 I'm so happy to be here. DevOps Days are one of my favorite conferences ever because they're all about the community and I meet interesting people and we get to talk about stuff that nobody else wants to talk to me about, like how databases work. So if you wanna talk about that, hit me up. But today, I'm gonna tell you a few stories. I'm like, spoiler alert, they're all about me. But they say, teach what you know. So, you know, I know me. So hi, I'm Katie. I'm a developer advocate at Influx Data. I've been there for almost a year. I love databases. Did I mention databases yet? Man, I love databases. I also love all the things she mentioned and apparently that was nearly an exhaustive list except it left off candy. So talk to me about Star Wars and candy and databases and we can be friends. Also, feel free to contact me. I love to talk to people I meet at conferences. I like to learn. My Twitter handle is on every slide because I wanna talk to you. So I'm kind of an average expert. In the kind of low area, you get noticed and on the high end, you also get noticed but that middle area, that's what I like to call just good enough and that's sort of my area of expertise. I've been really, really getting good at it in my life and there are a lot of reasons for that probably, right? It's really hard to try really hard and fail but if you try a little, knowing you could have tried just a little harder and you probably would have been great but you didn't want to, like that sort of has been my life philosophy for many years, hence the exhaustive list of jobs but a big reason for this is because of my family. I have three older siblings and generally speaking, they're the most extraordinary people and when I was little, I thought that they were like the Titans, like creators of the universe, like even my parents had nothing on them and it starts with my sister. This is a 100% accurate drawing I did of her. She made it her profile picture so you're welcome. She was the smartest and most clever and really tough, like nothing the world did seem to get to her and I wish still that I had the kind of authority she had when she was 12. She's a high school math teacher so it has served her well but I wanted to be the same kind of authority. I wanted people to just fall quiet when I started talking because that's what I did when she was talking but there was always like a small threat of violence and then I have my brother Jake, also pretty accurate although I couldn't get all of his tattoos in so he's probably the one who's most likely to criticize me on that front. He was what I like to call super cool. He had all the friends. He had more friends than I knew where people we went to school with. I had a friend and it was a book, okay? Like everyone seemed to invite him everywhere and he had a smile for everyone and he kind of navigated the world with a social grace that I found really just baffling but what I wouldn't give when I was a preteen to have that kind of popularity and ease and if it looks like I'm doing it now, that's a lie. And then there's my brother Jared. He lives here in Boston. I came a couple of days early to hang out with him and I'm exhausted because he's the most energetic person on the planet. He's magnetic. When people meet him right away, they like him and he can get a smile or a laugh out of everyone he meets in like the first minute. And I wanted to be that. I wanted to be like likable and exciting and I wanted to be like a martial artist who would like hit stuff and be like, everyone likes me. And that's, that never really happened for me. I don't know, I don't know why but I mean, there was just me, you know? I like to read. I had a pretty sweet like WWF shirt for a while I wore every day but other than that, I felt like I was living under a bar and the bar was just like all of their sort of areas of expertise and it almost felt like there wasn't anything left for me to be an expert at. Like they had it covered. They didn't need me. My sister once called me, she said for the first five or six years of my life I was basically a pet, cute but useless. We're really good friends now but. And when I thought about it, I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I was trying to fit in a world that I felt was built for them. I felt like, just don't make that sad sound, oh. Or maybe do, yeah, poor little Katie. I felt like everything was built for them. I felt like I was, like whatever the bar was for success, I couldn't reach it. Not even when I was jumping, you know? They had defined what success was in our lives and there was just no way for me to be where they were. And when I started at Influx about a year ago, I had shed a lot of this. I was like, all right, writing code, talking to people. That's what I'm good at. I mean arguably one more than the other but don't worry about that. But then on my probably like first or second day they said, Katie, we're gonna go to a lot of DevOps conferences. And I was like, cool. And I wrote it in my notebook and then I Googled it for three days. Because I did not know what that was. And if you go back to my notebook, it's probably just filled with like a lot of screams. It's just like, what, what? So I don't like to go back to those notes. But I, so I started Googling and what I found was a lot of lists of tools and a lot of like things that said like, we're the solution to your DevOps problem. But none of them really said what DevOps was or why or how. And if anything, I felt more confused, right? I thought, well, okay, I'll just install some, I guess. Like maybe you just learned by doing. I don't know. And I don't know if you've ever tried to install like Kafka on your local machine, but like. Pfft. I was starting to feel like I just wasn't gonna get it. I was like, well, this has clearly been built for someone else who like gets it, it's not for me. But like problem, this is my job now. So I found myself kind of faced with something I had before. So as with everything, I sort of turned back to my own life, right? Like, what have I done before that I could, like I can learn from and like, how can I start using this? Because when I was younger, one of my solutions to kind of being cute but useless was to try to take on the like traits that I thought were the best of all of my siblings. So I started with my sister because she is still kind of the coolest. I mean, don't tell my brothers because they're not gonna watch this. She's the best. So I decided I would just look like her and talk like her and just be like, don't worry about me. I listen to the smashing pumpkins. I was probably like eight when she went through her smashing pumpkin space. She's six years older than me. And we shared a room and one day we decided, you know what, we're