Challenges and Wins of Developer Advocacy Plus OpenTelemetry and Neurodiversity in Modern Tech

Carl Alexander:
Hi, welcome to Open Channels fm. I’m Carl. Zach couldn’t make it today unfortunately and we’re here with Diana Todea and why don’t you start telling a bit about yourself?

Diana Todea:
Sure. Hi Carl, nice to see you. I’m very happy to be here. Yeah. So a bit about myself. I’m Diana, I’m based in Valencia, Spain. I’m originally from Bucharest, Romania. I’ve been living here in Spain for the last 10 years because of Valencia. Yeah, you’ve been there? Amazing.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, I’ve been there. I loved it. So for people that don’t know they used to have a river and then they drained it and now you can like go. There’s like a bike pat in it. It’s awesome. Like it’s really, it’s. Yeah, I love it. It’s like everybody that’s been loves it. I think it’s like it’s a underappreciated until you’ve seen it and then over, over like very well deserve of the hype once you’ve been there. Kind of city in Spain.

Diana Todea:
Yeah, totally. I love it. So you get like really nice food, oranges. So yeah, the perfect mix, you know? Totally. So yeah, more or less I could go the easy way and say I move for the nice weather and the nice state, which is actually very, very true. But yeah, I work in tech so I’ve been working in tech for the last 16, 17 years and I’m doing like a bunch of things. So at the moment I’m leading the dev rel engineering at Victoria Metrics. But in the past I’ve been SRE reliability engineer and I did a lot of engineering work and what I do when I’m not doing the dev rel engineering part, I’m contributing to OpenTelemetry, that’s an open source project for telemetry, for observability and I’m also co leading the CNCF merge forward Neurodiversity group. So that is basically if you want to learn more about that, just, just ping me.

Carl Alexander:
I’m. I’m literally going to give a talk on neurodiver on neurodivergence in August in Montreal. Yeah, I’ve been really obsessed. I, I want to do a lot of. Oh my God, we might do the entire show on this. Like but, but, but yeah, no, I’ve been. I had kind of, like, my midlife crisis slash, like, discovering, like, all the, like, autism stuff. Like, I don’t have an official diagnosis, but I kind of, like, read this book. Actually. I have it right here, Unmasking Autism. It’s backward and. But excellent book. And then it made me realize a lot of my behavior was just, like, I just stumbled on a lot of, like, solutions to, like, my autism, and it was, like, really high opening and. Yeah. So I just. I feel like a lot of us, every time I talk about it, I don’t know what’s your experience been, but when I talk about it, a lot of people resonate.

Diana Todea:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, definitely, we can. We could go and talk about this some more. For me, that’s absolutely no problem. I mean, to be honest, I’ve been a neurodivergent person all my life, but, you know, like, I never actually opened up about it. And CNC have kind of, like, created this new initiative called Merge4 last year, and they had a bunch of groups before that, but they never had a neurodiversity group. So they created it last year, and I saw it as like, oh, I can volunteer. I could lead this. That’s me. You know, I didn’t know about that. So we slowly ramped up. So right now I’m also giving, besides, like, tech talks. I’m giving talks about neurodiversity and the same. Like you said, there’s a lot of people that are interested, especially in tech, and they come just for the topic. So, like, hey, that’s me as well. Like, let’s.

Carl Alexander:
Let’s talk some more. I mean, I. I feel my reason for doing it is. I feel like a lot of people don’t realize, especially, like, I’m. I’m turning 43 actually tomorrow. And basically, most people my age don’t really go through life with a diagnosis. Like, most people get their diagnosis because they had kids and they get a diagnosis and they’re like, wait a second, like, I’m this way. Like, does that mean. And then it’s like, usually. Yes, exactly. So I. And I just feel there’s a lot of that in. In tech of people that are just kind of, like, stumbling around not knowing why they’re doing things specifically in specific ways or why things bothered them. I’m also a big fan of the. The big headphones as well. And for. For the sound, you know, for, like, noise cancellation. So. No. Noise cancellation. Exactly. So, yeah, every time I bring it up, people get really excited because it’s that and ad, ADHD, if both. And just sharing, like, I think it’s just important. I don’t. Again, I don’t know what your experience been, but I just want to share tips and tricks basically, for sure, because I’m. I’m working with my therapist to do this talk, but basically the idea is not to be like, just, just talk about it and see like, how it impacts you and like strategies that worked for me and things like that because again, I’ve been very open about it. But I find like, people really resonate because they’re starting to be more aware of it. Like, more people are getting like, realizing that that’s affecting their life.

