About our guest:

Parveen Khan is a Quality Practice Lead at CFC, passionate about ensuring that delivering high-quality products is a shared responsibility. She enjoys working with teams to improve processes, tools, and methodologies that help create better products. Parveen is also an international speaker, sharing her testing experiences to inspire others worldwide. Outside of work, she loves spending time with her two children.

Find our guest on:

• LinkedIn

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

• On-Call Me Maybe Podcast
• Ana Margarita Medina on Geeking Out
• Parveen Khan on On-Call Me Maybe
• Observability Mythbusters: Observability is NOT Only for SREs (Adriana's article on Medium, inspired by a conversation with Parveen)
• Selenium
• Thoughtworks
• CAC Group (insurance company)
• Parveen's Blog

Transcript:
ADRIANA:
Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today. I have Parveen Khan. Welcome, Parveen.

PARVEEN:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

ADRIANA:
I am so happy to have you on. And for for those of you who have been following this podcast, you may remember that our precursor podcast was, On-Call Me Maybe with my former coworker, Ana Margarita Medina, and Parveen was actually one of our early guests on On-Call Me Maybe. And I'm so happy to have her join me for Geeking Out this time around. And, Parveen, where are you calling from today?

PARVEEN:
Yeah. So. Yeah. Thanks. Again. Thanks again. Like, I remember, like, we I, Yeah, I joined you last time when you, when this podcast was the. And then again, we are meeting like again. So it's it's awesome. Yeah. I'm dialing from London. And. Yeah, I'm looking forward for a chat today. Geeking Out.

ADRIANA:
Yay. All right. Yes, yes, we will geek out on all things. And I should also mention too, like, when we first connected, through On-Call Me Maybe, it was when I was doing a piece on, how, Observability is not just for, for SREs, and it was actually inspired by a conversation that you and I had, when you reached out to me on LinkedIn. And then I was so like, I was so blown away, but, by our conversation, I'm like, I have to write this down as a blog post. And then it it turned into this, like, whole thing, and it was just amazing and so many awesome things came, came out of that conversation. So I'm very grateful that we had a chance to meet.

PARVEEN:
Yeah, absolutely. It was more of a intersection between quality and Observability and that conversation. Yes, absolutely.

ADRIANA:
That's right, that's right. Well, we'll dig into that shortly. But first let us start with our icebreaker questions. Okay. First question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

PARVEEN:
I'm a righty.

ADRIANA:
Okay. Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

PARVEEN:
Android.

ADRIANA:
Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

PARVEEN:
I was a very Mac person, but now I'm okay. Like Windows. Fine. Like I'm very Mac person. Yes.

PARVEEN:
I prefer Mac.

ADRIANA:
Which one do you, end up using for work? Out of curiosity? PK: Windows. Is by choice or by, by by required by job.

PARVEEN:
Required by job. Yes.

ADRIANA:
Fair enough, fair enough.

PARVEEN:
If it was by choice, I would say, Mac. Please.

ADRIANA:
I'm with you. I'm with you. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?

PARVEEN:
Yeah, I love, I love, I used to love working with Java. That's my first favorite and forever favorite language. Which I learned. And, I used to work and I used to enjoy writing, programs on it, and, like, I think Selenium when I, back in those days when I used to use Selenium, I think Java was my preferred language. And then I think a lot of other tools came in where you kind of like use different languages, like JavaScript, TypeScript. But I think Java, Java is my favorite programing language.

ADRIANA:
Awesome. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer dev or ops?

PARVEEN:
I prefer DevOps. Like both together.

ADRIANA:
Ooh. Love it, love it. Okay. Next one. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

PARVEEN:
Tough one. Okay, I think I prefer JSON. Yeah, I prefer JSON. Yeah.

ADRIANA:
Cool. Okay. Do you prefer spaces or tabs? Not making it easy, am I?

PARVEEN:
Tab. Yes. Tab. Maybe. Is tab.

ADRIANA:
All right. All right, two more questions left. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

PARVEEN:
Through text? I love reading.

ADRIANA:
AV: I’m with you. Like, yeah. Yeah.

PARVEEN:
Like hear video.s Then you have to be prepared, like carry your headphones and all that stuff. So, like text is like, you can open up everywhere, anywhere. Read. I love reading.

ADRIANA:
I agree, and distraction free. I get very distracted when I watch video.

PARVEEN:
Yeah, I'm not a good listener, I guess. Like, that's how I feel. Like I can't listen. I can't yeah, I can't listen to longer time, but I can read for as long as I can.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I'm with you, I'm with you I found the only way that I can, do video. Like, especially for learning is either, like, walking around the house listening to the video, so, like a podcast. Or if I'm, like, distracted. So I have, like, a treadmill in my home office and a bike in my home office. I'm like, if I'm doing one of those things, then it keeps my brain distracted enough that I can, like, concentrate on the video. More than if I was just sitting there.

PARVEEN:
Yeah, yeah. Is it? I can't really I feel like I'm just I'm just doing one thing like. Yeah, it's just makes me like I can't concentrate for a longer time. If it's a video. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ADRIANA:
It's hard. Okay. Final question. What is your superpower?

PARVEEN:
Superpower? Superpower is at. I feel like I'm, I'm a very. I'm very open to learning always. And I ask for help. I don't shy away, like, you know, I don't feel like. Oh. Like what? What if, like, people think they. You know, what if they say no to me? What if, like, you know, people think that I don't know this, so I think, like, this is my superpower. This has helped me a lot in my career, I guess, like, you know, I, I, I just reach out to people. Let me I think I feel like I'm like, I'm lucky enough in that sense. Like, you know, I reach out to people and I ask them, I ask like, you know, I can reach out and say, hey, you know what? I love reading your article. Do you have a few minutes? I want to really chat with you. I just ask away people and I get time to speak to people. I'm. I feel like asking help is my superpower.

ADRIANA:
That is amazing. And it's the perfect segue into our conversation. And, you know, I, I just, I can't underscore enough, like, how important it is to ask for help. You make such an excellent, excellent point. Because we can, you know, it's so easy to I think as you get more senior in your career and people look up to you as having being the one with all the answers. And yeah, I think we need to get out of this mindset of not being the ones with all the answers. It's okay to not be the one with all the answers, and to stop being shy, scared, and to say, I don't know that. Like I'll even do stuff like, I'm sorry, dumb question. Can you explain this to me?

PARVEEN:
Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think somewhere like, you know, if you if you have that any kind of title or something, you feel like, oh people will think that they like, you know, you need to know everything. No, it's not like I feel like it's never, it's more about asking away those questions. Asking away for help and saying that, you know what? I might not know this. Like, you know, maybe let's let's, let's brainstorm. Let's understand what this is. And it's always about, working like it's not all about you knowing everything and you telling people, right? It's all about, how can you get different perspecti