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Introducing Geeking Out with Adriana Villela Sep 18, 2023

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If you loved On-Call Me Maybe, check out OCMM co-host Adriana Villela's new podcast, Geeking Out, which she produces alongside her daughter, Hannah. Geeking Out is the spiritual successor to On-Call Me Maybe, and it features the same topics that you've come to know and love from OCMM, along with a fabulous guest lineup, including Hazel Weakly, Tim Banks, Abby Bangser, and Jennifer Moore, just to name a few. Geeking Out launched its first episode on September 5th, and so to give you a taste of what Geeking Out is all about, you can check out the first episode on this feed. If you love what you hear, please subscribe to Geeking Out wherever you get your podcasts. Or, find Geeking Out on YouTube at geekingout_pod.

OCMM OVERTIME E03: Adriana Reacts to New Tracetest Features Jun 20, 2023

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About the guests:

Adnan Rahić

Adnan is an author, failed startup founder, and ex-Free CodeCamp leader. Adnan has pent the last 5 years building open-source developer tooling in the Observability and Big Data space. He is currently leading the Developer Relations efforts for Tracetest.io. Part time professional boxer and body builder.

Oscar Reyes

Oscar is a problem-solver, driven and motivated person. Oscar has 8 years of experience building backend cloud native systems, front end pixel-perfect applications and automated CI/CD pipelines. He is now the Lead Engineer at Tracetest.io.

Ken Hamric

Ken has 30+ years experience in developing software products, with a focus on enterprise testing solutions. He founded CrossBrowserTesting.com in 2008, which was acquired by Smartbear, a leader in the software testing category, in 2016. Ken stayed four years at Smartbear as VP of the web and mobile testing platforms. His most recent startup, Tracetest.io, is leading the way in utilizing observability data to enable deep integration testing for cloud native applications.

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OCMM OVERTIME E02: Talkin' About Talks Jun 13, 2023

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About the guest:

Hannah:

Hannah is a high school student living in Toronto, Canada. She’s also the daughter of OCMM co-host Adriana Villela. She loves showing off her artistic side, whether it’s through baking, sewing, painting, or knitting. You can see her creations on Instagram. Hannah has been bouldering since she was 3, and still enjoys going to the bouldering gym with her parents. Although both of her parents work in tech, Hannah would rather not spend her time sitting at a desk and staring at a computer all day. That’s why she’s planning on becoming a dentist when she grows up.

Miss Unicorn:

Miss Unicorn is Hannah’s trusty Squishmallow friend. She currently lives in Adriana’s home office in Toronto, alongside fellow Squishmallow buddies Barry the beaver, and Gerry the giraffe.

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OCMM OVERTIME E01: I Bake, Therefore I Code? Jun 06, 2023

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About the guest:

Hannah:

Miss Unicorn:

Miss Unicorn is Hannah’s trusty Squishmallow friend. She currently lives in Adriana’s home office in Toronto, alongside fellow Squishmallow buddies Barry the beaver, and Gerry the giraffe.

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To ChatGPT and Beyond! with Adrian Cockcroft May 09, 2023

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About the guest:Adrian Cockcroft is a technologist and strategist with broad experience from the bits to the boardroom, in both enterprise and consumer-oriented businesses, from startups to some of the largest companies in the world. He is equally at home with hardware and software, development, and operations. He’s best known as the cloud architect for Netflix during their trailblazing migration to AWS and was a very early practitioner and advocate of DevOps, microservices, and chaos engineering, helping bring these concepts to the wider audience they have today.Find our guest on:MastodonMediumGitHubFind 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 InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramAna’s BlueskyShow Links:NubankOrionXAssembly languageChatGPTBASICLunar LanderSun MicrosystemsALGOLPascalRS-PLUSAWKGoHPC ClusterAmazon Web ServicesNetflixReed Hastings (Netflix co-founder)Storage Area NetworksOracleHadoopCassandraAdrian @ QCon London ‘23Chaos EngineeringAdrian + Ana @ AWS re:Invent 2018: Breaking Containers: Chaos Engineering for Modern Applications on AWS CatchpointMonitorama speaker scheduleHarnessLinux FoundationCloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)Green Software FoundationCNCF’s KeplerEuropean Union’s Climate-Change Tax PlanLiz RiceKubeCon EU ‘23 - AmsterdamAdrian on Platform EngineeringSpinnakerThe Value Flywheel Effect by David AndersonWardley MappingAWS CDK PatternsJeremly DalyAmptAWS’s GameDayPre-Accident PodcastSidney DekkerChernobylGluecon 2023Lean Agile ScotlandAdditional Links:Laguna Seca RacetrackAlvardo Street BreweryDuckzilla from Duck Foot BrewingNetflix’s Journey to the CloudTranscript:ANA: Hey, y'all. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, Observability Principles, on-call, and everything in between. I'm your host, Ana Margarita Medina, and with my awesome co-host... ADRIANA: Adriana Villela.ANA: Today, we're talking to Adrian Cockcroft, who's an Advisor in Tech. And we get to hear about all his experiences throughout these years. We're so happy to have you join us.ADRIAN: Thanks. Great to be here, and good to see you again.ANA: Definitely. Where are you calling from today?ADRIAN: So I live in California. A few years ago, I used to live in Los Gatos near Netflix and eBay, where I worked for many years. And then a few years ago, during COVID, we sort of did the, hey, we're going to retire and get out of the Bay Area thing and bought a house down about halfway between Monterey and Salinas. Anyone that knows racetracks, I can see Seca racetrack out of my window, and I can hear it when the cars are running. So we're right by a racetrack, which is part of my fun and games.ANA: Nice. My favorite breakfast burritos are in Salinas, and I'm a huge fan of Alvarado beer out there too.ADRIAN: Yeah, it's nice to be out of the Bay Area sort of craziness. I mean, there's still a bit of traffic here, and there aren't so many roads, but it's a much more relaxed place. And we've got a lovely place down here, and the house prices were a tiny fraction of what it would cost to have a nice place in Los Gatos. So that was the main thing.ANA: That is awesome. And for the second question, it's our traditional On-Call Me Maybe Podcast question, what is your drink of choice for today?ADRIAN: I'm actually drinking some water because it's about noon. But if it was a bit later in the day, I'd be drinking a gluten-free beer. There's a brewery that I really like called Duck Foot, duckfootbeer.com. They make a beer called Duckzilla. They make a stout. They make all kinds of interesting beers. And Stout Mask Replica is the name of one of their styles, which has a picture of Captain Beefheart on it. ANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: And there's the "Trout Mask Replica," which is an album that some people might remember from the late '60s or something. Anyway, it's hard to find gluten-free beer. This is a brewery founded by somebody who has celiac. So all of their beers they don't make a big fuss about it, but all their beers have the gluten taken out. So the proper beer is made the normal way. There's an enzyme you put in that takes the gluten out. They do a full range of interesting beers. But they're in San Diego. They'll ship to California. If you're outside California, it's pretty much impossible to get. ADRIANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: So every now and again, I go on their website, click buttons, and then a big box of beer turns up full of stuff for me that I can actually drink. Unfortunately, I like beer, but I got gluten intolerant a few years ago and now have to manage what I eat.ANA: It is really nice that we're getting more inclusion in the beer and alcohol space that now there's less sugar or gluten taken out or just the way that they're being promoted thinking about, hey, everyone has different dietary restrictions.ADRIAN: Yeah. And if you get a stomach ache every time you have pizza or drink beer, it's probably because you've got some gluten intolerance, and when you eventually just stop, you discover all the stomach aches went away and carry on with your life. ANA: Just experiment. [laughs]ADRIANA: Cool. Well, we should probably get into some of our more techy questions. So a question that we love to ask all of our guests is, how did you get into tech?ADRIAN: I'm quite old, so this was a long time ago. [laughs] My dad was in technology, basically. He was testing anti-aircraft missiles back in the 1960s when I was born. I was christened on a missile test-firing ship whose motto was aim high. [laughter] So I thought that was...if you're going to have a motto, that's fine. And then, in the 1960s, he went to college and was programming a little bit. He did a mature degree in statistics when he was in his 20s and then got a job at a university as a statistics lecturer. So, basically, I grew up with my dad doing computing and statistics through to