Diana Todea:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, we are the same age, to be honest. And by the way, happy birthday for tomorrow.

Carl Alexander:
Thank you.

Diana Todea:
I’m turning 40. I mean, I turned 43. Sorry, I’m in the past. I turned 43 actually last December. I still, like, my mind is like somewhere in the past. I’m like, you know, I cannot get quite up to the moment. Like, hey, man, you’re 40 something.

Carl Alexander:
Okay. It’s funny, I’m the opposite. I’ve been thinking I’m 43 for a couple of months now. Like, yeah, but time’s weird. Like, age is weird. Especially in your 40s. Like, it’s like you’re kind of like still thinking you’re like, young and then.

Diana Todea:
Oh, yeah.

Carl Alexander:
And then some stuff doesn’t work anymore. We are. We are.

Diana Todea:
Yes.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah.

Diana Todea:
But yeah, my brain, my brain refuses to say, like, oh, you’re over 30. So I think I’m stuck weighing the best. So, like, when I see my age, I’m like, trying to confuse, like, am I 42? 40? I know I’m 40 something, but I like, I. I don’t know, like, what age am I exactly.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah. I mean, yeah, but, yeah, so it’s. It’s really interesting because I’m really excited to, to hear that you’re giving talks. And like, I’ve been trying to apply with that to work camps for a long time and I wasn’t able to. It’s not a word camp. I. It’s another conference. But I just think it’s interesting for. In tech talk, like in tech conferences, I feel like there’s a lot. Like I said, there’s a lot of people that are unaware and we’re like the prime. We’re like, we’re almost like selected for our autism. And in tech, you know, and we don’t talk about it and we don’t share strategies and we don’t you know, like, it’s kind of like this closeted thing, and I’m just like, no, we should talk about it and, and discuss, like, strategies that work for you and might not work for somebody else, but you won’t know till you discuss things. So.

Diana Todea:
Yeah, no, totally. And I’m really glad that you also, like, lead with that, and I think that’s really amazing. Like I said, this is very new to me as well. And I started giving talks actually this year, so I had, like, since January, I started giving, like, talks on neurodiversity, and we had a couple of interactive sessions even at Kubecon in Amsterdam. And I’m gonna be in Minnesota, actually, for the Observability Summit there and the Open Source Summit, giving a talk on Neurodiversity Day 2. So definitely we want to bring more awareness to embrace more visibility to neurodiversity, but not just, like, stay and be isolated, you know, like, just give a bunch of concepts, like, actually walk around and ask people, you know, have this interactive session. Hey, what do you think about that? Should we, like, you know, process some tips and advices like you said? Should we go even further? What’s, what’s your idea how we should move along with this community? So I think it’s great.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, I think, like I said, it’s really more about sharing. I kind of. I don’t know. I don’t know if you’re doing this in your talk, but first of all, do you have a diagnosis, if you don’t mind sharing?

Diana Todea:
No, I, I never went to get the diagnosis.

Carl Alexander:
Same, same. So. But I, I. One of the things I wanted to talk. I don’t know if you talk about it is whether you should get one or not. And I’m just. Basically, it’s up to you, basically, is what I, I, that’s like, kind of my position. I, I think for some people, it’s very empowering to get one. And for some people like me, it doesn’t really change anything because I just want prescriptions, you know, I just want. So, like, I just want to know what to do. I don’t need some sort of paper to tell me that I have it or not. And. But my first therapist really didn’t like that. Actually, my first therapist was like, I’m sure I am. And she’s like, you should get tested. I was like, do you think I have it? She’s like, yes. And I’m like, okay. So, like, I don’t, you know, I, I just think that’s like, that’s like an. Basically a. That’s the tricky topic because I think it really comes to like, personal preference for. For that. But that’s really cool. So how many talks have you given on this so far?

Diana Todea:
So far. So actually next week I’m going to give you the second talk. Also. I also had, how can I say, a community hub session at Kubecon. Like I said. So I’m moving away from day one because I’m giving the same talk I gave the. In January, but in. Yeah, in Minnesota. We’re going to move actually to day two. So we’re going to have another interactive session with people and we want to move beyond fundamentals and say, hey, how can we ship our community? What can we do from our side to, I don’t know, better raise the visibility. Should we create some resources? What should we do? So definitely. We’re moving along. We’re moving along.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, that’s great. And actually this is a good segue because you’re going to Minnesota for an open telemetry conference, right?

Diana Todea:
No, actually it’s an open source summit.

Carl Alexander:
Okay.

