Tech Origin Stories

About The Hosts:

Adriana is a Sr. Developer Advocate at Lightstep, based out of Toronto, Canada, with over 20 years of experience in tech. She focuses on helping companies achieve reliability greatness through Observability and Incident Response practices. Before Lightstep, she was a Sr. Manager at Tucows/Wavelo. During this time, she defined technical direction in the organization, running both a Platform Engineering team and an Observability Practices team. Adriana has also worked at various large-scale enterprises, including Bank of Montreal (BMO), Ceridian, and Accenture. At BMO, she was responsible for defining and driving the bank's enterprise-wide DevOps practice, which impacted business and technology teams across multiple geographic locations across the globe. Adriana has a widely-read technical blog on Medium, which is known for its casual and approachable tone to complex technical topics, and its high level of technical detail. She is also a HashiCorp Ambassador. Find her on Twitter at @adrianamvillela to talk all things tech.

Ana Margarita is a Staff Developer Advocate at Lightstep and focuses on helping companies be more reliable by leveraging Observability and Incident Response practices. Before Lightstep, she was a Senior Chaos Engineer at Gremlin and helped companies avoid outages by running proactive chaos engineering experiments. She has also worked at various-sized companies, including Google, Uber, SFEFCU, and Miami-based startups. Ana is an internationally recognized speaker and has presented at: AWS re:Invent, KubeCon, DockerCon, DevOpDays, AllDayDevOps, Write/Speak/Code, and many others. Catch her tweeting at @Ana_M_Medina about traveling, diversity in tech, and mental health.

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Transcript:

ANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to On-Call Me Maybe Podcast, where we talk about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, and everything in between. Who are we talking to today?

ADRIANA: Well, we're talking to us, actually. I'm Adriana Villela with...

ANA: Ana Margarita Medina.

ADRIANA: And we're, I guess, interviewing each other.

ANA: Yeah. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe, Podcast. You'll get to learn a little bit more about me and Adriana.

ADRIANA: Yeah. And I think, for starters, maybe we should tell our listeners what we're drinking today.

ANA: We make sure that our guests and our hosts are always having a beverage. And my drink of choice for the day is just regular H2O. What about yours, Adriana?

ADRIANA: Yep, I've got a nice glass of water next to me, keeping me nice and hydrated. It's a pretty hot day in Toronto, where I'm from. So we are definitely seeing some very summery weather. How about you? Where are you located, Ana?

ANA: I'm over in the San Francisco Bay Area. And it's also hot summer weather for us right now, so I'm trying to make sure that I'm constantly drinking water.

ADRIANA: Awesome. So I guess let's dig into it. Let's maybe talk a little bit. So one of the things I always like talking about is people's origin stories, like, what got them into tech? What excites them about tech? What got them to where they are now? You and I were chatting earlier, and I think you have a really cool story. So why don't we start with you?

ANA: Thanks. I do have a very untraditional story, and I'm definitely pretty proud of it. I actually got into tech by curiosity. I was taking an introduction to computer class, and my professor was teaching us Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and lovely Microsoft Publisher. When we were using Microsoft Publisher, of course, there was a button that was called insert HTML. I was in sixth grade. I had no knowledge of what HTML was.

And I went, back in the day, on altavista.com, if anyone remembers. And I was like, what is HTML? [laughs] Hypertext Markup Language. Yeah, this seems interesting. And I got a chance to copy some tutorial that gave me some code, put it into Publisher. And all of a sudden, I see an embedded image into my website. Then I was like, what is this other part of building websites, CSS? And I started diving into that. And as I learned HTML and CSS, I started putting together how you make websites.

This was also around the era that MySpace was a thing. So as I learned CSS for my school projects and for fun, I then started curating MySpace layouts for all my friends and online friends that I never met. That's kind of when I started being like, this whole coding, talking to a computer really started making sense for me.

And fast forward two-three years later, I decided to launch my own freelance business, like, a little creative studio that gave services around web design, graphic design, motion graphics, photography. I was super young while I did that. I was now having income and an ability to help my family.

And fast forward years later, when it came to what do you want to do with your life? I wanted to study architecture. I learned I can't draw. I remember computers are my friends. And I asked around friends who were working with computers at the credit union where I was interning, "What did you study?" They told me, "Computer science, computer engineering." So I decided to embark on my studies to study computer science. I went to college in Miami, and I transferred to University of California Santa Cruz to pursue a bachelor's.

After six, seven months out here, I realized that school wasn't meant for me. I was more of a self-taught learner, and I wanted to just go back to the field. And I got a chance to go back to that credit union where I interned at. I got a job there as a software engineer again. And just three, four months later, I got a call from another Silicon Valley company that wanted me to come out to the Bay Area to work for them.

