Geeking Out with Adriana Villela

It took getting laid off for Monika Rajput to rethink some things career-wise. She decided to work on her personal brand, which led to her building the Cloud Native Gurugram community, and eventually to a CNCF Ambassadorship. Join Adriana as she talks to Monika about these topics, and Monika's journey into data science and data engineering.About Monika Rajput:Monika Rajput is a Senior Technical Consultant at Ahead, where she helps build real-world data and cloud solutions. Over the years, she's worked with four early-stage startups, shaping products from idea to launch. Alongside her technical work, she's passionate about helping others grow in tech. She has mentored over 200+ students and actively contributes to the community as a CNCF Ambassador and organiser of CNCF Gurugram.Monika is also the founder of TMS: The Monika Rajput Stack, a podcast where she shares stories from the world of data, Al, and cloud, featuring people doing meaningful work in tech. She's currently serving as a Program Committee Member for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in China, Japan, and India. Her goal is to make technology more open, relatable, and accessible, especially for those who are just getting started.Key takeaways:Going from startup culture to large enterprise culture is shocking!Showing passion for what you do draws others to your work.The desire to make a name for herself and build a welcoming community led Monika on her journey towards creating a local CNCF chapter, and subsequently, becoming a CNCF Ambassador.Building a community from scratch was hard, but persistence and a desire to have a place to connect with others helped Monika overcome the initial hurdles.Organizing a meetup requires securing in a venue and getting sponsors.Expect to have a smaller turnout in your first meetup. It's about consistency and perserverence.Meetups are a great way to get started in public speaking, since they're pretty low stakes and have a much smaller audience compared to large conferences.Data science vs. data engineering: data engineering == preparing data for use by data scientist (data quality); data science == tune model based on dataYou are forced to change and adapt when you work in technology, because if you can't keep up, you won't be able to stay employed.Even if AI is writing our code for us, we must know enough to make sure that it's writing non-crappy code.Find Monika on:LinkedInWebsiteFind us on:All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on adrianavillela.com/socialsLinks:CNCF GurugramAHEAD (consulting)Snowflake (AI data cloud)Chapters:00:00 Opening credits00:26 Guest intro03:03 Icebreaker questions08:05 Startup culture vs large enterprise culture13:32 What's your superpower?16:00 Becoming a CNCF Ambassador22:00 Running the CNCF Gurugram community26:05 Monika's tech journey30:08 What's involved in a data science career?37:12 Monika's podcast42:52 Words of wisdom45:33 Peace out and geek out

Victoria Nduka wanted to get into tech, but she didn't have a laptop. So what did she do? She made money as a writer, saved up enough to get a laptop, and took a bunch of UX design courses. And when Victoria stumbled into open source by way of a video posted to a friend's WhatApp status. This took her down the path of getting a coveted Linux Foundation (LFX) mentorship, and finding ways to apply her skills as a writer, UX designer and all around Curious Human to contribute to OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Meshery. Join Adriana as she talks to Victoria about her undying curiosity and her surprise love for cloud native.About Victoria Nduka:Victoria Nduka is a user experience designer who’s passionate about making technology more inclusive and accessible. She recently wrapped up an LFX mentorship where she conducted UX research to understand how users expect Prometheus to handle OpenTelemetry resource attributes.Victoria writes and speaks about accessibility, open source, design, and more recently, cloud native technologies.Key takeaways:Not being accepted as an LFX mentee for Meshery didn't stop Victoria from contributing to the projectThe work that she did as an OSS contributor in Meshery got her into Outreachy, and eventually led to an LFX mentorship in the Prometheus projectAs an LFX mentee working on Prometheus, she got to interface with the OpenTelemetry communityExpanding the OTel End User SIG from 3 regular contributors to 6 took a lot of time and effort, through steady contribution and content creationOpen source is only possible because of the people contributing; who are willing to put in the timeVictoria continued contributing to OpenTelemetry even after her LFX mentorship was done, and has become one of the key contributors to the