Geeking Out with Adriana Villela

About our guest:Hazel Weakly (she/her/hers) spends her days working on building out teams of humans as well as the infrastructure, systems, automation, and tooling to make life better for others. She’s worked at a variety of companies, across a wide range of tech, and knows that the hardest problems to solve are the social ones. Hazel currently serves as a Director on the board of the Haskell Foundation and is fondly known as the Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm (a popular Mastodon instance). She also created the official Haskell “setup” Github Action and helps maintain it. She enjoys traveling to speak at conferences and sharing what she’s learned with others.One of her favorite things is watching someone light up when they understand something for the first time, and a life goal of hers is to help as many people as possible experience that joy. She also loves swing dancing, both as a leader and a follower.Find our guest on:GitHubMastodonLinkedInDiscordRedditHazel's blogFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyShow Links:HaskellErlangTypescriptBlog post: So You Want to Hire for Developer ToolingSmallTalkObject-Oriented ProgrammingVisualBasic (classic)QBasicQBasic Nibbles gameQBasic Gorrila gameOpenSSLBleeding Heart (Heartbleed bug)Cost CenterAdditional Links:Video: Hacking the Pachyderm: Scaling Servers and PeopleVideo: OpenTelemetry Q&A Feat. Hazel WeaklyCatch Hazel at QCon 2023 in San FranciscoTranscript: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. With me today, I have Hazel Weekly. Welcome, Hazel.HAZEL: Hey there. I'm glad to be here and I'm really looking forward to this episode. It's going to be a lot of fun.ADRIANA: Yay. Super excited. So first things first. Where are you calling from?HAZEL: So I am calling from the sunny surprisingly town of Redmond, Washington and if you were to ask me in a couple of weeks, I'm going to be closer to Seattle. Seattle. And we'll see how that goes. But yeah, I'm in Seattle.ADRIANA: Yay. Very exciting. Very exciting. You're my second West Coaster that I've spoken to for the podcast today, so I'm being outnumbered.HAZEL: I mean, West Coast is the best coast, and I'm sorry, I don't make the rules.ADRIANA: Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah. There is something like, I think, kind of magical about the West Coast, where it's like, chill vibes at one with nature.It's a different vibe from East Coast, for sure.All right, cool. So I'm going to start with some lightning round questions.HAZEL: Awesome.ADRIANA: Prepare. Tun tun tun...Okay, first question, lefty or righty?HAZEL: I am a rightie.ADRIANA: All right.iPhone or Android?HAZEL: AndroidADRIANA: For personal use. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?HAZEL: Simultaneously, macOS and 'Nix OS.ADRIANA: All right, cool.Favorite programming language.HAZEL: Probably....I feel like I'm obligated to say Haskell because I'm on the board of directors of the Haskell Foundation and it's true that is one of my favorites.My cheeky answer is also that my favorite programming language is the one that I write in and nothing bad happens.ADRIANA: Awesome. I do like that.All right. Dev or Ops?HAZEL: YesADRIANA: Yes. Okay. Wow. Both. Okay.And final question. Do you prefer to consume content through video or blog post?HAZEL: Blog post. I read way too fast to sit there and not read it.ADRIANA: I am the same way. I was just telling my previous guest the same thing. She also prefers blog posts because I cannot sit there and just listen to someone go, "Blah, blah, blah," where I'm like, "Get to the point."HAZEL: I mean, developers being ADHD in this economy, who would have thoughtADRIANA: I know, right? For realsies. So I guess let's get into the meaty bits.Well, first things first. So before we get into what you do, tell us how you got to where you are. How did you get your start in tech?HAZEL: How I got my start in tech? That is a really interesting question because I have mostly had moments of a ridiculous amount of luck and then the ability to at the moment capitalize on that luck.So how I got my first job was I was at a programming lab at university and I ended up happening to overhear two people talking about Erlang. And I was like, "I know that language."Well, I didn't know it, but I knew of it, and what kind of weird ass nerd knows about Erlang in undergrad?So I ended up talking with them for 2 hours after the lab and one of them actually said, "Oh hey, I work at a company and soon we're going to have internships. Do you want to do an internship here?"And I was like, "Oh hell yeah, I do." Because I didn't have any other options.And so eight months later I actually ended up getting internship there after applying to bajillion other companies and none of them gave a shit about me because I hadn't even graduated yet.So it turns out that he was a racist, misogynistic, terrible person who liked to rant about like weird religious topics in the middle of a Costco food cart.But other than that, it was an interesting first experience.ADRIANA: Damn.HAZEL: But if it hadn't been for that one moment of me knowing about Erlang, I wouldn't have had that job and then I wouldn't have been able to seal up in all the random weird crap that I had to, that got me my second job.ADRIANA: And so what was so what was like? What was your second job?HAZEL: Oh, you want the full history?ADRIANA: I'm curious about the second job.HAZEL: So the first job I have finally had enough of the person being really toxic because he had actually gotten the other intern to quit.And I realized that his M.O. was going through and finding gullible college undergrad people. Getting them to be interns and then just having them be super cheap rate forever until they finally rage quit and left. And he never understood why everyone left and never talked to him again. Then I left and never talked to him again. Shocking.So the second job, I looked around and found a company that was hiring and they were hiring for a front end job in React and TypeScript and all that stuff. And I didn't know TypeScript at the time, so I took a brief six hours and learned TypeScript and then took the interview and aced the interview because I had actually ended up, out of purely coincidence, helping my father-in-law at the time get his website built for a construction contracting company.And because I had that whole thing built up from scratch, I had a huge amount of experience in that particular field that they needed.And they pulled up that website during the interview and said, "We want this."And I said, "Well, I know how to do it."So that's how that worked.And then during the first week there, I built out the entire backend in MongoDB, Node JS, TypeScript and did a whole bunch of ingestion from a very weird Microsoft Server database.That was problematic. The whole thing was problematic.It turns out that that company was a consulting company that was trying to use another company in order to bootstrap themselves without getting funding so that they could actually go and do the thing that they wanted to in the first place.So you had a whole company whose entire existence revolved around their one single clients, never figuring out why they were paying this much money for a single website.ADRIANA: Damm.HAZEL: I know.ADRIANA: Wow.HAZEL: Shockingly, that didn't turn out. I don't why.ADRIANA: What a shocker.HAZEL: So after about after about ten months of that shit, it all fell apart. But in that time, I became the senior-most engineer on the team, IC-wise, built out an entire component library, re-did all the local developer environments, rebuilt everything in Docker, did like, a 10x performance improvement on the entire website and a 10x performance improvement on load balancing.Got the entire back-end working more efficiently, leveled up the entire team in terms of being able to use the component library to redesign the entire website to meet the neurotic and weird ass requirements of a client that literally did not understand how things worked.ADRIANA: Damn. So was all this happening, like, while you were still a student?HAZEL: I, so I graduated halfway through my first job.ADRIANA: Okay.HAZEL: So I went from that first job to having designed the entire design system and done all those other things. That was about one to one and a half years after graduation.ADRIANA: Okay. Now, was area of study related to what your work was?HAZEL: My area of study was computer science and the university was Portland State University. It's a great university, but did it give me the tools that I needed to actually do the literal work? No, it gave me really good tools for understanding theory.ADRIANA: Okay.HAZEL: That didn't have a lot to do with programming. So, like my very first day on my job at my first company, I still remember it took me 4 hours to do some weird jQuery nonsense with a list in HTML.And finally the head developer person was like, "What's taking you so long?"And sat there and did the whole thing in front of me, essentially like ten minutes.And then he was like, dude, "I thought you were good." Basically.And then it was the weirdest thing was like his look on his face was, "I know you're smart, but what the fuck?"ADRIANA: Yeah, it's funny because I do find, like, school never quite prepares us for the workforce because yeah, I mean, it's too much theory, not enough practical stuff.The practical, quote unquote stuff that they make us do is so irrelevant that when you hit the workforce and you're solving the real problems of the real world, you're like, oh, shit, I have to learn this stuff from scratch.HAZEL: Speaking of things in the university world that are not relevant at all, but I had a lot of fun doing. One of my favorite things that I ever did was during the operating systems course, we had to take a toy kernel and implement a multilevel feedback process, scheduler and priority queues.So I implemented that with the vast majority of the state machine logic being implemented in about 80 to 100 lines of C preprocessor macros that were recursively, expanding using macros and a whole bunch of various extraordinary crimes.My code was beautiful. It magically scoped in variables that were hidden. It did a whole bunch of things. It relied on some undefined behavior. I had to turn on GCC pragmas so that things actually compiled because Dead Code branch elimination wasn't working with ternaries and it was glorious.Absolutely none of the TAs after the third assignment would touch my...like, none of the graders would touch my code. The only person who would grade my code was the TA who was a grad student and she's still a friend to this day. But that code was cursed.ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's awesome.HAZEL: It prepared me for TypeScript, is what I'm saying.ADRIANA: So it's funny how the little things prepare us for the things that we don't even know are in store.HAZEL: Right?ADRIANA: Yeah. I feel like my whole life has been that. So one of the things that we have chatted about previously is, well, you've got many hot takes, and I feel like...we've talked about your thoughts and feelings around platform engineering.So I was wondering if you could share that with folks because platform engineering is the hot topic of the day and everyone's got an opinion. There are tons of discussions going around. So throw your thoughts into the ring here.HAZEL: Wow. Did you allocate the full four days required for this podcast to have all of my thoughts on platform engineering?ADRIANA: No, shortly, no. I mean, sadly, noHAZEL: Sure. So I'm going to have to summarize a bit. I wrote a blog post recently called "So You Want to Hire for Developer Tooling?" And in there I talk a lot about the first platform engineer or the first people that will become platform engineers in your company and how to not fuck it up.And I'm sure a lot of people are going to read it and then fuck it up anyway, and that's fine. It's really hard to hire for it.But hot take-wise, platform engineering is something that I find really interesting in that in the industry I see this habit of over and over and over.Someone says, "Oh hey, in a sociotechnical system we need to solve the technical problems for the spice of the social problems and solve the social problems for the spice of technical problems and have them work together in a collaborative fashion, understanding the constraints and challenges of both."And then someone goes in and says, "But tooling and vendors" and the whole thing goes to shit.And this repeats over and over and over as organizations don't want to skill up in the cultural maturity and outsource understanding of something that they see as not a core driver to the business, which in modern economic theory, it makes sense.If it's not a core competency of the company, why should you not externalize it and view it as a cost center?And since the world is being eaten by tech, people haven't seemed to catch on to the fact that developer tooling, how developers work, the entire process of how they collaborate with each other and with the company is now inherently a core competency of existing in a tech-driven world.So if you want to be relevant as a company, it's not platform engineering, it's not DevOps, it's not tooling...you need to understand how people work together and how people and solutions and technology work together and how to scale that understanding.And the problem you will always run into when doing that is if your work is meaningless or if you are ruled by toxic work behaviors or you have a bunch of institutional biases and corruption in your company that prevent people from genuinely being able to improve the system as they see it, you will always end up with a broken system.And so if you talk to executive leadership and say, "Oh," and they ask you, "What can we do to improve developer productivity?"It's not productivity you want to focus on; it's the developer experience. And the developer experience there. The biggest leverage you're always going to have has nothing to do with the tooling, has nothing to do with Kubernetes, has nothing to do with fucking YAML.Although swearing has a lot to do with the YAML because it's a natural and necessary defense mechanism when you have to write it every day.With that aside, if you're going to improve the experience of developers at a company, the work has to be meaningful, the work has to be high impact. The work has to be high leverage and the relationship that the company has with the developers needs to be healthy and fulfilling and equitable.And you will find very little leadership that is willing to take the full implications of that and execute on it.ADRIANA: Yeah, I completely agree and I think that's, I mean, that's why we see so many of these so- called "transformations" fail miserably. Because leadership doesn't have their heart into it.HAZEL: Mmhmm.ADRIANA: They've been told by someone else who's like, "Hey, do this, it's in vogue."HAZEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: Go on, go forth, do it. And it's just like business as usual.HAZEL: Did you know that related to that, it turns out one of the best indicators of quality in the system is whether or not people genuinely enjoy working on it.And if you ask the question, "How does this system, how does your experience with interacting with this make you feel?"Does it make you feel more alive and more whole?If the answer is "Yes," it's probably a good quality system.And if you need to choose between what to do, you can always ask yourself, "Which of these options will make me feel more alive and whole when interacting with the system?"And a lot of people will go, "But what about the quantification?"Like, what about the numbers? This seems like hippie mumbo jumbo.And no, you should be in touch with your fucking feelings. You should be in touch with the human side of yourself, and you should not just bury it deep in your ass crack in the name of capitalism.It's literally more efficient to actually think about your feelings and think about what it means to be a human and the human experience and try and make the world a more wholesome and inclusive place for everyone around you.It's literally more efficient. It's literally objectively superior in many ways. And you can show that.ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually, because I've definitely felt in the past, like, when I'm working on something where I feel like it's a pleasure to come into work every day because this work is fucking cool. I think you're going to see it in my code.You're definitely going to see that extra. I'll go that extra little bit. Right? Just to get it done. Because I'm excited about what I'm doing. Because I think this is cool shit that we're trying to do here.HAZEL: And you're invested in improving a system that you care about and that, you know, cares about you.ADRIANA: Exactly.HAZEL: No one wants to work on a broken tool and no one really wants to fit a broken tool if they don't think that it will actually be received. Like, you can't fit something that won't be integrated into the system and it cannot see improved something that doesn't want to be improved.ADRIANA: Yes. And it's both by design, doesn't want to be improved by design and doesn't want to be improved by the human overlords of that tool. Right? Because I've been in so many situations where you come in and they're like, "Oh, yeah, this thing's a piece of crap and it could really do with refactor or rewrite." But then no one wants to invest the time. Right?I've felt so many times where it's like this thing just straight up needs to be gutted. Like, keep somebody keep a team working on this thing to keep the lights on while the other team does the rewrite, right? So we can all be happy in the end, but a lot of organizations aren't willing to invest that extra time and money, right? Because that means you've got an overlap of like, two teams working basically on the same thing.But I feel it ends up being a very short-sighted decision to not support those types of things because you're shooting yourself in the foot in the end.HAZEL: Yeah. And so with migrations in general, one thing that's really interesting about that is it turns out there's like a pretty formulaic strategy you can use in order to execute a migration of arbitrary size and complexity. So there's three main steps that go into a migration.The first step is de-risking a migration. So that involves talking to people and understanding what they actually need and working with the people that are being hit the most by the inefficiencies and the insufficiencies of the current situation. And then you get them the new situation and you make sure that it works. You work with them, you work on that. You make sure that this thing will actually do what you want it to. That's the first step.The second step is the enablement, where you say, "Okay, what is all of the low-hanging fruit?""What is all of the automation we can do?""How can we take this migration?"And as much as possible, take the toil out of it and take it out of the hands of people who don't have the context required to execute the migration. How can we facilitate that?And the third step?The third step is literally someone needs to sit there and A commit to finishing it and B commit to communicating about it.So the thing that I find fascinating about migrations is that most migrations fail in the first stage of knowing, actually sat down and talked to the team before they ripped out a solution. Like people will rip out a solution that isn't broken or people will try and say, "Here's a new solution" that actually makes the problem worse.If you just talked to people and actually worked with them to verify that something will be in fact the solution, you would save millions of dollars a year or hundreds of millions or even billions in your company over time. And you would save years of developer effort by just fucking sitting down and talking. And it's ridiculous that this is not a thing.The second stage migration.ADRIANA: Yeah, I actually agree with you.HAZEL: And the second place the migrations fail the most is people celebrate the automation step and the majority and they don't celebrate the done done of, "We actually finished everything and turned off the old system."Don't celebrate if you haven't turned off the old system and sit there and commit to fucking doing the last mile. If you initiate the migration, it's on you to finish it. You cannot just hand that off to someone. It's on you to finish it, but it's also on you to communicate about it.And so many migrations are not able to be finished because the communication of your progress, the communication of the value, and the communication of what needs to happen in order to actually do this, never happened. So again, talking to people, or rather the lack of talking to people, kills most migrations. And it's astounding to me because sure, it's difficult to understand what leadership or what your management or other stakeholders or other teams are looking for in understanding the progress of your migration.But it turns out there is a simple and effective strategy to figuring out what they need in order to feel like you're communicating with them.You ask, "Hey, is this working for you?"And they say, "Yes," or "No."And if they say, "No," you change it and then repeat, right?ADRIANA: That's it novel concept, right?HAZEL: It's not like we've had language as a society for like 18,000 years or something, right?ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah. But it's so true and I think that's like the most fundamental problem that we see across the board with these types of initiatives.My favorite example is always, like, infosec. I worked at a bank a gajillion years ago and we were like so we had admin mode. Like, developers had admin mode on their laptops and we were able to install certain software so that we could get the job done.And this was, I believe, it was like, pre- approved software to begin with, but then all of a sudden, InfoSec, one day they're like, "By the way, we're going to block the installation of all software unless it's on a whitelist."And then unfortunately, we had to discover as we went. Like, "Oh, shit, this is blocked."OK, well, now we need to contact InfoSec to whitelist this. And we couldn't complete the simplest tasks. I mean, it was ridiculous. All of a sudden, developer productivity went to a standstill because InfoSec didn't bother to speak with development teams to talk about, like, "Hey, what would your workflow look like if we did this? Right?So it was just like the directive came from whomever. And thou shalt live with this heinous crime against development. So yeah.HAZEL: I mean, the real solution there, the real solution there obviously was to have all the developers move to Visual Basic and Microsoft Excel as their main development platform. Because it turns out Microsoft Excel is one of the most efficient, beautiful, and glorious development platforms out there. And it's one of the best programming languages, too.ADRIANA: Oh interesting, Excel. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.HAZEL: Honestly, it is actually a good programming language because it turns out so one of the people that says that is Simon P. Jones, who is one of the people that helped create Haskell.So actually the Visual Basic inside Excel is a functional programming language that has first-class functions. It has a whole bunch of other like, not-so-nice things in it. It even has lambda functions. It has all the fun, hot, trendy things. And the reactive programming model inside Excel was later stolen and turned into ReactJS.I'm modifying the history. I'm going to pretend it was stolen from Excel. But Excel is actually pretty awesome. Like, in terms of a programming language, it would be hard to find something that is more accessible to people outside of tech.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true. You're talking about, like, straight up Excel formulas at this point. Are you talking about, like, okay, not the fancy stuff that you can do with, VBA?HAZEL: They're the same thing. You can stick VBA inside basically any Excel cell.ADRIANA: Very true. You know, like speaking of VBA and Visual Basic. I liked Visual Basic. That was like, I guess, officially my second programming language. I started on QBasic back in the day. Yeah, back in the day when it with the gorillas throwing banana bombs to try to destroy the city. And there's also the Nibbles game. Big fan.HAZEL: Nice. So you've always been a BASIC bitch is what you're saying?ADRIANA: I mean, BASIC was basic, but I liked Visual Basic. I thought it was intuitive. It was a nice way to develop GUIs I mean, especially when you go from Visual Basic and then try to develop any GUI stuff in Java. That was a fucking nightmare. And I did not last more than 2 seconds trying to sort that out before going, "Buh bye!"Yeah, Visual Basic was great. It was fun. I used it in high school. Like, my high school programming class was Visual Basic and built some cool stuff. I did some shitty animations with Visual Basic. It was great.HAZEL: Visual Basic is so underrated and so related to Visual Basic. A lot of the programming languages and environments of the previous decades got an incredible amount of things very right. And so one of the things that I've actually said decently often about DevOps and infrastructure-as-code and all these things, is it's really just people trying to recapture the fever dream hyper productivity of SmallTalk and the SmallTalk VM, but with an audit trail for compliance.That's it. Trying to manage a wibbly wobbly ball of state in real time, at scale, without fucking it up. But the best feedback loop and the best productivity you have basically ever really been able to get in terms of being able to dig into a system.If you've ever seen SmallTalk, honestly, it's incredible.ADRIANA: I've never seen it. I've only heard of it my dad used to code in SmallTalk back in the day. Would not shut up about it. Yeah, that was because I think it was like one of the original object oriented languages out there. Right?HAZEL: It was THE object-oriented programming languageADRIANA: There you go. Yeah.HAZEL: And every other language after SmallTalk took object-oriented programming and said, "What if we ruined it?" And then proceeded to do exactly that?ADRIANA: So basically no one has succeeded in capturing the glory of SmallTalk, is what you're saying.HAZEL: And we probably never will, because now people are really used to being able to undo something or statically analyze something. And honestly, both of those are extraordinary inventions like the ability to say, oh shit, never mind, is actually really good. However, that has a lot of false confidences, in that, in the real world, your system is actually pretty mutable and pretty ugly anyway. So for people to say, "Oh, we can just undo this," or "Our state doesn't actually REALLY exist," that is kind of untrue. And so pretending that that's the case leads to developers having this very mismatched and distant view of the system that they work with.Whereas in SmallTalk, if you fucked up production, you knew the second you hit enter, because you just crashed the entire VM and the entire company is now screaming down to its knees, sobbing, the whole thing fucked up. But you KNEW...INSTANTLY.ADRIANA: Right. Yeah. So you get that immediate feedback versus the pussyfooting around maybe there's a thing that's wrong.HAZEL: Yeah. And the immediate feedback, it makes you fear yourself the appropriate amount. Like, if you release code that's about to nuke production, "What could nuke production?" You're gonna double- check it, whereas now, we're just like, "It's stateless. It's in Kubernetes. It's totally fine. We can undo this."And then you actually delete half your database and then OpenSSL Bleeding Heart happens and then all these other things happen, and it turns out that you're just like, you're crying in a corner, you eat 20 years in five days, you're like, stress bleeding out your toes. It's a whole thing.ADRIANA: That's that's actually a really interesting way of viewing it because yeah, I agree. It's similar...This reminds me of the argument where making developers responsible for their code once it goes into production, rather than throwing it over the wall, right? Because if you're the developer responsible for your code, there's no fucking way you're going to let shitty code go into production, because you're the one who's going to be on the hook if something happens.HAZEL: Right. A lot of people will think about that and they'll go, "So if I just make everything the developer's responsibility, it's all better." And that's not true. Because, with equal power comes equal responsibility.But with equal responsibility needs to come...With greater responsibility needs to come greater agency. Agency and responsibility cannot be separated because they are the same thing. And if you pretend that they're not the same thing, you're going to end up with a bunch of pissed off, burnt-out developers who hate you, your whole company, everything about you, and they're going to burn the entire economy down to the ground.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. I yeah, and I think, unfortunately, that's kind of how I felt early in my career. I was just so fucking burnt out. Like my first job out of school, I was pulling these ridiculously long hours where I was working six days a week, 14-hour days.And I remember I complained...this other guy, and I complained...like, I was fresh out of school. This other dude, Dale, he was engaged, so he's like, planning a wedding, and we're both like, "What the fuck, man? This is like, way too much work. We're dying."Like, we have no life. And so we're like, okay, we're going to complain together, right? And then Dale bailed on me and I complained to my boss and then he's like, "Oh, you can have the weekend off."And I felt so guilty. I felt so guilty for taking the weekend off because the rest of my team was like working and Dale bailed on me. So I was like the little prissy-ass bitch who was complaining about, "Oh, she can't handle the work."But as a result of that, I had zero vested interest in seeing that thing succeed because I was like, I hated that system. I'm like, if it goes down in flames, I do not care because they treat me so badly. I don't care. I don't care about my work.HAZEL: And if you were to take any of the executives and just talk to them and say, hey, you just ruined any capability that this company had of building a team that is engaged and able to actually put everything where it needs to go, they would just look confused and go, well, this is a cost center, so why do I care? But the knowledge required to operate and build and improve this is really about something that fundamentally can't be a cost center.ADRIANA: Yeah, and that's interesting because I feel like this whole, like, "You're a cost center" argument ends up really interfering with innovation and productivity because, well, it costs too much. We can't invest in that. You're not making us money. And it's to the detriment of the entire organization as a result.HAZEL: Yeah. One of the things that I always try to do when I am leading infrastructure teams is I see infrastructure as the way, or not "The Way," but as "A Way" to enable people to have low risk, high quality, rapid experimentation.You want that experimentation to be risk-free, and you want to basically sow the seeds of innovation. And the way to do that is you get a bunch of people that are smart, you put them in a room, you more or less let them do whatever the fuck they want to, as long as they have like, a vague sort of agenda that they're kind of going towards. And then you let them try out as many ideas as possible, and you let them understand the system.Because this whole idea of software development, or development, or building a platform is really about, "How do I understand this so deeply and intimately that I can express the entire understanding of this problem in a way that other people can interface with this as if it was knowledge made concrete and tangible, and interactable."And that requires you to try out a whole bunch of things that are not that thing. It requires you to evolve the understanding of that thing over time and the understanding of the knowledge itself, the process of getting that knowledge, and the process of even thinking about what it means to communicate about it.And that's what you're doing. It's not programming. It's knowledge work. It's creation of understanding itself.ADRIANA: I think that's such a cool approach, because I think by having these loosely-defined borders...parameters...it opens up your mind to creativity.Because now it's like, oh, I feel like if you let people do their thing, I think they will naturally gravitate towards finding the problems to solve and then they will be excited about solving those problems. And like you said, they'll learn things along the way. And for me, I think one of the coolest things after solving a ridiculous problem is taking a step back and thinking, holy shit, look at all the things that I learned along the way to be able to get here and having there's no better way to inject enthusiasm into a team than doing that.Personally, I always tell my bosses, "I don't like being bossed around." I thrive...And that's the thing I appreciate about my