 Hi, this is Yoho Sapil Bhartiya and welcome to another episode TFR. Let's talk. And today we have with us once again, after a long time, Angel Diaz, Vice President of Technology, Capabilities, and Innovation at Discover. Angel, it's great to have you back on the show after a long time. It's great to be back. Nice to see you. Thank you for getting some time. I want to quickly talk about your own journey. Why you chose to join Discover. What is Discover doing in the context of open source and what is your role at the company? So there are a couple of questions combined together there. Yeah, I know. But I think we could provide some good context. If you step back at Discover, we're obsessed with helping our customers have a brighter financial future. What does that mean? Well, that means becoming more digital. How do you do that? Well, you do that by thinking about our processes, how we deliver products, how those products align to our customer user journeys across card, bank, and payments. We think about our people. How can our people best serve our customers as well as learn and expand on those processes and, of course, technology? How do we best utilize technology? And I got to tell you, I've had such an awesome opportunity through my career being the beneficiary of others, others who've helped me learn about technology, whether it's early days of web standards to where we are now with open source and this democratization of technology. And as you look at this democratization of technology, we've been going up, up, up, and up on the massive hierarchy of needs. So what better next step for me personally than joining a financial services firm and trying to leverage those technologies in a more human-centric way? And that's what we're doing here at Discover. Can you talk about Discover's own journey or embrace of open source before you join and after you joined? You mentioned KubeCon, right? So at KubeCon, we spent a bit of time talking about this. When you look at open source principles, code, community, collaboration, the way of working, that way of working not only applies to open source, but applies to businesses, how technology teams, how business teams can actually work together, right? So Discover has always employed those principles. It's grounded in our behaviors, how we operate. We work together, we succeed together, we get better every day, right? And we focus on helping our customers. So what we've done is that we've taken those open source principles and we have used that as the way that we have defined our single way of working. In fact, how we define a user story or do contract-based testing with PAC or have a pipeline for our containers to go through in a secure and rapid way from dev to production, all of those ways of working has been defined by our own teams and continuously get improved through that inner open source process. Now, I want to just talk about the industry that Discover operates in financial industry. There are certain industries which are like kind of very, very open and pro-to-open source. There are certain industries which are kind of elected. I talked to Gabriel Colombo who also run Finos and he said, you know, this industry is kind of reluctant in some cases because, you know, they have been around for a while. They deal with a lot of sensitive. So from your perspective, where are we when it's come to, you know, financial industries and embrace of these open source technology and practices? Financial services is no different than any company. We're a technology company, right? You know, you think about it, we're in the business of trust and technology, right? And like most companies, the technology that we consume, right, has open source in it, right? So we have well-defined processes and things around how we utilize any technology, how we maintain that technology and ensure that we are providing that trust to our customers. Now, like any other organization, you have choices, right? So let's just say we want to improve on a piece of technology or we like to innovate. You can do it yourself, which gives you a certain amount of value or you can try to do it with others, right? So we do it with others. I think a great example of some of the work that we've done recently, and you mentioned the Finos group, right? Is around trying to reduce the time between understanding a customer journey and implementation, right? So going from a design system to a react implementation in code. Typically, there's lots of hand-offs and PDFs thrown across the wall, right? And we participated in I think Finos' largest ever hackathon across 27 countries around a code base, which we contributed and now an open source project, right? Around that reducing the clock speed of design to implementation. And by the way, doing it in a way that is accessible by design. So those are examples of things that we've done. We're not unique in that. Many companies do that. But how we are unique is how we do that, all right? The focus on our people and building their craft. I want to go to this how part as well. Of course, you have been technologist. When it comes to this whole new technologies, what is the challenging part, technology or people? And then as you said, the focus is more on people. How do you folks not only empower, enable your internal teams to go out, contribute, get involved? So of course, you can have a lot of legal framework, but you're also kind of cultured within the company. So talk about the people side. I got to tell you, when people, processes and technology are aligned, there's nothing you can't do to help your customers be successful. And that's one of the things, by the way, that really attracted me to join. Discovered be three years from me in February, all right? And let's just talk about the people piece. Here we're very much focused on what we call building your craft, whether you're a