Hi everyone, my name is Patrick you. And for today's episode, I had Priyanka Regatta on as a guest. She's a staff developer Advocate over at Google and she really, leverages the power of visualization when it comes to explaining the content and the complexity that have really cool. I'll put the links to our social in the description below. And with that being said, enjoy the episode. That big of a reader. So I haven't read a lot of books. I'm a more visually oriented really?
Yeah, I do. I never thought I would write a book. Okay. This has been a total surprise to even me but it happened in such a natural way of they because I'm a visual learner. Yeah, visual thinker. Like I started doing some of these sketches as just passion for like I like to draw this was covid, had just started. The pandemic was was here. And it's in 2020, right? And I was just like, not traveling. Okay?
How how am I just keeping myself saying was the point at the time and I started drawing some of these sketches and and and it and it just shared casually with some folks internally and then shared casually on social media and people were like, this is great can we do more of these and just the feedback that at that started coming in and say we want to see more of these and internal teams got excited. So I started investing more time into it. Did a few more blogs in a few
more sketches with them started. A GitHub repo and the kid have people that like 3,000. So there's some star, that's crazy. Yeah, sick. Okay, I've got something here. I'm sure. And and and people had started asking me, are you going to convert these into like a PDF or something? Yeah. It's like huh? Maybe I can do a book that is more like my kind, which I would potentially pick up because it's colorful and it has, it doesn't
have that much text. Yeah, I don't, I don't honestly just do books unless I have to like, you have to kind of read this book because in order to order like read this particular like 200 pages of documentation. Yeah. To kind of make this thing work, sure, I'll read that but but at the same time it's like it's not a choice that I would make Ever. So, I was, I got into the whole book thing with the patented
like, the other way around. Like, I already had half of my sketches done when I decided I'm going to. No, wait, yeah, I yeah, move the natural progression there, right? And I think always energy creates energy. If people are excited about what you're doing, you're like I'm gonna do more. Let's let's keep it going. Exactly, that's what it is and I just would like more and more. They were feeding that energy at
the same time. I was Also, like if I thought about it from the very beginning to be like, I'm going to write a book, yeah, that that can be intimidating, right? Absolutely. Because I was halfway there because I knew what people are thinking about it and it's helpful to people like certification folks who are
trying to get certifications. We're reaching out and saying, hey I went through this as a review process to before I got Vinton took the exam and and you know, I'm just Was very helpful that way. And I was just like, you know, getting all this feedback, which if I didn't have that, and I sat down and started to write a book, it would have been so hard because anyways, writing a book is hard, however, you slice it. It's a hard thing, exactly, right.
So having this enthusiasm of like, okay, you know what most people want this, so whatever energy are putting into it is well worth it. Knowing that is Good for return on investment. Absolutely, you're going to put in so much time. I spent about a year doing the whole thing from, from the start to finish and like, was weekends and nights and, you know, outside of whatever you, but there was a point when I was like, okay, what did I get myself into? But they were, but it was
points. Those were the points that I would think about the people who would send me messages and be like, hey, I got a job, your book. It was your your blogs are working great and I could review the whole things like okay like it keeps hazing. Yeah, yeah I know, I love the people give you that feedback, right? Because that is, I think that is fuel for whatever you're doing feedback from actual people that
of what you're doing. I think that's one of the best feelings you can get, especially when you're creating content in that way. Yeah, no, so the totally like I give credit for it. This book to exist to the community because it would have not happened. If people didn't give me that feedback. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's insane, I never think about, okay, let me write a book because it is such a humongous task. But to be like, okay, I actually already have quite a lot of stuff.
People are very much interested, so then I think doing this was kind of Professionalizing, what you were already doing, anyway, right. There's a book is kind of book. Sounds kind of legit compared to a GitHub repo with the sketches and all that stuff. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. And yes, there were like things that are hard to do, like, basically program managing the whole process, making sure you're meeting deadlines and working with the publisher to make sure like they their edits and then reviewing those edits and then Going back and editing more, it is a little bit more than more than just publishing a Blog, right? But all worth it.
If you know that the result is helpful to people, it's like there's no point writing a book if nobody's going to read it, that was my point. Exactly. That would be a shame. I I see so much comparison to kind of product development, right? Because writing a book or creating the book is a huge kind of step on a horizon. But the way you get there is Starting small incrementing, getting feedback of people actually going to use this or read this.
