Building for Developers with Daniel Kim of New Relic

About the guest:

Daniel Kim (He/Him) is a Principal Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic and the founder of Bit Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to making technology accessible to underserved communities. He wants to inspire generations of students in tech to be the best they can be through inclusive, accessible developer education. He is passionate about diversity and inclusion in tech, good food, and dad jokes.

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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, with my awesome co-host... 

ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.

ADRIANA: And today, we are talking to Daniel Kim, who works at New Relic as a Developer Advocate. Welcome, Daniel. Super excited to have you on the show.

DANIEL: I am so excited to be here. I feel like I'm on a celebrity podcast, so I'm very excited.

ADRIANA: Ooooh, dang. [laughter] I actually remember when you and I met at KubeCon. You were like, "[gasps] Do you host On-Call Me Maybe?" And I'm like, "Yeah." And then you're like, "[gasps] I listen to that podcast." And I'm like, "Oh my God, this is like the best moment of my life to meet someone who actually likes our podcast." So I was super stoked.

DANIEL: Also, the title is the best. 

ADRIANA: Yes.

ANA: [laughs]

DANIEL: I mean, On-Call Me Maybe. Shout out to Austin.

ADRIANA: Yeah, for real. He came up with a great title. First, we always ask our guests, what are you drinking today?

DANIEL: So I'll open the can live on the podcast. 

ADRIANA: Whoo.

ANA: Whoa. [laughter]

DANIEL: So I just opened a can of my new favorite obsession/drink. It's called Genki Forest. And it's a Lychee sparkling water, and it is so good. I've been drinking like four cans of it every day and -- 

ADRIANA: Oh my God, sounds awesome. 

DANIEL: I have to start to ration my stockpile. So that's how good it is. So I could not recommend it more. And it's so refreshing.

ADRIANA: I need to find this stuff in Canada.

ANA: That sounds delicious. And I think I'm going to have to buy some for myself to be able to share back on socials and be like, "You know what? Daniel was right when he was on our podcast. This drink is amazing," because I'm also a huge lychee fan.

ADRIANA: Yes. Yeah, you had me at lychee, honestly, yum. What are you drinking, Ana?

ANA: I have nothing fun for today. Today is just water for me. But I am eating raspberry jello. Is that a drink? [laughs]

ADRIANA: It's drink-like. 

DANIEL: [laughs]

ADRIANA: I mean, jello takes on the form of its container. Does that make it liquid? I guess, [laughs] until it solidifies. I've got some fizzy water. I'm just finishing up a can. It's called Bubly. It's sparkling cherry water. And then I've got water on standby because I'm almost done with my can.

ANA: Yeah, it's always good to stay hydrated. I'm now kind of jealous of not having a Lychee sparkling water with me. That's all. [laughs]

ADRIANA: I'm like dying here because it sounds delicious, and it's given me all the bubble tea vibes. 

DANIEL: Yes. I had such good bubble tea last weekend. I love bubble tea. It's kind of an obsession for me.

ADRIANA: Oh my God, me too. [laughs] I even make it at home. [laughs] The bill was getting too high with the bubble tea, so I'm like, I need to figure out how to do this at home. [laughs]

ANA: Reasonable. I've yet to actually have bubble tea in a while. 

ADRIANA: [gasps]

ANA: I passed by Boba Guys yesterday in San Francisco, and it's like one of the spots. And I was like, I want some, but I was going in for a dental procedure. 

ADRIANA: Ooh, boo.

ANA: And I was like, I'm pretty sure I can't have this now, and I can't have it later. 

ADRIANA: [laughs]

ANA: So I've been thinking about bubble tea since then. So now that y'all mentioned it, I'm like, hmm, good to remember I can't have that yet.

DANIEL: [laughs]

ADRIANA: When I'm in San Francisco next year, y'all are going to have to show me the awesome bubble tea shops. 

ANA: That's all, Daniel. I don't know the city anymore. And I feel like he frequents a lot more shops than I do.

ADRIANA: [laughs]

DANIEL: Yeah, I have some recommendations. 

ADRIANA: Awesome.

DANIEL: We'll definitely go for some boba.

ADRIANA: Yay.

ANA: It's going to be like tracing San Francisco for bubble tea. We'll need a blog post. [laughs]

ADRIANA: Oh my God, yes. 

DANIEL: Oh yes.

ADRIANA: That's right, the drink tour, the boba drink tour. I love that.

DANIEL: All the spans we could collect.

[laughter]

ADRIANA: I love it.

ANA: So, Daniel, for folks that are just getting to know you, how did you get into tech?

