Geeking Out with Adriana Villela

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

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

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

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

About our guest:Michael Levan is a seasoned engineer and consultant in the Kubernetes and Platform Engineering space who spends his time working with startups and enterprises around the globe on Kubernetes consulting, training, and content creation. He is a trainer, 4x published author, podcast host, international public speaker, CNCF Ambassador, and was part of the Kubernetes v1.28 and v1.31 Release Team.Find our guest on:LinkedInBlueskyX (formerly Twitter)Find us on:All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillelaShow notes:Windows PhoneVulnHubAmazon Machine Image (AMI)Type 1 HypervisorKali LinuxPenetration (pen) testingBlue team (security)Red team (security)Microsoft Azure Resource Manager (ARM) TemplatesMicrosoft BicepCompTIA CertificationsPenTest+ Study Guide (CompTIA)Tanya Janca (@SheHacksPurple)Alice and Bob Learn Application SecurityBlack Hat PythonBurp SuiteMetasploitStatic Application Security Testing (SAST)Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP)Every Microsoft Employee is Now Being Judged on Security (The Verge)Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have Michael Levine. Welcome, Michael.MICHAEL: Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.ADRIANA: Yeah, really excited to have you on. Where are you calling from today?MICHAEL: I am in New Jersey.ADRIANA: Ooh, fellow east coaster. Yay.MICHAEL: I know. Yeah, I'm. I'm actually. I'm in the process of thinking about getting out of here.ADRIANA: Oh. Yeah.MICHAEL: So, yeah, maybe Tampa or Austin. Those have been.ADRIANA: Oh, so somewhere warm.MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah, those have been the two spots that I've been really thinking about lately.ADRIANA: Cool. I've never been to Austin, but I always hear good things about Austin, especially the food scene.MICHAEL: Yes. Yeah, I feel like I hear that a lot, especially like podcasts and stuff. Like, I'll be listening to just random podcasts. People will talk. Be talking about how great the food is out there. A lot of barbecue, obviously. 'Murca, and. And all that good stuff. So there's. There's a lot of barbecue and that type of food.ADRIANA: I am down for the barbecue.MICHAEL: Exactly.ADRIANA: Cool. Well, we will be starting off with our lightning round questions. Are you ready?MICHAEL: I'm ready.ADRIANA: Hey, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?MICHAEL: Righty.ADRIANA: Okay. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?MICHAEL: I think iPhone, because I've just been using it for so long. But I would argue, though, that will argue with myself that about twice a year I think about switching to Android.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah.MICHAEL: But it's just. I feel like I'm just so used to the ecosystem at this point, and despite being an engineer, I'm not, like, super interested in consumer technology. I just want stuff that just works. And I feel like, at least back in the day with Android, it was like you had to kind of play around with things to make it work in a particular way. Whereas with iPhone, it's just I open it up and I can use the stuff that I need to use and that's it. So.ADRIANA: So, yeah, I'm. I'm with you on that as well. I. I do like the. Everything works, Everything's nicely integrated, it plays well. Nice. And, you know, the. The folks who love Android, I think one of the reasons they love it is, oh, you can configure everything.ADRIANA: And my. My thought is like, but I don't want to.MICHAEL: Like, no, yeah, I'm doing that 90% of my day. I just don't want to do it in my personal time either.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's not fun to me. It was fun, like, I don't know...MICHAEL: Years ago.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly. When I was younger.MICHAEL: Exactly. Yeah. Like, I remember, like, I had Android phones and I was jailbreaking them, and then I had like the Windows phones when they were popular for three minutes and then, you know. Yeah. And then it was like, eventually I just had to switch back and just. I just wanted something that just worked, you know?ADRIANA: Yes, I am with you on that. Okay. Similar vein, do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?MICHAEL: Mac. But there are certain things that are irritating me that I'm thinking about going back to Windows. Like, you know, like, for example, I can't tell you how many times I build a Docker image, then I try to deploy it to a particular place, and I'm like, why isn't this working? And then I'm like, oh, that's right, because I'm building on ARM. Yeah, and then there's. Yeah, and then there's even, like. So I'm really into the security realm and stuff, and there are certain things that I can't do. So for example, there's this website called VulnHub, which is awesome. It's literally just a whole bunch of AMIs that are built with vulnerability.So let's say you want to test or practice something from a pen testing perspective. You can download these AMIs and then you can spin them up in VMware Player, VirtualBox or whatever you're using for your Type 1 hypervisor. But they're not ARM based.ADRIANA: Yes.MICHAEL: Like, I can't use them on my Mac and I have like my Windows box back there, which I can do it on, but I'm like, it's just a pain, you know? Or like, let's say like I'm speaking at a conference or something. It's like, I want to demo something, but I can't because of this. I just. Yeah. So I've been thinking about going back to Mac, which would be the first. Er. Mac Windows, which will be the first time in like six, seven years.ADRIANA: Oh, damn. Yeah, you make a very good point with the, with the Docker images and ARM. Like, that has caused me so much grief recently.MICHAEL: It's a pain.ADRIANA: Like, I can't even tell you. And. And then also, like, I don't know if this is still true. I haven't checked for a while, but I think, like, you can run VirtualBox on M1 Macs.MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah. No, you totally can. Yeah. Like, even, like, I have. Yeah. I have VMware Fusion even on it right now because I'll like, I have a Kali VM, but Kali is like a pen testing distro that I'll run locally and stuff because it's not my daily driver. But like I can run those VMs. But if anything is built with AMD base 64 or whatever, it's all about the architecture.So even whatever the extension is for VMs, right, that AMI. You can exist, you could download it and stuff, but then it'll say, oh, you can't run it because your architecture. And you're like, yeah. Apple should have given an option like go Intel or go ARM. But yeah, so.ADRIANA: I definitely feel your frustration on that one. Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?MICHAEL: I'm comfortable and Go, but it depends on the use case. Right. So like programming languages to me are, are really nothing more than a tool to get a job done. Yeah. So like I'll use Go just because I, I enjoy it and I'm comfy in it. But from like a security perspective, a lot of Python and PowerShell, because those are like the two primary like scripting based languages. And from a security perspective, the majority, whether you're doing blue teaming, red teaming, purple AppSec, cloud sec, whatever, the majority of the time writing automation with your code. So it kind of makes sense to go the Python or the PowerShell route. I could do it in Go, but it's like nobody else is really doing it. So then it won't work in certain scenarios or people won't be comfortable with it in certain scenarios, so.ADRIANA: Oh, cool. That's. That's really interesting.MICHAEL: Yeah, Yeah, I love Go. I, I started out PowerShell, Python. I moved to Go years ago. I teach like Go training. So like I'll, I'll teach live trainings, teaching people Go. So I'm, I'm super comfy in that realm.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: Yeah. Python or PowerShell, it's pretty much the way to go from a security standpoint.ADRIANA: Good to know. All right, next question. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?MICHAEL: Which one? I don't know. I, I'm, I think because of the way that my brain works, if I had to choose to just do one, it would be development because I'm very logistical, left side of the brain. Like, I like, I like research and I like logistical based jobs. So I think programming gives me more of that and I've done both. Like, I started out my career in systems administration and help desk and all that. Around the middle of my career I moved to software development. And then I just found myself somewhere in the middle. Right. Yeah, whatever you want to call it. Platform, SRE, DevOps, whatever. Whatever title is catchy nowadays. So, like, I've done kind of a little bit of everything and I've played with all different pieces of technology. But what I will say is, like, I don't think I can do one without the other anymore. Like, I wouldn't be a good developer if I didn't understand infrastructure. And I wouldn't be good at infrastructure and systems and networks and containerization and Kubernetes if I didn't understand development. So I. There's. I feel like the, the lines are so blurred in today's world that you really need both. But yeah, if I had to choose, like, what I was going to do, probably, like, writing code.ADRIANA: Awesome. And, you know, I love what you said there about, like, really the lines blurring and having to understand both. Because I so agree with you. And I've had, I've had arguments with people over this because in the past, like, when I was managing teams and I was hiring folks for my team, like, I was hiring developers for my team, but I needed them to, like, have an understanding also of, like, the infrastructure side of things, like how to containerize your applications. And I was really surprised by the number of, like, resumes that I got or even like, you know, if they made it to the interview process of people who had no experience containerizing their, their own applications. And I'm like. But aren't you, like, remotely curious as to how that works? I don't know.MICHAEL: That's the problem.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's just so surprising because for me it's like, of course you're going to learn how to do that.MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. And it's. That curiosity is drastically important, especially in today's world. So, like, we've. Tech is weird. Like, it has gone from being this, like, really particular career for, for nerdy people. Right.And then it kind of went mainstream. Like, tech now is very much like, tech is buzzy and it's trendy and it's like, people like it because it's cool and like, I don't know when tech became cool, but it's. It's cool now. But what ended up happening was so many people, so many people got into it because it was cool and because it was trendy and all this stuff. Right. Which is okay. But the problem is, is that those people very rarely are putting in the same amount of work and effort that like, engineers were putting in before it was cool. And trendy and, and the interest isn't there.And that's why, you know, and hot, hot take. You know, people may be irritated about how to. People may get irritated because I'm saying this, but like, I think that's also a big problem with like why people are having such hard time finding and getting jobs. And look, I'm not, I, I understand there's been like over 300, 000 layoffs between, you know, the large tech companies. I'm not dismissing that. But what I also do know is like, I have friends recently that have gotten laid off and within three to four weeks they had four job offers because they're very, very good at what they do. And, and it's not because they're geniuses, but it's because they are very interested and like, they want to know the way things work and how they work and how they come together. And if you don't have that, it's very difficult to find a job.ADRIANA: Yeah, I so agree with you because I honestly think that's like the heart and soul of tech is being curious. And curious enough to learn new things because tech moves so fast that if you don't learn new things then you're, you're like outdated.MICHAEL: One hundred percent. Yeah, yeah. And it, it makes things really weird when you're self employed. Like I'm self employed and you kind of have to like pick a direction. I think at this point where it's like, are you going to be trendy or are you going to be more educational based? Like, my content is very educational based. It's very like, I'm gonna show you how to do a thing. Yeah, I'm it. This is just not my personality. I'm just not the guy that's like putting on the YouTube voice and like doing the camera angles and this.MICHAEL: It's not me. It's never been me. If I did it, it would be disingenuous.