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Geeking Out with Adriana Villela: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Adriana Villela, Hannah Maxwell
The podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between.
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- 2 weeks ago50 min
The One Where We Geek Out on Going from DevRel to Solutions Architect with Aakansha Priya
When Aakansha Priya was working on her computer science degree, she wasn't even sure she wanted to be in tech. She craved human interaction, and thought that a career in tech couldn't give her that. She soon discovered that that was not the case, and was able to find was to thrive in tech. Learn about Aakansha's career journey, from front-end developer, to DevRel, to Solutions Architect, and how her determination to get into the observability world won over her current employer. About Aakansha Priya: Aakansha Priya is a Solution Architect at Dash0 and a CNCF Ambassador. With a journey from frontend developer to DevRel to solution architect, she brings both engineering depth and a strong customer advocate perspective. She loves championing her customers and serving as a bridge between them and engineering, ensuring technology delivers real value. Aakansha has spoken at conferences on DevOps and the human side of tech, and is passionate about helping teams unlock the value of observability with OpenTelemetry. Beyond work, she enjoys painting, singing, reading, and spontaneous travel and you'll often find her at meetups and conferences. Key takeaways: Being unafraid to approach strangers leads to wonderful connections. Don't be afraid to learn in public. Aakansha challenges herself by working her comfort zone of public speaking, and as a result, she is more comfortable on stage. Many conferences support first-time speakers Men in tech come from a position of privilege and it's important for them to use that privilege to help underrepresented groups. Don't be afraid to show up for a conference and bringing your true style, whether it's super dressy, super funky, or super dressed down. The Cloud Native space gives us a safe space to do that. Conferences provide a great networking opportunity, and could lead you to your next job! Nobody talks about the stress of the job hunt, but it doesn't mean that it isn't there. There are many other communities outside the CNCF that are also welcoming, such Commit Your Code. People don't really understand what networking really means and they forget the human aspect of it. There is a lack of women in Solutions Architecture roles. It pays off to prepare well for an interview. Find Aakansha on: LinkedIn Github Twitter Find us on: All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout All of Adriana's social channels are on adrianavillela.com/socials Links: Aakansha & Adriana at NDC London 2026 Marino Wijay on Geeking Out Tim Banks on Geeking Out Part 1 and Tim Banks on Geeking Out Part 2 Hazel Weakly on Geeking Out Commit Your Code conference (Danny Thompson) Cortney Nickerson on Geeking Out talking about making the most of your conference connections CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) exam KCNA (Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate) exam Chapters: 00:00 Opening credits 00:26 Guest intro 00:43 Icebreaker 00:49 Lefty or righty? 00:55 iPhone or Android? 01:39 Mac, Linux, or Windows? 01:46 Favourite programming language? 02:26 Dev or Ops
- Jun 9, 20261h 0m
Geeking Out LIVE: The One Where We Geek Out on Slaying the Vibes
GenZ are in a unique position in the Age of AI, because they are coming up "AI native"...or are they? Join us for a special LIVE episode of Geeking Out, in which host Adriana Villela speaks with four GenZ-ers to get their perspectives on how AI is disrupting software development, and their future careers. Featuring Divyasha Pahuja, Stella Gu, Amrithaa Logeswaran, and Rachelle De Man. Key Takeaways A great way to use AI is to use it to do all the mundane tasks for you (e.g. formatting code) When you tell AI to do something for you, you're slightly losing the ability to do it yourself. When using AI, trust, but verify. Don't use AI for everything, because it takes away from why you're doing the project in the first place. Using AI to help you code makes things possible that you couldn't have necessarily done on your own. It brings to life ideas that have been in the back burner. GenZ-ers don't want AI to agree with them. They a partner challenge and brainstorm with, just as another human would. AI takes away the opportunities and joys of overcoming challenges in coding. There are higher expectations in terms of productivity now that AI-assisted development is a thing, and GenZ is feeling the pressure! We are at risk of losing our critical thinking skills due to over-reliance on AI. Many university course curricula are out of date, as they have not kept pace with AI, leaving students unprepared and without proper direction on how to use it in the workplace. Many universities aren't sure of how to integrate AI in their curricula in an effective manner. Final