On-Call Me Maybe

If you loved On-Call Me Maybe, check out OCMM co-host Adriana Villela's new podcast, Geeking Out, which she produces alongside her daughter, Hannah. Geeking Out is the spiritual successor to On-Call Me Maybe, and it features the same topics that you've come to know and love from OCMM, along with a fabulous guest lineup, including Hazel Weakly, Tim Banks, Abby Bangser, and Jennifer Moore, just to name a few. Geeking Out launched its first episode on September 5th, and so to give you a taste of what Geeking Out is all about, you can check out the first episode on this feed. If you love what you hear, please subscribe to Geeking Out wherever you get your podcasts. Or, find Geeking Out on YouTube at geekingout_pod.

About the guests:Adnan RahićAdnan is an author, failed startup founder, and ex-Free CodeCamp leader. Adnan has pent the last 5 years building open-source developer tooling in the Observability and Big Data space. He is currently leading the Developer Relations efforts for Tracetest.io. Part time professional boxer and body builder. Oscar ReyesOscar is a problem-solver, driven and motivated person. Oscar has 8 years of experience building backend cloud native systems, front end pixel-perfect applications and automated CI/CD pipelines. He is now the Lead Engineer at Tracetest.io. Ken HamricKen has 30+ years experience in developing software products, with a focus on enterprise testing solutions. He founded CrossBrowserTesting.com in 2008, which was acquired by Smartbear, a leader in the software testing category, in 2016. Ken stayed four years at Smartbear as VP of the web and mobile testing platforms. His most recent startup, Tracetest.io, is leading the way in utilizing observability data to enable deep integration testing for cloud native applications.  Find Adnan Rahić on:TwitterLinkedInGitHubFind Oscar Reyes on:TwitterLinkedInGitHubFind Ken Hamric on:TwitterLinkedInFind Tracetest on:TwitterLinkedInFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramAna’s BlueskyShow Links:TracetestOpenTelemetry Semantic Conventionshttps://thenewstack.io/trace-based-testing-the-next-step-in-observability/https://thenewstack.io/where-does-trace-based-testing-fit-in-the-testing-pyramid/

About the guest:Hannah:Hannah is a high school student living in Toronto, Canada. She’s also the daughter of OCMM co-host Adriana Villela. She loves showing off her artistic side, whether it’s through baking, sewing, painting, or knitting. You can see her creations on Instagram. Hannah has been bouldering since she was 3, and still enjoys going to the bouldering gym with her parents. Although both of her parents work in tech, Hannah would rather not spend her time sitting at a desk and staring at a computer all day. That’s why she’s planning on becoming a dentist when she grows up. Miss Unicorn:Miss Unicorn is Hannah’s trusty Squishmallow friend. She currently lives in Adriana’s home office in Toronto, alongside fellow Squishmallow buddies Barry the beaver, and Gerry the giraffe.Find our guest on:InstagramFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramAna’s BlueskyShow Links:Dall-eAdditional Links:Video Episode Miss Unicorn’s Siblings 

About the guest:Hannah:Hannah is a high school student living in Toronto, Canada. She’s also the daughter of OCMM co-host Adriana Villela. She loves showing off her artistic side, whether it’s through baking, sewing, painting, or knitting. You can see her creations on Instagram. Hannah has been bouldering since she was 3, and still enjoys going to the bouldering gym with her parents. Although both of her parents work in tech, Hannah would rather not spend her time sitting at a desk and staring at a computer all day. That’s why she’s planning on becoming a dentist when she grows up. Miss Unicorn:Miss Unicorn is Hannah’s trusty Squishmallow friend. She currently lives in Adriana’s home office in Toronto, alongside fellow Squishmallow buddies Barry the beaver, and Gerry the giraffe.Find our guest on:InstagramFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramAna’s BlueskyShow Links:MacaronFolding (baking term)MeringueConvection ovenBaking soda vs baking powderCracked macaronsSilpat baking matAdditional Links:Video Episode Miss Unicorn’s Siblings 

About the guest:Adrian Cockcroft is a technologist and strategist with broad experience from the bits to the boardroom, in both enterprise and consumer-oriented businesses, from startups to some of the largest companies in the world. He is equally at home with hardware and software, development, and operations. He’s best known as the cloud architect for Netflix during their trailblazing migration to AWS and was a very early practitioner and advocate of DevOps, microservices, and chaos engineering, helping bring these concepts to the wider audience they have today.Find our guest on:MastodonMediumGitHubFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramAna’s BlueskyShow Links:NubankOrionXAssembly languageChatGPTBASICLunar LanderSun MicrosystemsALGOLPascalRS-PLUSAWKGoHPC ClusterAmazon Web ServicesNetflixReed Hastings (Netflix co-founder)Storage Area NetworksOracleHadoopCassandraAdrian @ QCon London ‘23Chaos EngineeringAdrian + Ana @ AWS re:Invent 2018: Breaking Containers: Chaos Engineering for Modern Applications on AWS CatchpointMonitorama speaker scheduleHarnessLinux FoundationCloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)Green Software FoundationCNCF’s KeplerEuropean Union’s Climate-Change Tax PlanLiz RiceKubeCon EU ‘23 - AmsterdamAdrian on Platform EngineeringSpinnakerThe Value Flywheel Effect by David AndersonWardley MappingAWS CDK PatternsJeremly DalyAmptAWS’s GameDayPre-Accident PodcastSidney DekkerChernobylGluecon 2023Lean Agile ScotlandAdditional Links:Laguna Seca RacetrackAlvardo Street BreweryDuckzilla from Duck Foot BrewingNetflix’s Journey to the Cloud Transcript:ANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, Observability Principles, on-call, and everything in between. I'm your host, Ana Margarita Medina, and with my awesome co-host... ADRIANA: Adriana Villela.ANA: Today, we're talking to Adrian Cockcroft, who's an Advisor in Tech. And we get to hear about all his experiences throughout these years. We're so happy to have you join us.ADRIAN: Thanks. Great to be here, and good to see you again.ANA: Definitely. Where are you calling from today?ADRIAN: So I live in California. A few years ago, I used to live in Los Gatos near Netflix and eBay, where I worked for many years. And then a few years ago, during COVID, we sort of did the, hey, we're going to retire and get out of the Bay Area thing and bought a house down about halfway between Monterey and Salinas. Anyone that knows racetracks, I can see Seca racetrack out of my window, and I can hear it when the cars are running. So we're right by a racetrack, which is part of my fun and games.ANA: Nice. My favorite breakfast burritos are in Salinas, and I'm a huge fan of Alvarado beer out there too.ADRIAN: Yeah, it's nice to be out of the Bay Area sort of craziness. I mean, there's still a bit of traffic here, and there aren't so many roads, but it's a much more relaxed place. And we've got a lovely place down here, and the house prices were a tiny fraction of what it would cost to have a nice place in Los Gatos. So that was the main thing.ANA: That is awesome. And for the second question, it's our traditional On-Call Me Maybe Podcast question, what is your drink of choice for today?ADRIAN: I'm actually drinking some water because it's about noon. But if it was a bit later in the day, I'd be drinking a gluten-free beer. There's a brewery that I really like called Duck Foot, duckfootbeer.com. They make a beer called Duckzilla. They make a stout. They make all kinds of interesting beers. And Stout Mask Replica is the name of one of their styles, which has a picture of Captain Beefheart on it. ANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: And there's the "Trout Mask Replica," which is an album that some people might remember from the late '60s or something. Anyway, it's hard to find gluten-free beer. This is a brewery founded by somebody who has celiac. So all of their beers they don't make a big fuss about it, but all their beers have the gluten taken out. So the proper beer is made the normal way. There's an enzyme you put in that takes the gluten out. They do a full range of interesting beers. But they're in San Diego. They'll ship to California. If you're outside California, it's pretty much impossible to get. ADRIANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: So every now and again, I go on their website, click buttons, and then a big box of beer turns up full of stuff for me that I can actually drink. Unfortunately, I like beer, but I got gluten intolerant a few years ago and now have to manage what I eat.ANA: It is really nice that we're getting more inclusion in the beer and alcohol space that now there's less sugar or gluten taken out or just the way that they're being promoted thinking about, hey, everyone has different dietary restrictions.ADRIAN: Yeah. And if you get a stomach ache every time you have pizza or drink beer, it's probably because you've got some gluten intolerance, and when you eventually just stop, you discover all the stomach aches went away and carry on with your life. ANA: Just experiment. [laughs]ADRIANA: Cool. Well, we should probably get into some of our more techy questions. So a question that we love to ask all of our guests is, how did you get into tech?ADRIAN: I'm quite old, so this was a long time ago. [laughs] My dad was in technology, basically. He was testing anti-aircraft missiles back in the 1960s when I was born. I was christened on a missile test-firing ship whose motto was aim high. [laughter] So I thought that was...if you're going to have a motto, that's fine. And then, in the 1960s, he went to college and was programming a little bit. He did a mature degree in statistics when he was in his 20s and then got a job at a university as a statistics lecturer. So, basically, I grew up with my dad doing computing and statistics through to the time I was growing up. And somewhere along the way, the school had a computer, and my dad used to sort of put things in front of me. He didn't really teach me stuff. He just left things laying around that I looked at. [laughter] Computer Weekly magazine was a weekly newspaper that was always around the house. And so it was always things like that. But I taught myself to code at high school in 1972. We had a teletype connected to a deck system 10, and it had BASIC on it. And I played Lunar Lander and tried to figure out how to write things in BASIC and a few other programming languages. And then, when I went to college, I did physics, but I ended up doing applied physics and electronics, which there was a bunch of designing computers that could control physics experiments. It was kind of what they were trying to teach us. So I did Assembly Language and some C programming and basically embedded stuff. And then, the first job I got was at a place called Cambridge Consultants in Cambridge, UK. I was basically doing embedded real-time development full-time. That was my day job. I did that for about six, seven years, just writing code every day.Most of the code ended up burning it into a PROM and sticking it in a machine, leaning on the stop button while you press the start button in case the code went wrong, and all the motors went backwards or something. So we had fun with that. And then we were using Sun machines as development machines. During that time, I ended up basically as a one-day-a-week sysadmin because there was a full-time admin looking after all of the faxes and things. And there was one day a week I basically looked after all the Unix machines as a part-time job. So this is the early days of DevOps since I was deving four days a week and opsing one day a week. It mostly consisted of making sure the backup tapes got changed for a few Sun machines. And then, I joined Sun in 1988. They opened an office across the street, and eventually, I went...I wanted to know what they were going to do next. And basically, I talked my way into what you'd now call a solutions architect job though we called them systems engineers then. And I did that for about six years in the UK. And then I ended up moving to the U.S. to be in sort of the central group that supported that function globally, so writing white papers and trying to get all the information in the field people needed to learn about the new machines as they came out. And various things happened after that, but that's kind of how I got into tech, basically, by my dad bringing home random computers and calculators and things as I was growing up.ADRIANA: That is so cool. You mentioned learning BASIC. BASIC was my first language. I have very fond memories of BASIC. How do you find the evolution in programming languages from the early days of writing BASIC code to the stuff that's out there now? As you reflect on that evolution over the years, what's your thought?ADRIAN: I mean, some languages I find easy, and others I find hard to figure out. BASIC was just like; I had no idea what I was doing, absolutely no clue.ADRIANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: You could type things into this computer. And it was a roll of paper going up the screen. And you just, I don't know, you could make this thing do stuff by typing stuff in. So that was pretty...I had no theoretical background of what was happening at all. At some point, I decided to learn ALGOL, which is a more structured language. And that was where I kind of got into structured programming a bit more. And then there's like Pascal kind of things, those sorts of languages. And then the first job I had I was mostly programming in C. At some point, they gave me a terrible job with a really horrible language and development environment. And to sort of keep myself sane, I built myself a home computer and ported a C compiler to i

About the guest:Thilina (known as "T") is a Site Reliability Engineer at Lightstep. T has had a varied journey in tech spanning from support, project management, and systems engineering, which has eventually led him to focus on the "people" side of Reliability Engineering. He is extremely passionate about communications and how that plays a huge role in improving the performance of teams and increasing the reliability of their systems.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInGitHubInstagramBlogFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramAna’s BlueskyShow Links:LightstepBrittish Colombia - WatershedsChatime BobaCiscoPowerPointLeading SRE with EmpathyChaos Engineering PrinciplesSLOs (Service Level Objectives)SLA (Service Level Agreement)P1 Outage (Production Issue Gradations)Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela. And with me, I've got my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we are talking to Thilina Ratnayake, who works with us at Lightstep working as an SRE. Welcome.THILINA: Howdy, howdy ho. Hello.ADRIANA: So nice to have you. Now, first things first, where are you calling in from?THILINA: I'm calling from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.ADRIANA: Whoo. Awesome. We've got two Canadians in the house today. You are outnumbered, Ana. [laughs]ANA: Once again, I'm outnumbered. I think we're having too many Canadian episodes. I'm going to speak to some On-Call Me Maybe managers, which is us. So we're going to have to start talking.ADRIANA: [laughs] ANA: I need more representation from just the United States of America, specifically California. [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh yeah, that's true. Well, we did just record today with someone from California, so... [laughs]ANA: Yes. True. True, true. Here and there, I'm outnumbered. [laughs] ADRIANA: Yeah, here and there, you're outnumbered, either because they're from Canada or they're Brazilian. [laughs] ANA: True.ADRIANA: So it wouldn't be proper On-Call Me Maybe tradition if we didn't ask you what you're drinking today. THILINA: Sweet, yeah. I am drinking some pristine mountain water from one of three watersheds that apparently feed my city from the mountains of British Columbia. Yeah, this is grade A water that's been filtered through a Brita filter. ADRIANA: [laughs]THILINA: So you know what? I'm just drinking really nice mountain water. [laughter]ADRIANA: This is the best selling of water that I've ever heard. I'm like, I want some of that. [laughs]THILINA: Cool.ADRIANA: I've got Lake Ontario water, yes. [laughs]ANA: I thought we were going to get a Wikipedia summary of coordinates of where you can find these watersheds. I thought that's where this was going. [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh my God. Yes. For real.THILINA: I had it up on my screen. And I was like, oh, one of three watersheds. Oh, there are three. I don't know which one it's from. Well, [crosstalk 02:19]ADRIANA: Well, we're going to have to include this in the show notes now because our listeners are definitely going to be curious about this. [laughs]THILINA: And what are you all drinking?ANA: For me, today it's actually green juice, which is kale, pineapple, apple. And I think I put ginger and turmeric. So I'm trying to go back into some more veggies and fruits in my diet.ADRIANA: That's awesome. THILINA: Very nice.ADRIANA: Yes, I've got a glass of Lake Ontario prime H20. [laughter] THILINA: Ooh, wow.ADRIANA: No bubble tea, sadly. But as we were talking before we were recorded, I was so happy that in Amsterdam for KubeCon, I found a Chatime, [laughs] which, for those who are not in the know, it's a bubble tea chain. It's an international bubble tea chain. And we happen to have one in Canada, well, more than one in Canada. We've got a few in Canada. So I was pretty excited. And I told the Chatime guy I'm like, "I have these in my country." [laughs] He probably looked at me like I was crazy. He's like, get away, woman. [laughs] THILINA: So, a very important question, what was your order when you found that Chatime? ADRIANA: Shoot. I think I got a lychee green tea. THILINA: Ooh.ANA: Nice. ADRIANA: Yes, yes.ANA: That sounds fancy and yummy. I love anything lychee.ADRIANA: I know, right? I'm a fan of lychee. Now, I can't tell if it's lychee or leechee because people correct me either way.ANA: I was about to say I call it leechee. I grew up calling it leechee. ADRIANA: I call it lychee. I've got some Chinese friends who call it lychee. And then I've got other Chinese friends who call it leechee. One is always correcting the other. I'm like, which one is it? [laugher] So you never know.ANA: Hit us up on social media if you know how to pronounce this. [laughter] ADRIANA: There's our sidebar. I guess we should get into our regular business. [laughs] So, Thilina, how did you get into tech? THILINA: Well, it's a very interesting story that starts off with a news clipping on the back of my grade 10 high school classroom [laughs] because, in that class, that room was used for multiple classes, one of them being business 11 or planning 10. So I was in my Planning 10 class, which is a high school class that talks about how to do useful things like do your taxes, or get a utility bill paid, or decide your future in the world. And one of the assignments was, what do you want to do after you graduate? Like, what's your plan? Come up with three plans. And that was the assignment. And me being a classic grade 10 high schooler, I had just left it off till the block before it was due. [laughter] And it was like lunch, and then the next class would have been the one where I had to present. I'm like, oh, I got to think of something.ADRIANA: [laughs] THILINA: And then, looking to the side on this wall, was a newspaper clipping about Cisco, the telecommunications giant. And this clipping was someone in the business class had talked about how the future looks great for teleconferencing. In the future, we might have AI and holograms, so this is a good place to be. And I was like, well, I like computers. It's kind of cool. ADRIANA: [laughs] THILINA: And then, in the time between seeing the newspaper clipping and when it was due, I did a little research on how do I work at a tech company like Cisco? And it showed me a college program that I could do. It was like a diploma. So that was my plan A. And my plan B would be if I did my diploma and maybe a degree afterwards. I don't remember what plan C was. But I was like, cool, let's make a PowerPoint. Let's present it. ADRIANA: [laughs] THILINA: And that was it. So in a couple...a year happens, and I was like, what do I do after high school? And I was like, well, I've got this plan that I made last year. Why don't I just stick with it? And then I did. I did all of it to the letter.ADRIANA: That's awesome.ANA: [laughs] THILINA: I did the diploma, and I did the degree. My first job was learning at Cisco while doing support there. So, yeah, unintentionally, a newspaper clipping set the tone of the next 10-15 years of my life. So yeah, the answer to your question is I got started with a newspaper clipping about Cisco.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: That is awesome. I love it.ANA: I love when it's always the most random experience that one has growing up that's like, this was the moment that the light bulb went off, and I was like, oh, I can actually get paid for various years to do this. [laughs] ADRIANA: Yes, Defining Moment. Also, that sounds like a really interesting class. I don't think I ever took any classes on paying utility bills and stuff like that. That sounds awesome. [laughs] ANA: Filing taxes.ADRIANA: Filing taxes.ANA: The fact that a school teaches you. Like... [laughs] ADRIANA: I know. No one taught me that. My first tax filing I did manually, pencil and paper. [laughs] Why? THILINA: Nice. ADRIANA: [laughs] But that's a really cool start. And I love how the most subtle things, I don't know, they seem almost like passing at the time, and then they come back. It's like it was meant to be. So kudos for making that happen. That's amazing.ANA: And, I mean, I think it's great to also start asking you students and kids early on what they want to do for their career. I know for me, I figured it out in middle school, which I am extremely fortunate of that. But getting folks early in high school to be like, all right, you have electives. Start thinking about what you want to do three, four years from now. What makes you happy? What do you hate? Can you intern somewhere? Can you do a side project? Can you shadow someone? THILINA: For sure. I think it's worth mentioning that part of that story involves me making a PowerPoint presentation. And the reason I bring this up is a lot of people talk about, like, oh yeah, I knew I always wanted to get into tech because when I was little, my parents got me this computer, and I started building programs. And that wasn't my story. For me, it was that my parents got me a Windows 95. And they didn't give me any games, but they got the PowerPoint suite. [laughter] So all day, I would just be making presentations on things. And this is important because I got into tech, and my first job in tech was doing support, which is a lot of talking to customers. There was also presenting information. And a lot of people were like, "I just want to write code." I was like, "But I love talking about what we do and presenting it." PowerPoint, or the ability to present information, has served me so much more in life than being able to program. So all I'm trying to say is if you're curious about tech, it's not all about codin