Diana Todea:
It’s called. Yeah, Open Source. Yeah. Open source summits in Minnesota. And then the second day is observability summit. So, yeah. Anyway, at Open Source summit, I’m going to give this talk about neurodiversity and the second day I’m going to give a tech talk about telemetry. So, yeah, they’re like, you know, I, I have like multi, you know, I wear different hats. I’m like shifting from.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s great. Yeah, I like, I think it’s always good to have like multiple subjects that you feel like talking about. I used to, I used to speak. You seem like you speak at a lot of conferences per year. I think it comes from like the DevRel position, right?

Diana Todea:
Like, yeah, well, yeah, because I discovered conferences, the conferences, like two years ago when I was still my engineer and I couldn’t get enough of it. So I was like, okay, I need to speak more at the conferences. So is that a real job? I didn’t even know that Devrel is a real job. So I was like, oh, yeah, that’s a real job. Okay, I’m going to work for it. So, like, it took me two years to actually transition to a DevRel position and here I am. No, no, I changed companies.

Carl Alexander:
Okay.

Diana Todea:
Yeah, yeah, I changed companies. I used to be an SRE at Elastic and then I changed and I was fortunate enough to be at Devrel right now at another observability company. So for me, that’s the sweet spot because I can blend tech topics with whatever I want to do as well. And yeah, it’s a great position because I’m an introvert, but it also allows me to go out there, speak more, interact with people. Otherwise I’ll be sitting all day long next to my computer.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It, it kind of forces you, you out of, of your shell a bit. And I, yeah, I used to speak at a lot of conferences pre Covid, like seven a year or something. And yeah, it’s useful to have multiple topics like you’re doing and, and just so you can apply it. Because sometimes when I would coach people, I would say, well, sometimes they might want you to speak, but they already got like three topics similar to yours if you give them multiple topics that don’t overlap. And sometimes some years stuff is more popular than others. Right. Like if you apply with AI, right now everybody’s applying with AI, so if you try to talk about something else, you have a better chance because they don’t want to just have talks about AI and, and all of that. How have you found your, how have you found it to be in Devrel now that you’ve been in it for a little bit?

Diana Todea:
Yeah, it’s definitely, how can I say, hard work. Not as, I don’t know, the usual preconception is that, oh, Devrel is just like, you know, basically an influencer or whatever, a marketing person goes out there, gives some talks, yada, yada, yada, and then poof, magic happens and possibly we get some leads out of it, which is totally incorrect because right now probably it used to be like this at the beginning, I’m not sure, maybe like 15 years ago. But right now people are more and more actually technical because they move away from different segments from tech and they want to do Devrel. So basically I have lots of colleagues that they were like software developers or like DevOps or SREs just like me. The one day they did the clicks, like, hey, I want to teach people how to do stuff, right? I want to show them, I want to explain them and I also want to connect with them and I also want to learn. And I think here the plus is the community, right? Because you get big motivation from the community. I didn’t even know there’s such a big community out there in tech. And they’re all very welcoming and it’s good when you try to find your sweet spot, like, what’s your community? What topics do you like to share? And I like it because it’s Very, very competitive. So in the sense that, okay, right now that I transition, like I said, after two years from very, let’s say, tech position to Devrel, which is also very tech, don’t get me wrong, but I get to speak with a lot more people and interact a lot more with the community. And this allows me also to, how can I say, learn at my own. Like, keep up to date, let’s say, with the trends, but also get like, fresh perspective from my colleagues. They. They come with so many ideas at some point. Let’s say you do this for a few. A few months, or like a couple of years, and people come to you and they’re like, oh, Carlo, hey, Diana, do you want to do a talk together or would you like to come to this conference and, I don’t know, give a talk about this? So it’s really exciting, like the human factor, because we. We tend to know each other. We grow a bit like this, and within our segments, we are a lot more close. So it’s from my side, I could see right now knowing what Devrel person does. It’s very. Yeah, it’s. It’s mis. Misrepresented. Is very misinterpreted and definitely undervalued because, yeah, on the surface, people think that it’s not necessarily such a tech, technical type of role, but it is. And it’s also very demanding because you need to input a lot of effort. You need to have a lot of motivation. You need to travel.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, you travel a lot.

