Observability Internships with Mohammad Harun, Software Engineering Student at McMaster University

About the guest:

Mohammad Harun is a 4th-year software engineering student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He spent this past year working as an Observability intern at Wavelo, helping to develop best practices around Observability at the company.

Find our guest on:

Find us on:

Show Links:

Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, everyone. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, the podcast about DevOps, SRE, observability, on-call, and anything in between. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with my awesome co-host...

ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.

ADRIANA: And we are here today with Mohammad Harun of Tucows/Wavelo. He is a junior observability engineer. And actually, we've got a bit of a connection because I hired Mohammad at Tucows back when I was working there as my observability intern. So, welcome.

MOHAMMAD: It's great to be here. Thank you, guys, for having me.

ADRIANA: We're super excited to talk to you. So I guess the first question is, what are you drinking today?

MOHAMMAD: Just water for now. [laughs]

ADRIANA: Me too. Me too. I got a nice, tall glass.

ANA: I think the best reminder to folks is, like, staying hydrated during the work day, and especially with the heatwave that we're having in the world right now, it's just like the best thing we can do.

ADRIANA: It's true. Ana, what are you drinking today?

ANA: Today we're doing...oh, you're going to like this, Guava São Paulo sparkling water from Lacroix. 

ADRIANA: Oh. 

ANA: What's your drink, Adriana?

ADRIANA: Plain, old H20. Oh, and I also do have a little Perrier next to me. That's my go-to summer drink, just the lemon-flavored Perrier. I like the fizziness and the coldness. It's got the same effect as drinking an ice-cold coke but without the sugar rush.

[laughter]

ANA: I think the first question I would love to ask, especially knowing that you're a junior observability engineer, how did you come about the space of observability? Is this something that you had an interest in, and you'd look for some job postings? Or you kind of applied to a general job, and you ended up learning about observability and being in the space.

MOHAMMAD: So the story is kind of interesting. I think we have a job posting website for McMaster, where I go to. And I came across, I think, a software engineering role for Tucows at that time. And so I went into this role, and I gave an interview for it. I think it was a technical interview. And we had a behavioral interview as well with Adriana. And at that time, she recommended me for another position as well, so observability. 

And at that time, I wasn't sure what it was, but it sounded interesting. So she, I think, hooked me up with some of her articles and blog posts. And I began reading into that, and I thought this would be a fantastic opportunity. So this was my segue into observability. I was really excited. And I think ultimately, I did a technical interview as well for this position, and I was able to get it.

ANA: That's so awesome and rad and especially when Adriana gets to bring you on the podcast to talk about your experience. Did you have knowledge of systems prior to taking this role? Or what was your knowledge level of complex systems and running things for a company live for production and such?

MOHAMMAD: So I don't know if Adriana has mentioned this before, but this is my first tech job. So this is my first actual experience in this field. So I had no idea of what it would be like to actually look into a large system. And all I had before was just schooling, so I didn't have much to go on. But it's been a huge learning curve. And I think I'm really good so far into my internship.

ADRIANA: And it was trial by fire because my philosophy with my students [laughs] was basically like, hey, yo, you're a member of the team. [laughs] So you're going to be productive like everyone else. One of the things that I personally like about hiring interns is I love the attitudes of interns because it's before y'all get jaded. 

[laughter]

ANA: Amen.

ADRIANA: You work in tech long enough, and you, unfortunately, become a little bit jaded. Maybe you're lucky if you don't because you've worked at a super cool company throughout most of your career, but I got jaded pretty early. So I love [laughs] the lovely go get 'em attitude from interns. 

And I do love that interns are always willing to admit when they don't know something, which I think is so refreshing. Because I think a lot of people come into the workforce, especially more senior people, and they feel like, oh, well, I'm senior; therefore, I must know all the things, and then they don't ask enough questions. 

And, Mohammad, one of the things I appreciated when you first joined is you asked questions about everything. And it was awesome, honestly, because it's like, yo, if you don't get it, you ask a question. So then that way, we can help you do your thing so that we can help you move forward. So I love that.