So I came out to San Francisco in 2016 and embarked at Uber as a software engineer. And from Uber, I moved on to Gremlin as a chaos engineering SaaS company. And I joined Lightstep in May 2022 to do a little bit more of developer advocacy work with SREs and DevOps engineers on how to make their systems more reliable and build better cultures.

ADRIANA: Cool. That's so awesome. It's definitely different from my career path. So I was exposed to programming when I was 10 when my dad, who is a math major and learns programming languages for fun, comes to me, and he's like, "Hey, let me show you something cool," and he taught me BASIC. So even though I was programming since I was 10, I didn't really derive any enjoyment from it because I found it really frustrating.

And so when I went into university, I'm like, I never want to code again. I wanted to design spaceships because I was and still am a huge Star Trek fan. So I'm like, yes, this is what I want to do with my life; I want to be an aerospace engineer. So I applied to go to school for aerospace engineering and realized, first of all, that I didn't want to be in the aerospace engineering program at University of Toronto because I was surrounded by people who were so incredibly brilliant that I was like, oh my God, I can't handle this.

So I transferred to mechanical engineering thinking, okay, well, I can still do the aerospace thing as a mechanical engineer, no problem. I even got an internship at the Canadian Space Agency one summer and at the DaimlerChrysler Aerospace another summer. I'm like, okay, I'm lined up to do the aerospace engineering thing. And then I realized, like, oh, you know what? I actually like coding. My internships at both were coding-related. So I'm like, oh, I actually like coding. But then, at that point, I'm like, um, I don't want to transfer to a computer engineering program. So let me just stick with what I have.

But then I didn't want to stay in mechanical engineering, so I switched to industrial engineering because some of the courses offered were more computery. So I actually took some of the same courses that my computer engineering friends took. And I'm like, whatever, I'm going to go into software when I graduate, whatever. I'll just get this degree and be done with it. And then I ended up doing software for a living as I had decided after I decided I wanted nothing to do with computers. [laughs]

But my first role was as a tester, which I personally hated. I have a great appreciation for testing because of this role. But I personally did not enjoy it because I wanted to be writing code. And I was so frustrated by the fact that I was breaking things. And I wanted to be fixing things, not breaking them and waiting around for others to fix things. I like to be in the driver's seat, so this was not [laughs] very conducive to my personality. That's how I got into software.

ANA: I think it's funny you mentioned breaking things because for me, when I eventually transitioned to chaos engineering, it was that I can break things. But I also had the knowledge to fix them and the full opportunity to do it, and that's when I had the most fun. But when I had done some QA at an internship before, it was like, I can't fix anything. I don't know what's going on, like; this is really annoying.

So it's funny how sometimes, when you only see one side of the puzzle, you really get aggravated, and you think that's all of tech until you talk to more people. You're like; there's a lot of other parts that come together into this complex ecosystem that we call technology.

ADRIANA: Exactly. And also, if you stay tuned for a later episode, we'll actually dig into some more of that with relation to testing and where you can take your testing to the next level. So it's an incentive to keep listening to us if you're not already enamored by our wonderful stories and our wonderful voices. [laughs]

ANA: There are definitely some amazing guests that we have for this season. I'm very excited to be sharing with folks. It's actually one of the favorite things about the job that Adriana and I have; we get to help engineers tell stories about how they're working in tech. They're operating complex systems, and they're trying to make their software, and their companies, and the projects that they work on a little bit better.

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. And actually, that's one of the things I love so much about advocacy work is that you get to connect with so many cool people and learn about their stories but also try to share how to make things better. I feel like ever since I started my career, I was so horrified by people cutting corners or writing crappy code. I'm a huge fan of beautiful code. I'll write beautiful code, and I'll sit there and admire it [laughs] and go, oh, look at that beautiful code I wrote.

So I get so aggravated when I don't see beautiful code and to be able...and I know it's not a perfect world. You're not always going to have beautiful code, but to be able to at least talk to people and promote the beauty in software and to help further the cause, if anything, so that we can have better, more resilient systems, better-written software, more beautiful code, I think that's a really cool aspect of this job.

ANA: You're also fairly recent to advocacy work. But when did you really start contributing to communities and teaching people how to build better systems, write beautiful code, and such?

ADRIANA: I'd say it's been often on, but I think the most I'd say consistent would be I think it was 2020 when I started my blog on Medium. And it was just me, I guess, partly ranting about things. I'd just come off of doing a role where I was running a DevOps coaching and practices team at a financial institution. And so it was a cool role because I learned so much from my team of DevOps coaches on really what proper DevOps is all about. And I really wanted to just share that knowledge with the world.