Diana Todea:
If you have friends or family, then it also, you know, strains a bit on your schedule and on your family schedule. So, yeah, definitely you need to have like a pool of energy, some magic.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, I mean, I. I’ve met a lot when I was doing conferences a lot pre Covid. I mean, the two types of people I would see all the time are basically Devrel people, because they were speaking at a lot of conferences and the salespeople that were at the Boots, basically. And, um, yeah, I have a. The most extreme case is I have a. I have a friend called Dwayne. He speaks at a conference every two weeks on average, if not every week and a half, basically, which is insane. I. I don’t know how he does it because you said you’re introverted and I’m kind of curious. Like, I’m kind of ambivert. So actually right now I’m kind of like in an autistic burnout, which is like, I don’t really want to interact with people. And it’s because I just went to a conference and I came back and that was like kind of one of the insights that I got once I realized I was autistic is I had these kind of weird burnouts that weren’t really work burnouts. They were just kind of like, I can’t deal with people for a couple of weeks. So, like, I’m kind of curious how you manage that as a, as an introvert who does like Devrel and all that.

Diana Todea:
Well, it’s definitely has been a roller coaster and still is, but I think it’s like the way, the way that, I mean, that was part of my motivation. I wanted to push myself to, how can I say, take the plunge. Have the cold shower, go out there

Carl Alexander:
on the stage, push your limits.

Diana Todea:
Exactly. And actually for my first talk, I got invited to a conference. It was like a brand new conference, whatever. It was an SRE conference. And I got invited actually. I was like, okay, send your cfp, whatever. I got accepted. And I was so stressed and nervous for that conference, for that talk. And then like, slowly, but very slowly, I’m not, I’m talking about years here. It took a lot of preparation. And also I prepare a lot for my talks to calm down. Right. So I always have like, you know, that introvert moment of panic. You know, I get like, everything is going, you know, the angst is going like here to. To my throat. I’m like trying to breathe and then the anxiety slowly disappears. It’s a lot better with time, with experience. It kind of like, you know, muffles, you know, so it’s better every time. And also the recovery time, like you say it’s a lot faster, but definitely it’s a cold shower. Definitely. I get like all that anxiety attacks when I see lots of people there at the conference, just, you know, like bursting of energy and trying to find out things and, And I, I’m trying to like recoil and I’m going somewhere in a, in a dark corner and then appear for my speaker room.

Carl Alexander:
You go to the speaker room, you hide in the speaker room.

Diana Todea:
Even there. I don’t like it because it’s like they’re like people that want to, you know, get information and be social with you.

Carl Alexander:
I was like, oh, no, no, you, I need. Okay, so hotel room basically has to be hotel room. Yeah.

Diana Todea:
And yeah, of course I socialize, but you’re not going to see me over talking like that. But it’s. For me, it’s, it’s interesting. I definitely use it as a psychology experiment if you want like self Experiments if you want to take it. Because it makes me better. Right. It definitely reduces that anxiety. That social anxiety also allows me to observe people a lot more. Right. So I was telling you about those social situations and I like observing people that I do probably the best, right? I like observing people, I like to watch them and I learn, you know, from, from what is happening. And to be honest, there’s a lot of people just like us, like introverts and not only that, go to conferences and they do this kind of self experiment on them like all the time. And it’s, it’s. I’m pretty happy actually to see that more than 50% of us are, are out there. So makes me feel better. Every time I meet people, for example, at big conferences like Kubecon, for example, they, they come, they, they take me away. It’s like, oh man, I have this like anxiety all over me is like, let’s, let’s go to a corner, let’s

Carl Alexander:
relax, let’s talk about our.

Diana Todea:
And I feel like, hey, you saved me.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, you saved me. That’s funny. Yeah. Oh my God. My experience is so different. It, my ADHD side loves conferences, like, absolutely loves it. Like I will be talking to people for, let’s say it’s a three day. Like I will just be non stop talking to people for like 12 hours a day for three days.

Diana Todea:
And

Carl Alexander:
that’s when I’m doing well. There’s been some conferences. I, I hide in the speaker room. That’s like usually good enough for me. But what would happen and this is, was the discovery was just I would come back and I would crash. And that was like. Because the autistic side is like, yo, you need like, it’s like this tug of war between the two of them. And then at the conferences he’s like, I’m like, the ADHD side is like, there’s people everywhere. It’s so exciting and all of that. And I kept to learn and I get to talk and I get all this, this, this and like the autistic side is like just like basically like dying inside. And, and then I come back. That’s why I was kind of curious like how you manage it. Because like, like I usually have to hide sometimes like after like right now because I’m like, okay, I’m like spent. Like I used all my, my energy for, for that and now I can’t deal with people for a couple of weeks basically because I need to like be in a bubble. Basically. I call it bubbling. Like I have to bubble and stuff. But yeah, everybody’s different and you can kind of see it. I, because I have boat sometimes I’m really chatty with people and I can see that they’re like dying and I’m like, I have to like let them go basically because, because they’re, you could see that they’re just like oh God. Oh God. Like I’m stuck, I’m stuck here. This. He won’t stop talking to me.