End User SIG.Working with people who look like us is important!!Tech accessibility: not having a laptop prevented Victoria from getting into tech for the longest timeDoing freelance writing helped Victoria save enough money to buy a laptop to finally get into tech.How can you be expected to figure the course of your entire life out when you're young? Trying out new things is the only way to know what we like and don't like.Contributing to open source: look for areas that need help, with the skills that you haveFind Victoria on:LinkedInX (Twitter)Find us on:All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on adrianavillela.com/socialsLinks:LFX MentorshipOpenTelemetry End User SIGOutreachy (internship program)Juraci Paixão Kröhling on Geeking Out talking about OutreachyEromosele Akhigbe on Geeking Out talking about OutreachyMeshery (CNCF project)Prometheus (CNCF project)Memorisely (platform for learning product design)OTel Me... co-hosted by VictoriaOTel Collector follow-up surveyThe Importance of GitHub Stars (blog post)IHS TowersChapters:00:00 Opening credits00:26 Guest intro01:34 Icebreaker questions04:01 LFX Mentorship06:41 How being an LFX mentee in Prometheus led to the OTel End User SIG12:21 Victoria's tech career journey21:48 Contributing to the OTel End User SIG24:29 The ups and downs of being a writer26:53 Contributing to Meshery29:59 Outside of open source, what's your day job?31:49 Parting words of wisdom33:20 Peace out and geek out

We've heard from GenX-ers and Millennials talking about their views on AI-assisted software development. We've heard separately from GenZ-ers. But we haven't had all three perspectives in the same room together...until now. What advice do GenX-ers and Millennials have for GenZ-ers in the age of AI-assisted coding, and vice-versa? Find out, as we bring back some of our former panelists, Tim Banks (GenX), and Cassidy Williams (Millennial), and Divyasha Pahuja (GenZ) to talk about how all 3 generations can help each other in our new AI reality.Key TakeawaysEveryone wants to join the AI bandwagon because of FOMO...but should they?AI skeptics are being treated as Luddites, which is an unfair assessmentAI helps us build things faster, and helps us get through our otherwise unattended personal projectsBeing a developer in the agentic era means being a manager of agents (less building - more monitoring and observing what's being produced by AI agents)Domain knowledge is more appreciated as a developer in the AI eraHaving base knowledge (first principles) is helpful when it comes to troubleshooting/problem solvingJust as we did with Google, asking "the right questions" and being able to phrase them effectively is extremely helpful for using AI for problem solving/learning conceptsGenZ doesn't want to be robbed of the experience of troubleshooting.Learning from failure is the best way to learn, and because of AI, GenZ is given more room to fail fast.One of the side-effects of the AI era is that many folks are unable to handle pushbacks because they're used to AI saying that they're smart.Advantages of AI: "Everything feels possible", and AI lets you create content tailored to different learning styles (e.g. neurodivergent kids)“Brolulu” - AI has validated a lot of delusionsAbout our guestsCassidy WilliamsCassidy is the Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub! Outside of that fancy title, Cassidy is a startup advisor and investor, open source-er, and meme-maker on the internet. She enjoys building mechanical keyboards, playing music, hanging out with family and friends, and teaching in her free time.Find Cassidy on:LinkedInBlueskyGitHubBlogNewsletterTim Banks (they/them)Tim’s tech career spans over 25 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started in avionics in the US Marine Corps and then into various government contracting roles. After moving to the private sector, Tim worked both in large corporate environments and in small startups, honing his skills in systems administration, automation, architecture, and operations for large cloud-based datastores.Today, Tim leverages their years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with the open source and cloud computing communities in his current role. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. They are the 2-time American National and is the 5-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in their division.Find Tim on:LinkedInBlueskyInstagramDivyasha PahujaDivyasha Pahuja is a GenZ AI engineer, multimodal ML researcher, and four-time peer-reviewed author at ACM/IEEE and Springer — someone whose career started before ChatGPT shipped and accelerated alongside it. She's had quite a journey: software engineer (back when LLMs weren't a household phrase), then back to school, then ML researcher, and now sitting at the cusp of both as an AI engineer.Off the keyboard, she's spent the last few years with Feeding India leading a digital campaign team, distributing meals, and building recurring partnerships with local NGOs and old age homes.Outside of all that, she loves playing badminton, is a self-admitted sore loser, has a soft spot for cats, coffee shops and Netflix because who doesn't, and is just starting an AI community at @un__prompted — say hi if you want to be there early.Find Divyasha on:LinkedInFind Geeking Out onAll of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on adrianavillela.com/socialsChapters00:08 Intro01:11 Guest intros03:30 The demo curse06:18 Live demos at really large tech conferences09:30 Tape backups & zip drives14:27 What scares you most about AI?16:59 People don't know how to have arguments anymore23:26 Dev work has turned into AI babysitter25:30 Do you mourn the loss of hand coding?31:20 Use AI to augment34:17 GenZ doesn't want to lose the problem solving muscle memory45:03 What do you need from other generations to help you navigate the AI world?50:29 Flattening organizations to restructure for the AI world52:29 Delusions validated by AI ("brolulu")55:52 What excites you about AI?57:27 Do we have a reason to fear Skynet?59:58 Wrap-upShow NotesGeeking Out Live: The One Where We Geek Out on Vibing Like It's 1999, Coding Like It's 2026Geeking Out Live: The One Where We Geek Out on Slaying the VibesThe Devil Was Never in the Details: Code, AI, and the Rise of the Deep Generalist (Tim Banks, Commit Your Code 2026)Fruity Loops (now FL software)Skynet (Terminator)Cassidy's blog template on GitHubTape backupZip drive

Justin Garrison wasn't one of those kids who grew up in tech. In fact, he loved cars and wanted to fix cars for a living. He didn't own his own computer until university, and literally didn't know what to do with one once he got one. But then he took a job at university fixing computers, and that's when was exposed to Linux. After that, he was hooked. Since then, his career has been fueled by curiosity, a willingness to learn in public, and a love for technology. Join Adriana as she talks to Justin about his career, what inspires his fun tech content, and more. About Justin Garrison: Justin serves as Head of Product at Sidero Labs and hosts the Fork Around and Find Out podcast. He has been called the Steven Spielberg of Cloud Native and the Bill Nye of tech. His career includes contributions to Oscar-winning films, the Disney+ streaming platform, and Amazon EKS. In his free time, Justin enjoys building modern-retro computers and watching Moana. Key takeaways: In the early 2000s, being online was a choice. Nowadays, the tables have turned, and being OFFLINE is a choice. Being forced to be offline makes you realize how much you rely on technology not just on a day-to-day basis, but on a minute-to-minute basis. The realization that there was a whole tech world out there with "free tools" empowered Justin to learn as much as he could. Boring tasks are the best excuse for automation. The things that we do throughout our lives prepare us for where we need to be now. Learning in public led Justin to his job as a Linux sysadmin Almost everything in technology has some physical analogy. Inspired by Bill Nye the Science Guy and Elton Brown, Justin comes in with the mindset of "how can I make this entertaining", when creating tech content. Making short videos forced Justin to really focus on the important takeaway in the content he was developing. The hardest part for a lot of people to learn advanced topics is forgetting the things they already understand. Networking at conferences is a powerful tool which helped Justin go from his university sysadmin job, to working at Disney Animation. Find Justin on: Bluesky YouTube GitHub LinkedIn Reddit Podcast Find us on: All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout All of Adriana's social channels are on adrianavillela.com/socials Links: Palm Pre webOS AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) Trillium (software) Pidgin (software) ICQ (instant messaging) Business Wars: The AOL Time Warner Disaster Rogers Outage in Toronto in 2022 Knoppix Linux Distribution FASFA (US federal student aid) Windows CE XenServer TiVo Containers from the Couch (livestream) Infrastructure for Entertainment (KubeCon 2020 - Justin Garrison) Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) Cloud Native Infrastructure (book) Talos Linux Chapters: 00:00 Opening credits 00:26 Guest intro 03:22 Lefty or righty? 06:07 iPhone or Android? 12:38 Being "accidentally offline" for a business trip 17:30 Mac, Linux, or Windows? 20:48 From zero to Linux hero? 23:25 The least offensive major 29:12 Programming == manual work avoidance 33:29 Becoming a Linux sysadmin 36:25 Making tech content relatable and fun 41:30 Everything we learn is a lie 47:20 Working at Disney 54:31 From Disney Animation to Disney+ 58:00 Being a Cloud Native Ambassador 01:01:00 From big enterprise, to small startup 01:10:11 Final words of wisdom 01:13:10 Peace out and geek out  