About the guest:Marylia is a Toronto-based Engineering Manager and Developer at Cockroach Labs, working on Cluster Observability. Before that, Marylia was a full-stack developer at IBM, working on internal Observability tools for DB2 products.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInGitHubFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:Cockroach LabsChocolate VelvetiserUX - User ExperienceIBMCockroach DB Console to Observe and Troubleshoot SQLKubeHuddleToronto’s BeaverTail HistoryFlex FridaysAdditional Links:Charity Major’s The Engineer/Manager PendulumWill Larson’s Staff Engineering Blog & BookOpenTelemetry Collector alongside CockroachDBBrazilian Can Opener (Abridor de Latas)Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela. And with me, I've got my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we are speaking with Marylia Gutierrez, who is an Engineering Manager at CockroachDB. Welcome, Marylia. MARYLIA: Hello. ANA: Welcome.MARYLIA: Thank you. ADRIANA: First things first, where are you calling from today?MARYLIA: So I'm calling from Toronto, Canada. I'm actually from Brazil, São Paulo, but I've been living in Canada for the past almost nine years now.ADRIANA: Awesome. Awesome. I'm also in Toronto, Canada. And Ana, you are recently back from SREcon, right?ANA: Yeah, I actually just got back from Santa Clara over to the Marin, California area. And [laughs] it's really nice and sunny today. But now I'm actually outnumbered by Toronto folks, so this is pretty neat. [laughter]ADRIANA: Toronto folks and Brazilian folks. [laughter] MARYLIA: Yes. ANA: True, true, true. [laughter] ADRIANA: This is an all-Latina cruise, so yes! [laughter]ANA: Latinas in tech, we're here, and we're proud. [laughter]MARYLIA: Yes.ADRIANA: Let's start off our questions round with what are you drinking today, Marylia? MARYLIA: So I have hot chocolate with me. Hot chocolate is always my go-to drink. [laughs]ADRIANA: Very nice. And you were saying that you are quite the hot chocolate aficionado, right? [laughs]MARYLIA: Yeah. So usually, people have at home their set up for coffee with a grinder and everything. For me, it is the hot chocolate. So I have a velvetiser that actually can melt the chocolate, mix it with the milk, and I put the right temperature. And even the glass that I'm using has the shape to remind of cocoa, like the stripes of it. [laughs] So yeah, it's all chocolate themed. [laughs]ADRIANA: That is awesome.ANA: That's so cool. Is there anything special about the flavor profile for today's hot chocolate drink?MARYLIA: No, not really. Actually, I was having one that I just went to, like, a random store, and I bought it, and it was delicious. And it ended this week. But now I need to go back and actually pay attention to the name and [laughs] where did I buy it. [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh, that's the worst. You find something awesome, and you can't remember what it is.MARYLIA: Yeah. [laughter] ADRIANA: What are you drinking, Ana?ANA: I am drinking a strawberry acai refresher with a little bit of sparkling water. I had the Starbucks drink, and I was like, I need it to be fizzy, so I added a passion fruit LaCroix. And it's actually really refreshing because it's actually really hot out here today in my office, so I'm enjoying it. What about you, Adriana?ADRIANA: I'm drinking some green tea. I just brewed myself a cup just before the podcast today so that I'd have something more interesting to drink. Pretty soon, we'll be into bubble tea season for podcast recording, so I'm excited to bring that. [laughter] ANA: I have to get on that, but I'm very excited to learn. [laughs] ADRIANA: Cool. Well, let's get started with the serious questions, although we never take ourselves super seriously here anyway. [laughter] So, Marylia, how did you get started in technology? Why don't you share that story with us?MARYLIA: Growing up, I actually never really knew what I wanted to do. And then, at some point, I got the computer at home, and I thought, oh, this looks cool. But all the applications, everything was gray and square, and stuff, so I was like, why everything has to be this way? Can things be easier to use? So I was always getting frustrated with things. So that caught my attention, and I was like, I want to work on something but make it useful for the user. So I wanted it to be easy to use. So that started to bring me a little to that side. And then, I went to university, and I graduated in computer engineering. I also did my master's. So for the master's, I focused a little more on the UX side, so that was an area that I was very interested in from the beginning. And then just going over internships, jobs [laughs], and things just kept evolving on that.ADRIANA: That was super cool. When we were chatting earlier, right now your current role you're an engineering manager at CockroachDB. It sounds like early in your career UI UX was kind of your thing. But now the type of work that you're doing is very different from that. So what can you say about that?MARYLIA: My first full-time job was a mobile developer [laughs] so I even continued on the UX side that I was working on. And then, after that, I actually went to IBM. And on that one, I started looking a little more on the observability side. So I was working on an internal tool. And again, we had a bunch of data collecting about usages, things that people were doing. But again, it was hard for people to understand what all those metrics means, what all that information meant. So I started creating visualizations on top of that, like dashboards and tools and things that make it easy. Like, I'm about to call a customer now. I need to know everything we know about that customer. So you could filter on just the customer name, and it will have all the information about the cloud storage that they have, how much they're paying, how many tickets they had, and how much time their cloud servers were taking to be created, and all of that. So I started to really enjoy that part. And so I was there for seven years at IBM. And then two years ago, I was looking for a change, and then this is why I moved to Cockroach Labs. And then I wanted to continue a little on that area. But I think the important part for me was to continue being a full-stack because I always liked being a full-stack. And when I was choosing even the team, I say, okay, I want one that I can continue being a full-stack. And they didn't have a team for SQL observability at the time, which is the team that I manage. So the team was being created. So I saw that opportunity for me to continue working on the two sides on an area that I was interested in. And then I can continue going back to my initial desire of, okay, now you're using a database. You have a problem. How do you want to fix it? Again, I want to make it easier for the user to know what is the problem with the database. I want to make an easy way for them to fix the problems by themselves, or we can already fix for them. So in the background, I still continue with the [laughs]. I want to improve things for the user. So when I joined there, I joined as a developer. But very early on, I was helping with a lot of other things, and I just actually became the manager for the team. And actually, just this week, we are migrating two of the observability teams, the SQL observability and [inaudible 7:25] observability, creating just one for cluster observability. Then I actually I'm the manager now.ANA: That's super exciting. And I think a lot of folks don't realize that when they start in the industry, whether it's front end or back end, you could eventually bring in all your skill sets together, like you said, bringing in that front-end UX mindset to observability. Like, yes, we all care about the information out there and the context this provides. But how is it that we can make sure that the consumer and the user is able to take that and build proper mental models or even just have the right information at the right time?MARYLIA: Yeah, exactly, because I can give you here all this 20,000 files of logs. [laughter] You're like, okay, what does that mean? [laughter] So I'm there to, like, put in, okay, this is in your face. This is the thing. Fix this. This is what you should care about.ANA: I think it's that, like, make sure you highlight the information that you should be caring about and defining what that is. MARYLIA: Yes, yeah, exactly.ADRIANA: Yeah. It's kind of funny how we're so used to working with logs. I was part of a webinar a few weeks ago, and one of the questions that was asked was like, what was your first observability thing, observability signal that you were introduced to? And most people basically, their signal was logs because, as software engineers, that is the thing that we use to try to make sense out of our systems. And it's one of those love-hate relationships where it's like, yes, you give me the information I need, but, oh my god, [laughter] this was like finding a needle in a haystack. And I love that observability kind of takes it to that next level where now it's like a trace-first approach where logs still play an important part. And now you get a little more context into what's actually happening with relation to the big picture, which I absolutely love.MARYLIA: Yeah. Even giving the example on CockroachDB, so we collect a lot of metrics. The user they have access. They can go and look by themselves. But my team we're also responsible for the console. So we are creating pages on top of that information. So we hav

About the guest:Iris Dyrmishi is a Tech Platform Engineer at FARFETCH. She is passionate about building systems that leverage Observability to ensure their performance, scalability and reliability. Recently, she has been working with OpenTelemetry and exploring how her organization can use it to improve our observability platform. Find our guest on:InstagramLinkedInFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:FARFETCHAWSOpenTelemetryOpenTelemetry Helm ChartsJaeger TracingPrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetry CollectorTail-Based SamplingDistributed TracingThe Evolution of Game Days Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, and with me, my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we have Iris Dyrmishi, who is an Infrastructure Engineer at FARFETCH. Welcome, Iris. IRIS: Thank you. ADRIANA: So first things first, we're switching things up a little bit today. We'd like to know where you're calling in from.IRIS: I'm calling in from Porto, Portugal. [laughs]ADRIANA: Awesome.IRIS: I think that's pretty far away from where you're at, Adriana. Where are you calling in from?ADRIANA: I'm in Toronto, Canada. And Ana?ANA: I'm here in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.ADRIANA: So we are spanning three time zones today. [laughter] I love it. That's one thing I like about the show is that we get to talk to folks from all across the globe. Classic On-Call Me Maybe question for you, Iris, is what are you drinking?IRIS: Today I'm drinking a caramel boba with rainbow toppings, so I'm very happy with my drink. [laughter]ANA: You said the magic words. You said boba. [laughter] And I also love that it's rainbow toppings, like, [laughter] hell yeah.ADRIANA: Rainbows make the world go round. [laughs] How about you, Ana, what are you drinking?ANA: Today, I decided to pick up one of the Starbucks strawberry refreshers. And I do have a long day of work, so I just ordered a trenta-sized drink which is bigger than my face. [laughter]ADRIANA: It's a big drink. [laughs] I don't think I've ever known anyone ordering one of those. That's cool. [laughs]ANA: I will only do it for the teas. Like, if I know I need to hydrate and want a flavorful, sugary drink, I was like, it's worth the money.ADRIANA: Yeah. Can you imagine that much coffee? [laughs] You can be jittery by the end of the day. [laughs]ANA: I actually think they don't sell coffee drinks in trenta size. I think I looked into it once because it's like a heart attack waiting to happen.ADRIANA: Yeah, I feel like I'm feeling a heart attack without even having had that. [laughter]ANA: What are you drinking, Adriana?ADRIANA: Today, I had the presence of mind to make myself a matcha green tea. So I'm very excited to have something a little bit different other than water. [laughter]ANA: Yums. Always got to stay cozy.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. It's kind of a coldish day in Toronto. We're supposed to be expecting a big blizzard later today. [laughs] So this is my pre-emptive coziness.ANA: [laughs] Blizzards are never fun. And, I mean, I think that's kind of been the interesting part where we have all these weird climates going on right now. Everyone is kind of in some form of storm around the world; it seems like.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's true. How's the weather in Porto?IRIS: Well, it's pretty sunny but also very chilly because of the Northern stream. It's always very windy here. ADRIANA: Oh.IRIS: So the temperature might be around 12-13 degrees, but it feels very cold because of the wind.ADRIANA: It's like a windy San Francisco day. [laughter]ANA: Sounds very normal to my life. [laughter]IRIS: There is no beach for us. That's for sure. [laughter]ANA: Well, Iris, the first question that we wanted to ask you for today's podcast is, how did you get started in technology?IRIS: It's actually a very interesting story because, okay, I've been a tech nerd, let's say, since I was a little girl when I got my first computer at 9. I loved taking computers apart, [laughs] breaking them, fixing them.ANA: Hell yeah.IRIS: And when I was about to go to university, I had my mindset that I was going to study computer science. I come from Albania, actually, the other part of Europe. And I applied for university, but then I received a scholarship in another university in Bulgaria, [laughs] so I decided to go there. And I said, okay, computer science is too hard, so I'm not going to be able to maintain a good GPA. I'm going to go for something easier. And economics was the first thing that came to my mind, so I switched from a tech person to economics. And then I had this very good friend I have actually, and she gave me the pep talk: never forget your dreams [laughs] no matter how hard it is. And it actually worked. [laughs] So I enrolled in computer science classes, and I never looked back. I'm very happy that she convinced me. [laughs] And I did keep my GPA, fortunately, so yeah, there were no issues there. [laughs]ANA: That is awesome. It's always nice when you have people that kind of give you that push of like; you can do this, like, you are capable of it.IRIS: Yeah. And, for me, you know, there are some people that say that "Oh, if I didn't have to earn more money or if it wasn't difficult to get a job in another area, I will probably be doing that." It's not like that. For me, it's technology. My passion is technology, and I'm actually doing it. So it's amazing. [laughs] It's a great combination.ADRIANA: Oh my goodness, living the dream. That's so awesome. So with your computer science degree, how did it lead you to your current career path?IRIS: Actually, in university, I majored in computer science with a background in software engineering. So I worked for three months as a back-end developer. [laughs] And then the company that I was working for needed people to switch to DevOps and to train them, so I was like, okay, [laughs] so I went there. And yeah, that's how it started for me. We were doing small work in different customer companies setting up monitoring for them. And that's when I started becoming very curious and liking that sort of thing. And then, I switched to the job that I'm currently at. And we're actually creating our own platform. And it just got from the small pleasures of setting up small monitoring here and there to building a full observability platform. So yeah, [laughs] that's how it started, and that's how it's going. [laughs]ADRIANA: Wow, that is super exciting. And you got into...so it sounds like you got into DevOps pretty early into your career, too, which is cool.IRIS: Yes. In my university, surprisingly, usually, in computer science degrees, DevOps is not really taught. So when I entered, I was like, what is this? [laughs] Like, what are these things that I never heard about? [laughs] So it was scary. But it's a good thing that I started when I was uncomfortable in the field altogether. I wasn't confident enough in software engineering either. [laughs] So I got into that pretty easily, and it was just a matter of learning.ADRIANA: Very cool. It's interesting you mentioning that your university didn't teach anything about DevOps. And I think we've had similar conversations with other guests about there are certain things that you do out in the real world once you get your degree in computer science, computer engineering, whatever [laughs], but you're not taught this stuff in school. I think we've had a guest recently, Michael, who one of his first jobs out of school was SRE, which is kind of mind-blowing when you realize the fact that the only way to learn SRE is by doing it. And similarly, [laughs] for you, the only way to learn DevOps is by doing it. IRIS: Exactly. [laughs]ANA: It's definitely an interesting trend because I do think we're starting to see universities pick up on people are not coming to our colleges because the education they get in computer science does not place them in a job right out of school because we know the interview loops for these jobs tend to be pretty tedious. And I think we're starting to see a lot more schools start to realize, like, we actually need to fill in that gap.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. I really do hope to see more of that gap being filled in real life because we're definitely, yeah, we're still hurting. Circling back to a point that you made earlier when you were talking about building up a platform at your current workplace and getting to dig deeper into observability, can you tell us a little bit more about your observability journey?IRIS: Let me start from the beginning. So my observability journey, as I said, started with just setting up. AWS was my weapon of choice. [laughs] That's where I practiced my first observability and basically just collecting metrics and in cloud setting up dashboards, setting up alerts. That's how it started. Then it progressed to building a full platform, basically orchestrating applications, building the infrastructure to actually scrape the metrics, collect the traces, and basically the logs as well. I don't know if I'm explaining myself properly in explaining the platform. But it went from actually using what we had, what was already generated by default, to building a platform that allows the teams to set up their own metrics and basically building tools to allow every team to be able to set up observability for their own application because they know it best. And what we do is we provide all the support that they need for infrastructure wise and all the guidance when it comes to metrics or traces, the guidelines about configurations, and stuff like

