About our guest:

Kayla is an engineer on the New Relic Ruby agent team and an active member of the OpenTelemetry Ruby community, where she's a maintainer for opentelemetry-ruby-contrib and an approver for opentelemetry-ruby. Outside of work, she enjoys cycling and tinkering in her garden.

Find our guest on:

• LinkedIn
• GitHub

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:

• Apple IIe
• Unisys Icon
• GitHub Codespaces
• OpenTelemetry Ruby (Core)
• OpenTelemetry Ruby (Contrib)

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

KAYLA: Hi. Thank you. Happy to be here.

ADRIANA: I'm super excited to have you on. And where are you calling from today?

KAYLA: I'm calling from Portland, Oregon.

ADRIANA: Awesome. I've had a few people from Portland. There's a big tech community in Portland, isn't there?

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. They. At one point it was called the Silicon Forest, but I don't know if it has that same reputation.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. Are you originally from Portland, or...

KAYLA: No, I'm originally from a small town kind of near Mount Rainier in Washington state, but kind of grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so.

ADRIANA: Oh, cool. That's awesome. It's. You know, I always chat with people who, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest and it's such a different vibe from east coast life. Like, it's so much more outdoorsy, focused in the Pacific Northwest, which I absolutely love. Like here, where I live, in Toronto, it's like, it's flat. So, you know, I go out west, I'm like, oh, it's...The mountains are so pretty. I so miss that.

KAYLA: Yeah. Yeah. The times that I've lived other places, I. I miss seeing the mountains on the horizon. For sure.

ADRIANA: Yeah. You cannot beat that. Well, awesome. Are you ready to do our icebreaker questions?

KAYLA: Sure.

ADRIANA: Okay, let's do it. Question number one. Are you a lefty or a righty?

KAYLA: I'm a lefty.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God. I always get so excited when I meet fellow lefties. Yeah. I love learning. I. I love identifying other lefties. I. I've mentioned this multiple times in the show, so if anyone's listening and bored of hearing this. But like, I always, I'm always like watching, you know, what hand people grab things with, and I'm like lefty. And I feel like it's the thing that only lefties will probably notice anyway.

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah. Right. We're like a small enough percentage that it. It kind of catches you off guard. It's a little bit exciting.

ADRIANA: Exactly. And I, I don't know if you do this, but like, my coat hangers go like my clothes hang in my coat hangers in a very particular direction compared to like right handed people or even like where I put my knives in the knife bl. In the knife block.

KAYLA: Mm.

ADRIANA: But yeah, that that's from like living in a house of, of right handed people where they outnumber me but I impose my will upon them.

KAYLA: Nice. Nice. Yeah. Growing up there was always like a decent balance because my dad was also left handed. But you know, as an adult, like sharing a house with another with a right handed person, it's like the kitchen set up every time the. Where the cutting board is placed versus where the appliances are placed and the food.

ADRIANA: It's like exactly how you turn, like. The handle for your frying pan. Like what, where it's oriented as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KAYLA: And I've even looked at that sometimes when I've gone to like look at apartments or something. It's like, okay, where is the elbow space for?

ADRIANA: Yes.

KAYLA: Like, will it work?

ADRIANA: Or even like something silly like sitting down to a meal. And if you're sitting next to a right handed person, you need to be on the outside so you're not like butting elbows when you eat, which right-handed people don't think about.

KAYLA: Yeah, yeah, I know it, it like can cause sometimes a little bit of anxiety of like, okay, am I gonna get one of the two correct spots at this table?

ADRIANA: Exactly.

KAYLA: Yep.

ADRIANA: And, and one, one follow up question on, on leftiness. Because I, I find like lefties. Well, I mean already by default, like, lefties hold their pencils like really weird. I hold mine extra weird to the point where, you know, I've had teachers like, you're not supposed to hold it like that. Who cares how I hold it in my writing? Yeah. Do you, Are you an extra weird pencil holder?

KAYLA: Oh, yes. Yeah, I am. Yeah. Actually, let's see. So I hold mine. Yeah, I just kind of like balance it but have like an extra point.

ADRIANA: Oh, nice, nice. And do you have like an extra callus. Yes. Yeah, the callus.

KAYLA: And so whenever there were like standardized tests, this whole side of my hand would just be.

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, the smudge, the smudge. I used to have smudgy paper that I used to like... Under my hand over my notebooks to avoid that. Yeah. I had, for years I had a callus on my, on my left pinky. And it's gone. It's gone now because, I mean, I hardly ever write, but it was, I thought it was never gonna go away. I hold my pencil really funny. I have, I have a banana here that I'm going to use to demonstrate because my, my pens are like far away, but I, I hold. Oops. This is how I hold my pencil is like this. So yeah. Teachers would be like, what the hell, you can't hold it like that. I'm like, watch me, So anyway, well, thank you. Always fun to meet another lefty. Now do you prefer iPhone or Android?

KAYLA: iPhone. Yeah. I grew up using Mac products so I feel like it was just kind of a natural evolution.

ADRIANA: That's so cool that you grew up like that. I did not grow up using Mac products, but I became like a late stage convert.

KAYLA: My parents were both teachers and the school district that they work for got a huge grant from Apple and so they actually got to like take an early computer home.

ADRIANA: Oh my God.

KAYLA: In the summertime. Yeah. So like when it wasn't being used, which was great. So yeah. So back in the like green and black little boxy Mac days.

ADRIANA: I remember those. Yeah. I remember growing up like schools always had the Macs and it was like the, it was the Apple IIe before...pre Mac. And then, and then in my high school they had a, they had a Macintosh lab for like all the graphic design and then for like the computer class we had like a lab of Unisys Icon computers which I don't even know if they make those anymore but they, they ran Windows and yeah, that, that's what we use for computer programming.

KAYLA: Nice, nice.

ADRIANA: That's cool. Now did you get into computers because of your parents bringing home the max in the summer or was that like a later enlightening?

KAYLA: Yeah, that's a good question. I think that that got me curious in them and like I liked, I was like early on the IT person for my family. So it was like learning, learning how to do those things. I had a great computer computers teacher to, in elementary school but I kind of drifted away from it in junior high and high school and was using more like using computers for like creative things like you know, Photoshop or like film editing. But ended up, yeah, circling, circling back much later because I, I was charged at one point with creating like Internet based documentary extras, like different things that you could use to interact with media and archives. And there was so much that I was always just asking this other engineer to do that it got me somewhat curious of like, I wonder if I could do this myself someday. And it wasn't until you know, I was kind of at this point where I was wrapping up a film project that I had been working on for a few years and wasn't sure if I wanted to go looking for a new one or make a career change that a friend of mine who was a software engineer encouraged me to look into that. And so that's kind of how I got into coding and started learning about it and enjoying it.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. So your original background was more on the film end of