When Aakansha Priya was working on her computer science degree, she wasn't even sure she wanted to be in tech. She craved human interaction, and thought that a career in tech couldn't give her that. She soon discovered that that was not the case, and was able to find was to thrive in tech. Learn about Aakansha's career journey, from front-end developer, to DevRel, to Solutions Architect, and how her determination to get into the observability world won over her current employer. About Aakansha Priya: Aakansha Priya is a Solution Architect at Dash0 and a CNCF Ambassador. With a journey from frontend developer to DevRel to solution architect, she brings both engineering depth and a strong customer advocate perspective. She loves championing her customers and serving as a bridge between them and engineering, ensuring technology delivers real value. Aakansha has spoken at conferences on DevOps and the human side of tech, and is passionate about helping teams unlock the value of observability with OpenTelemetry. Beyond work, she enjoys painting, singing, reading, and spontaneous travel and you'll often find her at meetups and conferences. Key takeaways: Being unafraid to approach strangers leads to wonderful connections. Don't be afraid to learn in public. Aakansha challenges herself by working her comfort zone of public speaking, and as a result, she is more comfortable on stage. Many conferences support first-time speakers Men in tech come from a position of privilege and it's important for them to use that privilege to help underrepresented groups. Don't be afraid to show up for a conference and bringing your true style, whether it's super dressy, super funky, or super dressed down. The Cloud Native space gives us a safe space to do that. Conferences provide a great networking opportunity, and could lead you to your next job! Nobody talks about the stress of the job hunt, but it doesn't mean that it isn't there. There are many other communities outside the CNCF that are also welcoming, such Commit Your Code. People don't really understand what networking really means and they forget the human aspect of it. There is a lack of women in Solutions Architecture roles. It pays off to prepare well for an interview. Find Aakansha on: LinkedIn Github Twitter Find us on: All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout All of Adriana's social channels are on adrianavillela.com/socials Links: Aakansha & Adriana at NDC London 2026 Marino Wijay on Geeking Out Tim Banks on Geeking Out Part 1 and Tim Banks on Geeking Out Part 2 Hazel Weakly on Geeking Out Commit Your Code conference (Danny Thompson) Cortney Nickerson on Geeking Out talking about making the most of your conference connections CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) exam KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) exam   Chapters: 00:00 Opening credits 00:26 Guest intro 00:43 Icebreaker 00:49 Lefty or righty? 00:55 iPhone or Android? 01:39 Mac, Linux, or Windows? 01:46 Favourite programming language? 02:26 Dev or Ops? 02:59 JSON or YAML? 03:32 Spaces or tabs? 03:48 Video or text? 04:23 What is your superpower? 06:14 How did you start your tech career? 13:24 Aakansha talks about speaking at her first conference 14:52 Becoming a CNCF Ambassador 16:45 Organizing KubeHuddle 19:48 Men supporting women in tech 20:40 Women supporting women 24:23 Dressing up for conferences 28:40 Career transition from DevRel 34:33 The importance of networking at conferences 39:52 Being a Solutions Architect 42:34 Breaking into the observability space 48:21 Parting words of wisdom

GenZ are in a unique position in the Age of AI, because they are coming up "AI native"...or are they? Join us for a special LIVE episode of Geeking Out, in which host Adriana Villela speaks with four GenZ-ers to get their perspectives on how AI is disrupting software development, and their future careers. Featuring Divyasha Pahuja, Stella Gu, Amrithaa Logeswaran, and Rachelle De Man. Key Takeaways A great way to use AI is to use it to do all the mundane tasks for you (e.g. formatting code) When you tell AI to do something for you, you're slightly losing the ability to do it yourself. When using AI, trust, but verify. Don't use AI for everything, because it takes away from why you're doing the project in the first place. Using AI to help you code makes things possible that you couldn't have necessarily done on your own. It brings to life