Angel Diaz, Discover Financial Services | OSS North America 2023

This is techstrong tv. Welcome back to the Open Source Summit in beautiful Vancouver. We're here with longtime open source advocate, angel Diaz.

Many of you may remember Angel from his days at ibm, but Angel today has a new job working for Discover, where he is heading up engineering and application development. And guess what, strangely enough, discover's playing a bigger role now in the Lennox Foundation. Angel, welcome the show.

Thank you For having me. Nice to be with you again. She, What is it that brought Discover to the Lennox Foundation?

What's the value proposition? And you know, what was that conversation like when you were talking to the folks there about why Discover needed to play a bigger role in open source and Lennox in general? Yeah, Well look like most companies, well discover is no different as other technology companies.

We consume a lot of open source, right? 60, 70% of our code is open source like everybody else. We also have been contributing, by the way, but you know, let's say quietly, you know, as we have becoming more of a digital company, right?

So, you know, we obsess of help helping our clients get a brighter financial future. So how do we do that? We gotta align our people, our processes and our technology.

It's what we thought was, well, could we take those open source principles to apply to our digital transformation? So how we think about customer journeys, how we think about our teams, how we're organized, and then our technology and aligning all of that. That was really kind of, I think the, uh, big, the big aha moment.

I said, you know, we should really maybe organize a bit more, right? And, and become more overt in our participation in open source. And that's what we're doing here and have been doing for about a year now.

What's your sense of the community right now in the state of it? Because there's a lot more focus on security. You've been around in a long time.

Is this an overdue conversation? Some folks are kind of like, well, I'm the maintainer of an open source package, but I didn't ask you to use it in the first place, so you can't expect me to bring you the bug for you. And when there's a fix and all this other stuff, I have a life, you know, and things like that.

Where are we on the maturity curve of this whole thing? Well, You know, I think, I think that that issue of, you know, a bug fix, security patch, et cetera, I mean, that's kind of always existed, right? So there's different ways of consuming open source.

You can get it directly from the source, or you can get it directly from, let's say, somebody that takes that technology, build technology around it and serves it to you. So for example, you know, we are a big, uh, Kubernetes users, right? Most of our applications are microservices right now, non mainframe applications, but we partner with, you know, a vendor that provides a distribution, right?

So that's kind of a way for us to kind of get a currency and have urgency around things like that that happen. So that's kind of techniques that that, that we use and I think the community has been used to doing. Now, that said, you know, I think we all need to kind of, you know, think about how do we build sustainable ecosystems, right?

Because some things die in the vine, right? What happens when the maintainer is not around, right? Mm-hmm.

So those are interesting questions. I think as a community we're grappling with. Now, Are there particular areas in the open source community that Discover is looking to contribute more so than others?

Or the things that kind of leap out at you and go, yep, we're really excited about this one. Yeah, well, okay, so, uh, uh, we announced recently, uh, some contributions that we made in partnership with Fin Os, which is the financial services part of the Linux Foundation. And it's about bridging the gap between a design system, user interface, and actual implementation.

So, you know, oftentimes you have a design system, you create a user interface based on the customer journey, you build an implementation that could take six months, three months a week, wouldn't be great if you could do that in a day or in hours, right? Mm-hmm. And in particular, do it with accessibility and exclusivity, right?

Modality, visually impaired, dyslexic, whatever your accessibility issue may be, right? By design from the beginning. So we donated, uh, sorry, we contributed some code, uh, and we had a hackathon here that we just did with the FNAs Foundation to kind of start to ideate around that, around 200 hackers, 28 countries.

So that's an area that we're very passionate about. It's code that we've been doing, right? To get consistency and, uh, and it's something that I personally have been very passionate for, for, for about 20 years now, believe me.

So even before open source, I was, uh, we've been thinking about this in, in open communities. I think the area that I remember the most was the X formm standards from the Worldwide Web consortium, right? That had this nice model, view control decomposition of, of user interface.