the time I was growing up. And somewhere along the way, the school had a computer, and my dad used to sort of put things in front of me. He didn't really teach me stuff. He just left things laying around that I looked at. [laughter] Computer Weekly magazine was a weekly newspaper that was always around the house. And so it was always things like that. But I taught myself to code at high school in 1972. We had a teletype connected to a deck system 10, and it had BASIC on it. And I played Lunar Lander and tried to figure out how to write things in BASIC and a few other programming languages. And then, when I went to college, I did physics, but I ended up doing applied physics and electronics, which there was a bunch of designing computers that could control physics experiments. It was kind of what they were trying to teach us. So I did Assembly Language and some C programming and basically embedded stuff. And then, the first job I got was at a place called Cambridge Consultants in Cambridge, UK. I was basically doing embedded real-time development full-time. That was my day job. I did that for about six, seven years, just writing code every day.Most of the code ended up burning it into a PROM and sticking it in a machine, leaning on the stop button while you press the start button in case the code went wrong, and all the motors went backwards or something. So we had fun with that. And then we were using Sun machines as development machines. During that time, I ended up basically as a one-day-a-week sysadmin because there was a full-time admin looking after all of the faxes and things. And there was one day a week I basically looked after all the Unix machines as a part-time job. So this is the early days of DevOps since I was deving four days a week and opsing one day a week. It mostly consisted of making sure the backup tapes got changed for a few Sun machines. And then, I joined Sun in 1988. They opened an office across the street, and eventually, I went...I wanted to know what they were going to do next. And basically, I talked my way into what you'd now call a solutions architect job though we called them systems engineers then. And I did that for about six years in the UK. And then I ended up moving to the U.S. to be in sort of the central group that supported that function globally, so writing white papers and trying to get all the information in the field people needed to learn about the new machines as they came out. And various things happened after that, but that's kind of how I got into tech, basically, by my dad bringing home random computers and calculators and things as I was growing up.ADRIANA: That is so cool. You mentioned learning BASIC. BASIC was my first language. I have very fond memories of BASIC. How do you find the evolution in programming languages from the early days of writing BASIC code to the stuff that's out there now? As you reflect on that evolution over the years, what's your thought?ADRIAN: I mean, some languages I find easy, and others I find hard to figure out. BASIC was just like; I had no idea what I was doing, absolutely no clue.ADRIANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: You could type things into this computer. And it was a roll of paper going up the screen. And you just, I don't know, you could make this thing do stuff by typing stuff in. So that was pretty...I had no theoretical background of what was happening at all. At some point, I decided to learn ALGOL, which is a more structured language. And that was where I kind of got into structured programming a bit more. And then there's like Pascal kind of things, those sorts of languages. And then the first job I had I was mostly programming in C. At some point, they gave me a terrible job with a really horrible language and development environment. And to sort of keep myself sane, I built myself a home computer and ported a C compiler to it. So I ended up rewriting the code generator for a C compiler as sort of a home project. ADRIANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: It was a very small, think of a small C. But what the effect of that was is I ended up a much better C programmer because I now had a code generator in my head. I could look at the code, and I'd look at the C code, and I actually knew what it was going to do to the machine and much more. So actually, having spent a bit of time working on the guts of a language, it's very simple, but it gives you a much deeper understanding. I stopped being a professional programmer just as C++ came along, so I never learned C++. And then Java I used a bit, but I was never really that happy with Java. It's just too much stuff there. It's just too complicated and wordy. And then, let's see; I learned S-PLUS, which is now R. So most of this analysis code I do is in R. And because I know R, I never tried to learn Python because if I need to do something, I do it in R. Similarly, I never learned Perl because I could always do it in Awk or something like that. I learned Awk before Perl came along. And there are all these sorts of things where I know how to do with things, so I don't need to learn another thing or another way of doing it. When I was working for a venture capital firm in about 2014, everything started being written in Go, and it was all open source. So a startup would come in, and I'd start rummaging around in their repo on GitHub and trying to read the Go code, and I went, okay, I need to learn Go. ANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: So I learned Go, and I built some pretty complicated things in it. I learned the language fairly well. For a few years, I was sort of just experimenting and playing around in it. So that's the last time I really learned a language. And I liked Go quite a lot. I like the fact that it's just go build, and it's done. And it's a very lightweight environment to get into. And I liked the fact that they haven't changed the language much. So I probably still know Go [laughter], although I haven't written code with it for quite a few years. [laughs] Most of the other languages have changed so much you actually don't know how to use them anymore.ADRIANA: That's a really good point.ADRIAN: So you sort of have...I think languages come along, and then they wear out. They keep adding features to them until nobody new can really learn them anymore. ANA: Yeah, it's true.ADRIAN: They're just too top-heavy. And then you need a new language that's simple. That happens with a lot of technology. You get this sort of technology cycle where the big complicated thing is like the innovator's dilemma. It gets too big and complicated. And you get the new thing coming in underneath it, and it's just like a simple version of whatever it does, like all things.ANA: Especially with the adaptation of people being like, oh, this doesn't solve the needs I have in my organization. Or when we look at open-source work specifically, it's like, well, that company is not using the language anymore. So why are they going to continue contributing to it? And they moved on to something else.ADRIAN: I had the same thing with the cloud. When I was at Netflix, we were using EC2-Classic. That's like one big flat network. You just push a button, and a machine appears. There's none of this complex stuff with networking and all this really complicated stuff. So actually, I don't know how to use the cloud now. [laughter] But I did get a ChatGPT account recently. It generates code which looks plausible for stuff that might work in the cloud. But then I tried visiting some URLs that it brought up, and those didn't exist. So it invented some GitHub repos. [laughter] It sounded like it'd be really good if this thing existed. ANA: Interesting.ADRIANA: Damn.ADRIAN: But I think if you're in a place that's very well documented and understood, and you're trying to understand it, it's probably got enough background information to actually give you good answers. But if you get off into the weeds to do something that's a bit marginal, it'll start making things up that are unplausible. So still playing around with it. But I figure now that the AI has learned all the languages, I can figure it out instead of using Stack Overflow. ANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: The other thing I find is if I'm trying to build something complicated, eventually, I end up deep in the guts of some JavaScript, and I hate JavaScript.ADRIANA: [laughs]ADRIAN: It's like everything I do ends up stuck in some stupid JavaScript thing that I end up trying to debug something that doesn't work in JavaScript, and I wasn't trying to use JavaScript in the first place.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: It's funny because I am not a fan of JavaScript, either. And I'm sure...I'm sorry, listeners who love JavaScript. I just could never get the idea behind JavaScript. So I can completely relate. [laughs]ADRIAN: Yeah, it's all 1 + 1 equals 11.[laughter]ANA: As much as I liked writing it growing up, now it's definitely like, I'm so far away from it that I'm like, you know what? I'm okay without it. And then all of a sudden, I'm working on a project, and they're like, can you write TypeScript? And it's like, wait, why? [laughs] Why are we still here?ADRIAN: Yeah, TypeScript is probably a bit better. But there's a limit to how much time I...the other end of this thing was you said how to get into tech, but how to get out of tech; I'm not sure quite how I've got out. But last summer, I retired from my sort of day job. I was a…