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, I think my mindset for this was basically to just ask as much questions as possible so I could understand more. And the more familiar I got with it, I think I wouldn't have to ask a lot of questions in the future. So my thing was just to get it over early. Try to understand everything that there is to know, and then you'll be more productive or more knowledgeable on all the material.

ADRIANA: True. True. Yeah, and you've definitely gotten there.

ANA: What advice would you have to anyone listening, whether they're starting in tech, getting into production systems, observability, SRE? Like, when it comes to asking questions, I personally know that I struggled feeling comfortable asking senior engineers questions when I was starting as an SRE intern, specifically where I was like, I have no knowledge of what's going on, but y'all hired me. If y'all know that I don't know anything, you will fire me. So it's hard. [laughs] How do you go about doing that? What is your advice nowadays?

MOHAMMAD: I don't know if it would be advice. But I would say I was very lucky to have people like Adriana on my team who are very welcoming, and team dynamic is a huge thing. Because I don't know what I would be like if there were other people who weren't willing to help me out. But for my case, it was just a matter of luck that I landed in a really good team, and everyone was willing to help out, and they still are. 

ANA: That's amazing to hear, and credits to Adriana, but we're going to pretend she's not speaking right now. [laughter] We're going to have leadership folks listening to our podcasts and such, and what would you say are two things that your team did to make you feel really welcome and a safe space to ask questions?

MOHAMMAD: I think, first of all, the onboarding process was really good for my time here. Adriana had a cheat sheet for me, so I was quickly able to get into some of the technologies we were using. So that was really important. And I think in my early days, I was paired up a lot with a senior engineer, so I feel like I was able to see them work. So I think that helped me to get more comfortable. 

And ultimately, I think now I can do work on my own. Versus when I first started and I still was getting to know everything, I kind of needed a helping hand. But I think that was really helpful in the process.

ANA: Those are two amazing things, buddy systems to make you feel like a safe space to ask questions. And documentation really goes a long way. And that applies to everything in tech; documenting stuff is really key.

ADRIANA: It's so true. Yeah, buddy system is huge. Because if you have someone where you feel safe to ask questions, the sky's the limit. You can be so productive, no judgment, and just do your thing. Ask your questions.

ANA: I would say I've had a lot of senior engineers that don't know how to do the buddy system. Like, they don't really create a safe space. They're more of like telling you what to do, and it's not in a way of upleveling you, which I think that's quite...like, I haven't heard too much about those conversations happening of, like, how do you uplevel to be a good peer for early grads or early-career folks?

ADRIANA: Huh.

MOHAMMAD: I think it's just have a really nice manager like Adriana. That would be one.

[laughter]

ANA: Is there anything now that you've gone through some of the time of your internship that makes you really excited about being in tech or being specifically in the space of observability?

MOHAMMAD: Based on the work I've been doing now and just seeing SREs and devs in our own company, I think just knowing the power of what a fully observable system can do for them because I've seen some of the hardships that they've gone through. And I know for a fact that if we had proper observability with the best standards and I think troubleshooting whatever problems they need to fix, it would be much easier than currently, it is right now. 

Because at this point, I think people are kind of heavily reliant on logs. And we need more people to be tracing because I feel like traces basically can tell you the same information as logs but give you more context as well. So I think that's basically what I think of this.

ANA: That context [laughs] really helps when you're going through the fire when you're going through those incidents where you really can't understand why your software stopped working with the last release.

ADRIANA: I think it's so cool that because you're entering into the world of observability at such a young age, you're at the perfect spot, right? Because you don't have any previous biases from the old monitoring APM dashboard is king kind of mindset, logs are king. You're coming in from the yeah, man; this is the way it's supposed to be done, okay? Which I think is awesome. 

And I think it's the best way to continue to foster the message is not only the paradigm shift for the people who have been doing this for a while but also the fresh, young perspective of the people who are basically, for lack of a better term, indoctrinated into the trace-first mentality of observability.

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, and I'm really glad I was able to start my career off with this because I feel like in the future, for sure, this will always be a part of me to always try and include observability in whatever software that's being built or being looked at.

ADRIANA: That's awesome.

ANA: I think it's really fun to be able to come to a space in technology and be able to be trained and taught those best practices that can happen in a discipline. I did not know any systems, DevOps, or ops, and I came in as an SRE intern. Why would you ever put a full-stack developer as an [laughs] SRE intern? It's very interesting. 

