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About The Hosts: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 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 Twitter at @adrianamvillela 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 tweeting at @Ana_M_Medina 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 LinkedInAdriana’s InstagramAna’s TwitterAna’s LinkedInShow Links:Altavista - search engineBASIC - programming languageAdriana’s Medium BlogAdriana’s posts on the Lightstep BlogAna’s posts on the Lightstep BlogAdditional Links:O11ycast Podcast Episode: Ep. #11, Chaos Engineering with Ana Medina of GremlinO11ycast Podcast Episode: Ep. #48, Mastering Migrations with Adriana Villela of TucowsMTTR / MTTDPsychological Safety Transcript:ANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to On-Call Me Maybe Podcast, where we talk about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, and everything in between. Who are we talking to today?ADRIANA: Well, we're talking to us, actually. I'm Adriana Villela with...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And we're, I guess, interviewing each other.ANA: Yeah. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, Podcast. You'll get to learn a little bit more about me and Adriana.ADRIANA: Yeah. And I think, for starters, maybe we should tell our listeners what we're drinking today.ANA: We make sure that our guests and our hosts are always having a beverage. And my drink of choice for the day is just regular H2O. What about yours, Adriana?ADRIANA: Yep, I've got a nice glass of water next to me, keeping me nice and hydrated. It's a pretty hot day in Toronto, where I'm from. So we are definitely seeing some very summery weather. How about you? Where are you located, Ana?ANA: I'm over in the San Francisco Bay Area. And it's also hot summer weather for us right now, so I'm trying to make sure that I'm constantly drinking water.ADRIANA: Awesome. So I guess let's dig into it. Let's maybe talk a little bit. So one of the things I always like talking about is people's origin stories, like, what got them into tech? What excites them about tech? What got them to where they are now? You and I were chatting earlier, and I think you have a really cool story. So why don't we start with you?ANA: Thanks. I do have a very untraditional story, and I'm definitely pretty proud of it. I actually got into tech by curiosity. I was taking an introduction to computer class, and my professor was teaching us Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and lovely Microsoft Publisher. When we were using Microsoft Publisher, of course, there was a button that was called insert HTML. I was in sixth grade. I had no knowledge of what HTML was.And I went, back in the day, on altavista.com, if anyone remembers. And I was like, what is HTML? [laughs] Hypertext Markup Language. Yeah, this seems interesting. And I got a chance to copy some tutorial that gave me some code, put it into Publisher. And all of a sudden, I see an embedded image into my website. Then I was like, what is this other part of building websites, CSS? And I started diving into that. And as I learned HTML and CSS, I started putting together how you make websites.This was also around the era that MySpace was a thing. So as I learned CSS for my school projects and for fun, I then started curating MySpace layouts for all my friends and online friends that I never met. That's kind of when I started being like, this whole coding, talking to a computer really started making sense for me.And fast forward two-three years later, I decided to launch my own freelance business, like, a little creative studio that gave services around web design, graphic design, motion graphics, photography. I was super young while I did that. I was now having income and an ability to help my family.And fast forward years later, when it came to what do you want to do with your life? I wanted to study architecture. I learned I can't draw. I remember computers are my friends. And I asked around friends who were working with computers at the credit union where I was interning, "What did you study?" They told me, "Computer science, computer engineering." So I decided to embark on my studies to study computer science. I went to college in Miami, and I transferred to University of California Santa Cruz to pursue a bachelor's.After six, seven months out here, I realized that school wasn't meant for me. I was more of a self-taught learner, and I wanted to just go back to the field. And I got a chance to go back to that credit union where I interned at. I got a job there as a software engineer again. And just three, four months later, I got a call from another Silicon Valley company that wanted me to come out to the Bay Area to work for them.So I came out to San Francisco in 2016 and embarked at Uber as a software engineer. And from Uber, I moved on to Gremlin as a chaos engineering SaaS company. And I joined Lightstep in May 2022 to do a little bit more of developer advocacy work with SREs and DevOps engineers on how to make their systems more reliable and build better cultures.ADRIANA: Cool. That's so awesome. It's definitely different from my career path. So I was exposed to programming when I was 10 when my dad, who is a math major and learns programming languages for fun, comes to me, and he's like, "Hey, let me show you something cool," and he taught me BASIC. So even though I was programming since I was 10, I didn't really derive any enjoyment from it because I found it really frustrating.And so when I went into university, I'm like, I never want to code again. I wanted to design spaceships because I was and still am a huge Star Trek fan. So I'm like, yes, this is what I want to do with my life; I want to be an aerospace engineer. So I applied to go to school for aerospace engineering and realized, first of all, that I didn't want to be in the aerospace engineering program at University of Toronto because I was surrounded by people who were so incredibly brilliant that I was like, oh my God, I can't handle this.So I transferred to mechanical engineering thinking, okay, well, I can still do the aerospace thing as a mechanical engineer, no problem. I even got an internship at the Canadian Space Agency one summer and at the DaimlerChrysler Aerospace another summer. I'm like, okay, I'm lined up to do the aerospace engineering thing. And then I realized, like, oh, you know what? I actually like coding. My internships at both were coding-related. So I'm like, oh, I actually like coding. But then, at that point, I'm like, um, I don't want to transfer to a computer engineering program. So let me just stick with what I have.But then I didn't want to stay in mechanical engineering, so I switched to industrial engineering because some of the courses offered were more computery. So I actually took some of the same courses that my computer engineering friends took. And I'm like, whatever, I'm going to go into software when I graduate, whatever. I'll just get this degree and