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Reliability is a Team Sport with Thilina Ratnayake of Lightstep May 02, 2023

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About the guest:Thilina (known as "T") is a Site Reliability Engineer at Lightstep. T has had a varied journey in tech spanning from support, project management, and systems engineering, which has eventually led him to focus on the "people" side of Reliability Engineering. He is extremely passionate about communications and how that plays a huge role in improving the performance of teams and increasing the reliability of their systems.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInGitHubInstagramBlogFind 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 InstagramAdriana’s BlueskyAna’s TwitterAna's MastodonAna’s LinkedInAna's InstagramAna’s BlueskyShow Links:LightstepBrittish Colombia - WatershedsChatime BobaCiscoPowerPointLeading SRE with EmpathyChaos Engineering PrinciplesSLOs (Service Level Objectives)SLA (Service Level Agreement)P1 Outage (Production Issue Gradations)Transcript:ADRIANA: 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, Adriana Villela. And with me, I've got my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we are talking to Thilina Ratnayake, who works with us at Lightstep working as an SRE. Welcome.THILINA: Howdy, howdy ho. Hello.ADRIANA: So nice to have you. Now, first things first, where are you calling in from?THILINA: I'm calling from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.ADRIANA: Whoo. Awesome. We've got two Canadians in the house today. You are outnumbered, Ana. [laughs]ANA: Once again, I'm outnumbered. I think we're having too many Canadian episodes. I'm going to speak to some On-Call Me Maybe managers, which is us. So we're going to have to start talking.ADRIANA: [laughs] ANA: I need more representation from just the United States of America, specifically California. [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh yeah, that's true. Well, we did just record today with someone from California, so... [laughs]ANA: Yes. True. True, true. Here and there, I'm outnumbered. [laughs] ADRIANA: Yeah, here and there, you're outnumbered, either because they're from Canada or they're Brazilian. [laughs] ANA: True.ADRIANA: So it wouldn't be proper On-Call Me Maybe tradition if we didn't ask you what you're drinking today. THILINA: Sweet, yeah. I am drinking some pristine mountain water from one of three watersheds that apparently feed my city from the mountains of British Columbia. Yeah, this is grade A water that's been filtered through a Brita filter. ADRIANA: [laughs]THILINA: So you know what? I'm just drinking really nice mountain water. [laughter]ADRIANA: This is the best selling of water that I've ever heard. I'm like, I want some of that. [laughs]THILINA: Cool.ADRIANA: I've got Lake Ontario water, yes. [laughs]ANA: I thought we were going to get a Wikipedia summary of coordinates of where you can find these watersheds. I thought that's where this was going. [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh my God. Yes. For real.THILINA: I had it up on my screen. And I was like, oh, one of three watersheds. Oh, there are three. I don't know which one it's from. Well, [crosstalk 02:19]ADRIANA: Well, we're going to have to include this in the show notes now because our listeners are definitely going to be curious about this. [laughs]THILINA: And what are you all drinking?ANA: For me, today it's actually green juice, which is kale, pineapple, apple. And I think I put ginger and turmeric. So I'm trying to go back into some more veggies and fruits in my diet.ADRIANA: That's awesome. THILINA: Very nice.ADRIANA: Yes, I've got a glass of Lake Ontario prime H20. [laughter] THILINA: Ooh, wow.ADRIANA: No bubble tea, sadly. But as we were talking before we were recorded, I was so happy that in Amsterdam for KubeCon, I found a Chatime, [laughs] which, for those who are not in the know, it's a bubble tea chain. It's an international bubble tea chain. And we happen to have one in Canada, well, more than one in Canada. We've got a few in Canada. So I was pretty excited. And I told the Chatime guy I'm like, "I have these in my country." [laughs] He probably looked at me like I was crazy. He's like, get away, woman. [laughs] THILINA: So, a very important question, what was your order when you found that Chatime? ADRIANA: Shoot. I think I got a lychee green tea. THILINA: Ooh.ANA: Nice. ADRIANA: Yes, yes.ANA: That sounds fancy and yummy. I love anything lychee.ADRIANA: I know, right? I'm a fan of lychee. Now, I can't tell if it's lychee or leechee because people correct me either way.ANA: I was about to say I call it leechee. I grew up calling it leechee. ADRIANA: I call it lychee. I've got some Chinese friends who call it lychee. And then I've got other Chinese friends who call it leechee. One is always correcting the other. I'm like, which one is it? [laugher] So you never know.ANA: Hit us up on social media if you know how to pronounce this. [laughter] ADRIANA: There's our sidebar. I guess we should get into our regular business. [laughs] So, Thilina, how did you get into tech? THILINA: Well, it's a very interesting story that starts off with a news clipping on the back of my grade 10 high school classroom [laughs] because, in that class, that room was used for multiple classes, one of them being business 11 or planning 10. So I was in my Planning 10 class, which is a high school class that talks about how to do useful things like do your taxes, or get a utility bill paid, or decide your future in the world. And one of the assignments was, what do you want to do after you graduate? Like, what's your plan? Come up with three plans. And that was the assignment. And me being a classic grade 10 high schooler, I had just left it off till the block before it was due. [laughter] And it was like lunch, and then the next class would have been the one where I had to present. I'm like, oh, I got to think of something.ADRIANA: [laughs] THILINA: And then, looking to the side on this wall, was a newspaper clipping about Cisco, the telecommunications giant. And this clipping was someone in the business class had talked about how the future looks great for teleconferencing. In the future, we might have AI and holograms, so this is a good place to be. And I was like, well, I like computers. It's kind of cool. ADRIANA: [laughs] THILINA: And then, in the time between seeing the newspaper clipping and when it was due, I did a little research on how do I work at a tech company like Cisco? And it showed me a college program that I could do. It was like a diploma. So that was my plan A. And my plan B would be if I did my diploma and maybe a degree afterwards. I don't remember what plan C was. But I was like, cool, let's make a PowerPoint. Let's present it. ADRIANA: [laughs] THILINA: And that was it. So in a couple...a year happens, and I was like, what do I do after high school? And I was like, well, I've got this plan that I made last year. Why don't I just stick with it? And then I did. I did all of it to the letter.ADRIANA: That's awesome.ANA: [laughs] THILINA: I did the diploma, and I did the degree. My first job was learning at Cisco while doing support there. So, yeah, unintentionally, a newspaper clipping set the tone of the next 10-15 years of my life. So yeah, the answer to your question is I got started with a newspaper clipping about Cisco.