But the fact that a big organization was able to trust me that I could uplevel my skills meant a lot for my career. And at the same time, it was just the ability to deep dive into so many technical concepts, and like what Adriana was saying, the fun thing with interns is just how hungry they are to learn. You are so not jaded. You might be jaded from school. 

ADRIANA: [laughs]

ANA: But you finally get to be with folks that write documentation papers, that are working on your favorite apps, and you can be like, oh, I actually understand things now. One of my favorite things that I tell folks to do is read incident post-mortems for the purpose of learning about how things work or talking about failure in a more comfortable way.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, it's true. And it's so important to get that mentality early with our new grads and our interns.

ANA: As you say that, I think about what advice would you have for your school when it comes to the stuff that you've been learning in your internships?

MOHAMMAD: I think not just my school but a lot of schools should have observability as, like, I don't know if it's a mandatory course but at least have it as an option. Because I think, based on what I've seen this year so far, it's a huge help to at least people who might want to go into SRE and look into larger systems. And you'll need proper troubleshooting and not just dig through logs and stuff. So I think this should be a part of the curriculum in some manner. 

ADRIANA: That's a really cool point because regardless of where you end up in your career in tech, troubleshooting is a key aspect. And observability unlocks so much of that, and getting you into a troubleshooting mindset, not just learning how to troubleshoot but having the right information to troubleshoot, is so, so critical. 

And yes, a lot of it is learned on the job, but I think there's something to be said for being exposed to that even in school. Because school I found is so theoretical and so jarring when you go from like, oh, I got whatever 90% in whatever databases course. [laughs] And then you go and work with the real database, and you're like, oh, shit, [laughs] it's so much more complicated.

ANA: Theory to practice is not just like a level up. We're talking about 10-15 levels of like; you can take the theory concepts and bring them into school. But when we look at most technology companies, even microservices to monoliths, there are a lot of moving pieces. Even if you work at a startup with three engineers, there's a lot of code and parts of your infrastructure that are been worked on that you ended up realizing that you may have only focused on a certain part, or you really understand compilers in code but not how anything plugs into one another. 

ADRIANA: Yeah, so true. 

ANA: For me, one of the things that I...I do a lot of work with education non-profits of bringing in folks into tech. And one of the biggest things that I am a huge proponent of is, one, internships. Getting real-life experience while you're going through education is so important to me because it's like, are you even studying something you would want to do, or are you just chasing money? Or you're like following your parents’ footsteps.

Then the part around project-based learning, I think project-based learning is one of the great ways to learn together, build something, get comfortable with failure once again and iterate. A lot of folks that do those are able to uplevel the next time they get to their next class and stuff.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true. It reminds me of doing design projects in university, and that was the closest you got to the project-based learning where you're trying to have a real-life example of stuff which is cool, very stressful too. [laughs] 

One thing that I wanted to ask so, Ana, you know, being in the States, is co-op a thing in the States? I wasn't sure. It's a huge thing in these parts and in Toronto, definitely Toronto area. Is it a thing there? Or is it mostly just internships between, like, in the summer kind of thing?

ANA: You're making me go back to when I first heard about University of Waterloo and learning about their co-op program and being angry that I wasn't going to a co-op school. It was one of those things where it's like; I would help hire interns at Uber. And we would look at their resumes, and it's like they're coming in with four internships at companies, and a lot of them were big tech, of course. And you just spent a year working in the field but working with so many amazing minds.

Like, of course, I would love to just interview you and get to know of your skill set. But when it comes to preparing students for the workforce, preparing them for the future, it's beautiful. I was never able to find a university in The United States that had it. I'm sure there are a few that do have it that are more underground networks. 

But I started coding at a really young age. And one of the reasons that kept me going is that I had an internship at 15 years old that made me realize, oh, people say that I could not sit in a cubicle and code? Yeah, I can. That internship was like; you should actually go study something in tech. You get to learn of your strengths. You get to be upleveled by peers, and you have a support network that's growing and that's rooting for you. 