And at the same time, I'd also started digging more into Kubernetes and doing some problem-solving. I'd played a lot with Argo CD, and I'd played a lot with Azure. So I wanted to really share some of my learnings because one of my biggest pet peeves in reading tech blogs, for example, is that it feels like they're half written. Like, someone solves a problem, and you're like, oh, great, this is the thing that I'm looking for.

And they start describing it, and then partway through, it's like they got tired of writing. And it is; writing a technical blog post is freaking exhausting. I think my technical blog posts take way longer to write than my more thought leadership-y ones. And so I really wanted to go into like the gory, excruciating detail in the blog posts so that I could give people everything that they needed to be able to solve a problem that took me weeks and weeks to figure out. So yeah, I'd say it was through my blogging.

I had done a few talks in Toronto in 2019 around some of the DevOps work that my team and I had been doing, where we had codified the creation of DevOps pipelines for different teams across the organization. So we found ourselves, like, we're trying to coach teams on DevOps best practices. And then we realized, well, you can say what you will like till the cows come home in terms of best practices, but people will always go off course if you will. And we're trying to save them from themselves.

So we actually wrote software to codify best practices. So I did a couple of talks around how to codify standard pipelines but still giving teams wiggle room to make customizations that they needed. But we just wanted to give them the guardrails so that they could follow effective DevOps practices so that they could get the velocity and the safety that the DevOps promises.

So it's funny because I feel like all my life, I've always wanted to be a developer advocate. And for the longest time, I didn't even realize that there was a job about this. And then, when Austin approached me about a developer advocacy role at Lightstep, I'm like, oh my God, you're speaking my language. This was the coolest thing. How about you, Ana? How did you get into developer advocacy? You're a pro. You've been doing this for a while now, right?

ANA: It's weird to realize that I've been doing it for a job for...this would be year number six for me, which I still feel like a baby in DevRel space and in developer advocacy space. But it's funny; I kind of have a similar story where this is everything I've been doing for a while. And all of a sudden, I learned that it's a career. It's a job; it's not just a software engineer that cares about community.

But for me, I would say I got started in 2012. 2012 was the first year where I started going on stage. I started teaching other people how to code. At that time, I was working with Google. And it was like, helping promote scholarships, helping promote summer programs that they offered. And then, I decided to do Android applications. I was learning Java. So all of a sudden, I was within the Android Google ecosystem. And I also had Google Glass and building HTML websites to play with Google Glass. So it was something that I was doing without knowing what I was doing.

So when I finally got my breaking point into, hey, you now work for a developer platform team, you're working in advocacy; you're working with partners, it was like, oh, I can do engineering, and I can do marketing, and I can use my analytical side, and I can use my creative side. Like, this is perfect. Like, for me, this was something I had actually done in 2010 when I was with the credit union where I was coding mobile responsive websites for the credit union who needed to move with time. This was when responsive websites were becoming really big. Everyone was starting to get mobile devices. They needed mobile banking to be done.

And I would do my 40 hours, like, my 30-something hours, and then I would go hide in the marketing office and help them build marketing campaigns on why credit unions were better than banks. [laughs] I literally was volunteering my time to do this.

And I started to do more work as a developer advocate at Gremlin, where I was working with marketing. I was working with engineering. I was on call. I was building slide decks. I was building designs. I was talking to the community. I was like, this is literally the perfect thing. I context switch all the time. I like being able to follow trends, but I also like getting to the nitty-gritty. So to me, it's always felt like I'm at the right place.

And as I work more with communities, it's always, like, seeing them be successful gives me a sense of successfulness as well. It's like, oh, cool; now you get to go and pass the baton on to the next person. Like, I taught you the introduction, but now you're going, and you're writing a blog about 102, 103-level type of stuff. So it's just planting seeds, and I really like it.

And sometimes, you do all that work without realizing that you have a huge passion for it. And the community work makes you realize that there are other roles for you in your career that you don't have to just limit yourself to a nine-to-five engineer or just collaborating on open source, that we have a lot more spaces nowadays to give back to each other and do advocacy work I would say.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's so true. That's one of the things that I really enjoy about this job is, as you said, the constant context switching. I can pick at something for a while that tickles my fancy that I want to explore so then I can write about it. But then I can context switch to something else. Like, I joined Lightstep a little bit before you. I think it was end of April of this year.

And one of the things that I got to do...so, first of all, super excited that I was able to right off the bat crank out a few blog posts. But then, I was able to contribute to improving some of the OpenTelemetry documentation, which for me was super exciting because I'm a huge fan of the OpenTelemetry project. And to be able to work on open source as part of my job is so, so cool.

And then I got to context switch to another little thing that came up from writing one of my blog posts, which was trace tests, which supports basically writing tests using your OpenTelemetry traces. So I got to dig a little bit into that.