DANIEL: So I got into tech because I didn't know what I was doing in life beforehand. I was planning on becoming an electrical engineer. And I started my first day of my master's program, and I was like, wow, this really sucks. Because I was looking at what I was doing, and I was like, I don't feel anything looking at these math equations. And I was looking at these really complex diagrams, and I was like, if I have to do this for the rest of my life, I'm probably going to be very sad. 

So I decided to actually quit my master's without any plan and cold email all of the founders of the startups that I have used in the last year of my college experience. And one of them got back to me, and then I got hired the week later. So that is my journey into tech of randomness and me not liking where I was going in life.

ANA: What were you studying as in bachelors that you used some tools?

DANIEL: So I was doing circuits. I was figuring out how circuitry works, how semiconductors work, just very complex mathy things. Because when I first started my program, I thought electrical engineering was all robotics and cool things that you see in The Matrix, but it is just literally all math. And I was like; this is not what I signed up for. [laughter] I remember on the college website for the electrical engineering major, they have a picture of a hologram and robots. And I was like, this is what I'm signing up for. [laughter] This is so cool. But the reality kind of hit the first year, and I was like, maybe this is not for me.

ADRIANA: So you wanted to make our evil robot overlords, is what you're saying.

DANIEL: Exactly, but that didn't happen. 

ADRIANA: Oooh.

DANIEL: I'm not good enough at math for that. [laughter]

ANA: I feel that.

ADRIANA: I mean, honestly, it's so cool that...I think it's like a really important life skill to realize that, hey, I don't like this, and I don't want to do this. 

DANIEL: Yeah, for sure.

ADRIANA: I think it takes a lot of understanding of yourself and a lot of courage to be able to do that. So hats off to you for having done that and wanting to pursue something that made you happy.

DANIEL: Yeah, I think I didn't have enough fear.

ADRIANA: [laughs]

DANIEL: Because I don't think I would have done that again if I went back in time. So I'm happy that it happened because I'm so happy with my life right now.

ADRIANA: Yay.

ANA: What is it that you do now? 

DANIEL: So what I do now is a lot better fit with my personality. I like to think that I have a pretty fun, outgoing personality, and that's kind of what I get to do in my daily job. I get to work with a lot of customers, engineers, developers from other communities, OpenTelemetry community members like Adriana and Ana. 

I get to work with all these amazing people in the community to not just sell a product but help developers understand what observability is. And that's kind of my favorite part of my job because I don't have to sell anything for my job. My job is to literally make other developers happy and help them learn and gain skills. That is like the dream job, right? 

ADRIANA: Yeah. 

DANIEL: Because I don't want anything from anyone. I just want to help people on their journey. And yeah, that's kind of my passion, too; I want to help developers learn and gain skills and be better engineers, which I love about my job.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. I think that's such a lovely description of the type of work you do.

ANA: And it's also nice when you're able to feel like your personality fits your job role. I always say bring your whole self to work. But I feel very similar, like, when I joined developer advocacy, it felt a lot more natural to me since I was already such a community-giving person and caring about other people that it was like, oh, now this is part of my job description, rad. I was going to do this anyway.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I totally agree. Like, when I first heard about developer advocacy, I'm like, that's a job? Like, this is what I want to do. [laughs] Sign me up.

DANIEL: Yeah, when I found out about it, too, I was like, wow, I didn't know this was a job either. So I'm so happy that I stumbled upon the job.

ADRIANA: How does one stumble into a DevRel job? [laughs]

ANA: Yeah. How do you stumble into DevRel? [laughs]

DANIEL: This is actually a really weird, funny story. When I was in college, I had a lot of cojones. [laughter] So I didn't like...I was desperate, so I would do anything. So I actually Twitter-DMed, the CEO of GitLab. 

ADRIANA: Oh my God. 

[laughter]

DANIEL: And I was like, "I want to come to your conference," that was happening in the city. And he responded in like 20 minutes. 

ADRIANA: Whaat?

DANIEL: And he was like, "Okay, here are like four tickets for you and your friends." 

ADRIANA: Whaat? 

[laughter]

DANIEL: And then this is a core memory for me. When I went, they had this wall of bagels. Like, they had this entire wall covered with bagels that you could grab off the wall to make yourself a bagel sandwich, and I was like, this is really cool. Because that was my first tech conference I've ever been to, and I was like, wow, this is really cool. 