ideas that have been in the back burner. GenZ-ers don't want AI to agree with them. They a partner challenge and brainstorm with, just as another human would. AI takes away the opportunities and joys of overcoming challenges in coding. There are higher expectations in terms of productivity now that AI-assisted development is a thing, and GenZ is feeling the pressure! We are at risk of losing our critical thinking skills due to over-reliance on AI. Many university course curricula are out of date, as they have not kept pace with AI, leaving students unprepared and without proper direction on how to use it in the workplace. Many universities aren't sure of how to integrate AI in their curricula in an effective manner. Final exams are one way to determine whether or not you've mastered the course work, or just got by during the school year by using AI to do most of the work for you. What's acceptable use of AI in non-engineering classes, such as visual arts, for example? AI slop cleanup is a real job now! Today's juniors recognize that they will be tomorrow's seniors. Therefore, they need employers to provide them with mentorship from seniors to help them succeed, and they need time to learn the fundamentals. It's no longer about writing code; system design is a crucial skill in today's job market. Words of wisdom: You need a well-rounded view and understanding of AI, as be intentional about how you use it. Be curious! About our guests Divyasha Pahuja Divyasha Pahuja is a GenZ AI engineer, multimodal ML researcher, and four-time peer-reviewed author at ACM/IEEE and Springer — someone whose career started before ChatGPT shipped and accelerated alongside it. She's had quite a journey: software engineer (back when LLMs weren't a household phrase), then back to school, then ML researcher, and now sitting at the cusp of both as an AI engineer. Off the keyboard, she's spent the last few years with Feeding India leading a digital campaign team, distributing meals, and building recurring partnerships with local NGOs and old age homes. Outside of all that, she loves playing badminton, is a self-admitted sore loser, has a soft spot for cats, coffee shops and Netflix because who doesn't, and is just starting an AI community at @un__prompted — say hi if you want to be there early. Find Divyasha on: LinkedIn Stella Gu Stella Gu is an early-career software engineer with past experience at Manulife and Huawei. She has explored a variety of roles within software engineering, including backend systems and data infrastructure. She enjoys working directly with code, turning ideas into meaningful software. Outside of tech, Stella can be found playing sports ⛷️🏐, exploring new food spots, and capturing moments on her phone. Find Stella on: LinkedIn Amrithaa Logeswaran Amritha is a second-year Integrated Engineering student at the University of Western Ontario, passionate about building inclusive communities and amplifying student voices. Last year, she served as a First-Year Representative with the Undergraduate Engineering Society (UES), where she discovered how much I love connecting with people and created space for everyone to feel included and supported. She's realized I’m just as passionate about supporting student life as I am about studying engineering. Whether it’s through leadership roles or one-on-one conversations, she loves building community and helping students feel like they truly belong. Find Amrithaa on: LinkedIn Rachelle De Man Rachelle De Man is a young software engineer with experience working at companies like Google, Okta and 1Password. She has an interest in all things web, primarily with accessibility, security, and testing. She’s passionate about hackathons, being a longtime volunteer and attendee. In her off hours, Rachelle enjoys crocheting, games, and photographing nature. Find Rachelle on: LinkedIn Find Geeking Out on All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela Chapters 00:08 Intro 01:38 Guest intros 03:59 What was your first programming language? 08:22 What was your first experience with AI-assisted coding? 21:57 Are GenZ-ers better positioned as being more "AI-native"? 27:50 What are expectations around AI usage in school? 45:20 What kind of support do you want from employers for success in an AI world? 56:36 Final words of wisdom 59:31 Peace out and geek out Show Notes Geeking Out Live: The One Where We Geek Out on Vibing Like It's 1999, Coding Like It's 2026 OSAP Logo (programming language) Turing (programming language) Lua (programming language) The era of AI slop cleanup has begun (Reddit) STEM Aspire program (Dell Technologies)