So I feel like I've learned so much in the short bit of time that I've been here. And in some ways, like, I've never worked harder at this than...like, I've been working very hard at this role. But it doesn't feel like hard work because it's so much fun. I feel like every day I come into work, I'm like, what? This is my job for real? Like, this is so cool.

ANA: There are definitely some parts of the job that it's like that. It's like, I get to do fun things that I really enjoy and I would try to do on my free time and get paid for it. But it's also hard to balance at times because it's easy work; it's a fun job. I've had multiple times where I'm like, oh, it's 3:00 in the morning, and I want to crank out code because I love what I'm doing. And then it's like, let's have healthy boundaries [laughs] and go to bed instead.

So that was something that I talk a lot about, like finding that balance and making sure that you do take weekends to yourself and that you're recharging. Because community is always going to be there, and you need to put that air mask on your face first before you can help someone else. So you really got to make sure you're taking care of yourself when you're doing advocacy work. Like, it's a lot of engineering work. It's creative work. And then there's the emotional work that goes into helping one another.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true. And I remember the piece of advice that Austin gave me when I joined, which is like it's very easy to find yourself saying yes to a lot of things and get overloaded as a DevRel, and you just have to start saying no. And it's so much easier to say no to things that don't interest you. But when you've got a jillion things that really interest you, you're just tempted to say yes. But like you said, you have to put those boundaries on.

I have a hard time sometimes switching off my brain because I get so excited. Like, you and I recorded a podcast episode last Thursday. And it was so much fun the recording that we did that I was completely wired for days after that. But it's important to tell yourself, no, you know what? It's good that you're excited but, brain, please switch off. Like, it's okay to rest, take a break, recharge. And that goes not just for DevRel but for anyone across our industry.

Because as engineers...I know for sure I can speak for myself. When I get on a problem, I obsess over it until it gets solved, even though I know that stepping away from it is the best thing that I can do, but I just find myself sitting there for hours and hours and hours. And I have to constantly remind myself, like, step away. Please step away from the computer right now so that you don't burn out.

ANA: Yeah, preventing burnouts is really critical. I definitely try to give heads up to folks when I see them working a lot. I'm like, hey, just be careful. Do whatever you want. But just keep in mind that this is something that can happen, or these are some questions that you can ask yourself to check in to see how you're doing.

But I think when I look back at my full-time engineering roles, it was easier to burn out then. I mean, I did burn out. I ended up hospitalized. I burnt out quite bad. And it was that where having less context switching meant that I could focus more, and I could spend more hours on stuff. And there were also more solo projects, which is less interruptions and just coding.

And when you get amazing ideas at 8:00 p.m., if you look at the clock, it's 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, and you're still at the office, and you're like, this is okay. There are 20 other people at the office with me. And you know what? Not okay, [laughs] like, go home, spend some time resting. Try again in the morning. And this is also, like, the podcast is about On-Call Me Maybe. And we're going to talk a little bit more about some of those topics.

But when we think about the space that we work on, it's also that, like, take care of yourself that way you can do your work as well as you're being hired to do, but you can be a great teammate and also be ready to take action when failure happens for those moments that matter. Like, when your systems are on fire, you are not dragging on because you've been working all-nighters for five days. And now you have a seven-day on-call shift. And this also happens to be high peak traffic time for your servers, and you're not in the best shape to do the best for your team and have the right safety for everyone.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true, like when your brain is fried. I remember one time I was working so hard that I couldn't even remember Git commands properly. And you start catching yourself making really silly errors because you're just so exhausted. So it's so important to catch yourself when that happens. I think there are two aspects of it: one is being kind to yourself, telling yourself to stop but also learning to push back.

Very early on in my career in my QA role, I was working like 16-hour days, seven days a week for a month and a half. And I was burnt out. Yeah, I was kicking it in overtime, but it didn't matter. I was never home. It totally sucked. And no one on my team, like, they were all burnt out, but nobody on my team was complaining. And this one guy...I still remember this.

One guy and I were ready to talk to the manager, telling him like, yo, dude, we're super burnt out. And this guy, Dale, had a fiancé. He was planning a wedding. He never got to see her. So I'm like, "Okay, we're going to talk to the manager together, right?" He bailed on me [laughs] at the last minute. So then it was just me. And I was like, screw it, man, I'm talking to the manager. I'm freaking burnt out. I'm like, I can't work this weekend. I just can't. My mind is not working. I need a break.

I got the break on Saturday but nobody else did. So then I felt so guilty, so guilty for taking that break, not working on the Saturday. But at that point, I didn't care because I was so friggin tired at that point. But every time I pushed back early in my career, it was like, yes, I'm pushing back for my own mental health.