A lot of people want to root for you to be in the field. There are going to be a lot of folks that are going to push you out and make you feel like you don't belong. But at the end of the day, most of us are really trying to create a place that's inclusive, especially nowadays.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. One thing I was wondering, Mohammad, could you tell folks a little bit about where you go to school, what program you're studying, and how the co-op program works there?

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, sure. So I go to McMaster University. I'm in my final year. And how co-op basically works in McMaster is you can basically take either 4-month terms, 8-month terms, 12 months, or even 16 months. And these can be, I think, anytime in your four years, and you can get a co-op certification on your degree if you complete at least 12 months in your four years or five years if it's a management or a society program as well.

ADRIANA: So you get a break from school, and you get paid. 

MOHAMMAD: Yeah. Honestly, for me, it's just the experience. The pay is obviously a really good thing. But I just want the experience, and I'm happy.

ANA: When I think about my education experience and my work experience, I came at it from a different perspective where it was, like, school was really expensive. I'm really depressed. I don't want to do this. I just want to code and work on really cool stuff that I ended up dropping out. 

Sometimes it makes me wonder if a different type of school, a different system, one where I felt more welcome, that I could ask more questions, or a tighter community would have made me stay. Now, as you mentioned, you can do various co-ops while you're studying, like, you get the best of both worlds. Because for me, it was the financial burden of going to school versus getting a high-paying tech job.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so true. That's so true. And it really goes to say, too, about the choice of university because some schools some programs are huge and so full of so many smart people that you yourself are smart, but then there's genius level, and that can be so overwhelming. And I remember in university being in a class full of people who were doing this high-level calculus class. And everyone seemed to get what the hell was going on. 

And I'm like, oh my God, why don't I understand what's going on? I feel like the world's dumbest person. And it wasn't that I was dumb; it was just I was surrounded by people who were way, way, way smarter than me. And that can really, really mess with your self-esteem. Being in an environment where you feel supported, you feel like you're in a safe place to learn, you feel as smart as you know you are, I think is important, right?

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, I think you basically hit it on the head. Obviously, I think my experience would have been way different if I didn't have this internship because I feel like I would go into the workforce a bit not prepared. But now, after I finish my final year, I'll feel much more safe to go into the workforce versus if I didn't have this opportunity.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. What do you think you'll apply for when you finish your fourth year of university?

MOHAMMAD: I'm open to anything, to be honest, but maybe a dev role or somewhere where I can work a bit more on the developer side. But at the same time, now, with this opportunity that I received, I want to be able to incorporate observability in whatever I'm planning on doing in the future.

ADRIANA: That's awesome because if you end up with a dev role right out of school, you could be like, yo, let's instrument our code. [laughs] Or if they're already instrumenting their code, you have that knowledge already, which is super cool. That's awesome.

ANA: Do you feel like right now, with your role of focusing on observability, you find you're really missing the dev side?

MOHAMMAD: Actually, I feel like if I split up my internship, the first part of it was very dev-oriented because I remember Adriana gave us the task of starting to just getting to know OpenTelemetry. So this was basically done by having examples of instrumenting code and stuff. So I did get a bit of experience there. 

And then, we went on to trying to spread this information so more like learning sessions for the entire company and reaching out to teams to see if they need any help. We're still continuing that, I guess. But now we want to get back into instrumenting code. Because recently, we were working on a logging solution for teams who we wanted to be able to have them send logs to whatever backend they needed to. So we're going to be going back into the instrumenting very soon.

ANA: Nice. It's like a good, fun balance of picking up new tools but then going back to a lot of what you already are comfortable with too. With starting to look at OpenTelemetry, was that one of the first open-source projects you came about?

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, for sure. I was not looking into many open-source projects before. But when I first started, at least Adriana mentioned that this was our mission, to have our company be able to use OpenTelemetry. And I liked the idea of having an open system where we would be able to choose any vendor that we wanted to. So this was basically my first go at it.

ANA: Did you ever feel inclined to contribute to the project? I'm curious because I've always struggled with contributing to open source, a lot of impostor syndrome. But the more I get involved in it, I'm like, this is really great.

MOHAMMAD: Oh, yeah. In the future, I probably will want to contribute to open-source projects. But yeah, I did have a bit of a scared feeling because I was always of the mindset like, oh, what if people don't approve my PR? [laughs] What if it's not good enough? But yeah, I do want to contribute in the future for sure.