exams are one way to determine whether or not you've mastered the course work, or just got by during the school year by using AI to do most of the work for you. What's acceptable use of AI in non-engineering classes, such as visual arts, for example? AI slop cleanup is a real job now! Today's juniors recognize that they will be tomorrow's seniors. Therefore, they need employers to provide them with mentorship from seniors to help them succeed, and they need time to learn the fundamentals. It's no longer about writing code; system design is a crucial skill in today's job market. Words of wisdom: You need a well-rounded view and understanding of AI, as be intentional about how you use it. Be curious! About our guests Divyasha Pahuja Divyasha Pahuja is a GenZ AI engineer, multimodal ML researcher, and four-time peer-reviewed author at ACM/IEEE and Springer — someone whose career started before ChatGPT shipped and accelerated alongside it. She's had quite a journey: software engineer (back when LLMs weren't a household phrase), then back to school, then ML researcher, and now sitting at the cusp of both as an AI engineer. Off the keyboard, she's spent the last few years with Feeding India leading a digital campaign team, distributing meals, and building recurring partnerships with local NGOs and old age homes. Outside of all that, she loves playing badminton, is a self-admitted sore loser, has a soft spot for cats, coffee shops and Netflix because who doesn't, and is just starting an AI community at @un__prompted — say hi if you want to be there early. Find Divyasha on: LinkedIn Stella Gu Stella Gu is an early-career software engineer with past experience at Manulife and Huawei. She has explored a variety of roles within software engineering, including backend systems and data infrastructure. She enjoys working directly with code, turning ideas into meaningful software. Outside of tech, Stella can be found playing sports ⛷️🏐, exploring new food spots, and capturing moments on her phone. Find Stella on: LinkedIn Amrithaa Logeswaran Amritha is a second-year Integrated Engineering student at the University of Western Ontario, passionate about building inclusive communities and amplifying student voices. Last year, she served as a First-Year Representative with the Undergraduate Engineering Society (UES), where she discovered how much I love connecting with people and created space for everyone to feel included and supported. She's realized I’m just as passionate about supporting student life as I am about studying engineering. Whether it’s through leadership roles or one-on-one conversations, she loves building community and helping students feel like they truly belong. Find Amrithaa on: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/amrithaa-l/" rel="noopener norefe
- May 14, 20261h 0m
Geeking Out LIVE: The One Where We Geek Out on Vibing Like it's 1999 and Coding Like it's 2026
Key Takeaways Using IDEs took some of the mental load out of hand coding because of features like code completion Switching to IDEs from plain text editors was a bit of a mental change for many of us (maybe not as big as AI-assisted coding) AI-assisted coding gives us a similar feel to text editor based coding à la VIM AI-assisted coding is ADHD friendly — you can explain your architecture and the AI can do the mundane task of writing the code for you Vibe coding has turned senior developers into architects Vibe coding turns side projects that have been on your mind forever into reality in hours, days, or weeks Writing code in a language you don't know becomes dangerous if you're implementing it at scale As seasoned practitioners, when we vibe code, we know what "good code" is supposed to look like. The difference between a good senior developer and a great one is mentorship. We need to be willing to fail more in order to learn, but we also need a safe space to fail. Should non-developers write code just because they can, through AI coding agents? Not production-ready code, but it shouldn't stop them from using it to show off a proof-of-concept. Making space for "awesome slop projects" is a great way to showcase creativity and fun side projects, even if they never make it into production. AI side projects have led to an increase in purchase of domain names as developers finally have the "bandwidth" bring dust off old projects and bring them to life. Lot of developers now are becoming carpenters. They're building these tools that sometimes it's just vibe coded slop. Sometimes it's just being creative. Non-developer founders can bring ideas to life, but without a developer at their side, they risk introducing applications into the world that are non-scalable and walking security risks. Gen Z/Gen Alpha are NOT well positioned as devs in the AI native era if they don't understand some fundamental principles and if they don't learn through failure The most important skills a software engineer needs today: Trust, but verify, be curious, be a good communication, be willing to teach and learn from other humans Chapters 00:08 Intro 00:42 Guest intros 03:15 What was your first programming language? 