About the guest:Sasha Rosenbaum is Principal at a new venture, Ergonautic. With a degree in Computer Science, an MBA, and two decades of experience across development, operations, product management, and technical sales, Sasha brings a unique perspective to optimizing the organizational flow of work, bridging gaps with empathy and insight.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInMastodonFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:ErgonauticDevOpsDevOps Days ChicagoFileZilla[Video] “Single Person of Failure” by Sasha RosenbaumGoogle SRE BookAndrew Clay ShaferTranscript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today we are talking to Sasha Rosenbaum, who is a Founder at Ergonautic. Welcome, Sasha.SASHA: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. And it's a pleasure to be chatting with you all on this podcast.ADRIANA: Yeah, we're super excited to have you. So first things first, what are you drinking today?SASHA: I'm drinking peppermint tea. And this is a funny story; I recently became allergic to black tea.ADRIANA: [gasps] Oh no.SASHA: Which I previously drank all my life. I didn't even know you could be allergic to black tea. So now it's either coffee or I try to find some type of herbal thing. [laughs]ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh my goodness. At least it sounds like you've found a nice alternative. SASHA: Yeah, I have so many variations of herbal teas. It's not even funny. ADRIANA: [laughs]SASHA: Because I keep trying them all, and I can never quite find one that I'm committed to, so it's just a whole big cabinet of tea.ANA: [laughs] I am sorry for you having to not have access to black tea anymore. I think that's always been my favorite, like, oolong tea/black tea, and especially when you get to combo it with a peach or a mint on top, like summertime. But I'm glad that you can still drink coffee because I know for some folks, it's like they have to cut off tea and coffee.SASHA: Yeah, it's funny because the hardest part is people don't usually have hot drinks that aren't tea and coffee. So I'm like, if it's like 8:00 p.m., I'm not going to drink coffee, so I'm stuck with water.ANA: [laughs] Fair enough.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's sad. That's sad.ANA: I'm very close to Sasha's drink. I'm having something called a mint mojito. There's a coffee shop in the Bay Area called Philz Coffee. And this is one of their most common drinks where it's like you get a latte, but they also muddle mint into it, and they make it really sweet with a lot of foam. So that was kind of what I was feeling this morning.ADRIANA: Nice. Nice. I did not go with anything creative. I just have my water here.ANA: And it's too early for boba tea for you.ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah, I think the places don't open until at least 11:00 if I'm lucky. Otherwise, I have to wait till noon or make my own. [laughs]SASHA: Oh no. Oh, can you make your own? I've never tried making my own boba tea.ADRIANA: It's not bad. Like, you can get the pearls on Amazon, and you just boil them for like one or two minutes. And if you want, you can soak them in honey or brown sugar, and it's actually pretty good.SASHA: Nice. You know what I like? The new ones are like jelly, so lychee jelly or something like that. And it's just like, I like it more than boba because boba is so giant. [laughs]ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true, and it's filling too. They pile so much on. I'm like, oh my God, I'm like eating my drink. [laughs]SASHA: It's a whole snack.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly.ANA: I'm insane, and I like it when it's boba and then lychee like jelly. It's just like the double whammy of it.ADRIANA: It's a good combo.SASHA: Any drink that has lychee in it, I'm all for it. [laughs]ADRIANA: Me too. Oh, I'm such a huge fan. Whenever I find the fresh lychees at the supermarket, I'm like, oooh, give me, give me, give me because they're so, like, it's seasonal here. I don't know how accessible it is where y'all live, but here, I think I can find it in February and maybe one week in the summer.ANA: We definitely don't have too much access to it here. I think I had more access to it in Miami and in Central America. But I want to say in Downtown San Francisco, most shops always carry lychee, which is actually pretty neat because I'm like, I prefer this over anything else.ADRIANA: Oh yes.ANA: Or when you go to froyo shops, they have boba, but it's the popping kind, and it's got little like bursts.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's right.ANA: Then, at Target, I just saw that they're selling pre-made boba, and it comes with those like popping boba. So I bought it for my partner's kids, and we've yet to have it.ADRIANA: Oooh.ANA: But it comes in a little four-pack pre-made boba, and I was like, that's fun.ADRIANA: That's awesome, little family activity.ANA: Yeah. [laughs] For taco night, my plan was we'll do tacos, and then we'll have these as desserts. [laughs]ADRIANA: That's awesome. [laughs]ANA: Well, Sasha, we'll actually get started on some of the questions that we have for you today as much as we love talking to you about your love for herbal teas. [laughter] The first question that I'm sure some of our listeners are wondering, like, how is it that you got your start in tech? We know that you've gotten a chance to work at various companies. But it's always nice to hear how folks were like, ooh, this seems interesting. Let me take a look.SASHA: So I'm actually, like, I'm probably at this point an unusual woman in tech in the sense that I've been here almost 20 years. And I actually have a computer science degree, so it's like a more conventional path rather than switching careers. But I did actually switch. So I was getting the same message in high school as everybody else that computer science isn't for girls and that kind of stuff. And so what I initially enrolled in university was biology, and I wanted to do genetics. And the first year in biology, basically, I realized the entire degree is like growing yeast and such things in a lab. [laughter]So you do genetic experiments, which sounds really, really cool. But to modify these genes, you grow fruit flies, and yeast, and then mice, and stuff like that. And I'm like, you have to proceed to like Ph.D. to like...and the whole time, this is what you do. You show up every day to your lab, and you're like, feed mice something. [laughs] And I'm like, this doesn't sound like a career I want to have.  ANA: [laughs]SASHA: So I kind of went...and my university was extremely technical, so I went through the entire list. And it was like, chemical engineering, physical engineering, industrial engineering, this, this, and this. And then there was computer science. And I did one Pascal class in school that was really basic Pascal, and I was like, I kind of like that. So this was like, click a button, switch to computer science. But then the moment I was there, it was so fun because it was like basically playing games.What I love about computer science is you start with nothing, like, this blank slate, you know, empty editor. And then you create something that actually produces results, and that is just magical. It's super creative. You have a lot of freedom in how you structure things, and what language you use, what architecture you use. So it was always like, super, super fun to do. That's how I get started. And then, I was a developer for many years. And then I gradually got into...I did some ops in the beginning, and then I basically got into the DevOps movement. So that kind of shifted my career towards more opsy, SRE kind of conversation. I think I've held every role that you can imagine. So I was a product manager for a minute. And I've been in sales. I've been in DevRel, which to some people, it's marketing and to some people, it's not. So basically, I feel like I've been in every department of the organization but always something tech-related.ADRIANA: You talked about getting involved in the DevOps movement. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into that. And specifically, how have you seen the DevOps movement evolve since you jumped on it? And follow up to that is are you happy with how it's progressed?SASHA: I got involved...I think it was 2013. So technically, the first conference was 2009, so it was probably about four or five years later, but it was still not a thing. So when people talked about DevOps, like, if you look...there's in Google search results how does search for a certain word change over time. And so the search for DevOps was, like, from 2009 to 2014, it was near flat. And then it kind of starts spiking because people got more and more interested in the term. The devopsdays.org kind of spread the word and started popping conferences all over the world. So I was a speaker at DevOpsDays Chicago, I think, in 2013, and then I became an organizer in 2014. And in 2013, it was the fifth city that did DevOpsDays, and now there's like, I don't know, over 80, something crazy. So it's all over the world. It's everywhere. So I think there have been a lot of changes in how it started, and how it progressed, and where it is now. What we started with was basically a lot of talk about collaboration and a lot of talk about automation. So it was two things, like, one is aligning incentives, so you stop kind of chasing two different agendas. Basically, you know, and I'm sure your listeners know, that developers want to deliver faster, ops want to keep the lights on, so minimize change. And then there's this inherent conflict between the team.So the first conversation in DevOpsDays, how do

About the guest:Jewel has been shitposting and sadtweeting her way to a comfortable tech career for over a decade in community and consumer product engineering as a software engineer, manager, and all-the-hats start-upper.  She hasn't accidentally taken down production in a whole month, mostly thanks to PTO.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInGitHubInstagramMastodonFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:RedditRen Faire (Renaissance Fair)Commodore 64Jumpman (Video Game)TI-82 (Calculator)TI-83 (Calculator)Epic (Medical Records)Epic GamesWorkdaySonic FoundryImgurmipsytipsy (Charity Majors on Twitter)The Engineer/Manager Pendulum - charity.wtfEngineering Management: The Pendulum or the Ladder - charity.wtfPop PsychologyTranscript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host... ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we have with us Jewel Darger-Sacher, who is a Senior Full-Stack IT Engineer at Reddit. Welcome, Jewel.JEWEL: Thank you. I'm delighted to join you all today.ADRIANA: We are super stoked to have you with us. Now, our first question that we always ask our guests is what are you drinking today?JEWEL: So today I brought some fancy tea. I picked up some raspberry chai from Ren Faire a couple of years ago, and it's treating me great today.ADRIANA: Awesome. How about you, Ana? What are you drinking?ANA: That sounds very yummy, and I kind of wish I had some tea. I went with my LaCroix peach-pear sparkling water. Sometimes you just need a little bit of flavor. But I need sparkling water to do podcasts sometimes. It's just like that nice, crisp of staying awake. What about you, Adriana?ADRIANA: I am finishing off some green tea, and I've also got a glass of water.ANA: Extra hydration.ADRIANA: Extra hydration.JEWEL: Always staying hydrated.ADRIANA: That's right. So I guess first things first, Jewel, we always love to hear how our guests got started into tech. It's always really cool to hear different people's paths to their current career. So, what's your story?JEWEL: I grew up with a keyboard in my hands. My parents actually worked in IT and computer science from their graduate degrees. I was the third child. And they bought a Commodore 64 for the house to play games and do word processing. And I was the baby. I'm the third daughter. So I got to play a lot of Jumpman and little machine games as a kid before I really knew anything. And I remember they had just a big button or a big sticker on the go button on the keyboard for me because that was all I could push when I was a baby. [laughter] So my parents kept that up over the years. They gave us a good widespread diet of arts, and music, and math, and tech, and literature. So we always just had computers lying around in the house.'90s kids will remember the TI-82, the TI-83. I think they're still getting used. ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.JEWEL: Yeah. So I spent a lot of time in high school just manually hand-typing little games into the calculators, so I could goof off during class.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh my God, that's awesome. JEWEL: Yeah. And then there's the one time where my chemistry professor walks over, and he's like, "Excuse me, miss, you seem to be goofing off. What are you doing?" And I went, "Oh, I'm programming a visualizer for the orbit of electrons around this molecule," [laughter] using matrix math that my dad had taught me because he's, as I mentioned, a math nerd. So yeah, the instructor was just like, "[sighs] carry on."ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: I mean, how would you respond to that? Like, you've out-nerded the instructor. [laughs]JEWEL: Yeah. So I definitely come from a nerd background, and then I did actually --ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: That's awesome. JEWEL: Yeah. And then I actually did get a real Bachelor's degree in computer science. But I kind of mixed it up a little bit where I got a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science.ANA: Nice.JEWEL: With a double major in technical theater and a minor in Spanish studies. And people thought I was a music major.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: That is awesome. That's so cool, so cool. ANA: So many different buildings [laughs] to be in all the time. ADRIANA: Wow. That's a lot of hats. [laughs]JEWEL: It's a lot of hats and a lot of keys. I also worked in the AV department, so I would have keys to a lot of campus. ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: It was really funny when the campus security guy called me once or twice, and I'm just like, "I'm sorry, I work here. Like, I have more keys than you do." [laughter] And they were not impressed. But yeah, so that was my...my informal training as a kid was just mess around with computers, do math and science stuff, do a lot of other interesting extracurriculars, and then went to college. And then, after college, I got into the industry. I worked at Epic Medical Records, not Epic Games, doing internal tooling there where I worked on basically the internal employee directory and how to request PTO because this was 2009, and we didn't have Workday at that point. ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: We built too much stuff in-house. And then, I worked at Sonic Foundry after I got tired of Epic and mostly the commute. It was an hour commute in the snow sometimes, which was less fun. But Sonic Foundry was a quick skateboard ride away from my apartment. And then I left Wisconsin for California when one of my friends who I had been working on a startup with, said, "You can either move to Rhode Island, and we can get acqui-hired, or we can move to Silicon Valley, decline the acqui-hire. I have some other jobs lined up." And we said, "California sounds nice."ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: So we moved to Mountain View, and we worked there for a couple of months before we got laid off, which was fine. I didn't like the job anyway. And then, I got a job at Imgur for a year. And then I've been working at Reddit for the past six and a half years. So yeah, that's been my...I've just kind of floated around tech a bit, just kind of poking my nose in a lot of things and trying to make it multidisciplinary.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: That is so cool.ANA: It's always fun when you end up getting a chance to bring your hobbies into work and in and out and try to figure out what makes the most sense. I know when I first got a chance to meet you, I was just like, wait, how did you even study Spanish and something theater-related and technology in your year? And at that moment, you were a manager at Reddit. It was just one of those things that I was like, okay, acknowledging the different career paths that folks can come in with, which was actually really cool. But now that we have you here as an IC software engineer, I also kind of wanted to poke at it. What was your transition from management to IC like?JEWEL: It was an interesting transition to go back from being a manager to IC. And I'd always kind of planned this where I remember reading mipsytipsy's pendulum career path blog posts. So Charity had written several years ago about the benefits of working as an IC for a while and then switching over to engineering management and then switching back to an IC path as, you know, more experience and more understanding of how does management work? Why does management work? Like, what do the managers need? Like, why are they asking me these things that I previously thought were a name? And now I come back from it, and I'm like, oh yeah, I get this.ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: You're asking for this because your directors are asking for it, or because we have this regulation to deal with, or this policy, or this process. And I also understand why you build processes because, as a manager, you usually don't have time to deal with stuff. So you write it down, and you ask somebody else to follow the instructions. Or, more realistically, you ask somebody else to write down the instructions for a third person to follow. ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: So yeah, it's been fun going back from manager to IC and just having a lot of empathy for my manager and taking a lot of work off of his plate, especially logistics and project management that before I wouldn't care to deal with it. My manager would be like, "Could you please fill out your paperwork?" Now I understand why he's asking me to fill out the paperwork because he wants us to keep getting paid.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's funny because, as a manager, it's so frustrating to get people to fill out timesheets or fill out employee surveys and stuff like that. And then, as an IC, if you haven't been on that side of things, it can be a little bit difficult to relate to just how frustrating it is to try to like herd cats [laughs] because that's what it feels like a lot of the time as a manager. I definitely agree with you on the empathy. ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: I definitely find that nowadays when my manager asks to do some admin thing, I'm like, oh yeah, I remember what it was like to try to get people to fill stuff out and how frustrating it is to chase people down. And it's totally out of your control because, I mean, they have to do it, not you, but you're still accountable for making sure that that stuff gets done. JEWEL: Right. It's like, I see the benefits of, like, oh, if I do a little bit of the admin work, they can help me out with a lot of other things that they're much better suited for. Like, my manager is really good at schmoozing, and he has a good sensibility for, like, here's who to talk to, here's who you don't talk to, or like, here's the person you talk to first. They will help you prepare for who to talk to second because that person's time is hard to schedule, or they h