It is so similar. And yet still in organizations, we say, okay, this is where we're going to go. We're going to plan everything around it before validating even if people actually gonna actually gonna use this thing. Yeah, and that's kind of why I like the developer relations role because it's a great segue into what would from what you just said, just like In developer relations you can experiment like you have the room to do that. You can create demos that that you feel.
Passionate about using the technology that you are advocating or other pieces of technology that kind of augment together to bring something to life. And this, this book is a great example of that. I started a project few months ago, you might have seen this like the architecture diagramming tool that I Which was also kind of sort of like this, like it started as a as a thought process of like, you know what?
We need, a visualization make an ism for architectures and then the other big thing is like, what if they were reference architectures like that. And the third big thing is what if I could take some of these reference architectures and actually deployed them right from the architecture diagramming tool. So, it was just like me thinking about this would visually be Really appealing and you're seeing a theme here like from my visual thought process.
Like well the things have to be visual, can I reduce the number of words on this page? I mean I mean I love it. I'm gonna be honest I love that. So yeah that's kind of how that that that whole like product started which with just an idea of like, let's do a proof of concept. Let's see how many people click on that button to to deploy and pre-canned. To texture.
Yeah, and it was a great analysis were that's how you like going back into product development being in developer advocacy, you can kind of create a demo, but you can also polish it and and even take it towards the direction of like polishing it. And it kind of becomes something that you know, more than a few people want to use and then that can be pitched as as an idea somewhere else.
Else internally or you show value of what what has been done and then and then, you know, like, like any product that you asked for Investments and funding and whatever else that needs to happen to ya. To get it to the next level. Yeah, I can imagine what I've noticed with with myself and kind of the, I mean, I'm creating this podcast, but what I had to let go was the concept of perfection because whatever you put out there is never going to be perfect.
So I really had to be like okay I know in this episode we could have done better I could have done better as a host. We kind of went on this segment of for too long stuff like that and I can edit it down. I can really drill it down but then it's going to lose some of the essence. They're So I guess that I had on my body. He actually said progress over Perfection. Like even as a software engineer, it's never going to be
perfect. No one's going to tell you your software, Patrick. Oh, that is perfection. Oh no, because someone else is going to swing by and in the gonna be like, well, actually, I would have done it like X, Y and Z. So it's never going to be perfect. I we read a have to let go of that. Kind of notion of perfection. Yeah, and it kind of like that concept of like of not worrying about perfection and just continuing to move forward is just it applies everywhere, right?
In the yeah career building in content building in product building. They just iterate on what you've got. The the tomorrow should be better than yesterday is is the entire like thought process that that I build content with like one. The things that that we internally think about as a team of the content producers. Yeah, Google cloud. Is this idea of your first Pancake? And your first Pancake is always not going to be perfect, right? Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be a pancake.
Let's just say that, right? But then the whole point is that the next one's going to be better and the next one's going to be better. So it's like the whole idea of improvising on top of whatever you've been doing the previous day. Yeah, I love the pancake example. My girlfriend makes the most beautiful pancakes. I tried my cake making her. Some it wasn't the shape of a circle is just a blob, but it's
my first bank, exactly. And I did like as, as like, you know, in the last I think last year or year and a half ago, I'll send you the link to this. I created a A video just a funny video off of this concept trying to build a pancake. Like create a pancake, like a real pancake and recorded myself doing that. I put it on my YouTube, know, nobody really watched it, but that was the idea behind it.
Like, you know what, I'm going to do it for the first time it's not going to be perfect but I'm trying it is, I love that it's lead by example, right? If people can see that, it's actually everyone makes mistakes and that Kind of idea, I have of a person or they're just human as well. We have the same, thought processes people do different things but how you internalize it if you can accept that, not
everyone's perfect. I think that's going to give you a head-start in whatever you're doing, so firmly. Believe that. Yeah, back to the kind of visualization, I'm very visual oriented as well. I went to a talk, we do kind of knowledge sharings with Xavier so people whenever they have a cool topic, we have nights that we can actually Our that. And one of the guys said, I went to a conference and I made visual skirt sketch notes of a
lot of talks. And then here's what they look like and I was like, man, that was some impressive impressive stuff because I could see through his notes. Visually what the talk was about and I was like this is so easy to join digest and also in my head I was like I could never do that because I suck at drawing, but I would I would there be consumed stuff like that? What do you think that visualization is so? Powerful and kind of the tech
space. I think just because in Tech space we we don't really see a lot of visualization. That's that's one of the reasons right now because we are used to seeing a lot of documentation we are used to assuming that these things are hard. And so we're just going to have to read a bunch of pages to figure this out. Most I got really good at it. The customer engineer.