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: That is awesome. I love it.ANA: I love when it's always the most random experience that one has growing up that's like, this was the moment that the light bulb went off, and I was like, oh, I can actually get paid for various years to do this. [laughs] ADRIANA: Yes, Defining Moment. Also, that sounds like a really interesting class. I don't think I ever took any classes on paying utility bills and stuff like that. That sounds awesome. [laughs] ANA: Filing taxes.ADRIANA: Filing taxes.ANA: The fact that a school teaches you. Like... [laughs] ADRIANA: I know. No one taught me that. My first tax filing I did manually, pencil and paper. [laughs] Why? THILINA: Nice. ADRIANA: [laughs] But that's a really cool start. And I love how the most subtle things, I don't know, they seem almost like passing at the time, and then they come back. It's like it was meant to be. So kudos for making that happen. That's amazing.ANA: And, I mean, I think it's great to also start asking you students and kids early on what they want to do for their career. I know for me, I figured it out in middle school, which I am extremely fortunate of that. But getting folks early in high school to be like, all right, you have electives. Start thinking about what you want to do three, four years from now. What makes you happy? What do you hate? Can you intern somewhere? Can you do a side project? Can you shadow someone? THILINA: For sure. I think it's worth mentioning that part of that story involves me making a PowerPoint presentation. And the reason I bring this up is a lot of people talk about, like, oh yeah, I knew I always wanted to get into tech because when I was little, my parents got me this computer, and I started building programs. And that wasn't my story. For me, it was that my parents got me a Windows 95. And they didn't give me any games, but they got the PowerPoint suite. [laughter] So all day, I would just be making presentations on things. And this is important because I got into tech, and my first job in tech was doing support, which is a lot of talking to customers. There was also presenting information. And a lot of people were like, "I just want to write code." I was like, "But I love talking about what we do and presenting it." PowerPoint, or the ability to present information, has served me so much more in life than being able to program. So all I'm trying to say is if you're curious about tech, it's not all about coding. There's a whole bunch of presenting and packaging information too, which I hope kids are taking away from it.ADRIANA: Yeah, there's something to be said about being able to convey the information to people, like, yes, I know this, but can I tell somebody else about this? That's an art form. THILINA: Yep.ANA: One of the first bosses that I had was, like, we hire based on being a good person and a good communicator because we can teach anyone how to code. And it kind of stuck with me because I'm like, yeah, almost anyone can learn how to code as in if you put your head to it, and you do the work, and you're able to pick up on what's going on. But if you're not able to know how to be a kind person, how to communicate, how to work well with others, you're not going to be successful in any career you take part in, specifically technology or technology as we know it right now that's completely remote.ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree. I think there's this long-standing misconception that you don't need to be able to communicate to be in tech. And, I mean, I've been in situations where I've been surrounded by brilliant developers who cannot express themselves to me, and so, well, what's the point? Your brilliance is lost because you can't share your brilliance with others.THILINA: Yeah, that's really true. Communication is key. ADRIANA: All right, yeah. THILINA: That will be my tattoo if I get one.ADRIANA: [laughs]ANA: That would actually be a good one. I say that in personal and professional settings all the time. I'm like, communication is key; that's just it. Over-communicate whenever you can.THILINA: Yes, I really believe in over-communication. Over-communicating is key, like, when in doubt, over-communicate. That's the biggest takeaway I've had from working remote during COVID, not for nothing. That's just a thing that sticks in my head a lot. I have a lot of thoughts on how teams work well remotely, and that's a huge tenet of it. ADRIANA: Oh, tell us more. THILINA: One of the best teams I ever worked on was a hybrid remote team. And what I mean by that is we had a couple of members that were in office and a couple of members that were in the state, so like a different country, different geographical area. But the team never felt separate. I never felt like talking to person B was like, oh, they're not here. And the reason for that is because we communicated a lot to the point that our chat was never silent between 8:00 and 5:00 because there's always things going on. And it wasn't just like work-related things. It was like, I'm getting some coffee or like...it doesn't have to be context specific. But communicating frequently when you're remote and conveying tone goes into helping the other things that you do. And I feel like that goes a long way when you're working remotely, especially if you start new and someone's trying to get a vibe check of everyone. If you are not next to someone, you can't shoulder-tap them. Hearing what people talk about frequently goes a long way for building that trust. So I highly believe in over-communicating because you'll actually find the right norm easily versus not communicating enough. The onus is on other people to be like, okay, I guess I'll talk. What I'm saying is it's better to over-communicate.ADRIANA: Yeah, I agree with you. It's basically having a chatty Slack channel. Having a place where you're encouraging your team to shoot the shit, even if it's not necessarily work, right?THILINA: Yes.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: You're building up that camaraderie. Prior to coming to Lightstep, I managed two teams. I had 13 people working for me. And I was terrified because I'm like, oh shit, I've never managed a team remotely. So I made a huge effort to, like, okay, even though I have two separate teams, like, we had a Slack for each team, but we had a joint team Slack. And always posted stuff, whether it's like team announcements or funny things, because I wanted people to get used to communicating with each other. And we'd have like a bi-weekly sync-up meeting where, you know, so that it's not an us versus them sort of scenario. So I completely agree the over-communication is super key in a remote setting.ANA: And I think you nailed it with the hybrid aspect. I mean, I think this came to fruition a lot during COVID where it was like, folks were still trying to figure out what was going to happen. It was like different countries and states were shutting down at different speeds. But it's like, how do you make sure that everyone, no matter what work persona you have, actually carries a similar experience at your organization where it's like, we know how to collaborate really fast; we know how to move at similar speeds; we know how to get projects done? Or how do we make sure that all the tools that we have have collaborator access, that we're allowed to just kind of sync up quickly and be always on the same page?THILINA: Right. 100%?ANA: You mentioned that you got your start in support, but you're now working in SRE. I kind of wanted to ask you how was that transition for you? Why did you do it? How's it going?THILINA: Okay, so I have to start the story about what happened immediately after graduating, which is that immediately after graduating, a lot of my friends were going into software engineering roles. And for me, I was in this weird place…

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Observability, Databases, and Management…OH MY! with Marylia Gutierrez of Cockroach Labs Apr 25, 2023