07:59 IDEs took the mental load out of coding 11:21 AI-assisted coding is ADHD friendly 11:40 What do you despise most about hand coding? 13:34 What's your coder persona? 17:50 How do you feel about trusting AI implicitly to write code in a language you don't know? 23:04 Cassidy rant 28:19 Failure is a teaching aid 33:14 "Awesome Slop" 35:13 AI + domain name purchase side effect 36:49 Vibe coding + startup founders 41:54 Are Gen Z/Gen Alpha better positioned as devs in the AI native era? 45:36 Beware the non-developers with no coding experience' 53:35 Why is the AI writing React for me? 58:25 What's the most important skill a software engineer needs today? About our guests Cassidy Williams Cassidy is the Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub! Outside of that fancy title, Cassidy is a startup advisor and investor, open source-er, and meme-maker on the internet. She enjoys building mechanical keyboards, playing music, hanging out with family and friends, and teaching in her free time. Find our guest on: LinkedIn Bluesky GitHub Blog Newsletter Tim Banks (they/them) Tim’s tech career spans over 25 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started in avionics in the US Marine Corps and then into various government contracting roles. After moving to the private sector, Tim worked both in large corporate environments and in small startups, honing his skills in systems administration, automation, architecture, and operations for large cloud-based datastores. Today, Tim leverages their years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with the open source and cloud computing communities in his current role. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. They are the 2-time American National and is the 5-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in their division.
- Apr 14, 202658 min
The One Where We Geek Out on Vibe Coding with Jean-Mark Wright
Key takeaways: Kids take new tech for granted. For example, carriers used to charge by the minute for calls. Text and web browsing were extra (and extra expensive). Configuring Linux back in the day was 1 part fun, 10 parts pain. Watching things on video allows us to see expressions and hear intonations that you would otherwise miss with text. With text, you would have to imagine that for yourself. Being able to take a problem and break it down into first principles allows you to look at a problem from different angle, pulling on your experience and the experiences of others to solve those components and put the layers back on to form a solution. Many of today's paradigms are just variants of problems that we've seen before, just masquerading with different names. If we break down a problem enough, we actually start to see examples of how similar problems have been solved. Breaking down a problem into a way that someone outside of your area of work can understand teaches you to break a problem down into understandable bits and helps you understand the problem better. It's easy to think you understand something. But as soon as you try to try to explain that to someone else, it forces you to dig deeper. Understanding things from first principles gives us a better understanding of how things work. WIth vibe coding, junior engineers don't get to experience more traditional debugging (i.e. with Google). Is that good or bad? Problem solving loop: come up with a hypothesis, test it out, and if the test fails, come up with another hypothesis, and keep repeating that loop until the problem is solved. Juniors these days aren't necessarily exposed to that. Debugging with LLMs shortens feedback loops. Junior engineers, not having been through the "old way" of debugging with Google and StackOverflow may be tempted to view LLMs as an authority. Maybe it makes sense to just give into All The AI things and retrain ourselves to coexist with AI. Encode best practices in LLM rules files to help guide junior developers Style guides can be enforced through instructions files Mentoring + style guides + other guardrails can help junior engineers level up Pre-AI-era engineers and AI-native engineers can learn a lot from each other About our guest: Jean-Mark is a builder at heart, driven by a passion for creating sustainable architecture, fostering strong teams, and championing Observability. He has dedicated his career to building across various disciplines with a keen focus on creating systems that are both fit for purpose and built to last. Jean-Mark’s journey into Observability began from a practical challenge: the difficulty of understanding complex production systems at scale. This sparked a deep passion for designing and implementing solutions that provide clarity and insight into these systems. A natural leader, Jean-Mark is as invested in people as he is in technology. He has brought many others along on his journey, mentoring and training colleagues in best practices and making countless tooling improvements to enhance system visibility across the organization. This commitment to both technical excellence and people development has made a lasting impact. At his core, Jean-Mark is still a builder who finds great joy in investing in people and engaging in endless conversations about all things Observability. Find Jean-Mark on: LinkedIn Blog Find us on: All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela Links: Adriana's blog post born out of one of her chat's on LinkedIn with Jean-Mark Symbian operating system (mobile phones) Sony Ericsson Nok