fighting a lot. And we had read this story about some sisters who split their room in half when they fought. So she and I decided this was the best way to move forward. So we went to school and when I came home, she was already home and it already split the room in half and had very graciously gifted me the top half. It turns out she didn't really like me imitating her. She didn't like that, you know, I believe the word she used was poser at the time. And I was like, fine, you know what? She hates me more. This doesn't feel like me. Maybe I'll try something else. And so I turned to my brother Jake, who is again, super cool and he was really good at sports. And so I thought, I could play sports, right? Like you just, catch the ball. No, I couldn't play sports actually. I have been hit in the face with every kind of sports ball that humankind has made. Some repeatedly and some have broken my glasses. And I don't know what to tell you, except that I just thought it was something you could just go do. And I really never bothered to ask my brother if he like practiced or if he was just naturally good at it. I always just imagined there was just like not a sports ball he couldn't pick up and be like, I know what to do with this. And you know, I mostly got hit in the face. So I left that one voluntarily because I thought, this is hurting us both really. And adopting sort of his personality I found out was a lot more work. So lucky for me, that's only two out of three. I got one more brother. And I thought, you know what? He's so passionate and likeable, like I can do that. But you know what? It turns out it's a lot of work. And it takes a level of energy that really only he has. And I tried to be as passionate about the world around me as he was. But I felt like everyone could see that like, it just wasn't true. You know, I felt like, oh, they know, they know that I don't care about this as much as he does because no one cares as much as he does. And I thought, okay, well, maybe I could keep faking it. And maybe like by sort of like styling myself after him, I can like learn how to become passionate, you know? But it turned out that like none of those really, they didn't make me feel good. And they didn't make me feel like I was solving any of my like own problems. It felt like I was trying on these different solutions and they were all a weird fit. And like maybe I could make them work, but it would take a lot on my end. And I'm not looking to do extra work. That's one of the things I knew I wasn't after. So one of the things I learned early on is that average does not mean small and it does not mean irrelevant and it most definitely does not mean easy. Average just means most common, right? It took me a long time to learn this, but once I was out in the world, I realized that there were a lot more people like me than were like those Titans that I thought were ahead of me. And when I thought about this in the DevOps space, I began to wonder, what if there were more people like me than there were Kubernetes masters? And then I thought, no one I've talked to knows how to use this. Well, it has to be true, right? But still, it's hard to know where to start. Because it takes a bit of realization to know that we're not the anomalies. Those Titans, they're the ones who are bigger than life and the rest of us, we're the ones adopting the tech and using the tech and perfecting it, right? Because they can offer us solutions because they have a team devoted to it. When they have a problem, they set aside time and they say, you know what? We're gonna have our best sort of DevOps engineers. And we all know that's not really a job title, but like let's say it is. They're gonna investigate, they're gonna figure it out for us. But like, I work at Influx Data, we have 100 people. There's no one to set aside. We're all doing like 700 jobs each. There's no time to be like, let me just investigate this one thing for two weeks. It's not gonna happen. So if we're the ones who have to use and perfect the tech, then we're the ones who should be lowering the barrier to entry. Not that easy to journey into DevOps. No matter where you start, there's a long way to go. And there are a lot of obstacles. And there may not be a clear finish line because I don't think there's any being done with DevOps, right? Also, I just realized that I like finger quoted like three times during this and I'm just like, oh, I'm gonna hate this. So there's so many obstacles, right? From just understanding the tech to knowing what tools to use to knowing what problem you're trying to solve. So where do we actually start? We start with fundamentals. And these are things I've learned over the past year and I would love to talk to you more about them later. These are my beginner's sort of notes. So we start with insight. And this is basically one question. What is going on here, right? Which is when I was learning to code and really when I've learned to do every job that they just listed, this is the first question I have. What's going on here? And we can wonder that about a lot of different levels, right? We can say, what's going on in my code? What's going on in my infrastructure? What's going on with my sys admin? What's going on? So my sister moved out when she was 17 and I think I was like 11. And it was my first bit of like freedom ever I had my own room. And I was like, I'm going to find myself. No one bothered me for a while. And I don't remember the next year like super clearly. I'm gonna be honest, but my sister likes to remind me that I spent the next year making potions dressed as a wizard. So, and I don't know if I can explain to you why that was sort of what I hooked on to. But what I do know is that it was important for me to like evolve into the Katie of today. I wish I could say that it wasn't, but somewhere inside there's just a wizard, wait and be let out. But insight and tech can mean a lot of different things, right? I was getting insight into myself through this like period of like exploration. And we wanna do the same thing. We wanna like experiment with insight because does that mean you need to do a risk assessment? Does it mean you need to monitor more things? Does it mean you need to analyze patterns, identify patterns? There's so many places to start, right? So my advice that helped me is to choose tools that help you challenge your assumptions and verify your behavior. Now if this sounds a little bit like test driven development, it should. Because that's one sort of philosophy that I cling to as someone who was new to coding. Testing was a way for me to look into the future and try to like imagine what I wanted from my code much later regardless of whether or not I knew how to do it. And I think that that is a good fit