But there's also that huge pang of guilt that almost eats into your relaxation time because you're like, oh, well, everyone else is sucking it up and working overtime. And what's wrong with you? You're weak. Obviously, there's something wrong with you because you've asked to rest. So, I don't know, what are your thoughts on things like that? Have you experienced anything like that?

ANA: Yes, I'm shaking my head up and down very much because that is very relatable.

ADRIANA: [laughs]

ANA: We can't continue preaching great practices on how to not burn out your engineers, how to have healthy on-call, how to not burn out...I feel like these conversations happen more frequently during the pandemic as we're still in this pandemic of like, we're struggling like. This took a huge toll on our mental health like being locked up, being in quarantine, losing family members, losing community members, bad health.

But then, when we talk about SREs and DevOps, we're also talking about those engineers that had to be fighting the fires the most. So I feel like we struggled the most, alert fatigue, pager fatigue, just being tired of constantly running that it is not easy to push back. I've struggled with pushing back. Because as a minority in tech, I feel like I'm not allowed to push back; that's going to look bad upon my career progression. And with that, that's the biggest thing that I look at is like if leadership is not setting the example, we're doing it wrong.

And I'm talking about leadership examples coming from not just your first-level manager but that skip-level manager of really putting it out there, like, I'm taking two weeks off, and I'm spending it with family; you should too. HR companies making sure that teams are taking time off, especially when we're looking at companies that have unlimited time off.

There has to be a process to how do we make sure that our team, our employees, not just engineers, are able to keep a steady pace at our company, so we actually don't have this attrition in six months that everybody's leaving the company? Leaving the company because they're constantly firefighting or leaving the company because they burnt out, and they actually need six months off now.

And a lot of it to me rolls up to having good practices but also embracing failure, embracing better reliability practices. I'm a huge fan of chaos engineering. I did that for five years. So I always talk about that's always one way that you can inject failure into your systems, prepare your team to respond when failure does happen.

But they actually now have skills on how to respond from knowing where the tooling is, having run through certain exercises to bring back their systems, to even setting up this is some of the error budget that we have, like, ideally, we're bringing back our system immediately or with the least amount of MTTR like an MTTD and all this.

But if there is error in all of that, the CTO is not coming and taking your job away. Psychological safety that folks are able to feel like the blame is not going to be put on them that we're saying, oh, because Billy and Bobby didn't backup the server at this time, they're the exact single point of failure for this going wrong.

There are a lot of contributing factors that lead for people not taking an action. Why is the system not taking these actions and auto backup systems that we actually can leverage for technology nowadays? So I think there's a lot to it that comes with it. But as advocates, I can only do so much by sharing my stories and giving examples. We need leadership to actually listen to them and create the change they want to see within their orgs.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true. And going back to the blame game for when it comes to outages, there's so much focus on the who rather than on the what. That's what we need to be doing. It reminds me of when I took debating in high school. And they would always say attack the issue, not the person. And this is basically the same thing. Like, who cares who did it? There's a bigger underlying cause that resulted in this issue. And it's not pointing your finger at Jimmy or Jane that is going to resolve the issue. If anything, they're going to quit, and then you're really going to be up a creek.

ANA: And learn from it. Do those blameless post-mortems. Have a chance to do one-on-one interviews to see how folks could be more supportive. These are ways that you can find out what pieces of your incident response system are actually broken in terms of systems aren't working properly, or we can actually take care of our team better.

I like hearing about some companies that go out of their way to help their engineers be on call when they're dealing with really high severity incidents like zeros and ones. Like, making sure that there's meals support for their team whether they're all in an office or certain location, or here's a Grubhub gift card. You're doing hard work today; go for it.

Or you've been dealing with an incident for two days. Your on-call rotation goes for seven more days. Like, you've already brought the systems back up. Why doesn’t someone else take over your rotation and go rest up? Or you've just pulled an all-nighter, and it's 5:00 in the morning, and now you have, like, dealing with an issue. And now you have to do a non-incident-related call at 8:00 in the morning. That doesn't take priority. We need our people to recharge. There are certain ways that we can build people-first practices with the company backing it.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And we definitely need to see more of that. I do want to go back to what you had said earlier about time off. Time off is one of those things that it feels like so taboo in some areas. So when I joined Lightstep, and I told people, I'm like, "Oh, I have unlimited paid time off." And they're like, "Oh, watch out, man, those companies...it's unlimited paid time off, but it's not really." I'm like, why? Why does it have to be?

If anything, I love how the folks at Lightstep are like, yeah, you want to take time off? Just give me a heads up so that I know. I've been in the management seat before; like, give me enough heads up so that I can plan accordingly, make sure that we've got critical mass, people around doing whatever for while you're away. But aside from that, take the time you need.