So in front of customers and I just basically explored this about myself being in being in some of these it you know customer-facing roles we're in front of the customer. You've got really like usually 30 minutes or so with somebody and you need to explain the idea why they should buy. They should adopt a certain technology and how it would help them. Things like that.
A presentation could do the job but in most cases I was used to just doing a whiteboard, so, I, if given a choice, if, if I'm eating a customer in person, which in most cases was, I would use the Whiteboard to draw out how the, how the request blow would look like. Yeah, how your how, you know, you're going to implement this in your current scenario and I would ask them questions on the fly, like, okay. What is the CDN you're using that sits here?
It is the backend made of right and what's the language you're using and I'll just start like, writing all of that down make start making boxes, connect things and and, and I would challenge their approach in some cases and those those things visually go much better than if you were to present in a
presentation, right? Because there's no way you can capture and keep the the audience engaged because you need to have them in the mindset of Okay, this is something that's being solved right now in front of my eyes, where says she's planned all of this. This is a good thing. Yeah, they could cookie kind of thing, right?
So that's kind of where I've learned it and I horned that art over time of like, you have to still plan like you have to still plan who you're talking to and what they currently already have. But then once you have all of that, just you build that confidence, that guy. Hear from people all the time that they're not confident to just walk up to a whiteboard and, and start drawing.
Because what if they, you know, didn't know what to ask or didn't know where the arrows, go, or anything like that, right? But that confidence does come with time and fit like repeating repetetive like get yourself in situations where you are drawing drawing plans on on the Whiteboard if you If you're not using a whiteboard just like pen and paper, right? Get yourself in those situations and you don't have to be an artist for that. You can just draw flowcharts, right?
And then, just have words in the boxes, it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to have a character in it or those types of things. So, that's kind of where my, my entire Lake analysis of looking at what people interact with better came from the working directly that the customers and committing to the fact that I'm not going to use a presentation.
Let's just do this together on a whiteboard and in, from there like that, that that whole thought process of like, getting, how do you make anything? I think we have to get is to the fact that just a lot of documentation doesn't cut it anymore. VR we have we have everybody as humans have very little attention spans and that's reducing with the every single day, right? Exactly.
The amount of scroll. Like, it's so hard for somebody to stop scrolling and look at the thing that you've shared. And if it is not attractive, it's something in our brains, right? I don't know the exact science of it, but it's in our Veins in the eyes that attract colors and and movements and you know, not just squares.
Yeah or like words, right? So that that's the thing and then I keep it. I kept experimenting for the last two years or so, in Devereaux with different types of content and seeing what works and what doesn't. And and I really think the whole content spaces is a continuous. Action of like, what? Because it keeps changing to. Like, what works today will not work tomorrow. Exactly. Yeah. What I like, is that like the visualization is an easier way for kind of shared understanding, right?
If I'd send you a text and I have an a certain intention with that, it can so easily be misinterpreted, right? And a conversation is way better and a conversation with some sort of visualization. We can collaborate, we can challenge each other and we can actually be like ha. This image, alright, this fits in both of our heads. This is actually what we think reality is if it actually is that we can we can figure that out later but for now we are
aligned, right? So we can talk about the same stuff at this thing here. Does it make sense? Yes or no. And have that dialogue directly. I so agree. Yeah, and that was the whole like what? I Lost You video, really? Yeah, I think I'm still here. Okay, now I see you. Okay, it might have been just an internet hiccup. Okay, yeah, it was just basically agreeing with what you were saying. So yeah, and no worries. Let me see you said, deferral and developer advocacy.
All those kind of the same things is should I interpret those the same way? Oh yeah. So jebril is sort of like the short form of developer relations oh case developer advocate. Yeah, I think they're used these terms are used interchangeably. So yeah, yeah, this is kind of evolve, right? Because I think and this was probably before my time you had like product evangelist or like stuff like that.
I still see them out there. Then it's kind of developer Advocate but I think the role if I read it on LinkedIn every time it's different it's like okay. You do XY and z in this company do x y and a I guess a b and c mon yeah. But a better analogy. But it's whatever you interpret and how you want to create, if I, if I would explain it, I guess that's kind of, that's exactly what it is.
It's different D. Defined in different companies, and it also sits in different organizations and different companies. So, like sometimes you find developer relations and marketing, sometimes you find them in their product, sometimes you find them in engineering. So it just kind of depends on which Company or at and what is the expectation from a developer Advocate?