Key Takeaways Using IDEs took some of the mental load out of hand coding because of features like code completion Switching to IDEs from plain text editors was a bit of a mental change for many of us (maybe not as big as AI-assisted coding) AI-assisted coding gives us a similar feel to text editor based coding à la VIM AI-assisted coding is ADHD friendly — you can explain your architecture and the AI can do the mundane task of writing the code for you Vibe coding has turned senior developers into architects Vibe coding turns side projects that have been on your mind forever into reality in hours, days, or weeks Writing code in a language you don't know becomes dangerous if you're implementing it at scale As seasoned practitioners, when we vibe code, we know what "good code" is supposed to look like. The difference between a good senior developer and a great one is mentorship. We need to be willing to fail more in order to learn, but we also need a safe space to fail. Should non-developers write code just because they can, through AI coding agents? Not production-ready code, but it shouldn't stop them from using it to show off a proof-of-concept. Making space for "awesome slop projects" is a great way to showcase creativity and fun side projects, even if they never make it into production. AI side projects have led to an increase in purchase of domain names as developers finally have the "bandwidth" bring dust off old projects and bring them to life. Lot of developers now are becoming carpenters. They're building these tools that sometimes it's just vibe coded slop. Sometimes it's just being creative. Non-developer founders can bring ideas to life, but without a developer at their side, they risk introducing applications into the world that are non-scalable and walking security risks. Gen Z/Gen Alpha are NOT well positioned as devs in the AI native era if they don't understand some fundamental principles and if they don't learn through failure The most important skills a software engineer needs today: Trust, but verify, be curious, be a good communication, be willing to teach and learn from other humans Chapters 00:08 Intro 00:42 Guest intros 03:15 What was your first programming language? 07:59 IDEs took the mental load out of coding 11:21 AI-assisted coding is ADHD friendly 11:40 What do you despise most about hand coding? 13:34 What's your coder persona? 17:50 How do you feel about trusting AI implicitly to write code in a language you don't know? 23:04 Cassidy rant 28:19 Failure is a teaching aid 33:14 "Awesome Slop" 35:13 AI + domain name purchase side effect 36:49 Vibe coding + startup founders 41:54 Are Gen Z/Gen Alpha better positioned as devs in the AI native era? 45:36 Beware the non-developers with no coding experience' 53:35 Why is the AI writing React for me? 58:25 What's the most important skill a software engineer needs today? About our guests Cassidy Williams Cassidy is the Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub! Outside of that fancy title, Cassidy is a startup advisor and investor, open source-er, and meme-maker on the internet. She enjoys building mechanical keyboards, playing music, hanging out with family and friends, and teaching in her free time. Find our guest on: LinkedIn Bluesky GitHub Blog Newsletter Tim Banks (they/them) Tim’s tech career spans over 25 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started in avionics in the US Marine Corps and then into various government contracting roles. After moving to the private sector, Tim worked both in large corporate environments and in small startups, honing his skills in systems administration, automation, architecture, and operations for large cloud-based datastores. Today, Tim leverages their years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with the open source and cloud computing communities in his current role. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. They are the 2-time American National and is the 5-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in their division. Find our guest on: LinkedIn Bluesky Instagram Jeff Blankenburg Jeff Blankenburg spent the early part of his career in digital advertising, building websites for Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Ford Motor Company, among others. He also spent 8 years at Microsoft, primarily as an evangelist for any new technology he could get his hands on. He followed his passion to Amazon, where he was the Chief Technical Evangelist for Alexa for 7 years. Today, he is the Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace, helping developers make cloud native apps easier to build and maintain. Jeff has spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, India, Tokyo, Sydney, and New York, covering topics ranging from software development technologies to soft skill techniques. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek conference. Find Jeff on: LinkedIn YouTube Instagram Twitch Web site Josh Lee Josh is a Developer Advocate at Altinity, where he applies his observability and engineering background to ClickHouse use cases. He has over 15 years of experience in developing and leading software projects for various clients and industries. Josh is also a speaker and a contributor to the OpenTelemetry and CNCF communities, sharing his insights and best practices on topics such as distributed tracing. He is always eager to learn new things and explore new challenges, and he strives to create elegant and innovative solutions that take into account the nuances and correlations of complex problems. Find Josh on: LinkedIn Bluesky Find Geeking Out on All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela Show Notes Tim Banks on Geeking Out (part 1 and part 2) Josh Lee on the Geeking Out LIVE IWD Panel Amazon transcribe Handy Computer (text to speech) In the AI Era, Shopify Is Investing in Junior Engineers—Not Cutting Them Be a Carpenter (blog post) - by William Perron

Key takeaways: Kids take new tech for granted. For example, carriers used to charge by the minute for calls. Text and web browsing were extra (and extra expensive). Configuring Linux back in the day was 1 part fun, 10 parts pain. Watching things on video allows us to see expressions and hear intonations that you would otherwise miss with text. With text, you would have to imagine that for yourself. Being able to take a problem and break it down into first principles allows you to look at a problem from different angle, pulling on your experience and the experiences of others to solve those components and put the layers back on to form a solution. Many of today's paradigms are just variants of problems that we've seen before, just masquerading with different names. If we break down a problem enough, we actually start to see examples of how similar problems have been solved. Breaking down a problem into a way that someone outside of your area of work can understand teaches you to break a problem down into understandable bits and helps you understand the problem better. It's easy to think you understand something. But as soon as you try to try to explain that to someone else, it forces you to dig deeper. Understanding things from first principles gives us a better understanding of how things work. WIth vibe coding, junior engineers don't get to experience more traditional debugging (i.e. with Google). Is that good or bad? Problem solving loop: come up with a hypothesis, test it out, and if the test fails, come up with another hypothesis, and keep repeating that loop until the problem is solved. Juniors these days aren't necessarily exposed to that. Debugging with LLMs shortens feedback loops. Junior engineers, not having been through the "old way" of debugging with Google and StackOverflow may be tempted to view LLMs as an authority. Maybe it makes sense to just give into All The AI things and retrain ourselves to coexist with AI. Encode best practices in LLM rules files to help guide junior developers Style guides can be enforced through instructions files Mentoring + style guides + other guardrails can help junior engineers level up Pre-AI-era engineers and AI-native engineers can learn a lot from each other About our guest: Jean-Mark is a builder at heart, driven by a passion for creating sustainable architecture, fostering strong teams, and championing Observability. He has dedicated his career to building across various disciplines with a keen focus on creating systems that are both fit for purpose and built to last. Jean-Mark’s journey into Observability began from a practical challenge: the difficulty of understanding complex production systems at scale. This sparked a deep passion for designing and implementing solutions that provide clarity and insight into these systems. A natural leader, Jean-Mark is as invested in people as he is in technology. He has brought many others along on his journey, mentoring and training colleagues in best practices and making countless tooling improvements to enhance system visibility across the organization. This commitment to both technical excellence and people development has made a lasting impact. At his core, Jean-Mark is still a builder who finds great joy in investing in people and engaging in endless conversations about all things Observability. Find Jean-Mark on: LinkedIn Blog Find us on: All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela Links: Adriana's blog post born out of one of her chat's on LinkedIn with Jean-Mark Symbian operating system (mobile phones) Sony Ericsson Nokia 3310 LG Chocolate phone BlackBerry Curve Nokia phone case meme GPRS CDMA TDMA Observability Engineering book Anthropic AI fluency course

