Episode #62: The New Relic One Platform with Nica Fee

About Nica Fee

Nica Fee is a Serverless Developer Advocate for New Relic. She's worked with and written about serverless for the last two and a half years. She recently spoke at Deserted Island DevOps, which you might know as the tech conference that happened in Animal Crossing. She writes regularly for The New Stack.

Watch this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yM4q0NSFz0M

About New Relic
New Relic One is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. From monoliths to serverless, you can instrument everything, then analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize your entire software stack. All from one place.

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm speaking with Nica Fee. Hey, Nica. Thanks for joining me.

Nica: Hey. Thanks so much for having me, Jeremy. Longtime fan, so it's great to be on.

Jeremy: Well, thank you. So you are a developer advocate at New Relic, and I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a bit about your background and what led you to New Relic and sort of what's new with New Relic.

Nica: Sure, yeah. That's great. I was actually at New Relic back in the day. I was at New Relic as a support engineer until about 2015 I believe, and left to go and become a full-time developer and full-time coder. And my path took me back sort of... As I was sort of coding full-time and just clearing queues and writing features and fixing bugs, I really started to miss some of the community building that I'd done previously. Especially actually when I was at New Relic back in the day, I was one of the people who was starting meetups and doing that kind of community building. And so I started trying to pursue that as a job which is how I got into dev advocacy. Dev advocacy, you get to tinker and you get to play and build stuff, and you also get to try to get other people excited about it and try to show it to people.

So I was doing that for Stackery, which is a serverless deployment tool, for two years, and had some success there and built some skills and really enjoyed it, and that's where I got kind of very into AWS and cloud engineering. So yeah. Now I'm back at New Relic, and it's such an interesting time to be at New Relic, and be looking at how we can go and talk to developers. Something that is interesting about being here is that everybody is talking about the time I was last here. Everybody's talking about, "Hey. There was a time when New Relic was something that lone engineers would install on one server and something would go down." They'd be like, "Well, I can see right here what the problem is." And then some exec was saying, "Hey. Let's go use this tool. It sounds great."

And right now, the question is, can we get back there? Can we get back to the place where it's a tool that developers love and that they're the ones saying, "Hey. We got to use this," rather than... As are so many developer tools being something where most people know it from the CTO coming in and being like, "We're using this tool. I met this guy on the golf course. He's told me great things about it. It's got a great spec sheet. We're using it. Everybody's going to use it now," right? So the question is, can we get back there to being in that space? So that's sort of what I'm doing New Relic because I'm trying to go talk to actual engineers about what it does and how it can help them.

Jeremy: Awesome. Well, I mean, one thing about New Relic is that they just released the New Relic One platform. I want to say the new, New Relic One platform, but it seems kind of hard to say new twice. But first of all-

Nica: We actually do that every year. We should do New Relic but then a starburst at the side. It's new this time.

Jeremy: It's even newer. Well, first of all, I want to thank New Relic because they are sponsoring this episode which is amazing, which again shows their incredible amount of support towards the community as well. So I do think that this is a great opportunity.

Nica: Can I give a quick shout out on that one, actually?

Jeremy: Absolutely.

Nica: As a dev advocate, I am actually really actively looking for stuff that is exciting in the community that we can help support. And so, obviously, you were very high on my list. I said, "Hey. We got to do this." But I don't see everyone. I don't know everything. So if you're listening to this and you have either an open source project on observability or you're doing community events or running a podcast that maybe is a little bit less famous than this guy, get in touch with me. Hit me up on Twitter. Show me your stuff. I would love to hear about it. My situation right now is I don't know enough people to support, not that I can't do that. So yeah. I want to hear from you all, if possible.

Jeremy: Oh, that's awesome. That's a great offer, and anyone listening, please take up that offer because I think it could be quite amazing. So anyway. So-

Nica: ...keep expensing GitHub sponsorships. But for the moment, that's just one that's just one like, "Well, just do it." And I'll just fight with AR after I get it done. And I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Jeremy: No, no. Not at all. I appreciate that. All right, so let's get back to New Relic for a second and this New Relic One platform. I do want to go through this because it is actually pretty cool. I mean, the entire thing has been completely rewritten. It's all new, right? Not all rewritten. I shouldn't say it that way, but-

Nica: Yeah. I had hopped into... So I came on five months ago now, and I got into New Relic. And I had kind of... I was excited. There was obviously tons of new stuff since I'd last been there five years, but I was a little confused. There was some stuff that looked the same as what I'd seen five years ago. There was other stuff that was like, "Oh, this is kind of a nice little interface." And there were things in this new interface which was sort of part of the site at the time. You could do stuff like every chart, you could go see what is the actual query that's building this chart. You could go and edit it. You could go and facet it, and you can make it more sophisticated, save it out. Oh, it was really neat. But that was only kind of part of the site. And it was like, "Hey. This doesn't feel 100% cohesive." And I'm like, "Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm not trained or something."

But what's been happening and what's been released in the last few weeks is the whole site is the same very clean, cohesive experience now so that you can do stuff like if you're monitoring AWS Lam...