I once had a manager who told me, "If you request time off, it's because you need it," which I thought was great because, yeah, I need to recharge. I can't function properly if I've been going at it 150% for several weeks and don't have a chance to take a break. And being in a situation where I'm counting my vacation days, I find that so stressful, especially, you know, I have a daughter. As a mom, I want to make sure...and she's an only child. So I want to make sure that we still have time to spend together, especially while she still enjoys my company.

So having the unlimited time off is so nice because she's off for summer break, and so I can support her with my presence, and we can hang out. I still make time for the work. So I find that such a nice thing. But at the same time, you don't have to have kids to earn my sympathy. People without kids who don't necessarily have partners have lives too. [laughs] They have social lives with their friends or whatever you want to do. You want alone time to decompress like; it doesn't matter. Having a family shouldn't be a badge of honor.

ANA: It's like, I want my time off to binge-watch all the TV shows and catch up with my friends and vegetate.

ADRIANA: Exactly.

ANA: I spend a lot of time vegetating with my time off. I'm like, I'm really over... I always say one of the things that happens to me with advocacy work like, I'm a huge extrovert, but at the same time, I can be an introvert very well. And when I officially request time off, and I am taking those days off, I realize that a lot of our work is external and dealing with other people that I'm like, I'm going to hermit crab. I will talk to you in seven days. I will delete all social media apps off my phone.

And that's the way that I feel like I can serve myself best to recharge my batteries, to continue giving back to folks, to continue doing what I do love. And if I don't take that time off, I get really cranky. I'm unable to think. And one of the things that I tell my partner nowadays is that realizing how the most amazing ideas that we're able to provide onto our work actually happen when he's spending time with his kids when we're playing video games, we're on a hike, or we're riding. That space when you're not intentionally thinking about work, you might actually solve the issues you were having two weeks ago.

It's really great to curate. But coming from places that don't have the best time off policies of people didn't take time off, it is always very interesting because I'm always like, hey, can everyone track time off for yourself and for your team? I feel like I'm a broken record vibes when I'm always like, hey, you've been working a lot. Can you take time off? Can you take at least two days off? Like, not just a Friday. I need you to take off Monday so you can work better.

I always feel bad that I do that to my friends and co-workers. But I feel like HR is not doing it, management is not always doing it. So if an IC person that cares is going to say it, I'll do it. And I also tweet about it a lot. [laughs]

ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's awesome. We need more of that. I come from an enterprisey background. I think you said you've also worked in some enterprisey places. And in the large enterprise space, it's such a, let's say, stiff upper lip culture. It's so hard. There's so much guilt involved with taking time off that we need to continue the conversation around that so that we can tell people who are suffering in silence that, yes, it's okay to take that time off. It's okay to spend time with your family and your kids or your dog or yourself. Because otherwise, I don't know, I love work, but I also value my alone time. I value my Netflix binging time.

ANA: [laughs]

ADRIANA: Yeah, there's something to be said for chillaxing.

ANA: Yeah, when you're working a lot, there are some times that you're going to have times where you can't take time off because you're running through sprints of a project. Like, what are some ways that you take care of yourself in between your time off?

ADRIANA: So I wear an Apple watch, and it yells at me when I've been sitting for too long. So I try to listen to my watch, for example, to just take a little break. And it forces me to move around for like a minute or whatever, especially if you're in the midst of an intense sprint of work. I'm not always successful, I'll be honest, but I try to at least schedule some breaks. Especially with my daughter being home from school for the summer, I try to make sure that we'll get out for a quick walk around the block, for example, just to break the time a little bit.

And, yeah, sometimes just a coffee break in the middle of the day. I'm not a coffee drinker. I'll make myself some tea, just five minutes to make myself some tea. It's nice to be able to, like, okay, yeah, this is the time when I'm going to make myself some tea, something to look forward to, break the intensity of the work. So yeah, that's what's worked for me so far. Not always successful, mind you, but I try to at least be mindful. I figure practice makes perfect. I've improved over the years. So yeah, how about you? What do you do?

ANA: I go back and forth between things that I do. Sometimes I'm really bad at it. I have a good support network that's like, wait, why are you not doing that thing you say you always do? Like, that was the case on Friday. I was having a raging headache, and I couldn't work anymore. And I called my partner, and he's like, "Why don't you just go for a walk for like 30 minutes?" And I was like, that's right. I live in a beautiful part of town. I can go on the trails and take a moment to refresh. And that really helped. I was able to come back and do some work.

But being active is always something that helps me. I might not be the person that's always doing it. But when I do do it, I get a lot of benefits. And when that's not something possible or I really don't have the time for it, or I have forgotten about it for a while, for me, it's always cooking. There's something about being in the kitchen that uses some of my creative juices, but it also follows a very process-oriented procedure.