Key Takeaways With many companies scaling back DEI programs, conversations about gender equity are more important than ever. Seeing women in technical and leadership roles encourages others to enter and stay in the field. Men and women alike should use their privilege to advocate for and uplift women There's a difference between supportive and performative males. Performative males want to be "seen" doing the right things, but aren't actually supporting women in the workplace. Men who use their privilege to support women should not be put on a pedestal; that should be the bare minimum and something that should be done by default Don't wait until you're "ready" (we never feel fully ready). There's always someone less qualified than you who will apply for jobs/pursue speaking opportunities/scholarships/etc., so why not take a chance and put yourself out there? Don't be afraid to reach out to women to mentor/guide them; sometimes they may be too shy/scared to reach out Chapters 00:08 Intro 00:29 Guest intros 06:24 Why is IWD important? 11:20 Name one woman who inspires you 22:24 What can women do to support other women in the workplace? 31:43 Name one man who inspires you 42:55 What can men do to support other men in the workplace 51:48 What are some workplace inequalities that need to be fixed 58:22 What advice do you have for women entering tech? About our guests Colleen Coll "Allow myself to introduce...myself." - Austin Powers Ever feel like you're juggling flaming torches planning events—trying to keep all the details in the air while something’s always about to catch fire? Yep, she's been there. Events have a way of throwing curveballs, and when tech and tools aren’t playing nice, chaos can easily take over. That’s where Colleen Coll comes in. She love turning event madness into magic. Whether it’s on-site event coverage using digital media, live reporting, or behind-the-scenes management, she makes sure everything runs like clockwork. She's also a huge fan of using There.App, which simplifies on-location event management by keeping everyone in sync and streamlining the entire process, so no detail gets lost in the shuffle. From tech conferences to startup launches, I capture the moments that matter and keep things smooth, whether it's happening live or behind the scenes. And when she's not on the ground, she's writing—blogs, articles, and ghostwriting for tech leaders to tell the bigger story behind the event, brand, or mission. Find Colleen on: Bluesky LinkedIn Reese Lee Reese Lee (she/her) is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, where she enables users on open source technologies such as OpenTelemetry. She has spoken on various topics related to OpenTelemetry, and maintains and creates community resources aimed at OTel end users. She is super into anything paranormal, and enjoys sci-fi and traveling. Find Reese on: Mastodon LinkedIn X Imma Valls Imma is a Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs. She loves simplifying and sharing knowledge on Observability, OpenTelemetry, and Cloud Native accessible. Her mission is to create high-value technical content while driving the adoption of best practices within the community. As a community organizer and ally, she's passionate about building inclusive communities and events where underrepresented people in tech can confidently share their stories and knowledge. Knowledge isn't static; it's an asset that multiplies when shared. Find Imma on: LinkedIn Bluesky Josh Lee Josh is a Developer Advocate at Altinity, where he applies his observability and engineering background to ClickHouse use cases. He has over 15 years of experience in developing and leading software projects for various clients and industries. Josh is also a speaker and a contributor to the OpenTelemetry and CNCF communities, sharing his insights and best practices on topics such as distributed tracing. He is always eager to learn new things and explore new challenges, and he strives to create elegant and innovative solutions that take into account the nuances and correlations of complex problems. Find Josh on: LinkedIn Bluesky Find Geeking Out on All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela Show Notes Colleen Coll on Geeking Out Reese Lee on Geeking Out

Whats’s up, fellow geeks! Just a quick note to let you know that Geeking Out episodes will be dropping once a month, instead of twice a month. Still expect the same fun conversations and guests, but on a monthly basis, on the second Tuesday of the month. This means that you’ll get 12 episodes per year, with no breaks in the summer. Our next episode will be a livestream episode for International Womens' Day, featuring an awesome panel. We'll be streaming it on YouTube March 4th, and will drop it on the podcasting feeds on March 10th.