Have you come a long way since then, right? But it allows us to have these conversations. So that's one area that, uh, that, uh, we're really proud of doing right now and global accessibility awareness days, May 18th, so everybody can, uh, join up.

How do you have that conversation with the FNO folks? Because some of them are your competitors, and so how do you guys like collaborate within that and kind of have those conversations without everybody completely freaking out? Yeah.

Well, so we all know open source is about building on the shoulders of giants, right? The tie lifts all boats kind of go up, right? So I think that general notion is pretty well understood, right?

Mm-hmm. That if we can, you know, make advancements on technology, that we all benefit from those advantage. I mean, going back to your question about security patches, right?

If we can, all, everybody gets advantage of, uh, take gets advantage. Now what we, I think what we also realize, whether it's any, you know, quote unquote vertical, and I don't clearly like the distinction of horizontal vertical, but, but it is, it is a distinction, is the ability to express a collective point of view of use cases. You know, when you build technology without understanding where it's going to be used and it's hard to build, you know, appropriate technology.

So we have an opportunity with our colleagues and financial services to talk about what our customers are trying to do, the challenge, the real challenges that they have to manage debt, right? To secure a better future. And how does that impact a container platform?

And by the way, it does, it does. So we can articulate those things together and have a, have a nice, strong voice. And so that's, uh, part of the reason that we joined fennels and, uh, and, and, and I think that's something that, uh, is very valuable to to, to the convenient lawyer.

You guys have also created a technology academy, at least you discussed that Yeah. In your, uh, keynote today. Yeah.

What's that about? What's the thought process there? Yeah, Well, okay.

Initially the idea was that, you know, at Discover we very much invest in people. We want to provide the ability for folks to grow, we call Bic Craft, right? And, uh, we wanted an outlet for folks to kind of share their knowledge.

Now, what we ended up doing though was, uh, was creating an environment, digital environment where all our engineers and even product owners, business folks can share what they know. Like, here, here's how I write a user story inside of Jira. Jira.

Here's how I write a particular piece of code or an architecture and share that with each other. But then what came out of that was we started to create and use inner open source principles to define our processes. So we took the collective knowledge of the organization to define how we work and then get a single way of working, whether it's through how we approach our customers, how we build our teams, or how we build our platforms.

So the Discover Technology Academy is kind of the, uh, watering hall or the community, we call it our house, where everybody has a room, people have rooms, product teams have rooms, they share their knowledge. There's guilds and communities that standardize how we work, and it accelerates individual people's ability to grow. We actually recently, um, took that and said, you know what?

We're gonna share it with the world. Going back to your first question. com, which is like a subset of the technology academy that we put out there for the world to check out, right?

And that provides that, that kind of portal or view into all the things that we're doing, uh, around technology as well as open source. Have you seen a shift where people who wanna come to work for a company are looking to evaluating what your open source profile is like cuz they want to go hang with the cool kids in those projects and not just kind of work with themselves all day long. And, you know, is that part of the reason why you're here is to say, Hey, we actually do support open source in a meaningful way and this is a place where you can come and be part of that.

That's a reality. I think, you know, Every Engineer I know, at least I, yeah, I don't, I dunno if I can generalize. Certainly not, you know, wants to have a great culture to go to, right?

Absolutely. I would argue store has a fantastic culture, absolutely love it. But they also wanna have satisfying work.

Yes. But they also wanna have an outlet and a way of sharing, sharing their craft and building their craft. So if an organization doesn't have the ability for someone to go to a meet up or to participate in an open source or talk about what they're doing or to learn by doing outside, then it's kind of hard to attract and retain people, right?

So, uh, when folks come and see our engineering culture, our engineering talents are, are kind of, we have systematic programs for how we help people do and grow in communities. That's a huge differentiator for us and discover in terms of attracting great talent and, and retaining great talent. Like, So as you look across the people participating in the academy and without giving away too many trade secrets, but what are they most excited about?