And I heard all of these people called developer advocates or evangelists and all these engineers talk about what they're passionate about and like DevOps and really cool things that I'd never heard about. And I was like, that's a job? Where you get to have bagels and teach people about really cool technologies? And that's kind of how I stumbled upon developer advocacy. I think that was the first place where I saw a developer advocate giving a demo, and teaching, and working with the community. I was like, ooh, this sounds fun. I want to do this.

ANA: [laughs] I love that you just ended up DMing a CEO of a respectable tech company. That's usually what makes a lot of people in our communities, like, you just shot your shot, and something worked out in the space.

DANIEL: So, you know what's really embarrassing? Sometimes I meet people, and I realize that I DMed them like six years ago, and they didn't respond to me. So the last DM is college, me trying to get an internship.

ANA: That happens to me all the time. Like, I'm hanging out with someone at a conference or, like, connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. And I follow them, and I go to send a message. [laughter] And it's like, 2016, they reached out for help. No answer from Ana. 

ADRIANA: Oh no.

ANA: And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry. [laughter] Like, some years I'm available to respond to every email, and some years I'm not. [laughter] That year, I was not.

ADRIANA: Oh my God, that's too funny.

DANIEL: Yes, so I was definitely a hustler when I first started out. Yeah, going back through my DM history, it's kind of embarrassing all of the DMs that I sent that got no response. But I'm glad that the people who responded did respond because they helped me, like, guide, and gave me advice to the person I am today. So I'm really happy about that.

ANA: Do you think that those opportunities are still out there for folks to just randomly message people they look up to or leaders in the space?

DANIEL: Yeah, for sure. I feel like also teenagers and people who are coming up in the community are a lot more savvy with social media than I was. Because I remember the first time I cold-DMed someone, it was just like, "Hi, you're so cool. [laughter] Can I meet with you?" And that's not what you're supposed to do. [laughter] But little, old innocent me was like, oh, they'll definitely respond. 

I think other people who at least reach out to me come with questions that they want answered that's very pertinent to my job. Like, I've noticed that a lot of the folks that are coming up approach folks with a lot more intent and with really good questions. So I think those folks get to meet all of their heroes and get to interact with everyone in the community. So I think it's all about how you approach people that makes all the difference.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely.

ANA: I think I read on Twitter at some point one of those advices is if you're going to cold email or cold DM someone, either be very specific about what you're asking for or put out there what you're willing to give in return, like, I'll give you this and would you mind giving me that? Whether it's an introduction or a 15-minute coffee, or feedback on anything.

DANIEL: Yeah, for sure. Also, being persistent is important. Because I realized that some of these people I tried to DM probably get thousands of DMS a day. So following up in a respectful manner, I think, is also pretty important. Because I think some of the DMS I finally got responded to, I had to kind of follow up multiple times before I got someone's attention. So I think that was also really important. 

ANA: Don't give up if they don't answer the first time. 

DANIEL: It's probably not because they hate you because that's what I thought in the beginning. 

ADRIANA: Right, right. 

DANIEL: And I've seen these people's DMS, and I'm like, that is definitely not the reason.

ADRIANA: They're just busy. So when they have a chance to respond back, it almost feels like you've won the lottery, right? [laughs]

DANIEL: Exactly, exactly. 

ANA: Or they have ADHD, open the message, forget to respond. And they totally meant to answer, but they didn't. [laughter]

ADRIANA: Oh yeah, that's true. There's that angle too. I've totally had that happen to me before more than once.

ANA: [laughs] So I'm just speaking from experience of a lot of my DMs that I owe people responses to before Twitter went, like, sad face. [laughter] Yeah, that whole thing [crosstalk 13:02]

DANIEL: I kind of refer to that situation like, yeah, the thing over there, yeah. And it's really sad because I feel like Twitter is where I built a lot of my relationships with the community. And it feels like my home was getting wrecked, and I'm like; I don't know [laughs] because I feel like --

ANA: No, same.

DANIEL: Yeah, I don't know. [laughs]

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, it feels weird. It feels weird. For years, I resisted using Twitter. Like, [laughs] I remember when Twitter first came out, I'm like, I don't get it. Why are people telling me every minute of every day what they're doing? I don't get it. Then a friend of mine's like, "You can use it to build up your personal brand and promote your stuff." I'm like, oooh. And Twitter helped me get my current job [laughs] because Austin saw one of my blog posts that I posted on Twitter. And he's like, "Hey, how would you like to do this for a living?" 

