't tell them, like I stabbed them in the back by not making it perfectly clear that they're not performing and their job is at risk.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's definitely something that I wish that I had done more of in the past, and I try to remind myself of it, but, yeah, I think that is absolutely the right thing.CHARITY: And to your point earlier about being people's friends, you can absolutely be friends with your direct report, but there's a line there. There's a boundary there, and there's a point at which you're not their friend. It's just like being someone's parent, right? When things are going great, yeah, you act like friends, but they have to know that when it's time for you to be parent, you're going to be parent.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Because otherwise they will take advantage of you.CHARITY: Right. They will completely take advantage of you. It's human nature.ADRIANA: Exactly. And you will let your guard down, too, right? Because they're like, oh, "I don't want to hurt so and so's feelings, otherwise they won't love me." And it's like, you kind of have to get over that as a manager. And it's hard.CHARITY: It's really hard. It's really hard. And it's always a matter of judgment. It's always a judgment call. And you have to know that after you've had that hard conversation, chances are they're going to go tell other teammates a version of it that makes you look bad and them look great. And you can't do fuck all about it. You have to sit there and take it and hope that the relationships and the trust that you have built up are enough that people aren't going to just automatically believe that other person. That is the hardest thing about being a manager to me.CHARITY: That right there, knowing...is when I know I can't say anything.ADRIANA: Yeah. And risking, as you said, having people say, well, management doesn't know what they're doing. Oh, my God. Because as an IC in the past, I was like, management clearly doesn't know what they're doing, and then...CHARITY: Clearly doesn't know shit.ADRIANA: The first time it happened to me, oh, my God, I want to go cry. Like I'm trying everything to make you happy.CHARITY: Yeah. This is why I feel like my dream vision for the future of engineering management is that more people do it. But people don't do it. They don't do it as a career. They do it as a tour of duty, because I feel like having ex managers on the team, it's like a game-changer, because whenever the dynamic is ICS versus managers, which always happens. Comes and goes, but it always happens. It's so helpful to have an ex-manager there on the IC side who could go, okay, kids, it might be this. It might be this. It might be this. Do we trust this manager in general? Okay, well, let's not jump to the automatic conclusion that they're just an idiot or they're just, like, being manipulated by the upper or whatever. They're the only voice in the room who can talk people down off a cliff and remind them whether to have some trust. And it's such a game changer. It is so wonderful.ADRIANA: Yeah, that is so true. And it makes so much sense. I even find myself in positions after I've been a manager, and then being now an IC...whenever I get comments...CHARITY: It's nice!ADRIANA: Yeah, it is nice! And sometimes I have my manager apologize, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Blah, blah, blah." I'm like, "Dude, I totally get it." "It's fine. No worries."CHARITY: You're able to give so much better support and understanding to your manager than you ever could have without that experience.ADRIANA: Exactly.CHARITY: It's so grounding and validating for them to have someone who sees them.ADRIANA: Yeah. And especially, also when you have that nice rapport with your manager where you have that ultimate trust, where, okay, it might seem like they're riding you hard, but then you're like, oh, my ex-manager brain has said, okay, "I have a good reason to trust them. Take a step back. Let's look at the big picture." And, yeah, it's cathartic and it's eye opening.CHARITY: Everyone wins.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. No, sorry. Go ahead. No, please.CHARITY: I often hear people who are first-time managers who are, like, anxious or like, if I go back to being an IC, will I ever get the chance again to be a manager? And I'm just like, "Oh, grasshopper, they can smell it on you. You will be fighting off manager opportunities for the rest of your career." Have you found this to be true? I expect you have.ADRIANA: Yeah, I have. And it was funny because after I read it in one of your blog posts, I was like, oh, yeah, so true.CHARITY: Yeah.ADRIANA: I mean, it's on your resume. Yeah.CHARITY: Just the way you come across. I've also said that the fastest way to mint like, a shiny new staff engineer is to take a senior engineer and put them in management for a couple of years. Because the way you present yourself at work, the way you approach problems, you have such a better sense of the business, even if it wasn't on your resume. This is why some people get to be managers early and often, because for whatever reason, they already have some of those skills. But once you've been a manager, it's written all over your face that you understand.ADRIANA: Yeah, very true. Now, here's a question for you. What's your take on folks who have gone into management at a really early point in their career, becoming a technical manager for a technical team when they don't have that many years of actual technical experience?CHARITY: I think they are not well-served by this. I often see this happen to women, especially, and I think it's often intended as a compliment and by people who genuinely are trying to do they want to help the industry. They know that there needs to be more women in leadership and management. And so they're like, here's this person who has social skills and also some engineering skills. So we'll just...I think everyone has the best of intentions, and I think it really does not serve them because it's often a one-way...it's a one way-ticket, right? Because you don't have the skills to be able to go back and pick up coding easily in a couple of years. I think you also don't really have the skills to be a great manager.Honestly, my recommendation to them would be get back to coding as quickly as you can or climb the ladder. If you choose to climb the ladder, then those skills are less relevant. But I wouldn't be in a rush. If you're 25 and you're a manager getting offered a director position, I would look at that cross-eyed. I would be like, because, yes, it is probably a compliment, but is it the right thing for you? I don't know. I mean, if you play out over the course of your career, you've got a 30, 40 year career. There's no rush. And the people who really excel in those senior leadership positions tend to be ones with deep roots, not just a very shallow.And there's so much to learn, right? This is not to say that there's not anyone out there who's climbed the ladder in a hurry and not regretted it, because there probably is. But the people that I know who have done it have, by and large, profoundly regretted it. You know, I wrote about my friend Molly, who's an engineer at Honeycomb now, and she was one of those people. She super bright, straight out of college, became an engineer, became a manager, became a director. Shot up. You know she was a VP, she was a director, she was an EP. And she came to Honeycomb to be our head of...VP of customer success or something like that. And she was so unhappy.And she would make all these wistful comments about how she wished she could be a software engineer. She wished she had done that. Eventually, her husband, he was an early member at Okta and Okta IPOed. And so suddenly she was like, "Wow, I can do anything I want with my life. I want to be a software engineer." And so she became a support engineer for us, and she just started writing code on the side. She started picking up some PRs. Now she's a software engineer on the team, and it's been hard.She's never been happier, though. And I'm proud that Honeycomb is the kind of place that can support someone in doing that, because I think the opportunities to do something like that are few and far between. There are not many places we'll take a flyer on someone who's middle-aged and wants to go back to software engineering. But if you think of your career as a long game, you don't want to amass a bunch of titles, especially titles that are kind of empty because you're not getting a...I would...I would venture to guess that you're not getting a really high quality offer to be a director or a VP at age 27. It's really mostly the title. You want to amass yourself a solid base of experiences and skills, and you want to have shit to draw on as you climb that ladder so that you can help people better.So the thing that I do want to guard against when I'm talking about this, I'm speaking to people who are early in their career, who are facing these questions. I don't want to make it sound like it's too late and you're screwed if you're already in this position. In fact, if you're in that position, if you'd like someone to talk it through, reach out to me. I have a Calendly link, calendly.com/charitym/advice, and I'm always happy to talk through interesting and tough career conversations with people. You have skills, you have assets. It might not be a super sexy path, but you can find places that will take advantage of the skills you have to offer while you kind of work your way up from the bottom again, if that's what you want to do. I'm sure you can do it, but it's easier if you do it right the first way and become a solidly senior engineer. Seven years really is the minimum, I think, before you become a manager.And if you really want to be able to manage other senior engineers, you need to at least be able to speak the language and be able to roll back on it.ADRIANA: Yeah, I fully agree with you on that. I was thinking back to my own career. My first job out of school was as a consultant at Accenture, and the career path was basically like, you must pay your dues as a developer, and you shall be rewarded with a management position. Right? Yeah. Right. So we're all kind of brainwashed to think, oh, my God, if I'm not a manager, by 27, 28, I have failed at life. Right? And I hit this crossroads in my life where I was being groomed to be a manager. I didn't have the manager title, but they threw me on some engagement where I was managing three teams at once. I was doing a shitty job, and I'm like, I was miserable, and I'm like, what do I want to do with my life? And so I decided...I left consulting. I took on a job as a software engineer. It was a lateral move, but I was so happy, and it was the best thing for me because my thought was, how can I manage these people if I don't know enough? I just didn't feel right for me, so I'm happy I did that.CHARITY: Good for you for listening to your gut. I think all too often we talk about impostor syndrome, and we try to talk people out of it. I often think if your gut is really eating at you, that something is wrong. You should listen to that. You shouldn't just go, oh, everybody, there's impostor syndrome, and then there's just, like, the feeling in your stomach that you're not really setting your future self up for success or that you aren't really equipped to do the kind of job that you want to be able to do in this role. And I think that is not something to be brushed aside lightly.ADRIANA: Yeah, I definitely agree. Listen to your gut, because it's telling you something. One thing that I wanted to ask was, when you were building Honeycomb from the ground up, did you have sort of lofty aspirations of how you wanted things to be?CHARITY: Ha!ADRIANA: How was...the initial thoughts versus how it turned out?CHARITY: I 100,000% expected us to fail like the plan was to fail. So I was never one of those kids who was like, I'm going to start a company. Because I always kind of low key hate those people. It's like, "Oh, you're too good to work for someone else." I'm not too good to work for someone else. I was a serial dropout. I'm the opposite of you, right? I didn't collect all the awards. I didn't check anything off.I dropped out and I dropped out again. I dropped out again. And so I never had a pedigree. Nobody was ever going to give me money. Then I was leaving Facebook, and the first time in my life, I kind of had a pedigree. And so I was like, well, I can't waste, like, on behalf of all women and queers and dropouts everywhere, I have to take it and run with it and do something. But I was super burned out. And I was like, well, I guess I have an idea, but I'll go heads down the corner, write code for a couple of years, and then we'll fail.And I'll open source it. Then I'll have my tool to use. Hee haw! That was really the grand vision. And I would say Honeycomb has been around for eight years as of January 1, but we had many near-death experiences. Now, we hit our $40 million ARR mark this month, which is exciting. We're hoping to get on a path towards an IPO. But for the first five years, I think we wobbled around between 5 people, 12 people, 30 people. We did layoffs down to 15 people again. We were a skeleton crew wandering in the wilderness. In retrospect, I realized that we were creating a category and we were writing the database and all this stuff, but it just felt brutal. It just felt like failure was around every corner. And most of those corners were right. We did fail most of those corners. There are several just, like, near-death experiences that we had, and we made it through.And now I, for the first time, am not thinking we're going to fail. But no, there was no grand vision. There was no grand vision at all. There was just, like putting 1 foot in front of the other and feeling like I was failing the people that I loved most almost every single day. It was brutal. I will say, though, that Christine and I, a little bit older than your average tech founders, especially me, and turns out we have very strong opinions. And we learned a lot of lessons at previous startups. We were at, like, at Parse, which I loved working at Parse.Parse is where I learned about the importance of design, about marketing. People loved that product and I loved working on it. Before Parse, I was like, I'm just a backend engineer. I don't care what the product's about. I'll work on anything. Parse is where I learned that, of course, that was never true. But Parse never really had a shot because the founders never really tried to build a business. They tried to build a great product, and they did. But then around series B, they had a marketing person and a couple salespeople.We weren't bringing any revenue. They had to sell. Their destiny got taken out of their hands because they had no other choice. And so Christine and I, from the very beginning were like, we want to build a business. We want to build a business. We want to build a product that people want to pay money for. We're not building freebies. We're going to try and monetize on the other end of the pipe.We are building a product. We're building a business. And I had a lot of just, like, very strong opinions about the kind of culture we wanted to build, just about how...in the beginning, when we were interviewing engineers, if anyone talked, not even dismissingly, about go to market functions like sales or marketing, even just sort of, like, almost alienated, just like, "Oh, well, that's them. We're us. We don't understand that." Those weren't our engineers, because we don't need to hire engineers who wanted to build a business with us and who weren't going to create that us versus them dynamic that makes all great business people in the valley feel like second-class citizens. So, yeah, I would say we discovered the grand vision along the way. It really wasn't there from the beginning.ADRIANA: And as a follow-up, you know, one of the things that I admire so much about Honeycomb is you build such a lovely community around your product. Your customers truly, truly love it. And we met because I was asking so many questions in the Honeycomb Pollinators Slack. At the time, I was exploring Honeycomb as a potential product that the company I was working for might switch over to. And everyone was just so genuinely nice in helping me understand this Observability thing that was so nebulous. How do you build that thoughtful community? Was it something that you sought out to do from the get-go? Is it something that organically grew?CHARITY: If you ask any founder, they'd say they're trying to build that, right? So I think the questions were like, "Why were we more successful than many others?" I think a lot of it has to do with just...and if you had asked me if I would be talking about values and shit, like a year ago or a few years ago, I'd be, like, rolling my eyes, because I've always hated when people are like, "Values," because most businesses are just like. I don't know. I get really cynical about it, but I feel like we are our customers, and our customers are us. We built this product to solve a real problem that we are having. And it is more important to us that these problems get solved than that Honeycomb is successful. I think I can say that about everyone there.We would love to be successful. We'd love to make lots of money and all this stuff. But we see the pain that so many teams are in, and we know that we have a way to fix a lot of that pain, because we've seen our customers do this over and over, and we hear what they say about how no one else could do this. And we had the advantage of designing and building this 25 years after metrics began dominating the landscape. So we build on the shoulders of giants, like I said earlier. So I feel like it's easy to be a true believer, because we're not just trying to sell something. We're really building something that really changes people's lives. And it's easy to get starry-eyed about that.It's easy to be a believer when you're all on the same page about fixing problems, not just about trying to tweak your messaging or your marketing or your sales or something. I think people, Honeycomb, are generally very passionate about solving the problem, and it's very exciting to see them. I mean, the product does what it says on the sticker, which is very exciting, because almost no products do. Most products are hyped. If anything, Honeycomb is underhyped. It does so much more than we've been able to explain to people, which is why our churn is like nothing. We win, like, 80% of our tech evals, which the industry standard is, like 30 or 35%. Once people see it on their data, you cannot pry it out of their cold, dead hands.One of our best sources of leads is when engineers change jobs and they bring us with them, because once they've tried developing with Honeycomb, they can't go back to not having honeycomb. And this is all stuff that it's hard to explain to people in words, but once they see it, it clicks. And so, really, our core challenge, over the next year, we've built the product. Our core challenge is figure out how to get more people to click with it faster, because we know that once they've seen it. The deal is done, but it's still a very hard problem.ADRIANA: Yeah. The other thing that I think is very interesting about Honeycomb is it's not only are you building a product that people are excited about, but you've also really turned the whole area of Observability on its head. I'd like to think that it was Honeycomb that sort of gave Observability...Observability became what it is because of what Honeycomb has done. I mean, you've spent a lot of time talking about Observability. I mean, honestly, that's how I got dialed into what Observability was in the first place, was catching your Tweets. Yeah, if you could say a little bit more about that.CHARITY: Yeah. Like, Christine and I are not marketing people. It turns out what we were doing was category creation. All I knew was that we were trying to build something based on an experience we had had that had changed us as engineers, and we knew that it wasn't monitoring. And I spent months just sort of, like, testing language, trying various things. And one point, it was July in 2016 that I Googled the term "Observability", and I read the control theory definition, and I was like, "Oh, shit. This is what we're trying to do. We're trying to build something to let engineers understand the inner workings of a system, no matter what's happening, just by observing its outputs."So, like, working backwards from that, what do you need? Like, you need the high cardinality, you need the high dimensionality and all this stuff. And I feel like that definition really took hold for about three years. In 2019, 2020, maybe 2021, all of the money started rushing into the space, and suddenly, anyone who was doing anything with telemetry was like, cool. We do Observability, too, which, on the one hand, is like, it's a good problem to have. It means that what we were talking about really resonates with people. And at the time, I was naïve enough to think that, oh, well, they're co-opting our marketing language, but surely they're building the same technology under the hood. It's just a matter of time until they release it. I don't believe that anymore.I think all they did was steal the marketing language, and I don't think they actually have any plans to. I think that, like, Datadog in particular, their business model is centered around having all these different SKUs, right? A different product for metrics, for logs, for tracing, for profiling, for security, and they've got too much money invested in. The problem is that the experience degrades for everyone if nothing connects all these data sources. People are paying to store their data again and again and again and again, but nothing connects it except the engineer who's sitting in the middle just trying to visualize or visually correlate. If that spike is the same as that one, it's fucking broken. My hope is that there will be new startups that are entering the space. So I've kind of given up like, okay, Observability now means, and this makes sense, I'm actually completely on board.Observability, instead of having a strict technical falsifiable definition, Observability is a property of systems, right? A system can be more less observable if you add some metrics, great, you're more observable. But what we're seeing in the field is that there's a real huge step function difference between, let's call it Observability 1.0, which is about metrics, three pillars, right? And Observability 2.0, which is based on this single source of truth. And it's not just the technology, because o11y 1.0 is very much about MTDR, MTTD reliability, uptime. It's a checkmark before you send your code to production to make sure that it's observable. And Observability 2.0 is about, it's the foundation of the software development lifecycle. It defines your velocity, how fast you can ship, how well you can ship, the quality of what you ship, your ability to iterate quickly, your ability to identify what your customers are actually doing and why, and build on that. It's your ability to see what's happening in the wild and make decisions based on real data and then feed them. Because this is all about feedback loops, right? And it's about learning to be a developer where you're developing with fast feedback loops.And it's like the difference, o11y 1.0 is about, okay, this is something that you tack onto a product...2.0 is about, this is how you build the product, right? So many teams are stuck in 1.0 land and they're happy with the tools that they have, but the teams that are going to win are the ones that not only adopt 2.0 tooling, but also adopt the 2.0 mindset of this is how we build software. It's like putting your glasses on before you drive down the highway. You can drive a lot faster, you can make better decisions much more quickly. So I feel like right now, the big problem that Honeycomb has from a business perspective is that far too few engineering leaders even understand that 2.0 is possible because you can have a 2.0 mindset. But if you've only ever seen 1.0 tools, it's janky. It's real hard to like...you can only do so much, right? You really need to see 2.0 tooling in order to really...But it clicks so fast when you do. So that's really our job. For a long time, I was really disappointed that there are still Observability startups starting. They come up, ping, pong, like here and there, everywhere, but they're all 1.0 tools. They're still doing the multiple storage places. My hope is, and I get why, it's because you have to build an entirely different storage layer from the ground up. And very few VCs have the patience for you to do that. They want you to get right to product, market fit and all this stuff. Now that there are more columnar storage engines out there like Snowflake, I don't know...I'm optimistic, but I'm optimistic over the long run, our model of Observability will win. Even if Honeycomb completely fucks up in the end state is the complexity of our systems is increasingly demanding it. The complexity of people's systems is skyrocketing. You look at the DORA metrics, and I was always kind of like, dude, it's so weird. Like high performing teams, okay, that takes an hour to a day to restore service. But for the bottom like 80% of teams, it takes them a day to a week to restore service from an outage. How? It's because they don't have Observability.It's because they can't actually see what's going on. They rely on a few people's brains, people who've been there for a long time, who pack a lot of context into their heads, who can try and reason about it using the very limited data sources that they have. That's why it takes so long over and over. Part of the reason we win so many of our POCs is because over and over, our sales engineers, we help you roll it out, and they'll be like, is this an outage over here? We're seeing something wrong. And people will be like, what? Ten minutes later they get paged and they're like, oh, it's just like once you have this feedback loop, you get used to being constant conversation with your code instead of just like shipping and waiting for someone to get paged. At some point in the next hour two year, right. It's all about hooking up this feedback eventually, even if it's ten years from now, the model that we're talking about is the shape that's going to win whether it's us or not because our systems simply demand it. There's no other way to build software at that kind of velocity and scale.ADRIANA: I completely agree and I think having that conversation where Observability is considered...is baked into like...you're shifting left on Observability basically, right? Were it's like...CHARITY: Exactly.ADRIANA: No, it's not the thing that's tacked on at the end per usual. It's the thing that your developers are considering in the beginning that your QAs are using to troubleshoot shit and write trace based tests and that now your SREs are like, "Oh, I've got the information to solve the problem!"CHARITY: So many of the promises of Agile development and all these SREs and all of these cultural movements, they've never really lived up to their full promise. And I feel like the reason is because it's not just a cultural thing. You have to have the tools that actually make hard problems easy as well. And the feedback loops with metrics and logs are just painful and arduous and relies on so much on manual cross-correlation and heroes jumping into the break. But when you have the right tools, you can just glance at it and see the answer. And it's what unlocks the ability of teams to just be constantly...When I think about modern software development, I think about feature flags which help you separate releases from deploy so you can be deploying small changes constantly.CHARITY: I think about future flags, I think about Observability, just the ability to see what the fuck is going on at any point. I think about testing in production and I think about, well, canarying. There was one other thing that was on my mind. There's really just a four thing and they all reinforce each other, right? One of them alone is okay, but you get all of them together. And it's a completely different profession than it is in software development, which is kind of still from the shrink wrap era. It's like you're building, if your world while you're building software is your IDE and your tests, that's shrink wrap days. Your world should be production and telemetry. You should spend more time in your production windows than in your IDE windows. That's what modern software development is like I think.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. And the final point that I wanted to touch upon is you mentioning...having...the data that correlates right? Where you're not just having to figure out how it's stitched together. And tools like open telemetry definitely enable that. But then I guess part of the irony though, is that open telemetry allows you to correlate traces and logs and metrics. But then if your Observability backend doesn't have a way to show that correlation, then you're kind of up a creek too.CHARITY: So I am so glad that OTel came out when it did so that I think we were able to have a lot of influence on how the data is gathered. You're absolutely right. Part of observability is the presentation of the information. If you don't have the ability to slice and dice, if you don't have the ability to combine, if you don't have that single sort of truth, then you can't really reap the rewards of Observability, even if you captured it. But capturing it the right way is the first step, for sure.ADRIANA: Yes, absolutely. And so glad that OpenTelemetry has gone officially GA. The specification has gone GA end of 2023. Long time coming. I'm super stoked for that.CHARITY: It's a big moment in our industry.ADRIANA: Yeah, and I'm so glad also that so many of the vendors have come together to rally behind it. And it's really not someone trying to flex their muscles over everyone else. It's such a lovely community.CHARITY: The only lagger is Datadog. People need to keep putting a little bit of shame and pressure on them because they're the only ones who are not playing nice, but everyone else is, which is a tremendous achievement. Huge kudos to Splunk, who's got like 30 engineers working on integrations every day. We would not be where we are without Splunk.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so great. It's so great seeing all these innovations, collaborations, and people really genuinely caring for the project.CHARITY: It's great.ADRIANA: And on that note, we have come up on time. And thank you so much Charity for coming on geeking out with me today. This was awesome. One item off the podcasting bucket list for me. Always a pleasure to chat with you. And everyone, please don't forget to subscribe, be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources, and connect with us and our guests on social media.CHARITY: Until next time, peace out and geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Vileela. 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. My wonderful editor daughter will edit out any, any stuff. I pay her good money.CHARITY: How old is your kid?ADRIANA: She's 15.CHARITY: Nice.ADRIANA: That's a good age. Yeah. And she sports right now...she's sporting some really rad pink hair. Last year, she had gone purple, and I just took her to get a cartilage piercing, which I'm like, hey, I have no issue taking you. No issue taking you. I'll look away while it happens. Yeah, it's super fun. Super fun.CHARITY: I went to college when I was 15, and I felt very adult at the time. And now I look back and I'm like. I was a child. What was I doing?ADRIANA: You feel so old when you're in high school or like, when you're 15. I remember when I graduated college and I'm like, everyone looks like a baby.CHARITY: Yeah. Time of rapid change.ADRIANA: Yeah, for real.

