Geeking Out with Adriana Villela The One Where We Geek Out on the Plan from Which to Deviate with Diana Todea
Feb 10, 2026
49:37
Key takeaways:
- Diana took the "failure" of being downgraded in her PhD program as a wakeup call.
- Although being downgraded in her PhD program was a shock for Diana and made her extremely angry, she found the strength to finish her studies, and reinvented herself through a career in tech.
- Learning from failure is an important part of personal growth.
- Don't spend your time ruminating on the negative from years ago, because there are other, more important things that come up in life that we have to deal with.
- Find humility in your failure and move on.
- Diana's early experience in tech working at a call centre, and then in customer support prepared her for a later role as an SRE.
- Diana's call centre work taught her how to: Push past her introversion and phone anxiety; Manage her emotions; Filter; Have empathy; Listen
- Diana's work doing tech support in AWS, Azure, etc, introduced her into the cloud native space, and naturally primed her for a role as an SRE, and eventually as a developer advocate in the Observability space.
- Working in tech support meant being on-call, which prepared Diana for on-call work of SRE
- As a working mom in tech, it's hard to fully excel at work and at family life. It's a balancing act, and you do your best to manage.
- Nobody gives you an award for being a mom. You just do it.
- Updating docs, either to clarify a concept or to provide translation into another language is a great way to start contributing to cloud native projects.
- Having translation of OTel docs in different languages makes it accessible to those who aren't fluent in English.
About our guest:
Diana is a Developer Experience Engineer at VictoriaMetrics. She has worked as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Observability. She is an active member of the OpenTelemetry CNCF open source project, co-organizer of Cloud Native Days Romania, co-lead of neurodiversity working group (part of CNCF initiative merge-forward) and supports underrepresented groups in tech.
Find Diana on:
Find us on:
- All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout
- All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela
Links: