From “I Don’t Know” to “Let Me Show You How”
Eight Lessons to Inspire You to Do Great Things
I have been doing computer things for 24 years. Longer, if you count the fact that I learned how to code in BASIC when I was 10. Which makes me officially old.
I am a 2nd-year CNCF Ambassador, 3rd-year HashiCorp Ambassador, blogger, and podcaster. I’ve had incredible guests on my podcast such as Kelsey Hightower, Charity Majors, Hazel Weakly, and Julia Morgado. I’ve given talks at KubeCons and Open Source Summits in North America and Europe. By day I am a Developer Advocate in the Observability space, spending most of my time working in OpenTelemetry (OTel), specifically as a maintainer of the OTel End User SIG. And by night, I climb walls (and sometimes fall from them…badly). I also love capybaras, because they’re cute, cuddly, and make me smile.
You might be looking at me now and be thinking, “Damn, that girl has her shit together”. But what if I told you that at the end of the day, I don’t know anything. What if I told you that I live with the fear of failure every single day. What if I told you that each time I submit a pull request, I am terrified. And what if I told you that in spite of all that, I push past my fear and anxiety, and you can too.
And so today, I will take you on a little journey. I will share some lessons that I learned throughout my career to give you the confidence to do great things, so that you can go from “I don’t know” to “Let me show you how”.
Lesson 1: You are the expert
My first job out of school was in consulting. I worked at Accenture for 4 years before deciding that consulting wasn’t the life for me. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. It was a hard and demanding life. I worked long hours. But it also taught me to value work life balance at an early age.
But the biggest takeaway I have from my consulting days is the phrase, “You are the expert”. The irony is that half the time, we weren’t the experts at all. But we were brought in as the experts, hired by companies to solve some sort of tech problem. Therefore, we had to be the experts.
This experience was valuable because I couldn’t use the excuse, “But I don’t know how to do this.” We were expected to figure it out. And as a result, I became unafraid to try new things.
Before you roll your eyes and think that this is some shady scammy crap, think of it this way.
Most of us are doing a different type of job now than what they did early in their careers. Why? Because tech is always evolving. And as a result, we must constantly be learning in order to be able to keep up.
So my call to action to you is to keep on learning. Don’t use “I don’t know how to do this” as an excuse. Use it as an opportunity to learn cool shit.
Lesson 2: It’s okay to change your mind
In 2013, I decided to quit my tech job to become a professional photographer, much to the horror of my poor parents. At the time, I had a decently-paying, cushy 9–5 job. But I hated it so very much. I was bored out of my mind, and the only thing that brought me joy in my life was taking photos. So I quit tech and opened up my own photography business with the intention of never returning to tech again.
After a year of not making any real money and working way more hours than I had in tech, I found myself at a crossroads. I could try to stick it out for another year and hope that I could turn a profit. After all, most businesses don’t turn a profit in the first couple of years, so if I really loved it, I should stick it out. But I realized that I didn’t actually really love it. In fact, I liked the more techy aspects of running my business than anything else.
So I made the decision to return to tech. At first I was super self-conscious about it, because I had basically told everyone that I wasn’t going back. But then I thought, “Who cares? This is my career, and I’m entitled to change my mind.”
It was the best thing that I did, because I returned to tech with a new enthusiasm and gratitude that I had never felt before.
The moral of the story is that it’s okay to change your mind. People change careers and opinions all the time. We do the best that we can with the information at hand, and as we gain more information and knowledge, our thoughts and opinions will evolve. It’s natural!
Lesson 3: Embrace the suck
Some of the best changes can come from pain. That’s how I got into DevOps. Picture this. It was around 2014. I was managing a production deployment. In those days, at the company I worked at, we had to write our deployment instructions in a Word doc, and hand them over to someone offshore who was responsible for doing the deployment.
This meant that:
- I had to ensure that my instructions were correct
- The person doing the deployment had to ensure that they read the instructions correctly
- The person doing the deployment had to ensure that they executed the instructions correctly
Recipe for disaster? Hell yeah!
On this particular fateful Friday night, all the things went wrong. On top of that, I was really sick and had lost my voice. So I couldn’t talk to the deployment person on the phone. Oh, and there was nobody from my team who knew the system like I did, so there was no backup for me. Yay me.
It took the whole weekend, but we managed to sort things out. This should’ve taken a few hours, by the way. Frustrated, I vented to my dad about it the next week. Oh, did I mention that my dad is in his eary 70s, and is a retired software architect who learned Rust for fun in 2022 and has contributed his own Crates?
Anyway, he turned to me at the time and said, “You know, you should check out this DevOps thing.”
And so I did. And I fell in love with it. And it became my life’s mission to automate as much stuff as possible on my team to prevent that horror show from ever repeating itself. And it became a springboard for my career into DevOps which later led to Observability.
This crappy situation turned into the biggest career pivot of my life.
Bottom line: Sucky situations can push us to try new things!
Lesson 4: You belong here
It might surprise you to find out that I have only been a developer advocate since 2022.
When I was asked to join the DevRel team at Lightstep (now owned by ServiceNow), I felt like the biggest impostor. On my team were Ted Young, one of the founders of OpenTelemetry; Austin Parker, OpenTelemetry community manager; and Ana Margarita Medina, who is well known in the DevRel space for her mental health advocacy and her work in reliability and chaos engineering. Who the fuck was I? I didn’t belong there.
Let me rewind a bit. In my previous job, I managed two teams: a platform engineering team using all HashiCorp tools, including Nomad, and an Observability team. And guess what? I didn’t really know much about either.
But here’s what I did know. I knew how to become the expert. Remember lesson 1! So I did what I do best. I sat my ass down to learn about both areas, and blogged about my learning journey to share with others.
The Observability blog posts caught the attention of Austin Parker, who invited me to join his DevRel team at Lightstep.
My HashiCorp learnings caught the attention of fellow Hashi community member, Riaan Nolan, who nominated me for a HashiCorp Ambassadorship in 2021, which I still hold today.
So do I belong here? Yes, I sure do. And if you ever doubt whether or not you belong: remember that someone asked you to be here. You do belong.
Lesson 5: Face your fears
Let’s face it. Most of us use open source projects in our day-to-day tech jobs. But what about contributing back to these open source projects? I don’t know about you, but for me, up until 2022, the prospect of contributing to open source was just plain scary!! I mean, when you open up a pull request, you are literally putting yourself out there, exposed to the judgment of some seemingly random person hiding behind a GitHub avatar. SCARY, right?
When I first started off as a DevRel in the Observability space, I was encouraged to contribute to OpenTelemetry. The thing is, 20+ years into my career and I had never even contributed to open source. I was kind of terrified. But if there’s one thing that my year running my photography business taught me was to suck it up and do it anyway. So I submitted my first pull request. Fast-forward to now, and I have several pull requests to my name. And I have to admit that it feels soooo satisfying to contribute something back to the community..
My continued contributions to OpenTelemetry led to my eventual role in becoming a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry End User SIG, and it also led to my CNCF Ambassadorship last year and this year. All this because I faced my fears and overcame my shyness.
Lesson 6: Promote yourself
All of our experiences prepare us for what we are doing now and will be doing in the future. I am a firm believer of that. Back in my photography days, I had no choice but to put myself out there to introduce my services to potential customers and other local businesses which might benefit from cross promotion. This experience helped to normalize self-promotion for me. Because let’s face it: self-promotion can feel a bit cringey.
“Hey, check out this cool blog post that I wrote” or “Check out the talk that I gave recently at a conference” or “I was a guest on this podcast talking about Observability. You should listen to it”
But at the end of the day, people won’t know about the cool work that you’re doing unless you promote yourself. Only you can advocate for yourself, so go out and promote the crap out of yourself, because you deserve it!!
Lesson 7: Be curious
Advances in technology and science are made because people are curious. Why does this behave the way it does? What happens when I try this? Being curious keeps us on our toes and allows us to learn new things.
For example, remember when I told you that I had to learn HashiCorp Nomad for a previous job? Well, last year I came up with a wild idea. Kelsey Hightower has his famous “Hashinetes” tutorial, in which he runs Nomad on Kubernetes. So I thought to myself, “What happens if you try to run Kubernetes on Nomad? Can it be done?”
So I set out to do just that. Spoiler alert: I got it to work. Now, you might be wondering, why the hell did I decide to do that?? Was there any practical application? Not really. I was just curious to see if I could do it. But I learned so much about the inner workings of Kubernetes and Nomad along the way. And I also learned about the power of collaboration.
Because you see, I didn’t do this alone. I did this with the help of Luiz Aoqui, who, at the time, was a developer on Nomad. It so happens that we met on Twitter a couple of years earlier, as a result of me promoting my various blog posts on cool Nomad experiments on social media. Again, another wonderful reason why self-promotion is great: it allows you to meet tons of people whom you might have never otherwise met.
So my call to action to you is this: be curious. If you’re wondering how something works or why something works the way it does, dig into it. You will learn so many awesome things along the way, and you may also meet many wonderful people who will lift you up along the way!
Lesson 8: It’s okay to fail
We treat failure like such a horrible thing in our lives, but it’s actually a wonderful gift.
We learn more from our mistakes than we do from being perfect. Every error we make teaches us something new. Take coding, for example. When I make a mistake in your code, and I’m trying to debug it, I learn more from the debugging session than I would have if my code had been perfect the first time around.
Has this has happened to you? Of course it has! Because we’re not perfect. If we were, believe me, I’d probably be rich and sitting on a tropical island somewhere.
As I reflect on my ill-fated year as a photographer, I can say with confidence I totally failed at it. Like, fell flat on my face. I blew through my savings, I worked long hours, and I was miserable. But it was the best worst year of my life. Why? Because I learned something about myself. I learned that I didn’t want to be a professional photographer. I learned that I actually wanted to be in tech, but that I was just horridly bored with my tech career.
That failure shaped who I am today, and I am grateful for it.
So embrace your failures, because it turns out that they are better learning tools than our successes!
Final thoughts
And there you have it. Tech careers are not a “one size fits all”. Everyone’s careers are shaped by different experiences and circumstances. That being said, the lessons that I covered today can help guide you in your tech career, and to help you be the best that you can be.
And now, I will leave you with a picture of my rat Katie, chilling in the pocket of my husband’s bathrobe. Rats really love cuddly places! ❤️
Until next time, peace, love, and code. ✌️💜👩💻
This post is based on the keynote talk that I gave at KCD Porto 2024.
