 Riding for me is a great way for me to have me time get some connection to the earth as a someone with a non-traditional tech background where you know I can come to this place where I'm like totally fluent remember that you know I have power and kind of innate intelligence I guess outside of the pressures of the tech world to say that stunting motorcycles is just like riding a horse for me it's about finding a rhythm with another like with a horse it's another creature and with it's a motorcycle it's you know you're you're one with the motorcycle that kind of extension of your physical body is is a really cool experience and you know breaking down these big tricks or these big skills into like little bite-sized pieces whether it's you know learning basic wheelies or you know just learning how to to understand if a horse is stressed out or or calm you know but I started thinking about more of my long-term career and what I wanted out of my life and my job and decided that you know it wasn't crashing motorcycles for a living I ended up taking an online coding course in Python and kind of had this aha moment where I was like not only can I do this which I didn't think was previous previously possible but it's fun like I really like solving these problems yeah there's not a whole lot so actually what part of the problem is that my I have a PR sitting in the control okay I started using GitLab about a year and a half into my career and it was certainly the first platform where I was like I feel so at home here like I have that confidence to say okay where can I start like where is the smallest foundational brick and for me DevOps and Kubernetes is kind of like we're the plumbers of the internet so you really have to know these like solid foundational components of like how things fit together and how things are are flowing through the internet I work for a team in Samsung SDS called the cloud native computing team and I'm a DevOps engineer on that team so we deal primarily with containers and Kubernetes and helping companies modernize and move to the cloud my team is super unique so we were kind of treated as like an incubated startup within Samsung so we're really given a lot of autonomy to make our own decisions and we had a really excellent CTO who prioritized diversity and he became involved with the bootcamp that I went through at a developers Academy and so he's made a huge effort to make the team really inclusive so we're interested in using GitLab because of its Kubernetes native capabilities I feel like a lot of technologies are they weren't built precisely for what you're using them for when we moved our platform to GitLab it was very clear that GitLab was a cloud native product and that it was made for Kubernetes like this is what it was made for I really love how GitLab as a company kind of stands by their values everything I have read about them online and also just seen expressed in their products and the people who work for their company is that they're truly open source and they're truly caring about their users I definitely wish that I could tell everyone about the opportunities in the tech industry today companies need engineers like crazy like everyone is recruiting everyone is always hiring and they just cannot fill these positions fast enough and it's kind of like a modern-day gold rush in a way because you know we're using tech in every aspect of our life and and these companies like kind of can't build it fast enough I see that as an open door for like everyone to come in like let's all let's all get involved and become a part of building this tech that's like shaping our lives