product owner, a tech anchor, a test engineer, whatever your role is about building your craft. In fact, our talent system is aligned to encourage people to learn, to share, and to contribute. So let's start that conversation internally. We have an internal Discovered Technology Academy. We've had this past year over 10,000 pieces of Discover-Born content, blogs, articles, videos, tutorial, all categorized and tagged. Now some of it is normative. It becomes part of our engineering practice. Some of it is best practices. And some of it is just sharing, right? But that creates that inner environment. And folks, they love it. They love working together. It's a very vibrant digital community. And by the way, we started that community during COVID. So it was born digitally. Now right now, I'm in our physical space here in Discover. But I got to tell you, building it digitally first was fantastic. Now, what is better than learning and sharing and building out your practices together, building it with the world, right? So in February this past year, we brought out technology.discover.com, which is a reflection of who we are in our culture and our people. So there you will find technical articles. You'll find our real engineers sharing and collaborating, which of course ties very closely to our external GitHub. That whole process end to end, to your point, has very well-defined processes around how we talk and what we talk about. But it is a funnel, it is a funnel. Just to give you a data point, this past year, we had over 1,300 so-called acts of eminence across just our engineering teams. And that's going out giving a presentation or running a meetup or hosting event or doing a keynote at a KubeCon. That counts for one. And you mentioned DTE, Discovery Technology Academy and also there was another initiative, DTE. I want to just talk quickly about these two initiatives and of course the goal I do understand, but I just want to go a bit deeper into these two and what impact they have not only on discovery internally but also externally. So let's start with DTE, Discovery Technology Academy. So that's the place where we have a series of guilds. So we kind of break out guilds by technical area and by engineering practice. We have about, I would say, probably about 180, 200 active participants driving each of those different guilds, taking content, vetting content, deciding plus wanting, deciding what becomes normative behavior. We pair that with learning. So we have a dojo team, a dedicated team that pairs within a sprint. So you don't stop doing work, right? Pairs with engineering teams to help them get better. So let's imagine that a team wants to improve on TDD or BDD or contract-based testing or implementing a new taxonomy for API endpoints. We have dojo coaches that will pair and within the context of that backlog, ensure that folks are learning and then contributing back whatever those learnings are into the overall system. We also have events. We run, every week we have what we call elevate your craft events where we take moments out of time, folks come together, immerse themselves in hands-on keyboard workshops and so forth. So that's how we tie our processes, right? To our people so they get better. When you do that, you create space in the backlog, right? And when you have space, that's escape velocity for innovation. And we have a very well-defined innovation process where teams can then within that time in the backlog take on interesting things that they want to experiment with, technologies or ideas or intellectual property. And use it as an opportunity. Now, that's Discover Technology Academy, our internal kind of mechanism for sharing and growing, very deliberate, very engaged. But as I said before, you learn more when you're outside. In fact, the hardest thing to do is to teach something or explain something. So when you do that, you know that you're mastering the topic, right? So DTE, our Discover Technology Experience, which is technology.discover.com, is essentially the subset of DTA that we share with the world, right? It consists of blogs and articles and technical topics of how we do things. You can find out where we're at, what events we're doing to, what open source communities we're participating and so forth. And it allows us to showcase kind of what we do in a way that helps us better engage in open source communities. And by the way, it's great for employee retention and attraction, right? Because everybody loves talking about what we do, right? Especially if it's in a very positive way. Excellent, thanks for explaining that. Now, since people are talking about Cubeco and you mentioned innovation, this is a question that I have to ask you, which is about Genitive AI. Talk a bit about you have been in this space for so long. How do you see today? Of course, there's no one Genitive AI that technology is being built. But do you also feel that, is it just a hype or do you feel that this is the same scale of technology as is the Linux kernel or Kubernetes? And then we can also talk about from, how do you by you, I mean, discovered look at Genitive AI? Again, if I look at any set of technologies, they're all built on successes of the past, right? So nothing is truly revolutionary is additive, right? But then what happens is that use cases expand because all of a sudden these pieces start to kind of fall into place. You have compute, you have models that have been tested and learned and so forth. In the space of Genitive AI specifically, I think, I'll kind of mention two things. One, if you go to technology.disparer.com, you'll see one of our use cases, which is some work that we've done in our call centers. One of the most fantastic things about discover card bank payments teams that we have amazing customer support, right? And those folks work really hard to try to get the right answers, right? So we