About our guest:Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration.Find our guest on:X (Twitter)MastodonFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow Links:CompTIA A+ CertificationRube Goldberg MachineHerokuKornShellCapistranoCloud FoundrySpring BootDistributed denial of service (DDoS)HashiConfMitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp co-founder)Armon Dadgar (HashiCorp co-founder)Borg whitepaperSidecar (Kubernetes)Nomad on Kubernetes (GitHub)Hashinetes Talk (HashiConf 2017)From Community to Customers (KubeCon EU Amsterdam 2023)ConfdFOSSDEM (conference)Apache License, version 2.0RAIDWestworld LoopAdditional Links:Kubernetes the Hard Way (GitHub)Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, 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 today I have the pleasure of geeking out with me, Kelsey Hightower. Welcome, Kelsey.KELSEY: Happy to be here.ADRIANA: And where are you calling in from today?KELSEY: I'm in Washington state, so on the border of Portland, Oregon, and Washington.ADRIANA: Awesome. Well, let us get to it with the warm up questions. Are you ready?KELSEY: I am.ADRIANA: Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?KELSEY: Right handed.ADRIANA: All right. iPhone or Android?KELSEY: iPhone forever. And I've tried android. Given that I've worked at Google for almost eight years, I've tried, but I'm an iPhone person.ADRIANA: Yeah, I'm an iPhone person too. I never tried android. I went straight from BlackBerry to iPhone.KELSEY: I think BlackBerry was definitely...I was a BlackBerry person. I was also a Nokia person. But I think once iPhone really dialed in the ability to have third party apps in the App Store, iPhone all day.ADRIANA: Yeah, I'm the same way. That was like one big sticking point. And for us in Canada, when the iPhone first came out, we didn't even have access to the App Store. So if you wanted any apps, you had to jailbreak your iPhone until it finally became available...because we get everything a little bit late here.KELSEY: Awesome.ADRIANA: Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?KELSEY: The one that I can get things done in. So, at one point it was Bash, then it was Python, then it was Ruby when I worked at Puppet Labs, and then it's been Goblin, probably for the last ten years.ADRIANA: Cool. Awesome. And Mac, Linux, or Windows?KELSEY: Mac on my desktop. Linux on the server.ADRIANA: All right, next question. Dev or Ops?KELSEY: They're one and the same.ADRIANA: I love it. Okay. JSON or YAML?KELSEY: JSON. If I had to program against it, YAML if I had to write it.ADRIANA: By oh, yeah, I definitely agree. I do find, like, manipulating JSON in Python is nicer, but YAML is more readable.KELSEY: Yeah. To all the people that are like, JSON over YAML, let me watch you write it and see how fast you change your opinion.ADRIANA: Yes, I totally agree with you there. Okay, this one's a little more controversial, and you can thank one of my previous guests for hinting at it. Spaces or tabs?KELSEY: I don't care. I actually don't care if Python makes me uses Spaces and my IDE does the right thing. I'm totally fine, actually.ADRIANA: I'm down for that. Okay, two more questions. Do you prefer to consume video or text when you're consuming content?KELSEY: It depends. If I'm trying to learn, I need to read it, I need to see it, I need to be able to kind of backscan read it twice. But I do like video in terms of when people are really good at the human side of it. Right? Like, if they're expressing or showing me something, like, I want to see the code run. I want to see where they click. I want to see how they start. But when it's like learning something in the programming world, I need text. People are pretty bad at video and programming lessons.KELSEY: Like, oh, just write these three lines of code. I'm like, can you please scroll up so I can see what you imported to make this work? So when it comes to seeing code, I want to see no snippets. I want to see as much as possible, but if I'm just going through for the first time to get the flow, video.ADRIANA: I totally agree with you. And you landed on one of my big pet peeves. When consuming content for learning stuff, which is the code snippets, because I have been and I'm sorry, Hashi people, but this is a crime on the Hashi docs that I see all the time is that I get code snippets, and I don't get to see a full example on the site, and it drives me bananas. And I'm like, what does this apply to? Give me a full fledged code example? Link me to a GitHub repo at some point.KELSEY: I'm always asking, why are people writing docs out there giving me hints to a murder mystery?ADRIANA: Yes.KELSEY: Show me the whole thing. I don't need it to be cute. I don't need it to fit perfectly in your style guide. I just need to see the whole thing and what's going on. So I think people do it out of style. There's really no substance when I'm trying to learn.ADRIANA: Yeah, I completely agree. I do find it very frustrating. That's why, for me personally, whenever I do technical docs, I give excruciating detail. All right, final question. What is your superpower?KELSEY: My superpower? I think one thing that I've learned over the years when it comes to mentoring, specifically, I used to be all about sharing my expertise, my background, my learning. And I've noticed that I changed my approach to holding up a mirror in front of other people and convincing them to like what they see and the number of people who actually like what they end up seeing and follow up with me. I really felt like that is a superpower, that you can actually have that impact on people. So that would be my superpower.ADRIANA: That is such an incredible superpower. And I think it's so relevant to our industry, too, because we have a lot of smart people who suffer from impostor syndrome. And I think showing people that you are actually as good as you think you are is such a huge thing. Right? I mean, we've got some amazing stuff happening. I have some coworkers who are brilliant, and they're like, oh, my God, I feel like I'm just a hack. I'm like, Are you kidding me? I can't even keep up with some of the stuff that you're telling me right now.KELSEY: Yeah. And I try to get people to understand that sometimes you aren't as good as you want to be. And that's okay too, right? I think there's okay with making progress, entering to new domains, and just helping people just relieve the pressure. Ideally, if you're any good at this thing, you're going to always feel this way forever because you're humble enough to keep learning, so you shouldn't feel so bad about it.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true. That's a very excellent point. So let's get into the meaty bits. One of the things that I wanted to share with our audience was how you came to be on the podcast. We met at KubeCon North America in Chicago this year, and you were doing a book signing. And I came, stood in line, the long line. It was totally worth it. And I was wearing this mask that had the sticker for the podcast, Geeking Out, and you said, "Oh, what is that?" And I said, "Oh, that's my podcast."ADRIANA: And you said, "Oh, I could be on your podcast." So I am so stoked that you were able to join. And yeah, I mean, I've admired your work from afar for many years. I find your approach to Kubernetes very accessible, especially because it's such a complex subject matter. So I wanted to start off with how did you get into this field in the first place? Where did you find your calling to make things technical things, gnarly technical things so accessible to folks?KELSEY: I want to answer that question, but I want to address this advice that I give to my former self and to people that I run into all the time. And they say, how do you put in the effort to make sure good things happen to you in your career and in your life in general? And so you at that book signing with the podcast on your mask. You're advertising to the world, this is my podcast, this is what I'm doing, and you're advertising what needs to happen next. And so for someone like me, I can see that clearly. I understand in that limited interaction that there is this opportunity that I could actually be on your podcast, because now I know you have one. I think a lot of people really confuse luck and that kind of effort, right? When you put that kind of effort forward, you tend to make things happen. And so I just want to highlight that part of you having that as part of your strategy of going to KubeCon, making the best use of your time and every human interaction. So kudos to you for doing that.KELSEY: But it's a perfect example of how people kind of design their own careers and create the world that they want. So that's perfect. Now to your question about this whole idea of explaining things simply to other people. When I was getting into tech, a lot of people come from various backgrounds I come from the...fast food was my only job background, and I didn't go to college. And so for me, learning technology was like a pivotal life-making decision. I need to get into this field. I admire people that are in this field.KELSEY: I don't know anyone that's in this field. And so I would go get all the books and just flip through them. I remember the first book I think I bought was the A+ certification guide. I was like, I'll start there. And you just go through all of this stuff and you look at all your notes, right? You're trying to simplify all the information to truly demonstrate that you understand it. And everyone knows that feeling of the A-ha! moment where you take something that is complex to you and you finally understand it, and your confidence level just goes up. It immediately goes up. And so that feeling, I've always enjoyed having that feeling because it felt so empowering.KELSEY: So whenever I had the opportunity to speak at a meetup, I've noticed that some people at meetups or conferences, they speak, and it's just like, overwhelming. Hey, here's this computer science diagram. Here's this map that you cannot understand what's happening, and they are happy with just leaving it as a mystery to everyone. And you're like, what the hell was that? You had this opportunity to let me have my light bulb moment, but you chose not to. You chose to try to overwhelm me with your vast understanding of things that I don't. And so I've tried to say, what if I can make people feel like I felt whenever I learned a new subject? So this is why I've always said, hey, now that I understand this thing, I want to show it to you as well. But before I can, I have to give you context where I came from, my understanding beforehand, and then what led me to that understanding. And then let me show it to you.KELSEY: And I try to use analogies and simple terms, and you can see the light bulb moment go off for people in the audience, and then it becomes a game changer for their own career. So for me, I think I got addicted to that. Like, hey, I don't want to talk. I don't want to write a tutorial if it doesn't have that impact on people.ADRIANA: I absolutely love that because I can completely relate to that feeling, the euphoria, the high that you get from solving a problem, especially something where you've had to really put on the detective skills hat and try extra, extra hard to solve it. So that is so wonderful. I love that so much, and I think it's so important because making learning accessible to people, I think, makes it fun too, because I agree with you. Like those gnarly architecture diagrams that just look overly complicated, and then your brain starts to wander, and then you miss some important thing, and then that's it your opportunity for learning. That thing is gone if you're watching that lecture, because it's just, like, way over your head. So I think that's so great. Such an awesome approach to really disseminating information across the industry, especially these are not easy topics to unravel, right? So, Kubernetes, for example, how did you come upon doing your work with Kubernetes?KELSEY: You know how you walk in on someone watching some hit TV show, they're on season six, right? And you ask them, what's going on? Why is this person not like this other person? They're like, I got to recap season three for you to understand what's going on on the screen right now. And so I think for a lot of people, Kubernetes was my season six, right? I had always been in tech trying to share information. If you would have caught me 15 years ago, you would have saw me at a Python conference teaching people about packaging Python applications. If you saw me maybe six years after that, I was at Puppet Labs trying to contribute to configuration management tools using Ruby. And so when I get to Kubernetes, there's a whole career behind me of trying to build similar systems without the terminology or the experience. You just know that there has to be a better way of doing things. So when I saw Kubernetes for the first time and really got hands on time with it, there was an a-ha! moment. I was like, you know what? All the scripts, tools, philosophies, techniques, it has now been serialized into this one checkpoint, and the industry has finally given it a name.KELSEY: And so when I got that feeling, you know what was next, right? It was like, hey, I can't wait to go to a meetup to show people this thing. And I think the reason why I was able to resonate with so many people is because I had that previous background of doing things manually, trying different automation tools. And so I was just so excited. Like, I think we finally found the thing we've been all trying to build, and it looks like this. And so I think a lot of people got to see that season. It was like, oh, he's the Kubernetes guy. But there's so much historical context that goes into why I was ready to have that conversation, make those contributions at that time.ADRIANA: That's basically the classic case of, like, everything you've done up until that point has led you to that moment, and now you're ready to take on that thing. Right?KELSEY: I became a better speaker than I had ever been prior. I became a better engineer than I had ever been prior. And I've gone through all of that experience, and I was able to really articulate what was important. And I think for a lot of people who have been on this DevOps journey for a decade, nothing is working. We're doing all of the things: CI/CD pipeline, infrastructure-as-code. We're missing something here. And I think the industry had overly focused on automation and not abstraction. And Kubernetes was that final thing that you could touch to say, there is a difference between automation and abstraction.KELSEY: And I think when people saw those new APIs, in many ways, I told people Kubernetes was like this type system to infrastructure. It was like a standard library that we'd never had. It's not like a thing that if you just install, it solves all your problems. But it's definitely a much better checkpoint than what people were doing before.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of those things where I feel like it's a bit of a love hate relationship with Kubernetes. Right. Because in some ways, it makes life so much easier, and then in other ways, it's like, oh, my God, this thing is so complex to try to unravel in your mind. Right.KELSEY: I want to address that a lot, because there are some people that think I am the biggest Kubernetes fan in the world, and I am not. I actually spent the last four years working on replacements. I spent so much time at Google Cloud working on serverless just to make Kubernetes go away. I learned everything about it because I think the best people that will replace it are the people who understand it the most. And the way I look at Kubernetes is very different. People look at it as a tool that is competing with their other favorite tool or some alternative ways of doing things. To me, Kubernetes is just another word in the dictionary, and my focus has always been, what does it mean? And as a contributor, what should it mean? And when I think about it as an aggregation of the previous ten year set of techniques, and you push them all together, you get this thing. And I study that thing for, like, wow, we've come a long way since those days.KELSEY: Also, you can see what's missing. And I think that part is where, for me, that's inspiring. Oh, this is what's missing. So this is where the opportunity space is. Go work there and solve that problem. But I think a lot of people get into, oh, this thing is too complex. And I always ask them, but do you understand it? If you don't understand it and you say it's complex, then I think that's a mislabeling of the situation. You can just say, I don't understand it, therefore, I don't know why I would use it.KELSEY: And I think that's a fair way to start the conversation. I think a lot of people are just dismissing it because it's complex, and I can do something much simpler, and then they tell me what they're doing. I'm like, that sounds like a Rube Goldberg machine. You just named 25 pieces of custom tooling so you can avoid using Kubernetes. I don't know if that adds up.ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think it makes sense too, like what you said earlier about looking for something that could potentially replace Kubernetes, because I also think that we tend to get into this sort of rut where we think, well, it all ends with Kubernetes. But we all know that software has evolved so much in the last 20 years. Even everyone was talking about Heroku is this awesome thing, and now, yeah, Heroku is still in the picture, but other things have come and kind of taken our attention. So where are we moving towards then in this space?KELSEY: I think in some ways things haven't changed very much in 20 years. You write code, you build the code, and you try to do some process to get it on the server so people can use the code. About 20 years, people have been doing exactly that thing. Now, how people have gone about doing that thing, that's changed at different speeds. Some people are still writing KornShell scripts right now as we speak, deploying apps at their company, and it probably works well. Then you have some people that are still using tools like Capistrano because they want to use something that's written in their favorite programming language, in that case, Ruby. And so they just want to keep everything within their problem domain. And then you have some people who prefer platforms like Heroku, Cloud Foundry, you name it.KELSEY: I think the challenge has been is lots of people have been looking for that one solution for everything. I remember when Cloud Foundry, like the Heroku competitor that you could run yourself, it was like, look, twelve factor apps are the way to go, and you can write everything as long as you use Java and Spring Boot. You do that, you're done, you're great. And then it's like, okay, that's fine. What about my batch jobs? Where do I run those? Not there. What about my databases? Where do I run those? Not there? And then what happens is you end up having to bring in a second or third platform. And that's where the harsh reality of all of this stuff is, is that whenever we don't have one solution to solve everything, you end up having to complicate your infrastructure. And I think complicated infrastructure just the actual norm at this point.KELSEY: What the world wants in terms of if you have a public facing website, you're probably going to have a cache, you're going to have Cloudflare DDoS protection. Various security concerns that Kubernetes versus Heroku is such a small part of the decision making process that even if you got that layer right, it is such a small part of the equation that thinking that's where the complexity is, ignores the big picture, where I think things like Kubernetes are 1/100th of the equation.ADRIANA: Right. That makes a lot of sense. Now, on a similar vein of Kubernetes like product, you've also done some work with HashiCorp Nomad, right? How would you compare Kubernetes to Nomad for folks who aren't familiar with both?KELSEY: Respect to everyone that contributes. Because I've written lots of code myself, and you do the best you can. So we just got to make sure we get that out of the way. We're not attacking people here. So if you have a HashiCorp logo tattooed on your body or Kubernetes logo tattooed on your body, this is not about you at all. When I first saw Nomad, I remember, is when they announced it in Portland at one of the smaller first HashiConfs. And I was scheduled to give a talk about Kubernetes, and I changed the talk the night before to do Nomad versus Kubernetes. And I remember Mitchell, Armon and so many people from HashiCorp standing there watching the talk. Everyone's crowded in to watch the talk.KELSEY: And look, I'm not a mean person, so I'm not someone that's naively attack a project that I'm not working on. Doesn't make any sense. But I did learn it, got it installed. And the things I liked about Nomad, you got this single binary written in Golang. You just put it on the server and it's almost immediately ready to go, starting getting value, right? That part around, just go get a binary and just have it run on the server. It really, really made that easy. The part that wasn't great, though, is the API. You look at it and it's like, what is this thing? Right? I think I get it.KELSEY: And it felt like, oh, you're trying to copy the Borg white paper about what a task is, but you haven't used Borg enough to know that this is not what you want to copy. And so it was a good serialization of that knowledge that was out there. They built a very high performance fast scheduler. They optimized for scheduling, speed, and performance. But the thing I think that they missed was the ecosystem. This space now is about collaboration. So you have lots of people who want to build infrastructure, automation, tools. And the one problem we've had over time, in my opinion, is that you have to glue them all back together.KELSEY: And scripting only gets you so far when you have to glue together all these various APIs. So Kubernetes takes a different approach. Kubernetes says these things are all related. Your load balancer and your app and your IPs, and your storage, your secrets, all of it is related. And they depend on each other. And so Kubernetes felt like it lived a life where the maintainers or the people of that project had been using Borg for a decade or two and said, what would we fix? And they come into a popular ecosystem like Docker and all these pieces, and they aggregate them. And when you look at the API, you can see the experience peek through. Right here is a pod.KELSEY: A pod has to have multiple containers because most apps that people deploy in reality, need things like NGINX or sidecars or logging daemons. And so I felt like Kubernetes had so much more experience baked into it than just being a faster, easier to manage system for deploying things. So given that, it was really nice to see over time that both communities kind of learn from each other. I remember when Nomad started adding things like volumes, sidecars, or other things that you would typically see in Kubernetes. So I think some people like Nomad because of its simplicity. I kind of lean towards the simplicity side of the house, so I kind of resonate with the whole Nomad thing. But watching people kind of glue together, like vault console, and all these other pieces to try to get a whole system, I'm like, man, at this point, now Kubernetes starts to look a little better.ADRIANA: Yeah, I definitely agree. I worked at a job where so I had come from a Kubernetes background and worked at a job where it was a Hashi shop, and they're like, oh, we're using Nomad. So I'm like, oh, my God. How do I translate this? And when I learned that Nomad is not fully equal to Kubernetes, that you have to still stitch these other pieces together, I'm like, oh, okay, that complicates things. But I definitely agree with you. One of the things that I do appreciate about Nomad is that certain things seem a little bit simpler. And I did find the learning curve not too bad. Maybe it was because I also knew Kubernetes at the time, so maybe that helped and it allowed me to translate.ADRIANA: But there's definitely a lot of stuff that I appreciate about Nomad, and I'm glad that I've had exposure to both ways of doing things, because I think that's really cool. And like what you were saying, both communities learning from each other rather than, like, let's hoard our secrets, because that way you can end up with better products overall, right?KELSEY: 100%.ADRIANA: Now, one thing that I wanted to ask you about was your famous Hashinetes tutorial. What motivated you to put this together? And also, if you can just share with folks what this Hashinetes thing is.KELSEY: I remember the Hashinetes talk, because that was the year I was like, okay, all of these tools have been out for a while. Vault is out. Consul is out. Nomad is out. Kubernetes is out. Now what? How do you think about all these things? What do you even do with them? And I remember that year I wanted to have fun, right? Previous years, it's more about, what are these things? And then maybe years after that, it's like, it's in production. But I was like, you know what? I want to have a irresponsible talk. I remember starting to talk off: "Today we're going to be irresponsible."KELSEY: "Do not do this in production." "Do not go to work and say Kelsey said anything." This is just having fun. Okay, and so I remember having a Kubernetes cluster or maybe even Nomad, and said, all right, we're going to install Nomad as an app to see how it works. And I just started adding different layers and components one by one. Number one, teaching people how all of these things actually fit together and how another scheduler could actually arrange them and put them into place. And then I think people had so much fun with the talk. It's like, wow, look how powerful these tools are that they can actually deploy and manage each other if you really wanted to.KELSEY: And look how they're similar in some ways. And I think a lot of people were like, oh, these are just you need to pick one or the other. And at that time, there was a blog post of a company using Kubernetes for some stuff and then using Nomad for some of their batch jobs that would benefit from the Nomad way of doing things. I thought that was just, like, the right way to think about it. So that talk Hashinetes is like, what happens if you push Kubernetes and all the HashiCorp tools together, like using Vault for secrets instead of the thing that was built into Kubernetes, because I think Vault was a far superior secrets management product and API. And then what if you were to use Consul instead of Kubernetes built-in service-discovery? What would you get? And then let's just say you really do like Nomad. What if you were to run that inside of Nubernetes, too, and let that become the scheduler instead of Kubernetes doing the scheduling? And I think when people kind of saw that talk, they understood how to really fairly evaluate those tools. So we just had a bunch of fun.ADRIANA: What do you think was the biggest learning from putting this talk together for yourself?KELSEY: I think, honestly, if you just live 100% in Kubernetes land, all you know is config, maps, secrets, and you have an idea in your mind that there's no other way of thinking about these problems. Right? Everything must be a CRD. Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes. But I think people forget I was a contributor to Kubernetes. I knew how some of the inner workings worked. And so it's like, how do you get Vault to work nicely inside of Kubernetes? Then you have to rethink the APIs, and you start, oh, the Kubernetes secret management API isn't that great at all? And so when you bring in Vault and you have to stitch it in and bake it into the whole process, you really do gain empathy for gluing all of these parts together yourself. So I think the biggest learning for me is that, number one, you can do it. There are situations where it does make sense.KELSEY: Think about it. If you have multiple clusters and you want to have multi cluster service discovery, you cannot do that with Kubernetes alone. When you add something like Consul, you can have Consul be the place that takes over DNS. And guess what? Voilà, you can now address multiple clusters using one service discovery tool. And so it's like, oh, okay. So even though Kubernetes hasn't solved all the problems, it doesn't mean that you can't bring in all these alternative tools to step in and fill that gap.ADRIANA: And it's nice to see that everything plays nice in that little ecosystem and that you can, I guess, take advantage of each tool superpowers, right, to sort of give that boost to Kubernetes Awesome. Now, on the Hashi front, I also wanted to talk to you briefly about a talk that you gave at KubeCon EU, "From Community to Customers". And I attended that talk, and I really enjoyed the talk. I thought it was very interesting how you were talking about this fine line of what to keep open source versus what not to keep open source. One example that you cited was HashiCorp, and then shortly thereafter, HashiCorp changed their licensing. So what are your thoughts around that?KELSEY: Yeah, I actually had this question come up a few times, and I always tell people from a place of empathy, I had a project, Confd. It became a little popular. I remember going to FOSSDEM on the other side of the world in Europe, and watching someone give a talk about using Confd, this miniature configuration management tool, and how they were using it and why they thought it was one of the greatest projects ever. Like, as a maintainer of an open source project, you'd love to see a community form around the thing you've built. But as a solo maintainer, you also know how hard it is to say no. And you wake up on, like, a Saturday morning and it's like, hey, I work at a huge company that makes tons of profit, and I get paid really well to do my job. I would like you to work for free and add this feature that we really, really need to make even more money. And you're like, no, this is not my priority.KELSEY: Number one, you're not paying me anything. And then two, you know what? You're going to have to prioritize that itself and maybe step up and do some contributions. And so when you think about it that way, and as someone who's also contributed code to HashiCorp products in the past, I did those contributions to scratch my own itch. And I understand that once I deliver those changes, it's on the HashiCorp team to maintain them forever. And so I understand the relationship here is me contributing code is not the end of the story. And so when they make that licensing change, I put myself in their shoes of trying to run a business and remember, they're a public traded company. So a lot of these decisions are not in fully their control anymore. The market wants to see profit growth.KELSEY: I don't know if you've ever worked at a profitable company, people listening to this. But having stagnant revenue year over year is a fast way to get shareholders to leave investing in your stock. So now they have this added pressure of no longer just making the open source community happy. The people that they kind of started their careers off of, now they have to try to make the market happy. And there you get into different behaviors. So now you got to figure out where to get revenue from. And if you ask someone, Where do you get revenue from something that is given away 100% for free? Last I checked, most people do not pay for things unless they have to pay for things. And so you got to draw the line somewhere.KELSEY: And I think the big controversy is, where do you draw the line? Do you draw the line on the core of the product? NGINX tried to do things like that. It didn't work out well over time, do we draw the line on, like, enterprise features and Web UIs? Right? That could be a fair place to draw the line. And so I think for a lot of people, HashiCorp decided to draw the line at commercial competition. If you take our software and start competing against us, using our name, likeness, whatever we say now in our new license, the business source license, that you can't do that. And so if you're being honest, as a user, don't really care. Like, I don't plan to start a business competing against terror. If you're being honest, I literally don't care.KELSEY: And most people don't really exercise all their open source freedoms anyway. I'm not saying that's not a good reason not to have them, but a lot of these licenses like Apache 2 to me to fully realize the benefits of them. I think you do need to become a contributor to really understand what the code base does, be willing to step up to fork a project when the time comes and having the skills to maintain it. A lot of people don't understand that's the other part of this deal. And so when they change that license, I think people got a wake up call. They own that project. It is not our project. Even those with that HashiCorp logo somewhere tattooed on their body, it's not your project.KELSEY: It belongs to HashiCorp. And so now I think there's a rethink. And a lot of people forget HashiCorp predates the CNCF, right? So they're not a part of a foundation, even though a lot of their technologies are foundational, TerraForm, Vault, those things belong to HashiCorp, a private company doing what they have to do. And so for me, I look at that business license change and says, great, they made their stake in the sand. From a business perspective, this will be good for HashiCorp. Now they can say no. And now their terms are a bit clear and no longer vague. Now, for the community that is upset,KELSEY: now it's time to exercise those open source rights we've all been talking about for so long. You get to fork the project, you get to maintain the project, bug, fixes security, fixes new features and then ask the question how compatible should you remain going forward with the thing in which you branch from? That's what's on the table. So those are my thoughts on it. It's very pragmatic. I think it's one of ownership and responsibility and no matter how you feel about it, you're going to have to take on ownership and responsibility going forward.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. It makes so much sense and I think you hit on a very important thing when it comes to maintaining an open source project, which is maintaining it. It is a lot of freaking work and especially if it's something that you do on the side for funsies. You can only expect so much, especially if you're the solo maintainer. So also hats off to anyone who is a solo maintainer of an open source project or works with a very small team because it's a lot of work. It's a labor of love at that point, right?KELSEY: I want to make sure people understand. A lot of people may have an ops background. That's definitely where I come from. And people think dev is easy and there's the same stress that you have in operations, right. For example, if you replace a hard drive in a server with a bad hard drive, you worry the first couple of days like, is that RAID configuration going to actually rebuild on time and the hard drive is going to stop being slow before traffic comes. You worry about these things and this is why we started doing things like on-call. And when you are maintained of open source project, you know that anything you merge in will make its way to someone's production, someone you probably don't know and you're going to feel responsible and accountable for doing that. And so there's a lot of this added pressure of like, hey, I got to be able to say no and make the right decisions to make sure that no one is going to be negatively impacted by these projects.KELSEY: I think a lot of people forget that when we start to ask and I don't like the way this person runs this open source project, there is so much pressure that goes into it. So just know that there's humans behind these projects. There's a lot at stake. So if they say no to your new feature or they have to make a business license change or stop accepting pull requests for a while while they go tend to other matters, you just have to understand that just what comes with the territory.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. There are humans behind those repos right at the end of the day. Well, we are coming up on time, but before we wrap up, I was wondering if there are any parting words of wisdom that you would like to share with our audience?KELSEY: I don't know if there's any parting words of wisdom, but I do think we're at this next cycle of new technology on its way, whether it's AI or LLMs, some people only know that stuff as chat GPT. And the question that I'm hearing a lot around is, like, is this thing going to take my job? And I always ask those folks, what is your job? And they say, "Well, for the last ten years, I've just been running scripts and automating things, and I'm like the same things for ten years in a row." I was like, "Listen, if that's how you would describe your job, then yes, you might have a problem when a new set of tooling comes around that reduces the need to do that." And that's always happened throughout tech. And I think what most people should probably think about is take these moments of insecurity and just do some self reflection and say, "Hey, my tools"...and I think we started the conversation this way. People tend to confuse automation to abstraction, and a lot of times, people get so comfortable automating the same things over and over, almost like a Westworld Loop, that they forget that we should rethink the thing that we're automating and ask ourselves if we should replace it with better abstractions. So I would say this this may be your very moment to pause for a second look at the work you do, and ask yourself, "Is it time for a new abstraction?" And if it is, I think that's the perfect opportunity to either go find a project that's attacking that problem or maybe even start your own that introduces the new abstraction based on all of that experience that you have.ADRIANA: Awesome. I really love that. Well, thank you so much, Kelsey, 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...KELSEY: All right, everyone, don't forget to 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. Hey, hey Geeking Out fans! We're taking a little break for the holidays, so this will be the last episode of 2023. Be sure to catch us again in January as we Geek Out with a fabulous lineup of guests.ADRIANA: See you in 2024. And Peace Out, and Geek Out. Bye!

About our guest:Jacob Aronoff (he/him/his) is a Staff Engineer at ServiceNow Cloud Observability, formerly Lightstep, the tech lead for the Telemetry Pipeline team, and an OpenTelemetry maintainer for the OpenTelemetry Operator project. He's spent his career in a variety of backend roles acting as a distributed systems engineer, an SRE and a DevOps professional. Jacob's focus is enabling customers to reliably send telemetry data with a focus on Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry.Find our guest on:LinkedInX (Twitter)MastodonFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow Links:ElixirSwiftOpenTelemetry (OTel)OpenTelemetry OperatorPrometheusOTel CollectorOpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP)OTel for KubernetesOTel Operator channel on CNCF SlackOTel End User Working GroupstatsdOpenTracingOpenCensusJaegerCommon Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)OTel Operator Target AllocatorPrometheus Re-labelingOpen Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP)SignalFXAdditional Links:Adriana's articles on the OpenTelemetry OperatorJacob's Talk at KubeCon NA 2023Jacob on OTel Q&AJacob on OTel in PracticeJacob on the Maintainable PodcastAdriana on the Maintainable PodcastTranscript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. 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 is Jacob Aronoff, who is also one of my coworkers. Welcome, Jacob.JACOB: Hello. Very happy to be here. I'm so happy that we get to do this. I feel like we talked about this in Amsterdam, and I'm so excited that we get to make it happen.ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah. This is awesome. So as we start out, I'm going to do some lightning round questions. They are totally painless. No wrong answers. So are you ready?JACOB: I'm prepared. Let's do it.ADRIANA: Okay, cool. All right. Are you a lefty or a righty?JACOB: I am a righty. So I always thought I was supposed to be a lefty, and my parents forced me to be a righty.ADRIANA: Interesting. Soul of a lefty. iPhone or Android?JACOB: iPhone. I just got the new one. USB-C all the way.ADRIANA: I'm so jealous. I think I'm going to wait one more year because I want the iPhone...I don't like the Pro Max. It's too big. But I want the Pro.JACOB: It's way too big.ADRIANA: I want to wait until they upgrade the optical zoom to whatever the Pro Max offers.JACOB: Yeah, that makes sense.ADRIANA: Yeah. Anywho, go on. Okay. Mac, Linux, or Windows?JACOB: Mac for sure. Big Mac boy. Whole life.ADRIANA: Feel you. I feel you. Okay. Favorite programming language?JACOB: I feel like Go. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Go. It used to be Swift or Elixir. Those are my two a little bit more funky choices. I used to work in Elixir, and I really loved it. Definitely one of the most fun languages I've had the chance to do. Swift, I haven't done for a few years, but there are a lot of little Easter eggs around my socials that refer to Swift a lot.ADRIANA: That's why your social handle is get_sw1fty.JACOB: Exactly. Yeah.ADRIANA: Okay, I get it.JACOB: A lot of Easter eggs.ADRIANA: Nice.JACOB: Still, I was the first person to ever write a Datadog SDK in Swift, and it's still on their website.ADRIANA: Wow. That is awesome. Very nice. Very nice. Cool. Okay, next question. Dev or Ops?JACOB: That's a really hard one. Dev. I'm just going to say dev.ADRIANA: All right.JACOB: Ops is fun, but you're still doing Dev if you're doing Ops. You're still Deving. You're still Deving.ADRIANA: I like it. Especially modern Ops. Right? I mean, maybe not...well, even Bash scripting back in the day, right? Ops was more bashy, less like Terraforming.JACOB: Yeah. Back when Ops is mostly just like Jenkins scripting with Bash. That's still Dev. There's still a lot of Dev stuff in there, so it's always been like that. It's just new abstractions.ADRIANA: Yeah, fair enough. That's a really good point. I like it. Okay, next question. JSON or YAML?JACOB: It's just...I'm a YAML engineer. I can't deny it.ADRIANA: Yeah, I like YAML better. No disrespect to the JSON people out there, but I don't get it. YAML forces me to do indentations, but that's okay.JACOB: Yeah, that's all right.ADRIANA: Yeah, cool. Two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?JACOB: Probably text. I love to read really long form things, especially, I don't know, I save a bunch of articles whenever I see them and they'll be like, ten minute, 20 minutes reads, and whenever I have some real free time, then I'll go through one or two of them and that is like my favorite way to consume. I probably consume more video, realistically.ADRIANA: Oh, really?JACOB: Yeah, I watch a lot of YouTube videos, like "How To" type things.ADRIANA: Yeah.JACOB: But I love to read more than I love to watch. Watching is too passive.ADRIANA: I get too yeah, I agree. I think that's what I find annoying about watching videos. Like, someone sends me a video link, I'm like, it better be like some short video. So if it's like an Instagram video or YouTube short, it's fine, but send me a five minute video, I'm like, I'm never going to watch it. Even if you tell me it's like the most wonderful thing in the world, I'm not going to watch it. I'm so sorry.JACOB: Or it's like, even if you watch it, you get so distracted by another thing. It's just like I don't know.ADRIANA: Yeah, I think the only way I can consume, quote unquote, a YouTube video is if it's audio only. So I'm like just doing chores around the house and listening to it, then it's okay, right? My brain is like it helps me focus better.JACOB: I feel that basically you're just podcasting at that point.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Which I love me a good podcast.JACOB: Yeah.ADRIANA: Okay, final question. What is your superpower?JACOB: Superpower? I have a useless superpower. I can do a noise. I can make a noise that's really I can click with my tongue really loudly.ADRIANA: Okay, now you have to demonstrate.JACOB: I will, but it might disturb some people in this office. Okay.ADRIANA: Damn.JACOB: I don't know if that came through.ADRIANA: It came through okay over here.JACOB: It's really loud.JACOB: That was like a quieter one.JACOB: It's useful when it's like, I need to get someone's attention who knows that I can do that. And then I'll do the click, and then they'll be like, oh, there he is.ADRIANA: Nice. I like, that. Cool. All right, now we shall get to the meaty bits, which is sweet. Let's talk OTel.JACOB: Let's do it. I'm ready.ADRIANA: All right. Yeah. So I guess for starters you're involved as part of your so we both work at Lightstep, which I guess is now ServiceNow Cloud Observability. I guess you and I met because we both work in the OTel space, although we work in different areas of the OTel space. Why don't you tell folks what you do specifically around OTel?JACOB: Yeah, so I sort of got started with OTel two years ago when I joined the company working on the OTel Kubernetes story and what's going on there. Basically I came from a Prometheus shop that really heavily invested in Prometheus and I had sort of seen the great stuff with Prometheus and then some of the struggles with Prometheus and I came in and I was, you know, I now work on top of a metrics backend. What's the best way to get metrics there? OTel has the OTLP format and so I wanted to figure out the best way to get Prometheus metrics into the OTLP format and then into our backend, specifically in Kubernetes and what is the best way to do that. So sort of began this journey on the operator group, which is a SIG within OTel that works on a piece of OTel code that sits within your Kubernetes cluster, within your environment to make it really easy to deploy OTel Collectors and do auto instrumentation and things like that. And then the feature I was working on was to make it so that you could really easily scrape and scale metrics collection. So that was sort of my first foray into it. And then I started contributing a lot. I became a maintainer for the project and now I just sort of work on OTel Kubernetes stuff all the time. So thinking about new features, new ways to help users run their whole environment for telemetry collection in Kubernetes, that's really the focus.JACOB: How do we make that as easy as possible for people? There's definitely a lot to be done, but it's a really great group of people that I think think pretty deeply about this stuff and are very good at sharing and caring and not very what's the word? Nobody's really holding on to legos. Have you heard that phrase? Is that like a known phrase? Yeah.ADRIANA: I haven't heard that expression before, but I like it.JACOB: Everybody's happy to share. There's not really someone who's particularly unwilling to accept something. Yeah, nothing like that. It's really based on the merit of the feature, not the fact that you don't get to do it nice. It's a good group as a result.ADRIANA: I really like that and I can vouch for that too because I've bugged you with a bunch of questions around the operator when I was trying to understand it better. And I've also posed questions to the operator Slack Channel and people have just generally been really nice about answering my questions, which is awesome because I think definitely tech has, I would say. I'm sure it still exists. But you see stack overflows where people ask questions and then you get some asshole who's putting you down because you're a novice to the subject and you're just trying to understand it. I get none of that from the Otel community, which I love because then it makes me unafraid to ask questions and so it makes it easier to learn.JACOB: Yeah, and a thing that I try to make sure of, at least with our group, is for anybody who's like a new contributor. I try to go really out of my way to thank them for their contribution and make sure that they're sort of set up for success with what they're doing. Like, even today, someone was asking some questions on our GitHub about some operator features. I gave them their answers and they said, if you have more questions, reach out in our slack. Happy to follow up there. And so they followed up, asked some more questions. They asked for a feature that we didn't have. I was like, oh, if you make an issue for that, we can get that on the books.JACOB: It's not that hard. And then I was like, hey, this is actually really easy feature. If you wanted to contribute it, I can walk you through that process. I can show you an example of, like, here's an example that you can look at for someone who did something similar in the past and let me know if you have any questions. And that's what they're going to go do now. They're going to make their first contribution. So it's something that I'm really happy to see as not just with my group, but like, all the groups, people are really happy to walk you through contributions and make sure that you're supported. And if there's a feature that you want, people will actually take you seriously.JACOB: They respond to you with sincerity, not what's the other word? They respond to you with sincerity, not hostility. And so there are no questions that you could ask that I've seen where someone's going to really get angry at you for asking that question. And I think that that's, like, a really nice thing. It's good to see a humble bunch and not like, a really egotistical bunch.ADRIANA: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think that's why people keep contributing to OpenTelemetry, which is great. Now, as a follow up question related to OpenTelemetry, we had you on for the OTel End User Working Group for, well, two sessions. So first for our Q&A session and our OTel in Practice, which we host those two sessions on a monthly basis. And you had a really cool story, actually, about migrating to OTel within the context of an observability company migrating itself to OTel. And why don't you talk a little bit about that? I think it's so cool.JACOB: Yeah. So previously our company was on...before we had a metrics platform...we were on stated. Like, all of our metrics were recorded via statsd. Sometimes we would rewrite them in traces, which was pretty weird, or we would have them go through a proxy so that we could aggregate them in some way and get some information out of them. So we were previously on the statsd, and then we were also on a really old version of OpenTracing. This was before the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects merged into OpenTelemetry. And so we were on that old OpenTracing version.JACOB: And so I took on this work to migrate us to OpenTelemetry for everything. Well, metrics and traces. Logs support is still in the works, but that's the next migration. But so I started this project for migrating our metrics to OpenTelemetry, at which point the metrics SDK was still in beta, or the metrics API was still in beta, the SDK was in alpha. And so the goal was to really help the people on the, you know, iterate on their designs, work on performance and really tighten up that spec. So I did that, and then I actually found a bug in our maybe not a bug, a performance issue in the metrics code, which was a result of us having to convert from the new OTel format for attributes into the old OpenTracing sorry, other way around to convert from the OpenTracing attributes format to the OpenTelemetry attributes format. The reason this was a problem was because we shared this implementation between our tracing and metrics, and it meant that every time we recorded a metric, we had to do this conversion on the fly. And it doesn't sound that bad on an individual basis, but when you're recording hundreds of thousands, millions of metric points, that's a lot of conversions and that type of thing can really add up totally. And after I gave some of this performance feedback to the team, I actually realized that we could do this OpenTelemetry migration for tracing as well, which would then get rid of this performance concern.JACOB: And so in the midst of the metrics migration, I took a pause and then we began the tracing migration. The tracing migration was much easier because it was a more mature format at the time. So that process was a bit smoother. There were a few weird things here and there. You can read about that, I think online somewhere that we have documented, maybe, I think there's some blog posts.ADRIANA: We have the recording from your OTel in Practice, OTel Q&A discussion as well.JACOB: Yeah, cool, thanks. But so we finished that migration, we went back to the metrics migration. We got to use that performance benefit. And the OTel people actually worked on a lot of the performance recommendations that we made. So we were able to finish the metrics migration as well. And so it was really neat because I love these types of migrations, because you're really just like, you'll see the phrase a lot, replacing the engine of a flying plane. It's like doing that in place. And that's really what it feels like sometimes when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of data points per second, how do you replace your telemetry collection about that? That's a pretty challenging thing for any company, not just us.JACOB: But then when you're the vendor serving the metrics. It's like, who's watching the watcher? That type of thing. Really the most difficult part is just reorienting your brain to think about the environments correctly to be sure that when you're talking about environment A, you are sure that that's where the data should be and not somewhere else, right?ADRIANA: Yeah.JACOB: Because for most of these telemetry vendors, whether it's us or Datadog or New Relic, it doesn't really matter. All of them have a meta telemetry environment that's sort of the secondary place that they send the telemetry of their main environment to. So that's the thing that you're monitoring. That's what lets you do these migrations effectively as well.ADRIANA: Yeah. So here's a question because this is actually like a really cool use case, because when we talk about bringing in OpenTelemetry to an organization, if you're lucky and you're starting out your application from scratch, you have the luxury of factoring observability into your architecture, right? And so you can start instrumenting in OpenTelemetry right off the bat, hopefully, right? One can dream. But then you also have the so called brown field scenarios, right, where it's brownfield. I have zero instrumentation and then there's the brownfield of like, I have instrumentation, but it's out of date. And I think that's something or not out of date, but it's not up to date with a standard, which now like the standard being OpenTelemetry. And so those are two really interesting conversations to have because I think a lot of the organizations that are adopting OpenTelemetry probably fall into one of those two categories. And from talking to a lot of folks, it's interesting too, because you have this conversation of like, you start telling them, oh yeah, I work in OpenTelemetry. Oh yeah, OpenTracing, we use that.ADRIANA: And I'm like, no, not the same, not really. You're having to educate them on that. But folks are also like, even if you get them sold on, like, okay, OpenTelemetry is the thing you got to now talk about a strategy for bringing that into the organization. And that can be very tricky. I mean, where we're at, it was an easy sell because it's like, well.JACOB: Yeah, this is what we do, this is what we work on. We should be doing it ourselves.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. So that's not even the problem. But even with that easy...I'll say easy, right? Because you're not having to deal with that hurdle. You have the hurdle of like, well, I've got some existing stuff now that I have to migrate. So one thing I'm wondering is, as you mentioned, there was some old OpenTracing stuff in place. And one of the things about OpenTelemetry is that they say they're backwards compatible with OpenTracing, OpenCensus. Now, which from my understanding means that if you have that stuff in place, you don't have to gut it right away.ADRIANA: However, you probably don't want it to stay that way forever. So what do you say to folks who are in that position?JACOB: A real it's a benefit that OTel provides these bridges to these legacy formats so that you can start using OTel and then get all of that in place. The thing that I always think about whenever doing these migrations, whether it's like a service, your telemetry, it doesn't really matter. The question is, how long do you want to be in a dual state? How long do you want to be in a state where you're potentially confusing someone on call? It's like the real crux of the issue is it's like always imagine yourself on call for whatever service you're changing, and someone gets paged at, like, 3:00 A.m.. Do you really want someone to have to reason about where your telemetry is coming from or how it's getting generated? You don't you really want that to be consistent. You don't want to have to ask the question, oh, is this like an OpenTracing thing? Is this an OTel thing? In the same way that if you're migrating a service and you have legacy service and new service, if you're in the dual state for a long time and you get a page for an upstream thing that's related to both of these downstream services, it's really frustrating to have to ask the question, which of these downstream things is affecting me? Right? Yeah, it'd be much easier if it was just I look at the single downstream, and I know that's the problem. Basically, it's shaving the decision tree for.ADRIANA: This that you're doing.JACOB: And so anything that you can do to remove the amount of time that you're in that dual state, removing those branches is going to do you better in the long run. The migration path is good that you can do this. There's another path, which I also think is a great option, where the OTel Collector probably supports whatever format you have right now. I'd be surprised if it doesn't. What you could do is just send rather than installing a bridge into your code, you could just send your legacy format to the Collector and have the Collector output, and then you can change your application to use OTel in whatever time frame you want, and then just have that sent to the collector, which already accepts OTLP. Yeah, right. And so that'll help you actually verify that the migration worked. You're already getting OTLP.JACOB: You don't have to do anything with that. And then once you start sending OTLP from your application, you should see no difference in what's yeah, and that's a pretty verifiable thing. You could actually even use the file exporter on the OTel Collector to actually dump the data that you get. And then for Service A, run it with Jaeger for ten minutes, dump that data with the OTLP out, and then do Service A again, but with OTLP, dump that data for ten minutes, and then just see what it looks like, understand that you should see, like, a pretty minimal difference between those.ADRIANA: Right.JACOB: And that type of thing can give you so much confidence. And you can do that probably from your local environment without even needing to push it up. And so that's something that we didn't really consider as an option at the time. But had we thought of that, I definitely would have done it that way. It would have been a great option.ADRIANA: Yeah.JACOB: Where we could have just moved to OTel instantly and then backfill. Right. That's like a much easier path.ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's a very low friction approach, especially at my old company. They were using OpenTracing in a few spots, and so the mention of moving to OTel kind of sent people in a panic. Like, we have to re-instrument. Yes, we do. But hopefully never again after. But that idea sent people in a panic, and I had the same thought as you, which was like, yeah, just pump it through the Collector. Like, you don't have to change your code right away, but with the intention of eventually changing your code.ADRIANA: Because now, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you continue on OpenTracing, you don't get to reap the benefits that you get with the whole OTel ecosystem, right? I mean, you don't end up with the traces and metrics correlation and the traces and logs correlation or any new updates to the API or SDK, right? You're kind of stuck with whatever OpenTracing was when it froze, when it was retired, basically.JACOB: Yeah. Which means if there are any CVEs, you're kind of like, out of luck. Which is a bad state to be in.ADRIANA: Totally.JACOB: It's a really bad state to be in.ADRIANA: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I definitely like that. Now, going back to the OTel Operator. So you said that you're doing mostly work around the metrics portion. It's the Target Allocator specifically, right?JACOB: That's exactly. Right.ADRIANA: Yeah.JACOB: Now it's a bit more than that.ADRIANA: Okay.JACOB: But back then, like, last year was basically all target allocator stuff.ADRIANA: Okay, cool.JACOB: I can explain it. So basically when we started this process, someone from AWS had designed this thing called the Target Allocator. The goal of it was that you could distribute Prometheus works in targets. Targets are things that are like IP addresses, like a pod, a node, your old EC2 instance, whatever it is. You then go and scrape that instance to generate metrics. Prometheus works where it's a single monolith and you have a list of targets and it scrapes those and stores that data. You have to do this because if you have more than one instance of Prometheus, there's no way to tell which instance should scrape which thing. And so you're just going to be duplicating those scrapes. With OTel, we have the benefit of we don't need to store those metrics because we're just handing them off to the next thing with OTLP.JACOB: So the Target Allocator's goal is to allow you to distribute those targets amongst a pool of collectors. So if you have 300 targets and you have three Collectors, the Target Allocator could say, I'm going to give each collector 100 targets evenly. Right, but you need to have 100.ADRIANA: Collectors then to send it to...is that what that means?JACOB: No, you would just have to have...sorry...if you have 300 targets and you have three Collectors, then it's 100 targets per collector and then you would just forward that to your destination. So it'd be like if your destination is Prometheus actually, which now accepts OTLP, you could have OTel do all of your scraping and then just send the data to Prometheus as your backend store, right? And that would be like a totally viable option.ADRIANA: Gotcha.JACOB: If you really wanted the ability to shard your scraping and scale how you scrape targets, that would be a pretty viable approach.ADRIANA: Right, which Prometheus doesn't support the sharding right now, right?JACOB: So Prometheus has experimental sharding support but it doesn't have the ability. So it can shard your scraping, but it can't figure out your querying effectively. So because Prometheus is also a database. If you have three instances of Prometheus that are scraping each different targets, you'll only be able to query...you'll have to query the right instance each time because it doesn't know how to do that communication...to ask for, "Who has this metric?" At least that's my understanding of it. Maybe they've changed that, but I don't think they have.ADRIANA: Cool, okay. Yeah, that's super interesting. And so this allows you to scrape the Prometheus metrics which are not I mean, basically you're scraping it from wherever your source of Prometheus metrics is, right? It can be whatever, it can be coming from your infrastructure or whatever. And then this thing basically does the sharding for you and then it'll send your metrics to a destination. The destination could be Prometheus itself or it could be any observability backend that supports metrics essentially.JACOB: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cool. And that's the real benefit. I mean, we also open up by using the Target Allocator, we can be a little bit smarter as well. So the thing that Prometheus does, because it's all in one, is most of the targets that you get, you're just going to drop. The way that the scrape configs work is you get a target which has a bunch of metadata and then your scrape config determines whether or not you should actually get the data from that target.ADRIANA: Got it.JACOB: Even prior to making the request. And so usually you have to keep all of those in memory because you're constantly scraping them and you're constantly asking this question does the metadata match my scrape config? Does the metadata match my scrape config? And so forth. Whereas because we have the Target Allocator, we can actually just drop any targets that we know the Collector won't scrape okay in advance. So we only tell the Collector to process targets that it will end up scraping.ADRIANA: Okay, so it's like a filter.JACOB: Exactly. That's what we call it. We call it a relabel filter.ADRIANA: Okay.JACOB: So the real reason that this is really cool and why we added this in is because then we can also really evenly distribute targets to Collectors because we can say only. So if you have 300 targets, we use this strategy called consistent hashing, where you just hash each target and their metadata to assign that to a Collector ID. And so if you have, like, let's say, 500 targets, but you really are only going to end up scraping 100 of them after this filter, it would be better if you only tell the Collectors...if you only distribute the targets that you're going to end up scraping, because it's going to be more even rather than trying to fit in. It's the pigeonhole principle, right?ADRIANA: Yeah.JACOB: If you have three boxes and you have 500 targets, you might evenly distribute it at first, but eventually, when you go to scrape them, it might be uneven once you figure out what you're actually going to scrape.ADRIANA: Right. By the time the Collector is receiving them, you've already just gotten the ones that you want, and so it can give you an even distribution of those. So then there isn't an imbalance, basically.JACOB: Yeah, exactly.ADRIANA: Nice. That is super cool.JACOB: It's very clever.ADRIANA: Every day. Yeah, that's very awesome. So is the Target Allocator only part of the OTel Operator? Is that something that's available as part of the standalone collector?JACOB: So the Target Allocator is its own image. Like, it runs separate from the Collector binary. You could theoretically run it without the Operator. There are definitely some people that do that, but we don't support that as like, first class support. Reason why is that we do a lot of logic to rewrite. In order to make this work, you have to rewrite the Collector's configuration, and you also have to rewrite the Target Allocators configuration. It's just a bit of, like, data munging that we don't want users to have to do just because it's a little bit complicated. So we do it in the Operator for you.ADRIANA: Yeah.JACOB: There are people who will take what the Operator gives you, remove the Operator, and then just run it themselves.ADRIANA: Right.JACOB: And that's kind of a viable option. Yeah, but that's bespoke you'd have to do that yourself. And if you ask me a bunch of questions, I'll try to help you, but there's a certain point at which I can't help you. I don't know what you're doing.ADRIANA: That sounds like someone's idea of, like, a fun weekend project.JACOB: So we have a bunch of requests from people to enable the Target Allocator as part of the Helm chart, the raw Collector Helm chart. And I tried to do it, and it was so hard. It just proved so difficult to do. The config rewriting was so challenging because Helm isn't really a language. It gives you some go templating stuff, but at a certain point, it doesn't get you all the way there.ADRIANA: Right.JACOB: And so I wasn't able to make it work, and I eventually decided to give up because it was too much of a time.ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes sense.JACOB: Which is unfortunate because people ask for it a lot.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's interesting.JACOB: Yeah.ADRIANA: Now, obviously there's an OTel Operator because obviously a lot of people run the Collector in Kubernetes. Do you know, is it common for people to run collectors outside of Kubernetes? I mean, obviously, if you're not a Kubernetes shop, I would imagine that would be the use case. But how common is it? Do you know?JACOB: I don't know. I mean, I'm sure there are a bunch of people that do it, because I'm in my little Kubernetes world, I don't hear about it that often.ADRIANA: Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough.JACOB: I'm pretty isolated, but there are definitely people who just run Collectors as binaries on raw EC2 instances.ADRIANA: Yeah.JACOB: GCS instances. People are doing it, for sure.ADRIANA: Yeah.JACOB: I don't know. They probably have a whole different class of problems than the one.ADRIANA: I know we're coming up on time, but I wanted to ask you quickly. Well, by the time this episode comes out, I don't know if KubeCon will have passed, but all the same, but do you have anything coming up at KubeCon that you want to talk about?JACOB: I do indeed. So one of the main projects I'm doing for the Operator right now is adding support for the OpAMP protocol, which is a new part of OpenTelemetry that gives users the ability to do remote configuration management and agent configuration and Observability, sort of, with superpowers. And I'll be giving a talk with Andy Keller from ObserveIQ on OpAMP and how it's going to make your life a lot easier to manage these pools of Collectors that you have. So I am working on this project in the Operator group that will allow you to basically understand the topology of your Collectors in your Kubernetes cluster and also remotely configure them. Add in new features, push out updates, everything that basically allow your cluster's observability to be on autopilot for you.ADRIANA: Nice. Who doesn't love that? Very cool.JACOB: Stop thinking about it.ADRIANA: Is that part of Observability Day, or is that part of the KubeCon, like the main conference?JACOB: Main conference.ADRIANA: Nice. Very nice. Yeah, very cool.JACOB: I don't know how many people can fit in the room that I'm in, though. I thought they'd tell you that, but I guess they don't.ADRIANA: It'll be a surprise the day of.JACOB: It will. It'll be anywhere from five people to 500 people.ADRIANA: I'm always nervous for these types of things. I think on the KubeCon schedule, you can see people already will sign up for your talk and you start seeing people signing up to attend your talk. And if it's like a small number, you're like, oh my God. And if it's a large number, you're also like, oh my God.JACOB: Yeah, I'm very nervous. Yeah.ADRIANA: Is like a very big deal. But yeah, this is awesome. Very excited for your talk. Oh, the other thing that I wanted to mention also, I don't know if it's going to come out by the time this comes out, but I do want to promote it because you were on the Maintainable podcast, you recorded an episode recently.JACOB: I did indeed. I don't think that's out yet, but definitely something to look out for, though I have no idea when that'll be out.ADRIANA: We will find out. Yeah, I think when I recorded an episode, I want to say like, in the spring and it came out a couple of months later.JACOB: So probably there's a backlog of editing.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly.JACOB: It's a whole process.ADRIANA: I feel you. I have a backlog of editing for this too.JACOB: Yeah, that's just how it happens.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. But anyway, something to look forward to as well, so you all keep an eye out for that. Now, before we part ways, do you have any interesting pieces of advice, be it like in tech or OTel or whatever, or any hot takes that you wanted to share with folks?JACOB: I think the thing that I always say is just do something that you enjoy. If you're looking for a job, just like find something that work on a project that you enjoy. Find something that's weird and fun and doesn't really matter and just brings you some joy. I think that we all sort of forget that coding can be really fun and enjoyable and there's so many things out there that are so cool right now, especially. And there's so many things that I think have been forgotten just out of the consciousness. I used to do a lot of coding with SignalFX and Java to do UI building and games and stuff, and I haven't done that in so long, but I had so much fun doing that. So if you're looking for a job and you don't know how to do it, my best advice is to do a project that you find very fun and interesting and not just one that you think will play well on a résumé. Because if I'm interviewing you and you tell me about a project that you were so happy to do and really excited about, that's going to be ten times better than a project that you didn't really care about.JACOB: Yeah, just have fun is my advice.ADRIANA: Yeah, that is really great advice and I couldn't agree more. Yeah, and coding should be fun. It definitely puts me in a happy place when I'm working on an exciting project that I dream up some weird thing that I want to explore and then you learn so much and I don't know, you get a high. The programmer's high.JACOB: Exactly.ADRIANA: Totally down for that. Awesome. Cool. Well, thanks so much, Jacob, for joining today. So y'all, don't forget subscribe. Be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and with our guests on social media. Until next time...JACOB: Peace out and Geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Vileela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking out is also 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 slash Geeking Out.

About our guest:Julia Furst Morgado is a Global Technologist on the Product Strategy team Office of the CTO at Veeam Software. Her passion is making Cloud Native technologies and DevOps best practices easier to understand by sharing her knowledge and experiences. She is also committed to empowering communities as an AWS Community Builder, a CNCF Ambassador, a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador, a Civo Ambassador and Girl Code Ambassador. Additionally, she organizes the KCD NY, further fostering collaboration and learning opportunities. Find our guest on:Twitter (X)LinkedInYouTubeGitHub (Julia's talks)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 New York 2024The Julia programming languageKubeHuddleMarino Wijay (KubeHuddle organizer) on Geeking OutAWS Community BuildersCNCF AmbassadorsAWS Community DaysVeeam BackupTim Banks on Geeking Out (Mental Health)KubeHuddle Mental Health PanelMichael CadeAmanda Brock on Geeking OutOpen Source Summit North America 2024Edith Puclla on Geeking OutThe Happiness Lab (podcast)Cautionary Tales (podcast)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 is Julia Morgado. Welcome, Julia.JULIA: Hi, Adriana. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.ADRIANA: I'm so excited to have you on as I love having the ladies on the podcast. It's my favorite thing is to bring amazing ladies in tech to the forefront. But also, I've had several fellow Brazilians on the podcast as well.JULIA: That's amazing. Unfortunately, no Portuguese. But. But yeah, I love, I love collaborating with Brazilians as well.ADRIANA: It's so much fun. And where are you calling from today?JULIA: So I'm in New York. In Manhattan. Yeah, New York City.ADRIANA: And at the time that we're recording this, correct me if I'm wrong, but KCD New York is taking place tomorrow.JULIA: Yeah. Uh huh. Tonight we have a speaker reception already, and then tomorrow the whole day will have the KCD, which I'm super excited. We've been organizing it for over a year, so finally the day has arrived.ADRIANA: Oh my God, that's so exciting. And I definitely want to dig into that. But before we do, I'm going to subject you to my lightning round/icebreaker questions. Are you ready?JULIA: Yes.ADRIANA: Okay, first question. Are you left handed or right handed?JULIA: Right handed.ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?JULIA: iPhone.ADRIANA: Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?JULIA: Mac.ADRIANA: And what's your favorite programming language?JULIA: I would say JavaScript, but I recently learned that there is a programming language called Julia. I never. Yeah, I've never used it, never tried it, but I'm really curious. So, yeah, maybe. Maybe in the future I'll try it out.ADRIANA: That's exciting. A language with your name.JULIA: Yes.ADRIANA: So cool. Okay, next question. Dev or Ops?JULIA: Ops.ADRIANA: And do you prefer JSON or YAML?JULIA: YAML.ADRIANA: Spaces or tabs?JULIA: Tabs.ADRIANA: And do you prefer to consume content through video or text?JULIA: That's a good one. It depends. But I would say text, probably. Yeah.ADRIANA: Right. And then final question. What is your superpower?JULIA: My superpower? I speak a lot of languages, so maybe, you know, I'm good with languages. Not, not just programming languages, but I speak Portuguese, French, Spanish and English. So I would say, yeah, I have an easy time connecting with people all over the world. Maybe that's a super superpower.ADRIANA: That is. That's so great. That's so great. And I, you know, one of the times that we were chatting. So for those who aren't aware, Julia writes blog posts in all four languages.JULIA: I try to.ADRIANA: Oh my God. Like, that's, that's so amazing. That's so much work. I am so impressed that you do this. And it's so great because, you know, especially having had a chance to meet more Brazilians in tech in the last little while, because I've been in this like, bubble of like mostly in Canada and just interacting with, with Englishspeakers and, you know, it's been interesting meeting so many fellow Brazilians in tech who, you know, like, yes, we all speak English, but there is so much craving for content in our native language.JULIA: Yeah. And sometimes their English is not great. And whether we want it or not, it's easier to understand something technical when it's in your mother tongue. So, you know, documentation and blogs, things like that, it's easier to understand if it's in Portuguese or whoever is reading that their own language. So yeah, there is the need, the demand for that. But usually from what I see, most things are in English. So that's why I always try to create some content in other languages as well.ADRIANA: That's so great. And, you know, to rewind a bit even further, because you have a really, really cool background and you and I met last year in 2023 at KubeHuddle. And that's when I discovered that you have a very cool background and that you're Brazilian. And so if you wouldn't mind sharing with our audience.JULIA: Yeah, sure. So I'll give a summary if people want to listen to the long version. I gave a talk at KubeCon in Chicago about my journey from being non technical to becoming a CNCF Ambassador. But basically, yeah, I come from Brazil, São Paulo, and I went to law school there. I worked as a lawyer there for a year, a year and a half, and then I moved to the US and I studied business and I started working in marketing. And my last job in marketing was at NMSP. So, you know, working with a lot of engineers, support engineers mostly. There were some software engineers. And I never thought I would become technical, but I got laid off during the pandemic and I started a coding bootcamp. And that's when all, everything started. And I would say, I'm here today. Everything that I've achieved so far is also because of the community. So not only I studied, you know, programming languages, JavaScript, etc, that itself is not enough. You need to be involved in the community. And I think that's why I grew so much, so fast, as well.So, you know, became a CNCF Ambassador, AWS Community Builder, ambassador to other programs as well. Organized conferences. So the KubeHuddle last year, I helped organize. I helped Marino. And then this year, I'm organizing the KCD, which is tomorrow. We're having also the AWS Community Day in New York towards the end of August. So, you know, very involved with several communities. And I think when people ask me, oh, Julia, what did you do? What's the secret? There isn't really a secret, but I think, like, when you're, you're involved with the community, it...first, it's fun, and then you grow more than you would by yourself, doing everything alone. Yeah, yeah.ADRIANA: It's so true. And, yeah, I mean, I totally echo your sentiment on the community. If it hadn't been for the community, like, I honestly, I think my career has grown more in the last couple of years than it has. You know, I've been in tech since 2001, and I, you know, like, my career has grown more significantly in the last two years when I've been out more in the community than it has this entire time before that. And as you said, it's the collaboration. It's just getting to meet really cool people and...JULIA: Exactly. And they become friends, and. And they want to help you, and they want to see you succeed, you know? And it becomes fun. Yeah. Because it's work. You know, work sometimes is boring, but by being involved in the community, it becomes fun. And then you also want to volunteer your free time to do, you know, contribute to an open source, open source project or. Or write a piece of content or even do what you're doing. You know, this podcast, you're doing it on your free time, so it's amazing. And then you get to meet new people every time you record it. And maybe they know someone, they'll put you in touch with them. So that's the power of community and the beauty of community.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. It's the networking possibilities.JULIA: Exactly.ADRIANA: There is just a.JULIA: And funny enough, tomorrow, one of the keynotes, they got Covid, so they had to cancel. And I was asked to give the keynote for the KCD. So I'm giving...I know...first time, I'm a little nervous, but it's gonna go great. It's just 15 minutes, but, yeah, I'm going to talk about the community. So, initially, the title was how to boost your career with the CNCF community. And then I crossed career, and the title now is how to boost your life with the CNCF community. Because it's more than just, you know, your professional growth, it's also personal growth. And I'm really excited to talk about that tomorrow.ADRIANA: That's so great. Congratulations on that.JULIA: Thank you. I'm excited.ADRIANA: Yeah. And, you know, it's been such a meteoric rise for you, I mean, considering that, you know, you started, like, around pandemic times.JULIA: Yeah, a little over two years ago.ADRIANA: Wow. Wow. That's wild. That's wild. And it just goes to show, that's what I love about tech is it's such an inclusive type of community. There are people with degrees in computer science, computer engineering, and then there are people who either their degrees have nothing to do with it, or they didn't go to university.JULIA: Exactly.ADRIANA: It's so great. My degree is in Industrial Engineering. I took some computer courses, but, you know, I, people assume, like, oh, I studied computer science. Computer engineering. Yeah, no, but I always knew I wanted to do this, so I just, like, stuck myself in that.JULIA: And that's the way.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's so great. Now, you know, like, you're, and I think you're, like part of the, when they redid the ambassador program, you were part of, like, that new batch of ambassadors. I think we both came up at around the same time in that program. How did you hear about the CNCF Ambassadors program?JULIA: I think I saw on LinkedIn something. You know, I started getting involved with the community, I would say a year ago, because I started programming. I thought I wanted to be a software engineer. That's the only thing I knew. I thought tech was being a software engineer. And then I found out there is so much more to it. I started learning cloud, AWS, and then cloud native as well. I got a ticket to go to KubeCon, and that's when I saw, like, oh, there is this whole new world of possibilities and tech that I can learn, and there is a whole community around that. But I think they had CNCF Ambassadors back then, but then they closed the program and they reopened a new one. Then I saw on LinkedIn a post, someone posted, you know, register or, you know, fill out the form to try to become an ambassador. And I said, why not? I'll try. I didn't have any expectations. It's like when I submit a talk, I never expect that I'll get accepted, but I have this mentality of the no, I already have, so it's better to try. And if I get the no, that's fine, you know, but if I get the yes, even better. So that's what I did, I applied for the CNCF Ambassadors and I was just very honest. I said I was starting out in tech and didn't have a lot of experience. And I started, I was contributing a lot to documentation, like in the open source world, the CNCF project documentation and localization as well. And I said that's the extent of my contributions. But I'm very passionate. Sorry. I want to help and I want this to be an inclusive community and I want to bring more people that are in my shoes as well. Bring them like beginners, people that are transitioning to tech, bring them into the community. And I think that's why I got accepted, you know, because I have disadvantage. A lot of times, people that are in the industry for 10, 15, 20 years, they don't know how to talk to people that are starting out. They think, you know, if they write a blog, that is they, for them it's like not as, not that technical, but it's still very technical and hard for people to understand. So I think I break down things even more for those that are starting out.ADRIANA: And that's such a great attitude because I think, you know, my complaint has always been like, some blog posts are so technical because they're written by people who are just like, you know, this is their world, right? So they just assume, you know, stuff. And I take it from the point of view, same as you. Like, I know nothing and explain it in excruciating detail, right? Because there's, there's a desire for people and I think that's so wonderful. And I, I think it's really great to like, and, you know, congrats. And you just got renewed as a CNCF Amazon for another two years.JULIA: Yeah. Congrats to us, right?ADRIANA: Yes, yes. Yeah, it's so great. It's nice to know that we're good for two years now.JULIA: Exactly.ADRIANA: But I, I think it goes to show, and you mentioned two really important things, contributing to documentation and localization. Because again, we all know that technical documentation, especially for open source projects, isn't great because people would rather code. But then again, you put yourself in the shoes of someone who's new to the thing and you can't just assume that they understand. I have conversations with people where I'm like, can you explain this thing in the documentation? Like, oh, it's in like the Helm chart. I'm like...??JULIA: Exactly. How to start. Like, you really have to take someone by hand and show step by step. Otherwise, if you just put some links or, you know, like high level stuff. People are not going to understand and then they're not going to be able to try the project, you know, implement it, and then they won't be able to contribute in the future. So you have to really start from the beginning. And I think documentation is so important, but a lot of people, they don't think like that. They don't think it's that important.