And, and that differs from like, if you're Moore, if but kind of like the core part of the job, kind of stays the same, which is your learning about a product, or a technology, and you are kind of like this first interface, like, first person who are like working with the product testing it out. Like after it's gone out of the engineering and product ization
phase, you're the customer zero. Basically you're the person you're responsible for coming up with friction logs and how this is, how this can cause friction in the community, to, in terms of like, how can we make it faster easier, better? That you are the person who are working with the engineering and the product teams to kind of give them that feedback as the
first user of the product. And then you're also Person responsible to help like documentation team and and the end creating content for it to help developers who are going to be using this product for the first time because you've gone through using it yourself. The first time value can, now, you can help the documentation team, put together the documentation that way, you can create content that would help expedite the other developers Journey or adopting the product.
So you're kind of like this This liaison between the external consumers developers, whoever, those those people are with your, with your engineering and product teams, that's the image General cross covid. Now, depending on which teams you're on, which company you're in, there might be a little bit more Nuance to that. Yeah, that's that stays. I think common across most companies. Yeah, I think that alone. Kind of the image I have in my head as well. Do you do that in kind of a team
setting? Like is there a team of devrel or developer Advocates and and how do you share knowledge? Kind of and collaborate within that team. Yeah, so yes, there's team and then there's there. So the way we are organized, it's a few different teams. So there are Specialists for their specialist for like databases and then and then you know, of all the Different areas like networking and machine learning and sort of like that like data analysis to find Specialists who want to be a
specialist in those areas. And then there we also have generalists who can who know about who covered the breath which kind of is me and my team, we kind of like to cover the breadth from just our interest perspective as well. Some people just choose to be choose the breton's. People choose the depth, and so that's kind of how the teams are usually have seen organized as well, really cool. And yeah, and it's like great for me. I do get that question a lot like, generalist versus
specialist. Why? Or how you decide, which from the career perspective, like, which direction you go in? Yeah, for me, like, it was very easy because I get bored of any fast. So it It's like it's actually yeah if I picked a certain thing and we're deep in it, it's not that I cannot it's more like I think I lose interest in energy as I start going to too deep into one particular topic and I can maybe come back to it like 4 months after and then maybe go deeper into it.
But like if I keep going into one direction for too long, I just need Ange like every few days every few every few months or so. Which is why I think General this works out great. There was this last year when I created like Vortex AI videos because I was like, you know what, I want to learn a little bit of machine learning and get myself into that for a few months. And then I did that one series to 10 videos with a lot of learning, lot of demos to in order to create those videos.
And then I As like, you know what, I'll take the break from machine learning. I'll do this other thing here. Yeah, I like that February, right? Yeah, I love that. You can actually do that, right? Because especially this is a generalist, right? Everyone has their preference. But to be able to do that in, what you do on a day-to-day is really cool that you can be like this thing. Actually. Don't really know anything about that. It's interesting. Let's let's figure it out.
And then you can, you can continue that cycle because I think it's for me. I also I like the As though I come from an operations background. So I needed to know a little bit about everything and if I didn't know it was interesting and then if I did know if I was adequate not a specialist. I hope you like let's move on because I'm comfortable now right?
I think it's easy. If you're like if this side is 0% and this side is 100%, it's easier to get like 50, 60, 70 % of the way that last 30 is really hard and that's where I'm like, okay, I know that, I know that the 30% is hard, it's going to To take me probably twice as long. So let's move on to the next thing, right? And I think within a team especially in software development you're like okay that guy knows the last 30%.
All right, I have a question. Let's figure it out together and then you can be effective in whatever you're doing. Yeah, so I totally agree. Yeah I can imagine do people have that consciously? You think also within your team do they know if their aptitude is more towards generalist or specialist? Yeah, most of most of my team is like that, with an intentional desire to stay generalist. Yeah. Really cool. Yeah. And I'm guessing I know this probably because I also have this.
You don't know everything, right? Do you also get the room to just try things out and learn and learn from people? Yeah, that is, that is the best part about, especially the team I am and the culture in Google in general, and also Ella / advocacy. So all of these things combined, like it gives you the room to to try different ideas. So the content experimentation that, I think I touched on earlier, in our chat was was all
about that. Like I created a few Instagram, real slow like with or Google Cloud team of a few months ago, that was a part of an experimentation. We were just like, let's see how this goes. Well, You know we'll see if it doesn't go well we want to do it or don't warned invest in it now and stuff like that. So getting the room to try that stuff and and and having the the not not having the pressure of like because not everything
would perform the way sometimes. Either you expected it to perform or just you know, things change, reading the audience, it's all about learning like what. They what, what? The audience expects and and what they don't and also on which platform do they expect work? So you have to continuously, try and the team is set up to to allow that space to do that. Which is, which is nice. And there are lots of things that, that lots of content ideas that have not seen the there.