current boss is...They know that I thrive from doing my thing and doing it well, and finding cool problems to solve and then writing about it or whatever. Like sharing the knowledge in whatever way.And I think more managers need to recognize that because the field that we are in is ultimately a very creative field, contrary to popular belief.HAZEL: It's one of the most creative fields out there. And one thing that I think of, that you reminded me of is we have the concrete work of doing something, and then we have glue work, which is tying together things in a way that is not necessarily recognized. But there's a third secret option. It's not glue work, and it's not the concrete things. I'm going to call it innovation work. It is work of finding inspiration and drying it out and bringing it to life and sowing those seeds.And it's not glue work. It's not concrete work. It is the work of divining inspiration itself from sources around you and making that visible and making the process visible and figuring out what it means to be innovative and to execute on visions you don't even know you need to look at.ADRIANA: It's yeah, and sometimes that means like, finding collaborations in the periphery of what you're doing, or finding connections to your work from somewhere that you wouldn't necessarily see that connection, because everything I think, brings us to where we need to be.It's kind of like what you were saying. I think we were talking about this earlier. Career-wise. All the things that we do, all of our experience leads us to where we are now. And you draw on that experience. You draw also like what you said on the serendipity and the opportunity taking advantage of lucky situations. I mean, you're only truly lucky if you take advantage of that situation.And I think a lot of us tend to not recognize when we are in a lucky situation and that like, hey, this is something that I need to grab a hold on before it goes away.HAZEL: Yeah. And fine-tuning that notion of luck and that gut instinct of I should focus on this or I should prioritize. This is something that I've done a lot of and it's been one of my greatest career accelerators. Because that fuzzy feeling of this is important, or this person is cool, or this is where I need to be in right now, or I need to go into this room. I don't even know why sometimes, but I just trust it because it's going to lead me to pretty cool places like here.ADRIANA: Yeah, actually that's a really, really excellent point is trust your gut. Trust the fuzzy feelings.HAZEL: Unless it's talked about, then don't touch it.ADRIANA: I was just going to say we are coming up on time. But before we go, I would love to get any hot takes or words of wisdom for our viewers and listeners.HAZEL: So a hot take. Someone asked me once to explain what Kubernetes was because they felt like it might have been a practical joke or something, because they're trying to figure out what it is, and there's just so much nonsense going on.And so my explanation of what Kubernetes was...is...Kubernetes is what happens when you take about five to ten years of institutionalized tech debt, reinvent it, and create an entirely new parallel universe of tech debt as a consequence. Which is to say that it is highly effective, and yet much of it, to some degree or another, is simultaneously needed, yet unnecessary.ADRIANA: That is awesome. I think that is my favorite view of Kubernetes to date. So thank you. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Hazel, for joining me today on Geeking Out. 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.HAZEL: Peace out and geek outADRIANA: 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:Reese Lee (she/her) is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, where she enables users on open source technologies such as OpenTelemetry. She has spoken on various topics related to OpenTelemetry, and maintains and creates community resources aimed at OTel end users. She is super into anything paranormal, and enjoys sci-fi and traveling.Find our guest on:TwitterMastodonLinkedInFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyShow Links:Meme - Don't wait until you feel confident enough to actReese' Etsy ShopOpenTelemetryOpenTelemetry on YouTubeOpenTelemetry End User Working GroupOpenTelemetry Q&A sessionsOpenTelemetry in PracticeOpenTelemetry in Practice Meetup GroupOpenTelemetry Monthly DiscussionsOpenTelemetry Feedback SurveyBlog post: Tail Sampling with OpenTelemetry and New RelicVideo: Why, How to, and Issues: Tail-Based Sampling in the OpenTelemetry Collector - Reese Lee, New RelicVideo: OTel Me About Metrics: A Metrics 101 Crash CourseAdditional Links:Adriana's talks on YouTubeTranscript: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.I've got with me Reese Lee from New Relic. Yay!REESE: Hello. I'm so excited.ADRIANA: I am super stoked to have you on because we work together on the OpenTelemetry End User Working Group. So we're like, always chatting.REESE: Yes. Huge supporter of Adriana and so honored to be here. So hopefully we have something good for y'all.ADRIANA: Yay, super excited. And Reese, where are you calling from today?REESE: I am calling from Vancouver, Washington. So not Vancouver, BC. Lovely Pacific Northwest. It's very nice out right now, so that's why I'm in the sun.ADRIANA: So awesome. Yeah, I had to retreat indoors. It is exceedingly humid here in Toronto. Yeah, we had a bit of a reprieve from the excessive heat that's been going around in most places, but the last couple of days have been sweltering. But I don't think I'm any better indoors because my office is super hot, but I...REESE: Oh, no. Yeah.ADRIANA: But I can't record outside because it's so noisy. There's always cars driving by and I always sit on my front porch when I work outside. So, alas, I can live vicariously through you .REESE: Oh, no. Yes, for now. It's funny, it's been a pretty mild summer. We've even had a couple overcast rainy days. Usually by now we'll have seen some or more 90 degree days than we've seen so far this summer, so we'll see.ADRIANA: Fingers crossed.REESE: I can't believe it's August already. I guess, yeah. We still have more hot days ahead.ADRIANA: Sorry?REESE: Oh, just saying we still have more hot days ahead. It's not August yet.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, I know, right? Yeah, I think it's coming for us.REESE: Yeah.ADRIANA: Okay, so I'm going to start off before we get into the regular format. Well, I guess this is part of the regular format. I want to do some lightning round questions. I promise they'll be fun. Don't panic. You are the first person I'm subjecting to these lightning round questions.REESE: Let me do some stretches.ADRIANA: You have the distinct honour of being the first person I'm recording, so I'm testing out my format on you. Okay, question number one. Are you a lefty or a righty?REESE: Righty.ADRIANA: Are you iPhone or Android?REESE: AndroidADRIANA: Mac, Linux or Windows? What's your preference? Not what you work with, but what you would prefer to work with.REESE: Mac.ADRIANA: All right, favorite programming language?REESE: .NETADRIANA: Cool.REESE:ADRIANA: Dev or ops?REESE: Ops? I don't know.ADRIANA: And there's no wrong answer. And final question: Do you prefer to consume content through video or through blog posts?REESE: Blog posts.ADRIANA: I'm the same way. When someone throws a video at me, I'm like, Nah.REESE: Yeah. I like to be able to read it and see the words. And sometimes people just either talk too fast or they talk too slow.ADRIANA: Exactly. It's like sometimes I can read faster than they can speak, so let's get on with it. And then you can skim.REESE: Yes. And then depending, sometimes they have weird...they try to do funny little things, which is fine, but sometimes I'm like, I just need the info. I don't have time for 20 seconds of you being silly.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's true. I know. I keep thinking that, too. Like, whenever I read blog posts. And sometimes I have a lot of preamble in my blog posts, so then I feel guilty for doing it.But I'm like, I think somebody somewhere enjoys this. But for those who don't, I have clearly marked headings so that you can skim to the goodies.REESE: Yes. It reminds me of recipes where you just want the recipe and they go into the whole backstory of how this recipe been in the family for generations, and they like to make it on rainy Sundays or whatever. And I'm like, oh, my God, I just want it.ADRIANA: Yes, it yeah, I'm totally with you on that one. Like, on these recipe sites, I'm like, Just give me the damn recipe.REESE: I'm already hungry. I don't have time to...ADRIANA: I know, cut to the chase and can I have shortcuts?REESE: Yes. What do I need to buy from the grocery store?ADRIANA: Well, there you go. You survived my lightning round of questions, so let us get into the meaty bits. All right, so I guess let's start with the beginning. Like, how did you get into tech?REESE: Yeah, I've really only been in...I'm still a baby, I think, in the tech industry. Before I came to New Relic, I had my own small business, which I did for several years.I was in recruiting for a while. I was in retail management for some time. And after several years of running my own business, I was ready for new challenges, and I was also ready for a steady paycheck again.And I enrolled in a local coding bootcamp, actually, which, incidentally, is where a lot of Relics also come from. Got into tech support at New Relic, which is what I did for the first couple of years and then kind of happened upon Developer Relations. And so I've been doing that for almost a couple of years as well now. I'm now a Senior DevRel Engineer with a specific focus on open source technologies, specifically OpenTelemetry, which is how Adriana and I met. And yeah, I am here now.ADRIANA: Wow, that's so cool. That is, like, quite a varied path.REESE: Yeah, it has been. I kind of wish I'd checked out tech sooner. I always had this idea that programming was very dry, very boring. That was just a perception that I had. And I had a friend, she's an artist. She used to make apparel. She has some really cool stuff. I actually have quite a few of her pieces, and she went to the coding bootcamp, and I was like, what really? That interests you? And she was the catalyst, really, for me, looking into software programming.And that was how I learned that it's actually really creative and it's all about creating, just using a different format from like, I used to make jewelry and art. And so I love creating stuff, being creative.And when I learned that, holy shit, programming is actually a very creative activity, just using a different medium, I was really intrigued, enrolled literally, like, two weeks later in the same bootcamp that she did.ADRIANA: Yeah.REESE: And yeah, haven't looked back since.ADRIANA: That is so awesome. It's funny because I always have said that programming is a very artistic endeavour. I think you met my daughter the one time, and she is so artsy, and both my husband and I are in tech. And she's like, "Fuck no, I do not want to do this. I do not want to sit at a computer all