About the guest:Jenny Gee-Link is a Quality Assurance Automation Engineer at Tangerine. She has an extensive background in Mobile Applications, Wireless Technologies, and Telecommunications, having previously worked at large Telecommunications companies such as Motorola. When she’s not working, she always seems to have something on the go. Her spare time is spent on volunteer work with her kids’ school and on the board of directors for the local daycare, picking up another language, tinkering on the piano, and even out biking on the local trails. Binge-watching the latest shows? Nah. Life’s way too short for all that!Find our guest on:LinkedInFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:Tangerine BankPerlMotorolaUniversity of TorontoMotorola StarTAC PhoneMotorola Razr PhoneBlackberryT-Mobile SidekickMSC (Mobile Switching Center)Base StationAdditional Links:Gen Z embraces flip phonesTranscript:ANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host Ana Margarita Medina with my awesome co-host...ADRIANA: Adriana Villela. ANA: Today, we're talking to Jenn Gee-Link, who works at Tangerine as a Quality Assurance Automation Engineer. We are very excited to have you here today. One of the first questions that we have for you today as you join us is, what is going to be your drink of choice?JENNY: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for having me at your podcast. I'm honored. I'm happy to be here. Regarding your question as to what is my drink of choice right this moment, just to get over my cold, my pseudo cold, my sore throat right now, it's hot water, hot tea, hot cocoa if it's not too hot, too, too hot and burning my tongue. But that's pretty much my choice for now until I get better. [laughs]ANA: I've been drinking a lot of tea. My roommate was sick. My partner was also coughing. And I'm just like; I'm just going to drink tea with honey, like, protect myself.ADRIANA: Yes.ANA: Stay hydrated and, like, just [laughs] [crosstalk 01:28]ADRIANA: Protect the vocal cords. ANA: Yeah. ADRIANA: Totally.ANA: What about you, Adriana? What are you drinking today?ADRIANA: I've got fizzy water. It's Bubly sparkling water, and it tastes like cherry, so...JENNY: Love that. ADRIANA: It's an improvement over my usual water drink I have whenever we record, but I do have water on standby as well, so... [laughter]ANA: I'm definitely like the non-fun one for the day. I have water, just regular water for the day. I was going to make a mocktail, and I was like, maybe for the next recording. [laughs]ADRIANA: That would have been fun. [laughs]ANA: We shall see. So, Jenn, we've had guests from all walks of life come on to our podcast and talk about their journey. And we love hearing how people got started in tech. Like, what caught your eye?JENNY: That's actually a very good question because how did I get here? I honestly don't know how I even got here.[laughter]ADRIANA: My favorite answer to date, yeah.ANA: That's okay.JENNY: I don't know how I got here. Oh, I remember there was one time, I do remember this; way back in school, I was applying for just a summer job in the U.S. and just for the fun of it. I was applying back in December for a summer job. Why? You're probably like, why? Why do you apply for summer jobs in December? Well, apparently, the Americans they do all their summer job hiring in January for preparation for summer jobs starting in May. So they do all the interviews in January and everything. They start prepping all HR people to pull you in wherever you are in the world so that by March 1st, they already have people lined up ready to go. So they fly them in ready for April 1st, May 1st. And then I'm there, voila, for a summer job. Anyway, I didn't know, and I was going like, okay, here I am in computer engineering. I didn't know anything. I knew nothing. And I saw in this job posting, "Do you know Python?" I go like, hmm, I don't know Python or anything like that. Oh, oh, oh, and do you know Perl? No, I don't know Perl. [laughter] Okay, let's look it up. Let's Google. Let's Google it up. Then I was like, okay, bam, on my resume, I can say I know Perl. [laughter] I can simply say on my resume, "I know Perl. I know how to do that." [laughter] And lo and behold, I got selected for an interview. And they say, "Hey, you know Perl? You must be an expert on this." I go like, "Yeah, sure. [laughter] Give me a job, please. Please do. Please. Please do." They go like, "Great. You're coming in May 1st you start.ANA: Oh my God. [laughs]JENNY: And I go like, [gasps] yeah, that was it. That was absolutely it. They flew me in. I'm like, "Okay, I know Perl." "Okay, but what year are you in?" "Third year." "But how much Perl experience do you have?" "I read this document. [laughter] That's all I know." And they said, "Well, good enough. You're here already. It doesn't matter. [laughter] Oh, by the way, you get paid $22 an hour." "Oh my God, this is awesome." [laughter]ADRIANA: You're rich, right? By university standards. [laughter] ANA: As a college student, I'm like, well, I mean, as a college student, but just in general, that is really good money for a first job when you're anywhere. [laughs] ADRIANA: Yeah. Totally, totally.JENNY: Yeah, absolutely. That's all I did. On the job posting, they were looking for someone that knew Perl. I really spent 40 minutes reading that document [laughter], and then I can say on my resume I know Perl, which is true. It is true. Did I know how to run it? Yes, Perl blah, blah, blah.pl. Okay, what does it do? Hmm, [laughter] I don't know. And I got paid 22 bucks an hour. And I said, "Oh my God, this is awesome." I got flown in. I had an apartment. Yeah, my apartment was covered by my income. That's okay and everything. And I had extra money to spare after being paid 20 for 40 hours a week, sure. And I had more money left over at the end of the summer. And I go like; this is awesome. So that's how I started off with.[laughter]ANA: You mentioned you were studying computer science, computer engineering.JENNY: Computer engineering, that's right. That's right. ANA: So, what got you into computer engineering? JENNY: Oh, because I didn't get into other things. [laughter]ANA: This story just gets better.[laughter]ADRIANA: This is like the best story. [laughter] What did you apply for? JENNY: Civil. [laughs]ADRIANA: You applied for civil engineering, and they put you in computer engineering? JENNY: [laughs]ADRIANA: See, this is the state, like, Jenn and I went to school, like, we were in university together. We were in different programs. I remember around that time, computer engineering was the hot stream of engineering that everyone wanted to be in. And it was funny because you ask half the people, "Why are you here?" "It pays well." "My mom wanted me to study computer engineering," [laughs] or I guess in your case, "I got rejected from civil engineering."[laughter]JENNY: My physics mark was really shitty, and they were like, okay, you're not going to get in here. [laughter] And then it was like, but why didn't you apply to chemical? Because chemical I was actually really good at, I was getting top marks. And chemical was my third choice after computer. [laughter] So civil didn't want me. [laughter]ANA: Almost. You almost made it to chemical.ADRIANA: That is so funny. [laughter]JENNY: Civil didn't want me, so computer took me. And then chemical, I guess they would have wanted me had they gotten the opportunity, but hmm -- [laughs]ADRIANA: Computer engineering got to you first. [laughter]JENNY: It's sad. It's really sad. [laughs] So that's where I ended up with. But why did I stick with it? Because after school, the company that I eventually got hired into, Motorola, I was put into a team for not just the cellular networks but the whole telecom network, the whole entire framework. And that was an eye opener for me as to how your cell phone calls started off with on that little handset going all through the base stations to the MSCs and then to the mainframe where I actually set the call setups and everything. So that's ultimately where my interest was coming from, just from my first job. In school, you learn. You kind of are taught it and everything, but you really don't know how it works until you're actually getting your hands deep into it so that you know that, hey, this call starts at this stage, to this stage, to this stage and eventually gets to this. And then wherever I am in the world, eventually, it gets routed to wherever, here to there. And everything comes right back out to whichever...whether you're talking to someone on the telephone line, or to someone else's cell phone, to an IP phone, or anything like that. So that kind of communication, I thought, was really, really cool, and that's where I started off with. And I'm kind of...even though I'm now in banking, and I'm not quite touching that right now, I'm still very well-versed with how things are working here and there and how things are working in the industry. So that's where I'm at. [laughs]ADRIANA: That's so cool. And the other interesting thing, too, from when you started in telecom, is that it was probably around the time when cell phones were finally starting to become popular where it wasn't just the "use cell phone for emergency calls." It was like, oh, I can use it to talk with my friends. And then texting was starting to become popular on those little, [laughs] tiny keypads where you had to press the key like three times to get to the letter C. [laughs]JENNY: Right. Right.ANA: I miss those days.ADRIANA: [laughs] Yeah, the simpler

About the guest:Daniel Kim (He/Him) is a Principal Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic and the founder of Bit Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to making technology accessible to underserved communities. He wants to inspire generations of students in tech to be the best they can be through inclusive, accessible developer education. He is passionate about diversity and inclusion in tech, good food, and dad jokes.Find our guest on:Daniel’s TwitterDaniel’s LinkedinDaniel’s TwitchFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:New RelicOpenTelemetryCNCF Cloud Native Interactive LandscapeObservability Day - @ KubeCon EU 2023KafkaCassandraDistributed Tracing for Kafka with OpenTelemetry with Daniel Kim at Kafka Summit London 2022Tracing Kafka with OpenTelemetryKey Metrics To Uncover the Root Cause of Kafka Performance Anomalies with Daniel Kim and Antón RodríguezBit ProjectAdditional Links:Genki Forest - Lychee Sparkling WaterMajor League Hacking - SRE FellowshipNational Academy FoundationTranscript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host... ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we are talking to Daniel Kim, who works at New Relic as a Developer Advocate. Welcome, Daniel. Super excited to have you on the show.DANIEL: I am so excited to be here. I feel like I'm on a celebrity podcast, so I'm very excited.ADRIANA: Ooooh, dang. [laughter] I actually remember when you and I met at KubeCon. You were like, "[gasps] Do you host On-Call Me Maybe?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And then you're like, "[gasps] I listen to that podcast." And I'm like, "Oh my God, this is like the best moment of my life to meet someone who actually likes our podcast." So I was super stoked.DANIEL: Also, the title is the best. ADRIANA: Yes.ANA: [laughs]DANIEL: I mean, On-Call Me Maybe. Shout out to Austin.ADRIANA: Yeah, for real. He came up with a great title. First, we always ask our guests, what are you drinking today?DANIEL: So I'll open the can live on the podcast. ADRIANA: Whoo.ANA: Whoa. [laughter]DANIEL: So I just opened a can of my new favorite obsession/drink. It's called Genki Forest. And it's a Lychee sparkling water, and it is so good. I've been drinking like four cans of it every day and -- ADRIANA: Oh my God, sounds awesome. DANIEL: I have to start to ration my stockpile. So that's how good it is. So I could not recommend it more. And it's so refreshing.ADRIANA: I need to find this stuff in Canada.ANA: That sounds delicious. And I think I'm going to have to buy some for myself to be able to share back on socials and be like, "You know what? Daniel was right when he was on our podcast. This drink is amazing," because I'm also a huge lychee fan.ADRIANA: Yes. Yeah, you had me at lychee, honestly, yum. What are you drinking, Ana?ANA: I have nothing fun for today. Today is just water for me. But I am eating raspberry jello. Is that a drink? [laughs]ADRIANA: It's drink-like. DANIEL: [laughs]ADRIANA: I mean, jello takes on the form of its container. Does that make it liquid? I guess, [laughs] until it solidifies. I've got some fizzy water. I'm just finishing up a can. It's called Bubly. It's sparkling cherry water. And then I've got water on standby because I'm almost done with my can.ANA: Yeah, it's always good to stay hydrated. I'm now kind of jealous of not having a Lychee sparkling water with me. That's all. [laughs]ADRIANA: I'm like dying here because it sounds delicious, and it's given me all the bubble tea vibes. DANIEL: Yes. I had such good bubble tea last weekend. I love bubble tea. It's kind of an obsession for me.ADRIANA: Oh my God, me too. [laughs] I even make it at home. [laughs] The bill was getting too high with the bubble tea, so I'm like, I need to figure out how to do this at home. [laughs]ANA: Reasonable. I've yet to actually have bubble tea in a while. ADRIANA: [gasps]ANA: I passed by Boba Guys yesterday in San Francisco, and it's like one of the spots. And I was like, I want some, but I was going in for a dental procedure. ADRIANA: Ooh, boo.ANA: And I was like, I'm pretty sure I can't have this now, and I can't have it later. ADRIANA: [laughs]ANA: So I've been thinking about bubble tea since then. So now that y'all mentioned it, I'm like, hmm, good to remember I can't have that yet.DANIEL: [laughs]ADRIANA: When I'm in San Francisco next year, y'all are going to have to show me the awesome bubble tea shops. ANA: That's all, Daniel. I don't know the city anymore. And I feel like he frequents a lot more shops than I do.ADRIANA: [laughs]DANIEL: Yeah, I have some recommendations. ADRIANA: Awesome.DANIEL: We'll definitely go for some boba.ADRIANA: Yay.ANA: It's going to be like tracing San Francisco for bubble tea. We'll need a blog post. [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh my God, yes. DANIEL: Oh yes.ADRIANA: That's right, the drink tour, the boba drink tour. I love that.DANIEL: All the spans we could collect.[laughter]ADRIANA: I love it.ANA: So, Daniel, for folks that are just getting to know you, how did you get into tech?DANIEL: So I got into tech because I didn't know what I was doing in life beforehand. I was planning on becoming an electrical engineer. And I started my first day of my master's program, and I was like, wow, this really sucks. Because I was looking at what I was doing, and I was like, I don't feel anything looking at these math equations. And I was looking at these really complex diagrams, and I was like, if I have to do this for the rest of my life, I'm probably going to be very sad. So I decided to actually quit my master's without any plan and cold email all of the founders of the startups that I have used in the last year of my college experience. And one of them got back to me, and then I got hired the week later. So that is my journey into tech of randomness and me not liking where I was going in life.ANA: What were you studying as in bachelors that you used some tools?DANIEL: So I was doing circuits. I was figuring out how circuitry works, how semiconductors work, just very complex mathy things. Because when I first started my program, I thought electrical engineering was all robotics and cool things that you see in The Matrix, but it is just literally all math. And I was like; this is not what I signed up for. [laughter] I remember on the college website for the electrical engineering major, they have a picture of a hologram and robots. And I was like, this is what I'm signing up for. [laughter] This is so cool. But the reality kind of hit the first year, and I was like, maybe this is not for me.ADRIANA: So you wanted to make our evil robot overlords, is what you're saying.DANIEL: Exactly, but that didn't happen. ADRIANA: Oooh.DANIEL: I'm not good enough at math for that. [laughter]ANA: I feel that.ADRIANA: I mean, honestly, it's so cool that...I think it's like a really important life skill to realize that, hey, I don't like this, and I don't want to do this. DANIEL: Yeah, for sure.ADRIANA: I think it takes a lot of understanding of yourself and a lot of courage to be able to do that. So hats off to you for having done that and wanting to pursue something that made you happy.DANIEL: Yeah, I think I didn't have enough fear.ADRIANA: [laughs]DANIEL: Because I don't think I would have done that again if I went back in time. So I'm happy that it happened because I'm so happy with my life right now.ADRIANA: Yay.ANA: What is it that you do now? DANIEL: So what I do now is a lot better fit with my personality. I like to think that I have a pretty fun, outgoing personality, and that's kind of what I get to do in my daily job. I get to work with a lot of customers, engineers, developers from other communities, OpenTelemetry community members like Adriana and Ana. I get to work with all these amazing people in the community to not just sell a product but help developers understand what observability is. And that's kind of my favorite part of my job because I don't have to sell anything for my job. My job is to literally make other developers happy and help them learn and gain skills. That is like the dream job, right? ADRIANA: Yeah. DANIEL: Because I don't want anything from anyone. I just want to help people on their journey. And yeah, that's kind of my passion, too; I want to help developers learn and gain skills and be better engineers, which I love about my job.ADRIANA: That's awesome. I think that's such a lovely description of the type of work you do.ANA: And it's also nice when you're able to feel like your personality fits your job role. I always say bring your whole self to work. But I feel very similar, like, when I joined developer advocacy, it felt a lot more natural to me since I was already such a community-giving person and caring about other people that it was like, oh, now this is part of my job description, rad. I was going to do this anyway.ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree. Like, when I first heard about developer advocacy, I'm like, that's a job? Like, this is what I want to do. [laughs] Sign me up.DANIEL: Yeah, when I found out about it, too, I was like, wow, I didn't know this was a job either. So I'm so happy that I stumbled upon the job.ADRIANA: How does one stumble into a DevRel job? [laughs]ANA: Yeah. How do you stumble into DevRel? [laughs]DANIEL: This is actually a really weird, funny story. When I was in college, I had a lot of cojones. [laughter] So I didn't like...I was desperate, so I would do anything. So I actually Twitter-DMed, the CEO of GitLab. ADRIANA: Oh my God. [laughter]DANIEL: And I was like, "I want to come to you