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: I'm like, [gasps]. So yeah, I totally agree; sad face. [laughs]

ANA: Working at Google, working at Uber was technically all to Twitter, like, joined Twitter early on. Like for Google, I was able to search for...I think at that time, it was internships, and that was my in to then doing time with them. And same thing with Uber; it was the connections that I made on Latinos in tech on Twitter, it's that. Now that it's all going sad panda, it's like, but this was my roots. Like, this is what made me continue coming back, but we shall see what happens in the near future.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it'll be interesting to watch as this unfolds. TBD, right?

DANIEL: For sure. [laughs] I'm kind of biting my nails. But I hope that everything ends up good with that because I don't want Twitter to die either because Twitter is such a good medium. It really can't be replaced, I think.

ANA: I feel like Jack made that comment when everything was going on where it's like, Twitter can't just go away. I mean, we all work in tech, and we do know that it could just go away. [laughs] But he does have a point, like, it's just not going to happen. 

DANIEL: Yeah, for sure.

ADRIANA: I had a question for you. So you found your way into DevRel. Is this your first DevRel role at New Relic, or did you have a DevRel role at a previous company?

DANIEL: At a previous company, I was a developer advocate. But I was actually acting like a marketing person because I was the first non-engineering hire at a 20-person startup. 

ADRIANA: Oh, cool.

DANIEL: So that means that you're writing copy. You're trying to find contractors for the logo design, at the same time, doing documentation work, like, doing everything. 

ANA: [laughs]

DANIEL: So I think this is my first job where I feel like I'm doing the work of an actual developer advocate and not 16 roles in one. But yeah, even my time at New Relic, I feel like my role and the things I do have evolved over time. So when I first started, I think I was more focused on building how-to guides and getting ramped up myself on what observability is and what all of us do as observability providers. 

So the first year, I was kind of working more on one-on-one content, like how to get started, what is observability. But now I think I'm more focused on enabling practitioners who are kind of in the thick of things and trying to figure out where to go from one-on-one. So that's kind of like a shift that I've done as I've learned through my job more about observability. 

So I think that's been a really interesting transition for me, going from creating content geared towards very beginners that are getting started in their journey with observability compared to the audience I'm trying to target now, which is more of the folks who are running into roadblocks. They're on their journey already into getting better observability into their systems.

ADRIANA: Cool. And as part of your observability journey, did you get...like, you're active in the OpenTelemetry community. Did you start working on OpenTelemetry when you joined New Relic, or did that come about a little bit later? Like, how did you get in with the community? 

DANIEL: I think the first time I ran into OpenTelemetry was because one of our proprietary solutions couldn't do what I was trying to do. So I was trying to trace a particular application that did not have support from our language agent. And instead of trying to set up a 45-minute meeting with engineering managers and getting something on the roadmap...that stuff is very stressful. So instead, because we support OTLP and OpenTelemetry natively in our platform, I decided to try tracing this system with OpenTelemetry because someone built a collector receiver for this particular application. And then it worked out of the box. 

ANA: [laughs]

DANIEL: Like, it took me 20 minutes to set it up, and I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. I didn't have to set up a meeting to get this type of data into New Relic.

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: Magic.

DANIEL: And that's when I really realized the power of community and open source because you don't need to rely on a 10-person team to maintain all of your software, so if something breaks, you have to go to that team. With an open-source ecosystem, you can pull down existing pieces of code, edit it to fit your needs, and then just continue on with your day. 

And that's what I love about OpenTelemetry is that there are so many contributors all over the world that are building solutions for their use case and sharing it upstream to all of the users out there, like what I did with this particular receiver. And yeah, that's what I found amazing about OpenTelemetry, and that's why I got more involved in kind of being part of that community.

ANA: Nice. And it's also that where it's like, once you start with one project, you kind of realize how big the open-source community is. And I can speak for the Cloud Native CNCF projects, also, where it's just like, once you get into one, everything kind of starts making a little bit more sense, or there's always room for collaborations with other projects.

DANIEL: Oh, definitely. And something else that I think I've been really passionate about in my role is evangelizing observability in communities where observability isn't the main thing that they're concerned about. Because when I go to CNCF events like Observability Day, people who are going to Observability Day already have a pretty good grasp on their observability strategy. Like, you wouldn't be showing up unless you had some kind of vested interest in observability. 

But when I talk to a lot of my friends who are developers, observability is something that they think about in the back of their mind. It's never in the forefront. So what I've been really passionate about in the last couple of years that I've been doing this is bringing up the topic of observability to audiences where it's not their primary focus. So I've been working a lot with the awesome folks from the Kafka community over the last year because a lot of the Kafka operators I talk to at conferences are virtually...they're just worried about keeping their systems up.

ANA: [laughs] Yes.