Diana Todea:
Make him stop.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, yeah, make him stop. So I, I kind of like notice it. This is like the observing thing.

Carl Alexander:
woocommerce.com well that’s like really it’s good of you to like put yourself out there and, and all of that and yeah I think Devrel is an interesting position I think in the sense that like what’s been your experience also like internally like inside companies like I find like it’s, it’s kind of like this like I, we have a, a friend of the podcast, her name’s Tessa. She used to do. I think she’s still, she’s doing. She’s kind of a director of marketing now but she did Devrel at Snapchat and stuff like that and it’s a very hard time for Devrel it seems like right now like in, in the job market and I think part of it is just people don’t really understand what the, the job is like the, the non technical like the executives like the people that like decide on these programs and stuff. Like I don’t know what’s like been your experience with that. I mean you just have one company experience but it’s still. You probably see some stuff and hear some stuff from people in your field.

Diana Todea:
Yeah. So that’s a very super, super actually super clever question and I’m happy that you asked it because I started. So I’m like I said new to the devrel, like the official DevRel position, like nine months in, but I already have like, I’m also hosting like two podcasts and one of them is like literally about developer experience, right? So I’m like talking about all these topics about community, open source, whatever, developer experience. And I’m saying like, it’s not necessarily the person that gets hired, so it’s not the fault of the person that gets hired as devrel or developer advocate or developer experience, whatever. It’s actually the company’s problem, right? So they don’t understand what they want. They don’t have a clear picture, like, what are we going to do with this position? Where are we going to put it? Are we going to put it under marketing, under sales, under engineering, standalone? What, what are they going to do? Are they. Will they come up and just share stuff from the field like salespeople do or do they come in and they also change the product, right? So they give like concept loops internally to our own products or even more intelligently, they provide some metrics or they franchise. Basically the feedback they got from the field, that’s very important. So I think a dev rel person will shine as long as the company lets them shine, right? So if you give a dev rel a very short leash and you say like, oh, you are here under sales or under marketing or under engineering, and it’s like, you will never see the universe outside of this, like very fixed boundaries, it’s gonna backfire and basically you’re, you’re basically not allowing that position to flourish accordingly. And it’s a very beautiful role, right? It’s a very beautiful role. And if given the right liberty, it can do wonders. Happily for me, I’m the current company where I’m in, I’m actually doing this. So I have the right leash, the right amount of leash and the liberty and also the creativity. So I can totally express what I want and provide the feedback, come back and discuss further things. It’s a very misunderstood position and definitely different person. Shouldn’t be, shouldn’t be limited and also shouldn’t be like, yeah, should definitely have, like, how can I say it should be like a walking person that goes through all the departments say, hey, I learned about this, I learned about that.

Carl Alexander:
What do you think about this?

Diana Todea:
Like, oh, how about that? So he’s like, you’re jack of all trades. And it’s true, it’s very demanding. But also you need to listen to that person. If you go in gonna ignore that person that basically you’re not doing.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah. And they’re kind of like your frontliners. Right. With developers. Right.

Diana Todea:
So if you’re of course frontliner but also depending on that person’s, how can I say, past experience, past professional experience, it can be so much more than that. Right. Like I said, like we have been discussing this, like dev rails they come may come from different backgrounds, like more marketing, more technical, more whatever. And if you really channel that past experience it can do wonders, you can really, really shine. But just talking with other colleagues of mine that right now are dev rels but they come from a very technical background. They see dev rel as something totally different. Like they never expected devrel to be like this. And unfortunately many of them, what did

Carl Alexander:
they expect it to be?

Diana Todea:
To have more influence and to be more listened. And many are like nobody really listens to them internally. Right. So they provide the feedback or they ask for feedback and they’re not really given much importance and that’s bad. That’s basically you’re not using me properly and I think that’s. That’s sad.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, yeah. I mean I think you hit it really well when it is that it’s multidisciplinary, it’s multi departmental and I think one of the challenges is who owns it. Right. Like, like, like my, the more common one for me is it’s a marketing thing. But, but still, you know, under marketing it still struggles because again the marketing doesn’t necessarily understand developers and, and so if you put it under engineering anyways, there’s just a question of like who owns this because most people, most companies aren’t big enough to have like a department of developer relations, you know, so who, so it’s usually falls under some other department. That’s been my experience talking to people usually. Yeah, yeah.