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.MICHAEL: But in that realm, if you take that route, you know, and you're doing like vendor content and stuff, which I do vendor content. I just don't do that type of vendor content. You could pull in 5, 400, 500,000 a year USD. Like it's very manageable and reasonable to do that. But then you got to take a certain. But then if you do the educational route, like I, I backed off from that and I went the educational route. And you're not making that in the educational route, but that education. The reason why I'm saying all this is because that educational route if you keep that level of engineering mindset, it will make your life easier to get jobs because you'll be curious and because you'll be interested in what you're kind of doing, you know, versus the people that if you're just turning on the camera and just talking about stuff, it's fine and there's a place for that. But it's also going to be very, very difficult to find a job in tech now because of that.ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?MICHAEL: Oh, neither. Is that an option?ADRIANA: I mean, it's an option.MICHAEL: So I guess.ADRIANA: Tell me why you like neither.MICHAEL: Yeah, so I, I guess I would, you know, go with YAML because so in the Kubernetes realm, when I'm like, just so invested in. Embedded in the Kubernetes realm at this point out of the box, you can use JSON and YAML natively with Kubernetes, but you just 1000% of the time you're always going to see examples in YAML. You're never going to see them in JSON, but natively you can use both. I think in, in all seriousness, I think I would choose probably YAML. I think JSON is like, the more you add to it, the more convoluted it is. Hence why, you know, Microsoft switched from ARM templates to Bicep. Because it was just. People were looking at ARM templates and it was like, this is a. There's a lot happening here. And this is, it's really easy to misconfigure. I think that's why I would choose YAML. I think with JSON it's just far easier to misconfigure your environment with JSON as it gets longer than with YAML.ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. I find YAML a lot more legible. I know, like, people get really, like annoyed by the spaces thing. I mean, me too. But I. It's so much more legible compared to JSON. It's like just a blob of characters when I look at.MICHAEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: JASON and I, I, yeah.MICHAEL: Yeah, 100%. It's always funny to like the tabs and spaces thing. I don't know if, like, if you ever, if you watch the show Silicon Valley.ADRIANA: Oh, yes. Actually, that's my next question.MICHAEL: Yeah, I love when Richard, like, I forget, I forget the chick that he was dating, but like using space and he's freaks out and has to leave. Oh, so freaking funny.ADRIANA: Oh yeah, yeah, I love that. Like, that one little, like, you know, scene is Just like, just magic. Magic.MICHAEL: So funny. So funny.ADRIANA: And that's perfect because my next question is, do you prefer tabs or spaces?MICHAEL: You know what I prefer? I prefer clicking option shift F in VS code because it just does it for me. I don't have to like worry about like the tabs and spaces with like the auto formatting and VS code anymore. Um, but yeah, I think spaces. Cause sometimes with YAML it's like. So a tab is four spaces, I think. Right. But with YAML, like, sometimes you. You can only do two, like two spaces. So like, then it like screws up the formatting and. But even if the formatting is messed up anyways, it's just like command shift after or option shift F, whatever it is. And then it like formats everything. So. So it's less of a hassle nowadays. But I think spaces.ADRIANA: There you go. Hot tip on formatting. Yeah, I actually switched from spaces. Sorry, from tabs to spaces because of that, with the formatting in YAML where I think it defaulted to the tab, as you said, being four spaces. And then I open YAML documents. That was two. I'm like.MICHAEL: The nice thing too with VS code and pretty much any IDE at this point is when if I'm on a line and if I hit enter, like it will put me where I should be going.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: And so. So it's kind of like you really don't have to think about it anymore at this point. Which is nice. Yeah. Because that's. And, and. But it was more important like years ago, like there were languages, like whether you were using garbage collection or not, that it was like spaces would take up more memory once you were compiled. So. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that really. I don't know if it matters anymore. I haven't ran a benchmark against that in like 10 years, so I wouldn't know if it still matter. Yeah. So fun to talk about though.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. It always, it always provides for some like, very interesting conversation every time.MICHAEL: 100%.ADRIANA: Okay, next question. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?MICHAEL: If I'm trying to do something quick video. But I like reading. So one of one of my, you know, mental health things is 30 minutes a day. I. At least 30 minutes a day I carve out to read. And it's always a technical base book. Like I'm always reading something about a new practice or a new something in a language or a certification thing or whatever. Like I'm always reading stuff.ADRIANA: So what are you currently reading then?MICHAEL: What am I currently. Let me, Let me. Let me pull up my Kindle app because I'm reading like, four different things at the moment and I want to make sure I have the titles correct. So one thing that I'm reading, because for like, security based contracts, like government based contracts and DoD based contracts, I need certain CompTIA certifications. So Pentest plus by CompTIA, currently going through that. Again, it's needed for, like, DOD contracts and stuff. This is a really awesome book. Tanya Janca, if you're familiar with her, SheHacksPurple. She. She has, like, some really awesome content. She wrote a book called Alice and Bob Learn Application Security. Oh, yeah, It's a really cool one. Yeah. Yeah. And then Black Hat Python is another really good one. But I'm always bouncing back and forth, honestly.So one thing that I do as well, and I. I do this because I apparently enjoy pain, where I'll read like three to five books at a time and then I'll forget like 70% of it. So then I just keep going back and reading the same thing over and over again. So, yeah, it's fun. So that's a good. Yeah.ADRIANA: Okay, final question. What is your superpower?MICHAEL: Oh, God. Getting annoyed? No, I think that I am really. I'm. I'm open to more and more information, and I think that's. That's what I've always been really good at. Like, even, like in the beginning and in the middle of my career, like, I have gone. I've walked into job interviews where I didn't know 90% of what they were talking about, but I let them know, like, I'll figure it out. And they're like, all right, can you figure it out in two weeks before the job starts? And I'm like, yep. And I'll just. I'll sit there and like, throw myself into things for weeks and weeks and weeks to figure out how stuff works again. Maybe it goes back to the enjoyment of pain or just the enjoyment of learning. I don't really know exactly what it is, but, yeah, I'm just. I'm. I'm. I'm not, like, out of the box smart, right? Like, I wasn't, like, an A student in school and stuff. And, you know, I don't have a fancy degree or anything, but I'm just really good at, like, taking a problem and figuring it out. It may take me longer than. Than other times. It may throw me down, you know, a bottle of bourbon. But at some point, I will figure it out because I'll just keep kind of hammering it out until I fully understand what's happening.ADRIANA: That is such a great superpower, and I think it's such an important one for working in tech is just like the perseverance and, and as you said, like the openness. Because I think one thing that I, I've experienced in the workplace in the past is being on a team and, and folks being asked to, like, do something and they're like, but I don't know how to do that. And, you know, passing the buck to someone else because they didn't want to be bothered rather than, oh, this is like a really cool learning experience and you might get something out of it.MICHAEL: One hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's this curiosity aspect of it as well, but then there's also like, the life aspect. Like, I, I'm a firm believer that, like, what you've gone through in life will kind of dictate how much pain you're able to take. Right. And that's, and that's why people don't, like, want to go out and learn this and that and this and that. Because they, people like to be comfortable, right? Yeah, they don't like to not be, you know, they don't like to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And that's always been something that I've been able to be decent enough at where, like, I'm okay with being uncomfortable.ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's definitely a really good, good skill to have. And it, you know, it makes me think too, to like, especially like in so many organizations when they're doing, you know, digital transformations, agile transformations, DevOps transformations, where you're basically asking your employees to, like, change the way that they work. And you see so much resistance. Like, I, I worked at a bank for many years and I was part of a massive, like, DevOps transformation. And it was funny that we had, I feel like we had the dev part figured out. Like, we had the really good CI/CD pipelines, but the hardest part was actually getting the delivery to really embrace those DevOps principles. So it was more like we got the CI. It was the CD that was really holding us back because the folks who worked in ops were, eh, I don't want to learn this new thing.MICHAEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: And it was a detriment to them, but also to the organization because they couldn't move forward.MICHAEL: And that's still how it is. I mean, that's why if you're a good engineer, you can pretty much go and name your price at an organization, you know, like, depending on where you're. Well, I would argue that this shouldn't even matter, but it does. For whatever reason, like depending on where you are in the world, like you should be able to name your price, right?ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: Like, if you're like, hey, I should be making 220 a year and you know, you're that good. Yeah, you could go and you can name that price.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: You know, but yeah, I mean I think that's the big. Again going back to what we were talking about before, like, that's the differentiator right between like, are you going to get a job or are you going to be laid off for three, four years?ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, that brings us to the conclusion of our lightning round question. So thank you for playing. And I wanted to get now into, you know, the, the meaty bits and before we, we started recording, we were talking about how you do a bunch of security work, which you alluded to also in the, in the lightning round questions. So first question is, what got you interested in security in the first place?MICHAEL: Yeah. So I've been really. And for any, anybody that like takes a look at my content or sees what I've been doing over the years, I've been always really focused in the Kubernetes realm. I have written books on Kubernetes, I've spoken at conferences on Kubernetes, hundreds of blogs, hundreds of videos, podcasts, everything. And I kind of reached a point where so the way that my for better force, the way that my brain works is if I feel like I don't have a purpose. And my purpose is always career related. It always has been. Just because the way I was raised and my life and all these different things, if I'm not doing something that's really hard, I'm like drastically depressed.Like I've had, you know, mental health issues and all these different things and it usually comes back to because I'm not challenged.ADRIANA: Mm.MICHAEL: So I chose security because after I like stayed in Kubernetes for years and the thing was in the Kubernetes realm now, like you could give me any topic to talk about to go speak at a conference to write a book on and like I don't really have to do any research. Like I don't really have to do any prep. Like I've walked into conference talks with zero prep. Like, because I just know it. Like I just. Because I was focused in it for so long. So I wanted to. My next challenge I wanted to think about what can I do that's incredibly hard. That not a lot of people can do really well, and that is a constant, growing pain. And I came across security.ADRIANA: Ah.MICHAEL: Yeah. So I just. I just. I was like, what's the most painful thing I can work on right now? And that's what I came up with, yeah. Yep, yep. Yeah. And then for me, it wasn't even like, let me go blue team or red team. It was like, let me go application security. Because application security is arguably the one that, like, it seems like nobody can get right. So I was like, all right, let's do the thing that nobody can figure out. I'll go down that route. So, yeah.ADRIANA: There you are.MICHAEL: Here I am.ADRIANA: I actually wanted to go back to something that you mentioned because I can so relate to it, where you said not feeling challenged lead led to you having, like, mental health issues. Because it was. And I can so relate because I have found that. So I've gone between manager and IC roles in. In the past, and I realize that every time I'm in a management role, I'm depressed because I feel like I'm not doing something, like, cool and engaging.MICHAEL: Right.ADRIANA: And it's so interesting to meet someone else who has experienced something like that and that. It, like, you know, it. It. It's. It's validating in a way. You know, like, it's. Yeah.MICHAEL: So. It's so I can, you know, I don't know how. How deep you want. You want me to go here with it with these answers, but I've seen a lot of mental health issues, like, throughout my life. Like, I grew up incredibly poor. Both of my parents were drug addicts and alcoholics. You know, we were in apartments with bedbugs. We were in apartments where there were no bedrooms. It was a studio. Like, I. I went through a good, nice chunk of my life where, like, I didn't have my own bedroom. I've. I've. I've been, like, through, like, really bad times. And then I've been to the point where I own my home and I drive the car that I want to drive. And, you know, I'm. I'm. You know, the. The money that I can make is more than I ever even thought possible. Right. I didn't go to college. None of it. Like, I could. College wasn't even an option because I just needed to start working. So, like, I've seen. And I've seen everything that comes with growing up like that.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: You know, I've had a lot of mental health issues where I had a stroke due to depression. Like, a lot of big things. Yeah. So, like, I'VE seen, like, I've gone down the. Down the, the deepest, darkest mental health issues that you could possibly imagine. And the one thing that I found. And I. I did the yoga and the meditation and the medication and the several. Talking to several therapists and psychiatrists, and it's always fun to talk to psychiatrists and therapists when they're like, we don't know what's wrong. And you're like, oh, I. I guess I. I won the game of therapy when you, when you have to. When you stump the therapist. Right.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: So I've done all of this and what I found that brings me out of it. And this is. Again, this is just my personal opinion. This is going through again, everything that I went through in my life, being in such a dark place where my body literally tried to shut itself down.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: Medication, therapy, all this stuff. It is. It's great to sprinkle on top.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: But the only thing that's going to actually bring you out of it is figuring out what the underlying issue is. And the majority of the time, the underlying issue is purpose. It's finding purpose in life.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: And driving that purpose. That's why you look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and, And Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and whoever, all these people. And look, I'm not. I don't want, you know, that there's the conversation of, well, what about these people's personalities? They suc. I don't care about that. What I'm. What I more care about is, like, how people are and how they move through life and how they navigate. And all these people, you know, and tons of others.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: They're multimillionaires and multi billionaires.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: They don't have to work anymore, nor do the 20 generations after them. What keeps them going is not financial. What keeps them going is purpose. They have a particular purpose in life, and that's what drives them. So I'm a firm believer that purpose in life is what takes you out of dark places. And for me, it's always been career, you know, So I totally understand and agree with you. Where it's like, you can't be in something that you're bored because then you're going to be depressed and you're going to be drinking and you're not going to be working out and you're going to be eating crappy food all the time just because you need some type of escape and it just. It brings you down this, like.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.MICHAEL: Really bad hole.ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree it's like, you. You need to give yourself a mission, a meaningful mission. Like, whenever I feel like I've got, like, okay, I have a goal, I'm like, I'm all in. Even if it sounds, like, ridiculous and, like, I have no idea how I'm gonna achieve it, but I'm like, I think it's achievable. And. And I think that's the other thing. Like, if you think it's achievable, even if it's hard, I think on the most part, it gets achieved.MICHAEL: One hundred percent. One hundred percent. And I mean that. I think that's the same for anybody. Right?ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: So to your point, it's like, if you have a purpose, if you have a dri-...if you have drive, if you have any of these things, you could sleep three hours a night and get up and go. Right. Your life could be however it is. But if you have this thing that you're driving towards, it will be exceptionally better for you than anything else. Any medication, any therapy, any. Anything. And I'm not telling everybody, stop doing all that stuff. What I'm saying is you're not going to find the underlying cause of your. Your issues with that. Right? I didn't. Right. Nobody that I know that's gone through it has. Everybody's got to find purpose. That's. It's such a. It's. It's the most important. And your purpose could be your kids. Your purpose could be making sure you have a clean home. Your purpose could be being a digital nomad. Right. And living in different places every year, every six months. Whatever your per.MICHAEL: I don't care what it is. Find it. That's going to be the thing that's going to help you in life the most.ADRIANA: Yeah. It's the thing that gets you out of bed, basically.MICHAEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: You're, like, excited to tackle the day. Like, I. I find, like, especially when I'm in the midst of solving a gnarly problem, if, like, the previous day I made some sort of breakthrough and, you know, the. The next day I wake up all excited because I'm like, I get to work on this some more. And I'll even, like, wake up before my alarm because, like, I can't stop thinking about it. And it so excites me and it so drives me.MICHAEL: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And usually it. No, not usually. I mean, 100% of the time, it really. It's no financial gain. It's no. It's nothing external. Right. It's all intrinsic factors that make you get out of bed in the morning and go do what you want to do. And again, it goes back to, you know, that's why all of these millionaires and billionaires, like, they don't have to do anything.ADRIANA: Yep, yep, anything.MICHAEL: They could sit there in front of their TV and drink bourbon and eat pizza for the rest of their lives and do it incredibly comfortably.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah.MICHAEL: In a, in, In a smooth 70 degree house like this, life could be freaking awesome.ADRIANA: Cushy.MICHAEL: Yeah. And, but they don't do it like that because, like, they have to have some type of purpose because that's, that's what drives you in life.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally agree. Now, I wanted to switch gears back to the security topic because there's a couple of things that I want to ask. First of all, you know, you know, you mentioned that you got into application security because as you said, seldom, like, people get it right. What do you like specifically? What is, what is it that you think that people don't usually get right when it comes to application security?MICHAEL: The number one thing is you don't fully understand the underlying system. So, and I always say this security is pretty easy. Like the act of securing something is relatively straightforward. Right. The hard part is understanding where you're securing. It's the same thing with writing code. I can teach any. I can, I can take anybody off the street and teach them how to write a function and a method and a class. What I can't do is take anybody and teach them how to properly architect an application stack and get it done right and get it deployed right. Same thing with security. I can teach anybody how to go use Burp Suite and how to spin up a Kali Linux box and play around with Metasploit and use code scanning and SAST tools and DAST tools and SCAP tools, and I can teach anybody how to do any of this stuff. But what I can't teach them is, okay, I'm going to go and I'm going to run these tools and I'm going to use these tools. Now what? Oh, I found a vulnerability. Now what? Oh, there's an issue in a library. Now what? What's the fix? How do I implement change? You can't, you can't teach everybody that. And I think that's why.And even if you go, you, you know, you look on Reddit or you look on other forums, the number one question I would say and like, said the cyber security arena right now is, hey, I just graduated college and I want to go and do cyber security. No, you don't need to know what you're securing, you can't literally by definition you cannot secure what you do not know. And I think that's the hardest part. The hardest part is not security. The hardest part is understanding the underlying system, network, application, container, whatever. So well, yeah, that you know what it, how it works inside and out. That's the really hard part of security.ADRIANA: Do you think that's one of those things that would come with experience?MICHAEL: 100%. Yeah. That's why you know, you have like SOC style roles, security operations center. Right. Where pretty much their job is just like, oh, vulnerability come in, came in, let me triage it and send it to where it needs to go. Yeah, you could do stuff like that.