The One Where We Geek Out on Reinventing Yourself with Whitney Lee

Update: 2025-02-11

Description

About our guest:

Whitney is a lovable goofball and a CNCF Ambassador who enjoys understanding and using tools in the cloud native landscape. Creative and driven, Whitney recently pivoted from an art-related career to one in tech. You can catch her lightboard streaming show ⚡️ Enlightning on Tanzu.TV, and she also co-hosts the streaming show You Choose! - a 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure'-style journey through the CNCF landscape alongside Viktor Farcic.

Find our guest on:

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:

Additional notes:

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

WHITNEY: Hello. I'm so happy to be here.

ADRIANA: I am super excited that you were able to join and I want to get into this a little bit later, but we're like kindred spirits in some ways, like because we have photography in common. Although you did it way later than me. I mean, way longer than me. I'm super excited to have you join.

WHITNEY: Yay. I'm joining you from Austin, Texas.

ADRIANA: Awesome. So cool. So to get started, we are going to do some icebreaker questions.

WHITNEY: Bring it.

ADRIANA: Okay, first question. Are you a lefty or a righty?

WHITNEY: Presumably you mean which hand I write with. Not like which side of the bed I sleep on or I don't know which side of the car I drive on. I try to drive on the, on the right side when you do a steering wheel. So I'm, I'm right handed.

ADRIANA: It's funny because when I was.

WHITNEY: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

WHITNEY: Well, I write on the whiteboard as part of my, my job in the. It's switched in the camera. It's mirrored so it looks like I'm writing with my left hand to people. Yeah, but it's really just all mirrored. I'm writing like I'm not writing backwards.

ADRIANA: It's funny because I was actually going to mention that because when you had me on Enlightning talks, I, I messaged you just before it started. I'm like, are you a lefty? I get so excited when I meet other lefties. I'm like, there's more of us. And yeah, I was wondering actually about writing on the Lightboard also on. I'm like, are you like really good at mirror writing?

WHITNEY: It's hard enough to understand.

ADRIANA: Because it totally looks like that in the videos.

WHITNEY: Writing it backwards. Yeah.

ADRIANA: I hear you. Okay, next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

WHITNEY: I am. I have given into the iPhone ecosystem and really like, it's kind of like all my family does it and I. So it's. I'm an iPhone girl. It's okay. No judgment either way though. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Yeah. My, my family is also like all iPhone.

WHITNEY: You get that one person in there who turns the, the chat green. They don't even know what they're doing.

ADRIANA: This is, this is what wars are fought over. The. The Green Bubble. On a similar vein. And I think I might know your answer. Do you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows?

WHITNEY: I. I use MacBook. MacBook Pros. Yeah.

ADRIANA: Speaking to a fellow fan girl. All right, next question. Oh, yeah, go ahead.

WHITNEY: I draw a lot. I've really gotten into the Procreate app. I guess it's on my iPad.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

WHITNEY: Still part of the Apple ecosystem. For a second, I thought it was any different. I'm not. Yeah, I'm a stereotype. It's okay.

ADRIANA: Apple all the way. Woop woop. Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?

WHITNEY: Oh, YAML.

ADRIANA: I'm sure there's some, like, YAML haters who'd be like, grrrrr.

WHITNEY: Well, my. My story is that I changed careers into tech relatively late in my life and relatively recently. Only, like four years ago now. Um, so I. When I. I went back to school and I went to a boot camp, and in the boot camp, I learned JavaScript. Like, for a year, I. I did like, it's called the MERN stack, but I can't remember what it all stands for. Now. The R is React. Yeah. And Node and Express. Okay. And the M is Mon. Mongo. Anyway, this is not interesting. Yeah. And so I spent. I spent like a year, like, eating, living. Living code in the MERN stack and learning how to be an application developer. And then I immediately got a job as a cloud developer and then never touched any of that knowledge ever again.

ADRIANA: YAML is your language. That's awesome. I do like YAML. I was actually, like, just before we did this recording, I was editing a JSON file and it was like, getting mad at me because the. The syntax checker was like, you need a comma. I'm like, god damn it. If it was YAML, this wouldn't be a problem. And also making me use quotes.

WHITNEY: Rude!

ADRIANA: Yeah, I know, right? Okay, next question. Do you prefer dev or ops?

WHITNEY: Oh, I get. I. You know, ops. Based on what I just said, I think you could get that.

ADRIANA: That's what I assumed. And I know the answer to this question. JSON or YAML?

WHITNEY: Yeah, you tell me. You tell me about me. I like this better.

ADRIANA: I know, right? Like, all your questions are like, already. Your answers are already answering subsequent questions. I love it. Okay, next one. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?

WHITNEY: Spaces. I prefer when my. When my YAML is structure aware. Spaces, whatever. Yes, yes.

ADRIANA: And then do you prefer to learn through video or text?

WHITNEY: Oh, ironically, since I make videos all day long, I don't I don't learn through video. I like text. Yeah.

ADRIANA: People have said to me, they're like, oh, you make videos, so you must like to learn through videos. I'm like, no, I like reading stuff. It's way faster.

WHITNEY: Very much. And I can go back over that. Like a video. Like the second I miss something, like when concepts are built on top of each other, the second you miss something or tune out for a little bit and try to come back, you've lost the context. And it takes a lot, it feels like it takes a lot of focus or like, or a good presenter who's always coming back and reminding you the context or like drawings or something to keep that context there. But yeah, it's easy to lose context in a video or a talk.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree. It's funny because, like, I keep thinking back to like my university days where, you know, like, if the professor was talking about something really complex and then like, you