So I think I get my engineer-ness happy, and at the same time, I get my creative, curious mindset really happy. I love zoning out and just chopping vegetables and fruit or thinking of what do I even want to make? Let me look up for recipes, see what's in the fridge, in the freezer and see what we eat for lunch and dinner today.

And then I'm really big on tracking stuff. Also, similarly, I kind of forget about it, but I've been a huge fan of having the Apple Watch here and there. And it's like, oh, your breathing got really intensified, [laughs] or you have not moved for three hours, do something. And then, I use Strava for tracking my walks and bike rides, and I also own a Peloton. So sometimes, it's just a little bit of yoga and movement to get you going. But it's like, do something opposite of sitting on my desk and coding and thinking tech and talking to people.

The other thing that I always talk about [laughs] are podcasts, and my Twitter is all filled with music. Music is one of the things that brings me the most joy. Being a Latino, Spanish music is just my love. So you'll hear me on many podcasts talking about my love for Reggaeton and Spanish rock. And that's one way that I can easily tune out of my job and listen to music, recharge and then hop on to work mode again or be in the zone while I'm listening to Bad Bunny. Why not?

ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's awesome. So my distraction thing I'm a huge podcast junkie. I'm subscribed to way too many podcasts, and I've barely made it through my queue. I find listening to podcasts is such a good way. It's a good way to just relax my brain. But I do it when I'm either walking or running because then I can only concentrate on that. I won't have the other distractions. So I find that's good.

I like your thing about exercise, huge thing for me as well. I took to a lot of running during quarantine, especially first thing in the morning; I just found myself waking up super stressed. And no matter how crappy I felt when I woke up, after a good run, it was just like, there is nothing to think about other than finishing the run. And so, by that time, all the stress had melted away until I turned on my computer again. [laughter] But it was at least a good way to start the day and just get myself into the right mindset.

ANA: Was there anything that you did during quarantine, early pandemic that you now do that you're like, oh, I wish I would have been doing that earlier in life?

ADRIANA: I did take up longboarding for a bit during quarantine. So I bought my husband a longboard for Christmas in I want to say 2019. Because he was like, "I always wanted to learn how to longboard." And I'm like, "Great; I bought you one." And then nothing hadn't used it at all, and then quarantine hit. So then he's like, "Well, we can't go anywhere. Let's learn to longboard." So then he started learning, and then my daughter was like, "Ooh, that looks cool." So then she hopped on his longboard. I'm like, hey, I'm jealous. I want to learn too.

And then I hopped on his longboard, and he's like, "Y'all get your own longboards already; this is for me." [chuckles] So we all got longboards and we were doing that for a while as a family. I took a couple of bad spills, though. So I haven't been on my longboard for a couple of years now. I just rather stick to biking or running instead. How about you? [laughs]

ANA: I think I didn't pick up anything in the pandemic as most people did that they continued with. It was really big to do the baking, to do cocktails. I've heard all sorts of things. I think for me, it was more of like, I've tried variety, and I started more cooking during the pandemic. I stopped traveling as much, so I finally had groceries at home.

ADRIANA: [laughs]

ANA: I mean, I stopped traveling in general. There was no such thing as me being on the road. So I finally could be home and have groceries. And at the same time, I now had cravings for all the foods that I grew up with that I would find on the road. Like, I love Colombian empanadas, Venezuelan empanadas, Colombian hot dogs. That was the thing that I started making in the kitchen the most. So if you need a recipe, feel free to contact me for it because my empanadas are delicious.

But I think for me, it was just more of like, stay balanced. I think during the pandemic and quarantine is when I started protecting my time more. I started actually using an application like RescueTime. And I'll set that up on my work laptop. I'm like; I want to know how many hours I'm actually on the computer every single week and what those hours are being spent in, whether it's like I'm just in meetings, I'm coding; I'm reading online tutorials to figure out the next thing that I'm building. So that to me kind of helped me. But I wouldn't say that it was [laughs] longboarding or anything like that.

ADRIANA: [laughs]

ANA: I bought the Peloton, and I didn't use it as much as I could have. But the peloton was my quarantine purchase. Plus, California was on fire, like, the North Bay Fires were really bad. We had really bad air quality for about two weeks. And I was like; we can't go outside to walk. We need something inside to get our bodies moving, and that helped. It was a good investment.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that's awesome. You sent me your empanada recipe last week, and I definitely want to try that out. We did a lot of baking. My daughter is a big baker. And she makes the most amazing-looking cakes, and so we had a cake a week. I'm like, I can't eat a cake a week, man. That's a lot of cake.

But we also learned how to bake various types of breads, which was kind of fun. We have our own sourdough starter that we created; we gave birth to last year; we call him Gus. [laughs] So we made some sourdough with our starter. Breadmaking is always an experience. I'm always terrified that it's not going to work out, but when it does, I'm like, yay, bread.