Have not, you know, gone out just because they just didn't they, we tried them and they just didn't work out the way we thought they would. And, but You know that's that it having that space is amazing to try. Yeah I think that is also what keeps us going right? Kind of the unknown and being able to experiment. We don't know if this is actually gonna work let's let's try it out and let's figure it out right? Having the room and kind of the playground to do to do kind of
whatever you want. I think is really cool to have. Have you have you ever tried something and in your, in the back of your mind was like, okay, this is probably not going to work or this is actually not going to. Work and then it just blew up or it actually got a lot of about reaching that way. Yeah, okay, so architecting with Google Cloud. This is a video series that I
started. I think a little bit like last year, I think 20 21, and, you know, usually interviews, like interview setup type things, haven't performed that. Well, traditionally, and I keep seeing that that sounded like Not podcast, but like the actual interviews on posted YouTube videos. So I wasn't very like, I did the research looked at a bunch of different interview. Style shows on YouTube to see, like, to talk myself into not, doing it basically. I know that feeling.
Yeah. And then And then I was like, you know what, I will give it a try, that's really cool. And, and the first few, sorry, no worries. Like I said, first few videos. We did, they did exceptionally better than what we thought they would ghost like that. You often. Yeah, I literally thought I
would be like maybe two. Two twos on a video, I would have been happy with that because based on my research, that would have been around the ballpark of what pollution we could go see ya. But we ended up seeing the first video was at like 12K or something in the first week and I was like really good. Great. Okay. And then the next few we did, I did one with Pokemon go that blew up and then I and then I kept doing them because, you know, was doing really well and
it's no good. Continue. Yeah. And now and then, we did one with Uber that I think got that close to 100 K now which is amazing. So given given that every other episode is catching on, it's also like when you do these architecture type things. It's like how how relevant or how, how relevant is it to a broader set of audience, right. Yeah. It's also dependent on that. So some some episodes to really well, and some are in the air.
Average Mark. But that has been a series that has surprised me just because I had very low expectations with it. Yeah, I can imagine, I mean, it's what you do with it right. Pokemon go is a great example, A lot of people know what it is, when it came out, it blew up, I was walking around with my phone, so then to take that and to make a technical kind of architecture video about that. I'd I haven't seen the video so I'm assuming you kind of did
this. Yeah, I think is very good because People have already that kind of notion and relation, they kind of know in their head. What it is. So then a lot of questions pop up which hopefully you would answer in that video. Yeah, exactly. That's kind of what what happened? Like, how does let's take a peek into the architecture of Pokemon go and then similarly, we did like let's take a peek into how you bir migrated they're humongous database to spanner. Right now. Those are like curiosity
questions. So yeah, taking an angle that kind of, you know, appeals to a broader set of technical folks has has been the key to that one. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean it it kind of aligns with what you were saying earlier that at our brains, we don't have re storage brains like we don't really, we can we can't really memorize a lot of capacity, right? The internet has various amounts of information that would never fit in the brain that I have. Let alone like that.
Names of the people in this building, for example, what we do have is Smarts, I guess maybe Innovation is a better way. We have a way of kind of digesting that information and turning it into gonna bite sized things and creating the essence of what the information is there. And conveying that to other people for them is easier because you have this huge document, you create it into this little tiny bite-size thing and then you're like half this. Is it? And that's it.
Yeah, I personally love Yeah, I know, thank you for saying that and that's exactly what, what how the book has has been as well. And that's the feedback that I've gotten. It's like, I read thousands and thousands of documentation pages to come up with these sketches, right? And and when people say that, this one sketch was enough for me to understand what big query does. Yeah, that's like Thumbs up. Do you got? Because hey, I saved somebody
else. From Reading 200 pages and they can read the other 400 now, which which are more detailed and deeper and they can skip through that. The basic parts, which is, yeah, yeah, I think the thing you just said, you don't give someone kind of the end result and expect them to go through every little detail and be like, okay, now I understand it. No, right. It's step-by-step is gradually. You start with the start the basics, and then you go to the more advanced stuff.