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, code. Code is the holy grail of contribution. But yeah, I completely agree with you. I started out in documentation too. It felt like the less scary thing to do. And plus, there's so much to say. There's always room for improvement. And then again, the localization, acknowledging the fact that we need to make our documentation accessible beyond just the english speakers, because there are some very brilliant technical people where they don't either they don't speak English or they don't speak English well enough to be able to communicate, but it doesn't mean that they know that they don't know what they're doing.JULIA: Exactly.ADRIANA: Competent people. Yeah, great. That's so great that you did that. And, you know, you know, as part of like, just going back to your learning journey, what, what sort of, um, what tactics do you do you use when you're learning a new technology so that you're, you know, to get into something new? Like what's your motivation?JULIA: I would say mostly getting hands on, but I know it's hard, you know, because you encounter so many issues and bugs and then you want to stop and you want to give up. But I think getting hands on, getting your hands dirty and trying things, instead of just like reading a blog post or watching a video, trying the things yourself, you get to learn more. But for those that are starting out, I would say it's fine if you follow a tutorial step by step. It's okay if you don't know by heart how to do something and you have to look back at the tutorial, it's totally fine. It's that muscle memory that you built and no one knows everything by heart, like commands and things. That's why you have Google. You can google every time. And now with AI, it's making it even easier. I would say yes, getting my hands dirty and asking for help as well. Because sometimes, like I said, you encounter a bug and then you want to try to solve it yourself. You're embarrassed to ask for help, but you don't get past that point and you won't understand what's going, you don't understand what's going on. What the problem is. So ask someone that knows a little bit more than you for help. You might think, oh, I'm gonna bother that person. But like I said, in the community, everyone is so helpful. They want you to succeed and they will stop what they're doing to jump on a call with you and help you. I've had that a lot of times. You know, I had an issue, I was trying to contribute, and I had, you know, a PR error. PR error on GitHub. Someone jumped on a call with me. I shared my screen, and then, like, we, we fixed it. And I learned why, why I was getting that error. Or, you know, other examples. But I would say, yeah, also asking for help is a big thing. And I still, I'm still working on that. You know, I still have a trouble with that.ADRIANA: Yeah, I can completely relate. I also have a hard time asking for help. And I'm always, especially, like, if there's one person, you know, that is like, kind of your comfortable go to person in an area and you're like, am I bothering them too much? Are they gonna, and I've noticed that if, you know, it's a getting to the point where they're feeling overwhelmed, oftentimes people will say, oh, you know, I might be like, a little bit swamped with stuff, but if you post in the blah, blah, blah slack channel, I'm sure there will be someone who can help out. And so, and that's what I have to, like, tell myself because I still get scared. Like, I had to write a couple of talks for KubeCon and ask questions on topics with which I wasn't super familiar. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm so scared to ask these questions on the Slack. But then I'm like, I have to get this talk done, so.JULIA: Exactly.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's the best motivation. And, you know, like, for you, being a newer member in the cloud native community. And it's funny because, like, I think that's something you and I have in common is that, like, we're newer to cloud native. I've been in tech for a while, but I've been on kind of the closed source side of tech. And you're like, new to tech, new to cloud native. What's been your experience around making, like, how was it when you did your first PR? How did you feel?JULIA: Like it was scary, you know, I didn't know what I had to do. So at first I followed some tutorials on how to open my first PR, and step by step, I followed that. But like, I told you, I had some issues. Someone jumped on a call with me, and we fixed that. I felt, you know, realization and relief that I get. I got that done. And then you kind of get addicted. You want to merge and more PRs and. But it's a lot of work, you know, contributing to open source. You can't do something and, like, oh, I'll just give five minutes, and then I'll open a PR. No, if you want to do something well done, you need to put in some effort. So sometimes, like, take a chunk of your day, like, in 1 hour, and work on that. Otherwise, it's not even worth to start something. So know how much time you have to invest in that. But I think the feeling is amazing. And then you also get to talk to other people. You know, the reviewers and the maintainers, they're gonna check your work, and if there is an issue, they're gonna comment. And I had a lot of issues, you know, people would review and say, oh, can you change this? And then, like, if I didn't understand that, I would go on slack and message them. And, you know, that's how you start a conversation and you end up making friends like that.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true. Yeah. Just being able to ask those questions of, like, clarify, and it's a little scary. Like, I actually had a PR the other day where I needed to chase someone down. Like, they made a suggestion to a blog post that I've written on OpenTelemetry, and I had to chase them down till they were, like, the thing standing between, like, me and getting the PR merged.JULIA: Yeah.ADRIANA: And I'm like, oh, my God, I don't want to bug this guy and ask him to look at my thing, but I really want my PR merged and so get over yourself. Like, just message him.JULIA: Exactly. It won't hurt. Yeah.ADRIANA: They don't bite.. They don't bite. I think that's the nice thing. Like, everyone's been, you know, I've mentioned this on my podcast before. Like, whenever I do a PR and OpenTelemetry, people's comments are so thoughtful. No one has ever been a jerk. Like, you know, on Stack Overflow, people are jerks.JULIA: I know.ADRIANA: I'm not saying, like, just in general, on Stack Overflow, some people can be total assholes and. And, like, open telemetry community is like, la la la.JULIA: You know, I would say I only have had good experiences in, you know, in the CNCF community overall. Like, open source projects contributing to those or, you know, events that I've gone to only good experiences because I think, you know, there is the code of conduct and people really follow that. And like you said, it's such an inclusive community. People, they don't judge you or anything. They don't want to make you feel bad. They want to make you feel good and come there again and again and help out. So I'm lucky. And like you said on stack overflow, there are so many comments. I've never had those, so I can't complain.ADRIANA: That's good. That's great. That's great. Now, the other thing that I want to ask you about is because you're an AWS Community Builder as well, right? And you just got renewed for that as well, right?JULIA: Yeah.ADRIANA: Awesome. Is this your second year doing it?JULIA: Yes. Yes. So it's every year as well, not two years like the CNCF Ambassadors. But I'm very involved in the AWS community as well because part of my job at Veeam, my main product is Veeam Backup for AWS. So I have to be involved in the community and teaching, educating people about our product. And I really like database community as well. People are also inclusive and very friendly and similar to the CNCF Ambassadors. You know, you have to help out somehow. So I mostly, I create content. I give a lot of talks at AWS Community Days. I'm always, you know, visible and posting on LinkedIn, but I didn't know that this, but recently I found out that AWS has a lot of open source projects. So we were at the Open Source Summit in Seattle a month ago and AWS was there. I had a great chat with them and they were telling me about all the open source projects. I still haven't got time to check them out, but it's another opportunity to contribute to.ADRIANA: That's so cool. And what was kind of the first thing. So did you start learning about AWS because of your role at Veeam or did you get your role at Veeam because you started getting into AWS?JULIA: Yeah. The second thing that you said I started learning, you know, when I was doing the coding bootcamp and then going to some events here in New York. And one of the first events I went to before KubeCon was the AWS Summit here in New York. So Marino, you know, Marino, obviously the one that organized the KubeHuddle, and he invited me to go to the summit. It's free. Everyone is welcome to come. There will be another one this year. And then again, similar to KubeCon, I saw there was a whole community and you know, another space besides software engineering, because when you're starting out, when you're transitioning to tech, you don't know what's out there. You only know what people tell you. So I only knew the coding. You know, what the coding bootcamp was telling me, and it was telling me to become a software engineer. And then I started going to these events and seeing, oh, actually there is more than that. There is cloud. What is cloud? And then, like, oh, let me learn a little bit about these and see if I like it. And that's how I got interested. And then I deviated a little bit and went cloud native as well. But I'm very passionate and interested in both topics.ADRIANA: That's so cool. And for you, like, because I'm kind of curious because I had my own, like, expectations of cloud, cloud native. What was your expectation when you first heard of, like, cloud cloud native? Was it something that was intimidating or something where you're like, cool?JULIA: It was. I think it was more intimidating because, again, you know, coming from a non technical background, everything is new. So I already, I had, I was learning all the programming languages. You know, I was. Back then at that time, I was doing practicing react and, you know, it's a lot of things thrown at you, you know, different terms, and you have to practice and exercises. We had to build our portfolio by then, and so it was a lot. And then on top of that, I started learning about infrastructure. And what is infrastructure? Because obviously you don't have just your app. You need to host it somewhere. But I didn't know anything about that. And then I had to learn all that behind the scenes from the app, what goes on, and then the cloud and cloud native. And because of Veeam as well, I had to learn a little bit of on-prem and VMs. So, you know, it was a lot. I would say it was a lot. It's still a lot. It's very overwhelming. And tech will always be like that now with AI, and there are new tools popping up every day and new languages and new packages. So I understand when people say it's overwhelming and they want to give up. Sometimes I want to give up as well. But you know what my instructor used to say, it's a marathon and not a sprint. You don't have to know everything in, like, three months. You can take your time, three years and slowly learn everything. But people, they want to know everything. Like yesterday, they want to know everything. And that's the, our, the problem of the generation nowadays, I think.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. It's the instant gratification.JULIA: Exactly. Yes.ADRIANA: And I agree with you. Like, there's. You know, there's so many people that I meet in tech where you look at them and. And you're like, oh, my God, they're so smart. I can never be like that. It gets really depressing. I am not gonna lie. And I'll sit here...I'm like, oh, my God, they have so much stuff like me. Like, what am I worth, right?JULIA: That's how I feel when I talk to you. And, you know, being an ambassador, I get that a lot, because a lot of the ambassadors, most of them, they know so much. They've been in the industry for several years, and they are maintainers of the open source project, and they do. They. They are part of committees in the CNCF, and. And they're doing so much. And. And you. What you're doing is just a drop in the ocean, and you feel like it's not enough, and you compare yourself a lot to others. So I totally get it. And, yeah, it's imposter syndrome, right?ADRIANA: Yeah, big time. Big time. It's. It's funny because I think the. The thing that helps to ground me sometimes is talking to really smart people who also feel imposter syndrome. And I'm like, okay, all right.JULIA: I think we should talk more openly about that. You know? I know. I think everyone feels imposter syndrome. Even recently. Veeam's previous CTO, he left a few months ago. Before he left, he said, I also have imposter syndrome. So imagine a CTO saying that. But you go day by day, and, you know, we have our jobs, and we are working from home. We are not really talking to people. And you don't know if the people that are posting on LinkedIn, they have imposter syndrome, obviously. Probably they have. But you think, like, their lives are amazing, and they have everything figured out, which is the problem of social media, and. But people, they don't go advertising. Hey, I have imposter syndrome, by the way. You know, I am giving this amazing talk. I have this amazing job, but I have imposter syndrome. And it's okay. They don't have to advertise that. But it would be nice if people talked more openly about that.ADRIANA: Yeah, I completely agree. Because then. Then I think it would help make us all more human eyes. Right. Because people that we admire are probably secretly struggling. And I agree with you. That's why it's so nice to be able to have, like, open and candid conversations about mental health. And I've had the pleasure of being able to speak candidly on mental health on this podcast with various people. I've had Tim on twice.JULIA: Oh, I love Tim. Yes.ADRIANA: Oh, great. He's so great. He did a dedicated episode on mental health, and then for KubeHuddle this year, we did a mental health panel where he was part of it, and he's so open about mental health. And I love it because we need to have these more candid conversations. You know, it's funny because you say, like, you're intimidated by me whenever, whatever we talk. And honestly, I feel intimidated by you because I'm, like, you've accomplished so much in so little time, and you write four different languages, and I'm like, oh, my God, I don't know anything.JULIA: You know, I don't even. I don't even count these things. Although I have an achievement list. So on notion. Yeah, I have, like, a folder where I put my achievement, although I never look at that. But, you know, people say, oh, you've done so much. And, yeah, you speak four languages, but for me, you know, it's my life. It's my day to day routine. I don't think, oh, that's more than what I should be doing or I would be doing. But then again, you compare yourself to others and you think, no, actually, you're not doing enough, and you should be doing more. So, yeah, it's a big problem to compare yourself to others. What I've learned is we have to compare ourselves to who we were yesterday or who we were, like, a week ago and not to others directly.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And, yeah, it's something that I'm trying to. To do a little bit more than I. Yeah, because I. Yeah, I have the same problem. I'm always comparing myself to others, and I'm like, no, but, like, you know, the other thing, too, is, like, each of us has something unique to bring to the table. Right. And so I think we have to put everybody else aside and what they do and just focus on what you can do. Like, so at one point in my career, I worked at the same place as my father and my husband. We all worked at Accenture together at one point, and it was very intimidating because they're really smart guys and they're both very successful. And so I'm, like, thinking, I spent my time there thinking that I had to be like them, and I sucked. I sucked. I was trying to be something that I'm not. And then finally when I left and started, like, forging my own career and realizing, like, I don't have to follow in either of their footsteps. I can just bring my own brand. That's when I started doing well at work, because I'm like, I can't be like somebody else. I have to be like me.JULIA: Yeah. Your journey is unique and doesn't have to be like anyone else's. And that's why when people ask me, oh, what did I do? You know, like, their journey is gonna be different from mine. I can tell you what worked for me and you can try to replicate that, but, you know, the outcome might not be the same. And it totally fine, you know, if you, if you don't get a job, like, if in two years, you don't get a job in tech, if it takes you a little longer or things like that, you know, but people have to start comparing themselves to other big time, I think.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Now just, I had another question talking about, like, how you got into veeam.JULIA: Yeah.ADRIANA: You work as a community evangelist, right?JULIA: Yes. Yeah. Like, yeah, the role, the title is Global Technologies, but yes, it's evangelist or DevRel/developer advocate. It's the same. We. Michael, do you know Michael Cade? He's my colleague. You probably know him. If I show you a picture, I've heard the name and he says, we like to make noise, make noise in the community. So that's what we do. And that's what evangelists do as well. And, yeah, that's what my role at Veeam.ADRIANA: That's so great. That's so great. And that was basically like the role that you've had basically, since you finished, like your coding bootcamp.JULIA: Yes.ADRIANA: Like your first official tech role.JULIA: Yes. And I had barely finished the boot camp and I got this job. So I was very lucky, you know. But again, there is more to that than just, you know, people. They can't compare themselves to. My journey. I had a portfolio, I had a resume, but I had done a lot as well. I had created a lot of content. I had four YouTube channels. I was going to a lot of events. I was giving talks already, so really putting myself out there. And then I met Michael at KubeCon in Detroit. And that's how it started. He put me in touch with the hiring manager, and now I work in his team. And that's the power of community, you know, networking. Someone knows a job opening and then they can refer you and they'll put in a good word and that's how it goes. So I'm a big advocate for. I really love networking. I'm a big fan of that, you know, meeting people and not expecting anything in return. So, you know, just meeting to make friends and to have a good time. And if something comes out of it, that's fine, but not meeting someone to ask for a favor, I don't like that. I get a lot of messages on LinkedIn or Twitter, hey, I need a job. Can you do this or that? No. If you start a frank, start engaging with me and showing what you're doing, maybe it will be different. But don't just come and ask for. For a job, you know, that doesn't work.ADRIANA: Yeah, I completely agree. And I think you touched on something really, really important, which I call it tech karma, because I think, like, you know, and it's in the spirit of community, like, you start to know enough people where you can do, like, you know, help out a friend in tech. It can be in small ways. It can be like, oh, hey, I heard of this job posting, or, hey, you know, there's a really cool person that I think you should meet. And you make an introduction at, you know, like, a social event or whatever or on LinkedIn or Twitter, and, you know, sometimes it can and, you know, just doing, like, acts of kindness in tech, not because you want something out of it, like, just for the sake of doing it. And I do find that at some point down the road, that kindness will hit you back, that somebody else will do that act of kindness or even, you know, when you're starting out, like, my philosophy has always been, like, because my degree is in industrial engineering. You know, when I was looking for, like, a tech job, especially, you know, companies were like, oh, you must have, like, a degree in computer engineering, computer science. And I'm like, I don't have that, but I have the experience in programming for several years. And, you know, somebody had to take a chance on me. And the way I look at it, yeah, you know, I want to be able to take a chance on someone else, too, repay that kindness, not directly to the person who took a chance on me, but, like, because someone took a chance on me, I want to take a chance on someone, I want to guide them.JULIA: Exactly. Yeah. And same with me. You know, they took a chance on me at Veeam, and it was my first job coming out of a boot camp. And I know a lot of people struggle, you know, with their first job in tech, and they saw that I had the hunger to learn, and that was enough. Sometimes you don't need much on your resume or you don't need a computer science degree, but you need to show that you're willing to put in the work and you want to learn and you're going to be there when things get hard. So. But a lot of people, they want the easy way out and they want, you know, they, they think, oh, tech, they see dollar signs and they think that's it. But no, there is a lot of work that you have to put into to work in tech.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely see, like, you put yourself out there all the time and obviously, like, your hard work has paid out and you always give, like, really great nuggets. Like, I definitely recommend that you follow Julia on, on LinkedIn and on Twitter because she's always posting some, like, really good nuggets of, like, just little bits of advice.JULIA: Yeah. Life in general as well.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's great. Especially, like, if you're getting started out in tech and, you know, whether you're a student just graduating or someone who's, you know, doing a career change, I think the advice that you give is, is great and relevant. I wanted to ask you also just before we, we wrap up, because you're doing, you're organizing KCD New York, which by the time this airs will have passed. But I always like to chat with folks. I think you're like, I think the third person that I've talked to on this podcast, third or fourth, about who's organized some sort of conference, and I've talked to Marino, I've talked to Amanda Brock, who organizes OpenUK. Who else that I talked to? Oh, Edith Puclla. She's great. She's doing like the KCD Peru. What's your experience been? You know, like, having participated, having been an organizer of KubeHuddle last year, how did that help you with organizing KCD New York this year?JULIA: So I knew what had to be done. You know, we had a list of things that needed to be done in order to get a successful event. I think that was helpful from KubeHuddle. But again, each event is different. It's a different venue. And you need, every time you need new sponsors and then publishing on social media about the event, getting people to register and buy a ticket, all these things are different from event to event. And I think the biggest takeaway is that when you go to an event, you don't see how much work has been put in. You think, oh, great event. I'm just enjoying myself today and then I'm going home after that and that's it. You forget about it. But the organizers, they've been putting the work for, like, at least a year. And they, you know, they, they've been, my case, anxious about it. Is it gonna work out? Are we going to sell enough tickets? Are people going to enjoy it? And then, like, at the day of, we want everything to go as planned, everything to go perfect. And even after that, you know, there is the post event and what did go, what went right, what went wrong, and, you know, and start planning for the next one. So a lot of times for attendees, an event is just like one more thing on their calendar. But for, for organizers, it's a lot of work hours put into that, you know, a lot of work.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. And even when you have a whole team of organizers. Yeah, a lot of work. And how many volunteers for KCD...JULIA: I think we have probably, like eight volunteers. We had a lot of organizers. We were ten, although two of them won't be able to come tomorrow, and a few of them have disappeared. It's normal. The work, a lot of times ends up being on a few people instead of the whole group, especially if it's a big group. Everything worked out, and, yeah, we have a few volunteers tomorrow just to make sure everything works, because also the organizers, they're gonna be busy with most important, the most important things. I'm also giving a keynote, so morning. I'm gonna be busy, but I'm really excited. It's going to be a great event.ADRIANA: That's so exciting. And you have AWS Community Day later in August as well.JULIA: Yeah, August 29, I think. Yeah.ADRIANA: You're an organizer for that as well.JULIA: Yes, I know, I know. I'm starting to regret that.ADRIANA: I can see why you weren't able to help out with KubeHuddle.JULIA: Yes, I told Marino I have too much on my plate. Yeah.ADRIANA: Yeah. Very understandable. Because...JULIA: But I have a hard time saying no, you know, I'm still learning that. It's really hard. Yeah.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah. I have the same problem, and I've had to, like, there was one. One conference where I got accepted, and it was like an online conference, but it was going to be for, like, a new talk, and it was going to coincide with, like, KubeCon this year, and I'm like, I can't. Yeah, I hate to say no, but I can.JULIA: I know. I feel really bad, but. But, yeah, we. We have to prioritize. We need to learn how to prioritize, and, you know, we can't be everywhere at the same time.ADRIANA: Yeah, but it's hard, you know, when you're trying to, like, build up your reputation. And then people ask you to do stuff means that they're starting to pay attention to.JULIA: Exactly. Yes.ADRIANA: I know. It's like, me next time.JULIA: And then you're afraid you don't want to say no.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's. It's always nice to be surrounded by people who, like, you know, it. I think oftentimes, like, our guts are telling us what the right thing to do is, which is like, having to say no. And sometimes running it past a friend or two to just validate your gut feeling is so helpful, because otherwise, you're wracked with guilt. And even if you say no, you're still going to feel guilty. But actually, I heard a really kind of interesting thing on a podcast recently, because every time you're saying no to something, you're saying yes to something else. Like, the yes can be even just yes to yourself. And they suggested, I think this was like. I think this was like, a joint episode with a podcast called the Happiness Lab, and I think Cautionary Tales. And they were basically saying for the thing that you said no, to put it on your calendar, because then when the date comes, it's not a reminder of, like, oh, I said no to this. I'm gonna cry. Oh, my God. Thank God I said no to this.JULIA: I'm so busy, I wouldn't have been able to. Exactly.ADRIANA: So it's a validation. So I thought that was, like, a really interesting take on it. I definitely would like to do more of that. Yeah, it's a journey.JULIA: Exactly. Yeah. It's a marathon and not a sprint. Yeah, it's a journey.ADRIANA: Exactly. We have to keep that in mind. Now, before we go, I wanted to ask you one more question, because you do have, like, a background as a lawyer. Do you find that that background has served you well as, like, part of your current work?JULIA: Not really, to be honest. Not yet. My manager, he says yes, you know, because I'm so good at, you know, public speaking and writing blogs, etc. So probably my background in law, because you have to read a lot, probably that has helped. But I started getting more interest on open source licensing, and having. Then having the background in law really helps. So I started, like, doing some research recently. Nothing big, but I want to. I want to learn more about that. And I think, you know, there are a lot of lawyers that work on that area. Maybe. Maybe one day I can. And I can work with that. You know, I'm just interested at the moment.ADRIANA: That's so cool. That's so cool. And by the way, I will. I will mention something interesting that I, that I read once, and I think it applies to people like you and me, where the things that come easily to us were like, whatever. That was, like, no effort. And the things that other people accomplished were like, oh, my God, that's so incredible. I'm saying this as a reminder to both you and me that let's. Let's celebrate the things that we do well. Even if they seemingly come easy to us.JULIA: Yeah, even the little things.ADRIANA: Exactly. They're still impressive to other people who don't, who might not necessarily have those skills come as easily. Yeah. As a reminder to our, to our viewers and listeners as well, because it's very easy to get wrapped up in that. Well, we're coming up on time, but before we go, I was wondering if there are any parting words of wisdom that you would like to share with our audience.JULIA: No. Just thank everyone for listening and, you know, follow your podcast. I love listening to all your episodes. Feel free to follow me and connect with me on social media if you have any questions. And, you know, keep doing what you're doing. I'm sure you're doing great. Don't give up whatever hardship you have, you know, again, the journey is not easy. It's a marathon, not a sprint, but everything works out in the end So. Yeah.ADRIANA: Absolutely. Those are great words of wisdom. Well, thank you, Julia, 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...JULIA: 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/geekingouthe.