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: But anything more defending systems, pen testing, red teaming, application security, like you cannot do this unless you understand what you are securing. So if you have experience like anybody that has 10, 20 years of infrastructure experience can go do system security. Anybody that's been a software engineer for 10, 20 years can go do AppSec. You just need to like learn the tools and the terminology and there's a lot of terminology in security space. I don't know why it's worse than cloud native. There's so much terminology and I'm like, oh, why are we called like, can we just name these five things the way that they are and leave it at that? Yeah, it's so strange to me, but yeah, it's. Yeah. So yeah, like if you, if you know something very, very well, like if you know the underlying platform very, very well, security is, is relatively straightforward.ADRIANA: Right, right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now another question I want to ask. I remember when the DevOps movement started gaining traction and everyone's like, shift left, shift left and then shift left on security. Do you think that organizations are truly shifting left on security? And if not, why like, why do you suspect that they might not be?MICHAEL: No, I mean there are so many breaches all the time that like they're clearly not. Even like, you know, like the, the like people only. So it, security is very comparable to life. Right. You only make a change in life if things go wrong.ADRIANA: Oh my God.MICHAEL: Nobody, like very rarely do people do like preventative maintenance in life.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, right, like, absolutely.MICHAEL: If you go to the gym five days a week and you eat decently healthy, where let's say you eat, you know, three meals a day and you know, two to three of those meals per week or just whatever you want, it's pretty good preventative maintenance. Yeah. But the majority of people don't do preventative maintenance in life and they, nor do they insecurity until something goes wrong. That's why like Microsoft now, like Microsoft has been releasing all this stuff where their, their engineers now supposedly, who knows if this is true, but they're not going to be judged just based on like code quality and stuff. Like they're going to be judged based on security posture.ADRIANA: Oh good.MICHAEL: That's interesting stuff. Yeah, yeah, really interesting stuff. So I think the shift left. So the shift left thing, right, like if we break this down and because it's so buzzy, but if we, if we break it down, what's application security? What's AppSec? AppSec is securing the entire SDLC process.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: From the thought of this is going to be a thing to the idea, to the libraries we're using, to the language we're using, to the deployment process. Shift left is around this whole DevSecOps thing, right?ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.MICHAEL: So if you ask somebody what's DevSecOps securing the entire SDLC process. Why do we have three names for this? I have no idea. We have three names for the same exact thing. It's the same. There's no difference. If you take shift left, SDL-, AppSec and DevSecOps, it's literally all the same thing. There's no differentiation between these three things. So we unfortunately like have a lot of buzz because, you know, look, look, I'm. Vendors got to make money, right. They got to make it somehow. Right? And so they got to make stuff up that sounds cool. So they can sell their products. I get it. Yeah, we all, we all got to make money, but it just causes a lot of confusion, I think, unfortunately.ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. I, I gotta say I always found the term DevSec Ops a little cringe. Only because my thought is like, isn't security supposed to be baked into DevOps in the first place? So yeah, every time I hear that I'm like, yeah.MICHAEL: And it's, it's, it's tough too. Right. So it's like you could go and look at my LinkedIn posts and, and, and I always like, I don't, I, I don't know why. This is just society, I suppose. But like I'll create LinkedIn posts that are like really, like have a lot of really good stuff in there. Yeah, yeah, but I'll use terminology that people don't know maybe like perfect timing and pen testing and AppSec and stuff. And they don't, they don't get what I'm saying. So it doesn't it doesn't really go anywhere.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: But then if I throw something and I've, I've, I've, I've tested this out and unfortunately proven it to be true. If I put DevSecOps in.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: Gets a lot of traction. So it's the unfortunate reality of, you know, what the, the world that we live in right now because that's just what people know. And, and these aren't people that are just marketing people. Like I talked to really, really solid engineers and they say DevSecOps. And the reason why they say it is because they're hearing it. The reason that they're hearing is because marketing is incredible. In, in today's tech world, it's really good. Like some of these vendors are really solid with their marketing.ADRIANA: Yeah.MICHAEL: And that's just what people know now. So it's like, you know, you gotta, you gotta do it. It's weird, but is what it is.ADRIANA: I, I agree.MICHAEL: Yeah.ADRIANA: Yeah, it is funny. The, the LinkedIn algorithm is always, always an interesting one to wrangle.MICHAEL: Yeah, it's, and you know what's so funny about it too? Like getting solid content out in the world, it sucks. But it's not about how good you are at something. No, it's really just about how good you are at phrasing things. Um, and, and luckily I've just been a writer for so long now that it's like I've just kind of hit the nail on the head with it. Yeah. But like, I remember when I first became self employed, I was like, I'm a good engineer, everybody's gonna hire me. Yeah. I, I, I found out the, the quick and hard way that that's not the way things work. So yeah, it's, it's really all about, you know, that verbiage for people.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's true. And, and seeming approachable and, and whatnot to folks. The, the other thing, it's funny, I've had a couple conversations with folks, especially around LinkedIn posts. And actually my, so my friend Hazel Weekly and I were talking about like, why is it that when I just, you know, I have these nice thought out LinkedIn posts, like, they get like, so, so traction and then when I post something out of like, you know, emotional rage or shitpost, it gets traction. And then Hazel, like, I think later that day wrote a shitpost about shitposting and, and she's like, I got so much traction on this, more so than the other stuff. And it's like, oh my God. It just like proved what we were discussing.MICHAEL: I, I so I'll give you an example right as we're, I'll, I'll, I'll take a look at this live. So I'm looking at my LinkedIn post as we speak now. I put something together two hours ago. It literally did not get any likes and any comments. 