But a lot of software documentation is This is the advanced stuff. This is all of it. Get it started mistake. Okay with. But that doesn't seem like that's where I need to start or should start. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you mentioned earlier you did more, was it? I think the term was customer engineer but yeah, it was I think before more of the Deverell developer advocacy role. Yeah. How did you actually transition like how did you figure out?
This is what I want to do in. This is what actually excites me. yeah, okay, so that's a really good question, so I I was a customer engineer working with customers directly and I was building demos. Like I said, I was also doing You froze? Yeah, I think the screen froze. I can still hear you audience. Okay? Yeah. It's the zoom gone. I think we're reconnecting. Yeah. Yeah, is connected. Okay great.
So yeah, customer engineer to developer relations, it was it was a natural transition and here's how right I was already doing customer presentations demos. Of I being visual. Like I said, I was doing these on whiteboards and was very passionate about just, you know, the the art of presenting information in the in the way that people whoever and presenting it to can consume it better, right? And as I was doing that, I was realizing that I can. I can maybe convert some of
these things. I built a demo explicit. Do you remember I built a demo on for Dialogue flow using dialogue flow, a conversational experience for one of the one of the customers as a demo and in everybody internally in the team's was like, asking me for access to the demo, how to demo
it to other people. And I was like, you know what, let me just create a video because because because I don't want to have to go to all these meetings and present this thing myself, that's very smart, and let me just share the video.
So, I approached like I could have just done the video myself, just recorded it in this crappy way, but I approached a developer relations team and I said, hey I want to create this video and because I want to do it for internal folks, I might as well just just created so that external people can also utilize it so awesome so that it can go on Google Cloud Tech YouTube channel and that was it. I just asked and I said I am They said my manager at the time.
He was like great. Yeah, you should create a series of videos on this topic and I started creating a few videos and I was like can I do a twenty percent with your team because I was enjoying the process. So it was like me realizing and understanding that this video creation is and creating content in the video format was That I was enjoying.
I didn't I would have never figured that out if I did come across this situation of like, okay, let's share this with so many people, or how do I make this process efficient and then coming to realization that video, could be great for it. Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of how it started. I did it 20% with the team and then I said, you know what, this is looking good for at least a few years. I think I can do this, and I'm enjoying it. I would like to transition.
And then I yeah, it gave internal interviews to kind of transition into developer advocacy, but that was sort of a natural progression, but it again, like came comes down to it. When people ask me like, how do my previous transition from? Like I was the first job worked for me was software engineer in test. And then I transitioned good customer engineering.
And in the same way, like I all the transitions in career have just been Open to trying something new and and just welcoming of the opportunities that come your way, and then realizing what what do you like as well? And what you're doing? What what's working for you to? Like, yeah, just create at that time. If I just created the video and moved on that could have been
one output, right? One outcome of that but I created the video and then I analyzed that I think I really like Like this, right, nice and and that's like that realization is important that I kind of stress. This a lot to today, early career mid-career. I think it's important to to keep trying different things to to understand, what can, what you're passionate about, because you might not know what you're passionate about until you've encountered something that you felt like.
Ah, this is the thing I was missing, right? Exactly. That's kind of I stumbled on developer advocacy honestly and it's been, it's been great since then. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And it doesn't like you if to be open to like it. The fact that what you love today, you might not love tomorrow and that's okay. That's, it's just like part of growing yourself and yeah, enjoying your career in. It's like one step at a time. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I like having a go or
Organically right? I love the way that you said I could have just made that one video and that was it or even, you could have just gone to all the meetings and explain it in person and never create that video, right? But I think throughout your career, you will have several opportunities. First of all, you need to be able to see if it is an opportunity or you need to be able to create the opportunity yourself, right? Actually, Reach Out Network. Be like, is this an option?
Or if it's not an option and you really want it really create that option. I hear lots of people Say in our organization. In my organization, doesn't work like that. Okay? We don't have that. It's never going to be there. And I'm like, I think if you can and if you actually put in the effort, you can create a lot of stuff in here. Whichever organization in whatever you want to do. You have always, you have options. Always have options. That's exactly.
We're aligning. So much on this stuff. Yes, hundred percent. It's like if you want to actually do something, you always have options. You can either create them on your team. You can create opportunities like the one that I mentioned like 20% with another team, offered to help somebody like yeah, that doesn't take anything if you love to help somebody. Yeah. And and get get yourself experience of whatever it is that you're interested in by just saying, hey, I'm going to do this for you.