DANIEL: Observability is like, if your couch is on fire, you're probably not trying to rearrange your table. [laughs] You're trying to put out the fire first. [laughter] So when I go to these conferences, a lot of the talks were about optimizing their setup, performance engineering, things that were very related, but it wasn't about observability. It's more about how do we maintain a system that works? 

So I really want to go to these communities and kind of expose...just hold up a sign that says "Observability" so more people can at least start thinking about it and implementing solutions for their setup, like, for example, using OpenTelemetry to implement tracing or Prometheus for gathering metrics from their Kafka environments. So yeah, that's what I've been really passionate about is, talking about observability to folks who should care, but they're probably so overloaded with just keeping the lights on that it's probably not in their top 10 list. And that's been really rewarding for me.

ANA: That's true. There are a lot of those communities out there. I think Kafka is a perfect one. You mentioned a year of working with them. [laughs] I think it's very continuous work because due to the organizations that end up using their services, it is such a critical point of a software, of an application. You really have to make sure to understand it to be able to make it reliable. 

Like, I know at the last company, when we would talk to a lot of our customers, it was like they were constantly afraid of Kafka, Cassandra. Those two are always on the top five list of what tool within my toolchain is it that has had a lot of incidents, or we're constantly firefighting? And how is it that we can get ahead of the curve?

DANIEL: Yeah, for sure. Kafka is like...that's the reason that I speak to a lot of the folks in the community because observability really will help them in the future get a better position, better provision resources for their future needs. And something that I've been really passionate about also is leveraging my internal company innovations and sharing them with the world. Like, we have a team internally at New Relic that over 100 people are working just on maintaining our Kafka instances. And out of that team, there are experts, like, world experts on Kafka and monitoring. 

ANA: [laughs]

DANIEL: So I've been working with them to try to share some of the knowledge that we are learning internally operating at such a scale to the rest of the community. So that's also something that I've been really passionate about.

ADRIANA: That's super cool. 

ANA: Is some of this content already available online?

DANIEL: Yeah. So I will link it later. [laughs] I will share it with you guys later.

ANA: [laughs] Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes. 

ADRIANA: Okay, cool.

DANIEL: Yeah. I recently published...well, not recently, like middle of the year. I published a guide on how to do distributed tracing with Kafka using OpenTelemetry, and this is something that we implemented in some of our internal systems to start getting better visibility into our own Kafka instances as well as implementing Prometheus, like, which Prometheus metrics you should pay attention to in your Kafka environment. 

And we did a talk on that at the Kafka Summit in Austin. So yeah, I'll put it in the show notes. There are a couple of really cool pieces of content that me and a couple of engineers that are experts on Kafka we put out to help folks who want to get started in their observability journey with Kafka how they can get started with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. I have a question for you around that. As far as the stuff that you choose to surface as a DevRel, is it stuff that you choose to surface because it's like, hey, this is something that I see people are struggling with, or I've just learned about it, and therefore I want to write about it? Or is it something where you're like...or someone tells you, "You should take this direction. You should write about this. You should dig into that."

DANIEL: I don't think I've ever been told in my time at New Relic what to write, thankfully. It's usually me struggling myself with something and then me writing about it because I had such a hard time. I think when I talk to folks, I say my superpower is not being the smartest person in the room. I am not the best engineer, which makes me such a good person to have because in a team of very smart engineers, you always need that person that will ask the stupid, obvious questions, and I am that person. [laughter]

So I am in these fancy-schmancy engineering meetings, and I'm like, "What is A?" And everyone's like, "Oh," and then they take the time to explain it to me. And I try to share that knowledge that I gather too, like, share with the community because since I was little, I never had any shame asking questions. You know how people are embarrassed to ask stupid questions? I would raise my hand high. Like, I did not have hesitation to ask a stupid question. 

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: That is awesome. 

DANIEL: And I think that's one of the greatest gifts I have is not having shame to ask questions because I always get people afterwards after a big meeting being like, "Oh, I was wondering the same thing, but I just didn't know how to ask." So I think that's something that allowed me to be really successful at my job. That's how I find content is figuring out what I struggle with and trying to share it with the community. 

ADRIANA: That's awesome. I think that's such a good skill to have because, like you said...I remember even early in my career; I'd just sit there cowering in silence like, I have a dumb question I don't want to ask. I'm so confused. I'm so lost. And then, at some point in my career, I'm like, I don't care anymore. 

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: I'm going to ask it because I'm confused and lost, and I need to know this information to do my job, so screw it. I commend you for having the cojones to ask those questions and make it safe, like, make other people feel safe for asking those questions as well. Because I think when you hear someone asking, quote, unquote, "stupid questions," it empowers other people to also ask the, quote, unquote, "stupid questions," which are not stupid because it's obviously knowledge that people are seeking.