ADRIANA: I know how you feel because the first time I contributed to open source, which was earlier this year, was for OpenTelemetry docs. And I was like, oh my God, what if they hate the stuff I contributed? It's funny because yesterday we were talking to someone about open source, and he was like, my dream would be to have my PR rejected by Linus Torvalds. 

MOHAMMAD: [laughs]

ADRIANA: And I'm like, oh my God. [laughter] Yeah, I think I could aspire to that too, actually. I wouldn't mind that rejection. [laughs] But it's totally, like, the fear is real. Even if you open source your own work, you're putting it out there for the world. And you're going to have the haters, and you're going to have the fanboys and fangirls. It's a scary prospect.

ANA: It's like a very vulnerable position. But that's actually maybe something that would be awesome to be taught in school, like, learn in the open because the conversation we were having yesterday around open source was this being a great way to fail fast, iterate, and improve. 

And when we think about a lot of the work that you do within technology, and development, and observability, incident response, all these things, you have to be building upon the knowledge that you had the week prior. And when we think about open source, it's like, you're now looking at a distributed world that everyone is able to mindshare. And we could actually move faster by doing situations like that. 

At the same time, there are a lot of parts of open source that will slow you down. But there's that aspect of building in the open means that other minds are able to give you feedback of like, oh, maybe you should actually think about writing that piece of code. The function could be a little bit more optimized if you were to just change the variables or maybe even use an environment variable, so you don't have to be passing it through your functions. [laughs] So I think those things are things that I looked back on, and I was like, I would have been a better engineer if I would have started contributing to open source earlier.

ADRIANA: Yeah, because you get those little pro tips that you wouldn't normally get. I don't know about you, but I felt for the longest time in my tech career, I actually lacked a proper tech mentor, someone who could sit down and show me some really awesome coding practices. And I didn't get one until much later in my career, and I'm so grateful for that. But I think it's so, so important to have a person or a group of people that you can turn to who will flat out say, "Hey, maybe look at doing it this way. Don't do it that way." 

And I found pair programming was a great way to do that but pairing with the right person because I'm not the person who can pair with just anyone. So yeah, Mohammad, I know you mentioned that you had the buddy system when you were getting started. How was that in terms of learning, helping to improve your craft, if you will? What were the surprising findings from that?

MOHAMMAD: For me, at least, I was learning a lot of new concepts because I think at that time, OpenTelemetry was obviously new to me. So we had a senior before. He was able to really explain the concepts well. And he would sometimes allow me to try new things, and we would bounce ideas off of each other. And he was very open to listening to my ideas. So I feel like Adriana said, you need to have the right person beside you because some people may not be so open to your ideas or may oppose them but not really explain why it's not the right way. 

ADRIANA: Oh, so true. Yeah, the stodgy developer persona. Stay away.

[laughter]

ANA: As you're growing your expertise in the field, how do you feel about actually now mentoring someone else?

MOHAMMAD: Actually, right now, we have another intern that Adriana interviewed before coming here. And I've been able to help him a lot along the way, not as much in OpenTelemetry because of our project that we were working on. But now that that's basically finished, we'll be able to dive deep into OpenTelemetry again. I'm finished on the 19th, so I'll have however much days until then to try and pave the way for him so he can have a successful internship.

ANA: What are you most excited about the last few days of your internship, like the last three weeks, I think?

MOHAMMAD: I guess for me to get back into OpenTelemetry with full force, and we have a lot of services in our company, and to see some of them being instrumented properly. Like, we have a tracing library that is currently being worked on. And before, it was using OpenTracing, but we are trying to migrate it to OpenTelemetry. And we're basically trying to finish that library with OpenTelemetry. So once that's done, I think having other services use that library and be integrated with OpenTelemetry would be a nice way to finish off this internship. 

ANA: That's awesome. 

ADRIANA: Well, the other thing that I want to mention, if I recall correctly, didn't you write a blog post? 

MOHAMMAD: Oh, yes, I did. [laughs]

ADRIANA: I think we should...why don't you talk a little bit about that?