Diana Todea:
Not totally. And, and you’re right and this is what I mean, like 90% of the time it’s just gonna and die. So it’s not going to be, how can I say, it’s not going to be explored at its full potential. And this is why I think currently we are misusing the term devrel and whatever developer experience, developer advocate and we are treating these people, let’s say not at their full capacity and it’s not their fault obviously it’s the vision, like the company’s vision and how they position the whole role. But luckily for me, I know I met so many great people, like people in my position that come from like, like I said, from very different backgrounds. And they’re very, very helping persons, very curious and they’re constantly motivated. So it’s very nice. It’s like you kind of know a different person because you know, they have like this energy around them. Like you said, like you’re walking around, you’re glowing. This is my field right now. It’s like, yeah, I’m doing stuff. And they’re, I mean the majority of them are really, really helpful and this is what I like.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, I mean you, you gotta, you gotta like helping people in that position. I feel like that’s your number one like job basically. Whether it’s teaching, doing material, content or whatnot. Yeah, I, I always resonated with, I basically just did it for fun. I mean that’s what a lot of public speakers that do it like without a company do it. Like, I was just like, I like teaching, you know, topics. Like my shtick was basically object oriented programming for WordPress for a long time. So I would do talks on that and it didn’t, wasn’t for a company, but it was just like, I like teaching and I like people. And that made a lot of sense. It, it’s just like we said, it’s, it’s difficult inside a company because sometimes it, you know, somebody had, like I said, somebody has to own it, so it’s it. And then if nobody does, then you’re, you’re stuck with what you described, which is like you kind of, or it wasn’t you, but it was the person you were talking to. I think that it was like I send feedback up and then it just kind of goes nowhere. Right. Because nobody’s, nobody owns that. Yeah. So that’s really, that’s really great. It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s funny. Like I said, I’m, I’m shocked because I, I, I, my, my impression of the role this right now is that it’s like a bit dying. Like I, I don’t like, it’s hard Like I, I feel like it’s hard for dev rels right now. Like I think companies just, I think with COVID again, this is pre, this was prior to your career switch, but I don’t know, conferences and stuff struggled I think since COVID Right. So.

Diana Todea:
Yeah. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally. I mean I was lucky because I discovered everything like more or less two, two and a half years ago or even three. So I was like post Covid for sure. And then people probably wanted to revive the whole conferences part. So I never got the previous wave when I was like probably flourishing and people were like, hey this is cool. But yeah, right now it’s a lot more like you said, more conservative. But still it’s very, a very soft job. I’m not sure about the United States. I, I’m pretty sure that the trend is dying there.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s dying but I, I feel like there, it’s. I’ve seen a lot of people struggle to, to find work. You know, I think they’re, they, they, there’s not as much as there used to be, you know.

Diana Todea:
For sure, for sure. Yeah,

Carl Alexander:
yeah, it’s. And one of the struggles too is I don’t know, I don’t know how you do it. Like this goes to like even sponsoring like events. It’s like how do you measure rel like for the company, you know?

Diana Todea:
Yeah, that’s very. Like I said, depends on the company. So as a dev role you can come with some propositions that probably may or may not, may or may not make sense for anybody. Sometimes you can get pulled into like very difficult conversation about metrics and how do you prove your basically engagement and whatever you are doing, you know, how do you prove your productivity? And it could be so difficult to prove that. Right. Because you go to a conference and this is what I want because I was talking about this with some colleagues from other companies and we’re like sharing feelers like metrics for Devrel. They don’t really make sense. Why? Because you go to a conference, give a talk, then the organizers, they won’t enforce that feedback. Right. So they won’t enforce for every participant to write down the feedback. And if they do provide feedback, the participants will be not necessarily very accurate. Right. Because many of them, they don’t even pay attention. They will forget a lot of things, they won’t be in the moment or they will definitely give a very subjective feedback. Right. Based on what you address, who are you, the topic, etc. And that will reflect on you and your work. So if you go with that specific feedback from the conference, you know, hey, what did you do? Oh. So from 400 people I got three opinions and two of them were like meh, probably they didn’t get it then that doesn’t play well with your feedback. And the metrics basically are non existent. So we need to be able to very smart how we create them and how we brainstorm them inside the company.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, yeah. I mean it makes me think a lot of it should be more seen as like brand marketing. You know, I forget what it was called. I actually like saw somebody talk about it recently. But like there’s a whole statistical thing with like let’s say you like market over multiple channels. Like it’s hard to know what actually caused the person to like decide or how to attribute. You know, like if you do like ads at the example was like ads at the super bowl plus ads on TV and this like what actually like contributed to the person actually buying. You know, it’s a complicated statistical thing but, but yeah, no, and I wanted to, I, I, we talked a bit about it before the talk but I wanted to talk a bit about the open telemetry stuff because like I’m, I re, I want to know more, I’m learning about it right now and I think it’d be really interesting for people to, to know more about it as well because I, I think this is like something that’s like gaining some traction. Like a lot of the cloud providers are now like moving a lot of their, they’re, they’re offering solutions to basically ingest the, this kind of open telemetry. It’s a schema, I guess.