ANA: I know I was always the person that was afraid of asking questions for multiple reasons. [laughs] So when people are like, "I don't have any fear of asking questions," I'm like, "Oh, here are my questions. Can you ask these?" It's gotten better. 

ADRIANA: [laughs]

DANIEL: Oh, other people have done that too. Honestly, some people or some folks will DM me things to ask, which I'm happy to do. 

ADRIANA: That's awesome. 

DANIEL: And I think that's also a really good way to pressure test your documentation. Sometimes what I do when I audit some documentation, I screen-record myself, and I ask all the things that pop into my head as I'm going through it. And that's a really good way to make your documentation and things that are in your product a lot more accessible is having a person go through it and just stream of consciousness, like, say everything they think about their experience. So that's something that I've used internally as well to improve our product.

ANA: That's actually a really cool activity, whether you're in DevRel or not. Any engineer kind of thinks about the work that they do because, I mean, even when you build internal tooling, you still have other teams that are depending on your tooling, so you do end up writing docs. And I think sometimes a lot of engineers don't think about what the actual experience is when they use the software that they're building. Maybe they should be doing that more.

DANIEL: Yeah, more documentation is always better. And yeah, I've been super thankful that the documentation team I work with internally has been so open to feedback that I'm able to get a lot of changes implemented very quickly for the things that I struggle with. And I have a saying that goes if I work here and get paid by my company and I don't understand it, the likelihood of someone else that has nothing to do with the company understanding is probably even lower. So that's how I like to justify it to myself when I add 45 comments to a Google Doc about documentation. That's what I tell myself. [laughs]

ANA: I mean, I always see developer advocacy, developer relations as user zero. Like, you are at the start of that journey. Like, we have to test everything before actual users do get to touch it, prospects or customers or community.

ADRIANA: Yeah, we're the bridge. I do feel like documentation in tech that's something that the whole industry struggles with, especially open source. Like, I cannot tell you how many blog posts or technical docs from whatever open-source project I've read where I'm going through, and they're like, oh yes, just do blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, but like, how? [laughs] Like, am I the only person who has this question? It's not possible. 

And then you're like Googling all this shit in the middle of the night trying to figure out, [laughs] like, has someone else had the same question as me? Please, God, let it be that someone else had the same question as me. So I make it my mission to ensure that whenever I write technical blog posts, I include the excruciating details because I just freaking hate it when people leave those things out. 

Because I feel like engineers writing documentation partway through, it's like, I'm bored. I don't want to do this anymore, byee. We need to learn to not do that as a tech community in general. I'm not saying for DevRels. I'm saying anybody writing technical documentation has to be better about filling in the blanks, right?

DANIEL: For sure. I think accessibility is really, really important when it comes to onboarding new people to your open-source project or a product. And doing these studies where you look at how people interact with your developer assets, whether it's documentation, or a demo, or anything, it's really important to make sure as many people who want to try your product, or open-source project are able to actually go through with it. Because if I get stuck in step two, the likelihood of me figuring out the problem and getting back to step three is very low. Like, if something takes me more than 30 minutes to spin up a getting started thing, I probably will abandon it.

ANA: Developer happiness where you're just like...it's like, I mean --

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's fair.

ANA: Sadly, it's that too, there are so many shiny things out in the tech space or so many competitor tools to one another that it does become like, what is the user experience of using this open-source tool? Of these three vendors, what is actually easy for me to implement? And was it well-documented? Is their customer success team getting back to me in a timely manner where I can do my job and report to my leadership team the work that I'm doing? I think we have seen in the industry, like, I think in the last three, four years, there's been a higher growth of caring about developer happiness, developer experience.

DANIEL: Yeah, for sure. I am so happy that the industry as a whole is moving towards the idea that we want to make the experience for developers as smooth as possible. Because I've noticed that even internally, we prioritize ending developer friction over a lot of other OKRs because we want to make sure that people are happy using our product because when it comes to renewal time, all the other companies are going to be like, "Well, ours is better, and your developers won't be suffering as much." And that's like a huge selling point for a lot of products, especially developer-oriented products.

ANA: I even want to go a step further and say when you are working in the SRE space, it is just more niche, and it kind of matters a little bit more since you kind of need to maintain all the systems up. So people are having more scrutiny, I think is the English word for it, like just microscope, like looking at all these little details.