About the guest:Jen Shute Benson (she/her/hers) is a Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Slalom Build. She has worked for over 25 years in the tech industry. Her early career included quality engineering, application support engineering, and systems engineering. She moved into leadership and has managed Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Solutions, DevOps, and Platform Engineering teams. She has managed two major cloud migrations at large-scale enterprises before moving into the world of consulting. At Slalom Build, in addition to leading Platform Engineering teams in 3 geographic locations, she supports multiple markets and clients and is heavily involved in ID&E initiatives within her Platform Engineering capability and at the Slalom Build level. Jen also volunteers as a mentor for Slalom’s Women Who Build program. She is a member of Cloud Girls and co-chairs the membership committee. Cloud Girls is a non-profit organization dedicated to community building and celebrating the success of women in cloud careers, and giving back through awards and charitable programs.Find our guest on:LinkedInFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:HugOpsSlalom BuildHRISMicrosoft AccessQuality Engineer (QE)DreamweaverHerokuActive ListeningCloud GirlsAdditional Links:Slalom Women Who Build ProgramTranscript:ANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Ana Margarita Medina, and with my awesome co-host...ADRIANA: Adriana Villela.ANA: Today we're talking to Jen Shute, who is a Senior Director of Platform Engineering at Slalom Build. Thank you for joining us today.JEN: Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here with you today.ANA: In true On-Call Me Maybe fashion, we always like asking our guests, what are you drinking today? JEN: Okay. So I've brought with me some kombucha. It's organic brew, Dr. Kombucha, and it's a new flavor that I've never tried before. It is blood orange ginger, and it is very good. I highly recommend it to anybody who likes kombucha.ANA: I'm a huge kombucha nerd, and it makes me want to have one of those this morning too. That ginger sounds delicious. What about you, Adriana?ADRIANA: Today I've got water. ANA: Nice.ADRIANA: Nice and simple, my go-to drink. [laughter] How about you, Ana?ANA: I'm going to make some water and some caffeine. So if you've listened before, it's usually the yerba mate with mint. I'm doing one of those today; just trying to pick up the energies. With all these California storms going on, I'm like; I need all the positivity energies that I can get.ADRIANA: Oh yeah, you guys finally got a break in the weather. Somewhat. [laughs]ANA: We had a 24-hour break, and we're back to another three, four-day storm. ADRIANA: Oooh.ANA: So it's like, I think, four atmospheric rivers hitting California. ADRIANA: Holy cow. ANA: And for folks that are interested, they should look at the maps of what it was like the drought in California in December and what it's looking like now and the fact that some parts of California are still in drought and a lot of parts are very much flooded. It's crazy. Global warming is insane.ADRIANA: Yeah, well, definitely a stark contrast to Toronto. We actually got snow today. I woke up with, I'd say, five centimeters of snow. What's that in inches? Like two and a half inches. So yeah, we got a dose of proper winter after rain for the last couple of weeks, so yay. [laughter] Definitely better than the floods. I'm sorry you're having to go through that. That does sound very awful. So I hope it subsides soonishly.ANA: Thank you. Definitely HugOps to California. I feel bad for all of it. And, I mean, I think the entire world has been having some crazy weather right now, and hopefully, it is a bigger wake-up call to those that are currently not looking at it or being proactive about the actions that they take against the environment.ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree. What's the weather like in your neck of the woods, Jen?JEN: I'm in Ohio. And I think I generally I'm pretty close to what you have in Toronto. You know, I haven't been outside today. I just kind of peeked out the window to see if we got any snow since you mentioned you had snow. It doesn't look like it. But I think we're probably in pretty similar climatic regions, so we both got a little lake-effect snow and --ADRIANA: Yeah, totally.ANA: I like snow. I would not be able to live somewhere with snow. I think this rain made me realize --ADRIANA: [laughs]ANA: This type of weather just makes me extra sad, and that's really hard. ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true.ANA: So with snow, I would not be able to live, like, I've always lived tropical or next to water. I think California is the coldest I've ever lived, which says a lot. [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh dang. Oh yeah, that's right. You lived many years in Miami, right?ANA: Yeah, I've lived in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Miami, and now San Francisco Bay area. So pretty privileged, I would say.ADRIANA: Nice, warm weather. I do miss that. I do miss that. [laughs]ANA: Well, Jen, since we have you here, we wanted to hear how you found your way into technology. What was your path like from that moment when you were like, this was cool too. I can make money. JEN: I actually had a really roundabout path, and I think that's not uncommon for people in tech. In college, I took psychology, so I graduated with a psych degree. I worked in human services for a couple of years. I found that I was not making enough money, unfortunately, to support myself. So I tried to figure out what's a transition I can do? Like, I don't feel like I'm ready to, you know, or I'm at a point where I could go back to school. And I thought human services might be a shift that I can make a little easier. And so I got a job in HR. At the time, it was myself, and there were three other women that I worked with in our team. And I was the only person, you know, I was in my 20s at the time. I was the only younger person. And we had a HRIS where we kept all of our HR data, and nobody else really wanted to use it. And so I kind of became the person that took over that HRIS, and I did all the management. And it kind of got to the point where if we needed to be tracking something that we weren't...I'm kind of aging myself, but it was an Access back end. I learned --ADRIANA: Oooh. Good times. I remember Access. [laughter]ANA: Same. I'm certified in Access 2005. [laughter] ADRIANA: Oh my God. [laughter]JEN: So I learned how to go in and add fields and did a couple of trainings at the company that created the HRIS that we were using, and I actually ended up getting told about a QE position they had there. And I had always kind of thought that people who worked in tech were super cool. I always thought that's something I could never do. But I went ahead, and I applied for the job, and I actually got the job. So that's how I got into tech. So I worked in QE for probably about five years. And then I switched over into systems engineering and then kind of worked my way through. And as things changed and we started moving to the cloud, I started working more in the DevOps realm and cloud. So that's my journey so kind of a roundabout way, but it got me here.ADRIANA: That's such a cool path to tech. And what are the things that you're like, oh my God, so much has changed in tech from when I started to where I'm at now? What do you think is the biggest thing where you're like, holy cow, I could have never envisioned this happening tech-wise?JEN: So this is a great question. And I feel like it's a hard one to answer because I would love to say everything. Like, when I first started, I was testing software for a client-server application. And when I moved into systems and infrastructure support, I was supporting a monolithic application that was on-prem. And what we're looking at is scalable systems that are resilient, and self-healing, and containerized. I almost have to say, like, everything has changed, and I would not have predicted any of that.ADRIANA: Yeah, that is so true. I kind of feel the same way. I mean, my first foray into programming was on a computer that wasn't even on a network. There was no internet that I was aware of at the time. I think it existed at the time, but I wasn't aware of it. Writing code in QBasic, [laughter] like, I don't even think QBasic exists anymore. [laughs]ANA: Or even looking back at the text editors we were using, like, I was using some obscure one. ADRIANA: Yes.ANA: And then I ended up using Dreamweaver 8. And to think I was doing more of like websites and stuff, so using FTP to upload sites versus just going into the server in other ways. Like, it's interesting to look back on things like it.JEN: I mean, it really makes you wonder, like, what's next that we can't even imagine yet. How advanced are we going to be when we're going to be looking back on this and be like, "Oh my God, remember when we were in AWS?"ADRIANA: Yeah, it's true. And as radical a change as it is from starting out in one's career versus now, at the same time, I think everything's just been slowly evolving towards where it is. I was having a conversation with my dad the other day, and he was like, "Yeah, I was doing stuff in the cloud before it was even a thing."ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: And he was talking about, "Yeah, I was using Heroku." And I'm like, oh damn, yeah, I totally forgot about Heroku. Stuff like that has paved the way for where we are right now, which is super trippy.ANA: It is always interesting to see when Heroku comes up in conversations.ADRIANA: [laughs]ANA: Because everyone literally always forget

About the guest:Michael Kehoe is an author, speaker and Sr Staff Security Engineer at Confluent. Previously he was a Sr Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at LinkedIn architecting LinkedIn’s move to Microsoft Azure. Before graduating with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Queensland (Australia), Michael interned at NASA Ames Research Center building small-satellites known as Phonesats.While working at LinkedIn, Michael led the company's work on Incident Response, Disaster Recovery, Visibility Engineering & Reliability Principles. He has also been embedded with the profile, traffic, espresso (KV Store) teams. After leading LinkedIn’s last physical data-center build, he is now the architect for how LinkedIn builds its infrastructure in Azure.Michael has spoken at numerous events all over the world and has authored the books "Cloud Native Infrastructure with Azure" and “Reducing MTTD for High Severity Incidents”.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInGitHubPersonal BlogFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:ConfluentLinkedInSRELightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)eBPFLiz RiceGeneral Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)Terraformtfsec (security scanner for your Terraform code)Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)Azure PolicyOpen Policy Agent (OPA)Kubernetes Admission ControllerAdditional Links:Cloud Native Infrastructure with AzureReducing MTTD for High Severity Incidents Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today we are talking to Michael Kehoe, who works at...I don't know where you work. [laughs] MICHAEL: Confluent.[laughter]ADRIANA: Confluent. Excellent. Welcome, Michael. [laughs]MICHAEL: Thank you, ladies. It's so great to be recording with you both.ADRIANA: So, first things first, what are you drinking today?MICHAEL: Today, it is just water. I just got over a cold recently. So we're recording this in the middle of the day. So water for now, but I've got some coffee liqueur to finish before I get on my plane tomorrow. So I think that will be my after-work drink this evening.ADRIANA: There you go, goals for the end of the day. MICHAEL: Absolutely.ANA: That seems really tasty to look forward to towards the end of the day, so I'm definitely a bit jealous. For me, I'm actually very much feeling in the very festive mood. And I decided to get a white chocolate peppermint mocha with peppermint from Starbucks. ADRIANA: Yay. ANA: I'm on that holiday cheer kick today.ADRIANA: Hooray, hooray. I've got a can of Perry lime with me and some water to supplement. So not super exciting, I'm afraid. ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: But hydration is hydration, so good vibes all around. [laughs] All right, cool. Well, Michael, we always like to hear from our guests, like, how'd you get into your current career path?MICHAEL: When I was very young, four or five, I had an interest in computers. And during school, I had the opportunity to tap into that a little bit, but not too much. When I was in college, I got an opportunity to work for my university's IT department. I went to school back in Australia, and the universities are generally much larger there, so we're talking about a user base of 40,000 students, 10,000 staff across dozens of campuses. This role was in their network department. I started doing low-level tasks, making sure that switch ports worked in offices, setting up network switches. And that got to evolve into helping build out new data centers. It also allowed me to go and do more network engineering tasks. So my university was an ISP as well for not only the university but also commercial customers as well in the form of both residences but also other universities, other schools. So this gave me a lot of experience to go and help build out actual solutions, build customer experience, customer service mentality a little bit. I got some exposure working with our Linux team as well. So I got to learn Puppet. I got to learn a little bit of LDAP and was able to start putting these different skill sets together. At the same time, Google recruiters came to campus, and they had a presentation on SRE. And I'm like, oh, this is so cool. You get to do a little bit of coding, a little bit of Linux, a little bit of network, and problem-solving as well. And I really loved the combination of those skill sets. This is back in about 2012, 2013. There was this blog, I think it's still around, called "High Scalability," which talked about real-world architectures of different tech companies. And I immersed myself in that to learn how all these things work. And so towards the end of college, I did some job interviews, and, thankfully, was able to interview at LinkedIn for an SRE position, and thankfully got the job and then went from there. I was on the Profile team at LinkedIn, and then from there went on to a more central team that handled more infrastructure across the whole site and practices and procedures. And during that time, I also got seconded to a number of different teams to help them through some trying situations. So I got exposed to everything from the Ingress traffic layer all the way to backend key-value databases and grabbed a bunch of experience across teams, which was really awesome to be able to learn such specific knowledge across a variety of different experiences.ADRIANA: Cool. So you actually got an SRE role right out of college, then. MICHAEL: Yes. It was really challenging to do that. A lot of companies won't hire SREs out of college because it's very difficult to get that experience in college unless you've done an internship where the bar is a little bit different. But yes, I graduated and got on the first plane after grabbing my visa and got to work. And I'm very grateful for the opportunities I had at LinkedIn, especially to be able to just immerse myself in so many different areas of the stack.ADRIANA: That is wild.ANA: You also got a chance to come into SRE at a prime time. It hadn't necessarily kind of picked into a lot of big companies starting to use it, and the book had not come out yet. So folks were kind of still like, oh, there's this thing that you do to keep systems up for humans and Google calls it SRE. And, I mean, at that time, knew that Facebook called it production engineering, but that was it. Like, nobody was really trying to name-grab or anything. It was a really interesting time, so...ADRIANA: Probably wasn't solid like it is now [laughs] because it was kind of at the forefront, right?MICHAEL: I mean, I think at the time, there was a loose definition of what it was. And for those hyper-scale companies like Facebook, like Google, like LinkedIn, and others, I'm sure they worked out what made sense for their companies. At the time, I think a number of other companies were like, what is this thing? And post-Google SRE book publication, companies are now trying to work out how do I make this work in my organization? And we definitely seem to be at the point where like, okay, this book isn't canon; it is meant to be a guide. And each company finds their own way to put these various principles into practice in a way that makes sense for both the culture of the business but also in terms of how the business is run.ANA: 100%. And I think that we're still seeing that shift to people realizing that it's not a one-size-fits-all. I think we've had a lot of those conversations in our podcast recently where it's like, nope, you can't just grab the book and apply all to all your systems. It's all a lot of hard work. And as you said, culture comes into play. But the way that Google does it, the way that Facebook or LinkedIn does it does not apply to your enterprise company or your startup.MICHAEL: Right. A friend of mine who worked at LinkedIn also has his own podcast series. He has a quote that "Culture eats technology for breakfast," which is very true.ANA: I know that you, like, I met you when you were working at LinkedIn. You were working specifically on EBF and just sharing SRE practices. What do you feel about that space now, considering EBF observability has taken a huge rise? And as you were talking about it in 2018, you were the only person at conferences speaking on it in a sense.MICHAEL: Right. I wish I had more time to spend on it, [laughs] honestly. So eBPF, when I was talking about it at, I think, O'Reilly Conferences and also the SREcon series it, was in its infancy in the industry. The foundations of eBPF started in; I think, 1991. And then the first commits to what's now known as eBPF was late 2013 or early 2014. And so it took a couple of years for people to start picking it up. And now you see companies specifically like Cilium that have really accelerated its growth, and they've created a very well-known product. I think the great thing about that space is it is more or less an open-source technology eBPF. So anyone can go and create something exceptionally powerful with it, which is great. Obviously, Cilium has cornered the market and makes it more user-friendly to go and use in a Kubernetes containerized environment. But there's nothing really stopping me from going and building a high-performance load balancer or DDoS system if I really want to.I think for the space that I'm in now in security, we can go and do very low-level, kernel-level auditing of system call events, or go and do deep introspection of network flows without having to worry about the overhead of that software. And that's so exceptionally cool. So while Cilium has cornered t