- Mar 10, 20261h 3m
Geeking Out Live: The One Where We Give a Sh*t About IWD with Colleen Coll, Reese Lee, Imma Valls, and Josh Lee
Key Takeaways With many companies scaling back DEI programs, conversations about gender equity are more important than ever. Seeing women in technical and leadership roles encourages others to enter and stay in the field. Men and women alike should use their privilege to advocate for and uplift women There's a difference between supportive and performative males. Performative males want to be "seen" doing the right things, but aren't actually supporting women in the workplace. Men who use their privilege to support women should not be put on a pedestal; that should be the bare minimum and something that should be done by default Don't wait until you're "ready" (we never feel fully ready). There's always someone less qualified than you who will apply for jobs/pursue speaking opportunities/scholarships/etc., so why not take a chance and put yourself out there? Don't be afraid to reach out to women to mentor/guide them; sometimes they may be too shy/scared to reach out Chapters 00:08 Intro 00:29 Guest intros 06:24 Why is IWD important? 11:20 Name one woman who inspires you 22:24 What can women do to support other women in the workplace? 31:43 Name one man who inspires you 42:55 What can men do to support other men in the workplace 51:48 What are some workplace inequalities that need to be fixed 58:22 What advice do you have for women entering tech? About our guests Colleen Coll "Allow myself to introduce...myself." - Austin Powers Ever feel like you're juggling flaming torches planning events—trying to keep all the details in the air while something’s always about to catch fire? Yep, she's been there. Events have a way of throwing curveballs, and when tech and tools aren’t playing nice, chaos can easily take over. That’s where Colleen Coll comes in. She love turning event madness into magic. Whether it’s on-site event coverage using digital media, live reporting, or behind-the-scenes management, she makes sure everything runs like clockwork. She's also a huge fan of using There.App, which simplifies on-location event management by keeping everyone in sync and streamlining the entire process, so no detail gets lost in the shuffle. From tech conferences to startup launches, I capture the moments that matter and keep things smooth, whether it's happening live or behind the scenes. And when she's not on the ground, she's writing—blogs, articles, and ghostwriting for tech leaders to tell the bigger story behind the event, brand, or mission. Find Colleen on: Bluesky LinkedIn Reese Lee Reese Lee (she/her) is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic, where she enables users on open source technologies such as OpenTelemetry. She has spoken on various topics related to OpenTelemetry, and maintains and creates community resources aimed at OTel end users. She is super into anything paranormal, and enjoys sci-fi and traveling. Find Reese on: Mastodon LinkedIn X Imma Valls Imma is a Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs. She loves simplifying and sharing knowledge on Observability, OpenTelemetry, and Cloud Native accessible. Her mission is to create high-value technical content while driving the adoption of best practices within the community. As a community organizer and ally, she's passionate about building inclusive communities and events where underrepresented people in tech can confidently share their stories and knowledge. Knowledge isn't static; it's an asset that multiplies when shared. Find Imma on: LinkedIn Bluesky Josh Lee Josh is a Developer Advocate at Altinity, where he applies his observability and engineering background to ClickHouse use cases. He has over 15 years of experience in developing and leading software projects for various clients and industries. Josh is also a speaker and a contributor to the OpenTelemetry and CNCF communities, sharing his insights and best practices on topics such as distributed tracing. He is always eager to learn new things and explore new challenges, and h
- Feb 24, 20260 min
A Special Programming Note
Whats’s up, fellow geeks! Just a quick note to let you know that Geeking Out episodes will be dropping once a month, instead of twice a month. Still expect the same fun conversations and guests, but on a monthly basis, on the second Tuesday of the month. This means that you’ll get 12 episodes per year, with no breaks in the summer. Our next episode will be a livestream episode for International Womens' Day, featuring an awesome panel. We'll be streaming it on YouTube March 4th, and will drop it on the podcasting feeds on March 10th.