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About the guest:Marylia is a Toronto-based Engineering Manager and Developer at Cockroach Labs, working on Cluster Observability. Before that, Marylia was a full-stack developer at IBM, working on internal Observability tools for DB2 products.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInGitHubFind 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:Cockroach LabsChocolate VelvetiserUX - User ExperienceIBMCockroach DB Console to Observe and Troubleshoot SQLKubeHuddleToronto’s BeaverTail HistoryFlex FridaysAdditional Links:Charity Major’s The Engineer/Manager PendulumWill Larson’s Staff Engineering Blog & BookOpenTelemetry Collector alongside CockroachDBBrazilian Can Opener (Abridor de Latas)Transcript:ADRIANA: 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, Adriana Villela. And with me, I've got my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we are speaking with Marylia Gutierrez, who is an Engineering Manager at CockroachDB. Welcome, Marylia. MARYLIA: Hello. ANA: Welcome.MARYLIA: Thank you. ADRIANA: First things first, where are you calling from today?MARYLIA: So I'm calling from Toronto, Canada. I'm actually from Brazil, São Paulo, but I've been living in Canada for the past almost nine years now.ADRIANA: Awesome. Awesome. I'm also in Toronto, Canada. And Ana, you are recently back from SREcon, right?ANA: Yeah, I actually just got back from Santa Clara over to the Marin, California area. And [laughs] it's really nice and sunny today. But now I'm actually outnumbered by Toronto folks, so this is pretty neat. [laughter]ADRIANA: Toronto folks and Brazilian folks. [laughter] MARYLIA: Yes. ANA: True, true, true. [laughter] ADRIANA: This is an all-Latina cruise, so yes! [laughter]ANA: Latinas in tech, we're here, and we're proud. [laughter]MARYLIA: Yes.ADRIANA: Let's start off our questions round with what are you drinking today, Marylia? MARYLIA: So I have hot chocolate with me. Hot chocolate is always my go-to drink. [laughs]ADRIANA: Very nice. And you were saying that you are quite the hot chocolate aficionado, right? [laughs]MARYLIA: Yeah. So usually, people have at home their set up for coffee with a grinder and everything. For me, it is the hot chocolate. So I have a velvetiser that actually can melt the chocolate, mix it with the milk, and I put the right temperature. And even the glass that I'm using has the shape to remind of cocoa, like the stripes of it. [laughs] So yeah, it's all chocolate themed. [laughs]ADRIANA: That is awesome.ANA: That's so cool. Is there anything special about the flavor profile for today's hot chocolate drink?MARYLIA: No, not really. Actually, I was having one that I just went to, like, a random store, and I bought it, and it was delicious. And it ended this week. But now I need to go back and actually pay attention to the name and [laughs] where did I buy it. [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh, that's the worst. You find something awesome, and you can't remember what it is.MARYLIA: Yeah. [laughter] ADRIANA: What are you drinking, Ana?ANA: I am drinking a strawberry acai refresher with a little bit of sparkling water. I had the Starbucks drink, and I was like, I need it to be fizzy, so I added a passion fruit LaCroix. And it's actually really refreshing because it's actually really hot out here today in my office, so I'm enjoying it. What about you, Adriana?ADRIANA: I'm drinking some green tea. I just brewed myself a cup just before the podcast today so that I'd have something more interesting to drink. Pretty soon, we'll be into bubble tea season for podcast recording, so I'm excited to bring that. [laughter] ANA: I have to get on that, but I'm very excited to learn. [laughs] ADRIANA: Cool. Well, let's get started with the serious questions, although we never take ourselves super seriously here anyway. [laughter] So, Marylia, how did you get started in technology? Why don't you share that story with us?MARYLIA: Growing up, I actually never really knew what I wanted to do. And then, at some point, I got the computer at home, and I thought, oh, this looks cool. But all the applications, everything was gray and square, and stuff, so I was like, why everything has to be this way? Can things be easier to use? So I was always getting frustrated with things. So that caught my attention, and I was like, I want to work on something but make it useful for the user. So I wanted it to be easy to use. So that started to bring me a little to that side. And then, I went to university, and I graduated in computer engineering. I also did my master's. So for the master's, I focused a little more on the UX side, so that was an area that I was very interested in from the beginning. And then just going over internships, jobs [laughs], and things just kept evolving on that.ADRIANA: That was super cool. When we were chatting earlier, right now your current role you're an engineering manager at CockroachDB. It sounds like early in your career UI UX was kind of your thing. But now the type of work that you're doing is very different from that. So what can you say about that?MARYLIA: My first full-time job was a mobile developer [laughs] so I even continued on the UX side that I was working on. And then, after that, I actually went to IBM. And on that one, I started looking a little more on the observability side. So I was working on an internal tool. And again, we had a bunch of data collecting about usages, things that people were doing. But again, it was hard for people to understand what all those metrics means, what all that information meant. So I started creating visualizations on top of that, like dashboards and tools and things that make it easy. Like, I'm about to call a customer now. I need to know everything we know about that customer. So you could filter on just the customer name, and it will have all the information about the cloud storage that they have, how much they're paying, how many tickets they had, and how much time their cloud servers were taking to be created, and all of that. So I started to really enjoy that part. And so I was there for seven years at IBM. And then two years ago, I was looking for a change, and then this is why I moved to Cockroach Labs. And then I wanted to continue a little on that area. But I think the important part for me was to continue being a full-stack because I always liked being a full-stack. And when I was choosing even the team, I say, okay, I want one that I can continue being a full-stack. And they didn't have a team for SQL observability at the time, which is the team that I manage. So the team was being created. So I saw that opportunity for me to continue working on the two sides on an area that I was interested in. And then I can continue going back to my initial desire of, okay, now you're using a database. You have a problem. How do you want to fix it? Again, I want to make it easier for the user to know what is the problem with the database. I want to make an easy way for them to fix the problems by themselves, or we can already fix for them. So in the background, I still continue with the [laughs]. I want to improve things for the user. So when I joined there, I joined as a developer. But very early on, I was helping with a lot of other things, and I just actually became the manager for the team. And actually, just this week, we are migrating two of the observability teams, the SQL observability and [inaudible 7:25] observability, creating just one for cluster observability. Then I actually I'm the manager now.ANA: That's super exciting. And I think a lot of folks don't realize that when they start in the industry, whether it's front end or back end, you could eventually bring in all your skill sets together, like you said, bringing in that front-end UX mindset to observability. Like, yes, we all care about the information out there and the context this provides. But how is it that we can make sure that the consumer and the user is able to take that and build proper mental models or even just have the right information at the right time?MARYLIA: Yeah, exactly, because I can give you here all this 20,000 files of logs. [laughter] You're like, okay, what does that mean? [laughter] So I'm there to, like, put in, okay, this is in your face. This is the thing. Fix this. This is what you should care about.ANA: I think it's that, like, make sure you highlight the information that you should be caring about and defining what that is. MARYLIA: Yes, yeah, exactly.ADRIANA: Yeah. It's kind of funny how we're so used to working with logs. I was part of a webinar a few weeks ago, and one of the questions that was asked was like, what was your first observability thing, observability signal that you were introduced to? And most people basically, their signal was logs because, as software engineers, that is the thing that we use to try to make sense out of our systems. And it's one of those love-hate relationships where it's like, yes, you give me the information I need, but, oh my god, [laughter] this was like finding a needle in a haystack. And I love that observability kind of takes it to that next level where now it's like a trace-first approach where logs still play an important part. And now you get a little more context into what's actually happening with relation to the big picture, which I absolutely love.MARYLIA: Yeah. Even giving the example on CockroachDB, so we collect a lot of metrics. The user they have access. They can go and look by themselves. But my team we're also responsible for the console. So we are creating pages on top of that information. So we have one page that is like SQL activity. You can again see everything there that you want to dig into and decide.And then we have a page that is insights that will tell you, oh, these are the things that you should be paying attention. These have a high contention. This is having this problem or that problem. Then they can focus on the big ones first, like, okay, these are my main issues; fix them. And then they can continue looking at whatever they need.ADRIANA: Are you finding that your users are getting a lot of value out of that kind of thing now? Being in a position where you got to see this thing built from scratch, are you seeing your users going [gasps]? [laughter]MARYLIA: Yeah. So as soon as we created this, I had somebody using it send us a message, "Usually, it takes me ten days to do the thing that now I was able to do in 1 hour," because one of the features that we have is index recommendation. And then they were like, "Oh, I had to actually find what statement was in a bad shape, which one I should be creating an index for, but now it shows right away. This is the one you should be creating." At the same time, we show this index you created all of those, and you never actually use it. You should be dropping those. And it is right there on the console and very easy to find. So they're like, "Oh yes, please." [laughter]ANA: Getting a chance to win a customer or a user like that of I just made your very complex job just a little bit easier, and I'm helping you find that context a lot faster is very satisfying. That was actually going to be my question, like, how is it that your team goes about getting that user feedback from the users on the observability side of stuff? MARYLIA: Yeah, because we also have a PM on the team that also goes to the customers just to see how they are liking it, getting any feedback. So we also get the context from that side. But I think even somebody was asking on Twitter or something, and then I explained how the insights part works with the index. And they're like, "Oh, you are making me lose my job as a DBA. This is doing my job." I was like, "No, I'm just making your job easier because now [laughs] you don't have to spend the time." [laughs]ADRIANA: Like, I spent the first chunk of my career heavy into using Oracle. So performance tuning Oracle, I mean, like any database, really is a heinous, heinous, heinous exercise because you're trying to tune SQL queries and database tables, and the database itself and not knowing where to start is kind of a nightmare. And I think after a while, you develop a certain intuition around it. But isn't it nice now that we actually have something [laughter] here to guide around these things?ANA: It's like, database is already hard. And if we just make it easier to know the status of them, to know how they're doing, like, we're starting to solve that problem of just bringing in, like, lowering that complexity, I guess. But still, understanding that that's an abstraction layer and the system is still very complex. [laughter]MARYLIA: I was going to say that when you talk about databases, people are like, "Ah, no, I don't want to have to deal with the database." ADRIANA: [laughs]MARYLIA: So, ideally, you create your application. You have your database there and you never have to think about it. So that is the ideal scenario. [laughs] So if you have to interact with this, let's make them as smooth as possible that you can use.ANA: Most definitely. You're currently an engineering manager, but you worked as an individual contributor for a bit. How is it that you made the transition, and how do you feel about it? [laughs] MARYLIA: It is funny because I always said, "No, I'm never going to be a manager." [laughter] A lot of ICs are like, "No, not for me. I don't want it; go away." [laughter] So I was an IC for almost ten years. And then when I joined Cockroach Labs, I was thinking like, okay, should I be or not? When my manager talked to me about it, he was like, "Oh, you are doing a lot of things that a manager does. Do you have an interest in it?" So he was like, "Spend some time talking with other managers." So I talked with a lot of other managers at the company, a few that had already left. And I was like, you know what? I think I want to try. And the good thing is that Cockroach Labs also has some trainings specific for people that are just becoming a manager. So I knew that I was going to have the support that I needed. It was not something that they would spring up like, you know, everything. Go do it. So I will have people backing me up during this development phase. And the manager said, "Worst case is in one year, if you decide you hate it, go back to being an IC if that happens." [laughs] I ended up really liking it because, as a manager, I really like being a full-stack because I like to work a little on the back end and then switch to the front end. I like switching a lot. And I was like, okay, now I have a third thing that I can switch with. [laughter] So during the week, I have a rotation of each of the three [laughs] areas. And it's been really nice also helping the team, seeing other people grow. And the other topic was I don't see a lot of women being a manager, and that was also a big point for me. Then I was like, okay, if we have more... [laughter] ANA: Yes. MARYLIA: Even for example, I was doing some events and we could talk with people that want to become interns and stuff like that. And then I went to one, and I was supposed to stay there. I think we…