use, we're experimenting with Genitive AI to help those call center folks, our customer agents, our customer facing the visuals to front door for discover, right? Help our customers achieve that brighter financial future. That's a fantastic use case and there's a lot of work that we're doing there. And in fact, what we talk about externally is some partnership that we've been doing with Google. So it's kind of pretty cool. Now, but there's many more use cases. Many, many more use cases. So the question is, what do you do? People have talked about Genitive AI in the context of writing code and other things like that. We have an internal kind of council. We look at the different use cases and then we do experimentation in kind of a well-defined way of how we start thinking about some other areas where we can bring this technology in. Since we are talking about open source, I also want to talk a bit about Discover's involvement with foundations and open source project, talk about them. Absolutely. So we recently joined the Linux Foundation. We participate in several communities pretty deep in Phinos. We have a board member, we're very active in Phinos. And there's many exciting projects. So we talked a little bit about KubeCon and Kubernetes. We use Kubernetes and that technology as our door into leveraging scalable environments. Another area that's really important, I think not just to us, but to many groups is the whole notion around supply chain. This was a big topic also during KubeCon. And that is understanding how different open source projects relate with each other. And how do you manage requirements? It's also the providence of what's happening. So in the Linux Foundation, I believe, I remember how put a big investment in starting a supply chain kind of open source group. And that group is working across all of the different open source groups to kind of build that connectivity. So that's another area that we've been real active in as well. We are almost at that year. And so I also want to really talk about what are the things from the perspective of course there are a lot of things you cannot share but just give us a glimpse or teaser into the things that we can expect from Discover once again from the perspective of people open source. Okay, you're ready to do the crystal ball. No, look, one thing that we're obsessed about is around automation and pattern. So if you go back to early days of computer science, they had the gang of four software development patterns, arrays, link lists, I know, old school. You don't think about that anymore. It's embedded in libraries. But that concept of patterns and improving the technologist experience, some people call it the developer experience, is how you bring these different kind of ecosystems environments together. We have built a very rich set of technology patterns and automation patterns. In fact, just this past year, we have given back over a hundred thousand hours to developers through patterns, right? And we're starting to share more of those in the communities. It was a big topic of discussion within KubeCon as well, right? How do we improve the developer experience through automation, through patterns? And I think that there is a kind of a very nice kind of a hierarchy, right? There's lower level patterns when they come together as composites and those composites come together as larger things. So we will certainly be doing more in that space in the open and partnering with others who are thinking the same way. I want to also talk about looking at open source from the lens of a corporate player of a company's perspective versus a community project. How do you see it? And what role companies like discovered playing this space? Yeah, and this is so exciting because I've been involved in open source communities for a very long time and taking those exact same operating models, how open source works and applying it to how we work internally as an organization, not just how we use open source for inter open source projects, but how we use open source to define engineering practices, our processes, et cetera. It has such an amazing benefit of, A, getting a really good answer, right? Because you have a lot of people together and then, B, everybody's on board because they were all part of making that thing, right? And I think that has been kind of a supercharger for us as we continue to get better every day on how we deliver products and delight our customers. I know this is a bit sensitive, but I will ask and you'll see how it goes is that once in a while, I will not name any company, but we do see companies change licenses, we do see companies change their approach to our projects. Being in this industry for so long, are you worried about this trend or you see that, hey, open source is big enough, there is room for everybody and things will take care of themselves? There's always been that question, right? It's this, you can go back 20 years and the same kind of question. And the view that I take is that this all kind of always normalizes, right? To your point, open source is valuable. Why? Because you create a common way of doing something and you create a skill-based around it. One that cannot be rivaled or managed by any single company, right? And so when you have strong open store, true open source centers of gravity, you have strong ecosystems, strong partners that you can rely on, right? And great innovation. So there's always kind of back and forth between licenses, license terms, people changing licenses, whatever. It all kind of normalizes in the end. Angel, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course, talk about Discover Open Source, the work that you folks are doing there. Thanks for all those insights. And as usual, I would love to chat with you again. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you and seeing you again. Thank you.