MOHAMMAD: So I'd never written a blog post before. And Adriana is like the blog queen. [laughs] She really got our company into a blog post. So I remember we were facing this issue before with one of our colleagues, and he was in another team. And he had an issue because of the headers of Datadog and OpenTelemetry not matching formats. 

So we had to look into propagating p3 headers, which basically can be used for both OpenTelemetry and other vendors as well. So we had to help him integrate that into his project. So that was a really interesting journey that we went on. And I was able to write a blog post about this, which you can find on Medium.

ADRIANA: Yeah, look it up under storiesfromtheherd.com.

ANA: Nice. And we'll make sure to link that on the show notes, so make sure to check that out. I think as we think about you are getting close to wrapping up your co-op, if you had an entire other co-op term and you could stick to the same team, or you'd go to a different company, different organization, what would you want to be doing?

MOHAMMAD: Probably looking into more interesting projects and trying to...now that I've been here for a while and doing observability, I want to be able to apply observability into whatever I'm doing as well, whether that's developing or SRE, whatever it is. I want to be able to apply observability into my daily work because I feel like it would really help.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. So what was your favorite thing of the...now you get to reflect on almost a year as an intern. What was your favorite thing that you got to do while you were on your internship?

MOHAMMAD: There are a lot of things, obviously. But I feel like the very beginning; I was able to bridge a bit of development and integrate it with observability. So that first part was really interesting. I did work on another project as well recently, which we are basically wrapping up, but that wasn't really related to observability. But that was also a big project that we worked on. So I think those were really interesting things I did.

And along the way also, helping other teams was a big thing. And we have this helpdesk system where we can help teams with observability-related questions. So I feel like that was really important for me to be able to look into more troubleshooting. So a lot of things that went really well I hope to take into my next opportunity.

ADRIANA: So, do you feel like you've improved as a troubleshooter now over the last year?

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, for sure. Because I remember [laughs] my first week here, I was really scared. I think this was way back in September or something. And I would get really scared when someone would ask a question, but now I feel like I'm able to at least look into the proper documentation. And we had this document where we were able to have all of our issues and how we would best troubleshoot them, so building documentation and getting experience in problems that we might see really helped throughout the process.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. Yay documentation.

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, documentation is much better when you're doing it for work versus [laughs] school. I don't mind it as much for work.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so true. I hated writing papers for school, but I'll blog anytime, any day, any hour. It's so funny. [laughs]

ANA: She is so fast at writing blogs which is always really amazing. So make sure to check out all her content on Observability Mythbusters and all these other places where she's writing her thoughts. You mentioned you were supporting other teams with instrumentation. What was that role like? How did that feel?

MOHAMMAD: We wanted to use a library because before, teams were using a library to instrument their code, and that library was using OpenTracing. So basically, it was kind of getting to know the library and how to use it properly and showing that to other teams who weren't as familiar with using the library. Because before, I think teams were more focused on other issues but getting them to find the time to instrument their code and use the library was challenging, but we're still working on that. And hopefully, by the end of my time here, we are able to get a lot of services instrumented. 

ANA: Definitely have that hope for you too. It would be really rad to wrap up with onboarding a few more users on it.

ADRIANA: Have you seen a difference in the last year in terms of the attitude of folks around observability and even OpenTelemetry adoption? Like, are you seeing any positive change right now? As you take a step back, what's your assessment? Because you essentially joined in the beginning of when the change was happening, so it was a very unique position.

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, I remember when I first joined, we had our stack for observability; this was like way back when. We still didn't really have a direction. But I remember Adriana mentioning that we were going to be using OpenTelemetry. And before, I think teams were just fine with the current way things were going with the current vendor we were having. But as we managed to grow into the company, we noticed that teams were having a lot of trouble with our current vendor. 

So I think as time went on, teams began to understand the importance of OpenTelemetry because being locked into one vendor and if that vendor isn't suiting your needs properly is a very bad thing. So now teams see that, and they're willing to look into OpenTelemetry so that we can find the proper vendor that suits our needs best.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. Yay, success story for OpenTelemetry.

ANA: For anyone that's listening that feels very intimidated to pick up OpenTelemetry, do you have any words of advice?