About the guest:Shingi Kanhukamwe is an Executive Transformation Advisor working with Export Development Canada. He has 11 years of Agile experience and 9 years focused on leading transformation initiatives in large, complex organizations. He has worked at various financial organizations and has also worked as a consultant. Find our guest on:LinkedInFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:Content ManagementIBMDigitizationCloud-Native TransformationSociotechnical systemsMainframeNetflix’s culture explainedTranscript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we are talking to Shingi Kanhukamwe, who is an independent consultant working on organizational transformation. So, Shingi, welcome.SHINGI: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.ADRIANA: First things first, important question. We start off for all of our guests; what are you drinking today?SHINGI: I am drinking a kombucha, ginger-lemon kombucha.ADRIANA: Ooh, awesome. Exotic, I like it. How about you, Ana?ANA: I'm honestly always a huge fan of anything ginger. That's actually what I had for my breakfast caffeine which was like yerba mate with ginger tea. It was delicious. But for today's podcast recording, I'm on just regular H2O.ADRIANA: I, too, am drinking water. I was for a previous recording drinking some green tea, but I ran out of that, so water it is.SHINGI: Oldie but a goodie. [laughs]ADRIANA: Exactly, can't go wrong with water. One question that we also like to ask our guests is, how did you get your start in tech?SHINGI: Actually, growing up, I'd always been really interested in technology, so probably starting about the time I was 9 or 10, I got really interested in computers. And I spent so much time on my computer that my parents were getting worried about my future because [laughter] they're like, "You're spending too much time on this thing. Like, is there a future with these things?" To the point where they were just like, "Okay, we're not buying another computer because you just spend way too much time with this thing." So what that made me do was it made me try and squeeze as much performance out of the machine as possible. [laughter] So I would do all these things to kind of try and get the machine to run programs. Like, I'd boot the machine into DOS and load programs directly from there. But I also got more interested in kind of...I was kind of like, well, what can I do? Well, I can't change the hardware.ANA: [laughs]SHINGI: But what can I do from a software perspective? Like, what optimizations can I leverage to get more out of this computer? Because they're not buying me a new one. ADRIANA: [laughs]SHINGI: And I actually got interested in terms of, like, oh, I can't buy a whole new computer, but can I buy certain parts? Like, if I borrow more RAM, like, is that going to help? ADRIANA: Ooh.SHINGI: That's how I got interested in technology from a personal perspective. Weirdly enough, that didn't end up resulting in me studying computer science. But I did a lot of self-study from a networking perspective. So at one point, I was really interested in networking and just thinking about pursuing a career path. So yeah, the first job I got was actually a communications job working on Parliament Hill for a Member of Parliament. But a big part of the job was actually technology because I ran the website. And back in 2004, there was no content management, [laughter] well, not that there wasn't content management in the marketplace. There wasn't content management where I worked; let's be specific.ADRIANA: Right. Right.SHINGI: So it was this PHP monstrosity where -- [crosstalk 3:24]ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh wow.SHINGI: You were liable to break stuff when you were just updating the content. That was super fun. So I think, like, yeah, in terms of my relationship to tech career-wise, it's always been like a theme. But I never actually ended up working as a developer or an engineer or somebody who's like in networking in hardware. It was always doing jobs that involved some degree of competency/technical literacy. So after that, my focus was kind of in the area of digital marketing more from the marketing technology side of things because, at that point in time, some exciting things were happening around marketing automation and what you can do with a modern content management system and analytics, and being able to do things based on triggers. After that, I started moving more into the organizational transformation space because I had the opportunity to be part of a project where we needed to move away from a very antiquated point-of-sale system with the organization I was working with at the time. So it was an insurance company. It sold products through brokers, but we were still using this green-screen IBM software. ADRIANA: Oh, geez. [laughs]SHINGI: And there were like two customers left in Canada on it. And it got to a point where IBM was just like, "Listen, there are two customers on this platform. It just doesn't make sense for us to maintain it as a going concern for two customers. So you've got like nine months to figure things out before we sunset this." So the organization kind of freaked out because they'd never done anything in less than a year [laughs] from a technology standpoint. ADRIANA: Oh my God.SHINGI: So no matter what the undertaking was, it just wasn't possible. The default answer was always one year plus. So everyone kind of freaked out. And this served as a bit of a catalyst to think differently about how we would approach this. So at that point in time, all of a sudden, people were bought into the idea of, like, well, why don't we try this agile thing in terms of how we approach this project? Because if we do this the normal way we do it, we know what's going to happen, and we can't afford for that to happen because it's our point of sale system. So that was a massive success. And then you would think the company would rethink how we structure our technology delivery capability and build on the lessons learned. That's not what happened. [laughter] We just went back to how we used to do things. [laughter] It was like, yeah, that was a one-off. It worked, and it was nice. And yeah, we went back to business as usual. But by that point in time, I was kind of puzzled because I was like, okay, so we tried something different. Clearly, it worked. And there's some value to thinking differently about how we do things from a technology delivery perspective. So why would we switch back to how we were doing things? Yeah, so I got a bit frustrated, and I left and started pursuing more work from a transformation perspective to be part of thinking differently about how we deliver technology solutions. What set of conditions makes for better outcomes? What sort of processes? What kind of context do you have to create around that? So that really became the area of interest for me. And that's kind of been the theme in terms of the type of work I've done ever since.ADRIANA: Cool. That's awesome. Having done a lot of this tech transformation type of work, what do you see are some of the commonalities around this in terms of what are some of the common pitfalls that you see a lot of these large enterprises getting into? And what are some of the common successes as well?SHINGI: One of the biggest pitfalls is thinking that it's all about getting off whatever our legacy technology is. It's all about getting off the mainframe, or it's all about getting on to the cloud. ADRIANA: [laughs]ANA: It's true. SHINGI: So, yes, it's important for us to modernize the technology infrastructure, but the thing is, you have to realize that the technology infrastructure is kind of like an iceberg in the sense that it's reflective of a whole way of working, and the mindset, and organizational structure. So you can't just plug out whatever technology you've got and think that you can plug in the new stuff, and it's just going to work. You have to think about it more holistically. And usually, the other big thing, too, is that there's too much of a desire to be too aggressive out of the gate. So because the change is actually bigger than you think, it's better to kind of test the change in some small way in the organization to really understand what you're in for if you actually want to make an impact of the kind that you're looking for, typically, when people are talking about transformation.ADRIANA: That's a really good point. And do you find usually when you're working in these types of transformations, like, what's the appetite from leadership? Are you typically working with leaders who are super gung-ho about this? Or are they kind of being voluntold by other leaders? Like, what's the climate like?SHINGI: It varies. And it depends on what the narrative is around the transformation. So that's a big driver in terms of the behaviors that you're going to get and the context around it as well. Like, is it a new leader coming into the organization, and they're driving a certain kind of mandate? Or have we had something bad happen, and now we're really feeling the pain, and we need to make a change in terms of how we've been investing in our technology? So depending on what that context is, you get some very different patterns in terms of how things play out.ADRIANA: So what's the bigger motivator? Is it the new leader who wants to, like, let's change things completely? [laughter] Or is it the organization who's like, okay, this ain't working; [laughs] we got to fix it?

About the guest:Alex Hidalgo is the Principal Reliability Advocate at Nobl9 and the author of "Implementing Service Level Objectives." During his career, he has developed a deep love for sustainable operations, proper observability, and using SLO data to drive discussions and make decisions. Alex's previous jobs have included IT support, network security, restaurant work, t-shirt design, and hosting game shows at bars. When not sharing his passion for technology with others, you can find him scuba diving or watching college basketball. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner Jen and a rescue dog named Taco. Alex has a BA in philosophy from Virginia Commonwealth University.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInMastodonFind us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:Nobl9SREConChefHugOpsAdmeldCustomer Reliability Engineer (CRE)Service Level Objective (SLO)SquarespaceImplementing Service Level Objectives: A Practical Guide to Slis, Slos, and Error BudgetsOpenSLOOpenSLO Slack CommunitySlothO'Reilly Google SRE BooksRundeckBreak Things on Purpose Podcast - Alex Hidalgo Additional Links:Google SRE Book - Service Level Objectives  Transcript:ANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and just about everything in between. I am your host, Ana Margarita Medina, with my awesome co-host...ADRIANA: Adriana Villela.ANA: Today, we're talking to Alex Hidalgo, who works over at Nobl9 doing all things Principal Site Reliability Engineering. We're very excited to have you join us.ALEX: Thanks so much for having me.ANA: So, to kick us off for today, we love asking our guests, like, what are they drinking for today's podcast episode? What's keeping you hydrated?ALEX: Water that I put in a refilled bottle that I got on the airplane flying home from SREcon a few weeks ago.ANA: What about you, Adriana?ADRIANA: I've got green tea. For once, I have something different. I always have water, so yay. ANA: That is funny because I'm usually the one with the fun drinks. And today, I'm on water because I just forgot to grab anything different. [laughter] There's that whole, like, constantly thinking about too many things and having to hop on between meetings. It's like, what do I need for my next meeting to have near me? Like, do I need my notepad? Do I need my water? And if you're moving around your office, or your house, or commuting, it just gets a lot.ALEX: I always forget water half the time when I do these things because I have a neighbor who's actually the founder, and composer, and conductor for the Brooklyn Symphony, which is really cool. So he has this studio in the basement that he lets me use on occasion for stuff like this. And it's great because it's got pretty good sound quality. And my dog, Taco, he's prone to bark in the background for no reason. But that also means I have to take everything apart, like my mic, and my webcam, and my USB dock, and my laptop, and throw it all in a bag and rush downstairs because I probably just had a meeting. And then half the time I get down here, I'm like, I'm about to talk for a very long time, and I forgot to even bring water. But today, we're all set.ANA: Yay. It's like rescheduling. And then how many restarts have we had to do of computers [laughs] and browsers?ADRIANA: We're so happy we finally made this happen today. [laughs]ANA: It is kind of nice because it does bring to the front what we love talking about, that reliability aspect of stuff. And everyone kind of finds their passion for reliability in a very different way. For me, I kind of stumbled upon it, and it was like, oh, this is really cool. But I know that Alex has a really interesting story and how they got into their career path. So I would love to hear from you.ALEX: So yeah, I'll try to keep the beginning part of the story short and gloss over a few things. But I was into computers from a very early age. My dad started teaching me how to program in BASIC when I was about nine years old. And then, in middle school, my friends and I taught ourselves C and eventually C++. And we decided we were going to write our own video games. We learned OpenGL and how to make 3D trains and things like that. And I just maintained this passion for computers throughout my high school years to the point that I actually chose not to go to college. I figured I could go get a decent tech job right out of school, and turned out to be mostly correct. I ended up doing network security work for the Department of Energy. I did well. I actually got promoted within just a few months. I mean, I started doing overnight nighttime monitoring. I was watching a computer screen, watching potential alerts come in, trying to decide whether or not these were actual attacks on the network or just false positives, and most of them were just false positives. And I did well, but after about a year there, I realized I kind of hated it. So I decided, you know what? Maybe computers aren't for me at all. Maybe they're meant to be a hobby, and I'm not meant to work with them for a living. And I realized, you know, I was still pretty young. I could still pack up everything and go to school, and so that's what I did. And I ended up studying philosophy and history. Then after that, spent my 20s working all sorts of jobs, restaurant work, front of house, back of house. I worked in a warehouse for a little bit. I sold furniture. I made most of my money as a DJ for about a year. ANA: Wow. ALEX: Just all sorts of random odds and ends. Then a whirlwind of circumstances landed me in New York City in early 2009. And so the 2008 recession, that downturn was still really, really in effect. And even though I now had this shiny degree in philosophy and history, right? [laughs] Very highly marketable. [laughter] I wasn't sure what I actually wanted to do. And so I started to apply for all sorts of random jobs. I thought maybe I wanted to work in publishing, for example. And my money was running out. I didn't have a lot of money. I was able to stretch it a few months. And suddenly I was like, you know, I really need a job. And I met these two dudes who were at a bar one night, and they were crushing tallboys of PBR on their foreheads. [laughter] And so I went over to say hi, and turns out one of them needed to hire someone new at their IT firm, just kind of like a help desk-y small to medium business support kind of place. And I was like, you know, I can still do this computer stuff because it always remained a hobby for me. And so I said, "Sure, why not?" And I went in, and we did a very brief interview. And I started just a few days later. And that was great because the day I got my first paycheck, I was using quarters and change. That's all I had left. Like, literally, I was down to change to go buy a cheap Bodega sandwich and to ride the subway. I'd just made it. And doing that job, it was help desk support. But also, I got to do some Linux work and networking work because some of our clients had those kinds of setup. And no one else had this...it was a 10-person company, like, no one else knew that aspect of things. And I realized I actually did like working with computers. The thing I didn't like was working for the government as a 19-year-old. That was the thing I actually hated way back when. And so I did that for a few years. And then, I ended up moving to a company called Admeld as what we call the technical operations engineer. This is kind of before we consolidated on titles like SRE and things like that. And it was a really cool company to work for. They were pretty early adopters of Chef. They were pretty early adopters of the true DevOps approach to things. Suddenly, I was learning what DevOps meant, learning about HugOps. I was learning about blameless culture, which is something I had not really been familiar with in most of the jobs I'd worked [laughs] up until that point. It was great. And then, not too long after, Admeld got acquired by Google. And so suddenly, my title went from technical operations engineer to site reliability engineer. And I was like, what does this even mean? So I spent the next few years still supporting the Admeld platform because we were making money, right? Like we couldn't just turn it off. I didn't even really have a chance to learn about true SRE principles for the first few years that I was at Google. I got to learn a ton more about different kinds of tooling. And my coding skills went way up. And it was so a great formative time for me. But then it came time to turn Admeld off. I was the last SRE on the team. Everyone else had transferred already. I was the last one standing. And I got to run the Chef knife ssh command that logged into every single server because we were on physical servers, I think, like 1,500 or 1,800 of them, something like that. And I got to run that final command that shut them all off at the same time.ADRIANA: Oh wow.ALEX: Like, that was a great feeling. [laughter] But then, after that, I transferred on to some other Google SRE teams, spent about two years on each. I spent a few years on managed systems. I spent a few years on prodmon, the production monitoring team. Then I spent a few years on CRE, the Customer Reliability Engineering team. And all this time, I learned more and more about true SRE principles, especially things like SLO and proper incident management, and things like that. I even ended up starting traveling all over the world, teaching other SRE at Google how to do their jobs. Like, this is where I found my passion for writing, and education, and sharing the things that I've learned, especially on the CRE team, where a big part of the job wa