About our guest:Rynn Mancuso (they/them) is the developer community manager at Honeycomb.io, a contributor to OpenTelemetry, and a CNCF Ambassador. They led developer communities at Honeycomb, New Relic, Tidelift, Mozilla and Wikimedia. They're also an editor of Contributor Covenant 3 with the Organization for Ethical Source.Find our guest on:Twitter (X)LinkedInMastodonFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)ARIA (web accessibility)CNCF Ambassador ProgramCNCF Deaf and Hard of Hearing Working GroupAdaptive ClimbingCNCF AI Working GroupContributor CovenantOrganization for Ethical SourceOpenTelemetry Has Gone Multi-Lingual!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 Rynn Mancuso. Welcome, Rynn.RYNN: Hi, glad to be here.ADRIANA: Super excited to have you. And where are you calling from today?RYNN: Oakland, California.ADRIANA: Awesome. Okay, well, we shall start off first things first with our lightning round questions. Are you ready?RYNN: Yes.ADRIANA: All right, let's do this. First question, are you a lefty or a righty?RYNN: Righty.ADRIANA: Do you prefer iPhone or Android?RYNN: Android.ADRIANA: Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?RYNN: Mac.ADRIANA: What's your favorite programming language?RYNN: JavaScript.ADRIANA: All right, do you prefer dev or ops?RYNN: Ops.ADRIANA: Do you prefer JSON or YAML?RYNN: You know, I kind of hate them both, but my friend has cats named JSON and YAML. And so I'm going to say JSON is a shadow of a black cat who is very attractive, but YAML is extremely sweet. So I'm going to say YAML wins the day.ADRIANA: All right, love it. Next question. Spaces or tabs?RYNN: Spaces.ADRIANA: And then do you prefer to consume content through video or text?RYNN: Text.ADRIANA: And finally, what is your superpower?RYNN: Building relationships.ADRIANA: Awesome. Congratulations for being the fastest responder to the lightning round questions. Well, I wanted to. One thing that I wanted to talk about today is accessibility in tech and the importance of accessibility in tech, because oftentimes it ends up coming as an afterthought, if that. So, I guess, first things first, do you have any, like what, what are your thoughts around the accessibility landscape in tech? What do you see that's been super awesomely done? And what would you see that's been very poorly done?RYNN: Yeah, it's an interesting time in terms of accessibility in tech, because when many of us, and I'm included in this group of people, first built the current standards, the WCAG, other standards for web accessibility, the web was a much simpler place than it was today. And we, you know, we emphasize the importance of writing semantic HTML, of making every element needed for accessibility, from alt text to ARIA, elements that allow you to run more advanced controls, all just part of good semantic HTML. And if you're speaking semantic HTML, the thinking went, your content is going to be very easily made accessible. Right now, the web in general is burdened with many, many components that are coming from frameworks that are coming from a range of different tools. Often your front end has a very complicated tool chain supporting it. Lots of places, plugins, lots of things that you're sucking from other places, perhaps ads, if you're serving content. All of this is more complicated for screen readers to navigate because there's lots of components. It's more complicated for people with ADHD and other cognitive challenges because there's more things to distract them.And it's more complicated for folks who might have mobility disabilities and not use standard pointer systems. And so there's some really neat innovation coming out to address framework accessibility. And folks are building accessible frameworks, but it's still a much bigger bridge for us to cross than we anticipated with the original. And also, I think if you extend that from the front end into developer tooling, the tools that we're looking at are more and more complicated. They're more and more visual, because it turns out that things that involve sorting and classifying and pattern recognition in text AI can do very well. But humans are very good at spotting visual anomalies. That would take AI a long time because they need to know the algorithm for the anomaly. And so using developer tools and using so many of them is really, I think, taking accessibility in a lot of new directions because it's tricky to provide an equivalent user experience for everybody.ADRIANA: Have you seen like, are you. I know that it's been like slow moving, but are you happy with the direction in which things are going?RYNN: I'm definitely seeing things getting better. I'm seeing more concern and awareness for accessibility within tech. There's really a movement that I think really got accelerated by the pandemic and people getting to sort of see how they were in different situations than what they were used to, of folks discovering that they experienced some form of neurodivergence, particularly like lots of developers, lots of ops people are realizing that part of what made them good at their job was some form of neurodivergence, which can be very different. When you're trapped inside the house, the impact that that can have on you can be very different. And so I'm seeing folks come out as having these identities and have more sympathy, more interest in providing accessible experiences. At the same time, I think lots of folks still don't know how to do it, and we could be doing a better job of teaching and I think a better job of incentivizing folks to make accessibility something that's built in from the start and expected as table stakes, rather than something you're retrofitting for, because retrofitting almost always results in inferior user experience because you just didn't design it. With this set of users in mind, yeah, yeah.ADRIANA: It's basically you're saying, let's shift left on accessibility, because otherwise you're doing like a square peg into a round hole, which never ends well.RYNN: Right. And the reality is that when you build things for accessibility, you are generally making them better for everyone. The Google crawlers that do SEO, for example, are an example of a headless browser, similar to a screen reader, that has a sort of, that might have a sort of different head than a standard browser or, you know, a text only browser. It renders content quite differently. And so what you do to improve accessibility for these alternative user agents is also improving accessibility for SEO. It, another part of accessibility, frankly, is good user experience, particularly when you get to accessibility for folks with cognitive challenges, because the reality is that many, some people have formal diagnosed ADHD and it's hard to focus, and different elements on the screen will make it more likely that their focus gets hijacked. But we all have things periodically that challenge our ability to stay focused. Whether we, we're under a lot of stress, whether we're checking into our systems because we've gotten a page while we were on the train and we're trying to do it from our mobile phone, whether, again, we've gotten a page and we're at a loud bar.And so when you improve the experience to make logical elements, draw people's focus, to make it easier to find different elements in the user interface for users with cognitive disabilities, you're actually improving it for everyone.ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, you know, it's interesting. I remember a couple years ago when I was still working at Tucows, and I remember publishing some, some blog posts on their blog, and I was talking to the person who was responsible for managing the blog, and they're like, oh, make sure you have alt text for all your images. And I'm like, oh, that, you know, like, that's something that, you know, folks take for granted, right? Like, I can see the image, why do I need the alt text? And ever since then, like, he, they got me in the habit of always, whenever I write my blog posts now and include images, I always make sure I not only have the caption, but I also have the alt text. So it's gotten me into that new habit, which I think is very cool.RYNN: That's lovely.ADRIANA: And then the other thing that I was thinking of as well is I remember when Hachyderm became a thing on Mastodon and folks were talking about, when you write out hashtags, make sure that you use camel case because it's easier. I think it's something to do with. It has some sort of accessibility consideration. I can't remember exactly what it is, but because of that, I also always try to keep that in mind when writing out hashtags, which is kind of annoying. It's annoying in the sense where I'm trying to do camel case, and then some platforms have the hashtag autocomplete, and then they'll autocomplete it with all lowercase. I'm like, damn it, you're ruining my perfecty...you're ruining my camel case work. I put so much effort into doing this, and then you've, like, obliterated it. But it's like, just these little things, even, that we can do to just help make things a little bit more accessible for folks.RYNN: Right. Yeah. The accessibility concern there is that a screen reader will try to pronounce it all as one word if you have lowercase. But if it's camel case, then it understands to stop between words.ADRIANA: Ah, gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then the other aspect that I always think of, too, is like, from the podcasting standpoint, I always make sure that I have, like, captions included with my podcast. And so I think most of the production in my podcast actually comes from editing the captions and providing a transcript, because I have an AI tool that generates the captions, and it does a half decent job of it. But there are things that it misses. So me having to go through all of the entire transcript of each show and making sure that it's conveying the correct information so that if folks are using closed captioning on YouTube or if they want to just read the transcript from the show notes, they have that opportunity, which, you know, again, it's not necessarily things that I would have thought of in the past, but I'm grateful to folks who have pointed me in that direction.RYNN: Right.ADRIANA: And then the other thing that I wanted to mention, too, is, you know, I always think about accessibility, like, you know, in terms of you and I got to spend some time together at the climbing gym at a couple of conferences, and you've opened my eyes to, like, the world of paraclimbing, which I think is really, really cool. I mean, paraclimbers are like next level awesomeness. Would you mind talking a little bit about paraclimbing and even, like, how you got into climbing?RYNN: Sure. So I got into adaptive climbing shortly after the pandemic. I honestly, there was a group in my town, I saw them advertise on the a disability LISTSERV. I thought immediately, oh, this is something super exciting to me. I always thought of climbing as an extreme sport that sort of only people in really good shape could do. I'd never thought, oh, yeah, I, as a disabled person, could be a climber. It was definitely like, you know, there are certain stereotypes of climbing, especially from the outside, that you're like, I can't do this. But I was super excited to go try it.And so I went down and it just became something I was really excited about, started to do, you know, a couple times a week. Paraclimbing, I think, is pretty unique. Obviously, there's lots of people with lots of different types of disabilities who climb, but many of the folks in paraclimbing, we have disabilities that actually impact our mobility, our ability to walk. Some folks might be missing part of a limb. We have consciously chosen a sport that we are bad at according to any conventional standard, like, by definition, right. This is a group of people who have, you know, failed walking so badly that we use devices to walk for us, like wheelchairs or crutches, and yet, like walking up a hundred feet or thousands of feet in the case of outdoor climbing, wall. Sounds like a great idea. Yeah.So it's a very, it's a sport full of people who are trying really hard. It's a very tight knit community. Climbing in general can be very tight knit because your safety is always on the line with the person you are climbing with. But paraclimbing, I think especially so because people are having to actively figure out how to adapt climbing to make it work for them. There's no sort of bible for how you climb as an adaptive climber. It's so specific to your body. There are things that work for lots of people, but it's so personal. And so people are figuring it out together how to do it.What's interesting, and I think at the end of the day, paraclimbing and disabled climbers challenge the idea that we have that climbing should be about getting to the top as fast as possible, that it should be fundamentally goal oriented. Lots of climbers with mobility disabilities particularly, I see folks climb very slowly because they have to move slowly. And it's, I think, adding something unique to climbing as a sport to start thinking about it. Less is about getting to the top, doing things as fast as possible, and more is about the experience of climbing, about building strength, about solving problems, and, you know, like the way we talk about climbing and especially competitive climbing. It doesn't emphasize that. It emphasizes getting to the top of the mountain. It emphasizes how fast can you speed climb, and paracliming is the opposite of that, and I think has a lot to teach the climbing community.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true for me as a climber, especially because my family climbs. And so I'm constantly comparing myself to my husband and my daughter. And it's taken me a long time personally to just get over, like, oh, they're, you know, they're getting some bouldering problem that I can't. Getting over that and just focusing on, like, am I pushing myself? Am I improving as a climber? So it's not like the competition against others, it's the competition against self. What are you doing to challenge your mental limits, your physical limits within what you're comfortable doing? Because I think that's really, at the end of the day, is climbing is all about what you're, what you're comfortable doing and how far you're willing to push yourself to do it, really?RYNN: Exactly. Exactly. It's about personally pushing yourself. And I think comparison is definitely the thief of joy within climbing, because everyone, not just disabled people, has a unique body. There are lots of things about your body that go into which moves are easy for you and which moves are hard for you. For example, I'm super tall, so any kind of sit start where you have to start very close to the ground is super painful for me. I hate it. I can barely get in those positions. Adriana is, you know, you're super short, and so big reachy moves are difficult for you.ADRIANA: They are, yeah, they're, they're the crux for me. They. They make me angry, and in probably the same way that the sit starts make you angry.RYNN: Right, right. But I have big, long arms, so I can often just reach up for that kind of hold.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally, totally.RYNN: Yeah.ADRIANA: And I think that's. That's the thing. As you said, it's like knowing, like, working...what...working with your body and understanding how it works. And, and that's. That's one thing that I've personally, on my climbing journey, I've had to realize. Cause, like, my daughter is similar. Similar size. She's more slender than me, she's a little bit taller, but similar size.So I'm like, oh, she does whatever move. I'm like, then this is the way that I'm gonna do it. And then I realize, oh, I don't have maybe the same level of flexibility or, like, I just don't have the courage to do as risky a move as she's doing. And so now I have to, like, rethink my strategy. Like, how can I do this within the confines of what I'm comfortable doing, knowing how my body's gonna function?RYNN: Right, right. She's 20 years younger than you, and it's much less of a big deal for her if she gets injured because younger people bounce back quicker.ADRIANA: Exactly, exactly. But I mean, generally, just like, you know, that is what I love about the climbing community, though, in general, is, like, it is a very, like, welcoming community, and folks are always cheering each other on. Even, like, going to new climbing gyms in different cities, there's, you can, like, hang out with a random group of people that you'll probably never see again for a session and just climb together and cheer each other on. And I think that's, you know, we need more welcoming moments like these. And then the fact that, like, it's nice to see, like, you know, after you and I met, like, I noticed, like, in the last year, my. My local gym has been doing some adaptive climbing. And, you know, and then I thought back to, like, you know, when. When we were climbing a couple of times in. At, like, KubeCon, Detroit, and Open Source Summit last year, and. And, you know, and you kind of opened my eyes to adaptive climbing. I'm like, oh, this is so nice that, like, my local gym is, like, really embracing adaptive climbing and, like, really bringing that, like, making it more inclusive for folks, because I think I feel like that is, like, the. The essence of. Of the climbing community and also, like, just the range, as you said, of, like, different types of adaptive climbing. Like, you and I were talking at one point where you were, you told me about, like, climbers who are blind and they have somebody who calls out, holds for them as they climb. Like, I would have never in a million years guessed that that is something that was possible. And so, like, it kind of warms my heart that it really is, like, a sport that's, like, really open for everybody.RYNN: Exactly. And, man, like, as a mobility impaired climber, comparing yourself to a blind climber is definitely the theme of joy. They're so strong! Everything works.ADRIANA: Absolutely. Well, I did want to switch gears for a sec and also talk about another thing, which is, like, you're a CNCF Ambassador and you just got renewed for another couple of years, so congrats. Yay.RYNN: Excited to be an Ambassador with you.ADRIANA: Yeah, definitely. And I was wondering if you could tell folks about your own CNCF Ambassadorship journey, like, what got you to apply in the first place and what got you to continue doing the work, like, make you want to continue being an Ambassador.RYNN: Sure. So I became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Ambassador because I was already doing a lot of community building work within OpenTelemetry. And the Ambassador program has lots of support for people who organize meetups. And, you know, I was super excited to get that support to be sort of better connected to CNCF. I also, at the time Adriana and I started, there weren't really many Ambassadors who had a focus outside Kubernetes. So it was an opportunity to bring more awareness of our project, OpenTelemetry, which is the second fastest growing and, I think, second largest project within the Cloud Native Computing foundation to the broader Cloud Native Computing Foundation community to really attempt to make it as ubiquitous as Kubernetes. I've stayed in the program and continued to meet the requirements, less because of that, because much of that has happened over the past couple years that Adriana and I have been working on the project and more because the people in the Ambassador program are really, truly wonderful. And I love getting the opportunity to connect with people who are passionate about cloud native from all over the world that I get in the Ambassador program.ADRIANA: And I have to say, like, I think when we were first, like, newly minted Ambassadors last year in Amsterdam, there was, like, we attended our first CNCF Ambassador breakfast. And I, you know, hats off to you. Like, you are such a social butterfly. And I sometimes, like, I can be, like, sometimes in crowds, I can be very, like, I can shut down because of the introvert in me. And it was thanks to you that, you know, like, you went out and started introducing yourself and, like, to. To various folks and, and allowed me to tag along for the ride, and that way got to meet some, like, new Ambassadors that I, I probably would have been the person standing off in the corner because I'm like, oh, my God, this is too overwhelming for me.So, anyway, I want to call that out. Like, hats off to you. You really are like a lovely community builder. You do such a great job of, of connecting people. So I can totally vouch for your superpower on that. And what I know that obviously, we're involved together in the OTel End User SIG. Are there other areas in CNCF that you're involved in that you're super passionate about?RYNN: Definitely my biggest investment in CNCF is the OTel End User SIG. However, I've been involved in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing working group as an act of solidarity with other folks with disabilities. I spoke on a panel at KubeCon EU with a lot of folks from that community, and they have really I think some of the hardest time, you know, because my disability, when I sit down at my desk, it doesn't impact me all that much. Sure, I have ADHD, but so do half of the developers, but my mobility disability doesn't really have any impact. And in fact, once we started interviewing remotely, it was great because I didn't even have to disclose that I had a disability until after I was hired. And for the deaf and hard of hearing folks, it's very challenging because so much of the information about new technologies you get at conferences, you get by sort of watching videos and webinars. It's tough just to follow things in text. And people don't always make things captioned.They don't always make things accessible. And in the case of some deaf people, in fact, their first language is sign language. Sign languages aren't related word by word to their parent, to any spoken language. They. For example, American Sign Language is called American Sign Language because it shares many of the cultural assumptions of American English. What it does not share is the grammatical assumptions and the ways of saying things, because there is a language called signing exact English, and that is not so much a language as spelling out written English letter by letter. That is extremely slow. It's not a good way to communicate.So, for example, you may have three gestures to communicate an entire sentence in sign language because the grammar is set up to be economical in terms of movement. It uses facial expressions, etcetera. And so if folks' first language is written English, if folks first language is sign language, then when they learn written English, that is a second language. And they also don't have the advantage that the rest of us have of learning how to both write and speak at the same time and being able to move back and forth between the two modalities. It is strictly a visual modality. And so it can be more challenging for folks to get involved in the community, both because everyone is speaking English out loud and because written English is not the exact analog of their signed language. There's no written version of the sign language. So I have a lot of respect for folks in this community, and there's just amazing people becoming engineers with all sorts of situations, everything from a little bit hard of hearing to, you know, folks who are completely deaf and whose first language is sign language. And I've learned so much from the vibrancy and the energy that these folks bring to this very hard problem, because literally, like, the second they go on a phone interview, their disability is exposed.ADRIANA: Right, right.RYNN: That takes a lot. Besides that, I'm involved in the CNCF AI working group. I have mostly been involved in sort of community building exercises for them, like managing presences at events, doing user surveys. They're working on white papers on how AI is being used in cloud native, which is super exciting to sort of see this space grow and change. And I'm really stoked that that's happening outside the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. I work on contributor Covenant 3. I built an enforcement system and enforcement manual for contributor Covenant 2, and that's led to now I'm one of the lead editors on 3, which we have started on this year. We're at the 10th anniversary of this important code of conduct that was one of the first codes of conduct available for open source projects.The CNCF uses a modified version of the contributor code of conduct across all of their projects. So do lots of other major projects. I believe Google's open source team used it, at least for a while. They may, I think, have transitioned to their own thing, Microsoft, lots of big companies, lots of big foundations that really took it on and made it their own. And I'm excited to be revisiting this ten years after the first code of conduct, because when we thought of the first one, we were a bunch of Americans who were frankly pissed off about things like sexual harassment at conferences. And now much of that has settled down. Conference culture has changed for the better, so that there's almost an expectation that there's a code of conduct. You don't see things like booth babes on the show floor much anymore.The position that women and non binary people have and the relationship to sexuality has really changed in the industry. And now what we are taking on is how do we internationalize this? How do we genuinely consider developers from all over the world, how do we consider different concepts of justice, different concepts of what is right, and still continue to advocate for inclusion in a wide range of cultural contexts? And how do we make this code of conduct better for the wide range of people, things people are doing these days? Because when we designed it initially, we thought, well, there will be conferences and there will be contributing pull requests to open source conference, to open source things. And now it's way more than that. We're doing way more in tech, and it's super exciting to think about all these places in which a code of conduct can be used. And it's also super exciting to be able to evolve away from strictly sort of punitive measures like, no, don't harass people, because some of that groundwork has been taken care of and it's more expected that you're not going to do those things. Now we can start talking about desired behaviors and ways to contribute to a community positively, ways to maintain the tone of a community. And so I'm really excited about the cc three work this year.ADRIANA: That's so cool. And, you know, it's interesting, too, because, like, these are the types of things that I think most of us just take for granted. Right? There is a code of conduct, but there is a group of humans behind that code of conduct that have put a lot of time and effort in crafting that out to make sure that, you know, you're covering all the bases as much as possible. And it's cool to bring awareness to that because, like I said, it's absolutely something that we take for granted in this area.RYNN: Right. And what I would say is people who write codes of conduct get lots of hate mail. There is a group of folks who is highly invested in being able to behave badly.ADRIANA: Oh, wow.RYNN: Of course, they will claim that they really support free speech or that they think everyone is equal and they want to get past this identity nonsense when you have a thing that says, no, we shall not discriminate on the basis of ability, race, national origin, and they will hide behind those kinds of arguments, especially on the Internet. But the reality is they are invested in being able to continue behaving the way that they want to anyone, and not invested in being able to show up in a community and participate in a way that's inclusive and respectful. And so as a code of conduct author, we get lots of hate mail. Many of us have, like, elaborate personal security systems that make us hard to track down because folks have received threats to their home, etcetera. So it's really important for you to go to the authors of your favorite code of conduct and, you know, make the effort to put pull request to show that you're using that code of conduct. Write them a letter saying that you actually appreciate their work because they don't get those letters.ADRIANA: Wow. That is. I had no idea it was, like, so, so brutal out there for code of conduct authors. And I appreciate you bringing this to light because I honestly, I would have never guessed that would be so, like, wow, just an awful experience.RYNN: Yeah. Yeah. There's always a pool of people who are like, the status quo is fine because it is serving me, and I am highly invested in keeping that the same instead of being like, you know, how can we change text so that everyone feels welcome? So there's more text. So we're all supported, and it's sad to see.