MOHAMMAD: I would say, for sure, look into OpenTelemetry because the beautiful thing about OpenTelemetry is that it's open. So it's not really a lock-in and stuff. You're not being locked into something. Versus if you were to, let's say, choose a vendor and instrument code using that vendor's library, and if suppose that vendor wasn’t meeting your needs, then it would be much harder to migrate onto another vendor. But with OpenTelemetry, you have the option to move to other vendors because a lot of vendors are currently supporting OpenTelemetry, and this will continue to grow in the future. So I believe OpenTelemetry is and will be the way.

ADRIANA: Woo-hoo. Love it. This was such a great plug for OTel. 

[laughter]

ANA: It makes me wonder around something that I had to deal with when I was coming to the industry that was around vendor lock-in. Is this the first time that you deal with it, and you have to optimize for using something that prevents that vendor lock-in?

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, for sure. As my time went on, I was able to see a lot of flaws about lock-in into one of the vendors versus if you had OpenTelemetry. I think the ultimate goal was to have OpenTelemetry and be able to experiment with different vendors and find the ones that best suit our needs. So I feel like OpenTelemetry is a start. And based on OpenTelemetry, you can identify which vendor suits your needs best. And if anything changes, then you can always switch to another vendor, even if you have OpenTelemetry. So yeah, vendor lock-in was an issue for me in my time here.

ANA: Are there any questions that you would want devs, engineers to be thinking about when they're considering vendor lock-ins, like, things to optimize for or ways to test them?

MOHAMMAD: For sure, you would want to look into how visualization is being done because I know that's a big thing. Different people like to see the data visualized in different ways. If you are sure that that vendor is right for you, I mean, you can stick to it. But in the future, you might see your use cases changing. So at least with OpenTelemetry, you will be able to look into other vendors as well. So I would say be open to using OpenTelemetry because you could still use the current vendor you're using, and you can change in the future. 

ADRIANA: Best of both worlds.

MOHAMMAD: Yeah.

ANA: That's really awesome. I had always heard about OpenTelemetry, but I never dove in until my current role. I was always like, I don't understand observability, and I will not do observability. That's someone else's job.

[laughter]

ADRIANA: And now you're knee-deep into it.

ANA: Yes. Constantly learning about it and constantly being like, Adriana, I don't understand why there are four ways to implement OTel. She just recently told me about Launchers, and I was mind blown.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. Even me the stuff that I learned when I was at Tucows now, I'm forced to dig deeper. And I'm like, oh my God, this is, like, my mind is hurting from all this, but it's so cool too. Constant learning is the best. For me personally, that's what I always look for in a job is a place where I'm never bored, so yeah.

How about you, Mohammad? What's your top thing that you look for now that you've had practically a year of work under your belt? What are the qualities in a company that you look for for your full-time role?

MOHAMMAD: I guess it boils down to two main things. One is like, am I interested in the current work I'm doing? Are there cool or interesting projects for me to work on? And I guess the other thing I learned throughout my time here was the importance of group or team dynamic because I felt like that was huge in my development here. Because I had the right people around me, I was able to learn a lot and do my job to the best of my ability. So I feel like those two are my top most important things to look for.

ANA: So, for any folks that are listening to the podcast and are looking to hire and your organization has some of the qualities Mohammad mentioned, definitely reach back out to him via LinkedIn. [laughs]

ADRIANA: That's right. He's looking for a job after fourth year. [laughs] So, a question for you not related to work. So you'll have a little bit of a break between finishing your term and starting fourth year. What are you going to do?

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, I still haven't thought of that yet. But I guess just hanging out with my friends, nothing too serious. I mean, we went on a trip recently to Disney World, I think in the week of Canada Day. So yeah, that was basically it. We're still deciding if we want to do something in the long weekend that's coming up.

ADRIANA: Did most of your class go on co-op, or was it 50-50? Like, what was the split?

MOHAMMAD: I know a couple of people, but it was a split because there were some who did theirs in the summer and then some who did it the entire year this year. It was like a split of different things. And then some people just wanted to finish school. So I guess it was all around the place. But yeah, I don't really have a number for estimating how the distribution was. 

ADRIANA: So you'll definitely see some new faces and some old faces when you return for your final year. 