About us:Adriana Villela is a Sr. Developer Advocate at Lightstep, based in Toronto, Canada, with over 20 years of experience in technology. She focuses on helping companies achieve reliability greatness by leveraging Observability, SRE, and DevOps practices. Before Lightstep, she was a Sr. Manager at Tucows, running both a Platform Engineering team and an Observability Practices team. Adriana has also worked at various large-scale enterprises in both individual contributor and leadership roles, including Bank of Montreal, Ceridian, and Accenture. Adriana has a popular technical blog on Medium, co-leads the OpenTelemetry End-User Working Group, and is a HashiCorp Ambassador. Find her on Mastodon at @adrianamvillela@hachyderm.io to talk all things tech.Ana Margarita Medina is a Staff Developer Advocate at Lightstep, where she speaks on all things SRE, DevOps, and Reliability, and is a podcast host for On-Call Me, Maybe. She is a self-taught engineer with over 12 years of experience, focusing on cloud infrastructure and reliability in the last few. She is also part of the Kubernetes Release Team (v1.25 - v1.27) and has been advising CNCF's Keptn project since 2019. When time permits her, she leads efforts to dispel the stigma surrounding mental health and bring more Black and Latinx folks into tech.  Catch her on Mastodon at @anamedina@hachyderm.io about traveling, diversity in tech, and mental health. Find us on:On-Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast MastodonOn-Call Me Maybe Podcast InstagramOn-Call Me Maybe TikTokOn Call Me Maybe Podcast YouTube ChannelAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:AWS Well-Architected Framework - Sustainability PillarAdrian Cockcroft on "Architecting for Sustainability"HashiCorp NomadTracetestMalabiHeliosTrace-Based TestingHashiTalks 2023Julie GundersonConf42: Don’t Forget the Humans with Julie Gunderson and Ana Margarita MedinaKeptnLitmusChaosChaos MeshArgoCiliumBackstageKubernetes Release TeamCrossplaneAdriana’s blog series on running ArgoCD on KubernetesESCAPE 19: Chaos Engineering in a Multi-Cloud World with Ana Margarita MedinaOpenTelemetry End-User Working GroupOpenPolicy AgentAndi GrabnerObservability-Landscape-as-CodeTerraformService-Level ObjectivesStephen TownshendSlight Reliability Episode 39 - The Future of SRE with Adriana Villela and Ana Margarita MedinaAdditional Links:CNCF Working Group on Environmental SustainabilityCloud Carbon Footprint Project on GitHubTechstrongTV - What 2022 Taught Us About SRE’s FutureTranscript:RIAAN NOLAN: Don't worry about failure. Fail fast if you do fail. None of us are superstars or anything, so your name doesn't mean shit anyway. [laughter] So put your code out there; if people think it sucks, it sucks; if they like it, they like it. The best thing is just paint your picture. Do your thing, and put it out there because that will help you grow. LIZ FONG-JONES: And I think this is an area where we, as developers of observability tools, can really help because an SLO has to be a living, breathing thing, not just a thing that you put up on a dashboard and you look at it 90 days later and, oops, we blew our SLO.NORA JONES: But we're also all engineers. We've been a part of the big technical aspects of it all. And we've seen the social aspects not really be spoken about very much. I think it's a big miss. And it's honestly a business advantage to be able to talk about the social aspects as well. So we're really trying to give every company that advantage.ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela. And with me, I have my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we are kicking off Season 2, and I'm super, super, super excited to be doing that. We've had a little hiatus over the holidays, and we've had time to get refreshed and revitalized. Ready to take on 2023, hopefully, knock on wood. How are you feeling? [laughter]ANA: I'm hoping that the year continues to get better and that this year is better than last year, and that we see more amazing things happen in the industry, but that everyone takes care of themselves a little bit more.ADRIANA: Yeah, cheers to that. Now, in proper OCMM fashion, we must ask each other what we're drinking. So, what do you have today? [laughs]ANA: This morning is my famous Guayakí's organic Yerba Mate in enlighten mint flavor. You'll probably find me either having a latte or one of these as I kick-start my day. So we're still rolling out here in the Bay Area. We're trying to get the engine running for today's day. How about you, Adriana?ADRIANA: I've got green tea. I made myself green tea just before we recorded because I figured I need something a little bit more interesting than the water. I mean, water is great, and drink your water, but green tea today. It's kind of a dreary, rainy day in Toronto today, not compared to the rain that y'all have been getting in California, so big hugs to you. Yeah, every day in the news, there's new stuff [laughs] about the rain. I'm like, ehh. [laughs]ANA: There's definitely a big hug sent out to California. But I feel like there are so many places in this world right now that, with global warming, they're suffering from such terrible conditions of weather. The amount of flooding that I got to see in pictures and online and in parts of California was just mind-blowing that it can happen. But it's just a reminder that we take care of the world. And even though this podcast focuses on reliability, sustainability is equally as important. And maybe this season, we will get a guest that talks a little bit more about that, or next season. Or if y'all want to chat with us on social media, we're always happy to hear folks' thoughts on it.ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. And also, a note for our guests: we now have a presence on Mastodon, TikTok, and Instagram in addition to our LinkedIn and Twitter presence. So you can find us on multiple social media platforms now.ANA: And you can even put in a request there of your favorite podcast guest that you would love to see be part of On-Call Me Maybe.ADRIANA: Yes.ANA: Questions that you want to ask any of our guests, questions for us, any feedback. We'd love to hear it. Let us know what you thought about season one or if you missed us between this break.ADRIANA: Oh, you know, I want to circle back to what you were saying about sustainability and technology because I don't know if you feel this way. So I've always, like, the environment has been near and dear to my heart since I was really young. And I kind of feel guilty working in tech knowing that the type of work that we do contributes to a certain extent to environmental problems because when you think about things running in the cloud, you've got servers running all the time, consuming a crap ton of energy. And I feel a little bit guilty. And I'm always curious as to how there can be a marriage between what we do and environmental sustainability if there's sustainable tech.ANA: Hmm. I think that is an interesting question, like, is there sustainable tech? I think, as an industry, we are waking up to the conversation of sustainability slowly. And it has increased more than ever in the last two, three years. And once again, I think this is actually something to attribute to COVID. We've had more of a demand within the supply chain. We've also had slowdowns on air pollution due to travel, and folks are starting to realize, like, oh, if we were to make this change, our world is happier, our world is sadder. And I think that cause and effect made people be like, oh shit, my actions do matter. And then specifically to technology, I remember...I want to say it was three or four years ago. If you follow Amazon Web Services, they have something called the AWS Well-Architected framework. It covers five different pillars of how organizations can actually be building their applications. This covers things like making sure that you have a reliability pillar, that you have a security pillar, that you have an operational pillar. But two, three years ago, one of the vice presidents at Amazon Web Services, Adrian Cockcroft, created the Sustainability Pillar and created this entire sector within Amazon Web Services that was going to focus on reducing the footprint that they were imprinting in this world or just letting their customers be more aware of it. And I thought a big organization such as them taking that step is a step, and it gets the conversation moving. And then it trickles down to what actionable things can companies do? Well, even starting to look at capacity planning is one way to move forward in the sustainability conversation. Like, if you have all of your servers constantly just using 20%-30% of your resources, maybe you shouldn't be running a fleet that large, and maybe you can make it a little bit smaller. And therefore, your footprint is a lot less, and you're damaging earth a little less.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so true. That's so true. Because I think sometimes we get so caught up on reliability that we need to make sure customers are happy, systems are up and running that sometimes it can be easy to over-provision resources, especially when you have the cash to burn.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Maybe not so much when you don't have the cash to burn. In that case, yeah, it's like...[laughs] and it's worthwhile doing an audit of your systems to make sure that, like, yes, I actually need all of that capacity versus, oh, shoot, I'm using like 10%-20% of my resources.ANA: Do you have any thoughts on some of the things folks can do to audit what their spend is? I know that there are consultants out there that would help you lower your cloud footprint bill. But when we're thinking about this audit, a l

About us:Adriana is a Sr. Developer Advocate at Lightstep, based out of Toronto, Canada, with over 20 years of experience in tech. She focuses on helping companies achieve reliability greatness by through Observability and Incident Response practices. Before Lightstep, she was a Sr. Manager at Tucows/Wavelo. During this time, she defined technical direction in the organization, running both a Platform Engineering team, and an Observability Practices team. Adriana has also worked at various large-scale enterprises, including Bank of Montreal (BMO), Ceridian, and Accenture. At BMO, she was responsible for defining and driving the bank's enterprise-wide DevOps practice, which impacted business and technology teams across multiple geographic locations across the globe. Adriana has a widely-read technical blog on Medium, which is known for its casual and approachable tone to complex technical topics, and its high level of technical detail. She is also a HashiCorp Ambassador. Find her on Mastodon at @adrianamvillela@hachyderm.io to talk all things tech.Ana Margarita is a Staff Developer Advocate at Lightstep and focuses on helping companies be more reliable by leveraging Observability and Incident Response practices. Before Lightstep, she was a Senior Chaos Engineer at Gremlin and helped companies avoid outages by running proactive chaos engineering experiments. She has also worked at various-sized companies including Google, Uber, SFEFCU, and Miami-based startups. Ana is an internationally recognized speaker and has presented at: AWS re:Invent, KubeCon, DockerCon, DevOpDays, AllDayDevOps, Write/Speak/Code, and many others. Catch her on Mastodon at @anamedina@hachyderm.io about traveling, diversity in tech, and mental health. Find us on:On Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:AWS re:InventOpenTelemetryKubeConBreak Things on Purpose PodcastTranscript:ANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Ana Margarita Medina, and with my awesome co-host...ADRIANA: Adriana Villela.ANA: Today, we're going to be recapping what this year has been for us, some of the stuff that we have been up to, what we're looking forward to in the next year, and talking a little bit more about tech culture and what we could be doing to make it better. We're so happy that you have been listening to us this season, and we look forward to having you join us next season. To kick it off, what's your drink of choice today, Adriana?ADRIANA: Today I've got water. Super boring. I should have something warmer, though, because it's actually really cold here in Toronto today. We've got snow, our first snowfall of the day. I mean, sorry, first snowfall of the year, I should say.ANA: Ooh, that's actually pretty exciting. Like, I'm not someone that likes cold environments, but snow is really pretty. I'm not going to turn down being in cute snow clothes with a little beanie. [laughs]ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. Exactly. As long as it's not super, super cold.ANA: Well, hopefully, you'll get some hot drink for the day to cozy up with the snow. ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. ANA: For me, today I'm also doing water, and I'm finishing up my morning drink, which is orange-infused yerba mate. I kind of sometimes switch between coffee to tea. So it's kind of nice.ADRIANA: Nice. Nice. Yeah, I think we have a similar drink in Brazil called mate. It must be the same thing. It's got to be the same thing. The name is similar enough.ANA: Like, at least the little bit of knowledge that I know about mate is that it comes from South America. And my best friend is Argentinian, and she actually just gets the actual leaves of mate. And you boil them, and you drink them in these little, leather metal containers that help keep it hot. ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. ANA: And you have the metal straw. So I've seen it more down there than in the cultures that I come from.ADRIANA: That's cool. Now it makes me want to go to the nearby Brazilian supermarket and pick one up. [laughs]ANA: You should do it.ADRIANA: For nostalgia. I should; I should. Next time I'll come equipped with some mate. We can have a mate-mate off.[laughter]ANA: I'll make the OG Argentinian mate for that day.ADRIANA: Nice. [laughs]ANA: Is there any drink that in Brazil y'all drink for holidays or that you and your family really like having as a tradition?ADRIANA: No. I mean, I think I dishonor my culture because I don't like coffee. [laughs] My dad's really into coffee, but my mom never was into coffee. I'm much more of a tea drinker. Or I'd say my go-to holiday drink is a Starbucks hot chocolate, and I usually do it with coconut milk, which gives it a really nice silky texture. ANA: Ooh, I might have to try that. I just had their hot chocolate maybe two weeks ago. And I forgot that I actually really enjoy getting a hot chocolate from Starbucks. Like, it's a different experience than just making it a home.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's like a warm hug.[laughter]ANA: Yes, that definitely sums it up. I think for me, like, I just blanked out. But in my culture, we have different things that we do for the holidays. And in Costa Rica, we have rompope, which is our traditional eggnog that we drink during the holidays, and it's literally my favorite thing to drink. It's just not really available out in California. I think in Miami, it was easier for me to find it. So over the last seven years, what I have picked up as my holiday tradition is making coquito which is a Puerto Rican drink.ADRIANA: Ooh.ANA: Which is like coconut milk, condensed milk, evaporated milk, cinnamon spices. The culture of Puerto Rico is that you make it with rum. So you can do it with Brugal, and you serve it over ice, and it's extremely strong. So it's more of like their holiday party drink. So I always make it non-alcoholic, and then I'll pour Flor de Caña Nicaraguan rum and have it with it. And it's just like, cozy up. It's the holiday season, like, start celebrating from Thanksgiving to the end of January.ADRIANA: Oh my God, that sounds amazing. [laughter] I will have to try that at some point. You had me at condensed milk, so...ANA: Yes. I mean, that's what it is. It's that sweetness. It's that sweetness and boozy. It's also a culture that you make it for your friends and family, and that's your gift for the holiday season.ADRIANA: Aww.ANA: So, one of my past jobs with a credit union in Miami, I got gifted it in like one of the holiday seasons, and it was just really thoughtful of like another family is inviting you to celebrate holidays with them. ADRIANA: Oh, that's so sweet. I love it. So, we've been podcasting for a while, I guess, now, right? So I guess this is our year in review [laughs], where we get to reminisce on some of the highlights of the year. You know, it's a good time for reflection. So keeping in with that end-of-year theme, like, what experiences are you grateful for? And who are some of the people that shaped who you are today?ANA: Yeah, I mean, I think things that I'm grateful for have varied a lot year by year. I think this year I'm really grateful for the close group of people that I have around me; it has been co-workers, husband, open-source community. It has been my close friends and just uplifting. I remember the last winter season; I had a lot harder time mental health-wise. So kind of trying to remind myself of, like, oh no, like, leverage your community to not struggle this much this winter as we already have the sun going down at 4:30 p.m., which just makes my heart cry. [laughs]ADRIANA: So depressing. I hate it. ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: The only thing making it less crappy today is the snow. [laughter]ANA: True. Send some snow over to California, please, but not too much. [laughter] ADRIANA: Yeah, just a little, tiny bit. ANA: And then, to answer your second part of the question, I think there are a lot of people that I'm grateful for for making me who I am today. I think my dad instilled in me a lot of values of being community-driven, giving back to folks, and constantly just learning and staying curious, like, an entrepreneurial mindset. And then there are two mentors that I always go back to as folks that made such a huge impact in my life growing up that I wouldn't be in the career that I have today. And one of them is my sixth-grade technology teacher, Mr. Rios, who taught me just computers and the web are a really cool thing. And he published my HTML websites on his website. ADRIANA: Aww.ANA: And that gave me confidence of technology is cool; go code. And then, I had a manager for an internship in my ninth-grade summer of high school named Soleil. She was just an amazing woman of color leader that was fierce in business and really tried to explain to these high school students, like, you have to present yourself the way you want people to respect you and also think about your career really early, and those decisions are going to make an impact. So if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't be having a successful career in technology. So I think this holiday season, I'm always like, hmm, thank you. Thank you, all.ADRIANA: Aww, that's awesome. That's really sweet.ANA: What about for you? Who are you grateful for that has made you who you are today?ADRIANA: I'd have to say top one is my mom, and I lost her earlier this year to cancer. And I had to actually rush home early from KubeCon to be with her for her final hours, and that was really rough. But I'm also so grateful that all my family was there. My dad, my sister, my daughter, and I were there for her final moments. And every day, I think back to the lessons that she instilled in me, which were she always wanted my sister and me to be fiercely independent career women, and she got her wish. I mean, for her, the most