day long." She's an artistic person. She wants to be a dentist. So I think she prefers to sit at a dentist chair hovered over somebody's face than at a desk. But hey, each their own.But I keep telling her, I'm like, "Hannah, honestly, you'd be such a kick-ass developer." I mean, not that I'm not going to force her either way. She takes her own path. I am fully for that. But I always thought that if she allowed herself, she would actually be a very kick-ass developer.REESE: And she might and she might eventually take her own path to yeah, like, if I'd known sooner, I definitely would have checked it out way earlier than I did.ADRIANA: Yeah.REESE: You just never know.ADRIANA: I feel you. I started out early in programming, but then I rejected it for a really long time. When I went off to university, I'm like, I'm never going to touch coding again. But I studied engineering, and it's part of the curriculum. You have to code as part of it. But I think when I started studying in school is when I finally had these "Aha!" moments because I was mostly a self- taught programmer.I'd get those big thick books from the bookstore and learn QBASIC. That was my first programming language for me, that was like, oh, I don't want to do any of this stuff. This seems horrible. I don't have the brain for this. And then I discovered, oh, I actually do have the brain for this. I was just, like, looking at it completely differently.REESE: Yes, absolutely. Along with thinking it was dry and boring, I also thought, oh, I don't have my brain. Doesn't work quite that way. I'm still learning a lot. There's still a lot of technical things to learn to practice.But I didn't even know at one point that it would be a thing I would be interested in. So I really hope people, especially those that are kind of sitting on the fence or they also think it's boring, I hope they somehow find this and they're like, oh, maybe I should check it out.ADRIANA: Yeah, let them be inspired!REESE: Mmhmm.ADRIANA: So your business before you went into, like, you took the coding bootcamp, so you were selling, like, jewelry. You said you're making your own.REESE: Yeah. So there's really two small businesses that I was running. One is Chubby animal illustrations. It was mostly like, fat cats. And I also had brass and gemstone jewelry that I would make. So I did a lot of local regional art shows, also had my products in a lot of stores over the country and had international customers. And it was really fun. And I still do that on the side a little bit now to kind of keep that juice flowing. Creative juice flowing is what I meant.ADRIANA: That's awesome.REESE: Yeah.ADRIANA: I have to say, running a business is so hard because I did that for a year. And after a year, I was like, no, I'm done.REESE: What did you do?ADRIANA: I decided to quit tech in like, I don't know, it was like 2013 or 2012 to become a professional photographer, and it was going to be like, "Bye bitches, I'm done." And I came back to tech a year later.REESE: I mean, to be fair, I do know professional photographers as well who work for themselves, and it does take a lot to build up to that place.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly.REESE: And years, for sure.ADRIANA: Yeah.REESE: Yeah.ADRIANA: That was the thing. For me, after a year, I was at a crossroads. I'm like, if I love this enough, I can keep at it and maybe I'll even build my business. And I was starting to see I had made some changes to how I approach things, and I was starting to see the changes, but by then I was like, this is exhausting. I don't actually want to do this for a living. I actually loved tinkering with doing my website and I liked blogging and sending out my newsletters, which is a lot of DevRel-y stuff. And I'm like, oh, I had more fun troubleshooting the PHP and some plugin that I bought for my WordPress site than having to deal with the day-to-day BS of running a business.And then I'm like, you know what, it's time for re-evaluation. And I came back to the exact same team. And for me, I think the hardest thing was getting over the fact of what will people think of me? Because I was like, "Bye, I'm done." And then I'm like, you know what, I don't care what people think. I'm doing this for me, not for other people's perception. So screw it.REESE: Yes. That is so important. That's such an important thing that I hope we really impart to everyone who's listening is that do what you got to do. Don't worry so much about what other people are thinking.ADRIANA: Yeah.REESE: They're going to think what they're going to think. No matter what you do. If you think you're doing the right thing, other people could still be judging you and thinking you're not doing the right thing. So who cares? Just do what's right for you. Try out what's good for you and go with that. People are going to think what they're going to think anyways, and just let them be. Just focus on being the best thing for yourself.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. You do you. So what made you sort of decide, like, you wanted to put a pause on the side...I guess they weren't side businesses at the time, the actual businesses to shift over to do this bootcamp. I know you said you were inspired by your friend who...artist friend who was doing this bootcamp, but what kind of made you sort of take a step back and think, maybe I need to change.REESE: Well, kind of like to what you said, running your own business is hard. There's definitely a lot of great perks. So my work schedule was almost whenever I wanted. I would just obviously have to make sure for the shows that I wanted to do, have those scheduled and make time to make the products for those shows. And the landscape has changed so much too since I was last really in it with social media. A lot of people run their businesses online fully as artists, and that can still be really hard because of the algorithm. And like, oh, now Instagram wants you to do reels. And you don't really want to do reels. You just want to take photos of your products, which, as a consumer, I prefer sometimes to just look at photos because not everyone's good at doing videos. And if I have to rewatch a video four times just to see the products, that is so annoying.So the landscape has changed a lot and of course the pandemic. I think things are kind of getting back to normal. But I went to the bootcamp in 2019, which is a year before everything shut down, timing-wise it was really interesting because all of a sudden the markets were like, can we be open? Should we not be open? But people need to depend on this for the livelihoods, we don't know what to do.And so I viewed it as a very serendipitous time for me to have made that change because by that time everything shut down. I was already at New Relic doing tech support and seeing my artist friends kind of like trying to figure all that out. I felt very grateful. And to answer your question, yeah, I have been doing it for several years. I really enjoyed it. But it is definitely a huge grind. If you're not working, you're not making money a lot of the time, like there's online sales and stuff, but you still have to promote, promote, promote, make sure your products get seen it's a lot. And paying 300 something dollars a month for health insurance was starting to get real tiresome.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, I totally agree.REESE: Yeah. So I was also thinking I just wanted to try something new, look for some new challenges and get into something I've never done before. And so I also viewed my friend's trajectory as very opportune because it led directly to my timing of my switch and everything world events happening. So, very grateful.And for anyone who's listening, if you're thinking about trying a new career, do it.Just try it out if you can and see if you like it or not.ADRIANA: I mean, if you're in a position where you're like, I can afford to check this out for like a year and see how I feel, absolutely, go for it. Because there's always going to be an excuse, right, to not try.REESE: Yes, I think a lot of people think, oh, I got to do this and this and they have this laundry list of things to do before they're ready and...I saw this meme that I think will illustrate this point more and I'll send to you so you can put in your show notes or something, but it was something like, confidence doesn't come from being ready. You have to take action to build that confidence, if that makes sense.ADRIANA: Yeah, it makes sense. I think it's like one of those gradual things, right, that builds up. Like...REESE: So, like, yes, okay, "Don't wait until you feel confident enough to act. Your confidence builds as you take action."ADRIANA: Yeah, that's perfect. I love it.REESE: That was the thing. Yes, I messed it up, but that was it.ADRIANA: That's awesome. Words to live by.REESE: Yeah, I screenshot it because I was like, I'm going to Oh, cool. share this with people and I will send that to you're...ADRIANA: Yeah, I want to put that in the show notes. That's awesome. Cool. Now I'm beholden to including these in the show notes. Dun dun dun. Cool.So you mentioned your journey into tech and then so you started in tech support once you got your first tech role, and then what brought you into DevRel and then specifically, like OpenTelemetry?REESE: Oh, man. I really enjoy tech support, and there's aspects of it that I miss even like, solving, just like spending time trying to figure out these technical problems that our users are having. I really enjoy that piece of it. I do still get to do that a little bit in my current role.So I've been doing tech support for a couple of years. I knew I wanted eventually to explore beyond tech support and most tech companies, there's so many different paths you can check out, right?Software engineering, product management, technical training. There's so many other paths also that I was not even aware of, like program management, talent acquisition.And so I knew I wanted to try other things. I kind of decided on one route specifically. And so I was just really open at the time to just seeing what was available and looking for opportunities to add to my skill set here at New Relic. I didn't know anything about Developer Relations. Did not even know it was a thing.There were two engineers that I had worked with in tech support. They worked on the .NET Agent, and both of them reached out to me separately about this new role that was on their team. They were on the OpenTelemetry team. And at first when the first engineer reached out to me, I took a look and I was like, oh, that's very cute. That's very nice that you thought of me, but I don't know about this. And then when the other engineer reached out to me, I was like, okay, maybe I should believe in myself a little bit more.ADRIANA: Yeah.REESE: And so I ended up reaching out to the hiring manager, and she and I chatted more about the role. And that's when I found out about Developer Relations a little bit more. And the more I learned about it, the more intrigued I became because it's a lot of different things rolled into one, which is very great for my ADHD brain.I need a lot of