MOHAMMAD: Yeah, for sure. For sure.

ADRIANA: I was one of the I want to graduate as quickly as possible people. And so, University of Toronto had a 12 to 16-month internship as well. And I remember in my final year, I'm like, who are all these people? [laughter] Because they were the ones coming back from their internship. I'm like, I don't recognize half of you people. So it was definitely a really interesting year. It was like starting all over again because you're meeting new people again rather than the same old, same old that you've been going to school with for the last three years. So that was kind of cool.

ANA: I'm kind of jealous of co-ops in general; the idea of being able to stay with the workforce for a year sounds like a lot of fun. Most of my internships were three to four months, and then one of them converted into three summers, and freelancing and going back full time. But it was always that you can learn a lot in three to four months, launch a project, take it to production. But being able to have that safe space of a team, like team dynamics, means so much. And feeling empowered, feeling like you're heard, feeling like you're contributing to a greater cause really does bring it in together.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so, so true. As a student, you get the most out of a one-year internship, I would feel anyway. If I'd done that, I probably would have felt that. But it can be such a slippery slope because what if you interview for a position and the interview is great, and then you start the job, and you're like, oh my God, what fresh hell is this? And I'm stuck here for a year. [laughs] That's a massive fear as well. [laughs] Did you have any friends like that, Mohammad, who had a bad experience and had to drop out partway through a co-op term, or have you heard all happy stories?

MOHAMMAD: I've heard of one person who had an option to extend, but they didn't like the place.

ADRIANA: [laughs]

MOHAMMAD: So they didn't extend it, and they found another place. So that's basically the only story I have about that.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's not too bad. At least they had options; options are good.

ANA: During your co-op, have you ever considered leaving school? I ask as a person who has left, just always wondering. [laughs]

MOHAMMAD: I don't think that that's crossed my mind. But I wish this was a full-time thing [laughs], and I didn't have to go back. Because once you get into it, I guess it's like, this is the life, but yeah, I got to finish that final year.

ANA: That's very exciting. Yeah, I feel like you're so close to the finish line. It's a little hard to give up, [laughs] which major respect to you and everyone that's stuck to their university schedule.

ADRIANA: Although also, I have to say major respect to you for realizing that's not for me. I can build a successful career without having to finish school.

ANA: I'm a huge believer in everyone learns differently, and you just have to figure out what works for you. And some older person telling me what to do in front of a classroom did not work for me. 

ADRIANA: [laughs]

ANA: I was like, I hate this. I'm going to teach myself, and the last schooling that I did, I wouldn't show up to class. I would just turn in homework and try to show up for the test. And that was really hard because it was like, you got to go to a lecture. [laughs]

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. I still have nightmares, like, recurring dreams for the last 20 years. It's been 20 years since I graduated university, and I still have the recurring dream of, like, I'm at the homestretch and I'm writing an exam for a class that I haven't attended. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm not going to graduate. [laughs] Cool, I think we're almost at time. But before we sign off, do you have any pieces of advice that you want to give to anybody who's looking to do their first internship?

MOHAMMAD: I would say just go into it with an open mind. There might be things that interest you. There might be things that seem scary at first, but just go into it with an open mind and don't hesitate to ask questions.

ADRIANA: Yes, yes. I think that's a really great piece of advice.

ANA: That's amazing words of advice for anyone going into any job, or career change, or coming back into the workforce.

ADRIANA: That's right. It still applies even when you've been 20 years in your career like me, still continue to ask questions. [laughs]

ANA: Even when you're jaded, always ask questions. [laughs]

ADRIANA: Oh, yeah, yeah, it's true. I try to unjade myself. Actually, I've been lucky that the last few jobs I've enjoyed, so it's helped in my unjade-ing. 

Cool. Well, thank you so much, Mohammad, for joining us. Signing off from On-Call Me Maybe this is Adriana Villela with my awesome co-host...

ANA: This is Ana Margarita Medina. Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to check out our show notes on oncallmemaybe.com. And make sure to connect with us and our amazing guests via social media, whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter.

MOHAMMAD: It's been great fun being here. Thanks to Adriana and Ana. Signing off with peace, love, and code.