Coffee, code, and connections

Tiffany: Hi everyone. Actually, this is pretty cool. How many people are awake right now? I may have had three hours of sleep, so I'm impressed I'm here. So yeah, I'm going to be talking about connections. As you might be able to figure out, my name is Tiffany Jernigan. If you still use Twitter or X as they call it nowadays, my handle is on there and my website. And if you're hiring, please let me know. Okay, so I'm going to go through a little bit of a journey. So in college I majored in electrical engineering and through connections that I made along the way, I interviewed for a job and ended up being a hardware engineer at Intel. I was having a lot of fun there, but I really wanted to be able to code wasn't really getting that. Asked my manager, is there an option to do that?

Sorry, I know there isn't. Back at that time, there were cubicles. It wasn't all open floor plan. And I saw a new person and was like, Hey, who are you? And found out that they were an engineering manager for a software team that was just created. And I was given the opportunity to basically join a new software team, given that I had never done software as a job and had done a little bit in school. So that was back in 2015, so it's a little while ago now. So then through that job, I basically went and I started using this thing called Twitter, as you all probably know about at this point in time. And back then I thought that Twitter was basically a place where people would just post things about, Hey, look at the sandwich I ate earlier today, or Look at what I did today.

I didn't realise that people actually used it for sharing really cool things like technology. And through doing that, I ended up getting a message from an engineering manager at Amazon for container services. And then through that was able to actually start my first job as a developer advocate. So through that job, I got to go to more conferences, the awesome things such as where we're at right now, which is honestly such a privilege. And through doing that, I met other people. I learned more about containers, I learned about more about this thing called Kubernetes. And then through that I met Joe. And then several years later down the road, I ended up starting to look for new jobs again and trying to find something new. And Joe referred me over to VMware where I got to meet my awesome managers who are still one's now at Google, one's at Broadcom now.

Time has changed, but basically just learned a lot during that as well. And so was instead of specifically just on containers, I was on the container services team. I was focused on general cloud native and open source. So let's go into a different timeline. So that's the timeline of career through meeting a bunch of really awesome people that got me from being in electrical engineering to being able to do software, to being able to do developer advocacy. So if we go back over to 2015, I got to go to DockerCon, which was super cool. And apparently it's a thing now again. And through DockerCon, I met Diogo who then introduced me to Steve, and then a little bit later I went to Oz k, which unfortunately no longer exists, and then I got to go and meet Jerome there. So through meeting Jerome several years later at another DockerCon, I got to meet Lee who is at this conference, hopefully, I know he had to leave a little bit early today, but a bit later afterwards, I ended up posting a job posting being like, Hey, we're looking for another developer advocate.

He saw this posting and ended up applying and then ended up joining my team. So it's a little bit of all these different connections. Sometimes they can lead you somewhere, sometimes they can lead someone else somewhere. Sometimes they can connect people in the end and then you end up working together, which is super cool. And if my clicker would like me, all right, basically that led to Jerome and I. We didn't specifically work together right away, but basically we were colleagues and then Lee and I, we became coworkers. And through that, basically with the connections that were made, we ended up learning a bunch of things. We ended up delivering content together. We ended up speaking at different events together. And actually through Jerome, I got a short contract in which I was able to work with him on things I had been working on at Intel before workshops that he had. So through that, it's just hopefully a bunch more people that ended up learning something new.

So along my career journey, whether it was something like digital circuits or maybe I was coding or maybe I was writing a blog or creating a talk or just any of the various things there I was super fortunate and always had someone that I could go ask a question to or maybe I was mentored by someone along the way. But with that being the case, I wanted to also make sure that I paid it forward too. So basically you can see little versions of me of the different jobs that I had along the way. So you don't have to be super senior. For my first job, I ended up having an intern that I got to help for my second job. There were two different assessment interns. Some of them were actually high school interns, so that's also super neat. So sometimes it's things like sitting down with somebody and helping them to code something.

Maybe you're specifically thinking of the engineering side of things, maybe you go and help them with a talk or something like that. But sometimes it's not even just that. Sometimes it's just going and advocating for them in some way. So around eight years ago, someone reached out to me on Slack and was like, Hey, I would like to work as an intern at your company. And so I ended up sharing the resume and then ended up hitting a road bump since they were from France. The system for whether they counted as a bachelor's or not was different. So at first they're like, no, this person doesn't have a bachelor's degree, but they had the equivalent. So I had to go and get all the documentation and be like, this is why this is equivalent. This is why you should still let this person become an intern.

And they ended up becoming an intern. And currently our senior position at one of the top cloud providers in the eu. So that's super cool. And then I got to help interns with coding some of the high school ones that probably obviously had some interest in software at that point. And then went on to go major in software engineering and our software engineers. Now, I am not going to take any credit for where they are now, but hopefully I helped in some way. And hopefully there are people that you can think of that helped you in some way to get you to where you are or people that you have helped in some way. And then you can be like, that's so awesome. Look at where they are now. So there's just so many other connections and collaborations and friendships that have basically been forged over the years.

So together we've created content, we've delivered talks together. I got to deliver a bunch of talks with people that I met over the years last year when I got to go to conferences again and learn so many new things from these people who I could then teach things to other people. There is just other ways to make connections. Sometimes it's at conferences, sometimes it's through social media, sometimes it's through some other person. Like yesterday I got to meet someone new that I didn't know because someone introduced me to that person. So we're really privileged to even be here at this conference right now. So there's a few quotes that I heard from some of my friends recently. So one is that knowledge is the only thing that increases as you give it away by me along, which my friend told me about recently. And then another one is by my friend Char, who, and both of these people are people that I met at conferences said that junior and senior are both six letters.

So don't let the words define you. And there's a QR code there if you can even see it at the moment, that goes to a blog that Jerome Pelli wrote basically on this topic. So basically, I'm trying to say to go and share your knowledge with others. Keep building connections, keep collaborating with people, creating content, creating new things, just talking, helping people go and mentor somebody. Go after this during a break and get some coffee and say hi to someone new. Or if you meet someone else or someone else, introduce them to somebody that they may not know already. So the more that we do this, the more that we build these connections, the more that we end up creating content with other people, doing things with other people, the better our community ends up being. We all become stronger. We all end up being more knowledgeable, and hopefully just keep creating more communities and in the better generation going forward. And of course, I didn't send my timer, so I don't actually know what time it is right now. Yeah, so thank you very much. Special thanks to Jone and Shar for looking through the ideas I had and some of the slides I was doing. And also special thanks to Mattias for showing me about Ex SC Draw so that these slides weren't just a bunch of text. Yeah. And again, if you are hiring for DevRel, that's my LinkedIn and thanks everyone.