different things to keep me stimulated and motivated. And yeah, after chatting with her more, I decided to go through with the internal application process and I was hired on.And that was when I really dove into OpenTelemetry and learned more about what it is, exactly what it means for Observability moving forward, and landed in the OpenTelemetry End User Working Group, which is how I met Adriana.And yeah, it's been a wild ride. I've since published several blog posts. I've spoken in front of a live audience of hundreds of people, which I used to be extremely, extremely shy. Like, even in college, I had trouble speaking in front of the class and would need my professor to help me because I was extremely shy. And so the fact that I have now spoken on technical topics in front of hundreds of people is amazing to me.ADRIANA: And you're a great speakerk. I can vouch for that. I remember attending two of your talks and I'm like, damn.REESE: Thank you. Oh, my God, that means so much coming from you because I don't know if you all have seen Adriana's Talks, but she is awesome. Her slides are amazing.ADRIANA: Thank you.REESE: Yeah. So thank you.ADRIANA: Awwww...And hopefully we can do a collab talk at some point. Fingers crossed. That our KubeCon. Or is it Observability Day? We applied for one of those together. Observability Day, I think. Fingers crossed!REESE: Those notifications, I think, come out next month, I think so? In, like, a week...ADRIANA: I'm going to be on edge. Yeah. Because I think August 6 is the deadline for the CFPs for KubeCon and Observability Day.You're right. You're right. Yeah. The deadline.ADRIANA: I guess they'll let us know in a month.REESE: Yes, you're right. Okay.ADRIANA: We'll see. We'll see. So...And we applied also for DevOps days, Montreal. Let's see how that goes. Fingers crossed.REESE: Yes, I know. Oh, my gosh. I sort of got...every week is, like, such a whirlwind.ADRIANA: I know, right? CFPs are so exhausting to do and I guess for our listeners who aren't familiar with the term CFP is call for proposal. Right? Usually that's what it stands for.REESE: Yeah.ADRIANA: So it's like when there's a conference or whatever, they put out a CFP, so you have to fill out an application for speaking. Like, it's basically a proposal for a talk. And if they like you, then you get to talk. But it's a lot of work to put together a CFP, and every conference has its own nuance, so then you have to tweak it for their specific ask, and then they'll limit the number of characters for a certain description. So then you write this beautiful thing and it's like, I'm sorry, you're over by 100 characters. You're like, fuck.REESE: Although I have found usually for me, it's easier to have more and then subtract versus, like, oh, I might not have to add more.ADRIANA: Yeah...REESE: But yes, it's a whole project in itself, like, submitting proposals and then trying to come...ADRIANA: And then when you get rejected, it's like, "They don't love me. What's wrong?"REESE: Trying to come up with topics that I think are timely, relevant, interesting, not just to the audience, but something that I might want to learn, too. Oh, man.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly.REESE: It's a whole thing.ADRIANA: Yeah, because that's part of the, I guess, CFP game, if you will, is like, you don't necessarily have to be an expert in that topic, but if it's something that you want to learn more about, it's an opportunity. Like, if you get accepted, it's like, well, I guess I'm digging into this now.REESE: Yes. And so actually, my old manager, she pointed out something. Well, I guess I kind of done it because I submitted a talk proposal about tail sampling in The Collector within, like, a month of me starting my DevRel job and not really knowing too much about OTel at the time, and found out a couple of months later I got accepted, and I was like, oh, shit, I really got to learn up and down.But she explicitly said she would submit talk proposals on topics that she wanted to learn about that she didn't really know. And I was like, that is what I did without knowing it. And it's such a great idea to make sure you have time to learn something that is your job and that you can now teach to other people.ADRIANA: Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I keep running into your tail-based sampling article every so often, and it's very well-written. Like, Reese is a very good writer. So good speaker, good writer. You got the whole package.REESE: Thank you. I do have a degree in magazine journalism, so I would hope I am a good writer.ADRIANA: That is so awesome. Oh, my God. You're like Mystery Woman. So many skills.REESE: Finally putting my degree to good useADRIANA: That's so cool. I did not know that. Damn. This is why we have podcasts, so that we could learn more about each other.REESE: I really enjoyed writing, and when it came time to apply to university, I was like, writing journalism. But then with me being so shy as I was at the time, I just found it really hard to be in a reporter mode.ADRIANA: Yeah, because you have to be outgoing.REESE: Once I start talking to people, that's fine. I've gotten some good interviews in the past, but going out, I'm much better at it now. And I know a lot of people will be shocked to learn that I was so shy, but I was. And I've definitely had to get out of the comfort zone and talk to people on my own.ADRIANA: Especially when you're running your own business, like, you got to promote yourself. That's what I found scary about running my own business, where I'm like, oh, God. Because I'm the same as you. I am mortified of talking to most people. When I was a kid, even going up to an information desk at a mall was like it took me half an hour of convincing myself, okay, I can talk to this person and forget talking on the phone. That is a mega phobia of mine. But to run your own business, you have to put all that aside and just suck it up and do it. And I do feel like for me personally, it helped a lot, and it sounds like for you as well.REESE: 1000%. Oh, you know, other things that have helped along the way too, being in retail management and just people feeling like they can just come up and say whatever they want to you.ADRIANA: Oh, jeez.REESE: And I worked in recruiting for a while for an agency, and so I did a lot of cold calls.ADRIANA: Oh, jeez. That's very...REESE: You have to get over that real fast as well. Yeah, it's been interesting, like post college, just been putting myself in these situations where I'm like, okay, I have to talk to people.ADRIANA: Well it paid off.REESE: Yes. Now speaking live in front of ike 500 people.ADRIANA: Yeah. Like, KubeCon EU, you had quite the audience for your Metrics talk...REESE: YesADRIANA: And it was a good talk.REESE: thank you.ADRIANA: You're welcome.REESE: YesADRIANA: So we're almost at time, but I did want to spend a little bit of time talking about the OTel end user working group. I figure we should always promote the fun things that we do. So yeah. Why don't I let you explain what it is and the cool things that we do?REESE: So the OpenTelemetry community, I'll just take a step back a little bit. So the OpenTelemetry community, like, I think a lot of open source communities, is made up of many special interest groups or SIGs, as well as working groups or WGs, but I guess we can just say working groups that all have specific purposes to develop the community and the technology that it's part of, right?And so the End User Working Group, it was actually created by my former manager of the OpenTelemetry team here at New Relic. She saw a need to create a space where end users could come together and have access to resources to help them learn about OTel, adopt OTel, implement OTel, as well as a space for vendors and other interested parties who want to help develop OpenTelemetry to create resources for end users.And so to that end, we now have several monthly events that we do. So you'll see Adriana and myself at a lot of these.We have the End User Discussion Group, which is where end users come together and discuss challenges that they face with their migration. We also have a guest maintainer or someone from the technical or governance committee come on to help provide additional insight to the project and help answer some of the deeper technical questions that we may not be as aware of.We also have OpenTelemetry in practice, which is kind of an hour long, or they're about presentations about OpenTelemetry. So, like, for instance, we did one recently about how Observability is a team sport which is about adopting OpenTelemetry at a specific company. It was Farfetch with that one. That was a really good one.We had someone come on and talk about what distributed tracing is and how to do it with OpenTelemetry.So that's two.We have another one, which is the End User Q&A/interview/feedback session. It's kind of all those things. And that's where we sit and chat with an organization who is adopting or has adopted and implemented OTel in their organizations, and we find out, why did you decide to migrate to OTel? What are the challenges that you face? Like, how did you migrate? Because a lot of end users are interested in that. We also do blog posts which from some of these events that you can see on the OTel blog.We also have a community survey that anyone is welcome to take and share. Whether you are just kind of starting out in OTel or you have already implemented OTel in production, we are always looking for ways to improve the project. And that was one thing I forgot to mention at the beginning, which is one of the goals of the End User Working Group.So besides being a space for end users and developers of OTel to come together, we also want to create and maintain a constant feedback loop from end users to maintainers with the ultimate goal of improving and advancing the project.So these are the activities that we started and are doing pretty much every month to meet those goals. And so that's why feedback is so important to us. Connecting with end users is so important to us. And if you have an OTel story to tell, we would love to hear it. We know other end users would love to hear it. And so I know Adriana will get all these in her show notes about how you get in touch with us and stuff. So I will get that to her and yeah, I feel like there's other stuff that I might be forgetting but those are the main ones.ADRIANA: I feel like you got the important ones yeah. I do feel...like you said, we do blog post summaries of some of these events, and then we also put up some of the videos for these because that way we cater to our video lovers and our blog lovers alike. Which I find that they're usually very well-received. Like, whenever I post them on socials, people really seem to enjoy the content.So it makes me really happy that even if you're not able to actually attend the session, you can still benefit from it after the fact. And I always find in these sessions, you always learn new things, especially end user discussions where because we do usually have somebody from the OTel community who's in attendance and they'll mention stuff that being worked