DANIEL: For sure, for sure. And another aspect I think that's really interesting for me is how we value interacting with developers. Before developer relations really became a thing, I feel like there was kind of a disconnect between companies that made developer tooling and developers themselves. And I've noticed a trend where in the last couple of years, companies are hiring roles like developer relations, or they're having very intentional community programs where they're constantly interacting with the users of their product to continue to iterate, and I'm really happy about that. 

Because when I was first getting started with tech, like when I was in middle school and high school, and that wasn't even that long ago, companies didn't have community programs like they do now where they would answer questions from someone that wasn't paying them. The fact that there are free tiers for a lot of companies that are product-led growth, I think, is amazing. And it's going to make everyone better because competition, I think, increases the quality of all the products that are in the playing field.

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. I think one of the important things as a DevRel is to listen to the feedback from the community because it's one thing to be a talking head and to stand on your soapbox and say, "Thou shalt do it this way," and then it's another to get feedback from your customers. Like, hey, buddy, this isn't at all how it works in real life. You got to get back to reality here with the rest of us.

And I think it's so important for DevRels to be in touch with the real-life scenarios that are happening in the community so that we can relay it back to our employers or to the open-source projects that we work in so that we can increase that developer happiness.

ANA: Most definitely. One of the questions that I had for you, Daniel, is that I also know that you have a project called Bit Project; you're like the founder of it to get some folks started into DevOps. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

DANIEL: Yeah. When I was in college, and I was in electrical engineering, I was already starting to think about making a pivot to software engineering. So I started to teach myself coding. And I started a school club within my college where a bunch of friends would get some pizza or some boba, and we would congregate in a meeting room. And we would just teach each other things that we learned that week. And it started as that, and then we kind of grew it into a student organization where we built really fun, quirky ways to teach basic tech concepts because I'm a fun, quirky person, and I like to teach things in a fun, quirky way. 

ANA: [laughs]

DANIEL: So me and my friends built awesome, fun, interactive ways to learn different things. So one of the things that we built was a way for you to play Tetris, and it's more like...it's not Tetris but it's more like...I don't know how to describe it. So there's basically a giant grid that people could send cURL requests to that particular website where you could change the color of a particular grid, like a square within the grid with a POST request. 

And we taught people how to use Postman, and how to use APIs and cURL, and how to send requests, what HTTP requests are, things like that through a game. And that's kind of like the essence of what Bit Project does. We try to teach people complex things using fun and quirky ways. So we have had people build serverless-based projects where people built like a detector where if you could send an image to the website, it'll tell you what song would match your particular face. We had students just build really fun, quirky projects with cool technologies that aren't really exposed in school. 

I'm super excited. We're working on some really cool projects for next year, teaching students about serverless and APIs and all the cool technologies that are out there. That's what Bit Project is essentially. And I'm so happy that that's how I got my start because I get to kind of translate that over into enterprise software, where I think you would all agree that we could use a little more fun and quirkiness in this space.

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: Yes, I completely agree.

ANA: I mean, it's that, like, the stuff that we learn in school is not necessarily what we apply actually on the job. So when there are programs that help people filter out what is actually taught in school to be applicable, that's been my story. And it's also the work that I do. I remember when I first saw Bit Project was the SRE stuff that you were working on, I think, two years ago, and I was like, ooh, that's super cool.

DANIEL: Yeah, I'm super excited also that there are other programs in high schools that are starting to expose students to tech concepts early. These are very select schools across the country. It's not like everywhere. But there are certain schools that are exposing students to more realistic avenues of coding, not just designing number counters but actually building websites or building tools that engineers in the real world would use. So I'm so happy that there's still a movement out there that's growing where we're starting to expose students to the real-life idea of a software engineer and what people in our industry actually do.

ANA: And on that one, I'm going to plug that there was one by Major League Hacking that they were working on last year. That was an SRE one as well. It was being built; I think, paired with Facebook production engineering team. So it was kind of like really taking those concepts to give them to college students out anywhere in the...I think it's mostly North America that Major League Hacking works with. I'm also a huge fan of seeing that work be built out because it's needed. Like, it's really hard to catch the difference sometimes of what you are learning in school versus what's actually applied.

ADRIANA: Yeah, and they don't teach you how to use Linux in school, let me tell you. [laughter]

ANA: What is a server? [laughs]

ADRIANA: I agree. I remember when I started university, the first day in my computer class, we're like at a Sun terminal, and I'm like, what the hell is this? I'd never seen Unix in my life. I'm like, what's going on? I didn't even know there was anything besides Windows. And then they just sort of expect you to know this stuff. 