Yeah, let's do it together. I love doing that. Yeah, yeah, but I mean for me it was the same right? I didn't know. Wanted to be a software engineer. I didn't know what I wanted to do at all, so I chose kind of a really broad kind of start. And then in there, I was like this. This is what I want to do and that I went there, I made it happen and then the same for kind of the, the podcasting,
think it was an idea. I started out really small and now it has snowballed and I love having conversations because what they do is they allow me to reflect right in my career. Sometimes I've had conversations and they really made me reflect and after that, That if you have like a growth curve I grew more than I would have had otherwise without that conversation, right? I'm sorry in.
This is gonna sound cheesy but the developer advocacy role sounds really interesting to me like I could I could so see myself do that in a few years or like as a next career step because it does align with my personal interest. I just haven't actually tried it out. I mean, this is a variant of it but this is like 5% of what I actually do. All right? Yeah, it's small steps. Right? And then it snowballed. I love that we have the room to
do that. I love that we have the playing field and there's so many options. It's actually quite quite a lot that you can actually do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, treat the space to create the room for yourself to do it and you can yeah exactly. Is it some wondering about Google itself? Is it easy to transition from Kono team to team? Yeah, it's not it's it's designed so you can easily
transition. And there are like if you're moving from a certain role to a certain role, there might be interviews that you have to take, which is what I had to do, from transitioning from customer engineer to, to developer advocacy, like, for interviews of doing that. But, it depends on like, where you're transitioning from and where your transition into sometimes. You can, sometimes you can bypass the interview by the showing the evidence of flake, the work that you might have.
In already doing that aligns with that team. So it kind of depends on where you're transitioning from which wall, and to which Roland, but, but all of that is encouraged to a get you into a spot where the, you enjoy doing what you're doing. Yeah, that's really cool. I think the biggest driver for me has always been, is curiosity, right? Really a drive-thru curiosity. People ask me. Okay. How do you stay motivated? It's a hard question.
Ian because I don't really think of motivation intrinsic and tip doesn't really make sense for me. It's so that thing looks interesting. It's like a diamond. It's nice and shiny. Let me go. See what's what that is about and then I go that direction, it's always been like that. And I think it's what allowed me to thrive a lot as a software developer myself. What do you think a lot of other aspects could because I think curiosity is the biggest one
that you can have. That is definitely one of the biggest ones that I have like Sam the same way I can motivate it through curiosity. Yeah, like just get motivated. It's like okay today. Oh, everybody's talking about this. Like when been with three Kim came about I everybody on the internet was like, just talking about that three and I was like, okay I'm not getting interested just yet like it's just not pulling me in, right?
And and when that happens when I get pulled Into it like that, that Curiosity. That is the day. When I'm like, okay, now getting inside out understanding what this means and maybe create a demo. Learn it as much as however I can that yeah. That is what motivates me. Like it's not even about like because people are talking about it, I'm going to get interested. It's like it has to happen. One day.
It's like I'm going to wake up one day and be like Want to know more about web 3, but that doesn't come yet. You can't. You can't plan for it either. It just needs to happen plan for it either. Yeah, exactly. So yeah it's like it has Has been as well and I don't think I can put anything on above curiosity for my motivation. Yeah, same here. What does happen with me and I'm still, I'm still figuring this one out is, when I go down the rabbit hole, I'm not cool.
What about this? What about that? And I sometimes I go all over the place. And I'm like, wait, Waverly, we were here with a goal when we started out and I have to have to go back because there's a lot of light and you can go from from one end to the other. But I think especially if you I have that developer advocacy role. I've never had it but you go into it with a certain goal, right?
Explore for X y&z. So then if you if you spend too much time on other aspects, I think that that would be one of my flaws is you actually never actually get to that goal. You get it. You go at it slower I guess you do learn a lot. Probably you do learn a lot but it's like yeah, fit this role particularly like you have the intention of leg okay. I I want to create two blogs that are one at this level. And the other one at say, 300
level one. The first one is y, 1, S 2 and 1/3 at 301 level, you know, like how deep you got to get into the topic to be able to talk intelligently at the 301 level, right? And and so there's like there is the Curiosity aspect of like you're learning something new and you can go in different directions. I would create demos and And play with the project and then then decide. Okay, this is what I want to see in blog to, or this is what I want to say in the third blog.
And this is more advanced so maybe just leave it out. And like those decisions are made while I'm wandering around with, like, either demo or documentation, or reading more about it or playing the thing more than it. But but you're right like you the there is still a definition of like what the output is going. Going to be and what I am working towards.