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I Heart 💗 Observability with Iris Dyrmishi of FARFETCH Apr 18, 2023

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About the guest:Iris Dyrmishi is a Tech Platform Engineer at FARFETCH. She is passionate about building systems that leverage Observability to ensure their performance, scalability and reliability. Recently, she has been working with OpenTelemetry and exploring how her organization can use it to improve our observability platform. Find our guest on:InstagramLinkedInFind 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:FARFETCHAWSOpenTelemetryOpenTelemetry Helm ChartsJaeger TracingPrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetry CollectorTail-Based SamplingDistributed TracingThe Evolution of Game DaysTranscript:ADRIANA: 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, Adriana Villela, and with me, my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we have Iris Dyrmishi, who is an Infrastructure Engineer at FARFETCH. Welcome, Iris. IRIS: Thank you. ADRIANA: So first things first, we're switching things up a little bit today. We'd like to know where you're calling in from.IRIS: I'm calling in from Porto, Portugal. [laughs]ADRIANA: Awesome.IRIS: I think that's pretty far away from where you're at, Adriana. Where are you calling in from?ADRIANA: I'm in Toronto, Canada. And Ana?ANA: I'm here in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.ADRIANA: So we are spanning three time zones today. [laughter] I love it. That's one thing I like about the show is that we get to talk to folks from all across the globe. Classic On-Call Me Maybe question for you, Iris, is what are you drinking?IRIS: Today I'm drinking a caramel boba with rainbow toppings, so I'm very happy with my drink. [laughter]ANA: You said the magic words. You said boba. [laughter] And I also love that it's rainbow toppings, like, [laughter] hell yeah.ADRIANA: Rainbows make the world go round. [laughs] How about you, Ana, what are you drinking?ANA: Today, I decided to pick up one of the Starbucks strawberry refreshers. And I do have a long day of work, so I just ordered a trenta-sized drink which is bigger than my face. [laughter]ADRIANA: It's a big drink. [laughs] I don't think I've ever known anyone ordering one of those. That's cool. [laughs]ANA: I will only do it for the teas. Like, if I know I need to hydrate and want a flavorful, sugary drink, I was like, it's worth the money.ADRIANA: Yeah. Can you imagine that much coffee? [laughs] You can be jittery by the end of the day. [laughs]ANA: I actually think they don't sell coffee drinks in trenta size. I think I looked into it once because it's like a heart attack waiting to happen.ADRIANA: Yeah, I feel like I'm feeling a heart attack without even having had that. [laughter]ANA: What are you drinking, Adriana?ADRIANA: Today, I had the presence of mind to make myself a matcha green tea. So I'm very excited to have something a little bit different other than water. [laughter]ANA: Yums. Always got to stay cozy.ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. It's kind of a coldish day in Toronto. We're supposed to be expecting a big blizzard later today. [laughs] So this is my pre-emptive coziness.ANA: [laughs] Blizzards are never fun. And, I mean, I think that's kind of been the interesting part where we have all these weird climates going on right now. Everyone is kind of in some form of storm around the world; it seems like.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's true. How's the weather in Porto?IRIS: Well, it's pretty sunny but also very chilly because of the Northern stream. It's always very windy here. ADRIANA: Oh.IRIS: So the temperature might be around 12-13 degrees, but it feels very cold because of the wind.ADRIANA: It's like a windy San Francisco day. [laughter]ANA: Sounds very normal to my life. [laughter]IRIS: There is no beach for us. That's for sure. [laughter]ANA: Well, Iris, the first question that we wanted to ask you for today's podcast is, how did you get started in technology?IRIS: It's actually a very interesting story because, okay, I've been a tech nerd, let's say, since I was a little girl when I got my first computer at 9. I loved taking computers apart, [laughs] breaking them, fixing them.ANA: Hell yeah.IRIS: And when I was about to go to university, I had my mindset that I was going to study computer science. I come from Albania, actually, the other part of Europe. And I applied for university, but then I received a scholarship in another university in Bulgaria, [laughs] so I decided to go there. And I said, okay, computer science is too hard, so I'm not going to be able to maintain a good GPA. I'm going to go for something easier. And economics was the first thing that came to my mind, so I switched from a tech person to economics. And then I had this very good friend I have actually, and she gave me the pep talk: never forget your dreams [laughs] no matter how hard it is. And it actually worked. [laughs] So I enrolled in computer science classes, and I never looked back. I'm very happy that she convinced me. [laughs] And I did keep my GPA, fortunately, so yeah, there were no issues there. [laughs]ANA: That is awesome. It's always nice when you have people that kind of give you that push of like; you can do this, like, you are capable of it.IRIS: Yeah. And, for me, you know, there are some people that say that "Oh, if I didn't have to earn more money or if it wasn't difficult to get a job in another area, I will probably be doing that." It's not like that. For me, it's technology. My passion is technology, and I'm actually doing it. So it's amazing. [laughs] It's a great combination.ADRIANA: Oh my goodness, living the dream. That's so awesome. So with your computer science degree, how did it lead you to your current career path?IRIS: Actually, in university, I majored in computer science with a background in software engineering. So I worked for three months as a back-end developer. [laughs] And then the company that I was working for needed people to switch to DevOps and to train them, so I was like, okay, [laughs] so I went there. And yeah, that's how it started for me. We were doing small work in different customer companies setting up monitoring for them. And that's when I started becoming very curious and liking that sort of thing. And then, I switched to the job that I'm currently at. And we're actually creating our own platform. And it just got from the small pleasures of setting up small monitoring here and there to building a full observability platform. So yeah, [laughs] that's how it started, and that's how it's going. [laughs]ADRIANA: Wow, that is super exciting. And you got into...so it sounds like you got into DevOps pretty early into your career, too, which is cool.IRIS: Yes. In my university, surprisingly, usually, in computer science degrees, DevOps is not really taught. So when I entered, I was like, what is this? [laughs] Like, what are these things that I never heard about? [laughs] So it was scary. But it's a good thing that I started when I was uncomfortable in the field altogether. I wasn't confident enough in software engineering either. [laughs] So I got into that pretty easily, and it was just a matter of learning.ADRIANA: Very cool. It's interesting you mentioning that your university didn't teach anything about DevOps. And I think we've had similar conversations with other guests about there are certain things that you do out in the real world once you get your degree in computer science, computer engineering, whatever [laughs], but you're not taught this stuff in school. I think we've had a guest recently, Michael, who one of his first jobs out of school was SRE, which is kind of mind-blowing when you realize the fact that the only way to learn SRE is by doing it. And similarly, [laughs] for you, the only way to learn DevOps is by doing it. IRIS: Exactly. [laughs]ANA: It's definitely an interesting trend because I do think we're starting to see universities pick up on people are not coming to our colleges because the education they get in computer science does not place them in a job right out of school because we know the interview loops for these jobs tend to be pretty tedious. And I think we're starting to see a lot more schools start to realize, like, we actually need to fill in that gap.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. I really do hope to see more of that gap being filled in real life because we're definitely, yeah, we're still hurting. Circling back to a point that you made earlier when you were talking about building up a platform at your current workplace and getting to dig deeper into observability, can you tell us a little bit more about your observability journey?IRIS: Let me start from the beginning. So my observability journey, as I said, started with just setting up. AWS was my weapon of choice. [laughs] That's where I practiced my first observability and basically just collecting metrics and in cloud setting up dashboards, setting up alerts. That's how it started. Then it progressed to building a full platform, basically orchestrating applications, building the infrastructure to actually scrape the metrics, collect the traces, and basically the logs as well. I don't know if I'm explaining myself properly in explaining the platform. But it went from actually using what we had, what was already generated by default, to building a platform that allows the teams to set up their own metrics and basically building tools to allow every team to be able to set up observability for their own application because they know it best. And what we do is we provide all the support that they need for infrastructure wise and all the guidance when it comes to metrics or traces, the guidelines about configurations, and stuff like that.ADRIANA: Nice. I love to hear that because I've always been railing on people who are asking the teams who are not involved in the development to instrument their code. And I get so mad because it's like, [laughter] it makes no sense. I don't know your code. How can I instrument this? [laughter] It's very nice to hear that your team is providing guidelines but not doing the work for them because it's not really how it's supposed to work.IRIS: Yeah. I believe observability is a responsibility of everyone. It's not just, for example, five people setting up everything for everyone. Every engineer has to do their part. We, of course, have to provide the tools to make that happen and to make that very easy so engineers are not spending all their hours in a day to set up monitoring and observability but that should be their responsibility as well. ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.ANA: And it also just makes you a stronger engineer. I'm learning that skill set of being able to know how to instrument your code, how to be aware of the resources that it's actually taking up, to knowing that if you want to move up the career ladder and switch jobs or anything like that, that this is actually something that you are aware of. And you're not in that space where you're just throwing it up against the wall and hoping that it works and your customers are happy.IRIS: And, at the same time, troubleshooting is a lot faster if you are the one who has set up the monitoring and observability for your application because if someone else did it for you, you will, of course, have to go to them for help to help you figure out your own application and your own code, what it is causing and why [laughs] it's breaking. So that's not ideal. [laughs]ANA: It's like you and your team are going to know what functions you deployed in the last release versus the SRE team that has to manage ten services for the entire platform to work. Like, [laughs] why is there an increase in HTTP 400 errors for this one service that just got recently rolled out? [laughs] So, since you've been working in the space of observability for a bit, what do you say is one of the things you enjoy the most or your favorite?IRIS: One of the things that I love the most is how fast the area of observability is moving. I feel like it's one of the areas with the most modern technologies. It's always building, always improving. For example, I work a lot with Prometheus. There are always new features coming, and currently, I'm working with OpenTelemetry, which I am in love with. ANA: Yay. [laughs]IRIS: And you can imagine it's the most modern technology. You get your hands on some of the best things out there. So that's one of the things I love about observability right now. I don't know what's going to happen in five years. [laughs] I hope it continues the same.ADRIANA: That's awesome. OpenTelemetry is near and dear to my heart. I got involved, I guess, more heavily involved as a contributor to OpenTelemetry after I joined Lightstep last year. Same as you, it's been super cool to watch it evolve. I would love to hear about some of your experiences with OpenTelemetry, the good and the bad.IRIS: We are pretty new to OpenTelemetry. First of all, I heard about it last year. And I just played around with it a little bit, and it caught my attention. So now we actually had the space to work with it and the need to work with it. And I have to say I love it for the fact that, first of all, there is such big community support in OpenTelemetry, so it is very easy to actually implement it into an already running solution. You always find the Helm Charts are extremely helpful. There is very good documentation. And the other thing that I love about it is that it allows us to solidify our platform in one. Instead of using several tools, for example, logs, traces, metrics, we just use OpenTelemetry. ADRIANA: Nice.IRIS: But my favorite part so far is how easy it is to just fit it right into an existing architecture and make it work without having to change everything [laughs] and spend months and months of work on it.ADRIANA: That is really, really cool. I'm super stoked to hear that. What are the ways in which your own team uses OpenTelemetry? Do you guys stand up collectors? Or do you provide guidance on instrumentation to other teams? Like, what kinds of things do you guys do? IRIS: So, my team, we're responsible for the collector and the infrastructure in general. We have another team that is helping with the instrumentation. We work closely together, but my team works with our infrastructure. We are very close to setting it up in production, and I'm very excited about it, [laughs] the collectors. And then, we're going to start with the agents as well to make a full OpenTelemetry solution. [laughs] Currently, we're using Jaeger. So we are going to try and put them together until we have a full OpenTelemetry solution.ANA: Nice. It's always nice when you kind of get to bring things together and start finding the entire space of observability. Like you said, being able to now have your traces, logs, and metrics all in one with OpenTelemetry is kind of like a nice little package.IRIS: Yeah. And I have to say backwards compatibility as well is amazing. For example, I mentioned Jaeger earlier. It's just amazing [laughs] that we don't have to switch back and forth to make things work, and that's great for me.ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, totally. I think fo…