Diana Todea:
It’s a framework. It’s a framework. It’s a standard. Yeah, standard, exactly.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah. So why don’t you explain a bit about what it is for everyone?

Diana Todea:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, yeah. I’m really happy that you asked. And it indeed is like one of the most popular open source project and CNCF projects out there. Like we say, like to say in the, in the branch is the second most famous after Kubernetes because it is because a lot of vendors are chipping in and that’s really, really good. So just to give like a proper definition, like OpenTelemetry, it’s a vendor neutral open source observability framework and it’s used for instrumenting, generating, collecting and exporting telemetry data. So the telemetry data, we refer them to observability signals, you know, like logs, metrics, traces. So if you are working in observability, like I been working with observability for a long time because you know, I’m, I worked as an sre. So if you did some kind of observability work, you know. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. This is open telemetry so it might ring a bell. But obviously if you come from a different, you know, tech domain is like oh, I don’t really need observability or I don’t really work with It.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, I mean I have my own kind of like DevOps platform so I’m very excited about it because like it’s on AWS. But AWS now kind of supports OpenTelemetry and a lot of tools and providers now kind of like either ingest it or emit it. So it’s, it, it’s good that we have like this standard and, and for people that like she, like Diana was saying, like it’s, it’s about getting all the information. Like if you have stack, you know, crashes, bugs, like logs, you know, like stuff you would use, let’s say Sentry for is a good example. Like I do, I like Sentry a lot. So like Sentry is just like one part of like observability, right. Like it’s the errors. But you want, they’re trying to bring it all together now but basically you want to see the logs and all of that. So having a standard so that everybody can communicate properly and share that information without having to deal with like log formats and, and all that stuff because like each, at least I’ve been assistant in for a long time and every, every little server of some sort has its own log format and you have to like you, you can change them to the standards but they, nobody just standardizes on the same thing. Like by default like you have to do all this work to like make things like work together. So I think that’s really important.

Diana Todea:
Exactly. Yeah, definitely. I mean I think this is the, the general. Why people. Well, not people, but us as engineers and also the vendors are really excited because finally we can stay on the same level and ship basically the same the data. And we see them like oh yeah, it’s there, it’s the same standard but obviously the back end will differ in the front end as well in the sense that you’ll still need a database to store your data, your telemetry data and you’ll still need that visualization tool like for example to see dashboards and visualization and everything like that and that obviously opentelemetry doesn’t provide, you know, so you still going to have some vendor lock in, in that sense because you need to choose a tool. Right. So where I’m going to store it and where I’m going to see it, it’s always going to be different vendors. But OpenTelemetry, it’s. Yeah, it’s the bridge. Right. So at least we are making progress. So that’s pretty cool.

Carl Alexander:
How did you get involved with it?

Diana Todea:
Right. Yeah, no, so I, I heard about it I think like couple of years back and I wanted to actually work with it in production because I was still an engineer then, like an sre. And I got involved actually with the Open Telemetry community because Linux foundation was looking for some observability subject matter experts to create the first certification, the first exam for Open Telemetry. So I signed up and I started to work with them and like this slowly, like within I think eight or nine months we created this certification and for me was like the perfect beginning because I started to read more documentation, I started to like communicate with the maintainers, with the community and find out like, okay, what was this about? What is this standard about? What are the concepts? And also creating this like content for the exam, you know, like the, the questions and everything. And it got published after like nine months and it’s available. And then I started to POC Open Telemetry, the company I was in. Like, okay, you wanna, I don’t know, you wanna switch from your vendor that for your, from your APM vendor. Let’s say you have this application data and you wanna use it. Why don’t you use Open Telemetry? Because you know it’s a standard, it’s open source, you’ll reduce costs, et cetera. So for me it was a perfect example and we did that, it went fine, but we didn’t adopt it in production because nyz. So companies depends also on the company magnitudes, how much time they want to input in a specific project. It was very interesting for us like engineers, but from a company’s perspective at that time it was a bit too risky, right?

Sponsor Announcer:
Yeah, absolutely.