About the guests:Austin Parker is the Head of Developer Relations at Lightstep and has been creating problems with computers for most of his life. He’s a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry project, the host of several podcasts, the organizer of Deserted Island DevOps, an infrequent Twitch streamer, a conference speaker, and more. When he’s not working, you can find him posting on Twitter, cooking, and parenting. His most recent book is Distributed Tracing in Practice, published by O’Reilly Media.Ted Young is the Director of Open Source Development at Lightstep and one of the core maintainers of the OpenTracing project. Ted has spent the last 15 years building distributed systems in a variety of environments: computer animation, national elections, and elastic computing platforms. Find our guest on:Austin’s TwitterAustin’s MastodonAustin’s LinkedInAustin’s WebsiteTed’s TwitterTed’s LinkedInFind us on:On Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:Lightstep360.orgBill McKibbenThe Sunrise MovementOpenTracingOpenCensusOpenTelemetryKubeCongRPCBASIC Programming LanguageDockerConCNCFCoreOSLiz Fong-JonesOTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol)QPS (Queries per Second)New Era CapsDenise YuHydroflask BottlesStar Trek: VoyagerLava LampAdditional Links:Distributed Tracing in Practice (O’Reilly Media)The Future of Observability with OpenTelemetry (O’Reilly Report)[YouTube] Myths and Historical Accidents: OpenTelemetry and the Future of Observability Part 1[YouTube] Data by Design: OpenTelemetry and the Future of Observability Part 2[YouTube] What OTel is and isn't: OpenTelemetry and the Future of Observability Part 3Transcript:ADRIANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and everything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we're talking to the whole DevRel team at Lightstep, woo-hoo.ANA: Woo!ADRIANA: And it's taken us how long to get us all together on this? I think this is our third attempt.ANA: Yeah, it's actually third attempt. It's taken five months in the making.ADRIANA: [laughs]ANA: But it's here. We're finally getting this episode out the door to our listeners.ADRIANA: Yay. So we start with...our first question is always, what are y'all drinking?AUSTIN: Red Bull, sugar-free TED: Coffee. AUSTIN: I had an espresso earlier.ANA: Y'all are kind of crazy to still be doing caffeine at this time, like, East Coast 4:00 p.m., Pacific time 1:00 p.m. I have a strict cut-off of no more caffeine at 12:00. I just finished drinking my yerba mate, 160 milligrams.AUSTIN: Yeah, I drink caffeine. I don't know; I don't really have a ton of problems with caffeine. So earlier this year, when we did Deserted Island DevOps in Michigan, I was like, okay, as the organizer of this, I can finally make unreasonable craft services requests. And so I was like, we got to have sugar-free Red Bulls because I like energy drinks. I like sugar-free Red Bull. So as it was requested, there was a, you know, they would fill it up. And that was actually maybe a mistake because I think I drank like three or four of them, and I was too nervous to eat. So I think I just kept drinking sugar-free Red Bulls. And about noon on the first day, I felt like I was vibrating on my skin. ADRIANA: Oh my God. AUSTIN: So I did find my limit of sugar-free Red Bull, and it's about four in two hours.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Yikes. When I was in university, I used to have a can of Coke usually for a 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. class because I don't drink coffee. [laughs] I remember experiencing the vibrating in my skin sensation back then, and then I'm like, yeah, maybe I shouldn't do this anymore.TED: Caffeine has no discernible effect on me anymore, which in and of itself is probably bad.[laughter]ANA: It might mean something.AUSTIN: It's a sign. It's a signal. [laughter] It's some kind of signal, at least.[laughter]TED: The adrenal glands are just like, we give up. We give up.AUSTIN: So we've stopped trying. This guy is going to do whatever.[laughter]ANA: I've switched over to water for the rest of the day. So, what about you, Adriana?ADRIANA: I've got water. I do plan on having a lovely mug of green tea later, though. Caffeine doesn't; at least green tea doesn't affect me if I have it late in the day. I'll have homemade bubble tea at like 9:00 o'clock at night, and I'll be fine, so yay.TED: With your own tapioca boba?ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.TED: Whaaat?ADRIANA: Yeah, I get it on Amazon, yeah. And I can control the amount because I like it, but I find it too filling. So I'll have like just a few. ANA: Two pearls. ADRIANA: Yeah. [laughs] Sometimes five if I'm feeling super adventurous. But yeah, it boils in like one to two minutes, and then it's done. So that's my plug for homemade bubble tea. TED: Whoa.ADRIANA: Mind-blown. [laughs]AUSTIN: I've not had boba in so long. I miss it. I used to get them when I came up to San Francisco when I would travel, back before the pandemic and everything. I would always really get into some boba. ANA: That was the case when I worked at the San Francisco Uber office. We would always take walks around the block, and we would end up at Boba Guys or Asha Tea House. And it was just like the perfect 45-minute break, nerd out, get some sun, get boba. Sometimes it was a work expense because it was a work meeting, and I was like, this is nice tech privilege.ADRIANA: Yes, yes. I would totally do that, too, at one of my old jobs. It was like the daily bubble tea round. [laughs] And I used to work in Downtown Toronto, so there's like tons of places now. So never wanting for bubble tea.[laughter]TED: They always dunk way too much sugar into it for my liking. ADRIANA: Yes.  TED: So the idea of homemade boba sounds really enticing.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's why I like it too because I find they do put too much sugar, and I can control the amount of sweetness because I can't even take the amount of sweetness that Starbucks puts in its hot chocolates, like, it's sugar overload for me.ANA: When I request bubble tea, I'm always like the 75%-80% sweetness person, so I'm the complete opposite clearly.ADRIANA: [laughs] I mean, you do enjoy condensed milk in your drinks, too, right?ANA: And I cannot do sugar-free Red Bulls, like, no. Sorry, y'all.[laughter]AUSTIN: I mean, it's fine.ANA: I mean, you're caring about your health which is better than what I do, so I think --AUSTIN: I mean, I like sugar in things, but I just don't like it in drinks these days. I don't know; I've been trying to reduce sugar intake in general.TED: I mean, it's not like regular Red Bull tastes good, so you might as well get the sugar-free, right?ADRIANA: [laughs]TED: Like, it's not like you're losing something. AUSTIN: Well, that's true. I mean, there are not a lot of energy drinks that taste good. Is this just like an energy drink review podcast now?[laughter]ADRIANA: I guess so.AUSTIN: All right.ADRIANA: Apparently, apparently.[laughter]ANA: I still think Green Monster tasted really good growing up. That was definitely a go-to.AUSTIN: Hmmm. See, Monster Zero, I think, tastes better than the regular ones. And then, for a while, I went for the Bang energy drinks. Those are a lot. ANA: I just get turned off by the marketing. AUSTIN: Well, the marketing is also bad. I feel like we need a new kind of energy drink revolution or energy drink model or concept, like something --ANA: There is actually something new that I just discovered. And I discovered it because somehow I was going through Twitter, and I found a founder who follows me on Twitter who's also Costa Rican, lives in San Francisco, and is building a company on making coffee without coffee beans. ADRIANA: That's cool. AUSTIN: Interesting.ANA: I don't know the name of it. TED: What does it mean? ADRIANA: [laughs]ANA: It's using, like, cocoa nodes. I don't know how they're not processing the cocoa beans, but you're still extracting caffeine. And you still get the same flavor profiles that a lot of coffee lovers are able to get out of it. At least, that's what I gathered from reading her tweets or company's tweets. AUSTIN: Is it like a sustainability thing or? ANA: Yes, yes, yes. It's a sustainability angle of it, too, where it's like with the way that climate change is going, we're not going to be able to keep up with the coffee demands, so we need to look for alternative routes.AUSTIN: I like people when they try to head off, or they look at the dystopia, and then they just kind of like say, "You know what? We're going to just jump one step ahead of that.ADRIANA: [laughs]AUSTIN: We aren't at the collapse quite yet but let's go ahead and see how much VC cash we can wring out of monetizing the rot." ANA: I mean, I'm super biased as being from Costa Rica, but they're one of the biggest exporters who are known for their beans that I'm like, to be a founder...that it's like, as a country, we stand for taking care of our environment and sustainability always being part of the way that you grow up, like, to then carry that on in Silicon Valley, I was just clapping hands, just excited. [laughs]AUSTIN: I know it's a cool idea. Don't get me wrong on this.ANA: Well, I will take us to our technology podcast.ADRIANA: Technology. [laughs] Yes, let's get into the technology meat of it. So I guess, for starters, Ted was my co-host on one of the On-Call Me Maybe episodes where we had Luiz Aoqui talking about Instrumenting Nomad with OpenTelemetry. Let's use this as an opportunity to get to know Ted and Austin better.AUSTIN: I nominate Ted to go first. ADRIANA: Awesome, awesome. [laughs] I feel like when we met in person at KubeCon, you striked me as way more interesting than me. [laughs] So I feel like you've got really cool stories to tell, like how you got into tech and how yo

About the guest:Riaan is a Principal Consultant with Servian, based out of Brisbane, Australia. Originally from South Africa, Riaan has worked for multinational companies in China, Portugal, Germany, the US, and Australia. He has a keen interest in Automation, Infrastructure as Code, and Configuration as Code, with a strong focus on DevOps ways of working.Riaan is also a HashiCorp Ambassador.In his spare time, Riaan enjoys hiking in nature, camping, trail running, and motorcycles. Find our guest on:Riaan's TwitterRiaan's LinkedInRiaan's GitHubRiaan’s WebsiteFind us on:On Call Me Maybe Podcast TwitterOn Call Me Maybe Podcast LinkedIn PageAdriana’s TwitterAdriana’s MastodonAdriana’s LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramShow Links:ServianHashiQubekubectlMiniKubeHashiCorp Ambassador TerraformTerragrunttfenvDBTHelmDocker AMD64 ProcessorAArch64Apple M1 ProcessorApple M2 ProcessorVaultSRE / Google SRE Book (aka “SRE Bible”)Spring Boot Google BorgLightstepNew RelicWerner Vogels (VP & CTO at Amazon)Additional Links:Blog: Running HashiQube on Multi-Arch (Arm and x86)/ Multi-OS (Linux, Mac, Windows) with Docker Desktop and VagrantTranscript:ANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and just about everything in between. Today we're talking to Riaan Nolan, who's going to be sharing some really cool tips for us today. And we're very happy to have you join us today.RIAAN: Thank you very much. Good morning, Ana and Adriana. Nice to see you, guys. And thank you for having me on your podcast.ADRIANA: Oh, we're super excited to be talking to you today.ANA: So the first question we like starting a podcast with...since it's early morning for you, and it's midafternoon for me, and almost evening for Adriana, what's your drink of choice for today's podcast?RIAAN: Well, it's 7:00 o'clock here by me, just after 7:00, so I'm having coffee. But normally, I love beer, anything cold, since I live in Brisbane, Australia. It's normally quite hot on this side. But it's coffee today. Cheers.ANA: Cheers. I got carrot and orange juice. So it's somewhat tasty.ADRIANA: Nice. Got plain, old water. [chuckles]ANA: Gotta stay hydrated with whatever heat's going on in this world. Super sad panda for this global warming.RIAAN: Oh, it's summer by you guys now.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. We had a heat wave here last week in Toronto where we got hit with like 40 degrees Celsius, so 100-ish Fahrenheit, so that was very unpleasant. And my AC broke in the midst of it, so boo. We got it fixed, fortunately, but boo.RIAAN: Wow, that's cool. I can't wait to have that weather. I'm such a fan of hot weather. Really, I love it. If it's 38-40 degrees Celsius, I really love it.ADRIANA: I do dig it as well, having grown up in Rio de Janeiro, but it definitely got very stifling inside the house. [laughs] But yeah, I'm for warm weather as well. I do enjoy a nice balmy temperature.ANA: It's really weird for me because the entire United States is having temperatures of 80 degrees, 90 degrees-plus, and I reside in San Francisco, California. So sorry I use Fahrenheit, even though I grew up with Celsius; [laughter] that's a disclaimer. And secondly, San Francisco has been really cool, like not freezing cold, but it's been chilly, like 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit. And I go on the weather applications, and the entire United States is red. And then you look at Spain and France, and they're having deaths due to the heat. And I'm just like, I am so scared for whatever is going to happen overall in the world. But when you're one of the only cities that is not going through the heat wave, I'm like, so what are we going to get? Like, we're going to get something. What is it going to be?ADRIANA: It's coming for you, I think.RIAAN: I think it's that La Niña, the opposite of the El Niño at the moment. And that's what makes the weather a little bit lopsided, a little bit weird.ANA: And it's interesting because it's like, weather is one thing [chuckles] that I refuse to try to get into and try to understand. I have the understanding of how water precipitation and condensation hurricanes work. But then it's like, my complex systems start at DevOps and SRE. [laughs] I refuse to start an entire other study of how other systems work.[laughter]ADRIANA: You've got enough complexity in your life. ANA: I think so. RIAAN: That's funny, you know.ANA: So as we were breaking into having these conversations, I actually want to bring up the amazing conversations that happen virtually in COVID where I think we're geeking out a lot more. We have a lot more virtual calls. And it could be similar to the hallway tracks. We have conferences and meetups, but it's really awesome to be able to share tools. And we got a chance to share some of our favorite tooling and talk about Riaan's open-source projects. So I'm going to give you the mic for you to share a little bit more of what you have actually been working on and contributing to open source.RIAAN: Thank you. So as you know, I'm a HashiCorp ambassador also with Adriana, my colleague.ADRIANA: Woo. RIAAN: I'm HashiCorp staff. So the one tool I've been working on is HashiQube, and it runs all of the HashiCorp tools and MiniKube, and it now runs in a Docker container. So I'm really excited about that. It helps me a lot when I have to proof of concept stuff up. Sometimes just put up a...what do you call it? The Ansible Tower running on top of Minikube, and then I can use that to connect to Vault to sign certificates or get secrets. And if I have to use Docker or if I have to Terraform something up, it's just a little tool that I can quickly use to do that.And then, on the other side, there's a little tools container that I've been working on that's on my GitHub. And that's just a little container with Terraform, and tfenv, and Terragrunt, and DBT, and kubectl, and Helm that you use for data projects or infrastructure projects. And it's just a little container that I try to get it to run on AMD64, and AArch64, the M1 chip, so the M2 Apple chips. So that's how I keep myself busy with and tinkering with that.ADRIANA: That's awesome. I'm personally a big fan of HashiQube. And I think that's how we connected initially. RIAAN: Yes.ADRIANA: And it's funny because I found out about HashiQube from a former co-worker of mine when we were doing some local Hashi setup. And he told me about HashiQube, and then I started playing around with it. I'm like, oh my God, this thing is the coolest thing in the world. Because I can now mess around with all the Hashi tools without having to rely on some Nomad cluster running in the data center. And for me, that was amazing because that meant I could be in control. (I like being in control.) I didn't want to have to rely on someone. And we were running...we had our own private cloud. So it wasn't like I couldn't just as easily spin up a virtual machine the way that I would if we were on a public cloud. So for me, this was an amazing salvation because I was able to tinker.And I also want to say, as a plug for HashiQube, the stuff that I did in my local environment in HashiQube pretty much translated when I moved stuff over to deploy in the data center, so super stoked for that. So yeah, I can't say enough good things about HashiQube. And I've blogged a lot about HashiQube as well in my Nomad explorations.RIAAN: Thank you.ADRIANA: So awesome. Check it out, check it out. [laughs]RIAAN: Thank you. I'm glad it helped you. It certainly helped me when I was sitting on the train or trying to learn a new thing here, you know, seeing our Vault can connect to MySQL and create database users and seeing that lease expire, that time to live. It's fascinating and so easy to do now. You just spin up a MySQL container with some arguments, and there you go in and plug it into Vault database engine, and off you go. So, yeah, it helped me also a lot.ANA: We have so many tools out there. That's always nice when we have easier ways to onboard, especially when it comes to making the space that we work on better. That actually made me think about...I know both of you are huge open-source contributors. And I know some of our listeners are too. What was your biggest reason for going into contributing to open source and especially starting new projects for the ecosystem?RIAAN: I've always been interested in open source, and I've always been using Ubuntu. But something that I enjoyed doing is also contributing to open source and helping other people learn. And I saw one of your questions is how do you cope with failures? And this is so much related to this topic because if you contribute and you can push to GitHub, and other people can pull your changes and test it out for you, and work together on this, then it kind of helps learning and dealing with failures a little bit easier. Because every single day, you have that aha, it's working moment, that little bit of happy endorphins in your brain that just fires, and you get it ready, and then you can make that commit. And sharing your work with other people, it's really enjoyable. It makes life interesting and fun.ADRIANA: I was going to say when you put your work out there, when you open source your work, you are basically making yourself vulnerable to the outside world. The reward is immense because you can have people who come in and start using your product. And they're like, oh, this is awesome, but here's a way to make it better and contribute, and you help each other improve. But it can be so scary too because you open-source something, and then you can have some jackass go, "Well, this is crap. I would do it much better if it was me, and this was what I would do." And so it can be really scary. So I think it's so important to put yourself out there, even knowing that that could be the reaction that some may have from putting your work out there in public.RIAAN: Totally. I mean, you've seen the way I