379 impressions. That is awful. But it was, it was a carousel explaining certain AppSec tools, why you would use them and where to find them. Right. It got no traction. None. But then if I scroll down to where is this one? Oh, here we go. I wrote, "Networking is ridiculously important in Kubernetes. It's one of the core skills that all engineers need. There are a ton of different components. Pod IPs, container IPs, DNS, firewalls, and a lot more. I highly recommend learning these things."MICHAEL: This is pretty much nothing, right? Like I pretty much just said nothing in my post. 111 likes, 10,000 impressions. It doesn't make any sense.ADRIANA: Holy crap.MICHAEL: Yeah, so it's, it's a really like weird world that we live in where it's like you pretty much just say nothing and people are like, "Sick!" and then you say stuff that's important and people are like, don't like that at all.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, it's so bizarre. And then especially like when you have like this lovely, well crafted post and there's like, you know, hardly any impressions, hardly any likes and it's like nobody loves me now. Another question that I wanted to ask you around security is, you know, there's, there's the age old battle between InfoSec and developers. What kind of, what kinds of things are you seeing out in the wild with regards to this? Like do you think it's getting any better or what do you, what do you think think is kind of the main cause of this?MICHAEL: You know what's so ironic about this question too. I'm so happy that you brought this up because I so oftentimes I argue with myself, right? For better or for worse. I just. Multiple personalities in here and I have a lot of arguments and disagreements with everybody that's in here. And a lot of the developer security issues, right, are really all about this. It's everything that we know. This security person told me I have to change this and it's going to break this and it doesn't work with this. Right? This is the security thing that we all know.Why does this happen? Well, very straightforward. The security person is running a vulnerability assessment. These vulnerability assessments say this thingy over here is broken. Go fix that thingy and then they throw it over the wall. The reason why the security person is doing that is because, and I'm not trying to sound rude or anything, this is just open honestness. They don't know what they're talking about. If you have any security measure that you are recommending and it is going to break something, that means you do not understand the underlying application, the understand. The underlying libraries, understanding packages, and how this application stack is created. There is no security issue that should ever break a system when it's integrated.The only time that you may have an issue is when you're doing a vulnerability assessment that has a third, that's scanning a third party package or library that has a security vulnerability inside of it. Because you essentially have three options. You become an open source maintainer for that library package and you fix it. You accept what it is, or you take it out and you find another way to write that piece of your code. That's really the only time that something could break your application stack. But what ends up happening is a lot of security folks, they'll say, this thingy is broken over here, go take out that thingy. Because we have something, something compliance and something something need and something something management and something something something something. But they don't really know the why.And that really just goes back to what we were talking about before, where it's like you need to understand what you are securing. If you do not understand the way these things work underneath the hood, you will piss everybody off. That's what it comes down to. And again, this isn't like me trying to. I'm just really passionate about this and I'm like this right now because it gets me kind of going. And I'm like, this is why we have so many. And this is why we have problems in tech in general thinking about security. This is, this is why we have so many problems.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, thanks for shedding some light on that. We are coming up on time and I'm sad because I could just keep asking me so many questions around this. But before we go, do you have any either hot takes or words of wisdom that you want to share with folks?MICHAEL: Yeah, I mean if I could give anybody in tech regard, regardless of what direction you go in engineering help desk, systems administration, virtualization, cloud, DevOps software, whatever it is, just get really good at what you're trying to do. And this is something that's going to take years, but if you're really good at it, if you're really good at one thing. What you you'll learn two things. Number one, you'll be able to name your price at any job. Number two, you're going to begin to understand that a lot of this stuff overlaps. And then you'll realize, oh, because I got really good at this one thing, I think I actually understand a little bit of everything, and it's going to help you tremendously throughout your career.ADRIANA: Yeah. That is such great advice. Well, that's awesome. Well, thank you so much, Michael, for geeking out with me today. And y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...MICHAEL: Peace out and geek out.ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

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

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

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

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

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