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DevOpsify with Sasha Rosenbaum of Ergonautic Apr 11, 2023

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About the guest:Sasha Rosenbaum is Principal at a new venture, Ergonautic. With a degree in Computer Science, an MBA, and two decades of experience across development, operations, product management, and technical sales, Sasha brings a unique perspective to optimizing the organizational flow of work, bridging gaps with empathy and insight.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInMastodonFind 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:ErgonauticDevOpsDevOps Days ChicagoFileZilla[Video] “Single Person of Failure” by Sasha RosenbaumGoogle SRE BookAndrew Clay ShaferTranscript:ADRIANA: 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, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host...ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today we are talking to Sasha Rosenbaum, who is a Founder at Ergonautic. Welcome, Sasha.SASHA: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. And it's a pleasure to be chatting with you all on this podcast.ADRIANA: Yeah, we're super excited to have you. So first things first, what are you drinking today?SASHA: I'm drinking peppermint tea. And this is a funny story; I recently became allergic to black tea.ADRIANA: [gasps] Oh no.SASHA: Which I previously drank all my life. I didn't even know you could be allergic to black tea. So now it's either coffee or I try to find some type of herbal thing. [laughs]ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh my goodness. At least it sounds like you've found a nice alternative. SASHA: Yeah, I have so many variations of herbal teas. It's not even funny. ADRIANA: [laughs]SASHA: Because I keep trying them all, and I can never quite find one that I'm committed to, so it's just a whole big cabinet of tea.ANA: [laughs] I am sorry for you having to not have access to black tea anymore. I think that's always been my favorite, like, oolong tea/black tea, and especially when you get to combo it with a peach or a mint on top, like summertime. But I'm glad that you can still drink coffee because I know for some folks, it's like they have to cut off tea and coffee.SASHA: Yeah, it's funny because the hardest part is people don't usually have hot drinks that aren't tea and coffee. So I'm like, if it's like 8:00 p.m., I'm not going to drink coffee, so I'm stuck with water.ANA: [laughs] Fair enough.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's sad. That's sad.ANA: I'm very close to Sasha's drink. I'm having something called a mint mojito. There's a coffee shop in the Bay Area called Philz Coffee. And this is one of their most common drinks where it's like you get a latte, but they also muddle mint into it, and they make it really sweet with a lot of foam. So that was kind of what I was feeling this morning.ADRIANA: Nice. Nice. I did not go with anything creative. I just have my water here.ANA: And it's too early for boba tea for you.ADRIANA: I know, right? Yeah, I think the places don't open until at least 11:00 if I'm lucky. Otherwise, I have to wait till noon or make my own. [laughs]SASHA: Oh no. Oh, can you make your own? I've never tried making my own boba tea.ADRIANA: It's not bad. Like, you can get the pearls on Amazon, and you just boil them for like one or two minutes. And if you want, you can soak them in honey or brown sugar, and it's actually pretty good.SASHA: Nice. You know what I like? The new ones are like jelly, so lychee jelly or something like that. And it's just like, I like it more than boba because boba is so giant. [laughs]ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true, and it's filling too. They pile so much on. I'm like, oh my God, I'm like eating my drink. [laughs]SASHA: It's a whole snack.ADRIANA: Yeah, exactly.ANA: I'm insane, and I like it when it's boba and then lychee like jelly. It's just like the double whammy of it.ADRIANA: It's a good combo.SASHA: Any drink that has lychee in it, I'm all for it. [laughs]ADRIANA: Me too. Oh, I'm such a huge fan. Whenever I find the fresh lychees at the supermarket, I'm like, oooh, give me, give me, give me because they're so, like, it's seasonal here. I don't know how accessible it is where y'all live, but here, I think I can find it in February and maybe one week in the summer.ANA: We definitely don't have too much access to it here. I think I had more access to it in Miami and in Central America. But I want to say in Downtown San Francisco, most shops always carry lychee, which is actually pretty neat because I'm like, I prefer this over anything else.ADRIANA: Oh yes.ANA: Or when you go to froyo shops, they have boba, but it's the popping kind, and it's got little like bursts.ADRIANA: Yeah, that's right.ANA: Then, at Target, I just saw that they're selling pre-made boba, and it comes with those like popping boba. So I bought it for my partner's kids, and we've yet to have it.ADRIANA: Oooh.ANA: But it comes in a little four-pack pre-made boba, and I was like, that's fun.ADRIANA: That's awesome, little family activity.ANA: Yeah. [laughs] For taco night, my plan was we'll do tacos, and then we'll have these as desserts. [laughs]ADRIANA: That's awesome. [laughs]ANA: Well, Sasha, we'll actually get started on some of the questions that we have for you today as much as we love talking to you about your love for herbal teas. [laughter] The first question that I'm sure some of our listeners are wondering, like, how is it that you got your start in tech? We know that you've gotten a chance to work at various companies. But it's always nice to hear how folks were like, ooh, this seems interesting. Let me take a look.SASHA: So I'm actually, like, I'm probably at this point an unusual woman in tech in the sense that I've been here almost 20 years. And I actually have a computer science degree, so it's like a more conventional path rather than switching careers. But I did actually switch. So I was getting the same message in high school as everybody else that computer science isn't for girls and that kind of stuff. And so what I initially enrolled in university was biology, and I wanted to do genetics. And the first year in biology, basically, I realized the entire degree is like growing yeast and such things in a lab. [laughter]So you do genetic experiments, which sounds really, really cool. But to modify these genes, you grow fruit flies, and yeast, and then mice, and stuff like that. And I'm like, you have to proceed to like Ph.D. to like...and the whole time, this is what you do. You show up every day to your lab, and you're like, feed mice something. [laughs] And I'm like, this doesn't sound like a career I want to have. ANA: [laughs]SASHA: So I kind of went...and my university was extremely technical, so I went through the entire list. And it was like, chemical engineering, physical engineering, industrial engineering, this, this, and this. And then there was computer science. And I did one Pascal class in school that was really basic Pascal, and I was like, I kind of like that. So this was like, click a button, switch to computer science. But then the moment I was there, it was so fun because it was like basically playing games.What I love about computer science is you start with nothing, like, this blank slate, you know, empty editor. And then you create something that actually produces results, and that is just magical. It's super creative. You have a lot of freedom in how you structure things, and what language you use, what architecture you use. So it was always like, super, super fun to do. That's how I get started. And then, I was a developer for many years. And then I gradually got into...I did some ops in the beginning, and then I basically got into the DevOps movement. So that kind of shifted my career towards more opsy, SRE kind of conversation. I think I've held every role that you can imagine. So I was a product manager for a minute. And I've been in sales. I've been in DevRel, which to some people, it's marketing and to some people, it's not. So basically, I feel like I've been in every department of the organization but always something tech-related.ADRIANA: You talked about getting involved in the DevOps movement. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into that. And specifically, how have you seen the DevOps movement evolve since you jumped on it? And follow up to that is are you happy with how it's progressed?SASHA: I got involved...I think it was 2013. So technically, the first conference was 2009, so it was probably about four or five years later, but it was still not a thing. So when people talked about DevOps, like, if you look...there's in Google search results how does search for a certain word change over time. And so the search for DevOps was, like, from 2009 to 2014, it was near flat. And then it kind of starts spiking because people got more and more interested in the term. The devopsdays.org kind of spread the word and started popping conferences all over the world. So I was a speaker at DevOpsDays Chicago, I think, in 2013, and then I became an organizer in 2014. And in 2013, it was the fifth city that did DevOpsDays, and now there's like, I don't know, over 80, something crazy. So it's all over the world. It's everywhere. So I think there have been a lot of changes in how it started, and how it progressed, and where it is now. What we started with was basically a lot of talk about collaboration and a lot of talk about automation. So it was two things, like, one is aligning incentives, so you stop kind of chasing two different agendas. Basically, you know, and I'm sure your listeners know, that developers want to deliver faster, ops want to keep the lights on, so minimize change. And then there's this inherent conflict between the team.So the first conversation in DevOpsDays, how do we minimize this conflict? How do we make everybody speak the same language, understand that they're incentivized to do the same thing, which is delivering software to their customers successfully? Then it evolved to people started creating roles for DevOps, which at the beginning was a big no-no for us. I had one of my co-organizers refuse to take a job at a company as the director of DevOps until they renamed the role because he was like, DevOps is not a team.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Yes.SASHA: And I'm not going to work here.ADRIANA: [laughs]SASHA: We have definitely lost that fight. DevOps is now a team.ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes me cry.[laughter]SASHA: So I will say on the bright side, the DevOps teams we did kind of create a job. So, in addition to...because DevOps teams don't exactly do what ops team did and they don't exactly do what dev teams did, so it's kind of like this new set of skills that were defined by this movement. The DevOps term also got co-opted by everyone, and their, like, every company selling a product in this space wanted to say they sell DevOps.ANA: [laughs]SASHA: And so every day I read some article saying that DevOps is dead [laughter] and usually to start an argument. Usually, someone defines DevOps as whatever they want, so they're like, DevOps is all about culture, or DevOps is only CI/CD tools, or DevOps is this. And then this is why it doesn't work. It's like, okay if you define the word to be whatever you want it to be, you can argue against the concept and practice. And then I think the first couple years that SRE became popular, I was kind of like, oh, you're just renaming this thing to another term. But I've come around because SRE actually defines metrics that allow you to reason. So we talked about incentives, and the incentives are great while you can talk, while you can collaborate, and everybody can be in the same room, and they can communicate with each other. But over time, in the larger organization, that's kind of hard to maintain. If you can attach metrics to it that allow you to reason about this conversation, it makes it easier. So SRE did bring a lot to the table as, in practice, you can implement with SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets and all these things that kind of allow you to discuss what the trade-offs are, which is really important. I think the unfortunate part of it is a lot of organizations just rename the team to whatever the buzzword is. So ops has been renamed to DevOps; it's been renamed to SRE. Now it's been renamed to platform engineering, whatever comes next. And they don't change any of the practices. So how do you expect to get better results? Like, you say you're SRE...one example is so many organizations are like, we are an SRE team. I'm like, okay, what's an error budget?ANA: [laughs]SASHA: And either they don't have an error budget at all. They don't even know what it is. Or they have a pretty slide saying error budgets are this. They don't have it defined. Or the next one is they have it defined, but no one looks at it. And if you blow the error budget, no one stops development, and they just proceed as normal. I'm like, so you're calling yourself SRE based on what exactly? ADRIANA: Right. [laughter]SASHA: It's like, I'm monitoring alerts [laughter] like we did 20 years ago, oh no.ADRIANA: It's like fancyops at that rate, right? SASHA: Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of fancyops around it. And so I had this moment, I don't know, three years ago, whatever, somewhere during or before the pandemic. ANA: [laughs]SASHA: I had this moment where I came to my co-organizers of DevOpsDays Chicago, and I'm like, "I feel like we didn't do anything. We're having the same conversations for ten years. Nothing changes. Everything is sucking in the same way." And they're like, "No, no, no, you're wrong." My job used to suck. Like, my job used to be I had a once in six months deploy. It took me all weekend. I was on-call for it at 2:00 a.m., and no one cared about my well-being. And developers were like, "We don't care about operations and whatever." And now I get to implement tools and practices, automate a bunch of this, get releases every day, which makes it less painful, all of these things. So we improve the job of operations a lot. That being said, there are so many, like, if you look (I had it somewhere in my slides.), if you look at statistics from StackOverflow, they did a survey on deployment practices. And the last time they did it was 2017, and they stopped doing it, unfortunately. But I think in 2017; it was something like 20% of all companies deploy through uploading zip files. [laughter] I'm like, where are we? You don't have a single pipeline? You don't...what? Okay. [laughter] ANA: Like we bring back FTPs and just dragging and dropping like no sense of version- control apart from just dropping your code in some FileZilla. [laughs]SASHA: I've literally walked into organizations where they actually didn't have source control. So they're writing software, and they actually don't have source control, and this was like two years ago. To some extent, it makes me mad when people are like, "Oh, DevOps is such a solved problem." or like, "Everybody's doing CI/CD and deploying everything." [chuckles] I'm like, no, th…

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Swinging on the Engineer/Manager Pendulum with Jewel Darger-Sacher of Reddit Apr 04, 2023