on where you're like, oh my God, I didn't know that was a thing. Even so, I always find it's super useful to attend these and there's always something new to learn and then there's people with really gnarly ass use cases for OTel, sharing some of the questions that are asked. I'm like, oh my God, this is awesome. I did not know about this.REESE: Yeah, and so if you're interested and you don't feel like you have specific questions but you kind of just kind of want to listen in, please feel free to do so. There's no obligation for you to ask questions if you don't really know if you just kind of want to sit in and learn and don't even know what questions you might want to ask yet.ADRIANA: Yeah, so true. It's such a great learning opportunity. I know people always will tell me after the fact, too, that they always get so much out of these sessions. If you're an OpenTelemetry fan, highly recommend.REESE: Yes, and then you can come chat with Adriana and myself real time.ADRIANA: And we've got our third co-lead as well, Rynn, who also...they did a lot of the OTel in Practice in the past as well, and a lot of organizing. Like there's a meetup group for OTel End User Working Group, so I know they're always keeping that up-to-date.Tons and tons of stuff that we work on behind the scenes and there's three of us running this thing and there's so much work to do. But it's good that there's stuff keeping us busy because it means that there's demand from the community.REESE: Yes. And it's also a great know if you want to contribute to the community but not necessarily with code contributions. We could always use help with content creation. Oh, there is one more thing. The YouTube channel. The OTel YouTube channel.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's where we post our videos after. Yeah, we edit them so that they're not like boring.REESE: Adriana does a fabulous job with that. But yes, we are going to try and do more with the YouTube channel as well with creating content.ADRIANA: Yes, content creation, especially video, is like so much work. Oh my God.REESE: Yep, yep.ADRIANA: Like even a short little Instagram reel, you're like, Holy crap. Especially when you're like fiddling around on your phone going, how do I use this little tiny thing here?REESE: Oh yes. Yeah, going back know, running like my own small business, product photos, product descriptions, all of those things, all of those things take so much.ADRIANA: Time and effort. But we do it because we love it.REEDE:Yes.ADRIANA: Cool. Well, as we wrap up, I wanted to know if there are any parting thoughts that you would like to share, any inspiration with our audience.REESE: Whoo. I feel like I did I did so much better in the lightning round that than now, I guess since we kind of talked more about the career side of things. One thing that I try to impart on my colleagues to help them with their own career growth is especially as so much of us work on remote teams.Now, do your best to be visible with your communications and your contributions online so that your teammates, your future managers, future teammates see and shout out your co-workers.Talk about the problems that you've solved. Obviously not in a braggadocious manner, but just be like, hey, I did this thing, and I want to thank so and so for their help. It goes such a long way for people to see that who may not necessarily work with you a lot over Zoom or in person.And that has really helped me with my career growth here, is being very visible in my online communications. And yeah, from that, I've had people reach out to me about internal opportunities. So I really want to encourage people to be as visible as you can.ADRIANA: I think that's really, really great advice. And being visible means sometimes it means tooting your own horn and it feels weird, but it's got to be done, otherwise nobody knows what you've done.REESE: Yes, it's a skill that I am still learning as well. But think about, like, when other people do it, you're like, oh, my gosh, I didn't know you did that. That's great. Great job.ADRIANA: It yeah, totally.REESE: So think of it from that perspective. And it's rare that I'll be like, look at this person bragging about themselves.ADRIANA: Yeah.REESE: I never really thought that at all when I've seen something like that on Slack. And so if that's your concern, don't let it.ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree. And the same goes especially for an outward-facing role like ours, doing it on social media. People are not going to see your content unless you put it out there and it feels weird. I admit sometimes some of the stuff I post feels weird, but no one's going to know that I've done this unless I post it them.REESE: Exactly. I mean, you know, no one knew what Apple was at one point. They had to get the word out there.ADRIANA: Exactly. And I also really liked your other point of giving shout outs? Give credit where credit is due. Because I think we don't get here just from climbing the mountain solo. We've had a lot of help along the way and making sure that folks get that recognition, because I do feel like what goes around comes around. There's good karma to be had. Paying it forward, I think, goes a really long way.REESE: Yes, 100%.ADRIANA: Cool. Well, thank you, Reese, for joining me here today. This was a super awesome conversation. And thanks for letting me guinea pig you on my lightning round questions.REESE: I am so honoured, and thank you so much. I'm so excited to see what you do with this new podcast.ADRIANA: Yay. I'm psyched. Thanks for following me on my journey. Well, everyone, thank you for joining today on Geeking out. 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, I am your host, Adriana Villela, with Reese Lee, signing off with...TOGETHER: Peace out, geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

About Hannah Maxwell:Hannah is a high school student living in Toronto, Canada. She’s also the daughter of OCMM co-host Adriana Villela. She loves showing off her artistic side, whether it’s through baking, sewing, painting, or knitting. You can see her creations on Instagram. Hannah has been bouldering since she was 3, and still enjoys going to the bouldering gym with her parents. Although both of her parents work in tech, Hannah would rather not spend her time sitting at a desk and staring at a computer all day. That’s why she’s planning on becoming a dentist when she grows up. Find our guest on:InstagramFind us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyTranscript:ADRIANA: Is this thing on?HANNAH: Is this thing on?ADRIANA: Is this thing on?HANNAH: Is this thing on?ADRIANA: Ready?HANNAH: YeahADRIANA: Hey Y'all. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, reliability, Observability,TOGETHER: And everything in between.HANNAH: I've heard this too many times.ADRIANA: I'm your host, Adriana Villela, and with me for our very first episode of Geeking Out, I have my wonderful daughter and producer and just know overall, all around wonderful person.HANNAH: I was going to say overall, just know your emotional support human. Actually, I think I cause you the opposite.ADRIANA: My emotional support human, Hannah, and this is the first episode of Geeking Out, and I'm super excited to be bringing you this episode. You know, if you were a fan of the On Call Me Maybe podcast, you know, it's sad that the podcast has come to a close, but we have started this podcast talking about similar subject matter to On Call Me Maybe. And this time it's been a treat because Hannah is helping me with production of this podcast, because she has mad video editing skills.HANNAH:I wouldn't say mad.ADRIANA: And as a teenager is very tapped into this Youtube sub-culture...HANNAH: I know the social media. I'm very self conscious of people walking by...ADRIANA: Because we're recording outside. This was Hannah's idea. It's kind of nice. I mean, look, it's the end of summer. We're enjoying some outdoor time, right?HANNAH: Yeah.ADRIANA: Cool. Well, okay, so this very first episode of Geeking Out, I'm going to start off with a series of lightning round questions that I usually ask all my guests, and I guess my first guest is Hannah, so I'm going to read them off my phone. Sorry.HANNAH: She doesn't have good memory.ADRIANA: I don't.HANNAH: Sorry if there's noise, but hopefully the microphone...ADRIANA: I really hope so. Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?HANNAH: Righty. But I wish I was a lefty.ADRIANA: Because all cool people are lefties.HANNAH: Like, honestly, leftiness is cool.ADRIANA: It IS cool. I have to say, I love it. Okay, next question. iPhone or Android?HANNAH: iPhone.ADRIANA: Mac, Linux or Windows?HANNAH: Mac? Is that correct? Is that correct?ADRIANA: There's no wrong answer.HANNAH: No, but I don't know. I only understand Mac.ADRIANA: Okay, Mac it is. Okay. Favorite programming language.HANNAH: HTML or Excel?ADRIANA: I think Excel kind of counts.HANNAH: Yeah.ADRIANA: You'll see more in a future episode with Hazel Weakly.HANNAH: Yeah, but in my business class, we had to basically code inside the cells of Excel, and then we had to make an invoice for a magic store.ADRIANA: Yes, true. Okay, next question.HANNAH: And HTML is great. I love HTML.ADRIANA: I don't love HTML, sorry. Okay. Dev or opsHANNAH: Dops.ADRIANA: Dops! [laughts] JSON or YAML?HANNAH: YAML! It sounds like, "ya", "yak", and "llama"ADRIANA: Okay, awesome. That's great reasoning behind it. What is your superpower?HANNAH: Okay, so I thought about this long and hard. Long and hard. Long and hard. Okay, that's actually a good question.ADRIANA: I know. I just stuck it in, actually. This is a new. New for...HANNAH: Okay. Super speed, because I feel like you can do so much with that.ADRIANA: No, the question is not what superpower would you like? What is your actual current superpower? I'm super glad to know, though, that you would love super speed. I think that's actually a really good one, because it'd be nice to do.HANNAH: I'm so embarrassed.ADRIANA: Don't be embarrassed. This is hilarious. Don't worry. Wait 'til you watch one of our future episodes where I basically invent DevOps all over again. Ha. Ha. Ha. So if you feel embarrassed, don't worry.HANNAH: Okay. That felt like a job interview. Like, what's your superpower?ADRIANA: Yeah. One of the questions that I actually like to ask when I interview people.HANNAH: My superpower is at certain times, I can be very laser focused on what I'm doing and get it done really effectively. And I care so much about my work that I'm going to make sure it's the highest quality that it can be. I'm never going to slack off on anything if I truly love it.ADRIANA: That's true. Yeah. I can definitely vouch for that, which is why Hannah is such an awesome producer, video editor, social media, manager of this.HANNAH: Did I get the job?ADRIANA: Yes. Congratulations. Congratulations. You got the job. Okay, final question, and this is actually our topic for today, which is, do you prefer to consume information through text or video?HANNAH: Video definitely. I cannot...like, things just don't process as much if I read. I can read an entire book and be like, I