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. And so in spite of all this, like, what keeps you continuing to work on the code of conduct? Cause, I mean, I'm sure the hate mail can be scary at times.RYNN: It can be scary at times. And, you know, I didn't work on CC one, which is when we received, really the worst of it, but some of my co editors did. And I'm aware of those stories. And I think what keeps me doing it is that I genuinely believe that making tech, and especially cloud native, in our case, a more opening and welcoming place, makes better technology. It makes better user interfaces. When we think about the needs of a wide range of users, from folks who need accessibility to folks who might not speak the language of the interface as a first language, to sort of thinking about internationalization, all of these things are better thought about by a diversity of people. And so I feel that code of conduct work, and I also was involved in rolling out the code of conduct system across all of Mozilla's projects. I didn't write their code of conduct.It was one of the first codes of conduct that did have desired behaviors, but sort of evangelized it into all the communities, did workshops on it. I believe that codes of conduct have the power to help us heal some divides within the tech community and bring people together. And I feel like having a safe environment should be table stakes for everyone. And I want to work to make that happen.ADRIANA: That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone deserves to be in a place where they feel included and safe. And it's nice to see that, like, there is work going on in the community to help make that happen. Even just going back to the work that you said that you were doing with the deaf and hard of hearing group, even, like, I noticed in, I think, the last KubeCon that they actually had, like, someone who was basically, as the keynotes were happening, actually, I think as the talks were happening, they had someone in sign language. Like, basically, I don't know if that's the appropriate term, but translating into sign language as people spoke, which, very cool. And again, until you see that, you're like, oh, my God, I've been taking for granted this entire time that I can hear people speak, and some people, like, they can't.RYNN: And something you don't see at KubeCon is that they have a system behind the scenes that is AI based, that takes in audio and text and puts out captions or audio in a person's native language, and lots of people are listening to it. You get to see the sign language interpreters, because at least right now, that still can't be AI'd. The translation is too different. The translation is too different. It's visual material, but that's a tiny element of all the internationalization that is going on in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And we're also seeing, you know, in the last year, so they've launched KubeCon China, which is actually getting folks from behind the wall. They've launched Kube Day India. India is one of the largest places that contributes to open source, and they contribute in ways that are quite different than the way we think about contribution in the west, because they go to code clubs, which are like meetups.They'll go to code club on Friday. Like, you'll go to code club on Friday night, and you'll work through a contribution together. And you might not necessarily be, like, super skilled or all working on the same project, but your folks are learning together. But then from a code of conduct and a behavior standpoint that poses lots of challenges that we don't experience when we think about, oh, what's the code of conduct for people in the US who are sitting at home typing on their computer on GitHub, their experience is very different. And similarly, you know, China has lots of very specific rules about information going in and out of China. India, there is caste based oppression that can happen. For example, when I was at Mozilla to manage these code clubs, we ended up hiring a contractor in India who had a very good knowledge of, like, western feminism, had sort of been to school for women's studies and also of Indian culture, who could be our translator when issues came up, because we were like, this person is writing to us that people from this particular neighborhood can't feel welcome at this code club. And we care about this, and we don't understand the dynamics.And then it's like, oh, well, these people are actually low caste, quote unquote. And this other caste, you know, they're trained from birth to hate these people. And, like, we needed an explainer.ADRIANA: Wow. Wow, that's so wild. Yeah. These things that you just take for granted, you know, doing, working in western culture and even just going back to, like, the internationalization thing, I think I saw recently somewhere that, you know, I think the OpenTelemetry website, like opentelemetry.io. I think there they're doing. They're translating it into more languages. And I'm part of this group of Brazilians on CNCF Slack, and someone was asking around, oh, anyinterest in doing a translation into Brazilian Portuguese for opentelemetry.io. Because again, it's like if your working language is English, you totally take it for granted. But that is not the case for everybody.And there are some very smart people out there whose first language is not English. They don't feel comfortable speaking it, and why should they? And so, like, let's make it more inclusive for them by making things available in their native language or for them to be able to contribute in their native language and feel comfortable. And that's another aspect that we so easily forget about.RYNN: Right. And I should put in a plug that Contributor Covenant 2 and Contributor Covenant 3 are managed through the Organization for Ethical Source. And if you speak more than one language, particularly if you were very fluent in the culture of the countries that speak a non english language, we could really use you. First of all, we want to, we're trying to make sure that we have translations into as many languages as possible of CC 2. And CC 2 is sort of a direct translation from CC from, from the English. But what we would like to do with CC 3 is get folks in who have already translated CC 2 and thought some about, like, what that would mean inside their culture so that we can create translations of the code that take into mind that folks have different concepts of what justice is. Folks have different ideas about enforcement in different cultures. And we weren't able to keep that. We weren't able to, like, figure that out when we were writing CC 2 because the pressure was so great just to reduce the amount of harassment that folks were experiencing in tech. And now that we're working on CC 3, we have an opportunity to create that.ADRIANA: So it's not just a matter of doing a direct translation, but also, like, capturing the cultural nuances. And it is. What it sounds like?RYNN: Yeah, yeah. Probably the easiest path is to work on or review a direct translation of CC 2, and then you have a starting point for thinking about, okay, what's different in my culture that I would like reflected in a version of CC 3 that takes, that really is culturally sensitive, because that's an important part of localization and globalization efforts, is it's not just like the English words showing up in the other language. It's, does this make sense? And for our code of conduct, I think it's especially important that people are able to internalize and grasp the precepts of the code of conduct. So going back to the caste example in India, for example, we would include caste based discrimination directly. And folks in that culture are aware of what that is and how to impact that, that sort of thing. Yeah, just lots of things around cultures, ideas of justice are really different, and we want the code of conduct to be something that is so simple that people can internalize it within their own framework of justice and inclusion.ADRIANA: Gotcha. Gotcha. Wow. I have learned so much today. This has been such a great conversation, and thank you for enlightening me on so many different areas. We are coming up on time, but before we go, was wondering if there's any either a hot take or a piece of advice that you'd like to leave folks off with.RYNN: You know, people and people's individual stories are a really important part of technology. I think we underrate that. We think that it's all about the best tech, but the reality is it's about the human relationships. It's about how tech supports our ability to be human. And I think, you know, my advice is don't lose sight of that.ADRIANA: Oh, that's so great. I really love that. What a, what a what? Very lovely parting words. Well, thank you so much, Rynn, for geeking out with me today. Y'all don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check our show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...RYNN: Peace out and geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About our guest:Rizèl Scarlett is a Staff Developer Advocate at TBD, Block's newest business unit. With a diverse background spanning GitHub, startups, and non-profit organizations, Rizèl has cultivated a passion for utilizing emerging technologies to champion equity within the tech industry. She moonlights as an Advisor at G{Code} House, an organization aimed at teaching women of color and non-binary people of color to code. Rizèl believes in leveraging vulnerability, honesty, and kindness as means to educate early-career developers.Find our guest on:Twitter (X)LinkedInTwitchWebsiteFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:International Left Handers Day (August 13th)Kotlin (programming language)Resilient Coders (coding bootcamp)Angie JonesBrian DouglasG{Code} House (non-profit)TBDGitHub UniverseKansas City Developer Conference (KCDC)Verifiable Credential (W3C)Decentralized Web Node (DWN)Additional notes:TBD on TwitchTranscript: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 with me today, I have Rizelle Scarlett. Welcome, Rizel.RIZEL: Hi. Thank you for having me. It's super fun already, even though the podcast has just started.ADRIANA: Yay! I'm so excited to have you on. And where are you calling from today?RIZEL: I'm calling from Boston, Massachusetts, right now.ADRIANA: Awesome. So, fellow, fellow east coaster. As someone who lives in Boston, I gotta ask. So I just came back from a vacation trip to Stowe, Vermont. Have you ever been up that way? Because I have a bunch of family that. That goes up to Stowe, so I'm wondering if that's, like, a destination for Bostonians.RIZEL: Interesting. I never really go to Vermont or Maine, but it's like a place I want to go. Like, it looks. When I see the pictures, it looks pretty. It's really weird. Like, sometimes when you live close to places, you don't go visit them, but you go to the far place.ADRIANA: It is so true. Because it's like, it'll always be there. Whatever.RIZEL: I take it for granted.ADRIANA: It's so true. It's so true. Well, before we get started with the meaty bits, I always subject my guests to some icebreaker questions. So are you ready?RIZEL: I'm ready. Let's go.ADRIANA: Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?RIZEL: I'm a righty. Like, all the way.ADRIANA: All right, awesome. I do want to mention, even though this is coming out sometime in the fall, today is international lefty day.RIZEL: Oh, wow. Shout out to all the lefties.ADRIANA: I observe it because I'm a lefty.RIZEL: I'm glad you get a day. I don't...Y'all need it. I get it.ADRIANA: We get screwed over on various things, like scissors. So.RIZEL: Yes. I was just saying that scissors are hard for y'all.ADRIANA: I know. I just end up using, like, right hand people scissors, left handed. And it's a little awkward, but it's okay. All right, next question. Are you an iPhone or Android person?RIZEL: I used to be a die hard Android person, and then, I don't know, like, once I started into tech, my job gave me a Mac, and then they gave me AirPods at one job, so I just slowly switched over to all things Apple. So now I have the iPhone.ADRIANA: It's the gateway drug. It was my gateway drug, too. Like, when I got my first personal Mac, I was like, boom. That's it.RIZEL: Right? Wait, wait...iMessage is all synced. Everything's just perfect. I was like, I can't go back to Android now. Sorry.ADRIANA: I feel, ya. I had a BlackBerry before my iPhone, so I never knew Android other than helping my mom when my dad bought her an Android for a very brief period of time. And then I said, screw it, I'm getting you an iPhone. But she'd ask me for tech support on Android. I'm like...RIZEL: What do I do? Yeah, I don't. When my mom asked me for help, I'm like, girl. She's like, but you're a computer person. I don't know.ADRIANA: I don't want to touch it. Okay, next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?RIZEL: Oh, okay. When I was in, I used to be in IT support and I used to like Windows and Linux. I felt like they were easy to troubleshoot and all that. But then when I went to software engineering, I prefer Mac. I don't know, just, just very similar to what I told you about when they gave me a Mac. I got hooked.ADRIANA: Yeah, I feel, ya. Yeah. I grew up on Windows. Windows 3.1. Back in the old days...RIZEL: Oh yeah. I remember using Windows 95.ADRIANA: Oh my God.RIZEL: Screen savers.ADRIANA: When that came out, I was like, mind blown. I'm like, what is this? As if Windows 3.1 could get better.RIZEL: Oh my God.ADRIANA: Yes. That dates me a lot. Um, okay, next question. Um, do you have a favorite programming language? And if so, what is it?RIZEL: Oh, okay. I love JavaScript. I like SQL, and Kotlin is like my new love now. Like, SQL is like the first thing I learned, and JavaScript. And like Kotlin, I'm like, yo, why did no one tell me about this? It's bomb.ADRIANA: It's funny because I've heard the same thing from various people who get into Kotlin and they're like, yeah, it's so good. Cleaner, like version of Java, right? Because it runs on the JVM.RIZEL: Yes, way cleaner. I think I've learned Java in college and I was like, this thing is overwhelming. But like, Kotlin's like, it kind of, it feels TypeScript. It just doesn't feel...It feels lightweight. It's like...ok... And intuitive.ADRIANA: Yeah, I love it. It makes me want to check out Kotlin. My dad is actually in tech, so I have like big shoes to fill. And he, for years, like, he's retired now, but for years he'd just rave about Kotlin. Like he still loves it. He's like, it's my favorite language to prototype in. Now he does Rust for fun.RIZEL: Wow.ADRIANA: Yeah, super hardcore. He's 71 and he does Rust for fun, so there.RIZEL: And that's, like, cool that you have a dad that was, like, a software engineer.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like big shoes to fill, though, because it's like, you know, he knows his shit. So... Sorry?RIZEL: No, I was like, I could easily impress my parents. Whereas you're like.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. With my dad, it's like, he'll catch the bullshit, but I love it. Kotlin. That's awesome. Okay, do you prefer dev or ops?RIZEL: I think I prefer dev. I guess there's nice stuff about ops, but I think I'm just a more trained, formally trained dev, that's why.ADRIANA: Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. Okay, next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?RIZEL: I prefer JSON. YAML. I don't know. It gives me a headache. I don't know.ADRIANA: Yeah...it's so funny. For me, it's the opposite. I find, like, JSON is, like, too many curly braces. It's like, Java trauma because I did Java for, like, 16 years, so I'm like, I don't want to see another curly brace.RIZEL: I get it. I don't know. Like, it'd be like, you didn't indent the right way. And I'm like, man, how many indent?ADRIANA: Yeah, it's punishing. It's punishing. It's true. Although, like, I'm getting mad at JSON lately because I'm, like, playing with dev containers and, like, I keep forgetting commas after. I'm like, stop yelling at me, JSON. Yeah, no, I mean, that's the worst of it, at least, but it's still like, stop getting mad at me over a comma.RIZEL: I know that pain.ADRIANA: I get you. Yeah. Okay, next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?RIZEL: Hmmm...I don't know...people...I think I kind of mix them. I know, like, people are, like, die hard. I think I just press whatever I need to press. I don't really think about it. I just feel like, type, type, space, type, type, tab. So I don't have a preference here.ADRIANA: Awesome. I love it. Bridging the gap between spaces and tabs. Okay, two more questions left. Do you prefer to learn things through video or text?RIZEL: Oh, that's a good question. I think it really depends on the situation. Like, if I. If I just want to get something done really quick, like, I'm just like, I just need to figure out how to. Like, I don't want to read a book, to be honest...about, about coding, but if I see some documentation, copy and paste real quick. I'm like, da da da da da. But if I need a deep explain explainer, like, why am I doing this? What's going on? Then I prefer video because I could...I guess I could rewind. I guess you could rewind with a book. I don't know, but I...my brain consumes the information better.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I get that. I get that. It's funny when you mentioned, like, you don't want to read a book about tech, because it made me think back to, like, in the early days, that's all you had, right? Was, like, those big, thick, manuals, like, for learning a language. And as soon as you mentioned, I don't want to read a book, I'm like, holy shit, like, PTSD. Like, I had this flashback to my childhood of, like...because my dad got me started early in coding, so... Like, I had, like, a book on basic open.RIZEL: Wow.ADRIANA: And I'm, like, trying to go through the exercises and type it out on my computer at the same time. Right. Because no online documentation with copy paste. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I don't want to, like, go through a programming book.RIZEL: Yeah. Shout out to y'all that learned from the books, though. But I, like, it's just so much easier to do, like, command F and copy and paste. I mean, if the book is online, I'm okay with that.ADRIANA: I am super down for that as well. I like that. I like that. Yeah. I hadn't even, like, thought about that until you mentioned it. Okay, final question. What is your superpower?RIZEL: Oh, that's a good question. Um. Oh, I guess that I think I'm resourceful. Like, I think a lot of times, people...Is that a superpower? I don't know. They're like, I don't know how to get the answer or whatever. It doesn't matter if it's tech or not. I think I will find a way to make something work.ADRIANA: That is a great superpower. And I feel like you have to be resourceful in tech. Because we're put in so many situations where it's like, yeah, you can't do that because, you know, you're not allowed to because of, like, whatever work network policy or whatever firewall shit. Or, like, I don't know. Or my problem is, like, a slightly different variant of the thing in stack overflow.RIZEL: Yes. You can't just straight up copy and paste some text.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, I think that's such a great superpower. Well, thanks for. Thanks for answering the questions. And now we are ready to get into the meaty bits. So I wanted to start out with. I always like to hear how folks on the show have started their career. So what got you into tech initially?RIZEL: Yeah. So, initially, I was studying psychology, like, out of college because I didn't really know what I want to study. And then I found out I don't have enough money, and on top of that, I was undocumented. So that made stuff a little bit more complicated. Like, I can't get, like, certain grants and, like, bigger scholarships that people were getting, so I was doing a lot of out of pocket. So then I had to stop going to college, and then that made me reevaluate and be like, okay, I can't. It doesn't really make sense to study psychology because I got to go get my masters to actually make...start making some kind of money or get a job.So then I was, like, Googling what jobs make the most money really fast. And then, like, tech came up. Okay. Like, so in the beginning, it was, like, a financial thing, but, yeah, yeah. Like, so computer science came up. I got a little nervous by the math because I've never been, like, super strong in math. So I was like, I'll just do information systems major at a community college. So I did that.RIZEL: I got an internship, got a job, and then that allowed me to, like, pay for college at the same time as having a job, but then...IT support, that was fun, but I just felt like I was really good at it, so it got boring easily for me. I don't know. It's fun, but I'm like, I need more of a challenge. So I was like, okay, I'm ready to try out computer science, but I didn't. I still didn't have enough money to go for, like, a whole bachelor's, so I went to a free coding bootcamp called Resonant Coders. Learned to code from there. And then once I got my software engineering job, then I got a bachelor's in computer science. Did that while I had my software engineering job, and then I transitioned into DevRel.ADRIANA: Wow, that's so awesome. So it's like this accidental discovery of, like, oh, I actually like this.RIZEL: Yeah. Yeah. I was like, this is actually fun. Like, I like the challenge, and I like the community. So cool.ADRIANA: Yeah, the community has been awesome, and especially, I would say, in open source.RIZEL: Yeah, I agree.ADRIANA: So you mentioned you got into DevRel, and what got you into the DevRel path.RIZEL: Yeah. So I was doing software engineering, and I like coding, but I'm not a huge fan of software engineering. I don't know. So, like, you know, like the whole, like, agile and everything into, like, I don't know, that's, it's just not necessarily how I work or, like, what really excites me. So on the side of doing software engineering and on the side of completing my computer science degree, I also was helping to run, like, I also helped to start a nonprofit that was teaching women of color how to code. And I was like, I really enjoy, like, making these presentation decks and just like, explaining to them little parts of code that, like, I don't know, they were asking interesting questions. They were like, why do the hyperlinks turn blue? I'm like, I don't know. I never thought of that. Let me go, like, dig into it. So I really liked that part of, like, still getting to code but explain things to people. So I was like, Googling, how do I get to do that for the same amount of money as, like, software engineering? Because that nonprofit job was not paying. So I kept finding people like Angie Jones and Brian Douglas, and I was like, what's their job? And it's a developer advocate. So that's how I, I just applied. And at first people told me, you don't have experience. But then GitHub gave me a chance.ADRIANA: That's such a great story. And I love also that, you know, as you mentioned, like, GitHub gave you a chance. And I feel like so many times in tech careers, it's all about someone just taking a chance on you. That they see something beyond the experience, right? Like, I think that's the thing that's a little bit frustrating. I think a lot of people get very hung up on, like, do you know this exact technology? It's like...no. I can learn.RIZEL: Right. It's not that...I mean, it could be hard, but I have the ability.ADRIANA: Exactly, exactly. And what is modern tech if not the ability to just pick up a bunch of stuff that you never knew on the fly because, you know, otherwise you get left out.RIZEL: Yeah, that's how it works. You're never going to know everything. Yeah. So I was really grateful when GitHub gave me the chance. I didn't even think GitHub, like, that's a big company. But I was like, oh, thanks, guys. And I ended up, I think I did really well. So, yeah, absolutely.ADRIANA: That's so amazing. How, how, like, you know, before when you mentioned, like, working and studying at the same time and running this, this program for women of color coding, like, how, how did you manage doing that? Like, without, you know, just, like, losing your mind. Like, that's a lot of stuff to juggle.RIZEL: I don't. Okay. I think I was super stressed out, so I wouldn't. I'm not gonna lie to anybody. Like, I was just breezing through. I was. There was. There was times that, like, I was either doing bad at my job or I was doing bad at school. Took to. And then doing good at school, but, like, it would, like, fluctuate. I never reduced the amount that I was giving to the nonprofit maybe until the last year. Like, the last. I did the nonprofit for, like, four or five years. And when I joined GitHub, I was like, this is too much. Like, I'm traveling and doing this, and, like, you could tell the quality of work was kind of lowering, so I did. I did.There was crying nights and everything because I'm like, my homework's not working or my. My work is not working. So it was not. It was not smooth sailing, but I think I was. I was used to always having multiple jobs or multiple school and jobs, so, like, it didn't feel like anything to me. But now I'm like, I just want one job, and that's it.ADRIANA: Yeah, that is super fair. And. And, you know, thanks for also, like, being so candid, too, about, like, you know, these things are hard to juggle. And I do often find, like, something does have to give because there's, like, only so many hours in the day. Brainpower, sleep.RIZEL: Definitely.