- Feb 10, 202649 min
The One Where We Geek Out on the Plan from Which to Deviate with Diana Todea
Key takeaways:Diana took the "failure" of being downgraded in her PhD program as a wakeup call.Although being downgraded in her PhD program was a shock for Diana and made her extremely angry, she found the strength to finish her studies, and reinvented herself through a career in tech.Learning from failure is an important part of personal growth.Don't spend your time ruminating on the negative from years ago, because there are other, more important things that come up in life that we have to deal with.Find humility in your failure and move on.Diana's early experience in tech working at a call centre, and then in customer support prepared her for a later role as an SRE.Diana's call centre work taught her how to: Push past her introversion and phone anxiety; Manage her emotions; Filter; Have empathy; ListenDiana's work doing tech support in AWS, Azure, etc, introduced her into the cloud native space, and naturally primed her for a role as an SRE, and eventually as a developer advocate in the Observability space.Working in tech support meant being on-call, which prepared Diana for on-call work of SREAs a working mom in tech, it's hard to fully excel at work and at family life. It's a balancing act, and you do your best to manage.Nobody gives you an award for being a mom. You just do it.Updating docs, either to clarify a concept or to provide translation into another language is a great way to start contributing to cloud native projects.Having translation of OTel docs in different languages makes it accessible to those who aren't fluent in English.About our guest:Diana is a Developer Experience Engineer at VictoriaMetrics. She has worked as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Observability. She is an active member of the OpenTelemetry CNCF open source project, co-organizer of Cloud Native Days Romania, co-lead of neurodiversity working group (part of CNCF initiative merge-forward) and supports underrepresented groups in tech.Find Diana on:LinkedInBlueskyGitHubFind us on:All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingoutAll of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillelaLinks:Erasmus ScholarshipGeeking Out Live: Working Moms in Tech, featuring Diana as one of the panelistsCloud Native Days Romania 2026 (web site)Cloud Native Days Romania 2026 on InstagramCloud Native Days Romania 2026 on LinkedIn
- Jan 27, 202646 min
The One Where We Geek Out on Geeking Out with Scott Hanselman
Key takeaways: Language models without context are meaningless. How Scott's son went on a smartphone detox by getting an Alcatel flip phone where he could swap SIM cards back and forth from his iPhone to his flip phone. Given enough experience with enough similar programming languages, you're able to transfer skills from one language to another, and even understand/write enough code in an unfamiliar language to be dangerous. 😜 The line of dev and ops has been blurred. You should containerize an app once or twice so that you know what ops is doing. It makes you a true "full stack" developer, giving you an appreciation for various aspects of the SDLC, and it also gives you empathy for what folks in ops are doing. The same applies to testing. The amount of preparation for delivering a TED talk is a vastly different experience than preparing to deliver a talk at a conference. Most schools don't teach computer history and it's important to understand where the technology that we use comes from. About our guest: Scott Hanselman is a programmer, teacher, and speaker. He works out of his home office in Portland, Oregon for Microsoft as the Vice President of Developer Community. He works on .NET, Open Source, and the Azure Cloud Developer Experience. He blogs about technology, culture, gadgets, inclusion, code, the web, where we're going and where we've been. He's excited about community, social equity, media, entrepreneurship and above all, the open web. He has a number of fun podcasts and a YouTube channel. Find our guest on: Bluesky LinkedIn Instagram Mastodon YouTube TikTok Scott's Web Site Find us on: All of our social channels are on bio.site/geekingout All of Adriana's social channels are on bio.site/adrianavillela Links: Adriana's 2023 talk at Monitorama Scott's TED talk Darmok t-shirt Star Trek TNG Episode 102: Darmok Paul Winfield - Family Matters Windows 3.1 Joystick Commodore64 PS/2 port RS-232 Hoodo Hersi - Canadian comedian referred to by Scott at 07:33 Scott's viral TikTok on flip phones Alcatel flip phone Scott's open source artificial pancreas <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Knight"
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