So all that investigation and all that learning is like in a certain direction and if you are deterring from that direction, you know, that you should come back because you have this goal in mind of like writing a few things at the end of this. So I think that that definitely helps. So if we, if you're doing this in software engineering, maybe like set yourself up with A little bit of a soft gold ball sort of thing and that might be that might be helpful.
But yeah it's very it's very tempting to just wander off and try and they do tangential things and figure out those ten engines and then maybe come back and converge. Yeah, I think the the more you do it, right? The more you do it with a goal in mind, probably the better you get at it because at some point, you're right. You get out of it. Yeah, you can step out of yourself and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is actually not what we're here for. And then you can even with the
book. Yeah, I agree even with the book like that's the exact same thing that happened like the initial sketches. I took a lot longer even though I was reading the same amount of documentation and trying this same experimenting with the products, the same way it was much longer to create the sketches and then as I was creating more and more of these good getting further like after after like 20 of these, the guy had a Process.
And I could create the sketches and in like, like reading everything digesting the content in like a day and then creating the sketch the next day with like a plan of how it would all look at look and everything. So it's it does get better as you just do more of it. Yeah, yeah that makes yeah but since this is one, something I've been wondering if you and I are very visual oriented I guess. Yeah and over way of consuming content, But I'm really curious.
How do you consume content? Like how do you either learn or keep up today or gain that knowledge to be able to convey it to other people? I have to engage with the content. So even if it is text, I usually don't start with the documentation that good like I just start just playing around. Yeah, yeah I just go in blind and like whatever product whatever new thing, it is. I just experiment with it. I try it, I click on buttons. I see what happens, and and I have no fear of breaking stuff.
So exactly. So that's kind of how that that's how I does again. Like it goes back to the visualization aspect. Yeah I can see it. If I can even with the code like if I even if it's like an SDK, I would still play with it first before I read the documentation for it and then if I get stuck I go into the documentation and figure out. Why am I stuck? Same way if it's a UI product or even better, right? Because I love visual so I can just use the UI stuff.
Well, to get my stomach. Myself familiar with it. And if I get stuck or if I'm like, oh I don't know what that exactly means. Yeah, then I would go to the documentation be like, okay, that's what they want me to put here and, you know, they start making sense from there. So I do things a little bit backwards. I read the documentation on an as-needed basis. And yeah, and just try things out by myself.
And then obviously, once once I've done like God, And so, tell us to a certain level with that experimentation. I'm going to naturally, get curious about all the different things. So then I would believe documentation, even further, but, but I need the push to go. Read the documentation. If I started off with the documentation, I would never finish the thing. That's, that's my process. Yeah, I know, I keep saying this, but I do recognize myself in it, right?
I don't even know. Even on a software level, we got like a closet we needed to build. And I was like, let's look at all the parts and let's look at how it would fit together and my girlfriend's there with the man. You like that. That's not what I'm supposed to do. And I'm like, um, I'm already working on step three and she's like, but we supposed to start at Step 1. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like, I don't need a book if it doesn't work, we'll come back to the book.
Exactly, exactly. I mean, for software, it's exactly the same, right? If it's a new Software as a service tool. I'm like, let's let's click around, let's see what actually is there. And then once I'm like, why isn't this there? Then I'm I go to the documentation and either. There's a reason for it I'm like oh this is actually there and then it corporate it. Let's go funny actually.
Yeah, so true I think more and more I started going to YouTube which is weird because I'm already on YouTube. I already consume content, they're just not for technical stuff but more and more since I've realized visually I'm better at it. I go to YouTube because then people draw me diagrams. They condense the content real quick. I love looking at programming language explained in like 100 seconds. I'm like exactly this. That's what I want.
Give me the give me the gist of it and this is the gist. Yeah, and then if I'm more interested in it, there's obviously a lot of documentation. But yeah, give me the gist to begin with. Exactly, I love how this conversation flowed kind. From the, the power of visualization to more of the developer relationships aspect, is there anything that's missing that you still wanted to share? No, I think we covered a lot of good stuff and it just flowed on its own, which was perfect.
Yeah. That's that's usually what we, what we try and do and hopefully, hopefully it succeeds in the end as well. So, yeah. Bianca regardie everyone. I'm gonna put the links to our socials in the description below, so, check her out. Also, check out the book. I actually have it under the table. Here, we talked about that in the pre-show and thank you for listening. Yeah, he's like is there as well? And thank you for listening. We'll see you on the next one.