What's the buzz? What are they kind of looking at going, this is the next big great thing? Yeah, you know, the, uh, when I talk about the academy and what we're doing, there's this concept of developer experience.

Okay? So people talk about how long does it take? Say, say you're new employees, give you a lap, mate, welcome to discover.

Here's your laptop, Mike, start coding. How long does it take you to actually be picking off items in the backlog and, and having fun, right? Writing some code or doing something, putting something in production, running a test case, whatever, right?

Some organizations to take two months, a month, a week, two couple days if you're good. How about by lunchtime, right? So by sharing the knowledge, by creating reusable code patterns and automation, all these type of things that we share and make very easy to find and manage, right?

The developer experience, the experience of the people who are there is greatly improved. I think that is a very exciting point. Now, there's a couple other dimensions I want to ask because it's not all about here's how we work, here's how we share, and how do I get productive, right?

So how we innovate, so we have, we run internal events, masterclass workshops, hackathon, hands on keyboard events. We have a dojo that pairs with teams to, to help teams get better or learn from what they're doing and bring it back into the community, right? Um, those are the type of things we have, uh, innovation events, intellectual property of, uh, days, that kind of stuff as a part of the academy that really start to kind of scratch that innovator's itch because at the end of the day, we are all innovating every single day.

We're continuously getting better, right? Uh, and so it it's creating that, that space that then gives you escape velocity. Do we have too much stuff getting in the way of the joy?

Is there too much toil in the system? And whether it's the DevOps workflows and the back end, or the fact that a developer might take them, I don't know, an hour and a half to spin up a desktop environment to go work on their great idea, do we need to kind of really kind of take a whole look at this thing and say, how do we put the joy back in this thing? Yeah.

Well, you know, I I I, it's funny because, uh, so there is, uh, different types of toilet, right? I think we've done a pretty good job in getting better. Uh, we have a program, uh, which we probably called Extreme Automation, all right?

Where we basically we're trying to remove all manual, like as much manual tasks that engineers had to do in order to be productive through a variety of techniques, automation, rpa, et cetera. That helps reduce a lot of toil. Okay?

But there's also other toilet, right? So let's say I'm creating a spring boot app, right? Oh, I got my spring boot app, but I don't know, where's the URL for my internal repository for that version of the open source package?

And I gotta find that magic. Where is that magic? Who do I go?

I go ask somebody, uh, pin someone, right? Well, part of that is the knowledge point, just knowing what you don't know, right? And that's what we also address with the academy is these kind of common paths and patterns that people do so they can find the knowledge and get less frustration and be more productive.

We're still on the journey, and I think most organizations are, but we have really made a lot of progress, right? In making that, you know, making that as frictionless as possible. Are there Attributes to the types of people you look for to come work at Discover?

Are there things that you look for? I mean, is it all just about, you know, whatever skills I have and certifications? Or is there something intangible that you're looking for?

Yeah, Well, we have three discover behaviors and you're laughing. I absolutely love them. The first one is we get better every day.

Mm-hmm. So when I look at, you know, and, and it's about, it's, it's, it's about wanting to learn, right? It's about wanting to improve.

And, uh, we tend to attract people who want to learn, who want to grow every day. No matter where you are in your career, no matter what job you've done, there's always ways of getting better, continuous improvement. So that's one attribute I would say that we look for.

And, and by default, we, we attract people too, right? Because it's in our dna in the circle for the other, other is around the collaborative nature, you know, no engineer, no product team, no product. Family is an island, right?

Yes. We can have a team that focuses on one microservice and yes, that microservice can live in its own and change and just as long as it has another version with the old api, you can have the new one. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

It seems like it's independent, but we're not independent. We're all connected, right? So the ability to succeed together, right?