be done with it. And then I ended up doing software for a living as I had decided after I decided I wanted nothing to do with computers. [laughs]But my first role was as a tester, which I personally hated. I have a great appreciation for testing because of this role. But I personally did not enjoy it because I wanted to be writing code. And I was so frustrated by the fact that I was breaking things. And I wanted to be fixing things, not breaking them and waiting around for others to fix things. I like to be in the driver's seat, so this was not [laughs] very conducive to my personality. That's how I got into software.ANA: I think it's funny you mentioned breaking things because for me, when I eventually transitioned to chaos engineering, it was that I can break things. But I also had the knowledge to fix them and the full opportunity to do it, and that's when I had the most fun. But when I had done some QA at an internship before, it was like, I can't fix anything. I don't know what's going on, like; this is really annoying.So it's funny how sometimes, when you only see one side of the puzzle, you really get aggravated, and you think that's all of tech until you talk to more people. You're like; there's a lot of other parts that come together into this complex ecosystem that we call technology.ADRIANA: Exactly. And also, if you stay tuned for a later episode, we'll actually dig into some more of that with relation to testing and where you can take your testing to the next level. So it's an incentive to keep listening to us if you're not already enamored by our wonderful stories and our wonderful voices. [laughs]ANA: There are definitely some amazing guests that we have for this season. I'm very excited to be sharing with folks. It's actually one of the favorite things about the job that Adriana and I have; we get to help engineers tell stories about how they're working in tech. They're operating complex systems, and they're trying to make their software, and their companies, and the projects that they work on a little bit better.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. And actually, that's one of the things I love so much about advocacy work is that you get to connect with so many cool people and learn about their stories but also try to share how to make things better. I feel like ever since I started my career, I was so horrified by people cutting corners or writing crappy code. I'm a huge fan of beautiful code. I'll write beautiful code, and I'll sit there and admire it [laughs] and go, oh, look at that beautiful code I wrote.So I get so aggravated when I don't see beautiful code and to be able...and I know it's not a perfect world. You're not always going to have beautiful code, but to be able to at least talk to people and promote the beauty in software and to help further the cause, if anything, so that we can have better, more resilient systems, better-written software, more beautiful code, I think that's a really cool aspect of this job.ANA: You're also fairly recent to advocacy work. But when did you really start contributing to communities and teaching people how to build better systems, write beautiful code, and such?ADRIANA: I'd say it's been often on, but I think the most I'd say consistent would be I think it was 2020 when I started my blog on Medium. And it was just me, I guess, partly ranting about things. I'd just come off of doing a role where I was running a DevOps coaching and practices team at a financial institution. And so it was a cool role because I learned so much from my team of DevOps coaches on really what proper DevOps is all about. And I really wanted to just share that knowledge with the world.And at the same time, I'd also started digging more into Kubernetes and doing some problem-solving. I'd played a lot with Argo CD, and I'd played a lot with Azure. So I wanted to really share some of my learnings because one of my biggest pet peeves in reading tech blogs, for example, is that it feels like they're half written. Like, someone solves a problem, and you're like, oh, great, this is the thing that I'm looking for.And they start describing it, and then partway through, it's like they got tired of writing. And it is; writing a technical blog post is freaking exhausting. I think my technical blog posts take way longer to write than my more thought leadership-y ones. And so I really wanted to go into like the gory, excruciating detail in the blog posts so that I could give people everything that they needed to be able to solve a problem that took me weeks and weeks to figure out. So yeah, I'd say it was through my blogging.I had done a few talks in Toronto in 2019 around some of the DevOps work that my team and I had been doing, where we had codified the creation of DevOps pipelines for different teams across the organization. So we found ourselves, like, we're trying to coach teams on DevOps best practices. And then we realized, well, you can say what you will like till the cows come home in terms of best practices, but people will always go off course if you will. And we're trying to save them from themselves.So we actually wrote software to codify best practices. So I did a couple of talks around how to codify standard pipelines but still giving teams wiggle room to make customizations that they needed. But we just wanted to give them the guardrails so that they could follow effective DevOps practices so that they could get the velocity and the safety that the DevOps promises.So it's funny because I feel like all my life, I've always wanted to be a developer advocate. And for the longest time, I didn't even realize that there was a job about this. And then, when Austin approached me about a developer advocacy role at Lightstep, I'm like, oh my God, you're speaking my language. This was the coolest thing. How about you, Ana? How did you get into developer advocacy? You're a pro. You've been doing this for a while now, right?ANA: It's weird to realize that I've been doing it for a job for...this would be year number six for me, which I still feel like a baby in DevRel space and in developer advocacy space. But it's funny; I kind of have a similar story where this is everything I've been doing for a while. And all of a sudden, I learned that it's a career. It's a job; it's not just a software engineer that cares about community.But for me, I would say I got started in 2012. 2012 was the first year where I started going on stage. I started teaching other people how to code. At that time, I was working with Google. And it was like, helping promote scholarships, helping promote summer programs that they offered. And then, I decided to do Android applications. I was learning Java. So all of a sudden, I was within the Android Google ecosystem. And I also had Google Glass and building HTML websites to play with Google Glass. So it was something that I was doing without knowing what I was doing.So when I finally got my breaking point into, hey, you now work for a develop…
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