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And, you know, I think. I think as we get more into our careers, because it's so easy, like, when you get early into a career, even if it's, like, it's. You've been around for a while, but, like, you've taken on a new career, you don't want to say no, because it's like, but what if this is a great opportunity?RIZEL: Yeah, I tend to have that problem. I'm trying to reduce it, but that's been, like, a thing for me where I'm like, but I really need the opportunity.ADRIANA: It's more exposure.RIZEL: Yes, sorry, go ahead.ADRIANA: I was gonna say I totally agree, but feel. But saying no also, like, feels so icky sometimes. I don't know if you feel that way, but I feel so guilty when I have it. I'm like, I'm letting someone down.RIZEL: Yeah, I feel. I feel bad sometimes because it's just tough. I think even at GitHub, I really loved working there, and I did really well there. But sometimes some people, like, I think I was one of the more visible people on my team, and I was like, relatable. So sometimes people outside of my team would be like, hey, we need you to work on this. And I'm like, what about my coworker? And they're like, no, no. You're the only one that can do it. And people were like, you just gotta say no. I'm like, but I already said no. And they pushed back. I'm just going to say yes. Now I'm nervous, or I feel bad.ADRIANA: But it's so flattering at the same time, right? Because I think a lot of our job, especially as DevRels, is that relatability. And that's why people consume our content, because they look at the stuff that we produce and it's good, but also, like, we're approachable, relatable. It's like, oh, I want to talk to you. So then you don't want to say no.RIZEL: It was, like, flattering and overwhelming at the same time.ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah, yeah, I feel ya. And as a DevRel, have you also like, what's kind of your favorite thing to DevRel on? Is it like blog post creation, talks, video content? Like, what's your, what's your jam?RIZEL: Ooh, that's a good question. I think blog posts are my thing. Like, I'm very. I love doing blog posts. Recently, as I've gone to this new job, maybe I've done less of them. I also like live streams because, like, live stream coding or live stream talking to other people within, um, this particular whatever industry I'm in because I think it allows me to learn more about that industry while also, like, creating a connection for my company. Um, I like talks too. I like a lot of it. The only thing I probably don't like as much is I'm probably not the best at, like, pre recorded video content creation.ADRIANA: That's stressful. Like, you would think would be easy because it's like, I have a script, I just need to, like, talk in the video, and it's like, no worse than, like, than doing, like, a live talk or live stream.RIZEL: Yeah, because the live stream, you're going to make a mistake. You can't rewind it is what it is. But pre recording, I'm like, no, I got to do that over and then it's like 10 hours later.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, I. I can totally relate. Like, I created video content last year, and sometimes it would take, like, I think for a five minute thing, it would take over an hour. And there were so many outtakes of me going, fuck, I'm sure if I hadn't deleted all those outtakes, or...like, I would have a computer full of fucks.RIZEL: That would be a cool blooper reel.ADRIANA: Oh my God. It would be. I want to ask you, like, about public speaking. Like, what was sort of, like, your first public speaking experience? Was it, like, in a tech setting, or was it a non tech setting? Like, what launched you into doing talks?RIZEL: Yeah, DevRel did. Because actually, my intention was like, I don't know. I didn't. I didn't know that this was probably over ambitious, but I was like, I don't want or not ambitious. Or maybe under ambitious. Like, I thought I could sneak get away with it. I was like, I don't want to do any public speaking. I was like, I'll just sit behind the scenes. And my manager's like, yeah, I don't know if that's going to work, Rizel. So I think at first, I started off, like, doing virtual talks, and I think that was helpful because it was pretty similar to when I did a nonprofit I would, like, do talks to. Like, it was kind of like talks to beginners. So I'm like, okay. Familiar. And then after that, the first, like, in public and other people seeing me was at Kansas City Developer Conference.ADRIANA: Oh, cool.RIZEL: Yeah, it was a nice audience. They were, like, welcoming, so that was good. But because before that, my public speaking skills were not good. I was like. I just kept having a shaky voice. Every time I did any kind of public speaking, it could be, like, a small crowd, and they'd be like, Rizel, present your demo. And it'd be like, hello.ADRIANA: It can be so nerve wracking going in front of an audience, because, like, I don't know if you get this, but, like, when I go to speak, I'm like, shit, they're looking at me.RIZEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: They expect me to say intelligent things.RIZEL: Yeah, yeah.ADRIANA: The self conscious thing comes up, and you're like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm usually like, I'm dying before. Right before a talk. And then when once I get in the groove, I, like, calm down, and then the world melts, thankfully.ADRIANA: But I'm a wreck beforehand.RIZEL: Same, I think. Yeah. Now, for some reason, I don't know what switched, but now I just black out everybody. Like, I don't even realize they're there anymore, because once. Once I realize that people are there or, like. And I, like, make eye contact, that's when the nerves come back. But if I block out everybody, I'm like, I'm just talking. And it is really good.ADRIANA: Yeah.ADRIANA: You know, I think I do something similar because a lot of, like, advice around public speaking is, oh, focus in on one person in the audience and connect with them. And I'm like, I don't know if I want to make eye contact with people like that.RIZEL: I don't. I probably look like I am, but I didn't see you. For real.ADRIANA: Yeah. I'm more of a I will scan back and forth as I talk kind of thing.RIZEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, it definitely takes. Definitely takes a practice to get used to it, and I think to also, like, just kind of go with the flow when you realize that, you know, you've, like, messed something up. I had a talk where I had a co speaker recently, and she started, like, saying my lines at one point. I'm like, no, no, no, we gotta rewind. You know, like, we're not gonna get hung up on that. It is what it is. It's like, back up, restart, and the show must go on.RIZEL: Yeah, you just gotta go with, yeah, I make lots of mistakes, so I just have to erase them from my mind. I mean, it's whatever happened. Like, one time I showed my speaker notes, and I kind of. I just, like, I was like, oh, no, y'all can see my speaker notes, and I just moved on. Yeah. I'm like, it is what it is.ADRIANA: For real, that is actually one of my public speaking nightmares is for people to see my speaker notes. It's a window into my soul.RIZEL: I was like, how? In my head, I was like, how long have they been looking at the notes? Like, I don't know.ADRIANA: I had an online talk once where, um, I had forgotten to start sharing the slides, but fortunately it was caught early enough.RIZEL: Oh, yeah.ADRIANA: But I was, like, so embarrassed. I'm like, I. I can't think about this. I just need to, like, carry on and pretend that this didn't happen. But that's another nightmare of mine.RIZEL: And when I did the GitHub universe keynote, I messed up. But everybody was like, we didn't even notice. Like, I was, like, kicking myself about it. Like, I was like, oh, my God. Because basically there was, like, a recording of, like, I was demoing. What was it called? It was, like, Copilot Voice. They changed the name of it, but basically it's like, use your voice and then Copilot writes stuff for you.Yeah, but it was really hard to do live, so we were like, we're going to pre-record it and, like, kind of pretend you're doing it live, because I didn't record it with my voice, but sometimes, like, you know, your accent or whatever, it just wouldn't always go smoothly. And we have, like, a set amount of time, like, in the background, GitHub Copilot's, like, typing all the stuff that I'm saying, and then I. I think I went either ahead of it or behind it, and, like, it typed it out way after I said something, and then I was like, oh, no. Like, I said it under my breath, and when I was done, I was like, oh, my God. Like, everybody knew it. And everybody's like, we did not hear you say, oh, no. Like, we didn't even notice you made a mistake.ADRIANA: And, you know, that that's, like, such an important thing to call out, though, because I think, like, we tend to be so hard on ourselves when we give talks, and I think if people are interested in the content that we're producing, the things that we're talking about, they're not going to be scrutinizing every single little thing that you've done, because all they care about is, have I learned something? Am I having fun in this talk? And I think if you can deliver that, no one's going to harp on this stuff, but we, as perfectionists, lovers of our craft, were like, oh, my God.RIZEL: I want it to be perfect. But it's never perfect.ADRIANA: Never, never. Especially with live demos. This is why, as a rule of thumb, I don't do live demos. I pre-record my demos. I'm honestly terrified of doing live demos and live coding. So hats off to you for doing live coding, because I'm the kind of gal who likes to code in the comfort of my own personal little nook, and. And that is it. I hate it when people watch over me as I'm coding.RIZEL: Yeah, no, I I'm not a fan of it, either, but I think it's helping help me to grow and, like, I don't know, I become a better live coder on stage, so that's been good for me. But I agree with you. It's way comfortable to just be in your bed or just, like, in your own office and just typing with no one looking.ADRIANA: Exactly. No one can see, like, the. The angry, like, print statements that you put in. That's when I start to angry code. Why isn't this working? Why aren't you hitting the for loop?RIZEL: Oh, my God.ADRIANA: So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about. So, you mentioned that you were at GitHub, but you've got a new gig. Why don't you tell folks about your current gig?RIZEL: Yeah, actually, I almost worked here for a year. Now it's about like eleven months. Yeah. A company called TBD, that is the real name, but it's. It's a company or a business unit within Block. So Block has a couple of business units, like Square, Cash App, TBD, Title, like a couple different things. And, um, so just like background. Like, the idea behind all of this is like, Block really cares...or, this is their mission is like financial empowerment.So with square, they enabled like, mom and pop shops to be able to like, accept payments through, like, you know, you can just. In the beginning it was like you just put this little card reader on a phone and you could swipe it and stuff like that. And then with cash app, I know you're in Canada, but, like, within America it's like, oh, cool, I can send money to my friends with the click of a button. And so with TBD, we're doing a couple of things. One of the things is we're creating a. An SDK that allows financial institutions to basically make it easier for you to send money internationally and like, change the currency and stuff like that. Yeah. Because like, you're, you probably know, like, it's annoying if you're going to get money from or something.So they want to make it a smoother experience. So we're not necessarily building the tool that makes it a smoother experience, but we're building like, the SDK so that financial institutions and other businesses can take that and then they can build that. And then in addition to that, we also have this thing called Web5, which I know oftentimes people are like, what happened to Web4? And stuff like that. Like, yeah, I get it. But basically the. It's a tongue in cheek kind of name. But they're, the whole idea is they're trying to make it easier for you to own your data and your identity without block, the use of blockchain. So, like, they'll.They're basically like, we like the idea that, like, Web3 had of like, decentralizing things and helping you to own things, but there's like a barrier within blockchain. Like, we like some stuff, but we want to make it a little bit of a lower barrier to entry. And a lot of the stuff we're using like, our open standards from the W3C. And they're not like I, before I came into TBD, I was like, what are they really doing? But it's not like they made up anything. Like, one of the open standards is called Verifiable Credentials. And that's actually what mobile driver's license use underneath the hood. Like, that's the technology, the standard.Yeah. So it just allows you to be able to, like, have your digital identity on your phone and be able to control who can get access to certain parts of your data. Like, let's say you wanted to prove that you're of legal drinking age. Usually you will show your physical ID. It has your address and everything. You don't really need to show that. They just need to know you're over that age. So you can show your phone, have it be scanned, and it'll just be like, yep, this person's over 21 or 18 or whatever, and then you get your alcohol. So that's kind of like how the technology works.ADRIANA: So it basically, it's like we're just showing the necessary information.RIZEL: Yes, exactly. Yeah. It's called "selective disclosure". So you can choose to disclose only the things you want.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, that's so important nowadays because, like, I feel like we've basically become open books in terms of personal data.RIZEL: Right.ADRIANA: Because, you know, it's like, you want this, you got to sign up for that. Like, I can't go into a store. Like, I'll go into, like, a retail store. And they're like, can I start off with your phone number? I'm like, how about no? What do you need it for? Yeah, or like, you've returned something and they. They want, like, your entire life's history. It's like, I'm returning, like, a five dollar thing. Why do you need, like, all this stuff about me?RIZEL: Exactly. And that even reminds me, I think earlier you, before the. The stream start or the podcast started, you were asking me, like, oh, do I want to talk about, like, pregnancy and tech? But that reminded me about something else. So I actually used Web5. Like, and I want to build more on this idea, but, like, in a company hackathon, I was like, it would be so cool if you can, like, own your, like, menstrual cycle data, your period date. Oh, that's the same thing. Your pregnancy data, all that. Any fertility or anything that's going on with, like, your own personal health. Because I feel like as soon as I, like, Googled any questions about it, or I downloaded an, like, a pregnancy app, then, like, TikTok and all my Facebook reels were like, what it's like to be a mom? And I'm like, dang. Yeah. So I'm like, it'll be so cool to still be able to track this stuff digitally, but, like, be able to own that data and then have the ability to share it with who you want to share it with.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.RIZEL: There's slightly two different concepts, but very similar. So, like, the verifiable credentials. And then what I used was something called the decentralized Webno, but the details don't matter too much. But anyways, it would be like, you can decide. Maybe I want, like, my partner to see this particular information or my doctor to see just this one part, like, of the information. Yeah. The rest for myself. So, like, yeah, it would be like that.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, that, yeah, that is so useful. And so that's something that you said that you were building as, like, part of an. You did it as part of an internal hackathon?RIZEL: Yeah, it's like, very, like, bare bones.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.RIZEL: I really want to, like, continue to build upon that. So there's. There's more to it right now, which is, like, you just add your. Your cycle data and then you have control over it, and then you could send it to someone, but I want to add. Yeah.ADRIANA: Yeah. That's so great. Wow. Yeah. That's such a useful application. You know, it's funny because you know that back when. Back in my day, there was, like, none of this, like, tracking cycles through an app. So, like, when that stuff came out, it's like, what? You can track it through an app, but then, you know, it's like the can of worms that. That opens up. Right. It's like, oh, you got. You got a cycle tracker? And what does that actually mean? Where's my data going?RIZEL: Right, exactly.ADRIANA: Yeah. So, because, like, why does it need to go anywhere but, you know, within the confines of, like, you.RIZEL: Exactly. And I get that's how, like, they make money. So they, like, do marketing that way and they sell your data that way, but it's like, I don't even know who you gave it to.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. It's kind of creepy. Like.ADRIANA: No, thanks. On a similar vein, can you talk a little bit about, you know, like, as we talked before the show, like, you mentioned that you're pregnant. How far along are you at this point? How's it been? How are you finding, like, being a pregnant woman in tech? Is there, like, do you think that there's. There is, like, there is a difference being a pregnant woman in tech versus not in tech?RIZEL: Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah. I'm about 24 weeks right now, and I would say, hmm. I think it's probably. It's probably easier. Well, my experience. Right. If I. Maybe I was going in person a lot. That would be much more exhausting if I was going to work in person. But I have the ability to, like, work from home, so that's been good. And, like, I know that tech has a lot more flexibility in terms of, like, hours and stuff like that. Like some. Some jobs, not all of them, but, like, you know, no one's like, oh, your bubble went gray for a second.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.RIZEL: So that part has been beneficial. I think some parts of DevRel I might have been over ambitious with. So, like, at the. I mean, I didn't know I was going to be pregnant. So I had all these talks lined up and it went to them and I was like, oh, my God. Like, I did not know that first trimester is so exhausting. Like, I would tell people who are never been pregnant and they're like, are you eating your vitamins? I'm like, yeah, I am. Yeah, I don't think the vitamins are gonna make me less sleepy.ADRIANA: Yes. The your dead ass tired in a way that you never thought was possible.RIZEL: Yeah. I'm like, dang. Usually I'm a person, it's actually a little bit of a hard hit for me because I'm usually a person that, like, I don't know, I just get excited sometimes about work and I want to do, like, extra work and never been in a spot where I do not want to do extra work. In fact, I'm logging off early. Like, like, it would be like, 3:00 and I'm like, just gonna close my laptop. I can't even read what people are saying on Slack. Like, I get sleepy every day at, like, 2:30, 3:00 p.m. So that was a hard hit for me because I was like, oh, my God, maybe I was like, is all the pregnancy gonna be like this? Like, I was like, maybe I can't even work anymore.ADRIANA: I definitely felt that in my first trimester, I legitimately thought I'm like, I'm just gonna, like, peace out for the next few months.RIZEL: I was like, Googling, why isn't maternity leave longer? How do you more? Wait, Canada has like 18 months or something, though.ADRIANA: Yeah, you can do up to 18 months now. So when I was pregnant, it was twelve months. So you get twelve months where. So the way it works is like, you're entitled to twelve months. Twelve to 18 months now, which means that you do have your job guaranteed after that period. Like, when you return, it's up to your company as to how much they pay you during that time. So, like, when I was pregnant with my daughter, it was, I think my company paid, like, I want to say, six weeks at, like, 90 or 95% pay. And then after that, you go on unemployment, which is like piddly poo, but you are, you are technically guaranteed your job when you return.And I'm saying that in air quotes because there has been some shady ass shit that's happened where I've actually had a few friends who returned from mat leave, and then it's like, hey, welcome back to your job. Next day, oh, by the way, you're fired. Or it's like, oh, we're restructuring. And so there have been some interesting, like, obviously, companies are not allowed to do that, but some, some do, some have taken, like, have, have taken their companies to court over stuff like that. But, yeah, but, yeah, we do have that entitlement. I took advantage of that, for sure. It was, it was hard. Mat leave was hard because, like, I'm a very, like, I can't sit still.I'm an ADHDer. I cannot sit still. And this idea of, like, sitting home with my baby who was like, you know, the first three months is so boring because they're just, like, sleeping, crying, and pooping, and I'm like, nothing exciting is happening. And I'm like, this is so boring, and I need to be out doing something. But then they get more interesting after three months. And honestly, like, I'm so grateful that I had that opportunity because getting to see her grow, like, over that year was so unique. But it is so hard also, like, if you're used to being active and out and about and, like, my sense of, like, I need to feel like I'm productive all the time. So, you know, even, even, like, you talking about the first trimester fatigue, like, I used to not believe in naps until I got pregnant.RIZEL: Me too.ADRIANA: It's like, give me a nap.RIZEL: Yeah. My husband takes so many naps throughout the day. He's a software engineer, and I'm like, why are you taking naps? Just get your work done. Like, come on. But then I just all of a sudden, like, I need to take my daily nap.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. My husband was so excited when I started getting into naps because he loves naps. I'm like, naps are for old people. And we napped together while I was pregnant. And, like, oh, this is the best. We need more of that. And then, and then second trimester, for me, I was lucky that I got, like, my energy back. And then third trimester, it, like, it crashed again.RIZEL: I'm preparing. I'm now I'm prepared because I, like, I mean, part of second trimester, I was like, y'all were lying. I'm still tired, but I'm like, I'm in an energetic area, so I'm trying to get as much work done as possible. And then once it's third trimester, I know I'll probably go down because I, what you were mentioning of people still getting laid off. And so I don't think my company or my manager would do this to me, but I have read a book about kind of what you said, like, how companies they use, like, maternity leave or medical leave in a sly way to eventually fire the person. And I'm like, don't want that. I want that. Like, you're like, even though Rizel was gone for twelve weeks, like, she did, she did that. She was accomplishing stuff before she left.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, I think it's a combination of, like, working for a good company, having a good manager who has your back. Yeah. Makes a huge difference. One thing that was challenging for me when I was pregnant because, like, so I'm originally from Brazil and so for my parents, like, this, like, mat leave thing, it's different there. And my mom was a stay at home mom as well, so, and so for her, it was, like, very important that my sister and I both had jobs. She's like, you need to be independent. Make your own money, la la la. So when I was on mat leave, my parents are like, you're taking the full twelve months? I'm like, yeah. They're like, out of sight, out of mind. They'll forget about you.RIZEL: I'm like.ADRIANA: They were like, they were really on my ass about, like, you know, taking six months off or whatever. And I was like considering it for a while. I'm like, oh, my God, what if they're right? And then six months, you know, hits, you know, into my mat leave, I'm like, I can't do that. Like that.RIZEL: No, take all the time you need with your kid. Because if they're giving that benefit, I'm like, some people, they don't get a chance to see, like, even be at home. Like, I don't know how my friends who are, like, in retail and stuff like that, like, they worked until they gave birth and then they barely had mat leave. I'm like, wow, that is impressive. And also a little bit sad.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's like, you have to make do, but it's like, it's so stressful and, like, your hormones are raging after you give birth. Like, if you think your hormones are raging now.RIZEL: Oh, no. Well, I guess I don't need to worry about it. My husband does.ADRIANA: That's true. That's true. Yeah. It's the recipients who have the hardest time. But it's nice that, like, you get to work from home, you know? And it sounds like your husband is working from home as well?RIZEL: Yeah. He only goes into the office two times a week.ADRIANA: Oh, nice. Yeah, that is a really good setup and. Yeah, and that's definitely, like, a huge advantage to. To working in tech and starting a family is that you're. If you're able to work from home, then you have that ability to be with your kid, and especially if your spouse is home, then you get to, like, tag team. So not one person is dying all the time.RIZEL: Yeah, I cannot complain. If I. The only thing, if I had to do it over, I will realize how tired that you could really get, and I would have planned it out better. I think I'm in maybe a more better. A better position than maybe some other working women who are pregnant.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. Oh, this is such an exciting time. Do you know if you're having a boy or a girl. Are you gonna just wait to find out?RIZEL: Oh, I know. We have zero patience. As soon as we did...the test results were available, we're like, what is it? Tell us the gender. Everyone's like, do a gender reveal. It's gonna be so fun. Like, no, I don't care. Yeah.ADRIANA: Oh, so what. What are you having?RIZEL: Oh, it's a girl.ADRIANA: Oh, yay. So much fun. I'm a little biased because I have a girl, and she's lots of fun.RIZEL: I'm excited.ADRIANA: She edits. She edits the videos for this podcast, actually.RIZEL: Oh, she does? Oh, look at her. Wow.ADRIANA: But she rejects tech, so. She wants to be a dentist.RIZEL: Okay. At least that's a good job still.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, totally. No complaints. She knows what she wants to do. So I'm like, you good. You good. Oh, that's so exciting, though. Awww, congrats. It's. It's gonna be a wild ride, but it'll be. I promise it'll be fun.RIZEL: Thank you. I hope so. Thanks so much.ADRIANA: Well, we are coming up on time, but as we. Before we wrap up, I wanted to see if you have any, like, parting words of wisdom or hot takes or just anything that you wanted to share with folks...advice?RIZEL: As I will say, a lot of times people ask me like, oh, how do you like level up when you're a junior? And stuff like that. And this is probably not an answer people really like, but I think it's. It eventually comes with time and patience and just putting in work. I think I always was like, I really want to, like, level up. Like, I don't know how to do the things I'm doing, but I'm like, just continue to stay involved. There's not really. To me, there's not really a fast track. Like, as long as you continue to stay involved with your team and keep building and keep trying to learn, you'll naturally go on that, like, learning path or that growth path.ADRIANA: That's great. I really love that. And, you know, it is so absolutely true. I mean, you gotta. You gotta put in the work. You gotta put in the face time, and. And you'll see the rewards. That's amazing.Well, thank you so much, Rizel, 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...RIZEL: 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.