Understanding that is another really, really kind of keen attribute. And then I think, you know, the third, uh, is, is around the focus on the customer, right? If you want to play to win, you have to really understand who you're helping, right?

And, and keeping that in in mind. A great example is if I'm an engineer and I'm tuning some performance, you know, store procedure, call in a database somewhere, right? Because I wanna get response time under a second.

I know why I need to do that, because if I do that, I can reduce the time it do, it takes to refer a friend and then that person who's using can get a discount on their next thing that they're purchasing with our discovery, for example, right? So that, that obsession of understanding why you're doing something and the impact it has now, obviously technical skills, technical acumen, those types of things are important. But when you look at, at kind of our culture and our culture fit, those elements are everywhere.

You worked for one of the largest providers of it in the world, and now you work for arguably a company that's one of the larger consumers of that. Yes. What do you know now that you didn't know then?

I gotta tell you. And, and, and, uh, you know, you think, you know technology. Mm-hmm.

You don't know Technology Until you actually use that technology to build something that people use every day. All right? When You're on the other end of that equation and, And, um, So the, the list of things that I wish I knew is quite long and I'm humble, Uh, but it's energizing.

Mm-hmm. And it goes back to my, my thirst to learn and to grow personally, right? Uh, it allows me to really understand why it is we need to build this crude container management system this way, right?

These are the things that we're trying to do to help people, right? So it's that gap between using it, building applications that use it, right? And the technology itself and that space is very large.

Does that feedback loop get different in the conversation is different cuz now you're calling up some of your former employers or people that used to partner with and go, Hey, it's Angel and I got a beef. That's Right. Well, you know, there's many ways of, um, of, uh, expressing the beef, let's say, but, well, we covered one, which was open source technology, right?

Mm-hmm. I wouldn't say it's expressing beef. It's about providing use cases, right?

It's about being prescriptive on what we're doing and that's why we joined Finau. And a lot of the technology basically nowadays are built on open technologists by having that, that that voice right into the community bypasses vendors, right? It goes right into the code.

And, and, and I gotta tell you, uh, even, uh, you know, our, our render partners, everyone loves to hear from people building applic, both thirsty for that knowledge, right? So having that conversation's very natural. So you've been around the community a long time.

What, what's your take on where it is right now? What do you wish it was worth focused on or, you know, because it is a community and sometimes it will get attracted to certain things and other things it'll ignore. And are there something right now that you kind of look at the community and say collectively we should maybe thinking more about this?

Yeah, So I reflect on kind of the, the, uh, evolution of open source, right? There's, there's been these moments like I of of, I say renaissance, things that happen and you know, you go from the early days to, you know, when Linux started and companies using intellectual property to protect open. And that was a big moment.

You know, there were moments in between and there was that big moment where foundations started to happen under umbrellas, right? Where we can't actually get away from, you know, closed open source, but so like more governed open source, so the Linux Foundation and open js, all these type of things that can, that, that I think was another really important moment for us as a community to kind of get our heads around. I think we kind of, uh, there's two areas where I'd like to see more work and, and hopefully another moment.

Uh, one is around, you know, the principles of open source go far beyond code. It goes be it, it it is a way of working, it is a way of collaborating, it's a way of working that has proven to, to actually work out pretty well. And those behaviors translate to how an organization like ours in Discover can actually operate.

And we do. We are using, you know, these principles of contribution community, et cetera, and how we define how we work. And I think that, uh, and that's an area that other companies are doing as well, right?

I think so that's kind of another moment or something that can start to happen now related to that, uh, is, is, uh, and we already started to see an organization s is a much stronger end user view of what's happening so that the, so that use cases, so if the customers of the technology right, are helping kind of plot the future of where it goes or what other technologies we need. All right. Cool.

Folks, you heard a thing here. I think what he's saying is that the open source movement is the towel and it's starting to wag the rest of the dog, right? Oh Yeah.

Absolutely. Angel, thanks for being on the show and we'll be back in a minute.