Diana Todea:
Yeah. I mean opentelemetry is still not stable.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, exactly, yeah. I mean even right now I would say it’s. But I think the traction’s there. Like I said, I went from, I feel like in the last year it gained a lot of traction. Like lots of cloud providers are building into it now. Like I think, I think it’s an important standard. It was just. Yeah, I was curious how you, you got involved in that. It’s like, it’s always like interesting these stories because you know, like how do you get involved in Open source? It’s always like, it’s always a different reason or, or whatnot for, for everyone. But it makes sense. You were talking about Elastic, right? When you’re like.

Diana Todea:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I was an SRE and I got, when I was at lse, I got in the conferences, like the tech conferences. So this is when I started my first gigs and like around the same time I started with this open telemetry community, so I joined the certification contributing and then I stayed in the game. Right. So I stayed in the opentelemetry community. I was like, I POC’d opentelemetry for another company. Then I stayed in the game. So I like the community. I started contributing more on the non code part afterwards. So right now I’m a triad in the documentation, so I’m part of the community. I do a lot of talks about opentelemetry. I even gave a talk recently, last week about how developers can use OpenTelemetry to observe their own codes locally and instrumented a bunch of applications with that. That was really interesting. Yeah, so I’m, I’m staying there, I’m staying in the game, like no matter what. Like even if some companies like it or not, or if they, even if they want to adopt it, it’s. For me it’s pretty interesting because it’s a standard and it will stay.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, that, that’s what keeps you motivated to contribute and work on it.

Diana Todea:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because it’s just like Kubernetes or Prometheus. I mean, we all know it’s doing a good job. You know, people will use it. And even though right now OpenTelemetry still needs to do a bunch of steps to graduate, the vibe is definitely there. So even though if we don’t want to admit it, we cannot ignore it. Right? So.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, I think the more interoperability we have, the better. I think everybody can appreciate the value of standards and stuff, especially developers now we’re a bit more aware of it because there’s a lot of standards around AI that are coming out really fast. And I think it’s, it’s good to, to do that because otherwise it’s too, it’s a mess. Right. Like, if you want to, if you want to, like, you know, with AI, just like something simple like skills. Right. Like everybody deciding like skills is going to be a thing and everybody builds for the, the same kind of format and idea and things. There’s also the mcp. But having that also for observability I think is super important because at the end of the day, we need to know what’s happening in our software. We need to know what’s going on. Right. So not everybody could you, you know, you can’t cowboy code at Elastic, so you, you need some way to get information out and see it. So I think that’s really great. We’re going to have to start wrapping up here. I don’t know if there’s anything else you wanted to talk about or mention around opentelemetry or all the topics we talked about.

Diana Todea:
Yeah, no, so about opentelemetry. Yeah, that’s totally fine. So it’s like what I always wanted to share with people listening to us is like contributing to open source is really great because people obviously discovered the community. I stayed even after I left Elastic. So like I said at the beginning, right now I’m with Victoria Metrics and Victoria Metrics is focused on Open Source and it’s really, really nice that you know, I expanded, you know like a couple of years ago or three years ago. I never made a contribution in Open source. And right now I’m like fully contributing, like, like actively. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can only contribute with the codes. You can also do non con contributions. You can give talks like you and I give talks and you can share a bunch of, a bunch of experience from your side. And there is always, you know, enriching. You know, there is always room for improving and enriching. So yeah, thank you so much Kar for having me. I think those were my last words of wisdom.

Carl Alexander:
Yeah. Where can people find you, Diana?

Diana Todea:
Oh yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn, on Bluesky or Mastodon or Twitter or X, whatever.

Carl Alexander:
Okay. And what are the two podcasts? You said you were like hosting two podcasts, so what are those two podcasts?

Diana Todea:
Totally. So I’m hosting a DevRel talks podcast in this one. It’s all about open source or non vendor page. So just like you and I just, just chatting right now. I had a bunch of invites and I’m always looking for guests. Even if you have a cool story to share or a very interesting path in tech. Yep. Please ping me. And the other one is on Telemetry talks. So we are talking about observability and the same we don’t want to wing it on a specific vendor. Obviously we started with some Victoria Metrics concepts but then moving along to non vendors. So actually focusing on open telemetry. And my guests are going to be from also other companies and trying it’s more technical. Right. So we are trying even to we go more in deep dive. We’re trying to find out you know how to instrument an application for OpenTelemetry, et cetera, et cetera. So for there as well, if you have a cool story, if you’re an engineer or you want to share something that you did very cool with open telemetry or observability in general, we can definitely chat.

Carl Alexander:
That’s great. Well, thanks. Thank you again, Diana.

Diana Todea:
Thank you so much, Carlos. Thank you for having me.