kind of know what it's about. But then if I see it visually and I have someone kind of telling me the parts with actions and videos, I understand it way more. Like for a Shakespeare test, I cannot read very well. It does not process in my head.So it was the night before the Shakespeare test. I'm like, "Oh, my God, I don't understand any of this."ADRIANA: I mean, Shakespeare requires a secret decoder ring to begin with.HANNAH: Yeah, but I'm like, "I do not understand this. I'm going to fail this test." And so I watched YouTube videos breaking down each scene, and I'm like, "Oh, that makes sense."ADRIANA: So then you pass the Shakespeare test.HANNAH: Yes.ADRIANA: And then some.HANNAH: Yeah.ADRIANA: And you know what? I think that's actually a really important thing to discuss that a lot of people don't discuss, because I think there is a lot of emphasis in reading when kids are growing up in school, et cetera. And I think yes, I think we all need to learn how to read.It is an essential skill.HANNAH: But you don't need to be able to read high level books.ADRIANA: Yeah, I feel there's a lot of people are looked down upon if they're not amazing, avid readers. I do love reading. I do love to get lost in a novel, but Hannah doesn't. But I don't think any less of her or I don't think she's any less intelligent because she doesn't like to get lost in a good book. But you like to get lost in a good YouTube video.HANNAH: Yeah, people get so mad at someone deciding to watch a movie instead of read. They're both entertainment. They both teach you things. If you have the same story in a book and a movie, they will end up teaching you the same things.Who cares if it's on a screen or in a play or on a book? Like with text, it really doesn't matter as long as you end up getting the same or at least good things out of it.ADRIANA: Yeah, so true. Yeah, it's funny because even as you're growing up, we watch a lot of TV. No harm in that.HANNAH: No harm in that.ADRIANA: No harm in that.HANNAH:I don't like the stigma around like...ADRIANA: Oh, you watch so much TV, you must be a horrible person.HANNAH: I've learned so much from even TV shows like "Friends".ADRIANA: So many good life lessons.HANNAH: Or "That '70s Show" or "My Little Pony".ADRIANA: "My Little Pony" is a legit good show. Honestly, every adult should watch. It';s got such wholesome messages. I love it.HANNAH: Yeah, but it just really bothers me that people think I'm less of a human because I use YouTube videos or TV shows to learn when they're basically the same thing as a book.ADRIANA: I don't, by the way. I honestly...I embrace your learning style.HANNAH: I know, but when I tell someone about the Shakespeare story, they're like, "Well, that's cheating."ADRIANA: Not cheating.HANNAH: And it's like, but I bet if you're in my place and you just can't process stuff with reading...I can go through an entire page and not know what it was about and it's a struggle with me and I just feel like I should play to my own strength.And there's nothing wrong with playing to your own strength. What would be cheating was if you had the YouTube video playing on a headphone while you're doing the test. That's cheating.ADRIANA: That is cheating. Yeah, I totally agree.HANNAH: It's definitely not cheating to just learn your own way. And there's nothing wrong with however you learn as long as you end up learning from it.Like, maybe if I was just watching all these videos or TV and I'm not learning anything good from it, maybe then you'd have to be like, well...BUT, I'm learning something and I don't think people should get upset or tell you that you're learning wrong.ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's really important because everybody has different learning styles. I'm not a video person, so usually when someone sends me a YouTube link, I'm like, this better be a short video and it better have captions because that's going to capture my attention.But if I need to learn something, I much prefer skimming through a blog post.But I appreciate that that does not work for everyone and different strokes for different folks. And I think we shouldn't look down upon anyone because they learn in a different manner. I think what I find really awesome about you is you've found out what works for you in terms of learning and so you basically hacked yourself. Right?The Hannah hack.HANNAH: But also I think it's more important now as we're trying as a society to destigmatize learning disabilities and different ways that people learn.I think one of the things that we do need to look at is we can't get mad at someone for learning in a way that maybe you don't learn.Because I just get really annoyed when I say that I don't read books and people look at me like...ADRIANA: "Oh, you're an idiot."HANNAH: Yeah. It's actually very upsetting because I spend a lot of time doing the things that I like and learning about them, and I have end up learning about them and I'm proud of that.But then for someone to say, "Oh no, you didn't learn it the right way" It's like, but I still ended up learning.ADRIANA: Hannah wants to become a dentist when she grows up. And guess what? You learned a bunch of dentist facts. So oh, tell us some dentist facts.HANNAH: Charcoal is bad for your teeth. Do not brush more than like two times a day. Also, this is not professional advice. This is stuff that I've learned and that braces are sometimes on dogs.You don't want to mess with braces stuff.ADRIANA: You don't want to put braces on dogs? Or you do?HANNAH: No, you do want to put braces on dogs. If you have braces, you don't want to do anything else that the Orthodontist doesn't recommend, like trying to find a hack to move faster.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, fair enough.HANNAH: I get that social media is like, yes, there's a lot of bad stuff that comes with it, but youalso have to think of it as a different perspective on someone who has actually been helped by social media.I don't think I'd be the same person that I am if I didn't have social media.ADRIANA: That's true. Yeah. You've learned so many cool things, like the most random stuff, like Hannah's been getting financial advice from YouTube.HANNAH: I have! You know, all about investing.Yeah, but I just think that we really need to stop thinking of social media as a bad thing.Like this horribly toxic thing.ADRIANA: Like you said, there's bad aspects to it that are soul sucking and trolls are horrible and that'll mess with your mind.But we also need to remember that social media can be a really cool source of education and I think we need to embrace that as well.HANNAH: Yeah. And someone said to me, well, you're just "mindlessly" scrolling on YouTube? And I'm like, but then if I hadn't mindlessly been scrolling, I never would have actually found these things. I don't think I would have discovered different trying to think of something I've learned, like stuff about job interviews or disability rights issues if I hadn't been just like,I don't look for these things, but because they came to me, I'm interested in them and I can spread my information that I've learned.And so there's nothing wrong with scrolling on social media because it'll take you to places that you never would have gone otherwise.Because I don't think I would have actively been looking for financial advice. Yeah, financial advice, something like that. So I just think it's a really helpful tool. Yes.I'm not saying that there isn't bad stuff. There's a lot of bad stuff and misinformation, but you have to look at the light of and think of someone else's viewpoint of it.And we can't just say get rid of all social media, because then that would be getting rid of a resource.It would be like getting rid of a library.ADRIANA: Yeah. Because it's basically demonizing the whole thing, where it's like, well, guess what? There are bad books out there.HANNAH: Yeah, they're books with, like...ADRIANA: Misinformation...HANNAH:...comments...Exactly. Yeah, there is misinformation books.ADRIANA: So how's that any different? It's just, back in the day, we had books. Nowadays we have books and videos, and others...we've got, like, social media. So it's just like the evolution of how we consume information, which I think is super cool.And I think really the moral of the story is don't judge somebody by how much they read or don't read. Judge them by like...HANNAH: what they've come out of it with.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. And being tolerant of how people consume information and understand that not everybody's going to learn like you do.And I think it's been really cool getting to see like, you know, I learn in a very particular way and you learn in a very different way. And you also like to learn by sometimes by watching others being shown. Which is something that her teacher in the early years of Montessori, her teacher Cecile, figured out early on.I mean, that's so cool to be able to understand how we learn so that we can be our better selves, right? Because there's no way that we can improve if we can't learn.And part of hacking ourselves is understanding how we consume information.HANNAH: Some may say, oh, well, you're getting better at spelling and vocabulary when you read. You can still do that by watching something. Yeah, I can learn new words by someone just saying them. And I can be like, "Hey, let me look it up.""What's that word?"Or if I like to watch stuff with subtitles on, I'm like, "Oh, that's how that's spelled."ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so true. There are just so many ways that people can learn, and the more we say, well, this is bad, you're just trying to stop people from learning, which.You're excluding an entire group of people who choose not to learn or cannot learn in the same manner.HANNAH: Yeah. So I think that's all I wanted to say, you know. I may come back for another episode about this. We might have a guest on who has an opposite opinion.ADRIANA: Oh, yes, on social media. Yes. Hannah's friend Alice we've tapped her to come for a future episode. We're very excited to have her on.Yeah, well thank you Hannah for joining me today.I hope y'all enjoy our inaugural episode of Geeking Out.Make sure that you follow us on all the socials...HANNAH: And let us know what you think about this topic because it's a very interesting topic that a lot of people have a lot of different opinions on, so I'd like to hear those different opinions.ADRIANA: Yeah, definitely.And the interesting thing about this topic too is it's not a technical topic, but it applies to pretty much any job out there, right?Whether or not you have a techie job like me or a non techie job like you want to pursue.I think understanding how we learn makes us better at doing the jobs that we want to.Yay.Well thank you, Hannah.And with that, thank you so much for joining us on Geeking Out.Be sure to follow us on all all the socials. We've got show notes coming your way.Until next time...HANNAH: Peace out, and geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is produced and hosted by me, Adriana Villela. I also composed 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.