for DevOps. We should look really far ahead and say what could go wrong and try to prepare the best that we can. And yes, I work at a company that makes a tool for this. But I will tell you that when I was learning, I used Influx. That's what I needed to learn for my job. But if there's something at your job and everyone you know is like you must use X tool, then that's what you should use. Because you need to start with some things you do know to be able to grasp what you don't. So the first thing I instrumented was a Rails app because I knew Ruby well enough to, and it was old and it was a little bit broken and I expected it to have some weird things to be able to monitor because I had written it. And when I sort of instrumented it with Influx, I began to get back metrics from my database and say like what are the response times like? Why are the queries slow? And within just maybe like an hour or two just depending on like how many times I messed up, I had already improved this like old application. And I thought well if I can make these little improvements knowing nothing in a couple hours, then like what must a DevOps engineer be able to do with their time? So I would tell you that the tool doesn't matter. Choose the one with the lowest barrier to entry and as you get familiar with tools, then naturally what follows is you begin to understand their nuances and you begin to say you know what, I don't need a tool for monitoring anything. I need to monitor just logs or just errors and then you'll get smarter and the tools will get more sophisticated. But don't do it first. The second thing you need to be successful in DevOps is communication because if you don't think about how to communicate, bad things will happen to you. And really we can communicate on so many different levels. There's person to person, there's team to team, there's system to system. There's a lot of ways to be wrong and a lot of ways to be right too. But it's hard to know where to start. So in communication what we wanna do is help ourselves do two things. We want to prioritize and empathize. Now prioritize is important to me because like I said, if we work at this average company and you're just doing your job, well it probably means you have a lot of things to do. So this can be even as simple as knowing that like an email means it's a task that can wait but like a direct message means it's urgent. It doesn't have to be a whole tool, right? It just has to be about expectations because most of the times that I've seen communication go badly, it mostly revolves around people's expectations not being met. So setting those expectations are a way that you can prioritize. What really matters to you? What is the first obstacle that you need to tackle? So empathy, am I right? Yeah, that's empathy down there. Okay, so the most important part for me about empathy is not necessarily that you adopt a tool, right? But this is about adopting a mindset because DevOps problems are the kinds of problems that cross teams, cross companies, right? They're so much bigger than just one person. And as being the person who has just like messed up a lot of stuff, like empathy is a really important characteristic. The most I've learned is from people who are like, you are wrong about that, but so was I one time. Here's how to fix it. Because small changes can still lead to big incidents. So the first time I came home from college, I was like not that excited to come home. I was like a new person, you know? I had been living dorm life and I was just like very cool. But as soon as I got out of the car, my brother Jared ran out of the house and he saw me and I saw the look in his eye and I knew exactly what he was gonna do because he had done it a million times before. And he ran at me for a piggyback ride. He is about three feet taller than me, but this has never stopped us before. So he launched himself at me and in that moment I had these realizations. I'd been reading for about a year, just sitting there and he had definitely been going to the gym. So when he hit me, what happened instead of me catching him and like prancing along happily was that he just smeared me into the gravel and just rode me like a toboggan for 10 yards. And these invisible changes, right, that are hard to test for and easy to miss because you just think, well, that looks about the same. No, not the same. Imagine that your coworker changes just the port number in a config file and it's already taken in production and then you're very sad. And I do wanna touch on one note about optimization. Sound good? No, do do it someday, but if you're starting in DevOps and you think, I don't know where to start and then you find yourself just like improving times and just wondering like, ooh, can I make this better? Don't do it. Prioritize. Because there's always time for optimizations later but if you're in a spot where you need to know what's going on and like, how do I communicate with my team? Then optimizations are not the right place for you to be spending your time. I'm not saying never but just maybe not for a while, okay? Especially if you're like me and at these average sort of place. The thing is, is that average is typical, right? Average means it's a good fit and average means, yeah, good enough and sometimes when we're these smaller companies, smaller individuals, then like compromise is just, it's part of how you grow. You say, today's good, today is average and that's a good thing because that means nothing's going wrong. Average doesn't mean that we're never going to be titans of industry. What it means is that we're patient. It means that we know how to prioritize and it turns out average is still pretty good after all. Thank you. I was wondering, you said you're a developer advocate. Yes. What does that mean and what do you do in a day to day? Oh, oh, you. No, thank you for asking that because honestly it's the question I get asked the most and I had never heard of this job before I took this job because I just wasn't worried about it. No, so the reality is that at Inflex Data we make an open source product. So what we need is someone to be the voice of the company to the community and then the voice of the community to the company. So I am sort of like a technical liaison. So sometimes I write code, I write our demos, I write blogs about how the tech works and I help people who use it on the open source community understand it. I never touch sales because ugh. And I don't have to care about it, which is nice. And then I also basically just, my job is just to explain. I am a technical explainer and friend to all. Okay, awesome. Well then thanks again, Katie and we'll move on to the next thing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Give me the applause.