So the question I had for you was like, you know, it's awesome that there are these programs out there that bridge that gap between the theoretical and the practical. But does that make you wonder should schools be doing more to bridge that gap themselves rather than having to rely on these satellite programs to bridge that gap? Because I feel like that's still missing. I want to get your thoughts on that.

DANIEL: Definitely. The problem is that academia is, I think, particularly slow to adapt curriculum. And for a thing like maybe law or biology, where the basics stay the same, it's probably less of an issue. But with something like computer science and software engineering, the goalpost moves every day. Like, there's some more level of abstraction that developers have access to. Like, if you compare what a software engineer does now compared to 30 years ago, it is extremely difficult. 

ADRIANA: Totally.

DANIEL: So even though schools should be adapting to the times, the times are moving so fast that I don't think it's feasible for a lot of the schools to adapt their curriculum to the rate of innovation that we're seeing in our industry. So I think it's important for schools to build in flexibility and real-world engineering into their curriculum. And I think universities like the University of Waterloo does a really good job at that because a core part of their curriculum is students going into actual companies and internships. I don't know what they call it. I don't think they call them internships. 

ANA: Co-op.

DANIEL: Co-ops, yeah. They actually have to work with real-life systems and real-world problems, and that's I think why Waterloo grads I think are the cream of the crop when it comes to getting their first PR in the fastest.

ANA: [laughs] I mean, it goes to that where it's like, who's the most comfortable touching tools, touching software, and not being afraid to ask questions? And a lot of it does translate to what have they been exposed to when they're learning. I work with a foundation called National Academy Foundation. They partner with high schools to academies like on verticals, and there's one for IT or networking and engineering. So they learn and by senior year of high school, they've interned at one or two places for networking, or development, or graphic design, and they get certifications. 

So I think the earlier we're able to expose students to whatever career they might be, like, I'm not talking about just doing this for tech. I feel like it's a lot easier for folks to commit to going to university for, like, this is what I want to do when I grow up, and also be aligned with this is how much salary I could be making if I do study this. I think prior generations didn't really have access to that perspective.

DANIEL: Yeah, for sure. 

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's true.

DANIEL: And I think it's moving towards the better. Like with the internet, with TikTok, the rate at which students get exposed to new ideas is quite fast. And there are so many creators out there that are advertising all the opportunities that are available in tech and in IT. So I'm hoping that we get more diverse and cool candidates that are coming through the pipeline and be the future leaders in our field. I'm so excited for that.

ANA: I 100% agree with that. As we're getting ready to close out this episode, I wanted to ask what advice do you have to folks starting out their careers in tech?

DANIEL: I think not giving up is a really, really important piece of advice because right now, especially, it is the worst time to look for a job, especially someone with not a lot of experience because there are so many people in the market. And then there are not enough jobs to go around because of the economic situation. 

So don't give up if you don't find a job in your first two months or three months or even a year of looking because it's probably not you. It's just that there are so many candidates and applicants for particular jobs. It's so competitive that it's more than likely that you're not going to get the job in your first couple...even a couple hundred times that you apply. So I think not giving up is really important. 

And also, being part of the community is really important. A lot of the jobs that I've gotten in my career have been through connections I've made both virtually and in person. So creating friendships, being part of the community, I think is a really, really important differentiator when it comes to separating yourself from the 4,000 other applicants for the same job that you're trying to go for. So I think building up a personal brand, being part of a community, having real-life friends in the community is really, really important.

ADRIANA: I think that's really awesome advice, and I could not agree with you more on that.

ANA: I plus-one all of that. I feel like personal brand also definitely really helped my career and not just transitioning to DevRel but just as a strong engineer.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely.

ANA: Well, with that, thank you so much, Daniel, for joining us in today's podcast. We loved talking to you about your start into tech, observability, Bit Project, and all the cool things.

Don't forget to subscribe and give us a shout-out on all social media via oncallmemaybe. We just joined Mastodon not too long ago so check us out there and be sure to check out the show notes on oncallmemaybe.com for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. For On-Call Me Maybe, we're your hosts Ana Margarita Medina...

ADRIANA: And Adriana Villela signing off with...

DANIEL: Code, peace, love, you know, or whatever combination thereof. [laughter] I hope everyone has a great time and you're not yelling at your code today. 

ADRIANA: I like your spicy take. [laughs]

ANA: He's like, I'm Daniel. There's no such thing as peace, love, code. [laughs]

ADRIANA: You just turned it on its head. It's fantastic.

ANA: Randomized string.

ADRIANA: That's hilarious. [laughs]