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About the guest:Jewel has been shitposting and sadtweeting her way to a comfortable tech career for over a decade in community and consumer product engineering as a software engineer, manager, and all-the-hats start-upper. She hasn't accidentally taken down production in a whole month, mostly thanks to PTO.Find our guest on:TwitterLinkedInGitHubInstagramMastodonFind 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:RedditRen Faire (Renaissance Fair)Commodore 64Jumpman (Video Game)TI-82 (Calculator)TI-83 (Calculator)Epic (Medical Records)Epic GamesWorkdaySonic FoundryImgurmipsytipsy (Charity Majors on Twitter)The Engineer/Manager Pendulum - charity.wtfEngineering Management: The Pendulum or the Ladder - charity.wtfPop PsychologyTranscript:ADRIANA: 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, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host... ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.ADRIANA: And today, we have with us Jewel Darger-Sacher, who is a Senior Full-Stack IT Engineer at Reddit. Welcome, Jewel.JEWEL: Thank you. I'm delighted to join you all today.ADRIANA: We are super stoked to have you with us. Now, our first question that we always ask our guests is what are you drinking today?JEWEL: So today I brought some fancy tea. I picked up some raspberry chai from Ren Faire a couple of years ago, and it's treating me great today.ADRIANA: Awesome. How about you, Ana? What are you drinking?ANA: That sounds very yummy, and I kind of wish I had some tea. I went with my LaCroix peach-pear sparkling water. Sometimes you just need a little bit of flavor. But I need sparkling water to do podcasts sometimes. It's just like that nice, crisp of staying awake. What about you, Adriana?ADRIANA: I am finishing off some green tea, and I've also got a glass of water.ANA: Extra hydration.ADRIANA: Extra hydration.JEWEL: Always staying hydrated.ADRIANA: That's right. So I guess first things first, Jewel, we always love to hear how our guests got started into tech. It's always really cool to hear different people's paths to their current career. So, what's your story?JEWEL: I grew up with a keyboard in my hands. My parents actually worked in IT and computer science from their graduate degrees. I was the third child. And they bought a Commodore 64 for the house to play games and do word processing. And I was the baby. I'm the third daughter. So I got to play a lot of Jumpman and little machine games as a kid before I really knew anything. And I remember they had just a big button or a big sticker on the go button on the keyboard for me because that was all I could push when I was a baby. [laughter] So my parents kept that up over the years. They gave us a good widespread diet of arts, and music, and math, and tech, and literature. So we always just had computers lying around in the house.'90s kids will remember the TI-82, the TI-83. I think they're still getting used. ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.JEWEL: Yeah. So I spent a lot of time in high school just manually hand-typing little games into the calculators, so I could goof off during class.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: Oh my God, that's awesome. JEWEL: Yeah. And then there's the one time where my chemistry professor walks over, and he's like, "Excuse me, miss, you seem to be goofing off. What are you doing?" And I went, "Oh, I'm programming a visualizer for the orbit of electrons around this molecule," [laughter] using matrix math that my dad had taught me because he's, as I mentioned, a math nerd. So yeah, the instructor was just like, "[sighs] carry on."ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: I mean, how would you respond to that? Like, you've out-nerded the instructor. [laughs]JEWEL: Yeah. So I definitely come from a nerd background, and then I did actually --ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: That's awesome. JEWEL: Yeah. And then I actually did get a real Bachelor's degree in computer science. But I kind of mixed it up a little bit where I got a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science.ANA: Nice.JEWEL: With a double major in technical theater and a minor in Spanish studies. And people thought I was a music major.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: That is awesome. That's so cool, so cool. ANA: So many different buildings [laughs] to be in all the time. ADRIANA: Wow. That's a lot of hats. [laughs]JEWEL: It's a lot of hats and a lot of keys. I also worked in the AV department, so I would have keys to a lot of campus. ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: It was really funny when the campus security guy called me once or twice, and I'm just like, "I'm sorry, I work here. Like, I have more keys than you do." [laughter] And they were not impressed. But yeah, so that was my...my informal training as a kid was just mess around with computers, do math and science stuff, do a lot of other interesting extracurriculars, and then went to college. And then, after college, I got into the industry. I worked at Epic Medical Records, not Epic Games, doing internal tooling there where I worked on basically the internal employee directory and how to request PTO because this was 2009, and we didn't have Workday at that point. ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: We built too much stuff in-house. And then, I worked at Sonic Foundry after I got tired of Epic and mostly the commute. It was an hour commute in the snow sometimes, which was less fun. But Sonic Foundry was a quick skateboard ride away from my apartment. And then I left Wisconsin for California when one of my friends who I had been working on a startup with, said, "You can either move to Rhode Island, and we can get acqui-hired, or we can move to Silicon Valley, decline the acqui-hire. I have some other jobs lined up." And we said, "California sounds nice."ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: So we moved to Mountain View, and we worked there for a couple of months before we got laid off, which was fine. I didn't like the job anyway. And then, I got a job at Imgur for a year. And then I've been working at Reddit for the past six and a half years. So yeah, that's been my...I've just kind of floated around tech a bit, just kind of poking my nose in a lot of things and trying to make it multidisciplinary.ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: That is so cool.ANA: It's always fun when you end up getting a chance to bring your hobbies into work and in and out and try to figure out what makes the most sense. I know when I first got a chance to meet you, I was just like, wait, how did you even study Spanish and something theater-related and technology in your year? And at that moment, you were a manager at Reddit. It was just one of those things that I was like, okay, acknowledging the different career paths that folks can come in with, which was actually really cool. But now that we have you here as an IC software engineer, I also kind of wanted to poke at it. What was your transition from management to IC like?JEWEL: It was an interesting transition to go back from being a manager to IC. And I'd always kind of planned this where I remember reading mipsytipsy's pendulum career path blog posts. So Charity had written several years ago about the benefits of working as an IC for a while and then switching over to engineering management and then switching back to an IC path as, you know, more experience and more understanding of how does management work? Why does management work? Like, what do the managers need? Like, why are they asking me these things that I previously thought were a name? And now I come back from it, and I'm like, oh yeah, I get this.ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: You're asking for this because your directors are asking for it, or because we have this regulation to deal with, or this policy, or this process. And I also understand why you build processes because, as a manager, you usually don't have time to deal with stuff. So you write it down, and you ask somebody else to follow the instructions. Or, more realistically, you ask somebody else to write down the instructions for a third person to follow. ANA: [laughs]JEWEL: So yeah, it's been fun going back from manager to IC and just having a lot of empathy for my manager and taking a lot of work off of his plate, especially logistics and project management that before I wouldn't care to deal with it. My manager would be like, "Could you please fill out your paperwork?" Now I understand why he's asking me to fill out the paperwork because he wants us to keep getting paid.ADRIANA: Yeah, it's funny because, as a manager, it's so frustrating to get people to fill out timesheets or fill out employee surveys and stuff like that. And then, as an IC, if you haven't been on that side of things, it can be a little bit difficult to relate to just how frustrating it is to try to like herd cats [laughs] because that's what it feels like a lot of the time as a manager. I definitely agree with you on the empathy. ANA: [laughs]ADRIANA: I definitely find that nowadays when my manager asks to do some admin thing, I'm like, oh yeah, I remember what it was like to try to get people to fill stuff out and how frustrating it is to chase people down. And it's totally out of your control because, I mean, they have to do it, not you, but you're still accountable for making sure that that stuff gets done. JEWEL: Right. It's like, I see the benefits of, like, oh, if I do a little bit of the admin work, they can help me out with a lot of other things that they're much better suited for. Like, my manager is really good at schmoozing, and he has a good sensibility for, like, here's who to talk to, here's who you don't talk to, or like, here's the person you talk to first. They will help you prepare for who to talk to second because that person's time is hard to schedule, or they have certain interests they want to zero in on. And it's like a lot of stuff that I just don't have experience in. I'm like, oh, you've been around this block. Let me just watch and learn and take coaching. And then he also does the nice thing of career growth for me and puts me in those situations and then back channels it to me about, like, you can lay off this topic. You can move on to that. Or, like, hey, you're doing a really good job. Keep it up.ANA: That's super supportive. [laughs] JEWEL: Yes, very supportive.ADRIANA: I was going to say you have a unicorn manager. [laughs]JEWEL: Yeah, he's pretty great. He even asked me in one on, one he's like, "Hey, I know that you've got this big three-month recovery time for surgery coming up. Are you planning that in Q3 or Q4 or what?" And I was like, "Let me get back to you in two weeks after I talk to the surgeon." So that's what I'm dealing with today is going back and forth, back and forth with the surgeon, to nail down times so that I can take off three months from work. My manager is here for it, and I'm like, oh, great, cool. This is awesome.ADRIANA: That's awesome. JEWEL: And his request was like, "Please give me two or three months' warning so that I can schedule our projects around this."ADRIANA: Yeah, for sure, for sure. You mentioned going from manager to IC. Have you done the jump back and forth a couple of times, or is this your...or have you just done the jump once from manager to IC? Have you gone manager to IC, IC to manager?JEWEL: In terms of titles, I have been an IC software engineer for years and years and years. And then, I took on a management role for three years, two and a half years, and then switched back to IC. But I've also been doing lead roles in other spheres, like for ERGs. I've helped found and lead and then train up other leads and step back and get them to do the work for a bunch of ERGs and for various little projects. One of the nice things that we do at my job is like a one-week hack week every quarter. So even though I've come back from being a full-time manager to an IC, I have this time where I can put together a small squad for a week or two and do engineering manager work again for them or act as a product manager or act as a project manager and delegate out other stuff. Mostly it's to ask people to step up and pick up who wants to be the project manager for this or who wants to do this and that. So I get to jump around to a bunch of different leadership roles, even without the manager title now. ADRIANA: Oh, awesome. Lots of fluidity, then.JEWEL: Yeah. It's fun, especially during this one week off where it's like, go try out partnering with people in other teams, go try out other roles, go just do some project you've been wanting to take care of. So I end up kind of matching up around my ERG goals as well. Like, one of the projects that I worked on last quarter and I'm working on this quarter is when you change your name...because I changed my name legally and socially last year. So, in addition to changing your government ID, there are all these places where you're identified by name or by username. In all these systems, what's the process for getting those fixed, like, for updating those? Where does it kind of break? Where does somebody need to manually take on work versus where can you just do it in one central point? So one of my projects was, as I went through that, I went and logged all my actions that I was doing, like, I updated this system, or I noticed that this system was broken, just log it. And then, after three months of that, I got together a group for this hack week and said, "Hey, I need people to help me get this knowledge together, get it usable, identify more gaps, and turn it into a guidebook, like a runbook for other on-calls who are tasked with processing a name change of one of their fellow employees," because this happens all the time.People are changing their names for weddings, and divorces, and transitions, and just notable life events. And it's like, okay, we should streamline our systems where they're not streamlined because there are protocols for this. But there are a lot of systems that are on older protocols or aren't doing it. So we have to do manual work on top of that. So it's like, all right, well, let's write a runbook. That's what we know how to do, write a bunch of runbooks.ANA: [laughs] It's nice that you get a chance to bring some of that mentality of, like, you do it once, and now let's actually document it the first time so that we actually don't have to deal with this on a constant manner as it continues to come up. That mindset of the SRE that we kind of get to walk life with, I think, is a very niche space of glasses to wear and pattern-recognize, or just kind of want to standardize, automate, delegate?JEWEL: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's very much where can we make the computer take on the work? And where do we need to have our own checklists to take care of it ourselves? Or can we even find middle ground of you file a helpdesk ticket, and the automation is not go apply the change to all the system? The automation is go create more helpdesk tickets, like, have one central helpdesk ticket, that is, I'm changing my name. And that can fan out to the accounting department and the infra department, and SREs, who are people who are responsible for different systems.We have a team that is specifically responsible f…

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