ANA: Bread was one that I was intimidated by. But I really did love the amount of people that got sourdough hobbies nowadays.

ADRIANA: Yeah, our sourdough hasn't had any love for a while. So I don't know. It's like, I'm hoping maybe I can restart Gus, maybe bring him back to life. We'll see. [laughs]

ANA: I believe in you. I think you can do this.

ADRIANA: I'll let you know. I'll let you know. But that'll be the summer project to revive Gus. [laughs]

ANA: I think as we start thinking about wrapping up today's episode, what practical advice do you have for listeners today in terms of what they should be doing after listening to this podcast?

ADRIANA: How about I give practical career advice? But I will also say if you're curious about observability and want to get more into it, definitely be sure to check out the Lightstep blog. We've got some cool observability posts.

Career advice, I would say I want to impart some career advice as a woman in tech who's been doing the woman in tech thing for 20-plus years now, which is like, believe in yourself. And I say this because I went through a period...and it was kind of weird too. Every time I'm in a management role, it's almost like I forget that I'm good at tech.

And I had this friend, my best friend Bernard, man; he always knew how to make me feel good. He was like, "You are so good at what you do, and you need to remember that." And so, just as a woman in tech, believe that you are good at what you're doing. You are here for a reason. You can play ball just like the rest of all the other folks in tech. You deserve a seat at the table.

So don't be afraid to share your opinion, share your thoughts, speak up in meetings. That's another one. I was always so scared in meetings of speaking up, even though I'd see something blatantly horrible going on, thinking, well, the men in the room are going to laugh at me and aren't going to take me seriously. And yeah, maybe that'll happen. But I told myself, so what? [laughs] At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Say what you need to say if you believe in it. That's, I guess, my advice, my parting advice. How about you?

ANA: That's such great advice. I feel like I would really echo that one, like, you are your biggest supporter in a sense. Like, if you're not advocating for yourself, it's hard for others to advocate for you. And I feel like I wish I would have done more of that when I was younger. I always kind of was like the shy, weak voice at the end. And I still feel like I'm in that space. But the years of working in the career always gives an easier way to trust yourself.

For me, it's like, stay curious. Engineering is a space for constantly learning and adapting. And that's always fun, like, just in general in life, staying curious and constantly learning is a great habit. But when it comes to your career, that's definitely what helps you move up. And what definitely helps you get more opportunities is not just necessarily about leveling up.

And one of the things that I felt really carried me forward in the hardest moments of being one of the only ones in the room was finding community, finding your group. Like, you're not alone. I think those three kind of together where there have been other women in this space that have had similar struggles as you might be having. Tap into a network of people that look like you, that are closer to your representation, and that you're able to have a safe space.

In that safe space, you can ask for career advice. You can ask for advice on how to handle a situation at your workplace, at home. And there are many times that I felt like literally running out of tech and lighting everything on fire because things were really rough in places I've worked at.

I had community that said, "You belong here." It doesn't matter what's happening to you or going around you. You have a space at the table. You have a space in technology. You're helping make change. Don't run away. Don't let them win. And knowing that I could fall back on a crew that was rooting for me, that was something that I think I didn't know until things got really bad.

So the quicker you're able to get comfortable with the idea that there are people out there supporting you and that you can tap into when you're feeling afraid or you're scared, like, this space is meant for you. And no one is supposed to kick you out. You belong here.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. I do find whenever you find a space of like-minded people; it's such a comforting feeling. It's like getting a warm hug and validation that, like, no, I'm doing the right thing. I belong here. I deserve to be here. All we want as humans is a place to belong, no matter where you are.

ANA: Most definitely. Definitely. I think that's the best sentiment; we just want to belong, and there's a place for you.

ADRIANA: Yeah, and definitely a place for you in this podcast. So for anyone who wants to come talk to us about DevOps, SRE, observability, technology, challenges of tech as a minority, we would love to have that conversation with you. We want to elevate the good and the bad of tech. We're here to improve. That's one of the great things about developer advocacy is that we're always pushing the bar, and we want to make it so that we live in this big, beautiful tech world.

ANA: Most definitely plus-one that. Well, thank you, Adriana, for joining us today in today's podcast. I loved talking to you about how you got started in technology, what are some of the advice that you have for listeners today, and just in general, your passion for developer advocacy and how much you love writing about this. You can find Adriana on Twitter and LinkedIn. We'll be dropping those links over on the show notes.

Don't forget to subscribe and give us a shout-out on Twitter. We're @oncallmemaybe. As I said, don't forget to check the show notes on oncallmemaybe.com for more resources on how to connect with us and the guests. Signing off, this is Ana Margarita Medina.

ADRIANA: And this is Adriana Villela.

BOTH: Peace, love, and code.