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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 timesJENNY: I worked on the original StarTAC phones, I did.ADRIANA: That's so cool. [laughs]JENNY: I worked on the original Razr, the Motorola Razrs. I worked on the original -- ADRIANA: Oooh, that was a sleek phone.JENNY: Oh, it was a sleek phone.ADRIANA: Super sleek.ANA: I owned the Razr.ADRIANA: [laughs]ANA: I also owned the other Razr that was like a non-flip phone, the pink one. Yes, that was...I remember being like; I must own this phone.ADRIANA: Oh, pretty. [laughs]ANA: And it was one of the first phones that had integrations with Apple, so it was like an iPod phone. And it was like the coolest commercials ever. And I was like, oh my God, yes. [laughs] So I'm a Razr girl.JENNY: I'm glad to hear that because it is, like, if you look it up on Wikipedia, it was, or is, was, the most bought phone in the world, and it's still now; why? There are different reasons, but it was the most popular phone. I'm not saying the iPhone is not. It is very popular now. But if you look it up, you can see it's right up there.ANA: Have you all heard that there's this group of Gen Zs that are trying to make it a thing to bring flip phones back? JENNY: Yes. ADRIANA: Yeah, it's hilarious.ANA: [laughs] How do you all feel about that? ADRIANA: I mean, I loved having my flip phone. I loved having a flip phone. It was so awesome. And I was really sad, like, I love my iPhone, but I was really sad that it was no longer a flip phone. There's something very satisfying about just flipping it open to make a call. [laughs]ANA: And on that note, I personally miss the sidekick. Being a millennial, the sidekick was like, full keyboard.ADRIANA: [laughs]ANA: Moving on from Blackberry, I was like, oh, look, it's got that cute, like what? Like 280 flip of a screen. [laughs]JENNY: Oh, that's right.ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah. I never used one, but I remember there was a period in what? Like the early aughts where it was popular.ANA: Like 2005?ADRIANA: Yeah, 2005 to 2000 and, I don't know, 10, 8, something.ANA: 23? [laughter]JENNY: So, ultimately, yeah, phones I actually worked on. I still work on them now. But even back then, I even knew about the whole underlying infrastructure as to how all the calls are going through, how to intercept, to change to look for certain things. So every single keypad that you make, I see it. If you're in the back end, you could see every single thing. Oh, someone's putting in their credit card information into their phone; I see it. You can see it. It's all there. And it's really interesting when people sort of say, "Oh no, I'm keying in my credit card. I'm keying in my birthday and everything." Well, don't worry, well, for the most part. [laughter] It's pretty safe. It's pretty safe. Unless you have some judge that has put out a request for this sniff, we need to get this information out. So I've gone around to many different parts of telecom, at least specifically for cell phones and such. It's interesting how it all goes around the whole circle, how things get around, and people see how it works and everything. ANA: That's super cool.ADRIANA: That's awesome. So then, how do you go from cell phones to testing software?JENNY: That's really interesting because one of the biggest changes that happened to me about 10...yeah, ten years ago is the need, at an infrastructure level, as how can we emulate how many calls are happening at the same time? I mean, right now, our biggest problems, at least for the telecom level, is to say, how do we reproduce a high call load? How do we reproduce that? And how do we reproduce not just at one spot, how do we reproduce it at a state level, at a tri-state level? And that need was mandated by the government to actually prove that, hey, does the software work? Can it handle that load? Whoever's buying the software they're paying billions of dollars for this, but they need proof to say that can it handle it? Will it die at the utmost need of time? I mean, we wouldn't want something like that to happen. We've already seen instances where networks have gone down, and I'm not going to name them or anything like that or name instances, but we've already seen it. We've experienced it, and it's pretty crappy. It's really shitty when hey, the cellphone network or telecommunication network is down because there's an overload. So that's one of the reasons why that came out, why I came out in testing now, because there was an absolute need where the buyer wants proof that can it handle it? We need to show it. The developer has claimed that it works, but they haven't tested it. They haven't tried it. They really haven't. I mean, one cell phone call, sure, that's one.ANA: [laughs]JENNY: But you need to make a couple million. And it's not just for one at one point; it's like a couple million for over a period of 18 hours, 24-48 hours, more than that. And that was the need, that was absolutely the need. And how much testing is done right now, I'm not going to comment. [laughter] But there is definitely a need for testing. Absolutely.ANA: What are some of the practices that go into doing these types of testings? Like, is it all using stuff that's built internally that's very specific to your organization? Or are there bigger projects that are used…
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